Last month we reported on VIA's new open-source driver efforts that was announced at the LF Austin Summit. This new strategy involves VIA providing the open-source community with NDA-free hardware specifications, code, and other resources -- in a similar fashion to what ATI/AMD and Intel have been doing for some time now. However, not everyone has been satisfied by this announcement and their new Linux website isn't yet exactly useful. We explore the VIA Linux situation in this article as well as sharing what two open-source developers have to say.

In the press release concerning VIA's new "open-source driver development imitative", they mention "As the first step in this initiative, VIA will open its official VIA Linux website at http://linux.via.com.tw this month. The site will initially host drivers, technical documentation, source code, and information regarding the VIA CN700, CX700/M, CN896 and the new VIA VX800 chipsets, with plans to add official forums and support for more products later on in the year." The website was opened up that month (April 30th to be exact), but the site is rather bare. The only drivers being offered on this Linux website right now are two Chrome/Unichrome drivers. The only distributions supported from this Linux portal are Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and SuSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP1.

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