Suggestions on notebook

[jonathan at jonmasters.org (Jon Masters)]

On Sun, Mar 05, 2006 at 09:14:53AM -0500, Ward Vandewege wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 05, 2006 at 03:05:59AM +0000, Jon Masters wrote:
> > I like this, because you're both openly extolling the virtues of
> > horribly proprietary video drivers as if there's no problem :-)

> That's a fair point, I should have mentioned that the official Nvidia driver
> is a closed-source binary driver. But there's also the community driver which
> while not nearly as good, is Free.

Ok. Indeed. Basically, the whole situation just sucks and is in urgent
need of being fixed.

I recently had to do some hacking on the Nvidia driver (that one) to get
the RT patchset working (based my stuff on a community patch that had
figured out the Nvidia HAL and where the correct locks that needed
fixing are located) and it re-affirmed how evil it all really is. In
fact I'm not even sure if I changed very much in the end because I
wasn't able to feel comfortable about working on it.

And all because they don't want to reveal the magical software bits that
win the benchmarks. Interestingly, the Open Graphics guys have been
saying a lot on their mailing list lately so I'm hopeful that there will
be some truly open graphics hardware I can use soon - though I'm really
not suggesting we're going to get vendors to release open source
hardware too! I'm just advocating thinking everything through.

> I guess I should amend my statement to 'ATI and NVIDIA suck (no
> official free software drivers), but ATI sucks more (no decent official linux
> driver period).'

It's a pity really. I used to really like ATI (that kind of obsessive
and unjustifiable love that comes from having a vendor that works with
the community - it kept me from ever buying any Nvidia card at any
price). Now I might just go with an Intel card in my next box.

My older Powerbook has an ATI card and that was what kept me from going
for a 12" model for the longest time (that it had an unsupportable
Nvidia chipset) but I recently did upgrade to a 12" one with Nvidia
because of the ATI situation. Of course since they're aren't going to be
any more decent Powerbooks (with a useful architecture), I'll probably
end up getting even more weird and buying a SPARCbook next time :-)

Jon.