Open nVidia Linux Driver Pledge Nearly Complete

Ciarán Mooney writes to let us know that the Pledgebank drive to raise $10,000 for Project Nouvaeu is almost complete — at this moment it needs only 196 more people to sign up. Project Nouveau aims to provide open source 3D acceleration for nVidia cards. The drive was started by David Nielsen, whose blog explains what he hopes will happen.

Comments

This is a worthy cause

[MountainMan101]

With new technology like AIGLX, XGL and XEGL emerging, having open source drivers for 3d cards is very important. Along with the recent R300 work for the ATI cards, this will bring much improved graphics to the Linux Desktop regardless of architecture. I only hope that the ATI X200M card gets open source support soon too (obviously not from nouveau).

Also Fedora 7 (dure April) intends to include the nouveau drivers - which is great as out-of-the-box Fedora can't include the binary nVidia driver necessary to have AIGLX working.

And to anyone who thinks this is unnecessary as there is the binary driver - just wait until you card is dropped from the official support and the old driver stops working with some future kernel.

Re:This is a worthy cause

[cortana]

According to NVIDIA, there is no demand at all for free software drivers for NVIDIA hardware.

They don't need money...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/NouveauCompani on_11

[...] The pledge mentioned is however not supported by our project. We currently don't need any money and the person who set it up is not connected to our project.

Congratulations to everyone who pledged to throw money at something that doesn't need any.

Re:Huh?

[Kalriath]

The project's official website is even more interesting. It explicitly says they have no affiliation with the pledge drive, and don't need money.

Re:Huh?

[Otter]

In fairness, the Nouveau guys (Heh, I hadn't grasped the name before but that's fairly clever...) aren't asking for money, say they don't need the $10K and make it clear that they're not expecting to have a reliable driver for the Fedora 7 release. The hype isn't their fault and I look forward to seeing what they come up with.

Re:What is wrong with the proprietary driver?

[just_another_sean]

Well when I used nVidia's binary driver on Debian Etch I went through two kernel upgrades and each time I rebooted to begin using the new kernel I was greeted by a console prompt instead of an xdm login screen.

Now for me that wasn't much of a problem. I sighed, logged in as root, found the original installer I downloaded from NVidia, ran it, agreed to the license, pressed continue and was greeted with a message about missing kernel headers. Sighed again, downloaded linux-headers-`uname -r`, reran NVidia installer, etc, etc, ad nauseum every time I update the kernel.

As I said, I know why and how I do this but not everyone does and the whole point of bringing true open source 3d graphics to the desktop for Linux users is so they don't have to learn how or why they need to do this.