Microsoft's DRM vision [LWN.net]

Microsoft's DRM vision

Posted Aug 1, 2005 18:19 UTC (Mon) by rknop (guest, #66)
In reply to: Microsoft's DRM vision by JoeBuck
Parent article: Microsoft's DRM vision

Yep.

Which means that we NEED cards with open-source drivers.

It's getting harder all the time.

As far as I can tell, the newest 3D video card that has succesful open-source support is the Radeon 9200. Is that true? Or are there newer ones?

Likewise, I'm not sure what the deal is with wireless cards, and it's very hard to find the information.

The real problem is that the Common Joe and Common Jane do not understand why this is going to be bad for them. I don't quite get why they don't understand; all that talk of "you will be locked out from doing things on your own computer" ought to scare them, but I don't think it's getting much mainstream play. What IS getting mainstream play is how much the MPAA and RIAA claim they are hurting because of piracy, and how much we need to do about it. Very, very, very sad.

-Rob

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Microsoft's DRM vision

Posted Aug 1, 2005 20:21 UTC (Mon) by gurulabs (subscriber, #10753) [Link]

There is now open source support for R3xx based cards such as the Radeon 9600/9800. My laptop has a FireGL Mobility T2 (aka Radeon 9600) and I have been using the r300 DRI driver for a couple weeks now with heavy 8+ hours a day use. Not one lockup or issue at all.

The 3D performance is very very good as well.

Supposedly on the 9800 cards there is one or more hang bugs that are being tracked down.

The driver lived out-of-tree for awhile at http://r300.sourceforge.net/. However, last week or so it was accepted into the official X.org/Mesa trees.

You can get it here now: http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/

Dax Kelson
Guru Labs

Microsoft's DRM vision

Posted Aug 2, 2005 0:01 UTC (Tue) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link]

Excellent. Good news, thanks. (Especially now that X.org is in Debian, and presumably will get over to testing at some point in the next few months.)

It seems to be following the late-90's trend of "you get support, just later." I remember a period when a whole bunch of laptops got NeoMagic chips, and it became near-impossible to run Linux on a recent laptop without using one of the commercial X servers. Fortunately, that day is past....

I do miss the days when ATI was sending programming information to people writing free drivers.

-Rob

wireless cards

Posted Aug 2, 2005 22:21 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

I don't know about video cards, but wireless card info can be found over
at Jean Tourrilhes' site:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/

I recently bought a Zonet ZEW1500 802.11g card, based on the Ralink
RT2500 chip. The driver is under GPL, and is at:
http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/