X Server 1.6.0 Has Been Released

[grantek]

Any idea when the XServer 1.6 ABI/API/whatever was frozen enough that binary drivers could depend on it? Or was NVidia still taking a small risk by releasing a driver when it was still in RC status?

I'd still rather the closed-source devs worked on bug fixes and feature completion before supporting prerelease code on prerelease OSes, bleeding edge is where the benefits from having an OSS driver come in.

[bridgman]

All fair points. Let's talk about those though, rather than "not working with the Ubuntu release at all".

[Kano]

@bridgman

I define "ready" a bit different. Ubuntu got the driver, but it was not in the standard installer package. But there are always other distros out there which would like to use the driver too. Of course you can hack a package to install those provided files for Ubuntu on another system, but do you call that really "ready"?

[grantek]

I had a friend who tried to install Kubuntu relatively recently and the graphical installer failed horribly on him.

He ended up compiling "some alpha drive off git" (I suppose that's the oss one) to get it to at least show something.

Ubuntu 8.10 worked fine for me with the OSS drivers on an RV770, so I don't know what the problem would be.

[bridgman]

Now I know that after 2 months my video card will be a dead horse again, because FOSS driver is still not out yet and fglrx would have a hard time TRYING to support x server 1.6.

Hope Ubuntu team could give a hand helping those poor fglrx devs to get their driver work on Ubuntu 9.04 by the time it is out. Otherwise it (X server 1.6 DRI-2 fantasy) is going to be a major show stopper for ATI users -- YET AGAIN.

We had an fglrx driver ready for inclusion in the 8.10 Ubuntu release; why are you so sure there will be a huge delay with 9.04 ?

Note that DRI2 isn't going to change anything on its own; it's just one of many things which need to be in place to enable RDR, which is what you *really* want

[Vadi]

I have just (last week?) managed to get fglrx 9.2 installed onto my main PC running Ubuntu 8.10 and get compiz + xv worked.

Now I know that after 2 months my video card will be a dead horse again, because FOSS driver is still not out yet and fglrx would have a hard time TRYING to support x server 1.6.

Hope Ubuntu team could give a hand helping those poor fglrx devs to get their driver work on Ubuntu 9.04 by the time it is out. Otherwise it (X server 1.6 DRI-2 fantasy) is going to be a major show stopper for ATI users -- YET AGAIN.

I had a friend who tried to install Kubuntu relatively recently and the graphical installer failed horribly on him.

He ended up compiling "some alpha drive off git" (I suppose that's the oss one) to get it to at least show something.

[bulletxt]

because they actually dont use most of the X Server infrastructure, but use their own instead. So to them it is not that a difference whether to replace xserver1.5 or xserver1.6 files.

Basicly you just said NVIDIA is ahead. Also there is no good reason why AMD hasn't done what NVIDIA did. Conclusion: NVIDIA is ahead.

[DanL]

I mean, why is NVIDIA always, always, always, always: ahead.

I don't know, but I do know that complaining about it in a multitude of phoronix.com threads will do little or nothing to change it.

[FunkyRider]

I have just (last week?) managed to get fglrx 9.2 installed onto my main PC running Ubuntu 8.10 and get compiz + xv worked.

Now I know that after 2 months my video card will be a dead horse again, because FOSS driver is still not out yet and fglrx would have a hard time TRYING to support x server 1.6.

Hope Ubuntu team could give a hand helping those poor fglrx devs to get their driver work on Ubuntu 9.04 by the time it is out. Otherwise it (X server 1.6 DRI-2 fantasy) is going to be a major show stopper for ATI users -- YET AGAIN.

[Kano]

So will that mean that fglrx will support it now