On Wed, 17 Apr 2002, Dexter Filmore wrote: [snip] > only a minority for Linux. Those who ain't online and use UN*X based > OS's to get work done i.e. at a company will prolly run commercial UN*Xs > for better and quicker support and won't use XFree, furthermore these Linux *IS* a commercial *NIX (this also applies to *BSD btw)in several varieties of its distributions with excellent support. Better and quicker support than RedHat's corporate offerings? I don't know about that, perhaps you have some means of backing up that statement? > machines ain't meant to run games and if their intended to proceed > sophisticated 3D graphics for simulation and the like they'll highly > likely have professional high end GL boards installed that have Point taken. But many people doing high-end 3D graphics are scientists that like to run Free OS's because they're that type of person and also because they use them for the floating-point intensive number-crunching in their work. So, one woould need to know how large/small an audience that is before writing them off as negligible. I don't have any data on that, do you? > commercial drivers shipped with card. So why waste money on setting > aside a coder for programming drivers for a handful of guys who wanna > play Tux Racer on their machines. The better place to start IMO are the Depends on how large the hobbyist home-user market is in reality. If there are a couple of hundred thousand in that "handful of guys" and they have to decide "What do I want as a decent GPU in my dual-boot, nvidia or ATI?" then ATI can steal a march by dedicating $60K to a coder for a year. > Hmyeeessss but this is against the idea of an free and open OS, isnt't > it - solutions like this rather apply to the above mentioned companies, > I think. Yes, but the original poster has a card, wants to run XFree86 (I don't know if he's *BSD or *NIX or whatever) so that he can run his underlying OS and this is an unpleasant but pragmatic solution. Ideally he would sit down with the source and code-up a driver in a sweaty, 97-hour, caffeine-fuelled hackathon and GPL it to great applause, but this is the Real World (TM). So, again, advice to the original poster: either don't use the card (the morally pure option which may also work out cheaper) or use the proprietary non-Free, non-free driver which will cost both your wallet and your soul. And in general: if planning on installing a Free OS of some sort then check out the supported hardware before buying an expensive new item. -Oisin
