OneAndOneIs2

Two fairly big stories surfaced in the last day or two.

Firstly, ATI, recently taken over by the FOSS-friendly AMD, announced that they were going to release open-source drivers for their graphics cards.

There are basically three big players in graphics. Intel, which are good for basic uses but not for hardcore gamers. These have open-source drivers. NVIDIA, which are good for serious gamers and have what are reckoned as the best closed-source Linux drivers. And ATI, who pretty much equal NVIDIA in performance but have a less-good reputation for their closed-source drivers.

On the other hand, there are open-source drivers for some of ATI's older cards.

To be fair, ATI have been trying to improve their Linux drivers recently, with some success. But binary drivers can only get so good, so if they carry through with this, it'll be very good news: Decent drivers for Linux, plus it puts a BIG incentive on NVIDIA to do the same thing.

With 3D desktops becoming all the rage, it's more important than ever that the drivers be where everybody can get at them.

The other news is that Red Hat has just released some new fonts. This *is* important, because right now, too many of the standard fonts are MS-owned and can't be legally distributed with a distro. Fonts like Ariel and Times New Roman are too widespread to be unsupported.

Red Hat has finally taken away the need to use MS fonts by releasing their own equivalents under the GPL. I gather that they aren't fully anti-aliased yet, but the support for this is coming soon.

So RH deserves a big thank-you for what I know is a tedious and largely thankless task that will nonetheless make many default Linux desktops look just that little bit nicer. . .