On Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:22:24 -0800 "Michael A. Peters" <mpeters@xxxxxxx> wrote: > I don't think Fedora should endorse the closed source drivers/software - > they do sometimes mis-behave, and the Fedora developers can't do squat > about it - so Fedora itself should not recommend them. We've been porting software to ubuntu lately, so I've recently gone through the gen process, and if I'm remembering right, it goes something like this: 1. install from live CD. 2. during install it looks for repos (better have an internet connection for this to work) these include the closed source repos. 3. it asks if you want to install the nasty closed source driver for your hardware, and just does the right thing if you say yes (actually it may not ask till the first time you click on the updates available button, then it tells you about nasty closed source updates that are available). 4. once you do install the close source driver, you get an icon in the gnome panel that tells you about the nasty closed source stuff you have installed. So really, the two main things that are happening which fedora doesn't do are: 1. You get the equivalent of "livna" repo definition installed on system by default. 2. The software updater points out the available alternate driver (even though it isn't technically an update since you don't have an old version installed to be updated). Actually, the thing that impressed me most about ubuntu wasn't the ease of driver installation, it was more that little things just work - the first one I noticed was that the software updater progress bar actually shows progress happening - it seems like every fedora release comes with a new version of pirut which never shows progress happening :-). P.S. I'm not advocating anything here, I'm just reporting :-).
