Ubuntu

Graphics card with open source driver.

Asked by Thomas Mertes on 2008-07-19

What graphics cards do have an open source driver?

Please do not suggest Nvidia or another graphic card which has only a proprietory driver.

I am in a situation where the super-duper proprietory driver from Nvidia just offers
a resolution of 640x480. It may be, that the automatic upgrade from the nvidia-glx to the
nvidia-glx-new package caused this. The 'hardware driver' program just offers
the driver for the newest graphic cards (probably the one from nvidia-glx-new).
Probably the 'hardware driver' program should offer more than one driver.
Even installing nvidia-glx instead of nvidia-glx-new does not help.
So far for automatic upgrades.

After several hours of trying with EnvyNG and trying other suggestions I came to the
conclusion that bying a graphics card with an open source driver is the only solution.
Since I am not a gamer 3D features are not really needed, but I would like to
see (2D) movies with it.

Question information

Language:: English Edit question

Status:: Answered

For:: Ubuntu Edit question

Assignee:: No assignee Edit question

Last query:: 2008-07-19

Last reply:: 2008-07-19

Link existing bug

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Bhavani Shankar (bhavi) said on 2008-07-19:

Hello

You can take a shot at ATI.....

More info:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver

Or if you have an intel onboard graphics card you can use it instead of Nvdia

Regards

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Thomas Mertes (thomas-mertes) said on 2008-07-19:

According to the motherboard specification I have a
NVIDIA GeForce 6150 GPU and a
NVIDIA nForce 430 MPC chipset onboard.

BTW According to System/Info I use Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron
AFAIK: The one with "long time support".
I graded up just two weeks ago from the last
"long time support" Ubuntu.

Since it was destroyed by an update, I guess that
this support does not last long...

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Thomas Mertes (thomas-mertes) said on 2008-07-19:

Update:
I printed the list of supported graphic cards from
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver
and took my motherboard specification to went to a shop.
According to the specefication the motherboard supports
PCIe, but not AGP. The salesclerk looked at the list of
supported cards (supported by the open source ATI driver)
and said that this are all AGP cards and that the list does
not contain any PCIe card.

They began to suggest using NVIDIA with proprietory drivers
and started to make jokes about linux.

For me this is a horrible situation. I am a long time linux
user (since before kernel version 1.0) and used X11 under
linux without problems for at least 15 years. I am not
interested in 3D graphic accelleration, therefore 10 year
old technology would probably be sufficient. But I do not
want to use historic hardware just because of this situation.

Aren't there any PCIe graphic cards with open source
drivers on the marked?

It is absolutely unacceptable that closed source drivers
are suggested as solution. People who do that just have
no idea what open source means.

Can anybody help me?

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Sharar Ravitz (jewfro-macabbi) said on 2008-07-19:

Here's another list of hardware known to work with free drivers:

http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/video

You might also try using the nouveau driver - free driver for nvidia

http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/InstallNouveau

and here's some more info on running free drivers:

http://free3d.org/