On Fri, Nov 03, 2006 at 12:55:50PM +0000, Francis Giannaros wrote:
To address a point made earlier:
Greg KH wrote:
Both of these are third party packages, Ubuntu was forced to stop shipping their pre-built packages a while ago for the obvious legal reasons.
That's not true at all (see http://packages.ubuntu.com/edgy/x11/nvidia-glx ). That is the package for the Edgy release, which was released just over a week ago. It's in the "Restricted" repository, officially supported and released by Ubuntu. These packs have never been stopped; always been there.
That's not the kernel driver, only the Xorg drivers, as per the list of the files contained in this package: http://packages.ubuntu.com/cgi-bin/search_contents.pl?searchmode=filelist&word=nvidia-glx&version=edgy&arch=i386 so I don't have a problem with them being distributed. From what I remember, Ubuntu gets around this whole issue by downloading the files from somewhere and then having the user (through an automatic script) build the kernel driver and do the linking on their own. That way they don't violate the GPL, and push the violation onto the user (if the user happens to redistribute the binary). So no, Ubuntu does not ship the pre-built kernel driver, unless you can find it somewhere else on their site.
In fact, their future intentionson getting these included by default are even stronger. See a spec for Feisty (the next version of Ubuntu) drafted by the Shuttleworth himself: https://features.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/accelerated-x
Yes, I've been talking with the Ubuntu developers about this. And they too are working to get opensource drivers for these devices. See the magic wording on that page: For those vendors which have proprietary drivers that enable acceleration, we will consider enabling those drivers by default if they can provide us with an SLA for security and related updates. That does much of what Novell currently does with Nvidia. Novell pushes all of the burden of support, distribution, and legal issues onto Nvidia. So again, Ubuntu is moving toward the same situation that Novell currently has. And that's fine with me. thanks, greg k-h --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org