[Mageia-discuss] Nice review!

[andre999]

Patricia Fraser a écrit :
>
>
>> On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 2:02 PM, Dick Gevers<dvgevers at xs4all.nl>
>> wrote:
>>> On Fri, 10 Jun 2011 19:51:22 +0200, Patricia Fraser wrote about
>>> [Mageia-discuss] Nice review!:
>>>
>>>> Hi folks,
>>>>
>>>> For our reading pleasure (and consideration):
>>>>
>>>> http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/review/2076258/impressions-mageia-linux
>>>>
>>>> Kudos to these guys
>>>
>>> And to you!
>>
>> The only big problem they mention is the lack of decent video
>> drivers for both Ati and Nvidia in the DVD. Will Mageia ever have
>> those in the DVD or will it keep the "free" kind of version that
>> Mandriva has?
>>
>> If it was for me, I would include them but I don't know about the
>> original reasons of why they are not.

In my mind, misplaced ideology.  The arguments were that non-free drivers should not be on a 
nominally "free" dvd.  I say nominally because even the kernel contains technically non-free code.

Let's make the focus "working out of the box".
If that means including non-free drivers where a reliable free driver does not exist, so be it.
After all, these proprietary drivers are to make the user's proprietary hardware work properly.
And if a reliable free driver exists, of course we wouldn't include the proprietary driver.

The purists can be accommodated by warnings which would require their confirmation to install any 
required non-free software.
The last thing we need is driving potential users away from Mageia (and Linux in general) by an 
installation that doesn't work properly.

> The T42 they used is quite old, and that model of IBM Thinkpad had
> a problematic Radeon card - I had loads of trouble with mine under
> Mandriva, even when using the proprietary drivers.

The review pointed out that after an Internet search which identified the needed driver, they 
downloaded the proprietary driver, which worked properly.  So it was _not_ a hardware problem.
Note that this would have been a difficult problem to solve for the average new Linux user.

They summarized :
"Overall, our opinion is that this first release of Mageia does what the team set out to do. Namely 
to build a clean and attractive derivative of Mandriva. Now, if the developers will revisit their 
decision not to distribute proprietary video software drivers on the installation media for those 
users who need them, we'd say that Mageia seems to have bright future ahead of it."

So let's eliminate this negative.

> I remember seeing loads of discussion about proprietary binary-only
> stuff on this very list, several times. I think most of it can now be
> found in the Tainted repos (that's where I found the codecs I
> needed). It's a legal issue - there are potential Mageia users in
> every country, and differences between licensing issues are very real.

This is not related to patent or legal issues, as can be found with codecs.
These drivers are freely redistributable but the manufacturers don't provide the source code, so 
they are in the non-free repositories.

my 2 cents :)
-- 
André