Re: Proprietary or open source NVidia drivers?

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On Fri, 15 Oct 2010 09:50:12 -0700 James McKenzie wrote:
>  On 10/14/10 1:52 AM, Valent Turkovic wrote:
> > This post has raised some heat in blog comments and also in Fedora
> > mailing list discussion.
> Discussing OpenSource versus Proprietary always brings heat.  Folks have 
> to remember thought, that the OpenSource drivers do not support features 
> and products that the proprietary drivers do, due to the 'hiding' of 
> information by Vendors and the time it takes to black box test a 
> particular feature.  That is a fact of life and we all need to keep that 
> in mind when someone asks:
> 
> "Open or closed source"?
> 
> Well what video card do you have and what do you plan to do with it?
> 
> Older model, 2D and simple 3D:  Open Source, almost always.
> Newer model (not on the OSS driver supported list) or complex 3D.  
> Proprietary, mainly.  As the OSS driver picks up more features AND the 
> video card becomes 'older' then the OSS driver should be selected over 
> proprietary.
> 
> Simple answer, complex solution as information has to be gathered and 
> suggestions should be made with caveats "This works for me" or "Your 
> Mileage May Vary".
> 
> No need to argue here.  This is about as cut and dried as it can be 
> made.  Some folks swear by Open Source, others at it.  Some swear by 
> nVidia/Catalyst/Intel, others at it.  Nobody is ever going to be 
> completely satisfied by someone else's solution if they are not doing 
> EXACTLY the same things.
> 
> James McKenzie

A voice of reason on this issue.  Amazing. :-)

As for me, on every new Fedora release I install (currently running F13)
I try the latest open source driver first.  Then I install the NVidia
driver (from the rpmfusion-nonfree repo).  The latter has not yet failed
to be snapper when running the KDE Desktop Effects than the former.
That's on my desktop machines.

I also use very advanced display technology (it's my research) which the
open source driver will probably _never_ drive.  (For example I'm
running a $10,000 NVidia Quadro Plex subsystem on one machine with
multiple gen-locked and frame-locked monitors.)

As for the OP's question of what driver:

    [root ~]# rpm -qa | fgrep -i nvid
    nvidia-settings-1.0-6.fc13.x86_64
    nvidia-xconfig-1.0-4.fc13.x86_64
    akmod-nvidia-256.53-1.fc13.x86_64
    xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs-256.53-2.fc13.x86_64
    xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-256.53-2.fc13.x86_64
    kmod-nvidia-2.6.34.7-56.fc13.x86_64-256.53-1.fc13.4.x86_64

all installed via "yum".

Note the "akmod".  It ensures (as I understand it) that a new
"kmod-nvidia" gets automagically compiled during the boot process
whenever I update to a new kernel.  I've been using the rpmfusion stuff
(and Livna) stuff for years w/o any problems to speak of.  (NB: Others
have had problems with akmod and don't use it.  YMMV).

The one time I downloaded a binary driver directly from nvidia (about 1
year ago) for some experiements, the package borked the module
installation process so at boot time I had to always "rmmod" and the
"modprobe" drivers.

That's my experience.

Dean

=========
Dean S. Messing
Senior. Scientist
Display Algorithms and Visual Optimization Laboratory
Sharp Laboratories of America


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