Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 9th Sep 2010 17:40 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ahem. I just had to write that all-caps headline. Broadcom's wireless chips - used by just about everybody in this industry - have been a major pain in the bum for Linux users, because the company did not release open source drivers. Workarounds had to be created, lots of pain was had in the process, but now, Broadcom has finally seen the light: they have open sourced their wireless Linux drivers.
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Member since:2007-09-06
Credit where due and I must give Nvidia credit for at least providing a usable closed binary driver. It installs easily if the distro does not already have it packaged in a non-free repository. As far as companies who've chosen to go it alone and only provide a closed driver; Nvidia has done well. Many other company's have delivered piss poor token drivers if they've delivered drivers at all.
I sure wouldn't complain about them releasing source so that all effort can be focused on the existing code base instead of rewriting it under the Nouveau project. Drivers have no business not being open source and anything that makes general purpose hardware more general purpose software compatible is a good thing. I am currently waiting for some polish for Debian Squeeze packaged nvidia-glx for my GTX260 and polish for the Debian Squeeze packages xserver-xorg-video-intel for the Intel gpu in the Lenovo X201. Until those two items work I'm stuck with Nouveau's lack of 3D support for Nvidia and the Xorg Vesa driver which is sadly lacking compared to what my notebook GPU should be doing. I'm patient since Squeeze is still "Debian Stable 6 RC" with emphasis on Release Candidate at present but still, there is really no valid justification for the amount of hardware grief bad vendors cause.
Member since:2008-12-26
That pretty much leaves only nVidia as the only idio^h^h^h^h company holding out on us.
You can easily get by with Nouveau already.
Granted there are other graphic card options that make an nVidia announcement less important than this one.
So far it's been easy to avoid broadcom. As an example, a Dell laptop I got offered the option to choose either intel or broadcom wlan chip.
Netbooks seem to ship with Atheros cards that work great now.
I imagine that some OEMs have told Broadcom that they will do their hw sourcing elsewhere because of the driver situation - all big companies have Linux savvy people around at places where their voice gets heard.
Wifi chip is a cheap commodity, and I can't think of anything special that Broadcom could offer that would justify choosing them over anything else.
But it will be nice when the day finally comes that closed hardware is no longer an issue and we can concentrate on competing with closed solutions higher up the stack.
How does closed hardware prevent this?
Member since:2006-09-01
Member since:2005-07-06
That pretty much leaves only nVidia as the only idio^h^h^h^h company holding out on us. Granted there are other graphic card options that make an nVidia announcement less important than this one. But it will be nice when the day finally comes that closed hardware is no longer an issue and we can concentrate on competing with closed solutions higher up the stack.
What the open source world needs to provide is a Mesa stack with a good interface so that at least the driver itself can remain closed source (for the short term) and the OpenGL part of the equation is then pushed off to the open source world thus to have a standardised single library as with the case of MacOS X rather than the current situation of Linux where you have a mixture of OpenGL implementations each introducing their own peculiarities and bugs.
With that being said, there is always ATI but even then the open source drivers are always behind the times when it comes to performance and support - the man power just isn't there and open source isn't the silver bullet that'll solve problems as some try to make it out to be.
Thanks Broadcom
Well BroadCom have been providing a driver for quite some time:
http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php
Sure it includes a binary blob but all what is required is provided in an open source way which doesn't prohibit developers from shipping it with their Linux distributions. I guess the big step forward is having an entirely open source driver rather than a hybrid which is a step in the right direction.
Member since:2006-10-24
What the open source world needs to provide is a Mesa stack with a good interface so that at least the driver itself can remain closed source (for the short term) and the OpenGL part of the equation is then pushed off to the open source world thus to have a standardised single library as with the case of MacOS X rather than the current situation of Linux where you have a mixture of OpenGL implementations each introducing their own peculiarities and bugs.
You don't support open source by enabling closed source solutions. You support open source by pursuing and encouraging open source solutions.
With that being said, there is always ATI but even then the open source drivers are always behind the times when it comes to performance and support - the man power just isn't there and open source isn't the silver bullet that'll solve problems as some try to make it out to be.
You're right, open source isn't a silver bullet. But open source can be a goal in and of itself. Open source solutions have certain traits that are desirable beyond the latest and greatest performance metrics. There is real liberation gained when you're not tied to a single vendor who controls the source. As one example, support for old video cards can be maintained long after the original business that sold them has dissolved or just lost interest in the product.
IMO people need to stop being so obsessed with performance or the latest bells and whistles to appreciate the real value of open source in freedom and risk mitigation.
Well BroadCom have been providing a driver for quite some time.
That doesn't help address some of the important qualities that attracts business and hackers to open source in the first place. You don't have to be a radical freetard to appreciate and value open source. And once you appreciate its positive qualities, the nVidia or Broadcom closed-source offerings for Linux aren't interesting or praise worthy.
That being said, sometimes a company like Broadcom can not make the internal shift needed toward open source in a single leap and must make a gradual transition as we saw in this case. Though not ideal, it's understandable and we can forgive them their late arrival to the party now that they're really ready to join in.
It will be really nice if someday we can say the same about nVidia.
Member since:2010-01-11
That pretty much leaves only nVidia as the only idio^h^h^h^h company holding out on us.
Hahaha. What a clown. Nvidia doesn't give a damn about you. They have business customers who rely on Linux. That's why there is a driver. That's why the driver doesn't suck. Go back in your cave. And stop open sourcing your brain. It hurts.
Edited 2010-09-10 04:43 UTC
Member since:2006-10-24
Member since:2007-02-17
That pretty much leaves only nVidia as the only idio^h^h^h^h company holding out on us.
Hahaha. What a clown. Nvidia doesn't give a damn about you. They have business customers who rely on Linux. That's why there is a driver. That's why the driver doesn't suck. Go back in your cave. And stop open sourcing your brain. It hurts.
Hahaha. What a clown. Nvidia doesn't give a damn about you. They have business customers who rely on Linux. That's why there is a driver. That's why the driver doesn't suck. Go back in your cave. And stop open sourcing your brain. It hurts.
Being separate from the kernel means that the Nvidia driver breaks with every kernel update.
Being separate from Xorg means that the Nvidia driver is incompatible with recent developments in the X stack, such as kernel modesetting (KMS).
KMS is a pre-requisite for the coming upgrade to X that will allow "rootless" X ... as long as the graphics driver is part of the kernel and supports KMS, soon it will be possible to run an X session with non-root privileges. This is a great advance from a security and stability point of view. It will mean also that it might become possible for X to crash and be re-started without having to close applications or login sessions.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzM2MA
None of these advances will be available to people who run the binary Nvidia graphics driver.
Very soon, if not already, Nvidia will be very much the non-preferred graphics option for use with Linux machines. It may still be possible to run Linux on a Nvidia graphics machine using the nouveau open source driver, but that project is regrettably falling further and further behind in capabilities.
Edited 2010-09-10 05:36 UTC
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
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Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 21:41 UTC
Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 17:04 UTC
"But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 13:17 UTC
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 12:06 UTC
"According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.More News »
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Member since:
2006-10-24
That pretty much leaves only nVidia as the only idio^h^h^h^h company holding out on us. Granted there are other graphic card options that make an nVidia announcement less important than this one. But it will be nice when the day finally comes that closed hardware is no longer an issue and we can concentrate on competing with closed solutions higher up the stack.
Thanks Broadcom