I notice that the binary blob discussion is again on lwns front page. Recently I got a new portable from work and this gave me some new insight. In short: binary-only drivers are so bad people will buy other hardware.
The machine (a Lenovo Z61m) uses a X1400 ATI chip, so I have to use the ATI binary-only driver. Well. I'm trying to use it.
The amount of grief I'm getting from it would convince even billg himself that opensource drivers are mandatory in an opensource system. Strange errors pop up and you're just lost, googling only gives you forums where other poor users are trying to make it all work. Due to the dynamic nature of xorg and kernel development the driver will never 'catch up' and problems will keep popping up. And there is little I can do except complain to the responsible person and urge him to buy the Intel only portable next time.
If this keeps on Intel will just sweep the Linux hacker's market, and with it the heart and minds of a lot of people. My next machine will be an Intel, the first one in years, because I cannot get an AMD with a open graphics card, and I think I won't be alone in this.
My Common Lisp and Debian blog. For more off topic rants and stuff please see my livejournal blog.
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4 comments:
I switched to xorg ati driver this very week (xorg 7.1, radeon driver). I have a notebook with X700 graphics card, and the driver works. I even get Composite and Render extensions now. 3d kinda works -- glxgears do ok, but other things like bzflag have some texture corrupting going (or so it seems to me).
One thing Kanotix does well is provide an easy and supported installer for ati and nvidia binary drivers (and some other uglies). Is this is a good or bad thing? I gave my answer at my linux.ie blog about kanotix and non-free stuff. I'd still say that if someone is willing to do the work, and it is the only way hardware will work, it shouldn't be ok to do it. That being said, anyone using it should know they are doing something potentially troublesome and the best answer is good hardware.
Anyway kanotix install-fglrx script just might provide you some clues to getting the card up and running?
What kind of errors were you getting?
I remember setting up fglrx was a real pain, but you only have to do it once. It's working fine right now on an X 300 on a Gentoo laptop.
Work recently purchased a Dell D620 for me to hack on. Great machine, NVIDIA video card; required me to run the binary drivers. NVIDIA tries hard to do things the right way, but ultimately, it doesn't work too well when you're keeping track of Debian Etch or Sid. Oh well.
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