Xeiso UI

Will proprietary graphics drivers be included (and legally)?

Asked by Jeremy Visser

From Xesio's description on the Launchpad page:

    "Pop in the CD, boot up your PC, and play some games."

This is obviously not a feasible goal unless proprietary graphics drivers are to be included on the CD. So, will the drivers be included?

Also, would you see this as being legal? I know that Kororaa (an Xgl live CD that bundled NVIDIA drivers) stopped developing their product due to this.

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Jacob Peddicord (jpeddicord) said : 		#1

All I can say right now - as I haven't looked into the licenses - is maybe. If the license prevents it, it could be done the Ubuntu way: have a scripted download of the drivers directly from Nvidia, and store them somewhere on the system on first boot.

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Jeremy Visser (jeremy-visser) said : 		#2

In Australia, we are encumbered by very small download quotas. When I last checked, the download package from NVIDIA was 30MB or so. To download that much _every_ time you boot the live CD would be just crazy, and anybody that had a "budget" broadband plan in Australia would blow their quota after using Xeiso just 6 or 7 times.

Nope, downloading them on each boot is not feasible.

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Jacob Peddicord (jpeddicord) said : 		#3

You're forgetting a detail: the storage mechanism. For users that would opt into it, the downloaded driver could be stored on the host HDD or an external drive, and read on-demand at boot. Essentially, at the end of every Xeiso session (or live) the RAM squashfs image would be written to the user's HDD, making an installed image without having to partition or install a boot loader. Then everything could simply be chainloaded from the HDD. It won't work exactly like that, but it gives a general idea.

Those that don't want to use on-demand storage could either download it every time at boot (bleh) or use the built-in nouveau driver (still bleh at the moment). XPackage has an flag for requiring hardware acceleration, and if the system doesn't support it then only certain games will be allowed to run.

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Jeremy Visser (jeremy-visser) said : 		#4

I did forget about that.