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No Closed Video Drivers For Next Ubuntu Release
lisah writes "Ubuntu's next release, Feisty Fawn, is due out in April and, according to company CTO Matt Zimmerman, proprietary video drivers failed to make the cut for the default install. Zimmerman told Linux.com that although the software required for Composite support is not ready for prime-time and therefore will not be included in Feisty, Ubuntu hasn't given up entirely on including video drivers in future releases. '[T]he winds aren't right yet. We will continue to track development and will revisit the decision if things change significantly.' Ambiguous or not, the decision to exclude proprietary drivers for now should satisfy at least some members of the Ubuntu Community. In other Feisty Fawn news, the Board also decided to downgrade support for Power PC due to a lack of funding." Linux.com and Slashdot are both part of OSTG.
This is in no way an "ideological" decision but a pragmatic one.
The propietary 3d drivers would have been included because the original plan was to support a 3d desktop (like compiz and beryl) out of the box.
As it has now become obvious that these desktops are not yet stable enough to be the default, there isn't any need to include the propietary drivers.
Graphics drivers are highly compex and extremely difficult to write and maintain and stay up to date, graphics advances happen tremendously quickly. The community simply cannot keep pace with the functionality and quality required. The test effort alone is huge and the available test cases are actually trivial compared to real world useage. The available drivers are ABI compatible and therefore simple drop-in replacements. Face it people available public implementations don't even have glslang compilers and that's not exactly brand new.
It's not an ideal world and distros need to treat these proprietary drivers as serious first class citizens.
The question is: will they be present in the repositories?
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
I'd understand the "give us our whatever-blobs"-attitude better if the "half" of the proprietary drivers people want wouldn't suck so bad. On my 64-bit Ubuntu, the proprietary ATI fglrx drivers:
...while the reverse-engineered drivers give my Radeon X800 card 3D acceleration, DVI output, DVI+VGA output, accelerated Beryl 3D desktop via AIGLX etc. just finely. So I just don't belive in the FUD (from eg. NVIDIA) that they are so complex and extremely difficult to write, that the worldwide OSS community couldn't do that - those handful of reverse-engineering people are already doing better drivers than ATI with all the in-house knowledge!
. odp (yes, server's mime-type is probably wrong, you have to save it first)
- Hang the whole machine every time I logout (apparently because I'm using DVI output... gosh!), so I exit that installation of Ubuntu (which is not my primary, just testing the fglrx drivers etc. there) with alt-sysrq-e/i/s/u/b because it's safer.
- Give only green stripes and a complete hang if using _both_ DVI and VGA outputs at the same time (oh my god, we never though that could happen!).
- Do not give any 3D support if I happen not to disable Composite/AIGLX in Xorg.conf.
I do symphatize with the people who just want "stuff to work", and know that NVIDIA proprietary drivers happen to be better quality at this time, but all my experiences with binary blobs has been so bad that I will take reverse-engineered drivers anytime, even for NVIDIA.
For those who haven't read it yet, David Airlied's LCA 2007 talk is a really good and entertaining piece: http://www.skynet.ie/~airlied/talks/lca07/nouveau
As with every previous release of Ubuntu, proprietary drivers will be provided and installed by default, but they won't be used by default unless the free drivers do not function at all on the hardware present (a choice that has nothing to do with 3D acceleration). This decision just means that the plans to use proprietary display drivers by default have been nixed, but only for feisty.
Everyone seems to make a big deal about the display drivers, but Ubuntu has shipped proprietary wifi drivers since warty, and they are used by default on vastly more hardware than the display drivers.
Quote: "Starting with Ubuntu's 7.04 release in April, Ubuntu users will gain access to Linspire's newly opened CNR (Click and Run) e-commerce and software delivery system."/ 1830240 : "Canonical and Linspire Make a Deal ... Ubuntu users will get access to proprietary software (DVD players, media codecs) via Linspire's ..."
referenced here: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/08
What will a potential user make out of this while asking himself whether things will work for him?
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
When ubuntu started, I had high hopes for it as a project. Now I see it's become just like Debian, and Mandrake/riva/whatever, and Redhat/Fedora, and EVERY OTHER LINUX DISTRO. It's become mired down in it's own politics rather than working on making better releases. So, what's a good distro to move to now?
I don't understand why we can't use proprietary drivers if they exist. I mean support from the hardware manufacturers are what Linux lacks and needs and what many wants, at least bitch about. Let proprietary and open source live together and take advantage of each others existence since proprietary drivers means that developers have one thing less to do and might use their time onanother project.
All of the above IMHO of course.
Do you want the technical reason, or the legal reason?
From a technical point of view, the proprietary drivers may just not work. What happens if the driver hangs the kernel, or (worse) causes memory corruption or other malfunctions? What if it doesn't actually do anyway? How could the Ubuntu developers fix anything if they can't get at the code. Microsoft has pretty much the same problems with drivers, by the way.
From a legal point of view, the proprietary graphics drivers are not legally redistributable. Ubuntu can not simply package them up, include them and run them by default without being extremely careful not to violate the EULA on the drivers, or the license on the Linux kernel itself.
So now you know "what's so difficult" about it. Your average newbie would simply give up at that point and go back to Windows, having no idea what went wrong nor what to do about it. And when someone asked him he'd say "I tried that feisty fawn that was supposed to be so good, but it doesn't work. I had to type in the gibberish and then nothing happened. When I asked why I had to do that the answer was 'The winds are not right'. What the fuck? Seriously, WTF is that supposed to mean?"
That is what is wrong with them. Even on windows. how do you know which part really breaks? is it the crappy third party drivers, or is it MSFT's interface? Both sides blame each other if you ask them. All you can do is throw out the card or wait for an update. At least with linux if you have the mind to you can do the work yourself.
Or you can get Windbg, find the non Microsoft module in the stacktrace and either upgrade or uninstall it.
Interestingly, on Win XP, the machine uploads a dump to Online Crash Analysis which tries to find the faulty driver. I've seen this on a laptop with an Intel graphics chip - the machine would freeze for a few seconds, then Windows switched back to the default VGA driver at 640*480*16 colors and said that the device driver had got stuck in a loop and prompted me to save my work while it rebooted. After the reboot, OCA run and told me to install a new version of the graphics driver from the Intel site. Very, very impressive.
You can see that the GDI has some kind of watchdog to detect infinite loops in graphics drivers. It also knows how to reinitialize itself from 1024*768*64K colors to 640*480*16, and run in that crippled mode until the user has saved his documents. And OCA can presumably spot patterns in stacktraces submitted by the developers who found the original bug.
So it's possible to have systems based on untrusted kernel mode code which can heal themselves without needing any human input by talking to a server, with a bit of organisation.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Sorry, but that community must obviously be 1) nuts and 2) not representative of Linux users if it thinks that way.
I am really sick and tired to see a couple of fundamentalist nuts hinder the success of Linux through nonsense like this. Until you can actually use hardware the way you do with other OS, Linux on the desktop for everyone will remain fiction.
It is already sad enough to see how much hardware there is were no driver at all (proprietary or not) is available -- to limit Linux even more by not supporting companies to easily include and distribute proprietary drivers is just insane.
I and many others have been using Linux (and before, *NIX) for many many years and I hate to see some fundamentalists declare themselves "the community" and speak for me and many others.
Of course, they are free to finally drive Linux into total irrelevancy with this, but I hate to see it happen.
For those of you who care about having free software / open source drivers, email ATI or NVIDIA. Maybe if enough of us can email them telling them that having open source drivers (or at least hardware specs to enable their development) would be a deciding factor in our purchase. I'm hoping that with the somewhat recent acquisition of ATI by AMD that maybe we'll get lucky. If not, those of us who care about such things, will have to go for the Intel driver.
Maybe if the free software, or open source arguments don't work, an economic incentive will.
http://support.ati.com/ics/survey/survey.asp?deptI D=894&surveyID=508&type=web - ATI's feedback page.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/feedback_temp.html - NVIDIA's feedback page, although unfortunately still under construction.
"How about: ./ati-driver-installer-8.33.6-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/6.10
# sh
# dpkg -i *deb"
On my laptop a compaq r4000 with a bcm43xx pcmcia network controller and ubuntu
6.10, xorg 7.1, beryl, and a ati 200M XPRESS controller it was a nightmare to get
it all working together. Either my nic would fail, graphics would fail, x would fail
, all would fail at the same time. I tried ndiswrapper, my system hangs on that one.
(three different versions of ndiswrapper). All on amd64.
After a week or so trying different versions of all programs involved i came up with
the right settings. A custom kernel 2.6.18.1, ati driver 8.29.6, x windows 7.1.1,
If i try a newer kernel, the ati drivers won't compile, if i try an older kernelversion
my wlan isn't properly supported, so i'm stuck at 2.6.18.1, and i want xen to run on
my laptop, which uses 2.6.17.x i think so i'm out ofluck...
I think they did a good job postponing the option of a beryl/compiz/xgl/aixgl setup
in ubuntu. If you get it working it's quite cool and worth the trouble. IMHO this kind
of thing is always worth the trouble (i have a relatively high geek factor).
If you don't like my sig then don't read it.
It breeds complacency. My home desktop has an old GeForce MX 400 card which still works perfectly well. It renders my 1600x1200 desktop cleanly and quickly, and basically does what I want it to. I don't have a strong need for OpenGL but do like to play games occasionally (eg Quake or Second Life) and although it's not fast, it worked perfectly.
Note I said "worked". Nvidia has officially deprecated my card, so no new drivers will ever support it. New kernel with an incompatible ABI? I can't upgrade to it. Security vulnerability? I can't get the fix. Basically, I can either keep using my system in its current state forever, or buy a new card purely for the driver upgrade.
Yes, I know my card is old and slow by today's standards. But if it works for me and I'm happy with it, why should I have to replace it? Given that my motherboard has an old Via chipset that Nvidia only supports in AGP 2x mode and that new cards are all but impossible to get working (I've tried), I'm looking at a complete system upgrade just to get a new driver.
With a Free driver, in the worst case situation I could at least attempt to fix new problems on my own as they arise. With closed drivers, I have no control whatsoever. I like Free software for philosophical reasons, but it also has huge practical advantages. This is one of them.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Why not just use Windows? Or Macintosh? They're both stable, have stable drivers for any decent hardware, look nice...
I happen to value my freedom a lot more than that, especially when it comes to computers. As for the topic at hand, the proprietary drivers are usually pretty bad (I have an Ati card, so I'm partly to blame for that) as you can see in another post above this one.
Linux is a free operating system, in all senses of the word free. If that is not to your liking, there are loads of other OSes out there. Good luck.
To me, at least, this arguement mirrors the DRM arguement. The RMS-minded software "purists" are trying to take away my right to have fully-functioning 3d capabilities on my Linux computers, much the same as the *IAA are trying to take away my rights to play my media on whatever device I wish. Both the FSF-purists and the *IAA argue legal semantics, while users are left wanting functionality. At the core, both arguements are nothing more than ego-boosting power moves for the FSF and *IAA and their ilk.
Both the FSF and the *IAA should stop trying to use bully tactics to get others to follow their ideals, and instead denomstrate the benefits of going their way. For the *IAA, this means tossing the entire DRM scheme, and offering good entertainment, in easily usable formats, encoded at very high quality. This also means that they will actually have to find talent so that people feel they are truly getting something for their money. For the FSF, this means encouraging the release of hardware specs, the development of viable alternatives to binary-blob drivers, such as the open radeon 3d driver (although even that is nowhere near truely viable, yet, although I believe it will be soon), and continuing to tell the benefits of open-sourcedness.
The F/OSS movement is an ideal, and ideals can NOT be forced upon society. They must become accepted practices in order to spread, and the only way for an idea to become accepted is to continue telling people about it.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys.
Let's tell consumers to stop buying their low-quality buggy hardware that require special installation procedures, and maybe they'll stop dragging down the consumers idea of the Linux Desktop.
I have an intel-based graphics setup that works just fine with beryl- no special install voodoo necessary. It might not get quite as many FPS as my coworkers' firegl board, but it never crashes, and never freezes up on me.
He's convinced all he needs to do is tweak some underclocking or somethingrather I don't really understand, but at this point I'm pretty sure a big part of his efforts are there to justify his purchase and vindicate his decision, and that the ATI board really wasn't worth it even to him- an otherwise very technical person.
Maybe after we get ATI/NVidia to stop hurting Linux with their inferior hardware and software, we can get some OEMs- besides TiVO- to actually ship with Linux desktops...
I did just that. Well, almost. I downloaded the Ubuntu 6.06LTS DVD, and installed from that.
Everything worked. My PC is an Abit NF7-M with 512MB RAM, Athlon XP 2000+, and the only card I installed is a Belkin 802.11 wireless card I got at Wal-Mart. Everything worked "right out of the box," including the nForce video, audio and ethernet, and the Belkin wireless card. I would have had to install a driver from the Belkin CD with windows, but Ubuntu recognized it and worked right away! Everything works.
I use Envy to install the ATI drivers. It actually works ;-)