Fedora 9 - Common Issues

Proprietary (third-party) video drivers

Fedora ships a new X.Org X11 server (1.4.99) which brings a large number of benefits to users and a new ABI as described in the feature list.

All drivers contained within Fedora have been ported to use this ABI and mostly work as expected. Third-party drivers from some vendors (AMD (fglrx)) are not yet compatible with this new X.Org ABI. (nVidia has also taken their time, but as of May 28, 2008, an updated driver is available from them and from third-party repositories.) This is not a bug in Fedora, nor even something Fedora can fix, only the third-party vendors can update the drivers due to their choice of licensing. Refer LWN for more details at

http://lwn.net/Articles/283291/

You can usually find proprietary drivers in third party repositories such as Livna at http://rpm.livna.org

Campus Linux Services

Campus Linux Services (CLS), part of OIT, is a group at NC State University that provides support for Linux and Open Source resources on campus. CLS provides a supported Linux distribution called Realm Linux, access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, installation, monitoring, and other services. Around campus there are many facilities for supporting Realm Linux and the Linux movement at NC State University in general.

Open Source Initiative

CLS has launched the NCSU Open Source Initiative. The goal of the OSI is to encourage the growth of the open source community here at NCSU and encourage participation in open source projects outside of NCSU.

To facilitate these goals the OSI offers project hosting services for NC State faculty, staff, and students. The OSI is also building a network of Open Source projects happening throughout the university to build collaboration inside and outside of the university.