[PlanetCCRMA] 64bit, 32bit, and other things

[Tracey Hytry]

> What sort of problems have you had with the open source drivers? 

I have an edge case with the hardware on this machine.  It's an early SLI motherboard with a nvidia chipset.

I have one graphics card in it, where as I think it was really made for two at the time.  The card isn't supported that well now and wasn't something that I would ever have expected the open source drivers to give me any openGL on before.

I could sometimes run it with the open source driver(NV) and it would be reasonably stable, but not enough that I would trust it.  I usually run it with the rpm-fusion nvidia drivers, so I can use the graphics potential of the card, and reboot using the open source nv driver when I need to debug a problem that involves the kernel(I run and test the rt kernels all of the time).  Otherwise, this machine is a real nice one, something I wouldn't trade for another machine easily.

I've tried using the nouveau drivers a number of times with no real good luck with them.  Now that Linus has been bugging fedora to hurry up and do something about the nouveau drivers' I was hoping that maybe(just maybe), I could be able to enjoy a  3d graphics system here while running a non-tainted kernel.

I did run the machine using the 2.6.3*-rt kernel that Fernando has built on it for a while.  The graphics seemed stable using the open source "nv" driver.  I did a few audio tests and they came out ok too(I didn't do some of the more punishing ones though).  Overall the kernel looks good here on fedora 12.

I've run fedora 11 and 12 on other machines and haven't had any real problems there with the graphics.  As I said, it's an interesting edge case on this one machine.  I'll wait and see how it goes, maybe a little while longer as fedora gets this one together.  If it still isn't working I'll probably not care that much, as I would prefer to have a lower power graphics card in it anyway(the GPU eats more power then the CPU does).

And Steve, I hope you can get it all working properly on yours.

Tracey.