However, to get these effects on a KDE or Gnome desktop, you must* use a 3D-accelerating hardware driver for your video card. Most video cards are produced by NVidia, ATi, and Intel, but of these three, currently only Intel has advanced Free/Libre/OpenSource drivers, used by Xorg in your system the moment X is installed.
If you have a computer with a built-in Intel video 'card', your 3D graphics and the effects that you see in those videos should work out of the box after installing a modern Linux distribution. Debian Sid with KDE 4.2 works great on my EeePC 701, for example, without any extra work on my part.
If you have an NVidia or ATi card, however, life isn't so easy. The *buntu people have Envy which assists with installing a closed, proprietary driver, but it's not perfect. As I am not interested in running *buntu, and it has failed for me in the past for Debian installations, I have to pass on this one.
The point is, installing these closed GPU drivers on one distribution or another is filled with occasional successes and (more often) failures. I have to say, NVidia seems to work a lot more often than ATi driver installations, and I maybe should have bought another NVidia card when I recently upgraded. I went with an ATi RadeonHD 3450, however, because of the lure of Free Software drivers....
Free Software drivers are in the works for both ATi and NVidia cards. ATi has released documentation since their purchase by AMD, leading to the FLOSS drivers 'radeon' and 'radeonhd'. My card, an ATi 3450 that I purchased with the express intent to use the radeonhd drivers, isn't yet supported for 3D but support for this functionality is in the works. See its progress here:
http://www.x.org/wiki/
Unfortunately for all Free Software users, and especially for the developer himself, Novell has layed off Luc Verhaegen, so that is one fewer developer working on getting 3D Acceleration in the RadeonHD drivers. The RadeonHD page once said to expect 3D Acceleration in the RadeonHD driver in 2009 Q1, which is now; this has since been changed with the loss of a developer and the 3D support is in development.
Likewise, for NVidia cards there is a FLOSS driver being written, named 'nouveau'. This driver is expected to be the default NVidia-hardware driver in the next Fedora release, warts and all, while its developers try to iron out its issues. Red Hat recently hired another developer to work on this driver, which is excellent news.
This driver also has Feature Matrix of its progress, available here:
http://nouveau.freedesktop.
As Desktop Linux and Free Software both grow in use, open and unfettered hardware access for driver writers is essential. For years, FLOSS supporters have written and campaigned both NVidia and ATi hardware manufacturers to open their drivers, and for years we've been shot down. Now the Linux community, including Novell and Red Hat, are taking matters into their own hands by writing the Free drivers instead of getting the drivers Freed from the corporations.
Unfortunately, this lets NVidia off the hook somewhat. ATi released the documentation to assist with writing this driver, but NVidia will get great graphical performance on their cards without helping the FLOSS community in any way.
This is the reason that I bought the ATi card, even though I knew my closed drivers installation would be difficult (I've given up), I also knew the Free drivers were coming and I wanted to support the company that supports the community.
* Enlightenment DR16 and Enlightenment DR17 both do not need 3D-enabled Graphics drivers to do some of their amazing desktop work. However, using these window managers is less common than KWin, Metacity, or Compiz.
9 comments:
Do you feel the drivers need to be open to actually work well...or just for the sake of having a "fully open" system.
If its the former then FOSS and and particularly Linux have a problem. Linux is open and so any company should be able to put together a fully compatible driver open or not. They have access to everything they need in order to make sure it works. If it needs to be open so that the community can help then either something is wrong with Linux or the idea of open source is flawed somewhere.
Personally I just want the drivers to work and they should be able to without having to be open source.
@Phillip.
Automatically and instantly working like the Intel 3D drivers would probably be the main point.
A second point would be if NVidia went bankrupt in the current economic climate. What would happen with the next X server release - or MS Windows 7 for that matter? Well, your graphic card driver won't work anymore - or ever again. If it was open source, then the card will be supported until the day Linux no longer exists!
Not sure the last time you actually installed a *buntu system. but for the last two versions it has been extremely easy to install the nvidia drivers. the system does it for you. and the ATI drivers are now open source although I don't have an ATI card so haven't tried those out. I have not had any problems installing NVIDIA drivers on my machines or the other 5 people I have switched from Windows to Ubuntu in the last year. Sorry for your bad luck though.
I use sgfxi from techpatterns.com to install my nvidia drivers on my Debian systems (lenny, testing and sid). I don't have ati for obvious reasons, but in some cases using certain options (I've heard) you can get the proprietary ati drivers installed also.
You can download it directly, like so, as root: cd /usr/local/bin; wget -Nc smxi.org/sgfxi; chmod +x sgfxi; sgfxi - see sgfxi -h for current options. The home page is http://smxi.org/
As a sidux user, I use it after each new kernel install. Hope this helps.
IF Nvidia went bankrupt, or IF Nvidia decided to not support your video card, then you would have a point. But Nvidia has been supporting many of their video cards under Linux, old and new, for years now, with much fewer difficulties for the users than ATI. When I built my first box a few years ago, I opted for a near top-of-the-line Nvidia card, and installing the drivers to unlock the card's capabilities was a snap. I bought the card to display hi-res graphics after installation, not to strike a blow for open source. Yes, it sounds like instant gratification, but let's face it, you don't buy the latest video card so that you can use it a year or two from now, you buy so that it works right after you stick it into your box and load the drivers. Telling someone to buy ATI just because at some point, someone is going to eventually release drivers which bring out their card's capabilities, may actually be more damaging to Linux and open source, by perpetuating the propaganda that Linux doesn't have the drivers for the latest hardware.
Ok, dude. . . start writin' 'em. In the meantime, I'll be enjoying 3D with my Nvidia card and the free drivers they provide. Thanks, Nvidia, for providing FREE drivers to the Linux community!!!
when we (free drivers users) all be enjoying kernel video mode stuff like plymouth you (nvidia users) will be waiting for the company to implement that stuff i used to be an nvidia user but not anymore the whole point on here is that linux desktop needs to move on and that won't happen if you can't glue all the pieces and depends of a company for drivers
The thing about ATI drivers isn't completely true. You can have 3D and all through opensource drivers : you just need to chose the card wisely.
My "old" Radeon X1650 works quite well with the "radeon" driver, accelerates thing satisfyingly.
Nothing's perfect, though, and I still have some troubles (KWin's compositing doesn't play well with other OpenGL apps, I can't use OpenGL2.0, and it sometimes crash badly), but it worked out of the box on Kubuntu 8.10.
@Phillip
"Do you feel the drivers need to be open to actually work well...or just for the sake of having a "fully open" system."
I prefer the idea of a Fully Free system, but I just want them to work and prefer that they work automagically and don't break with kernel changes, etc. Free drivers do this; closed drivers do not.
@bjb1959
It has been a while since I installed a *buntu system, as I don't like much of it (GNOME in particular, but I dislike the way they set up KDE as well, and much much more that I won't cover here). If its tools work well, that is good news to hear. Now, share them upstream eh devs?
My current ATi 3450 card does work fine out of the box, just not with 3d graphics which I don't care much about anyways, it would just be nice if they did work.
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