Games doesent work in Fedora test 3

Andrew Farris fedora at andrewfarris.com
Fri Oct 24 07:24:56 UTC 2003


On Thu, 2003-10-23 at 23:49, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Oct 2003, Bjorn Andersen wrote:
> 
> >>Oh we can care, but we can't do much about it, since we don't write the 
> >>nvidia binary drivers.  Nvidia has never supported beta releases of 
> >>Linux distributions.  Fedora Core is still in beta.  Once Fedora Core 1 
> >>is released, then you can expect some support from Nvidia, and have a 
> >>better argument when you contact nvidia for help.  Until then, tough.
> >
> >Hmmm, its 75% of all OpenGL games that doesent work. I dont think thats 
> >an Nvidia problem.

> That's the business reality of things anyway.  I'd love to see 
> video games work rock solid on all video hardware in Linux, but 
> that's not going to happen without a large number of volunteer 
> programmers getting their fingers dirty with gdb and debugging 
> DRI problems when they have them with OpenGL games, and 
> submitting patches.
> 

nVidia has a very active help forum, where several developers
*regularly* visit (unfortunately they have been a bit absent the last
few months).  The problems that have been mentioned in the last few days
here are almost all addressed on that forum, by many people who have
been through them.  It is not necessary for nVidia to give direct
support of Fedora, the drivers work (in their current blow-away-files
install design) well for a great many people, and for those with
problems there is help available.

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=14

Yes a more robust install method that supports packaging systems would
be useful, especially if they stopped overwriting files all over the
place.  The installer does contain a tarball extraction option, from
which you could easily build an rpm (just need a spec, which there have
been several floating around).  You could then see conflicts occur
before the install, thx to rpm.  RedHat isn't responsible for creation
of these packages however, its not their driver.

To ask RedHat to fix these problems themselves is completely misguided.

> Games are cool, but not essential to business or the enterprise.  
Yes, and it shouldn't be a primary point of interest for Fedora.  There
are currently no distros that can claim fully working and well supported
3D gaming out of the box for all cards, at any level close to the
windows support.  It would be very cool indeed, but circumventing the
problem by making each distro deal with it in a unique way is the wrong
solution.

> Also, I posted recently to xfree86-list that I spend some of my 
> spare time unfortunately having to vacuum my house, do the 
> dishes, and other cleaning tasks/chores...  If someone were to 
> come over on Saturday/Sunday and do this for me, it could free up 
> hours and hours of DRI debugging time.  ;o)

Yeah, a number of us suffer from similar predicaments I see.  Perhaps
the OpenSource model can address this in the future, there must be a
solution if enough geeks start thinking it through.

> /me runs
-- 
Andrew Farris <fedora at andrewfarris.com>





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