nForce2 GART Driver Finally Released For Linux

Rejoice, Radeon owners! For those of you who bought an nForce2 motherboard with the hopes of doing a bit of linux gaming on it, I'm sure it was a pretty hard let down to find out there was no AGPGART driver for the nForce2 -- until now. nVidia has finally released a kernel patch for the 2.4.20 release that is now providing GART support. Perhaps this means that nVidia is re-thinking their closed source-isms in favor of a more open policy in the future. A note on AGP 3.0: Note that AGP 8x mode is not available in 2.4.xx series kernels. If you find that X will not start, try disabling 8X mode in your BIOS. AGP3.0 has been implemented in the 2.5 series.

Two questions

[Anonymous Coward]

What games do you play on Linux?
Do they run faster than on Windows?

Re:Closed-Source

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that there is also a problem with politics, In that the drivers are seen as an asset by the investors, That ATI took years to get theirs right, serves to reinforce this view. Ie people with MBA's have no idea when it comes to engineering. Even if the board and the engineering team think that open source is a good idea then they will still not release them for fear of being sued by the corporate members - somthing that happens in public company's all the time. The sucky thing is that engineers tend to see themselves as being in a acedemic setting (we're all in this together type thinking rather then us and them) and tend to share work amoug themselves anyway, a sort of club members only open source - so its all just legal/politcal BS.

I sware to god that your need to have a degree in intellectual Property law nowadays just to be a programmer. Somtimes I think that all lawers, marketers and politicans should be put on a rocket and blasted into the sun. Leaving the rest of us here to, like you know, do stuff.

Re:The GPL: Intellectual Theft

[despistao]

> we were unable to defrag its ext2 file system

I had never the need to defrag an ext2 or ext3 file system, anyway you should be able, there are tools to do it, for instance

$ apt-cache search defrag | grep ext2
defrag - ext2, minix and xiafs filesystem defragmenter

you modify the kernel and you don't know how to search on google?

you are a FUD maker, and your surname is either sco or gates

who really needs this ?

[Anonymous Coward]

i mean, what good is playing games with linux ? i use linux for server and programming purposes only, and never even think to use it for games or on the desktop because everything seems to be so crappy - especially application with non-cli user interfaces. on the other hand, games are easy to port. i guess that's why they exist. h.

Re:The GPL: Intellectual Theft

[Omnifarious]

What a blatant troll. It contains several obvious falsehoods all designed to stir people up into a frothing mass. *sigh*

this is a good thing, and the next step.

[Mark19960]

I think they see supporting Linux as a good thing.
I have found their driver for the Geforce cards to be stable, I have never had a problem personally.
while I dont own an nForce2 board, I am happy that they released this driver. its another step in the right direction in my opinion.
They cant release the code to the Geforce driver because the code they utilise isnt their code, but I wonder: will they try to get around that?
There has to be a way around that issue. I forsee Nvidia releasing an open source driver one day.

to Nvidia: Thanks for giving me many years of stable gaming in Linux