Hanno's blog

Maybe you've read that I did some coordination on relicensing the old GATOS TV-Out code to make inclusion into the radeon driver possible (gatos was gpl, while xorg uses mit-license).

Now, shortly after that Alex Deucher started implementing tv-out in the randr-1.2-branch of the ati driver based on that code. randr-1.2 is the new and shiny stuff that will make future versions of xorg manage resolutions and output connectors much better. As you can see on the picture, today I played around with the new code and got it working (get Gentoo git-ebuild here).

As a short howto, on some cards (including mine), autodetection of the connector status doesn't work yet. You'll have to manually force the connector:

xrandr --addmode S-video 800x600
xrandr --output S-video --mode 800x600

This is especially exciting as it is the last features of my laptop that was missing for »full linux-compatibility« (some minor issues left, as the cardreader only reads sd at the moment, the modem needs a binary driver).

This friday, there were two driver releases for linux graphics hardware. A new proprietary driver from nvidia and a new free driver for ati cards.

The release of the new nvidia driver was spread over all major news-pages. It's main new feature was the support of Xorg 7.1 just three months after it's release and about five months after the first release candidate. It still doesn't support the main new feature of Xorg 7.1, which is AIGLX. I couldn't find the release of the new free ati driver mentioned anywhere (even on linux news-pages) and probably even wouldn't have noticed if I wouldn't read the xorg-mailinglist. The new ati driver has much improved support for r300 and above chips, which is very important for the future development of 3D-desktops like compiz.

Now, the reason why this happens is probably that nvidia put out a colorful press release when they update their drivers. One could say that it's bad journalism from those news pages (especially if they are linux related) that if they get press releases from companies, they always post news, but they don't do so for rarely announced free releases. But news writers are lazy, if they get some ready-to-publish press release, they'll more likely take it than grabbing some announcement from some developers mailinglist. The problem from many free software projects is that their publicity sucks.

The work done by the xorg-developers to the ati-drivers is great. But I still meet people that even don't know the free drivers support anything above 9200. I never read big announcements on news pages about »free ati driver now supporting new card xy«. Now, if you have a look at the xorg-page, it doesn't even have release announcements. It looks boring. We know that xorg is cool, that it has wobbly windows and such, that development is happening. But looking at the webpage, it much more looks like xfree86.

This problem is not just related to xorg, it's just that I noticed this fact the last days (two driver-releases, only one noted). Same thing was e. g. with ffmpeg supporting h264 for a long time and then I read that some »I-forgot-their-name«-company said they'll bring a commercial h264-codec to linux. Or that about a week after ffmpeg supported wmv9 (also rarely noted by the public), real software said they want to bring wmv-support to linux. There's so much great stuff going on in free software development that would deserve more publicity.

Oh, and for a last note, Lars also has a nice example how not to do it.