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May 13, 2010

Hardware manufacturers today produce a huge selection of complex video cards whose graphics processing power alone outstrips entire computer systems made as late as 2003.

But it hasn't always been easy for Linux users to take advantage of this hardware. Until recently, the more exotic 3D acceleration features in particular have often required introducing closed source, ie: proprietary driver software.

In the past, proprietary drivers have pretty much made life more difficult for Linux users, and not much has ever been done about it, at least not in a significant way. Since they are next to impossible for the Linux community to debug or improve in any way, it can be very frustrating when they cause work interruptions or system crashes.

Following on the strong capabilities for the drivers for Intel and ATI based graphics cards, in Fedora 13, the new drivers that are used provide fast 3D hardware acceleration and are designed to support a wide array of NVidia-based high-end video and graphics cards.

Because these powerful drivers are free, Linux and open source software developers can build additional software against the multiple functions they provide, taking full advantage of the modern hardware that Linux users have recently purchased.

However, open source video drivers are only part of the story of Fedora 13. There are numerous other such enhancements involving hardware such as automatic print driver installation and a complex but highly efficient color management system for many devices.

The Red Hat / Fedora community has produced a set of detailed interviews on these features with the Fedora contributors who created them.

This support has already allowed Fedora developers in the Linux community to greatly improve and further accelerate the boot process and heighten the overall user experience in Fedora.

However, many people believe that it also provides a solid platform for future capabilities of the open source desktop environment that can build on this complete open source software stack.

For example, the user’s desktop environment can take advantage of 3D acceleration to provide a richer and more elegant interaction model, as in the next-generation Gnome or KDE desktop.

Linux users can also enjoy a variety of 3D software and various games already packaged and freely available in the Fedora 13 software repository.

Colin Walters, a Red Hat software engineer, says there are many benefits of free video hardware drivers, and how users can take advantage of them now and in the future.

In the coming months, we will feature more articles on the benefits of Fedora 13 and what it can do for the Linux and open source community.

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Source: The Red Hat / Fedora Group.

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