Linux Video Card Drivers

ATI publishes their specs so open source people write their own drivers (ala the new X 4.3).

Nvidia does have a "Linux Exception" clause to their licensing agreement (see their website) that allows for the distribution of their drivers. Consequently several distros DO include them. I think Xandros does and I know for sure that Morphix has them on the Gaming Edition.

I think the reason why the Nvidia drivers have not appeared on Knoppix is because there are no programs on the CD that won't work fine with the standard nv drivers. The only reason why I can think of that they need to be included on the CD is for HD install purposes.

Should be reason enough imho, anyway, i should go to work and throw the nvidia drivers in the morphix base where they belong :D

The main problem is that IF knoppix would include the nvidia drivers, for them to work knopper would also have to include the GLX mesa replacement by Nvidia. This works great with nvidia cards, but it breaks any normal softwarebased openGL (instant segfault). Morphix uses on-the-fly installing to overcome this problem, kudos to anyone who can make GLX play nice alongside Mesa without this trick ;) Still have one problem though, openGL only seems to work as root for nvidia cards. Would be glad if someone could figure this out, but i'm not holding my breath...

Anyway, how are the new ATI drivers? Don't have a card to test them, if anyone has a Radeon to spare :P

Alex,

I'm not sure how to deal with the Nvidia driver problem myself but one live cd that seems to manage it is Linuxconsole.

http://linuxconsole.free.fr/

Maybe there are some clues there.

I think that Cool Linux also uses Nvidia on their live CD but the auto detection / auto setup isn't quite as good IMHO.

The new ATI drivers are moderate. I haven't tried XFree 4.2 on it because I just got the card, so I can't comment on whether there's an improvement or not.

Free games like tuxracer, xracer, etc all work fine. Its only the commercial ones that don't. Ut2003demo runs for a few seconds before crashing, and Neverwinter Nights is practically unplayable. (In NWN) The textures are warped, so you don't really see anything, except some weird psycadelic colors. That's on the characters. No suc problem occurs in the environment. The textures applied to the environment just flash about a lot.

Its either a driver problem, or my Ati Radeon 9000 ain't configured correctly.