F14 Support Coming?

[jbuckley2004]

Perhaps this belongs in the "support" thread, but I only have questions about where to find the answers when I attempt to install F14 next week.

Many people have been asking questions about the status of the Livna repo, and the DVDCSS rpm. Is this minor-but-absolute necessity gone now? (Yes, I know that the rpm is available elsewhere, but I was curious as to the status of the repository).

I'm more confused about the support of the Nouveau driver for 3-D (in 86x64), and I'm really confused about the status of the NVidia drivers in the repos. I seem to hear that the driver available from NVidia works consistently, but not the one from the repos. I understand the function of akmod. I take it that using the driver from NVidia means re-installing it every time the kernel is updated.

The question embedded in all that is: what is the preferred driver, and how best to keep up with the progress on the Nouveau effort.

Thanks.

[Hlingler]

For discussion of the Livna topic, see: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=253261

Moved to "F14 Development".

V

[TomasM]

If you want to use nVidia's proprietary driver, I would strongly recommend using RPMFusion's akmods and kmods over nVidia's installer. You're right about needing to manually re-install the proprietary driver from a tty every time you update a kernel. With an RPMFusion-packaged driver, you can easily upgrade/downgrade/uninstall it and still have a working system. And depending on mirrors, akmods may not be necessary - RPMFusion ships prebuilt kmods for new Fedora kernels soon after the kernels are released.

and how best to keep up with the progress on the Nouveau effort.

Once Fedora 14 is released, I would be surprised if its Nouveau driver stack (especially the DRM/kernel components) was regularly updated. If what Fedora 14 provides works well for your card, you can stick with it and enjoy the support and stability that comes with a Fedora-packaged snapshot. But if you want the best and latest of what Nouveau has to offer, you will need to
a) run development/Rawhide versions of Fedora (Fedora 15 and 16 branches after Fedora 14 is out)[/INDENT]b) use a third-party repository that provides cutting-edge packages
OR
c) build the latest drivers for yourself.

How well 3-D with nouveau (from Fedora or upstream) works will depend on what card you have.

[AdamW]

tomasm: the packaged driver in Fusion does not work well with F14 at the moment due to a bug in pyxf86config in Fedora, which means nvidia-config-display (in fact, all the -config-display's) doesn't run. That breaks configuration of the driver when using the Fusion packages, so if you install the Fusion NVIDIA driver packages, you wind up with a non-functional driver, at present. We (Fusion) don't really have a strategy to deal with this, yet. In practice, if you need the binary driver, installing it from upstream is probably the best method for F14 right now.

There is no 'preferred' driver exactly. It depends what your parameters are. If you mostly care about freedom, ease of updating, compliance with X.org standards, and support from the Fedora project, you want nouveau. If you mostly care about raw functionality, particularly 3D, VDPAU, and/or power management, you want the proprietary driver. My usual advice is to see if nouveau does the stuff you actually want to do with your computer, and if it does, use it. If not, go with NVIDIA.

tomas is right about the general question of keeping up with nouveau development; if that's your goal, you can better do it by running Rawhide or F15 (once it branches) than F14. Obviously, this has its own drawbacks.