the teabag

Whoops! Looks like there is a problem with the new Debian 2.6.21-2 kernel being updated recently, especially with the NVidia drivers.

Most of you who compile your NVidia drivers will know that everytime you run apt-get update && apt-get upgrade, you are also going to have to run through the NVidia installer to compile against the new kernel headers. Of course this is optional and if you use the nv driver everything is OK (that is assuming you don’t want to take advantage of your super duper hardware).

Well the bad news is that the NVidia installer wont compile against the newer kernel headers because this happens:

FATAL: modpost: GPL-incompatible module nvidia.ko uses GPL-only symbol ‘paravirt_ops’

It seems the only way around this is to compile the kernel yourself, and not include the virtualization options, which is bad news if you are trying to use QEMU, and especially more bad news if you are not interested in compiling your own kernel from scratch.

I ask a simple question though about this: Who looses in this battle between GPL and proprietary? Of course the open source camp are going to say that NVidia should release open source drivers for their hardware or at least allow someone else access to the specifications of the hardware so they can write the drivers for them. I understand this argument and perhaps subscribe to it on occasion, but not this time.

I remember the days when using Linux was a royal pain in the proverbial, most hardware out there wouldn’t work out of the box, and for the standard user, running Linux meant that they had to learn everything again and to such a deeper degree than they did when they used Windows. The users had to understand how to edit config files, follow installation procedures (that are completely alien to someone who is used to double clicking on a file called setup.exe and simply crossing their fingers), read man pages and prey to the gods of *NIX that something might work first time (which invariably it didn’t).

I cut my teeth on this Linux, and I remember it was a struggle all of the way, it was painful but undoubtedly worth it in the end, which brings me to today. If I install a distribution of my choice, I can pretty much garuntee that 95% of any hardware or peripheral I purchase and plug into my box will work without me having to do anything special, and the ones that need a bit of tinkering with will install fine in the end after a few searches with OFSE (our favourite search engine) to guide us in the right direction.

Think back again to the time when the hardware manufacturers thought the Linux community was a fad, and we were either going to have to use Windows or Macs or get used to the fact that we couldn’t use their technologies. The community was bashing people like NVidia because they wouldn’t write drivers, our attack was simple, we voted with our wallets and we used our geek powers to persuade others to try other vendors.

One day, NVidia released drivers for Linux, and they worked for most of us, and this made me very happy, of course, the drivers were not GPL compatible, but I didn’t care. All I cared about was that I was able to use my favourite OS with my (very expensive) video card, and nowadays, when I can be bothered, I switch on Beryl and play with my spinning desktop.

So what is wrong with our community? and with debian in particular? why will you not allow me to run with NVidia drivers with your stock kernel? The way I see it is that we battled long and hard for recognition by the very vendors that today we are throwing obstacles at and, as I asked earlier, who looses? I tell you who looses, I do, and so do you!

Well done

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