I finally decided last week to take the plunge and try the nouveau driver out. My feelings on proprietary drivers like nvidia’s are well known by now so I doubt there is anybody who will be much surprised except that I took so long.
RMS has said many times that the only time it is acceptable for somebody who believes in free software to use proprietary software is when (1) there are no usable free alternative and (2) you are also contributing to the creation of such an alternative. Thus the use of the proprietary only program is just a temporary stopgap – and you are making an effort according to your abilities to ensure it remains temporary.
Well there are four pieces of proprietary software on my computer (that I know about – if something else slipped through I haven’t found it but even gnewsense has trouble finding it all – and if I haven’t found it then the implications if that I don’t use it). The first is the BIOS, well there isn’t much I can do about that right now, opencore doesn’t support my motherboard yet, and since it’s not a dual-bios motherboard there is no way I can help fix this without bricking my computer. The second is java, which is not major concern to me since it’s 90% GPL’d already and the remaining ten percent will be GPL’d by April if SUN keeps their word.
The last two are the nvidia driver and the adobe flash player. So those two are things that I can start helping to get rid off, and I am doing just that. For flash, I am running gnash as well, my coding skills do not extend to what gnash needs but I can contribute bug reports and I am doing so as I have been for several years. Gnash is fast approaching a usable state. I see too many ‘opensource’ people cheering because Adobe finally ‘saw the light’ and released the GNU/Linux flash-10 alongside the windows version. Wake-up people. They didn’t see the light, they didn’t do this because they are nice ! They did it because gnash is fast approaching a usable state for everybody (it already works for almost everybody) and they want to try and stop it’s momentum by cementing their position with an early release.
Please folks, if you care about free software, see through this piece of pure marketing strategy. Adobe didn’t do this to make it easier on new GNU/Linux users, they did it because GNASH represents a threat to them on Windows and on GNU/Linux, so stopping it where it is currently strongest is their best bet to try and prevent it replacing them on both.
I believe however that they will come to learn that the only way they really could have stopped gnash and made it irrelevant would have been to make flash free software.
But back to the topic at hand, there is one project out there to try and create a free replacement for nvidia’s proprietary driver and I am now running it. At this stage you will need to have xorg1.5 installed to make the most of it, the 1.4 3D and compositing support requires the gallium driver for it which is … very broken. But not long ago, all of nouveau was pretty broken. It’s impressive how the driver has come along in a short period of time. Already it outperforms the nv driver a hundred times over on my system.
I will be upgrading to xorg 1.5 as soon as it’s practical to test it on that (particularly it’s 3D support) but I can vouch that if you follow the wiki instructions for installation nouveau works pretty well for 2D on most setups. There are some quirks which I will post on more fully as I discover them, but well done to the nouveau folks, I have already offered them what help I can give because contributing to this is the only way I can rid myself of a driver that has proven unstable, badly designed and thoroughly proven that proprietary software always comes back to bite you in the ass sooner or later.
