Open Source Success!

67GTA · October 13, 2011, 1:50am

I have to admit that I have always been on the fence with open source. I loved it for it’s freedom and openness, but always found I had to install proprietary drivers to get full functionality with my hardware. I know this is not the fault of open source, but aggravating none the less.I downloaded and am now running the 12.1 beta KDE CD. Everything works perfectly, but got an itch to try out the graphics card with the open source driver. I was skeptical about it’s abilities. I have Dell Studio with ATI HD 4570 Mobility (using Unknown Gallium (7.11)) . All of the compositing/effects work beautifully. I installed open jdk and minecraft, and it ran smoothly without a hitch! My Broadcom wireless card now uses the open source driver, and works out of the box. The laptop suspended and hibernated flawlessly also. This is all from the live CD with ZERO proprietary drivers! I realized that flash was the only frontier left for me. Gnash and lightspark are broken quite often because they can’t keep up with Youtubes changes. Hopefully HTML5 will break that battle line! I wish everyone could have this experience.

martin_helm · October 13, 2011, 2:05am

Thank you for sharing this.
From time to time it is really good to hear a success story. I postponed
myself installing the 12.1 beta on my main PC as dual boot for testing (I am
mainly interested to see what progress the noveau driver for nvidia has
made).
Maybe it is some kind of dream to have one day a box where everything which
is hardware related runs with free software and runs as performant as with
the proprietary drivers, but I think this shows that it is not completely
impossible (even if there is still a long way to go).

67GTA · October 13, 2011, 2:23am

I am also curious about the noveau driver progress, but since my old laptop’s motherboard died, all I have now is ATI machines.

martin_helm · October 13, 2011, 2:36am

67GTA wrote:

>
> I am also curious about the noveau driver progress, but since my old
> laptop’s motherboard died, all I have now is ATI machines.
>
After the weekend I can tell you more, I will post my results in the
prerelease-beta forum.

steffen13 · October 13, 2011, 5:02am

that´s good to hear. It is always nice, not to have to install extra drivers.

BTW I have the 12.1 Beta installed on a Nvidia Laptop, with a Nvidia GeForce 7300 GO. The Noveau driver makes 3d effects, although they are a bit sluggish. But I did not switch the effects engine from openGL to xRender yet. So compared to the last trial, it is a huge step forward.
With 3d effects switched off, everything is as fast as always, no difference to the prop. driver from Nvidia.