[Sheflug] NVidia on SuSE and the SuSE/Novell/M$ thing

[Lesley Binks <lesley.binks@xxxxxxxxx>]

Richard Ibbotson wrote:
> Alex
> 
>> I have only got compiz, which is less crack-y than beryl but with
>> many of the same effects. It works great with the stock free
>> software ATI and Intel drivers; I only occasionally run into
>> problems with OOo upsetting the system.
> 
> Thanks to this M$/Novell thing I've had to throw openSuSE away due to 
> the fact that people shout at me when I go to public events.  I tried 
> Ubuntu Edy Eft for a while but it was full of bugs and not what I 
> wanted.  Got the legacy Nvidia drivers working but couldn't get Beryl 
> or Compiz going. 
> 
I experienced no real problems setting up an NVidia Quadro 900 XGL on
SuSE 10.2 .

There's a very good How To here
http://www.suse.de/~sndirsch/nvidia-installer-HOWTO.html
(in English).

As far as people shouting about SuSE, Novell and M$ ....
<rant>

My first postgraduate job I used Microsoft Xenix (1986) which was
eventually sold off to SCO and they sold it as SCO Xenix (1987)... they
then later sold it as SCO Unix (1987/88).  In the 21st century, SCO
claim some copyright to some core material in most Linux distros out there.

I have no idea if there is any intellectual property originating from
SCO or indeed M$ in Linux distros today but, if there is, then I feel
it's egg on the faces of most dogmatic people in the free software
community.  If there is one thing *I'm* dogmatic about it's plagiarism
and the one type of person I hate with a vengeance is the Intellectual
Property Thief.  My dislike for dogma rests simply at the intense level.

My view of SuSE and Novell was that it was good for Linux in that it
gave the potential for a movement away from M$ in the corporate
environment.  I am not talking about some geek ( typically white, male,
at best antisocial if not sociopathic, and often totally misogynist)
beavering away on a piece of C and assembler to get a device working.

I'm talking about non-technical people in a commercial environment being
able to use Linux within their everyday working corporate environment in
a stable manner without having to learn emacs and LaTeX just to write a
memo.  Obviously this is of zero benefit to the Linux movement.

If some people in the free software and open source movement can't see
that as a benefit for all in the free software movement then I can only
wonder what planet they are on.  Do they seriously expect people,
ordinary generally technophobic people, to want to venture into Debian
unstable or gentoo and compile everything from scratch?  Or are they
only exclusively considering the technically elite here - who are
probably already using some Linux distro or some version of OpenBSD?.

Do they really expect people to move from something familiar into the
unknown when faced with uber-dogma in the style of the Russian Revolution?

As for using Fedora, well that's just the opensource version of RedHat
and a lot of free development work probably feeds back into later
releases of RedHat and ends up on Dell machines.  So there's profit
being made there out of free software and I would suspect that the many
of the original developers don't get any benefit from it.  Why is there
not as much of an issue with this?

I really fail to see where some people think they are coming from in
this respect.

Some pundits out there support the move
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/02/novell_microsoft_deal/
and point out where the Linux community lets itself down.  My view is
it's not the license that is the problem, it's the attitude from the
source, i.e. the open source and free software movements, that the
license is plain for end users when it has been clearly demonstrated and
commercially exploited by Oracle that the license isn't clear to the end
user.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/02/novell_q1_07_earnings/ shows
that the Linux part of Novell is improving with a 46% increase in
revenue over last year.  Is this what the dogmatists are upset about?

Novell has sold out to M$ for reasons best known to themselves.  Maybe
the deal was finally too good to refuse?

I use the Linux and OpenBSD distros because i don't like Windows and I
don't like licensing restrictions and the general dumbing down via the
WIMP environment.  I use SuSE as my everyday platform because most
things work in it.  I've been using it since 7.3 and I haven't stopped
yet.

That there is a business model for Linux can be demonstrated from the
SuSE/Novell/M$ and the Fedora/RedHat combinations.
</rant>

Regards

L.

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