Michal Čihař - Archive for March 14, 2008

Nvidia is bad, Intel is good?

Intel is always seen as good guy, who is writing open source drivers, releasing at least some specifications for hardware. Unfortunately it is not always the case. If you want to use their new embedded solution - Menlow CPU and Poulsbo chipset, they provide you lot of crap.

Basically what you get is a zip file containing several Microsoft Word documents, badly formatted text files (end of lines at each 80 chars), PDFs and some zip and tar archives. If you look to one of these archives, you will get binary graphical installer, which will install license, uninstallator and yet another set of tarballs. These tarballs finally contain binary and source packages you need to make graphics work on this platform. Maybe somebody did this to practise various ways of compressing and distributing things, but it is really amazing how many times you need to decompress several archives to actually get to the things you want.

Unfortunately at the end you will find out that libgl1-mesa-dri-psb binary (DRI driver for graphics) has no sources and Intel is not willing to give them to you. Bad luck if you have slightly different distribution than one of these which are supported (FC6, Midinux-build9, ubuntu-gutsy, ubuntu-hardy) and the provided binary simply crashes.