On Tue, May 29, 2007 at 12:22:41 +0800,
Ed Greshko <Ed.Greshko(a)greshko.com> wrote:
Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Mon, May 28, 2007 at 17:32:41 -0500,
> Les Mikesell <lesmikesell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>> Nvidia and ATI's drivers aren't included in the box. They could be.
>
> Except that they will be broken by kernel updates and there is no way
> to force nVidia to produce updated drivers. I seem to remember that
> being a significant part of a big discussion about whether or not to delay
> an xorg update because of a lack of binary drivers. (Ultimately the
> update was delayed due to other considerations.)
Except there are methods that, upon booting into a new kernel, will rebuild
the drivers as part of the boot process. Thus, making it a trivial task.
That depends on what changed. Some changes are going to break the drivers
in way that can't be fixed like that. In fact it is a virtual certainty
if you continue to run the hardware long enough while continuing to update
the kernels (and xorg).