I'm just saying that we need to back up a bit and think about what happens when this type of "binary only" behaviour becomes commonplace with Linux drivers.
Well, if the nvidia stuff is any indication, it means we'll have some great drivers;)
You're new to this whole technology thing I see...
The OpenGL screeensavers that ship with linux use them -
The various multimedia players use them -
The OpenGL games use them, for instance ut2003 and the like -
Actually, every app that uses X11 ends up using the nvidia drivers once they are installed, though not all apps utilize the hardware-accelerated OpenGL.
Dude, why couch your licensing concerns in such apocalyptic fashion? nvidia makes great cards, and they supply good, solid, up to date linux drivers.
If you don't want nvidia, nobody's twisting your arm - find an old voodoo 3, or use an onboard intel i8x0 video chipset, which are supported in hardware accelerated 3D mode by linux out of the box.
As for me, it is clear that nvidia is working hard for my business and they have earned it - open source or not, they make good stuff and they support Linux, and that's the bottom line for me.
I have nvidia cards and their 3D accelerated drivers in every linux workstation I use.
I can't remember any of them ever crashing with the nvidia cards. I have seen kernel messages from time to time about sleeping in illegal context etc, but no crash. (On the other hand, I see severe instability with the ATI cards I've tried, such that I just turn off DRI if using an ATI card, so that the machine will reliably stay up)
My main desktop at work has a riva tnt2, and it's mainly mozilla and vnc all day every day, with 3D screensavers when I'm away, while my home workstation has a geforce 2, and that's where I do a lot of q3a, ut2003, movies & music, and of course 3D screensavers when I'm away.
Uptimes on both boxes are basically as long as I feel like waiting before upgrading the kernel, usually 60-90 days at a stretch, but bottom line is they reboot when I reboot them, period.
One thing I tend to do is use intel chipsets and CPUs, that might be a factor. Also, I use in-kernel agp, rather than nvidia agp. The nvidia readme mentions several known issues with certain hardware or BIOS settings, be sure and double check those.
Good to see that nvidia is still working hard for my money. I'm glad to keep paying them.
From my experience with different video cards and 3D FPS in linux, nvidia is head and shoulders above the rest, and they have been very responsive to the community.
Is nvidia perfect? well, no, they could do a better job of playing nice with the vendors package management schemes, but their cards and drivers are rock solid and give the best bang for the buck.
this tells me that you are a hobbiest. I assume you mean hobbyist, but in any case, I am a professional systems administrator. For the company payroll database, you bet I'll demand RHAS and Oracle - but for my desktop, fedora is great.
I'm not just a redhat fanboy, in the past year I've deployed quite a bit of SuSE, as well as looking at debian based distros like progeny.
A quick trip to the redhat website confirms that for $349 you get Redhat Enterprise ES, and indeed, the support is for installation. But, that's all you really got with RH 9, so no biggie. But it's better than that, upgrades from EOL'd Red Hat ditros to RHES are half price, so it's more like $175 -
Now, for the full blown, 24x7 phone support, it gets more expensive - but have you priced comparable support from HP, Sun or microsoft products?
to me, it says that a lot of mid-sized sites got burned with red hat's recent killing of rh9. when the option is either a) pony up $400 or b) move to this untested hobby distro (fedora) that requires a complete re-install anyway, people start looking at other distros.
LOL, these anti redhat activists are entertaining.
The end of life for RH distros was not a surprise, they gave plenty of warning that this was coming
If you want enterprise level support, $349 is not a bad price
You claim fedora is an "untested hobby distro" which tells me you've never seen it. I actually installed and tested it on several boxes, and can best describe it as "red hat 9 done right" as a number of irritating RH8/9 bugs are absent from fedora, and it is noticeably snappier.
you claim it requires a complete reinstall - again, you are 100% wrong - I have upgraded several RH 8 and RH 9 servers to fedora, remotely, and they remained in service the whole time. A reboot is required to load the new kernel, but that can be done at a time of your choosing, or never if you prefer. Also, apt-get makes it a dream to keep up to date.
Actually I DO use nvidia drivers - best drivers available for linux BTW. and I just don't see the crashes, sorry - it's solid, on 2 machines at home and 1 at work - and that's giving X a good workout - mozilla all day, OpenGL screensavers when I'm away from my desk, occasional quake 3 arena, ut2003, videos with mplayer, lather rinse, repeat - and no crashes.
never? um no - that's not quite right - Unixy OSes can crash in certain circumstances, including faulty hardware. In general though, Unixy OSes crash far less often than microsoft OSes.
A typical unix/linux system running on sound hardware will simply run nonstop, as long as you want - for instance our linux mail/dns servers ran for about 2 1/2 years without a reboot, while the windows servers around them were not only rebooted scores of times, but had the OS reinstalled a few times as well.
I seem to remember that suse was making a deal with ximian anyway - suse had been criticied for focusing only on KDE and having a crappy implementation of gnome.
Suse will probably keep kde as the preferred desktop, but will offer a ximian gnome alternative as well.
Mozilla on my fedora box opened it up too... when I saw the goatse crap and heard the loud "Hey everybody, I'm.." I did a quick CTRL-ALT-BKSP to kill the X session - blech...
photoshop? bah, there are many graphics programs besides photoshop. If adobe refuses to port to linux, it will be interpreted as brain damage and workarounds will arise.
Decades? I remember one day in July 1998 - people were saying linux would never be taken seriously in the datacenter, because it "couldn't run" serious databases like oracle. That very day, oracle announced that they were going to start supportin linux, and a few months later I was running oracle 8 on my linux box at home.
Once the decision is made, things can move a lot more quickly than you can imagine.
Some anonymous troll wrote: "but the OS still has a long, long way to go before the common consumer truly embraces it"
Faulty logic: Customer ignorance is not a flaw in the design of the OS.
So a more correct statement would be "the customer must be aware of the alternatives available to him in order to embrace them"
The troll goes on to say "Besides, the move away from Windows only affects employee laptops and workstations. Why would most of the rest of the world care?"
They would care because if a company like IBM can do business using linux, that sort of takes all the wind out of the giant microsoft FUD machine that shrilly insists that you need microsoft in order to do business.
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I'm just saying that we need to back up a bit and think about what happens when this type of "binary only" behaviour becomes commonplace with Linux drivers.
;)
Well, if the nvidia stuff is any indication, it means we'll have some great drivers
You're new to this whole technology thing I see...
The OpenGL screeensavers that ship with linux use them -
The various multimedia players use them -
The OpenGL games use them, for instance ut2003 and the like -
Actually, every app that uses X11 ends up using the nvidia drivers once they are installed, though not all apps utilize the hardware-accelerated OpenGL.
How is this better than RIVA frame buffer driver in the standard kernel? What benefits will I get from using the NVIDIA driver?
You get fast, hardware accelerated 3D - on a server it's really not important, but on your gaming desktop, it's crucial.
Dude, why couch your licensing concerns in such apocalyptic fashion? nvidia makes great cards, and they supply good, solid, up to date linux drivers.
If you don't want nvidia, nobody's twisting your arm - find an old voodoo 3, or use an onboard intel i8x0 video chipset, which are supported in hardware accelerated 3D mode by linux out of the box.
As for me, it is clear that nvidia is working hard for my business and they have earned it - open source or not, they make good stuff and they support Linux, and that's the bottom line for me.
I'm sorry, I don't understand your meaning. nvidia makes great video cards, and provides well written, up-to-date linux drivers.
Exactly what is your point?
I have nvidia cards and their 3D accelerated drivers in every linux workstation I use.
I can't remember any of them ever crashing with the nvidia cards. I have seen kernel messages from time to time about sleeping in illegal context etc, but no crash. (On the other hand, I see severe instability with the ATI cards I've tried, such that I just turn off DRI if using an ATI card, so that the machine will reliably stay up)
My main desktop at work has a riva tnt2, and it's mainly mozilla and vnc all day every day, with 3D screensavers when I'm away, while my home workstation has a geforce 2, and that's where I do a lot of q3a, ut2003, movies & music, and of course 3D screensavers when I'm away.
Uptimes on both boxes are basically as long as I feel like waiting before upgrading the kernel, usually 60-90 days at a stretch, but bottom line is they reboot when I reboot them, period.
One thing I tend to do is use intel chipsets and CPUs, that might be a factor. Also, I use in-kernel agp, rather than nvidia agp. The nvidia readme mentions several known issues with certain hardware or BIOS settings, be sure and double check those.
2.6 kernel includes nptl - redhat's nptl is merelay a backport of what's in the 2.6 kernel
Good to see that nvidia is still working hard for my money. I'm glad to keep paying them.
From my experience with different video cards and 3D FPS in linux, nvidia is head and shoulders above the rest, and they have been very responsive to the community.
Is nvidia perfect? well, no, they could do a better job of playing nice with the vendors package management schemes, but their cards and drivers are rock solid and give the best bang for the buck.
well, for one, sco has no case, so nobody really cares enough to use an obsolete kernel just to make sco happy.
Having installed RH and apt, I never need to install again either - from here on in, it's just apt-get upgrade -
apt - it's not just for debian anymore.
this tells me that you are a hobbiest.
I assume you mean hobbyist, but in any case, I am a professional systems administrator. For the company payroll database, you bet I'll demand RHAS and Oracle - but for my desktop, fedora is great.
I'm not just a redhat fanboy, in the past year I've deployed quite a bit of SuSE, as well as looking at debian based distros like progeny.
A quick trip to the redhat website confirms that for $349 you get Redhat Enterprise ES, and indeed, the support is for installation. But, that's all you really got with RH 9, so no biggie. But it's better than that, upgrades from EOL'd Red Hat ditros to RHES are half price, so it's more like $175 -
Now, for the full blown, 24x7 phone support, it gets more expensive - but have you priced comparable support from HP, Sun or microsoft products?
We started in about September. At this point approximately 70% of our servers have been switched to Debian from Red Hat.
Oops - damn. You just found out that you also need support for Oracle databases and other commercial applications!
Full stop, go back to redhat!
LOL, these anti redhat activists are entertaining.
The end of life for RH distros was not a surprise, they gave plenty of warning that this was coming
If you want enterprise level support, $349 is not a bad price
You claim fedora is an "untested hobby distro" which tells me you've never seen it. I actually installed and tested it on several boxes, and can best describe it as "red hat 9 done right" as a number of irritating RH8/9 bugs are absent from fedora, and it is noticeably snappier.
you claim it requires a complete reinstall - again, you are 100% wrong - I have upgraded several RH 8 and RH 9 servers to fedora, remotely, and they remained in service the whole time. A reboot is required to load the new kernel, but that can be done at a time of your choosing, or never if you prefer. Also, apt-get makes it a dream to keep up to date.
Actually I DO use nvidia drivers - best drivers available for linux BTW. and I just don't see the crashes, sorry - it's solid, on 2 machines at home and 1 at work - and that's giving X a good workout - mozilla all day, OpenGL screensavers when I'm away from my desk, occasional quake 3 arena, ut2003, videos with mplayer, lather rinse, repeat - and no crashes.
never? um no - that's not quite right - Unixy OSes can crash in certain circumstances, including faulty hardware. In general though, Unixy OSes crash far less often than microsoft OSes.
A typical unix/linux system running on sound hardware will simply run nonstop, as long as you want - for instance our linux mail/dns servers ran for about 2 1/2 years without a reboot, while the windows servers around them were not only rebooted scores of times, but had the OS reinstalled a few times as well.
Just a data point for your consideration
You say X crashes twice a week? How bizzarre - perhaps you have hardware problems. I use X all day every day and I can't remember it ever crashing.
yeah, that's way kooler than all that gsilly gnome gstuff, glike grip, gand gother gnome gprograms.
blech, loud and filthy presentation that may get you fired...
I seem to remember that suse was making a deal with ximian anyway - suse had been criticied for focusing only on KDE and having a crappy implementation of gnome.
Suse will probably keep kde as the preferred desktop, but will offer a ximian gnome alternative as well.
Mozilla on my fedora box opened it up too... when I saw the goatse crap and heard the loud "Hey everybody, I'm.." I did a quick CTRL-ALT-BKSP to kill the X session - blech...
photoshop? bah, there are many graphics programs besides photoshop. If adobe refuses to port to linux, it will be interpreted as brain damage and workarounds will arise.
Decades? I remember one day in July 1998 - people were saying linux would never be taken seriously in the datacenter, because it "couldn't run" serious databases like oracle. That very day, oracle announced that they were going to start supportin linux, and a few months later I was running oracle 8 on my linux box at home.
Once the decision is made, things can move a lot more quickly than you can imagine.
1. You can not play games on it.
hmm, was I just imagining that I was playing quake 3 and ut2003 today on my linux box?
2. It cannot be used by my grandma.
Sorry, can't comment on your grandma - but it can be used by my mom with no trouble.
3. It lacks a GUI of any note.
It's got a GUI that I enjoy using a lot more than windows - perhaps you've not actually used linux recently.
4. There is no support available for it.
(yawn) support avaialble from vendors and 3rd parties - not that you'd really need it.
5. It is an assortment of fragmented OSes.
hmm not sure what you mean here...
6. It cannot be run on the x86 platform.
Actually it can and does work quite well on x86.
7. You have to compile everything and know C.
LOL, tell that to my 7 year old daughter.
8. Support for the latest hardware is always poor.
That's odd, my new nvidia card, video capture card, usb scanner, and digital cameras work just fine.
9. It is incompatiable with GNU/Linux.
Difficult to tell what you mean here.
10.It is dying.
Nope.
Hope this clears things up!
That would have been great a few years ago, but IBM blew their chance - now it would be too little, too late, as OO is superior.
Some anonymous troll wrote: "but the OS still has a long, long way to go before the common consumer truly embraces it"
Faulty logic: Customer ignorance is not a flaw in the design of the OS.
So a more correct statement would be "the customer must be aware of the alternatives available to him in order to embrace them"
The troll goes on to say "Besides, the move away from Windows only affects employee laptops and workstations. Why would most of the rest of the world care?"
They would care because if a company like IBM can do business using linux, that sort of takes all the wind out of the giant microsoft FUD machine that shrilly insists that you need microsoft in order to do business.