Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario [LWN.net]

Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Posted Dec 7, 2005 12:19 UTC (Wed) by rknop (guest, #66)
Parent article: Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

While a year earlier people would have to give up 3D acceleration for this often, now even 2D doesn't work without binary drivers, nor does networking (both fixed wire or wireless) or sound.

Isn't this often half-true already? At least if you're on a laptop. How common are the NVIDIA chips where you give up 3d? Yeah, we don't give up 2d yet, but people have become so inured to just using the NVIDIA binary modules that it's already not far off. People on my floor think I'm strange because I try to avoid buying anything NVIDIA, and try to buy cards that have open-source 3d support (which right now, as far as I can tell, means two-year-old ATI cards, and is getting harder and harder in laptops). And Centrino... I have two grad students who've got laptops, and despite my grumblng about it, I've downloaded the binary firmware blob to go with the drivers for the built-in wireless. No, not a fully "binary-only" module, but it's already (a) a pain, because the Debian kernel doesn't just support it, but requires futzing around to get it to work, and (b) disturbing, because it can't be in a source-only kernel. On one of the grad students' laptops, for a while this was also true for the wired ethernet; for a while, the tg3 drivers were not in the standard kernel because of some sort of related issue.

This scenario isn't a doomsday scenario, it sounds to me like simple and plausible extrapolation of where we are already.

-Rob

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Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Posted Dec 7, 2005 17:00 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

For Laptops:

As far as laptops go just by Intel. Their Sonoma platform is fully supported by Linux OSS drivers.

Just buy 'centrino'. Just avoid buying anything with a ATI video card and Broadcom Wifi. If you have a broadcom wifi it can't be 'Centrino', but many people sell centrino laptops for one configuration and centrino-like for another.

A laptop with ATI graphics can still be called 'centrino', but you just have to watch out for that.

Their newer 'Graphic Media Accelerator' items are as fast as or a bit faster then the old ATI stuff.. and those Pentium-M cpus are, frankly, quite amazing.

Pentium-D and Pentium 4's suck realy badly, but a Pentium-M 1.7ghz is low-power and cool, but at the same time is just as powerfull as a 3200+ AMD64 cpu.

Since your buying a laptop with 'everything intel' you know they work well together and power management is nice. You should be able to get wifi working, suspend to ram and suspend to disk to work, and all that without any more effort then it takes to get Windows XP secure.

There are some lingering issues like some laptop's bioses and such still suck and make ACPI stuff difficult.. and with Wifi there is some issues with 'software switches' vs 'hardware switches' with Intel nics. There is special software for Linux to deal with it (open source of course)
http://rfswitch.sourceforge.net/

If there is any questions then avoid buying a 'consumer' style laptop and buy a 'business' style laptop. Business laptops tend to avoid all the gimmicks and add-ons that tend to make some laptops a pain in the ass to support.

Here is some more stuff:
http://tuxmobil.org/centrino.html

Out of all the major vendors HP probably has the best hardware support for Linux. On a few models of their notebooks they have specificly setup the hardware to make Linux compatability work well...

Their website sucks ass though.

Here is the installation instructions from HP regarding Suse Linux and Redhat on some nc4200, tc4200, nc6110, nc6120, nx6110, nx6120, nc6220, nc6230, nc8230, and nx8220 notebooks.
http://h10018.www1.hp.com/wwsolutions/linux/products/clie...

You may be able to find others.

You can buy these laptops with Windows XP-delete and get FreeDOS installed on them for a 100 dollar discount.. which you can use to configure for more memory and larger harddrive.

There are 2 problems.

Probem number one is:
When you get a very customized laptop you loose the discount they have on pre-built models. This means with FreeDOS on customized notebook it costs the sames as Windows XP on a more generic notebook.

Problem number 2 is:
finding the stupid thing on their website.

The solution to number 2 is to follow this navigation guide:
Goto www.hp.com
on the right hand side click on 'online shopping'
on the 'buy direct from hp' click on 'small and medium business store'
click on 'notebook and tablet PCs'
click on 'notebook'
click on 'thin and light' notebook.
scroll all the way to the right and select 'configurable thin and light'

That way you can do the "Local FreeDOS" option with the -100 cost and much more carefully select wifi stuff. AVOID Broadcom.

OK.

Now if you want the pre-built discount and want to get Windows (most people here, I assume, still have some use for it)

You want to select a normal notebook and get the standard setup. Select the 'recommended notebooks' options to get the lowest prices.

Just be very carefull. Some models will only come with broadcom wifi.

Probably be wise to call HP and specificly request models with intel wifi cards for the specific reasons that you want good Linux compatability.

I don't know how well they work or how nice these HP laptops are... but from what I've heard or read these things work very well with Linux. Power management and everything works almost right out of the box on newer versions of the distros.

Probably want to try one out first though.

If you want AMD notebook then you have to use propriatory drivers for 3d. There is no way around it.

However for Wireless get a Ralink rt2500-series MiniPCI card. Ralink released specs and drivers (GPL'd even!) for their wifi stuff.

Rt2x00 is a effort to rewrite them to get they running on the new generic linux ieee80211 protocol stack. (This should be very nice).

Meanwhile the OSS drivers work well on x86 platforms.

On my PPC laptop I had to use ported FreeBSD drivers (called Ural-Linux) drivers for the Ralink USB 802.11g wifi adapter.

For people that are stuck with broadcom crap or TI crap..
Linux kernel developers are going to break NDIS drivers! Not intentionally, but because of a policy of 'agressively ignore' thing they have going with binary drivers.

There is hope for you broadcom users:
https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/bcm43xx-dev/2005-Decem...

Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Posted Dec 7, 2005 17:10 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

oh and before I forget:

For DESKTOPS:

Intel is much less desirable here.. mostly because AMD proccessors are SOOOO much nicer.

However I would like one for the specific reason that they have good hardware support. The fastest GMA integrated graphics you can get is with the 945 chipsets. I think the proccessor speed is around 400mhz. For 945 support you'd have to use the latest distros. The 915 driver may or may not work in earlier X.org versions.

For the 945 series motherboards you have to by ddr2 memory and stuff like that. I don't know about 915 boards. For 915 and 945 boards you have speed differences in the GMA chipset speeds. Goto Intel's websites because they have very good documentation on their boards and their features.

They also have nice advice (chassis engineering level) for buying heatsinks and fans. All this different stuff in PDF form. Like you have to get a 3-wire fans for the cpu hinksink to use Intel's onboard active fan controls. This allows your fan to scale along with your CPU to get quietest operation.

For AMD users you have integrated Via stuff, which is slow as slow can get.

The only workable option is to go with propriatory Nvidia stuff or 9200 and older ATI stuff.

With XGI there is a glimmer of hope...
They are thinking about releasing FULL OSS support for 3d graphics and everything for their 8300 series video card.

this is a low end video card designed mainly for low-heat, low-power stuff and multimedia. They claim superior image quality and that is their focus for these cards.

There is supposadly a 8500 series card to be released and these are the 'gamers' version of the card. They claim speed equivelent to 6800gt cards and whatnot.

So I guess email them and tell them what you feel about buying versus not buying their cards if they release OSS drivers.

Keep in mind that OSS drivers would probably be immature in the beginning and would take a few months to mature. That seems the track record for people spontaniously releasing OSS drivers for anything.

More information:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=32...

Oh, and don't forget about the OGP project.. Those guys making a video card specificly for Linux use.

This should be very fasinating for anybody interested in hardware hacking. For a price significantly more inexpensive then anything else you'd be able to get a very big FPGA proccessors and a 128megs of onboard RAM on a PCI or PCIe card... There is nothing else like this on the market. Should be great for hackers, hobbyiests, and educators.

Hell, with Sun releasing their Verilog stuff for the OpenSparc stuff maybe you can get a Sparc proccessor running on your PCI bus. :)

For everybody else they plan on releasing a ASIC version after the testing with the FPGA proccessor is over that should increase performance, reduce cost, and reduce heat.

Opengraphics wiki:
http://wiki.duskglow.com/tiki-index.php?page=Open-Graphics

hardware for laptops

Posted Dec 18, 2005 12:10 UTC (Sun) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

I have an Apple iBook G4 12" 1GHz (actually 1066MHz), and I am pretty
happy with it. The graphics is a Radeon Mobility 9200; I had some
trouble getting it to display on external displays, but that works
now. There is no WLAN built-in (with is just as good ad the
Broadcom-based Airport Extreme in newer iBooks), but I have bought a
Netgear MA111 USB stick; there is a free driver for that (prism2_usb
from linux-wlan-ng-0.2.2), but out-of-tree, and when I tried it, it
did not compile with the then-new 2.6.14 kernel (so I'm back to
2.6.9).

Of course, currently sold iBooks are somewhat different, so YMMV.