Fedora Core 5, the Good and the Bad

Since the Dell laptop I started using a year or so ago has Nvidia graphic hardware, I’ve been following the status of xorg nv driver a bit more than I used to. At present, no 3D acceleration support for Nvidia hardware is available for free software users. I learned today that there’s now a project working on DRI support for Nvidia hardware. It’s called project nouveau. The feature matrix is a bit sparse but it’s good to see some work being done here. It would be great to finally have 3D support for Nvidia cards in xorg.

That’s the good Nvidia news. The bad news is that there seems to be an nv driver bug in the version that shipped with Fedora Core 5. It’s causing problems for a number of folks (including me). Hopefully some fixes will be coming along soon.

In my previous blog entry I was complaining about the horrible Linux CD writing software called X-CD Roast. I was pleased to find it wasn’t needed in Fedora Core 5. All I have to do to burn a CD of an ISO image now is right click on the CD and select “Write to Disc”.