NVIDIA Licence Update (Linux Exception)

(startx) writes "I don't know how long this has been the case, but with the latest NVidia driver update comes a new installation method, which unifies the installation process almong all Linux distributions. Just for kicks I re-read the licence, and it has a new section labeled "2.1.2 Linux Exception" Basically GNU/Linux users are now free to redistribute the driver file. Not only this, but the FAQ section of the README file says you can redistribute in whatever form necessary, stating distributions are welcome to include it as a package as well. Woohoo!"

Comments

All ready now

[Loosewire]

3 Cheers for NVIDIA
FREE BEER FOR ALL (Hey it might happen)

Debs

[Strike]

Excellent, now I can just apt-get install nvidia-kernel nvidia-glx instead of having to grab the *-src packages and build my own debs. Provided the maintainer will package these ... oh please oh please oh please

Re:Debs

[Anonymous Coward]

> Excellent, now I can just apt-get install nvidia-kernel nvidia-glx instead of having to grab the *-src packages and build my own debs.

Considering that you have to rebuild the kernel driver each time you rebuild or upgrade the kernel, I hope such a package would be the sources linked into the kernel build such that a rebuild/upgrade would automatically rebuild the driver. That would be the easiest solution all around.

Great

[Apreche]

Great, they do this just AFTER I upgrade to Mandrake 9.1. If they would have done this before then it probably would have been included in the distro.

Re:Great

[leviramsey]

Well, Mandrake has a policy against including software that's not Open Source in the main distro (they made an exception for Netscape back in the day, though). However, PLF (the repository for patent or license-encumbered Mandrake packages) could be a place to find them, in which case it's just a urpmi away.

Re:Great

[slux]

buy a Mandrake boxed set and you'll get the Nvidia drivers on the commercial applications CD.

Re:Great

[KeyserDK]

Either that or you can join mandrake club which has had them too for a couple of weeks, although that is currently an unrleases version 4321 which the boxed versions are going to carry. It works here though =).

Gentoo

[doja]

Gentoo already has nvidia-glx and nvidia-kernel packages as part of Portage.

Re:Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to fail to understand the difference between source distribution and binary distribution. So much for the theory that Gentoo users are smarter because they build their whole system by themselves ... wait, what the fuck am I saying? Gentoo's userbase dispelled that myth ages ago. Go troll on osnews you faghat.

Re:Gentoo

[DeathPenguin]

And the LiveCD :)

WTF is happening today?

[Anonymous Coward]

It took 15 minutes earlier for a gentoo whore to start blabbing and now in this article it was almost a whole half hour! WTF? Usually you guys are fucking shooting off at the mouth within five minutes! C'mon people! Live up to the standard!

First of the april fools posts are coming up

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux | Posted by timothy in The Mysterious Future!
from the after-all-rpm-is-better dept.
YOU ARE SO FIRED! writes "In an effort to conform to the LSB standards, Gentoo Linux will be adopting RPM as the standard form of package management in portage 2.1. More information can be found in the Gentoo weekly newsletter. I'd surely be fired if I would've proposed such an idea!"

Moo

[Chacham]

Whatever. I simply don't trust Nvidia. Even if they mean well today, they'll be well mean tomorrow. I don't understand why anyone still uses them. They lost my trust, and I'll never go back.

Re:Moo

[10Ghz]

How did they lose your trust? What did they do? Provide good drivers for Linux while Ati and others sat around with their collective thumbs up their asses?

Don't fool me ...

[Tux2000]

Hey, it's April 1st, isn't it? Just wait 24 hours and look at the licence stuff again.

Re:Don't fool me ...

[ComputerSlicer23]

I don't think NVidia would fool around with a legal document. Some one could actually use it in a court of law, as a legally published document. That'd be relatively stupid, the legal department will have somebody's head on a platter for doing it. About the only thing I can see is that the documented last change is Mar 27th. I suppose if the license could be for a revision that doesn't exist. So I'm guess that it is real, if it's an April 1 day joke, it's a very, very good one. I don't have the time to try installing the stupid thing to see if it blows up badly, like the Engineers had a field day building a broken driver to make me feel the fool. However, the dates are all older (and they display very funny, look at the 103 as the year, and the negative hours).

Kirby

Excellent!

[Trogre]

This will be a great help for distro packagers. Not the least of which, Knoppix would finally be able to play OpenGL games (Chromium!) straight out-of-the-box.

I applaud nVidia for their continuing support for Linux.

Like many others, I would be happier if the drivers were open-sourced, but realise that there is so much licensed technology in these cards, that getting permission from all the IP holders would be impossible, even if nVidia wanted to release the source.

Well done, nVidia.

Doesn't seem to be an April Fools Day Joke...Yet.

[SpdRacerGuy]

Doesn't seem to be an April Fool's Day Joke.... yet.

I'm with everyone else who thinks we should check the nvidia website in a few days.

If this isn't a joke, then I certainly applaud nvidia for taking a step in the right direction so you can install Linux on an nforce/nforce2 system and have to muck with driver code patches to get sound/lan/video working right.

And yes, I double checked... the license also applies to the nforce drivers!

Say what you want about nvidia fumbling on the FX cards, ATI still has a long way to go before they have real drivers that work correctly for all their cards under Linux/XFree.

Good one, guys!

[Dr. Photo]

2.1.3 Limitations.

No Reverse Engineering. Customer may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the SOFTWARE, nor attempt in any other manner to obtain the source code.

Whew! That really had me going for a second 'til I realized what day it was!

Haha! :-D

Not quite fully automated install yet....

[rklrkl]

It's great to see that NVIDIA are getting rid of their huge and confusing list of RPMs and also adding in what sounds like a cute installer, but...and I quote from the README:

"If you already have an XF86Config file working with a different driver (such as the 'nv' or 'vesa' driver), then all you need to do is find the relevant Device section and replace the line:..."

Er, silly question here, but why doesn't the NVIDIA installer do all this ? The NVIDIA installer on Windows certainly doesn't expect the end-user to hand-hack a config file afterwards, so why do Linux users have to ?

Re:Not quite fully automated install yet....

[moncyb]

My guess they do it because they're afraid they may hose the config file. Let's face it, text config files can be problematic. One has to go to the effort of creating parse routines (easy in perl, but not it C), many of the files have their own format, and there is always the risk of misparsing part of it. Then to change one setting, the most simple way is often to just rewrite the entire file. Not an easy task, and an error in any step may hose the entire thing...

The M$ registry sucks, but at least it has an api (so you don't have to write all the code to read / change settings) and it is binary (so you only need to lock part of the file, and you don't have to rewrite all or most of the file just to change a single setting--assuming M$ didn't screw the design up, I don't know much about the arcane internals of the thing.

Using text files for configuration has advantages--such as being human readable--but it makes programming more difficult.

Re:Not quite fully automated install yet....

[ichimunki]

Right answer, but for the wrong reasons I suspect.

Since most installs are done via shell script or makefile, it's not like this would be that hard to program-- sed or perl are likely to be involved and this isn't tough for either of them. I know it's not as simple as s/nv/nvidia/, but it's not that hard to make sure you only change the right lines and nothing else.

The real problem is finding the right config file to change. Are they in /etc or maybe /etc/X11 or perhaps /usr/X11R6/etc/X11 or any of the other locations (some of which are dynamic) listed at http://www.xfree86.org/~dawes/4.3.0/XF86Config.5.h tml. Compound this with the fact that different users may have different relevant config files of their own and you have a problem that the Windows registry probably can't solve either.

Also, in this case, only X, one of its utilities, or the driver install are going to need access to the config file, so locking the whole file isn't an issue. You probably want the whole file locked during driver install, but this wouldn't prevent you from messing with other config files at the same time-- if you can find them ;).

FreeBSD driver

[dynamicexpression]

When are we going to see an update to the FreeBSD driver which is currently lagging way behind the Linux driver?

They seem to have a clue

[tunah]

This reinforces my impression of NVidia as a hardware company that knows it's a hardware company.

I was pleasantly surprised back when I got my new computer with a TNT2 that they provided nice (in my experience) fast 3D drivers. They haven't subscribed to the whole open-source/free software philosophy, they're just being smart. Giving source for their drivers may have some benefits, may have some costs, may not be possible for legal reasons. Giving away binary drivers makes sense - you're quite likely to influence a linux user's video card purchase with decent drivers. Making people download it from their website, or install it differently from any other package is just a pain in the ass and doesn't gain them anything.

There's no altruism here, just common sense. What's surprising is that so many big hardware manufacturers make things so hard.

Re:They seem to have a clue

[Radical Rad]

Giving away binary drivers makes sense - you're quite likely to influence a linux user's video card purchase with decent drivers. Making people download it from their website, or install it differently from any other package is just a pain in the ass and doesn't gain them anything.

I had already made up my mind to buy ATI next time around but if this .run file makes things easy enough then I will stick with Nvidia. Every time RH updates the kernel I have to fiddle around to recompile nvidia and cisco vpn kernel modules.

HA HA APRIL FOOL!

[Anonymous Coward]

These april fool stories are SO FUNNY!!!

From the README

[misfit13b]

"Installation will also install the utility `nvidia-installer`, which may be later used to uninstall drivers, auto-download updated drivers, etc."

Sounds pretty nice!

Text config vs binary

[moncyb]

...sed or perl are likely to be involved...

So everyone has to have either sed or perl installed? Different developers will make different choices. If it is done this way, everyone will probably need both, plus awk, plus [insert a bunch of programs here]. In fact this is the current state of most open source project. That is a lot of stuff, especially for those workstations who don't do any development.

Also a lot of programs are starting to use XML (even worse). For config files, it has all the disadvantages of a text file, but also it is not very readable (to a normal person). A little while ago, I was looking at a program, and it required the latest freaky xml library. Why? Because they decided to make the configuration file XML. Nothing else.

Also using perl doesn't solve the problem of being inefficient. If the line you modify changes size, at the very least, you will have to rewrite every bit of data from that line to the end of the file. It may not be a problem if you only need to change one small file, but large or many files will waste the user's time. Many settings are of constant size in binary files, and those which are not, can be dealt with. Indexing and moving stuff around doesn't work with text files, but it can with binary.

Yeah, you'll probably want a library to take care of the binary files, but it's being done for XML, and like you said, perl, sed or some other program is needed for flat text. Something for binary configs would be thousands of times easier to write and would be ten times smaller.

The real problem is finding the right config file to change. Are they in /etc or maybe /etc/X11 or perhaps /usr/X11R6/etc/X11 or any of the other locations

You bring up a good point here. One I didn't really think of. However, it's trivial to put a table of constant strings into a program. It'll miss the unknown paths, but I imagine only tweak monkeys would have such a set up. Just give them instructions I suppose...

...the Windows registry probably can't solve either.

Well, I wasn't saying the Windows registry would solve anything, I was giving an example of the bottom of the barrel going in the right direction. Their registry has countless design flaws, the most obvious are they put everything into two huge files. They probably were forced to go this way because all the stupid decisions they made caused text files to be completely unworkable.

Imagine if the registry was one huge text file. "Registry scan rate is now at 10 min per scan" "Blue screen! Blue screen!" "We're going down in flames cap'n." "Pull up! Pull up!" "Damn it Bill! You killed us all! Aaarrggghh!!!" ;-)

As for file locking: Yeah, being able to lock portions of a config wouldn't help installer programs much (assuming you aren't running programs at the same time), and it was a strech for me to mention it. But it would help where config files are used by multiple programs or multiple instances of programs.

Re:Text config vs binary

[ichimunki]

Highly unlikely to find a Linux system without sed-- it's in the base install for Debian and Gentoo and I suspect most other Linux distros as well. The real point here is that you would probably be better off getting the NVidia drivers from your distribution in package form, which it sounds like is now allowed due to the "Linux Exception" in the license. That way the package maintainer can use whatever tools and config files are appropriate to that distribution.