Video Controller (VGA Compatible) 5.2.1.6
From NVIDIA
NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400
Documentation and drivers
Nvidia does not publish the documentation for its hardware, meaning that programmers cannot write appropriate and effective open-source drivers for Nvidia's products (compare Graphics hardware and FOSS). Instead, Nvidia provides its own binary GeForce graphics drivers for X.Org and a thin open-source library that interfaces with the Linux, FreeBSD or Solaris kernels and the proprietary graphics software. Nvidia also supports an obfuscated open-source driver that only supports two-dimensional hardware acceleration and ships with the X.Org distribution. NVIDIA's Linux support has promoted mutual adoption in the entertainment, scientific visualization, defense and simulation/training industries, traditionally dominated by SGI, Evans & Sutherland, and other relatively costly vendors.[citation needed]
The proprietary nature of Nvidia's drivers has generated dissatisfaction within free-software communities. Some Linux and BSD users insist on using only open-source drivers, and regard Nvidia's insistence on providing nothing more than a binary-only driver as wholly inadequate, given that competing manufacturers (like Intel) offer support and documentation for open-source developers, and that others (like ATI) release partial documentation.[19] Because of the closed nature of the drivers, Nvidia video cards do not deliver adequate features on some platforms and architectures (However this is credited[by whom?] to be due to lack of the proper kernel API needed for implementation). Support for three-dimensional graphics acceleration in Linux on the PowerPC does not exist; nor does support for Linux on the hypervisor-restricted PlayStation 3 console. While some users accept the NVIDIA-supported drivers, many users of open-source software would prefer better out-of-the-box performance if given the choice.[20] However, the performance and functionality of the binary Nvidia video card drivers surpass those of open-source alternatives[citation needed] following VESA standards.
X.Org Foundation and Freedesktop.org have started the Nouveau project, which aims to develop free-software drivers for NVIDIA graphics cards by reverse engineering Nvidia's current proprietary drivers for Linux.
