Will The Catalyst Driver Work On Ubuntu 11.04 At Launch?

[blackiwid]

Whats the point of using fedora and using a binary blob, fedora has some disadvantages, crappy default themes (not that big deal) and also crappy package management tool (big deal ;=) ), but they have one advantages, to support of good new X technologies often developed by them self and good opensource technolegies like plymoth etc. This stuff usualy don´t work very well with closed source drivers (at least not with the amd blob) so whats the point of using fedora + amd blob?

I think in 6months or 12 months this question is even less important, because the free driver gets fast much better right now. if the magic gpu video speedup is in it, only some commercial games will not run fast enough but even there are right now big steppes in the making. So use the free drivers, if you are really wanted to use the blob in long term, why did you buy amd card in the first place?

sorry for the much mistake, but I am a lit tired right now.

[drag]

Sorry, i still don't get it. Does Red Hat give AMD orders on what to support? Is it not their decision?

No. Like Nvidia, ATI only really cares about people on Linux that provide the most profits... which is to say professional workstation types using Linux for scientific visualization, 3D movie editing, blah blah blah. Those people use Redhat. For most of them they require support contracts and hardware support and if you want that then your going to be using Redhat as Redhat has the industry support channels and partnerships established with a lot of hardware/software vendors. This is why Redhat continues to make money.

That is also the only reason you have proprietary drivers in the first place. If it was not for those markets preferring Linux over Windows then you would get nothing. They'll continue to support consumer hardware because that gives them a useful debugging tool. They can't expect just to target Redhat and get a reliable product. Fedora and Ubuntu represent essentially development versions of Redhat.

To put it another way... they'll get around making it work for you in Ubuntu, but only until after they get more important things done. Everybody works for a living, everybody has to eat and most have families to take care off... etc etc etc. Be happy that Linux is profitable for them to provide some support.

Also this is why OSS drivers are important. They simply enable people to get hardware to work/work better even when there is no significant/direct financial benefit for ATI. It helps break some of the dependency on AMD itself, which is a good thing for everybody involved.

[devius]

fedora has some disadvantages, crappy default themes (not that big deal) and also crappy package management tool (big deal ;=) )

What's wrong with Fedora's package management tool?

...or is this false drama that will be long dead come three months from now?

This is false drama that will be long dead come three months from now.

[d2kx]

Will The Catalyst Driver Work On Ubuntu 11.04 At Launch?

Yes.

/thread

[blackiwid]

What's wrong with Fedora's package management tool?

I think thats the major problems:

.rpm is distro-agnostic. It doesn't rely on package naming conventions for dependency resolution, it's file based.

that causes much problems. You maybe get somewhere a rpm, install it it says all dependecies are there, then it does not work anyway and you have no clew why. In debian/derevats, you have from your distribution very good quality debs with hard accurate dependencies, and they have the goal to give their users all whats out there at least the importent stuff. And that makes sence because the same people who updates the depencies can also recompile and give you the stuff that depends on it. That seems to produce higher quality packages.

So the package dependency system is better because you can not mix incompatible packages that depend on each other.

[spiritofreason]

You maybe get somewhere a rpm, install it it says all dependecies are there, then it does not work anyway and you have no clew why. In debian/derevats, you have from your distribution very good quality debs with hard accurate dependencies, and they have the goal to give their users all whats out there at least the importent stuff.

What are you smoking? RPM allows for both file and package dependencies, if you want. Frankly, the real dependencies are the files, anyway--the loader isn't searching through your package database to find libraries.

As far as how the packaging systems compare, I see yum and apt being similar, except Red Hat and Fedora are the only ones that seem to support 32-bit on 64-bit properly. All the Debian-based distributions have to repackage any 32-bit libraries for 64-bit systems, and you end up with much-reduced support from the repository. Some projects only provide 32-bit packages for some reason or other, and the 64-bit Debian derivatives can't use them. It's ridiculous.

[blackiwid]

What are you smoking? RPM allows for both file and package dependencies, if you want. Frankly, the real dependencies are the files, anyway--the loader isn't searching through your package database to find libraries.

I just googled that quote so I dont know the internals much but in the real world it sucks, so you say both is allowed so even worse a standard that say make stuff how you like it is no standard. thats the problem, the repos of lets say debian is bigger than that from fedora, and the search of 3rd party stuff sucks. After Ubuntu entered the market the deb-format did gain even more focus noone who makes packages for linux distros cant ignore debian or ubuntu but they can ignore fedora, dont get me wrong I respekt the redhat guys for some some software they are doing and they focus on free software etc. But the package manager in my opinion suck. Also all the defaults (directory structure etc) is bad. But thats my opinion you can have another opinion thats ok, it was not meant to be totaly serios or a point I want to fight other, more like a mix of a joke and some trough.

[spiritofreason]

I just googled that quote so I dont know the internals much but

Haha, well I know this is the internet, but you might want to have some experience with whatever it is you're criticizing before you do it (joke or not). You sound misinformed at the very least.

I think you'll find that companies like AMD tend to only support the distributions that have the corporate customers, those that sell support contracts (i.e. Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu). Aside from the viral influence gained, I doubt AMD cares particularly much about supporting any of the other distros, Fedora included. On the flip side, I'd say the Fedora folk don't care about AMD, either. There hasn't been a script supporting Fedora packages in the Catalyst distribution since F10.

I'm not sure how popular Ubuntu is on the coporate front... but considering AMD has chosen to give it official support, probability is good we'll see at least a semi-working driver by 11.04 launch.

[tcv90]

I was told by an AMD official that they will no longer be supporting Ubuntu. Therefore Ubuntu 11.04 will not be supported.

[pvtcupcakes]

I was told by an AMD official that they will no longer be supporting Ubuntu. Therefore Ubuntu 11.04 will not be supported.

Does this mean that instead of even trying to support a kernel released in the last 3 years, they're just going to stick with whatever RHEL and SLES use? So anybody using a kernel after 2.6.32 is gonna be out of luck. Hell they probably won't even support RHEL6 and just stick to RHEL5 because anything with a kernel released after 2.6.18 is just too new for AMD to bother with.