Sonntag, 1. November 2009

New RPM Fusion packages: nvidia drivers for F12, staging drivers for F11 and F12

Just FYI:
  • the nvidia graphics drivers finally showed up again in the RPM Fusion repository for rawhide (the current public rawhide to be precise, e.g. what becomes Fedora 12 soon)
  • Most drivers from the linux-staging tree are disabled in the kernels that Fedora ships (among them a few wifi drivers like rtl8187se) . That's a good thing, as they are often of highly questionable quality (¹, ²). But some people nevertheless what them, as they own hardware that needs them(³). Those people from now on can get them easily for Fedora 11 and Rawhide/Fedora 12 by installing kmod-staging from RPM Fusion.
    Please note that:

    • the drivers for Fedora 11 are in rpmfusion-free-updates-testing currently and build for the kernel that is in Fedora's updates-testing repo; thus to use them you need to run something like "yum --enablerepo='*testing' install kmod-staging" and reboot into the kernel that is installed to use them
    • you need to install kmod-staging-PAE if you use a PAE kernel on your x86-32 machine
    • there are no akmod-staging package at this time
    • the package doesn't contain all the drivers from the staging tree; in case you miss one just file a bug in bugzilla.rpmfusion.org and tell the packager to enable it
Also note that it might take some hours till the mirror yum chooses for you offers the packages, as they were uploaded to the master repo just a few minutes before this blog posting got published.

We thank you for your attention and we wish you a pleasant flight.

(¹) that's the long story short

(²) don't expect the drivers to work well; NetworkManager for example will in have problems with some of the WiFi drivers in staging-kmod. In most cases that will be the fault of the driver and not NetworkManager, thus filing NetworkManager bugs that occur with staging drivers is likely a waste of your time.

(³) friends don't let friends buy hardware which need's staging (or even worse: proprietary) drivers on Linux

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