Intel: Why Open-Source Drivers Work

The winds of change are blowing in the industry, good stuff.

From my own experience, I had an nvidia card in my primary desktop machine at home, but when the video card blew up, I had to use the onboard video to get up and running again. That was the Christmas holidays of 2006, and I've never gotten around to replacing the nvidia card, as the onboard intel 945 works fine - it's not the fastest card around, but I can play quake 3 arena, run the OpenGL screensavers, and watch movies with smooth results. Having the intel video also makes it much easier to try out the newest kernels....

-- KDE/SuSE 10.2 - Unix since 1984, Linux since 1993, SuSE since 2004 Linux 2.6.23-rc7-default #3 SMP Wed Sep 19 20:20:53 PDT 2007 i686

And that's exactly the point here - it just works[TM]

Let's not forget that Intel does not make any separate graphics cards, but only has onboard designs. And these are the vast majority in business machines. So AMD/ATI's step was one in the right direction; now we are waiting for Nvidia to follow. They just have to, if they still want the proverbial "foot in the door" tomorrow...

wjl -

You're right. They do just "have to". Admittedly, high powered 3D gaming cards seem a little less "businessy" than the printers, scanners, lan cards, etc that have crossed the divide in years gone by, but that is becoming more perception than reality as video and other multimedia stuff becomes more important.

Eventually, the equation becomes join in or jump out.

Quoting:"Moblin.org is a community site where developers can download tools and contribute, based on Ubuntu Linux. There appears to be a hardware seed program for active developers. Helpful assistance."

http://www.whatisnew.com/2007/09/20/mobile-internet-devices-...

http://www.moblin.org/