24 June 08 - 11:52no nvidia open source linux drivers

Well, it seems like Nvidia has put the cards on the table and will not provide open source drivers for Linux. It will continue to ship the pretty good but closed source binary drivers for the time being. ATI/AMD started a few months ago to provide the community with documentation on their hardware. I used to tell my friends/family that if they wanted good display drivers they should get a nvidia card. I am changing my advocacy to ATI/AMD as of today. I am not doing this for "religious" reasons, but with plain economics in mind. If I have the choice, and I do, between open source and closed source I choose open source, because my experience shows that binary drivers will get obsolete some day while open source rarely do.

My new endorcement: Buy ATI/AMD cards.

managementboy - Linux - No comments - § ¶

02 June 08 - 15:12Switching form opensuse to mythbuntu

My first linux distribution was debian. Then I swiched to gentoo. Fed up with all the compiling stuff, I swiched to SuSE, mainly because back then the drivers for AVM cards where only supported by SuSE. A few weeks back I upgraded my Server at home from an old Athlon 1.6 Ghz with 700MB RAM to a DualCore 2.6 Ghz with 8 Gig RAM. And while at it I tried mythbuntu out. The reasoing behind it being, that the server, once being only a fileserver, today mainly does TV and music.

I did not need to back up anything, as I  was not going to use the old 80 Gig hard drive for the new system. All I did was pop in the mythbuntu Hardy (8.04) cd, klick 6 times on next and after about 25 minutes I had a working MythTV setup. WOW! I also have to say that the package manager from debian/ubuntu is just fast, I mean fast. What a joy to work with. Getting the cyrus mails to work on the new system took a few days of learing curve, but once I knew what to do it was a breeze. Using the mythbuntu control centre I upgraded the distribution from plain mythbuntu to kubuntu. Now my server is a full Desktop, too.

On the sad side, SuSE has with sax2 a great X.org manager. The stuff available by Ubuntu just does not cut it. I had to go back to oldschool xorg.conf editing to get the dual displays I have to work at native screen size.

Right now my mood towards Ubuntu: Great!

managementboy - Linux - No comments - § ¶