free drivers

Hello,

I was wondering if there are many laptops which are able to run off of completely free (open source) drivers? or not even close?

I'm also wondering what would be my best bet for a graphics card? I'm aware Intel has open source drivers, but the specs are relatively weak. I'm also aware that there are non-official free drivers for a range of ATI cards, and while the specs are better, the drivers are relatively weak.

Which would be my best bet? I'm not necessarily a gamer, but do enjoy running programs like Celestia, Quake III, and enjoy making OpenGL demos.

 

You are probably not going to find any laptop that will use completely free drivers. The problem is that even "open source" drivers such as Atheros wireless cards and the Intel GMA aren't technically GPL (probably actually LGPL). AFAIK, they still contain bits of binary code in them, which is why they still aren't integrated into the kernel.

If you're looking for a decent GPU, you probably want to go with an nVidia graphics card. Not only are the proprietary drivers better and easier to set up, but if you really want to stay open source, there are options for that as well with nVidia since the "nv" drivers are being worked on as much as possible to advance them, and already provide some (very) basic 3D acceleration features. I don't think ATi has anything like that going for it right now.

 

Apparently ATI's stance is pretty against anything that would allow for open source drivers.

Further, there's no adequate documentation for ATI's cards that allows for development of open source drivers, while at least nVidia has immature drivers going for it. (Evidently Richard Stallman protested an ATI speech for this reason)

 

I can't wait until software patents get revoked. They're as bad as being able to patent or copyright genetics.