On Sun, 21 Mar 2004, Bob Fischer wrote:
On Sun, 2004-03-21 at 12:02, Bjorn Tore Sund wrote:
If I end up going for Opteron workstations I'll probably be buying 15 or so as a start. I have learned the hard way NOT to try and remote administer other people's workstations with NVIDIA cards, the driver compiling after a kernel or xfree86 upgrade is just too much of a pain.
Aack!
I haven't (yet) tried to install my NVidia 3-D drivers. They at least claim to have made installation "painless" --- but I'll have to wait and see on that one.
I have. It _can_ be done non-interactively. If you're in runlevel 3. Which means I either need to contact each user with an nvidia card individually or schedule the patching process outside working hours. Working hours being highly non-definitive in an academic institution, I need to _check_ that the user isn't logged in.
If 15 workstations are all the same, is there any way you can re-build the kernel on one of them and then rsync to the other 15?
Quite possibly, but it would involve making sure I knew every single file the nvidia driver needed - do you think they've got that documented anywhere public?
Do ANY graphics card vendors offer painless 3-D support that doesn't require you to recompile the kernel? AFAIK, if you want to use your 3-D accelerator, your only choice these days is to recompile your kernel. I don't think that any graphics vendor has supplied open drivers that can be included with a standard Linux distro.
Define painless. In 32bit systems I'm quite happy both with Matrox' and Radeon's open source drivers. The Radeon isn't quite as fast as it could have been, but this isn't a problem in my work environment. I very rarely need to build my own kernel, unless I'm doing something really experimental. SuSE's rpms are quite adequate. Except where closed-source (or brand new) kernel modules are involved, in which case I build the single kernel module, not the whole kernel.
In my experience, Radeon cards barely work without their special driver. I mean, I don't get 1280x1024 with 24-bit color.
What sort of Radeon card is that, on what distro version? Never had a problem, except with the very newest cards, and that usually resolves itself through tricks of the trade. One thing I like about the Radeon close-source driver is that it doesn't seem to have a kernel module. Thus it keeps on working independent of kernel upgrades, which is Very Good(tm). Bjørn -- Bjørn Tore Sund Phone: (+47) 555-84894 Stupidity is like a System administrator Fax: (+47) 555-89672 fractal; universal and Math. Department Mobile: (+47) 918 68075 infinitely repetitive. University of Bergen VIP: 81724 Support: system@mi.uib.no Contact: teknisk@mi.uib.no Direct: bjornts@mi.uib.no