Michael Dolan Dot Com

Wednesday, August 9th, 2006

YES! Open Source Graphics Drivers from a Vendor!!! From Intel though…

I’ve been very vocal in the past (and here) about the need for open source graphics drivers from vendors (can’t forget we have basic drivers already from the community). It’s never made sense to me what the business strategy is for nVidia and ATI to come up with crazy methods for keeping their drivers proprietary and not distributable by the “free software” distributions (OpenSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian). Finally… someone listened to ME … or any of the other 10 millions Linux desktop users complaining for the last 5 years in public forums :)

The common rationale is that these proprietary drivers contain the secrets to how the chips work… as if engineers can’t deduce what a chip is doing by how it’s laid out, the layers, etc??? They can come pretty close without the drivers…

So while I may have had the easy street getting 3D XGL running on my laptop with nVidia drivers that worked with my system and distro versions, others got the shaft b/c they had to fight through getting his Intel’s proprietary video drivers to work with XGL. In the future, the positions may be reversed - if Intel gets its way. The Internet is littered with Linux “3D video card problems”.

This may end very soon - Intel has led the charge and open sourced its 3D video drivers! CNet covers it here and it looks like RH and Suse had early access - now I just need a good Intel graphics card… do they have any? I’m guessing these are just the “on motherboard”, low end, budget Gateway PC video cards - maybe I’m wrong. Anyway, it’s great to see a first mover in this stale debate. Hopefully others will follow suit.

One thing is for sure now - Intel video card users will probably have it much easier. Just think: install Linux and reboot into good graphics without the hassle of booting with basic video, downloading, accepting agreements, installing drivers and hoping X fires up on the next reboot…

Oh, if you want to download the source code for a 3D graphics card you cannot go here for it, and you can’t go here, but rather, go here.