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nuntius asks: "I went over to Aureal's Homepage to check for any news drivers, but all I saw was talk of the resignation of all senior staff/executives and talk of Chapter 11. What's happening? When did I miss this?" Looking at the state of Aureal's site, and the plethora of 404's, the obvious conclusion is, at the very least, that things are not going well. It's a shame. Aureal looked to be doing some pretty neat things for the state of Linux Multimedia. Can anyone shed some light on what is going on and whether the company has a future?

"X Company now supports Linux" announcements are coming in thick and fast these days. Examples: yesterday J Ellerbroek sent this link for Aureal's Linux drivers and Drakar wrote, "I e-mailed Sigma Designs asking them about Linux support for the RealMagic Hollywood Plus DVD Decoder, and they say they're working on supporting Linux for a future product." And Nicholas Tang turned us on to this announcement about an upcoming open sourced RPG with a Linux client. Very nice! But we're getting so many of these announcements that we can't possibly run them all. If you've spotted any others recently, please post them below. (Click for more.)

I had a thought while I was typing the words above: should Slashdot do periodic "roundups" of new Linux ports and support announcements? With so many hardware and software vendors now moving into the "Linux marketplace" (which is how many of them see Linux -- as a marketplace), these announcements are no longer "news" in the sense of being unique or unusual events, but they're still good to know about.

Should we make a weekly post out of all these announcements? Or, because they don't come in at an even rate, should we save them up until we have 10 or so and post them all then whether that takes two days or three weeks?

So, besides posting any new Linux product/support announcements you've seen lately, how about a little advice on how Slashdot might best handle these announcements in the future? I promise to read every comment with a moderation level of zero or higher.

- Robin "roblimo" Miller

Guy Saban writes "I've just received news that Aureal 3D plans on releasing Linux drivers for their Vortex sound cards in February. These cards have a good reputation for quality sound and 3D effects. The A3D technology for creating realistic acoustic effects has become a favorite among many. Apparently 4Front Technologies are working on drivers for the Vortex 1 and 2 chipsets under Linux through their OpenSound package. "