Re: [Nel] GNU/Linux ... snowballs is running

[Thomas RIBO]

Le Mercredi 13 Février 2002 15:52, Loic Dachary a écrit :
>       Oh, you mean my Matrox G200 is not as powerfull as a geforce
> ?-) I'm kidding. The issue here is to find a card that runs on
> GNU/Linux and has a Free Software driver. All nVidia based products
> are discarded right away, thanks to their address@hidden@$ non free software
> policy. The worst of all is that they provide a gratis driver that
> runs on GNU/Linux, therefore nobody is apparently motivated to write
> a Free Software alternative.

Yes, but it is the only way for the moment to have a good video card 
and good drivers running on Linux. I would prefer free drivers too, but 
I use the non-free ones and am not too embarrassed with that...

>       I figured that an ATI RADEON 7500 / 64 Mo is probably the best
> I can get. I'll have to recompile XFree-4.2.0 to take advantage of
> the accelerated drivers, though. But not too far in the future it
> will pop automagically on my Debian unstable, therefore it's
> acceptable. From the benchmarks I saw, it more or less compares to a
> geforce 2 but is vastly outperformed by geforce 3. Any
> input/experience on this subject would be welcome.

To compare with a GeForce 3, you'll need a Radeon 8500. But I have no 
idea of the support on Linux (I'm talking about free drivers). BTW, 
it's a chance that ATI does not provide drivers on Linux: when we see 
the quality of the Windows ones, we can only be happy about that ;-)!

>
>       Who is pressuring nVidia to release their drivers under a Free
> Software license ? I'd gladly add my 0.2 euro advocacy bit ;-)

It seemed to me that a petition was somewhere on Internet, but I can't 
find it... There are some discutions about that on Debian lists 
archives, but that's all... :-(

-- 
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"Le temps ne fait rien à l'affaire, quand on est con, on-est-con !"
-- Georges Brassens