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Story: Suse Linux gives proprietary modules the boot
Posted by: David Wright (Wednesday 2 August 2006, 11:10 AM)
The change was actually announced back at the end of 2005 and came into effect when SUSE 10.1 was released for public Beta testing.
SUSE 10.1 was released back in May. It comes on 5 CD's with only OSS licensed software. Software under different licenses and proprietary software such as some wireless card drivers, Opera, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Flash and Real Player are supplied on a 6th CD. The retail version includes the extra software on the DVD, so no disk swapping...
Also, SUSE have never provided proprietary video drivers with their distribution, the OSS "radeon" and "nv" drivers, for example, were included, but the proprietary drivers from ATi and nVidia were never included on the distribution. The nVidia drivers were available through the online update process, although the ATi drivers never were.
Now it works much like the Windows drivers, you download a self-executable from nVidia or ATi's website and follow the wizard to install the drivers, not exactly difficult (clicking Yes/Next half a dozen times does the job).
The video drivers, to be honest, are the least of the problem, because they were never directly included in the distribution, but some ISDN TA and wireless drivers have been excluded which is a shame.
While i can understand the Kernel developer's opinions on this matter, as a user I can't say I agree 100% with the way they are handling this. They have slammed the door on closed source drivers for several valid reasons - breaking the GPL/developers copyright by attaching to GPL'ed routines whilst not releasing their own code under GPL, even though they are using GPL'ed interfaces in the code; difficulty of testing/debugging, in that if you don't have the source code for the drivers, if something goes wrong, you can't fix it.
The manufacturers have had a reasonable amount of time to counter this problem (over 6 months), in which to either move their drivers out of the Kernel space, or to open source their driver code. Many manufacturers have responded well to this and are working closely with the OSS community, Intel and nVidia among them - in fact getting an Intel based motherboard with onboard Intel based graphics is probably the most efficient way to go these days if you don't want to use closed source drivers.
Other manufacturers though have just complained loudly about the change and have spent the time whinning about the problems it causes as opposed to working on solutions which are acceptable.
When I heard about the announcement when I was working on the Beta of SUSE 10.1 in January, I was very worried about the situation, it sounded like the developers were slamming the door and cutting off the drivers without allowing the manufacturers time to respond. It seemed like cutting off your nose to spite your face, leaving the users with the options of staying with older, working installations, or upgrading to the latest versions without support for much of their hardware.
But in reality it has bee much smoother than I had expected for most hardware. There are still problems with products from companies (mostly ISDN and wireless networking manufacturers), who haven't reacted well to the changes, but the user can still manually download and install the relevant drivers.
My setup has two different printers (HP and Samsung), a USB hard disk, nVidia and ATi graphics cards, Intel Centrino and Athlon 64 machines, Intel and Creative sound cards and wireless networking and I haven't had any real problems, the USB drive just works, as do the scanner and card reader in my HP Photosmart, just plug the memory cards in and they appear in a new window automatically on my desktop. In fact if you get the right hardware, it all installs a darned sight easier than under Windows! SUSE says it has found new hardware, do you want to use it, Windows tends to say it has found new hardware, give me some drivers if you want to use it!
Now, if we could just get the recalcitrant hardware developers t
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