On Tue, 17 Apr 2007, Alan Cox wrote:
Also keep an eye on the videochip/GPU that the laptop is equipped with.
Compiz or Beryl only work well with nVidia GPUs, older ATI GPUs (I think
The Nvidia requires a huge great binary driver which means you won't get
any support from anyone but Nvidia (because only they have all the code).
The earlier ATI is well supported (R200 etc), the R300 is despite ATI,
and latest ATI is not supported at all (even 2D) properly because ATI are
actively blocking it.
They also have an interesting habit of dropping support for chipsets
without telling anyone. The 97xx dropped support of the 440go chipset and
there was no mention of it in the readme or on the website. (Which is
what I have in my laptop.)
up to and including the R400 family) and (I think) Intel GPUs. If you
The intel stuff just works which has something to do with the fact Intel
employee/contract with people to make sure this happens and their staff
includes various X developers.
Keith Packard being one of them.
Not speaking for my employer here but personally, right now I'd recommend
the Intel setup for a quiet life and for just about anything but heavy
gaming. The 3945 wireless requires a little bit of fiddling as its not
entirely free software yet but that is all being fixed right now.
The hard part here is the desire for 64bit. Intel seems to have made it
as difficult as possible to determine if a processor is 64-bit or not.
At some point I need to replace my 3 year old laptop to something that
will last another three years. It looks like it is going to be as
difficult now as it was when I bought the last one.
Another issue with the Intel chipset is that you cannot just go out and
buy an Intel video card. It has to be on the motherboard or an OEMed card
that came in the machine. (Onboard video usually gets disabled by anyone
who wants performance because they use "shared" memory in most cases. Even
worse is when they pad out dedicated ram with shared memory, which can
cause striping effects on output.)
So far there are no real good options for video. If you get the video card
with open source drivers, you are limited in what processor you can use
and what motherboard you can buy. For some hardware configurations, you
have no open source options if you want fast graphics or hardware
acceleration.
It bites but it bytes.
--
"Invoking the supernatural can explain anything, and hence explains nothing."
- University of Utah bioengineering professor Gregory Clark
