Apologies for the late posting; a mixture of hardware woes and scheduling issues  made getting this post out difficult.

As mentioned in part one of this series, despite the legendary pace of development in the Open Source community, it can be difficult to keep tabs on what is being worked on.  I don’t claim to know about everything, or even most things; I do however enjoy tracking these things in my free time, and would like to share what I know to those who don’t share my passion.

Arguably, multimedia is just a subdivision of hardware support, another area where Free operating systems have suffered from a lack of attention. Luckily, vows of support have been sworn recently from AMD/ATI, and Intel has continued on their legendary campaign of support for Linux. This along with more mundane evolutionary work with corporate support and the diligent work of many kernel hackers has led to a much more usable system with a bright future.

Webcam support has gone through several drastic improvements in the past year starting with the release of Linux 2.6.26 introducing a driver supporting all USB video input devices.[13] This success was built upon with Linux 2.6.27 with the introduction of a driver for another popular device. As a result, most webcams are now supported on Linux.[14]

The Free Software community has long had a love-hate relationship to NVIDIA, loving them for their relatively superior graphics drivers yet hating them for their bugs and refusal to play nice with their philosophical demands. This situation has not changed on NVIDIA’s side of the court, but a small team of Free Software enthusiasts finally threw up their hands and began development of the nouveau project: an attempt to design a fully FLOSS driver for NVIDIA-based graphics chipsets. They have made good progress, and most devices are now supported with full 2D acceleration, with a start on 3D for some devices.[15] Interestingly, their 3D driver development is now entirely done in Gallium3D. It’s worth noting that as mentioned above, NVIDIA has released a video decoding framework called VDPAU.

The situation for ATI has been a complete reversal, however. After AMD bought them out in 2006, they swore to release documentation and fund development for their new devices.[16][17] This resulted in not only such radical developments as same-day Linux support but also the official funding of a new open-source driver, radeonhd. As a result of this, ATI cards are now well-supported both with and without proprietary drivers, even with a video decoding framework called XvBA.

A similar effort has come across from S3 Graphics, the maker of graphics chipsets closely associated with VIA.[18] However, their pledge of Linux support has so far been somewhat unsubstantiated, especially in terms of open-source support. The video decoding acceleration framework they chose to implement for their Chrome 500 driver was Intel’s VA-API.

Broadcom, the extremely popular manufacturer of network equipment, still has patchy support on Linux for their WiFi chipsets. Although there is a driver–b43–in the mainline kernel since Linux 2.6.24 (succeeding the earlier bcm43xx driver), the firmware needed to actually initialize and run the device is not open-source and cannot be distributed.[19][20] As a result, it is impossible to use Broadcom WiFi devices on a fully Free system, and it is even impractical–if not impossible–on many systems. Some distributions such as Ubuntu have an automatic setup system for this, but it’s not guaranteed to work.

On the note of wireless networking, there is a development worth noting although it occurred a while back. A somewhat revolutionary update, it dates way back to Linux 2.6.22, and concerns the complete rewrite of how WiFi is done in Linux by the company DeviceScape.[21] This is a mostly internal change, but allows for cleaner and more rapid wireless driver development. It replaces the much older Wireless-Extensions kernel subsystem developed in 1997 to accomplish a similar goal. Because of this fundamental internal API change, it may be that iwconfig and like utilities introduced with Wireless-Extensions are deprecated and may not work with newer drivers; iw its its replacement.[22][23]

Lastly, support for WiMAX has been added to Linux as of the 2.6.29 release through a set of patches donated by Intel.[24] WiMAX is a new wireless networking standard designed for much higher transmission speeds and range compared to WiFi, and is necessary both as a mobility innovation and as a method of internet delivery.