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ATI Releases Drivers for XFree 4.3.0

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the better-late-than-never dept.

Kyouryuu writes "ATI has finally released official drivers for XFree 4.3.0 and updated their Linux drivers to 3.7.0 for supported XFree versions, several months after the originally proposed release date of April last year. Although Schneider Digital has previously made available unofficial drivers, Linux users who have ATI Radeon cards can now benefit from an official release. Unfortunately, ATI still insists on using RPM exclusively and keeping the drivers closed source."

6 of 428 comments (clear)

  1. Re:closed source != bad always by zzabur · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Whats the difference anyway?

    Even if we don't count idiological issues, closed source drivers mean numerous annoyances to the users.

    For example:

    • Drivers can be buggy, and there is no way to fix it. (NVidia drivers are hang my system all the time.)
    • Closed source drivers need additional EULAs and thus often cannot easily be distiributed with Linux distributions.
    • Drivers need to be installed separately, which is annying, sometimes difficult and may break your system. (this is also true for Windows)
    • When some new soft/hardware appears (like AMD64, 2.6 kernel), one has usually wait for months for drivers to be updated.
    • Source-based distributions like Gentoo cannot compile new, performance optimized version, if driver is distributed as a binary.
    --
    Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
  2. Re:closed source != bad always by Paleomacus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Because when nVidia wants to know something about ATI drivers it's only slightly less trivial to get the information when the driver source is closed than open.

  3. Re:closed source != bad always by bl8n8r · · Score: 5, Insightful

    > It is naive to think that you could even
    > understand, let alone improve,

    I get to stare at "professional" code every day. It is nothing like what was in the textbooks. There is acres of room for improvement. silly little things like something called a buffer overflow are present in many of the implementations. I cannont believe my eyes somedays, and it's a wonder that the product that this certain company puts out, functions at all. It is under the cover of closed-source that these things are allowed to persist, and will probably never change. The company just keeps issuing patches and revisions and fixes what is terminally broken. Futhermore, the only reason these "bugs" exist is simply do to human laziness; something that could be overcome by another simple human, with the right principles, without an "intimate knowlege" of the hardware.

    --
    boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
  4. Re:closed source != bad always by lubricated · · Score: 5, Insightful

    blender comes to mind. Furthermore there is the chicken and the egg problem. No 3d drivers untill the applications come. No applications untill 3d comes.

    --
    It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
  5. OpenGL is used for more than games! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's used for 3D modelling, for which there are a few open source applications now. It can be used for some extreme 2D accelleration, too.

    Displaying HD video will make many a XVideo overlay driver puke. Using OpenGL instead may work, and in some cases work faster.

    Do I here someone saying "No one uses Linux for video, and certainly not HD"? You're wrong. Of course, the kind of shit we have to put up with from NVidia and ATI (and Matrox, too, I think) makes Linux a marginal choice for such applications.

    The apologists are just too willing to defend the hardware manufacturers because they provided drivers for their platform. Anybody using another platform must be weird, eh? Anybody using hw-accelerated GL for something else than gaming is weird, too, of course.

    Empathising with weird* people is hard, I know. But it won't hurt if you try.

    * People with other interests than you

  6. Re:Non-OSS arguments don't hold water by DeathPenguin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This guy seems to have it right:

    "Suppose you create and design feature X into your chipset. You might find, via a lawsuit, that feature X is patented by company Y. I've talked to vendors who would like to open their hardware but are scared to do so for this very reason -- they might have designed a patented feature into their hardware without realizing it."