Christopher Beland, Thu, 28 May 2009 02:31:22 -0400:
> > to the open source "xf86-video-nouveau" driver,
which will be
> > available in Fedora 11. (Will it be backported to 9 and 10 as well?)
There was nouveau driver in Fedora Xorg like since forever (certainly F8,
maybe even F7, not sure about that), which in its later versions (for
sure F10) worked for some (emphasizing *some*) better than -nv, so I was
suggesting it over -nvidia, when somebody smallest willingness to leave
THAT THING. However, it was certainly something which nobody could trust
his life, honour, and welfare to.
Unfortunately F11 nouveau will almost certianly not be ported to F10,
because it is (as all other KMS drivers) tightly linked to the
development in kernel, and I am afraid nobody will port all KMS kernel
patches to F10.
> > It was also unclear whether "xf86-video-nv" is
open source enough not
> > to warrant the "proprietary driver" response, or what.
-nv is a difficult beast. From the legal standpoint it is pure open
source (MIT/X11 license as the rest of Xorg), but from the programmer's
point of view it is more complicated ... it has been maintained only by
one nVidia employee, source is largely undocumented, some would say even
obfuscated, and extremely difficult to deal with. So, yes it is open
source (it is in Fedora, right?)
There doesn't seem to be a good page with step-by-step
instructions for
F9 or F10 conversion, so I was vague. Probably this will become less of
an issue as those versions are EOL'd anyway.
I hope upgrade from F9/F10 should work automagically.
Much more interesting than how to install -{nv,nouveau} is how to get rid
of -nvidia goo which stays on the disk (unless rpm from The Repository
Which Shall Not Be Named is used, which quite often isn't). Mike Harris
my esteemed predecessor in Xorg bug triaging wrote a long piece on this
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Xorg/3rd_Party_Video_Drivers (which
somebody cleaned up recently for English; thank you!).
Matěj