On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 4:04 PM, Dan <dan.steele.d@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Could you give me some names of Video cards that are most compatible with > Fedora 9 and that have drivers for Fedora 9?? > > Thank you dan > > -- People ask this all the time, and never get a very helpful answer, I'm afraid. This might sound mean, but you might learn from my experience. I think you are barking up the wrong tree if you think the Fedora core users are going to help you very much with the choice of video hardware or the development of software. I stopped using Fedora as my main desktop OS because releases repeatedly broke the Nvidia or ATI drivers and there was an inevitable period of searching and re-compiling and yelling about the fact that the video card did not work right. In F9, the new xorg beta was used and Nvidia did not have a driver ready. The "nv" driver was simply full of trouble. It did not render lots of things properly for me and I thought F9 was a total bust. As it has always been with RedHat & Fedora, you have to find the "Nvidia" commercial driver from some other source. Usually I've found the most help from livna.rpm. If the Nvidia can work, they usually know how to make it. (When F9 was released, I'd guess it was 2 or 3 weeks before there was an Nvidia RPM. And if you let F9 upgrade to the latest kernel, you'll usually have some excitement trying to rebuild the Nvidia video module to match the kernel.) You'll note they currently have no offerings for ATI on the livna site, and they do have a list of video cards that they recommend you should not get. As far as I can tell now, the test version of Nvidia does work pretty well on a Dell Latitude D820 with the Nvidia Quadro. I also have some dell workstations with older ATI Radeon X300 and getting a video config that works on them with F9 has been trouble. The radeon driver can display well enough in 2D, except for some random lines popping out now and then. No 3D, as far as I can tell. If you google enough, you'll find yourself to a "howto" that says you should uninstall the xorg drivers from F9 and reinstall the ones from F8. I found that unsatisfying, to say the least, but if you are a ATI owner, there may be no choice. If I were buying something now, I'd look at Intel video cards and/or motherboards with built-in video from Intel. Several people have pointed out that Intel is actually engaged in open source research and some people say the 3D drivers for them are better. But I don't have any Intel devices to test. This page encourages me: http://support.intel.com/support/graphics/sb/CS-010512.htm They give a list of cards, and I'd stay within that list if I were you. If you already have a video card and can't get it working in F9, you might try a different Linux distribution. I've tried two options, neither one quite perfect. One is to stay in the RPM framework, but switch to Centos, which is more conservative and does not push ahead of the software support. Centos is a free version of RedHat, and I'd say it lags behind Fedora's kernel & video by at least a year. The downside there is that the release maintainers still contend that they have no responsibility for making sure that the proprietary drivers will work. So you go off hunting for RPMs from some place on the internet. You are likely to find them, however. The only other alternative I've tried is to switch to the Ubuntu distribution. The team there tries to co-ordinate with video software, so when they have a release, they try to make sure they can point you to a place where you can get video drivers. This site http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS7895189911.html says they actually include some proprietary drivers, but I have a recollection that they did not install by default. I think I had to ask for a proprietary repository during the install. There is a "linux-restricted-modules" package... -- Paul E. Johnson Professor, Political Science 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504 University of Kansas -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
