Yet another binary driver problem

Yet another binary driver problem

Posted Sep 2, 2004 7:52 UTC (Thu) by mbp (guest, #2737)
Parent article: Pointless ideology?

I was just struggling with this today, before giving up and going to read LWN.

One of my machines has an ATI FireGL2 card in it. A couple of years ago this was apparently quite an expensive and powerful card. (Not that I really care; I only run mozilla, rxvt and emacs, but it came in the machine.)

However, ATI are apparently now bored with supporting it: the last driver release was in November 2002 for XFree86 4.2. I don't want to keep running the same kernel and X software I had in 2002, so as time goes on it's gradually getting worse. This card doesn't seem to support VESA modes. It's now hobbling along in a very slow 2d mode. I suppose someday I need to replace it with a cheap Radeon that has at least open-source 2d support.

ATI's answer seems to be that people ought to buy an expensive new card if they want an updated driver, otherwise they can see figure 1.

Damned if I'll buy anything that needs proprietary drivers in the future if I can possibly avoid it.

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