Hey PD Community,

I am looking to move from OSX to Linux as my primary music and coding OS. I was hoping to be able to get a feel for what hardware everyone here is using, especially graphics hardware. I realize the state of linux graphics drivers right now is a sore spot, but I'd like to have a halfway decent system. I hear the X800 is great with open source drivers.

Any input you can give me or experiences you've had in this arena are greatly appreciated. Any other 2cents are great too....

Hi bz,

my two cents: I've an "old" (sept 2002) NVidia Ti4200 and with
nvidia drivers it runs really smooth, hardware acceleration is ok.
At the moment under linux I don't have the need to change it
because it's good for all the tasks needed:

• GEM
• Xgl & co.
• sauerbraten

..

Best,

Alberto

I have an ATi Mobility Radeon 9700 in my laptop. It was tricky to get the ATi binary drivers to work at all, but when they do it works ok (tested with Fluxus).

One annoying thing with those drivers is that you have to choose either video overlay or opengl overlay before you start X, but mplayer -vo gl or whatever it's called works well enough.

And I'd be much happier with open source drivers that worked accelerated than having to taint my kernel with binary blobs...

In regards to the binary blob, that's what I was thinking. And beyond tainting the kernel, aren't binary blobs a pain in the ass!?

I've been thinking X800, so I can use the open source R300 drivers and get the most performance. Although a 7600GS would be cheap and perform better, but with binary drivers. If only Intel or someone would release a powerful discrete graphics card with open source drivers. I guess I could always get that later on... your input is much appreciated and very useful.

Hi ,

I only use Nvidia graphics, from PCI MX4400 to GS 7600 through nvidia chipsets nforce2 and 4. I use the module assistant to compile (no nvidia binary) with xorg.

I've had totally painful experience with Ati such as no GL acceleration with Gem.