NVIDIA drivers moved to the DVD images

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Sat, Sep 06, 2008 at 03:43:37PM +0100, Matthew East wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 6, 2008 at 9:21 AM, Matt Zimmerman <mdz at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> > These drivers have never been installed in the live environment in Ubuntu.
> > Until now, they have been provided as .debs on the desktop CD as a
> > convenience.  Removing them simply means that they will need to be
> > downloaded or installed from the DVD instead.
> 
> It would be good if the installer could do this automatically, rather
> than the user having to figure out why the system isn't working and
> using Hardware Drivers to fix it. That was one of the things that got
> in my way when installing Ubuntu 8.04 on a machine with an Nvidia
> chipset - when I logged in the desktop looked like it was broken
> because of the low resolution. Opensuse seemed to get it right.

I don't think the proprietary driver is required to get a reasonable mode on
most cards, only for full acceleration.  Perhaps what you encountered was a
bug in the open source nv driver (it works fine for me on a widescreen
external display).

> I understand that part of our message is to communicate to users when
> they are using proprietary software, but I think that can probably be
> achieved at the same time as making the user's life easier by
> downloading the required driver during the installation process.

There are technical reasons why this is not a good idea with this particular
driver, and in general, we would rather hear about problems with the open
drivers (ati more so than nv perhaps) so that they stand a chance of being
fixed.

The proprietary drivers are a necessary evil for many users, but we want it
to be a temporary one, and defaulting to open graphics drivers is one way we
help to work toward that future.

-- 
 - mdz