What is the best video card to get if one is planning to build a system for linux? The reason i ask is that i have ati radeon 9100, and updating the drivers for it in linux (red hat enterprise workstation 3.0) was VERY complicated... I think I had to recompile the kernel?! (there were very good step by step instructions at ati.com) and after I did that... the updates from redhat wouldn't work anymore because they were complaining about some sort of problem with the kernel... and it was one of those messages that is just a little over my head. Is there a linux-friendly video card that is supported very well by linux and is easy to update drivers from manufacturer's website? I'm planning on building a new system and putting suse linux 9.3 (or 10 if it's out). Thanks! Adam.

Your main options are ATI and nVidia. nVidia provides excellent closed-source driv3rs that perform as well as the Wind0ws driv3rs, but they don't release any information to open-source developers. ATI's binary driv3rs aren't as good as nVidia's, but information is available to write open-source driv3rs for older cards. These driv3rs don't perform as well as nVidia's either, but some people care more about politics than performance. None of these options should require you to recompile your kernel if you use one of the popular commercial distributi0ns. Others like Gentoo and Ubuntu have their own systems. Anwyay, ATI's site claims all you need is the kernel headers package, so I'm not sure what you did. All things considered, unless you're an open-source purist, nVidia has the best support.

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I was trying to prevent my post from having any potential IntelliTXT, but it seems I underestimated the system. For the longest time I didn't care because it didn't work in gecko-based browsers. Now that it does, I figured I'd try to write a post that didn't have any IntelliTXT, but it looks like the amount of l33t necessary is more obnoxious than the IntelliTXT I sought to eliminate.