a few weeks ago i got a call from john terpstra (you might know him from his work with the samba project) who is currently working at amd. during the conversation he asked what i was using for a development desktop and i told him i was just using my laptop these days. so they sent out an amd athlon 64 system and it arrived yesterday making for an early christmas present.it's a fairly middle-of-the-road box (single core; 2Ghz; 1GB RAM; 120GB SATA drive; 256MB nvidia 5500) but will do quite nicely as a dev system. thanks amd! =)
first thing i did after chuckling my way through the windows xp oem set up app was to toss in a belenix live cd. belenix is an opensolaris based distribution that comes with xfce and kde. kde ran just fine, though their choice of desktop icons was a bit odd (evince, particularly when kpdf is also there?), and the addition of the binary nvidia driver by default was kind of neat to see the hardware in action. too bad there isn't a full featured open source driver for the card. i would never have bought this card myself due to that.
belenix did show that while kde certainly runs very nicely on solaris there are a number of things that haven't been adequately ported yet. this can be seen in places such as the info center and kpackage. while in india i talked to a few of the solaris guys there (who gave me the belenix cd i tried out) and they expressed interest in working on these things. i'm sure that would make all the kde-on-solaris users, of which there are quite a few, very happy.
the amd system is now running edgy and things seem to be humming along nicely. kde4 is building and i'll have to decide exactly how to split my time between my laptop (freedom) and the new desktop (liberty). i think i'll probably code on the desktop and use the laptop for communication. this should let me turn the desktop into a kde4 system and even devolve it into an unstable mess at will without choking. =)
6 comments:
About Nvidia, a free (speech) driver is being developped by the community currently: http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/ . I hope they'll be able to make a working version fast enough to have perfectly smooth XGL/AIGLX like effects even with older cards.
Funny they didn't put in an ATI card :).
AMD is also porting some top-end desktop motherboards to LinuxBIOS (no DRM/treacherous computing, yay!)
And the OpenGraphics project has recently manufactured their prototype 3D-enabled OpenGL graphics card that will have full specifications.
Funny that distributing the nVidia and ATI drivers is completely legal on Solaris because of the CDDL :P
I really wonder how this issue works out on Linux though. It's what currently worries me most in regard to Open Source. (Besides not getting my work on KDevelop done till the v4 release ;)
This entry made me flash back to that scene in Austin powers where they knock out all of the paid endorsements in one shot. ;) ;)
Seriously though congratulations on the new Liberty machine.
Thanks Aaron for trying out the CD I gave. Thought big guys won't have time to try it out ;)
I use KDE on my sparc box, jst love it. :)
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