Re: silug-discuss

["Bryan J. Smith" <b.j.smith@ieee.org>]

NZG <ngustavson@emacinc.com> wrote:
> Really?

FYI ... There can be some developer-issues with regard to how nVidia
maintains its libgl.so and other files with stock MesaGL, among other
things.

That's the same issue with Sun's Java as well, although Sun is far
more intrusive on what assumptions it makes on a Fedora-based system.

> I admit that I don't know much about Fedora specifically,
> but this works wonderfully on Debian systems, which are
> certainly less popular than RH

Don't be so assuming.  A lot more distros are Debian-based today than
Fedora-based, even including Red Hat Linux (which I now refer to
"Fedora-based" collectively).  But yes, probably the total number are
more Fedora-based -- even if radically changed from their prior
roots.
 
> I'm suprised if NVIDIA doesn't release RPM's.

They won't for the same reason as Sun, you have to agree to a
license.  Although nVidia's packaging/installer is quite good, and
itself is GPL.

Anything nVidia can legally release GPL or MIT, they do.  They got
legally SMACKED -- and HARD -- by both Intel and Microsoft (among
others) when the released ALL of their accelerated X11 driver
sourcecode back in the XFree 3.3 days.

BTW, no vendor puts more people on the MIT 2D drivers than nVidia. 
And that includes far more support for multimedia functionality
(e.g., video, multihead, etc...) than ATI does in the stock MIT 2D
drivers.

Even Intel holds nVidia to NDAs on its kernel driver.  Intel itself
won't release some code for their own solutions on Linux, even though
most people think they are more supporting than nVidia.

> Don't get me wrong, like I said I don't know much about the RH
> world, but this seems strange to me.

It doesn't to me at all.  There are just some considerations you have
to take care of when you install from the nVidia installer.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith     Professional, Technical Annoyance
b.j.smith@ieee.org      http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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*** Speed doesn't kill, difference in speed does ***

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