[nycbug-talk] NVidia Drivers/PC-BSD

[Charles Sprickman]

Hi all,

Just a plug here...

I was asked to setup a handful of *BSD workstations for someone and PC-BSD 
kind of grabbed my interest.  These are fairly generic workstations that 
really just need a desktop environment, browser, xterms, etc.  PC-BSD 
looked to be less maintenance than a full-blown FreeBSD install, and it 
also allowed for things to be installed via ports outside of the PC-BSD 
PBI system.

They've been running a few of these for months, and it's worked out well. 
I got the workstations from our friend Lee at GCS, of course. :)  The 
onboard video on his cheap machines is pretty crappy (S3 "chrome" 
integrated graphics) and there's no accelerated support for it in x.org. 
So we opted for cheap-o NVidia cards after seeing that:

-Nvidia has native drivers
-PC-BSD has point-n-drool PBIs for said drivers

Just wanted to share...  Anything I build that needs a video card from now 
on is going to get an NVidia card.  I really want to reward NVidia for 
taking the resources to make these drivers, and would suggest others that 
use FreeBSD do the same.  They even have useful docs, including some Linux 
ABI tips:

http://download.nvidia.com/freebsd/1.0-8178/README/index.html

Just wanted to make a little sales pitch for PC-BSD and NVidia... :)

Charles