Message-ID: <413B248C.5030204@blueyonder.co.uk>
Date: Sun, 05 Sep 2004 15:37:00 +0100
From: Sid Boyce <sboyce@blueyonder.co.uk>
Reply-To: sboyce@blueyonder.co.uk
User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.6 (X11/20040502)
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To: Grzegorz Kulewski <kangur@polcom.net>
CC: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>, Lee Revell <rlrevell@joe-job.com>,
       Tim Fairchild <tim@bcs4me.com>, Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>,
       Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: NVIDIA Driver 1.0-6111 fix
References: <41390988.2010503@blueyonder.co.uk>  <200409041954.05272.tim@bcs4me.com>  <1094327788.6575.209.camel@krustophenia.net>  <200409050702.29007.tim@bcs4me.com>  <1094332949.6575.360.camel@krustophenia.net> <1094385894.1078.31.camel@localhost.localdomain> <Pine.LNX.4.60.0409051511500.4243@alpha.polcom.net>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.60.0409051511500.4243@alpha.polcom.net>
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Grzegorz Kulewski wrote:

> On Sun, 5 Sep 2004, Alan Cox wrote:
>
>> On Sad, 2004-09-04 at 22:22, Lee Revell wrote:
>>
>>> I have never understood why these people don't just run Windows.  I 
>>> have
>>> also never understood why people make so much noise about having to use
>>> a closed source driver to play A CLOSED SOURCE GAME!  What's next, a
>>> petition to open the UT2004 source?  Sheesh...
>>
>>
>> Because a lot of them happen to like running things on Linux, or having
>> the webserver still work while they are blasting aliens. You could ask a
>> few of them. Thats a rather good idea when you don't understand why
>> people do something. They also play a lot of open source games - bzflag,
>> cube, flightgear (which does need a high end video card to do well),
>> gl-117, neverball etc. Take a look at the happypenguin website some day.
>
>
> Yes. Also Linux has often better performance and is way more smooth 
> than Windows. I am running vanilla-rc-bk with -ck patches (and some 
> others) and I can download or compile something and play my favourite 
> game (at the same time) without any problems.
>
> Also not everybody have enought money to buy Windows (and all legal 
> applications that every normal Windows user must have).
>
> And when I am using Linux I can forget about the treat that somebody 
> will find my IP and will (automatically) compromise my system and 
> install some worm (for example to send spam to LKML) in it. Games 
> often have security holes too and if I run them on Linux on my user 
> account I am sure that, in the worst scenarion, somebody will gain my 
> normal user rights (or my normal game user rights) instead of "root" 
> in Windows.

I threw out Windows many years ago and have seen light ever since. I've 
even installed Linux on my daughter's machine and the one time she 
wanted to switch back to Windows was when she couldn't figure out how to 
delete files, then I showed her how to do it in konqueror and she's been 
happy ever since, even with the games. I came in for some stick when I 
first used Linux for doing everything at work, mainly because they had 
an old mailer which used to throw up several pages of preamble for 
anything from Netscape mail, later, I was one of a small bunch that used 
only Linux proudly even for Cisco VPN connection from home using cable, 
wiping smiles and snide remarks away.
When we had a small but active contingent using Linux on the UK TCP/IP 
hamradio network, we took some awful flack, especially from one guy who 
had never seen Linux but got bent out of shape at the mention of it, he 
stopped abruptly when he discovered he was the main recruiting seargeant 
for Linux, by then he'd gained us more users. One guy comically (no pun 
intended) referred to Linux as "Boy's Own Unix", I assume apology to 
"Boy's Own Comic".
I knew we were in great shape the first day Bill Gates mentioned Linux - 
greater things are yet to happen, lots of little pieces of a jigsaw 
puzzle eventually paint a whole picture.

>
>>> I suspect many of these users are ricers who tweak CFLAGS and compare
>>> benchmark scores all day, and cannot bear to use the open source driver
>>> if it will make their machine 1% slower.  I was surprised to find that
>>
>>
>> There is certainly a strong Gentoo gaming contingent.
>
>
> I am running Gentoo. I have very conservative CFLAGS and I am not 
> benchmarking my system and comaring results with friends. I am using 
> Gentoo mainly because it has very big amount of software "packaged", I 
> can choose what software I am installing on my box (nobody will force 
> me to install esd - not needed with ALSA and often harmful - just 
> because 1000 apps in my distribution are compiled with it), software 
> is compiled from sources (its open*_source_* not openRPM or openDEB), 
> and new versions of apps are appearing constantly not with 6 months 
> release cycle. Also Gentoo has very good (but can-be-better) 
> installer/deinstaller.
>
> Yes, I am using nvidia binary only modules. But there was some time 
> when nvidia binary module was not supporting 4k stacks in kernel. And 
> I was using some -bk kernel that had this option and I turned it on. 
> So I tried the nv X driver and later framebuffer driver. Both were 
> absolutelly useless. One was freezing my box constantly and the second 
> also had some mayor problems. And the quality of picture in both of 
> them was worst than bad. One of them displayed some "moving 
> background" on search subpages of lkml.org instead of normal 
> background with nvidia binary drivers - this can yield to epilepsia or 
> other illness in very short time. Of course I was unable to play my 
> favourite tuxracer (OPENSOURCE). So I was forced to return to nvidia 
> binary only driver as soon as they provided fixed one.
>
> And I am using nvidia binary only driver for nearly 4 years on my 
> GeForce 2 and I have seen only 2 or 3 oopses caused by this driver. 
> And I am using very experimental (-mm or -vanilla-bk) kernels with 
> strange patches from time to time. Nearly all ooopses were 
> reproductible with untainted kernel.
>
>
> Grzegorz Kulewski
>
Ouch!! The 4k-stacks and nvidia bit me twice, once when I didn't know 
about it and once when I built a new kernel and forgot to reverse the 
patch - 2 new rebuilds had to be done, it had corrupted my hard drive 
beyond reach and reclaim by reiserfsck.
Regards
Sid.

-- 
Sid Boyce .... Hamradio G3VBV and keen Flyer
=====LINUX ONLY USED HERE=====

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