Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

Donnie, what’s stopping you having both X.org 7.0 and X.org 7.1 stable at the same time on x86? Is it possible to craft the ebuilds so that, if you choose the opensource drivers, Portage will let you have X.org 7.1, but if you choose the binary drivers, Portage will block any attempts to go beyond X.org 7.0? That’ll allow us to support both types of driver for now.

Instead of the current black and white approach, maybe it’s time for a two-speed approach instead?

I can’t speak for anyone else, but whilst I’ve found the opensource ATI driver fine for your run-of-the-mill 2D GNOME desktop (provided you don’t mind the lack of power management support!), the lack of 3D support limits my use of Linux. This is with a Radeon 9600 M10 card - an obsolete graphics cards from several years ago. I’d love to see ATI and nVidia open their drivers, but until they do, I’ll be a user of the binary drivers as long as they offer features that I need, and that I can’t get from the opensource drivers.

So, c’mon Greg, stop fucking about beating up distros, and go after ATI and nVidia directly. In the Windows world, users are already well-trained in downloading binary drivers from ATI and nVidia. There’s no reason to believe that the same behaviour won’t become the norm in the Linux world (if it hasn’t already). The only way you’re going to put a stop to it is to get ATI and nVidia to honour the GPL by releasing their code. Stopping binary drivers being included in distros won’t win the battle. Folks’ll just download the easy-to-install binary drivers directly from ATI and nVidia instead, and it’ll be in ATI and nVidia’s interest to make them easy to install.

If you’re right in your assertion that binary drivers are illegal, put ATI and nVidia directly in the dock. Enforce the GPL against the source of your problem - the folks making the binary drivers.

I’ve just added a copy of the gi8k Gnome applet to my desktop overlay. This handy little applet sits in your Gnome panel, and displays the current temperature of the CPU. It can also display fan speed, and can be used to make the fans kick in sooner than the BIOS would.

All you need to do is to make sure that you have the i8k module compiled for your kernel.

Now, if only I could get suspend-to-RAM working on this machine …