Closed Source Drivers & The Linux Community
Every time I come in contact with a closed source 'proprierity' driver
I find that it offers me more trouble than it is worth. Below are some
opinions on the different fabricants of hardware.
NVidia
Nvidia is the kind of cooperation that pollutes the linux community.
Linux is open source, the Nvidia drivers are not. They are proprierity,
which is silly in general. I buy hardware and when I buy hardware I
want a pretty decent specification on how to use it (e.g: under the
form of source code). If that is not available, then I bought something
useles. The NVidia drivers, and specially the 3D access, are closed
source and incredible difficult to install. I managed to do this for
all past kernels and versions of their closed source driver. However
very recenlty my card was 'suddenly' no longer supported. This means
that I now have the choice of buying a new one (problably the big
masterplan behind their current driver), or fall back to the
less-than-optimal X.org implementation of the NVidia driver. I 'choose'
the last option.
Bottomline: NVIDIA sucks for not providing the interfacing
specification of their hardware.
ATI Radeon cards: Fglrx
The firegl cards are a nightmare as well. Again a closed sourced driver
and a company that tries to get their 'hands' in the market by not
releasing the source of their driver in one way or another. These days
this might seem 'natural' not to provide a specification of hardware.
But, the reality is that one effectively buys a car without the ability
to steer it. For instance it has taken many generations of the radeon
driver to actually not crash X every once in a while (probably a
concurrency problem). However, it was completely impossible to fix that
issue since no source was available. Similarly: lately the X.org
drivers changed their versioning scheme which broke the binary driver
entirely. Normally one could fix that, now we can't.
It finally happened. One of our machines stopped working with the upgrade to the 8.38 drive. The mobility radeon 9000 is no longer supported. So here we are: great hardware, no drivers. Does this mean their hardware is completely useles ? The answer is: yes.
Bottomline: ATI and their fglrx/radeon driver suck.
Sound Blaster
Sound blaster cards and creative labs in general are a nightmare for
the Linux community. In a sense they are partly supported, in another
sense they are supported because some people have spent a lot of time
in figuring out how the cards work. However, what I can now do with my
'Create Labs live mega DSP piece of hardware' is that I can access the
DA and AD cirtuits. That's about it. There are simply no proper
specifications available on how to access the hardware.
Bottomline: creative labs suck for their useles linux suport
Intel IPW2200 drivers
At the moment I have a intel IPW2200 wireless network card. That driver
is closed source as well, and I'm pretty sure that in the near future
the drivers will become obsolete as well.
