nvidia GeForce 450 GTS driver

On 03/01/12 00:11, name at domain wrote:
> You shouldn't be required to do anything fancy for installing the free
> driver, which is contained in the repositories. Just do:
> sudo aptitude install xserver-xorg-video-nouveau

If only it were that simple. In the release of nouveau's kernel module
Trisquel is currently carrying as maintained in the past week, it
appears the developers' use of a non-free firmware blob for skeleton
purposes which drove NVC0 cards such as the 450GTS and my 440 has been
spotted. You will recall the release notes for the kernel update said
'removed non-free stuff.'

The nouveau team have as of November declared all free firmware
availability for some NVC0 series cards including the 440 and 450, but
that doesn't appear to have made it to Trisquel. The nouveau commits are
against their own copy of a 2.6 kernel tree, so in theory one could
build your own kernel. I haven't yet because I can use my onboard gfx.

I was more than a little annoyed at my daily use machine being stopped
on the basis of firmware removal when the firmware clearly falls under
the FSF 'used to write a replacement' criterion. To test replacement
firmware you clearly have to have working ctxprogs validated by running
them under the old support firmware on a good number of machines and
variants. More use as better testing is the FOSS methodology. That a
distro extends the life of such a test is not relevant, it was free code
in a valid stage of development when they included it by the published
FSF criteria. It makes me wonder how much of what Linux-Libre are
taking out would qualify 'as a circuit' under the OpenMoko statement?

Leny

GCC, GNU Make, the kernel headers, ... all that is in Trisquel repositories.

But really, you should reconsider your choice of a proprietary driver. Do you really want to have, in your GNU/Linux system, a piece of software that you cannot even tell what it does. Maybe it spies on you. Who knows? Do you really want to depend on nVidious. E.g., it often forces its user to stick to older versions of the kernel/Xorg ( see, e.g., https://lwn.net/Articles/195351/ ). The driver probably is insecure too ( it was so at least: http://www.rapid7.com/security-center/advisories/R7-0025.jsp ) because security through obscurity is very common in proprietary software. Don't you want to encourage the development of the nouveau driver? That may as well convince nVidia to publish the documentation for their devices (e.g., AMD has published thousands of pages) or even convert itself to free software. In comparison, Intel already ships its drivers under the GPL and AMD has four engineers exclusively working on free drivers ( what probably explains their major improvements during the last two years: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_radeon_histq111 ). Finally, have you ever heard of the story of a man at the AI Lab and a printer driver: http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch01.html

Then you're not promoting freedom in this sense, I believe freedom should be being able to install any software you want whether they be closed or open source, I think nouveau is a good project but I can't use it for what I want, I want to use my computer to play my games using my high-end card, but nouveau can't support them yet. If I am forced to use open-source software, it's NOT FREEDOM! I may not be an advanced GNU/Linux user but I can tell a lot of what's truly great about it is having exactly what you want and nothing you don't.

P.S: What's the name of the package for the kernel headers.