After new second try, the driver license problem appears somewhat more relaxed. One important component needs good OpenGL support for plug and play full desktop colour correction. First choice for the OpenGL API on Nvidia and Ati hardware are the proprietary drivers from these manufacturers. For a LiveCD this did not work out due to legal reasons. The new CD can offer some basic OpenGL support to run Compiz and GPU accelerated colour conversions. The more and improving open source Nouveau driver comes to the rescue. Together with the experimental Mesa DRI it provides shader support. Some aspects work even better than the proprietary drivers, like backlight, obtaining monitor infos in a standard way through XRandR and automatic driver selection by Xorg. If you want to run on a daily base consider the Nvidia driver, as that provides power saving. It’s simply cooler.

There are some more changes like placing Krita on the CD. Krita is colour management wise a very interesting project. It supports floating point HDR images, comes with two own colour transformation modules in OpenGTL. The other new application is RawStudio. It implements the DCP spec of Adobe for DNG colour profiles. Both add to a very interesting colour software suite.

To read more about the LiveCD, please look at the old blog entry.