Better interactions with new upstream version on drivers

[Bryce Harrington]

Hi Mario!

Interestingly, several of us seem to be thinking along the same lines.
Recently several of us laid plans for merging efforts with Envy.  The
notes from the meeting are at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EnvyNG if you'd
like to look (and please add your own ideas - we'll love to have you
onboard the team too!)

Notably, in the meeting we also had similar ideas of making use of dkms,
improving access to newer driver releases, improving integration in
release manager, and so on.  Envy includes support for both fglrx and
nvidia.

Much of what we discussed involved how to make envy and l-r-m play well
together (and with displayconfig-gtk via uniform xorg.conf editing with
guidance-backends).  The GUI layer didn't receive as much discussion but
is also obviously important, and I bet you have some good thoughts on
how we can make the user experience there be tighter.  mvo was going to
look into modifications to restricted-manager, and I bet he'd love your
help with this.  Alberto Milone would probably also appreciate feedback
on the Envy UI and it's integration.

Bryce

On Thu, Dec 13, 2007 at 02:22:27PM -0600, Mario Limonciello wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
> 
> Recently I stepped up to the position of the primary maintainer for the
> upstream fglrx package build scripts for Ubuntu.  As maintainer for it,
> I wanted to make it a priority to make an easier experience for people
> installing new versions of the driver.
> 
> In an upcoming Catalyst release (7.12 I believe is the number), I've
> added dkms support, allowing the package to build its own kernel module
> via dkms and move any old modules out of the way.  This removes the old
> requirement of having to setup build-essential manually and use module
> assistant to build the package.
> 
> I would still like to improve the user interaction for newer driver
> releases further if at all possible.
> 
> I was wondering what people's views would be on having
> restricted-manager (or a similar tool), grabbing newer driver releases
> and running the package generation for people?  This is currently a weak
> point, requiring people to drop to a command line to build/install a
> newer driver that might say add support for their new cards, or improve
> performance.
> 
> Currently this would only be applicable for fglrx, since nvidia doesn't
> include a package generation suite in their driver installer.  I think
> with the correct framework in place however, this could encourage a
> similar package generation suite to be added to nvidia releases.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> -- 
> Mario Limonciello
> superm1 at ubuntu.com
> 
> 



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