Slashdot Mirror
Linux's Achilles Heel Apparently Revealed
ahab_2001 writes "In Information Week's latest 'Langa Letter', Fred Langa points to something that he calls Linux's 'Achilles' heel': 'New Linux distros still fail a task that Windows 95 -- yes, 95! -- easily handles, namely working with mainstream sound cards.' After lamenting his difficulties in getting a particular sound card to work with nine Linux distros, he concludes that his experience 'empirically shows that, despite its many good points, Linux still has some huge, gaping holes--holes that Windows plugged almost a decade ago.' (Oddball note: Information Week prefaced the e-mail alert pointing to this article by saying 'Occasionally, we have news or analysis of such importance that it warrants a special alert to you.' Hmm...)"
Is this a record moment for MS, when 95 outperforms a Linux boxen? I just heard a few coworkers keel over dead.
I knew I should have kept my copy of Windows 95!
I dont know about that: even on Win98 and WinME, it goes to shit if you try and have 2 different programs play sound at the same time. (Sometimes it bluescreens, sometimes just one of them works and the other doesn't).
Some sound cards suck and are not supported by Linux...or the original manufactures that went out of business 10 years ago and took the specs with them
What's with all the Troll articles lately?
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
If you just use AC'97, why would you get problems? And the new standard, azalia, should allow linux to work with much beter quality without individual drivers.
-I am an elective eunuch.
The ones that came configured with the sound volume set to 0 by default.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
My watch says it's April 19th, not 1st.
:wq
This article is pointless FUD. I've installed Linux dozens of times, and it has always worked with my soundcards. Even so-called "winsoundcards" work just fine.
I've had problems with video card, SCSI cards, RAID cards, Fibre Channel cards, PCI cow milking cards, but never, not once, have I had trouble getting a mainstream sound card to work under Linux.
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
I did set one up once, but all I got out of that was knowing how some weird dude pronounces 'leenucks', whatever that is.
I mean, maybe if the card manufacturers would open their specs more, the drivers would be better, and the problem would evaporate.
You are not the customer.
Seems funny that I have had no problems with my soundblaster audigy card under linux
Is the problem due to the OS or due to the sound card drivers? I assume the card makers simply didn't bother writing Linux drivers, but please correct me if I'm wrong, or clarify otherwise.
~CGameProgrammer( );
I've never had problems with my sound cards in recent years. I am not a big audio afficionado - a basic 2.1 speaker setup plugged in to the motherboard's onboard sound chip is all I need, so I don't really know. The extent of my experience is that the intel8x0 ALSA driver seems to work okay. Has anyone had bad experiences with modern cards and ALSA?
I have never had a problem getting sound working in Linux in the 10+ personal (and friends') machines I've installed it on, including an array of laptops and manufactured computers. Linux might have a weakness, but I doubt it is support for sound.
"Linux has some huge, gaping holes?" Because one distro didn't auto-detect one card?
I'm willing to bet that M$95 would fail to detect many others, but we're not going to bring that up?
Skivvy Niner? Email me!
HEY! Look left just ONE MORE TIME!
.. 9 distro's? I thought the ALSA sound lib was used commonly accross them all.
Steal This Sig
...I give it about two days until it appears on the Microsoft propaganda machine's website.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Annoying maybe, but really, sound cards are so NOT important.
Giving windows credit for working with sound cards gets thing rather backwards don't you think? Considering the MONOPOLY windows has, they don't need to to be compatible and work well with the sound cards. The sound cards need to make sure they work well with windows. Microsoft can do what ever they want and the world must switch it's practices and standards to suit it--which of course is the problem now isn't it.
ALSA supports most mainstream soundcards, and (as I'm sure most of you are aware of) it's integrated into the kernel as of 2.6. Linux's sound support is getting much better than where it used to be (OSS). It would really help if the card manufacturers would help us out though (ie. It would be nice if Creative handed us an opensource EAX). Microsoft has it easy because the manufacturers produce Windows drivers with each sound card.
Life is offtopic.
He didn't reveal what sound card he was actually working with?
Well I have some so called Empirical "evidence" of my own.
I have never had to recompile a kernel for audio drivers and the soundcard has in every system that I have set it up and used it on worked out of the box (that would only be 3 mind you , but given the sample used by "informationweek" I think that it holds its own)....
If only "evidence" was so easy.....
Say it isn't so, Linux doesn't support his on board sound chip set. We're fucked now!
On the other hand, one usually looks into these sort of things before one purchases one's hardware.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Considering that every MS Windows install I've ever done (Win 3.1-Win2k, I haven't installed XP) I've had to use external party drivers - either having to have driver floppy(s)/cd or had to go to the manfacturer's website before I had any sound. Even for Soundblasters and SB clones, PCI or ISA, it was always that way.
The article's tripe.
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
Bottom line: For broad hardware support, Windows is still much better than Linux. That's not bias--it's a demonstrable fact.
He has a problem with an un-named sound card, and concludes with that comment?
Is Info-week an MS site or what?
...this guy's never had an irq conflict where his sound card wants to use the only irq that his isa nic card requires.
We all remember the Win98 Scanner incident, don't we? That was televised...
Give this guy enough blue screens and he'll be begging for penguin.
FLR
This is the experience of one man, one sound card, one Linux distribution and he feels he has discovered the Linux Archilles heel! And that's not all, he wont tell us exactly what the companies are or what board he is talking about. Wow!
So I gotta agree with this guy, Linux does have its share of problems, but its not because Linux is deficient in anyway, its just that there is a different mentality about Linux than Windows. Lets take his sound card example, the manufacturer of the sound card had two choices, support Linux and spend money on potentially smaller market, or save that money and focus entirely on Windows. The company probably hoped that some Linux driver coder would just whip up a driver and save them the hassle. That's the wrong mentality, and until companies see Linux as a financial win, these sorts of problems will exist.
Sigh, I can relate with this guy, I've tried and tried but my DLINK DWL-520 rev e PCI wireless card still doesn't work under Linux.
Bottom line: For broad hardware support, Windows is still much better than Linux. That's not bias--it's a demonstrable fact.
Even if we assume for the moment that this guy's sound card problems were, in fact Linux's fault and not the fault of the sound card vendor or himself, this is still a completely false statement.
Linux may indeed be behind Windows in supporting some of the latest and greatest hardware, particularly those where the vendor doesn't open the specs or provide linux binary drivers, but Windows only supports one architecture.
That fact alone means Linux supports a much broader hardware base than Windows.
Also, I notice that he doesn't mention what sound card he's using, I have to wonder why.
Two computers..
1.) Ensoniq PCI sound card - detected by redhat/debian/slackware/SuSE and setup in the Install. Had to use the driver CD in windows 2000.
2.) Intel OnBoard/Laptop i810 audio (labeled Yahama XC-something under windows) -detected and setup by redhat/debian/slackwaare/SuSE install. Also works with ALSA. Windows: had to download drivers from notebook manufacturer website.
$cat
I had equally if not more trouble getting stuff like sound cards and modems to work properly with win95. In fact, those items always seemed to be what was causing it to crash.
Fred Langa's main claim to fame was as one of the key personalities in CMP's now-defunct Windows Magazine. Therefore, he's much more familiar with Windows than Linux. Let's face it, he's paid to be a pundit that writes stories that sell magazines.
Although, this doesn't exactly invalidate his point. Microsoft's got a deep driver library database included in Windows XP... containing many cards that there is no known Linux drivers for.
I know that where I work, having a sound card is critical to operation of the company.
I cannot imagine how someone can function without hearing that Ding! each time a new email arrives. I'd be lost, ever wondering, "do I have another Symantec AV warning about an attempted incoming virus message?"
Linux is doomed if it can't even Ding! when email arrives.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Someone mail a Windows 95 CD to NASA right away!
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Have you ever tried to run xmms and a game at the same time? how about teamspeak and a game? How about any two sound programs? ALSA is a good start, but linux sucks with sound support. I love linux. I use it 24/7 but i have to admit that I am continually frustrated with the support provided for sound. Although, I can say that the benefits still outweight the cons of running windows. I'll deal with shitty but improving sound support. BTW.. most cards WORK, the problem comes from trying to mix sound applications output.
Hrrm... I usually just sign my name.
Sound is important on Windows machines because how else are you supposed to know that IIS has gone down or become infected with a virus for the third time this week, than with a lot of "dinging" noises, while you're huddled under your desk?
I'm a windows user, and I still like sound editing and playing better on linux!!!!
my media box runs linux with onboard ac97 sound perfectly, never had any problems
I am married, bow down before me geeks. Married men pray for me. http://www.htpcnews.com http://www.hackaday.com
And that Apple plugged in the 1980's
Oh, wait. On the Mac sound is built in. You don't need a sound card.
Well, geez.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
How lame is this. So you can't get a sound card to work in Linux. All hardware should be supported? Just buy a new card that works with both windows/linux.
Linux has a million benifits to it and if a particular sound card doesn't work oh well. I will still take my linux boxen any day over windows.
I have a windows 2000 box that because of a MB / Sound card conflict its sound card doesnt work.
Um... because windows came with the driver for the chipset in question?
What do I win?
which distros, what hardware and which card? That would make it sound a lot less like FUD.
anyone who is farmilliar with the greek myth of achilles knows that his heel was the means to his end. allegedly poor soundcard support will hardly be the end of this stellar operating system.
It is easy to download and install a driver for W95.
Linux distros contain many drivers for sound and printers and other.
It is not easy for a supplier to make a single file available that users can download and install onto a distro, even just the subset intended for desktop users and not hackers.
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
Well that seems to be that case now things were alot simpler back in the old days when it was sb16 :-) A SuperProbe for audio devices would be great.
I have yet to get my sound working on my Dell 5150, everytings else was easy to configure. I just couldn't be arsed hunting down the correct kernel setting. I miss Kernel 1.2.13 we had such great times.
Good thing I don't need sound on my servers
Sound (and USB) support on Linux can be a pain. He doesn't give any specifics as to what sound hardware, kernel versions, etc... so there's no hope in trying to second guess what he did wrong. I'm inclined to guess that after he got ALSA working the first time, after reboot he probably just needed to crank the volume back up, or forgot some insmod lines (both easy to do.)
I've fought the software to get sound working on linux, and got there without too much trouble most of the time.
It goes both ways. I spent a fair amount of time trying to fight Windows ME on a relative's machine to trying to get sound working reliably. I had to give up and take him to XP, where they seem to finally have interrupts sorted out properly.
I'm using linux since many years ago and have never had problems with 'mainstream'sound cards.
I don't know if there are problems with advanced sound cards, but I have had no problem with the mainstream ones I have used.
My heart is pure, but make no mistake, it's pure evil
I only read the first page, but this looked like a rant rather than a useful article. What sound card are we talking about? Something ancient and off the charts? Something really new with W95 drivers? Something Linux developers can't get specs for but comes with W95 drivers? What?
This isn't quite down to Wonkette's standards, but he seems to be trying.
Had more problems finding the windows driver disk for my sound card than I did getting sound running under Debian. Whoever wrote this obvously has sand in their vagina.
When linux doesn't support a particular device, it's not the developer's fault, it's the manufacturer's fault for supporting one proprietary operating system and not releasing specs or source code. I can understand why the wouldn't because of competition etc, but binaries would be nice.
This is stupid. I can show you a lot of hardware that works on Linux and not on Windows 95 (ex. USB devices).
If your sound card is not supported by Linux, then is not a problem of Linux (properly speaking), but of the soundcard manufacturer, that provides only Windows drivers.
MOD THE CHILD UP!
So, you get the sound card working... great. You can play the "ding" .wav over and over.
What about what you do with it? Try installing Festival / FestVox on a Linux distro to make a desktop usable by someone with poor or no sight. Now try using a modern Windows version's TTS / disabled user features.
While there are excellent Linux resources for sound for the blind (blinux, for example), it's the first real world example of what the article is talking about that jumped at me.
Sometimes hardware makers don't provide sourcecode for their drivers or specs for their hardware so that we can write our own.
Solution: Don't buy shitty hardware from ignorant manufacturers! Film at 11.
I also recently discovered that RedHat 9 does not recognize the external 5.25" drive that my C64 so easily manages without a hitch.
Do you think Linux will support my Adam tape drive? I better go check...
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Eureka! Linux's true failing has finally been revealed! Failure to function with obscure sound cards is the weak underbelly of the otherwise perfect world that is Linux.
/*cough*/
Of all the choices for the Linux's Achilles Heel award, this is what they choose?
- Allen Pike
Altering time, one time at a time.
Look at all the zealots in a tizzy.
Yeah, piddly stuff like sound, video, net cards, usb and video capture devices are a pain in the ass to get working, but linux is still vastly superiour to anything microsoft has written, because it's free, and I'm cheap.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Ok well not exactly. This is exactly what that new thing groklaw is doing needs, more feedback from people who don't know what they're doing.
Granted, sound card support isn't amazing, but I've booted knoppix on many pcs where the sound did work just fine. Hell my tv card even works on the SuSe live cd too!
I couldn't get XYZ to work with my sound card
Small FUD-HOWTO:
BTW, I couldn't get "my harddrive" to work with Windows XY.
P.S.: Actually I really had a Western Digital 40GB harddrive that crashed the BIOS in both an Athlon and P2 and therefore wasn's usable in Windows98, since Linux ignores the BIOS the harddrive worked fine (of course booting off it was impossible).
This isn't a problem inherent in Linux, but rather ANY operating system that runs on commodity hardware that has a small user base. Until Linux is popular enough that the hardware manufacturers write drivers or release specs, we're just going to have to bite the bullet and buy only stuff that is known to work with ALSA.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
After selling an old Dell laptop to that I was using (for fun) as a Mandrake Linux 9 box, I attempted to reinstall Windows 98 only to find that it didn't recognize half the hardware in the machine such as the ESS Maestro soundcard, the ATI video card, the Xircom network card etc. All of these had been detected successfully by the Linux install. What followed was about 2 hours of searching the web trying to find the appropriate Win 98 drivers, downloading them to a Mac and burning them onto CD (since I couldn't transfer them over the network since the network card wasn't recognized). So the article is a little disingenous.
How gratious to way until 24 hours after OSNews ran this!
It's not worth discussing.
Ignore for a moment the obvious baiting in Langa's article. He's such a shill it's not even funny. Forget that he didn't even try a Redhat based distro for his experiment (Red Hat, Fedora, Mandrake, etc). Forget all that. Is it possible that there is such a mainstream sound card, embedded or not, that has such problems being recognized by Linux? I'm skeptical considering he didn't even name the card.
. Ergo sum cogito - Yoda
"On no, this guy found a flaw in Linux! Get him!!!!"
Smoke a joint
to protest the Cheney-Rumsfeld War on Anything That Gets In The Way Of The Almight y Buck
Cheers,
Kilgore Trout
End of story. Linux has always been in need of more driver support for obvious reasons. Of course you won't have any problems if you get the card everyone uses, but if you are looking a little extra, then problems begin.
I still have an Audigy 2 card which works with only 5% of all its features, and i had to wait for kernel 2.6.5 in order to make it work appropriately. Yes i knew about the sourceforge project before this kernel update, and yes i have tried it and yes it was a joke and yes it never worked properly without the worst audio quality ever. I still need to google/read/search ( perhaps it'll take me 1 week or 2 ) to find out how to use the other features in a convenient manner.
I have another card on my desk, a Monster Sound MX300. That was some powerful sound card, under windows that is. I had to wait almost 1 year to get some working linux drivers.
Bottom line: Linux needs more support from hardware companies and no one in the community currently seem to be able to convince them. Maybe we have the wrong approach?
I thought it was sound card MANUFACTURERS who wrote these drivers, if they wanted to sell their cards to people who use Windows.
In fact, I remember once upon a time when every piece of hardware you purchased came with a driver disk, and not all of them were compatible with Windows...
linux has some of the coolest audio tech around. okay, it may be totally under-the-radar right now, and borg-fudders may not be so willing to pry into things, but once you have linux doing audio over firewire like it does something-over-everything-else, then its game over on any 'driver' issues.
...
want easy audio in linux right now? get a usb sound card. yup, thats right. usb-audio works great, and paired up with jackd, you can quit 'worrying about some magic achilles heal' that may have just popped up out of somewhere
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I'm a linux n00b, installed slackware 9.1, ran xf86cfg... upgraded to kde 3.2, selected alsa sound. ran the little prog that came up on boot for the mixer. And lo and behold.. my SB live plat 5.1 worked flawlessy (and thats with plugging a digital coax cable into the live drive and ignoring the plugs on the back).
Wouldnt you like to be a pepper too?
I reinstalled the whole operating system, from scratch, four times! I poked. I prodded. I tweaked. I FAQed. I How-To-ed. I searched Usenet. Nothing solved the problem.
Ah ha, he forgot 'I RTFMed'!
Seriously, should this article be modded Troll, Flamebait or Funny?
Dumb fuck lusers who want another Windows without the license fee. Windows requires you to pay in dollars, Linux requires you to pay in patience and willingness to learn. Some of us find Linux's fee to be more palatable; people like Fred Langa should stick to Windows.
So from this emprical eveidence, we can conclude that Windows isn't as ready for the mainstream as the Mac OS released in 1996.
Quick, everyone switch to Macs!
Sound cards have definitely got to be one of Windows' strengths. We're 14 years of gaming from Wing Commander and the original Sound Blaster to now. If Microsoft is going to get anything right, it's graphics and sound! Hopefully as gaming picks up on Linux platforms, there will be more pressure on card makers to cooperate, and at least supply data for other people to write drivers.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
no matter what is said
im sure we can all relate to a disgruntled few hours spent trying to get device drivers working on linux
lets face it installing a device driver is still an easier process on windows, not saying it in faliable either, just saying there are less motions a USER has to go through
back in the day we didnt have no old school
Surely every science student learns that to be able to draw a conclusion, one should always repeat tests in order to reduce errors? Just proving that one soundcard doesn't work does not prove that Linux has a problem with sound overall; I could just as easily say that as my soundcard works with Mandrake, support is 'obviously' equal.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
I think it is suspicious that he doesn't list his exact hardware. Mayhaps he doesn't want his account to be verifiable?
The OS doesn't support the drivers, the drivers support the OS. Generally if the manufacturer doesn't write a driver for a particular piece of hardware, it's up to a coder or coders who have this hardware to do it because they want to.
For most consumer level PC hardware, it's suicidal not to release a driver that supports Windows, so of course Windows "supports" most hardware. Linux, for most of these guys, is an afterthought.
What Langa doesn't get is that the millions of people - consumers, institutions, corporations - that use Linux know about the problems with hardware support, and they use Linux anyhow.
Pierre
It's the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine). This gives all the more reason not to run proprietary hardware. For those who do, however, I suppose there's always hope that someone will be willing to wrap windows drivers to get the job done. As much as I detest the idea, it's really a shame this isn't done more often, as it would go a long way towards silencing loyalist weenies who look for any little defect in Linux so they can write a cheezy little expose and earn their $1.98.
Ok, seriously. This article should have been titled "Man who doesn't get it tries linux, and still doesn't get it." This is a great day for all of us when Windows Cheerleaders have to write nonsense articles like this because they have nothing VALID to write about.
And note how he doesn't once actually name this supposedly "mainstream" sound card that Linux doesn't support well? That's yet another trick of SCO's that doesn't sit well with me.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Now how am I supposed to pay mp3's on my burly mail server? :( Time to install NT.
A "decade ago" if you made a sound card you bundled drivers for at least 3 "operating systems" (one may not count, the other definitely doesn't) DOS, Windows 3.x and Windows 95. Microsoft didn't solve the problem, the card maker did. It annoys me when people say that Microsoft had drivers when they where all supplied by the vendor (or they used the "Sound Blaster compatible" driver). FUD, FUD, FUD.
I am annoyed when some piece of hardware isn't supported by Linux, annoyed at the vendor who thinks there is something so special about their sound card that their competition would steal all their ideas if they released specs or an open source driver. Get a grip, it is a sound card, if it isn't some multichannel THX certified piece of pure pro kit, it just isn't that big a deal.
Insert pithy comment here.
I've tested more than a dozen GNU/Linux distros in the past year, and two versions or more of those dozen in that time and on a wide variety of hardware... only with two distros, both with pre-2.4.19 kernels (Mandrake 9.0 and Lycoris 1.1), did I experience any problem with onboard sound. I tested Knoppix 3.2 on every Intel motherboard since and including the D845GBVL and sound worked on all of them (mostly it was the same AD chip). I wish he'd have said what distro he used rather than publish this nonsense.
Ironic that this story should show up two slots above the story on questionable Internet journalism. Y'know I wish my last two articles had been picked up by Slashdot, but I'm not going to start peddling bullshit in order to make the front page. But then again, I don't have a deadline to make and I don't have to publish every week. I guess the more you get paid as an Internet journalist, the less you're worth?
-JemIn many respects, linux has better sound card support. My card, an EMU10K1 variant, works out of the box with nothing more than the built in 2.6 kernel ALSA support. Windows, on the other hand, requires me to install a driver before I have access to any but the most basic features of the card. I smell FUD...
on the the motherboards I've used with ac97 it picks up bus noise so that even pressing a key generates an annoying buzz. Playing games is terrible when they loads sounds from disk to play in DirectSound.
And on XP on my Tyan DUAL when I disable the onboard AC97 it will install the SB Live but not use it.
FreeBSD decides to ignore the BIOS's disable and use the AC97 anyway !
The article is a troll anyway. This soundcard isn't in the supported hardware list but I expect it to work. Win95 can use it, why can't Linux!
Newsflash - Win95 can run Word2 for DOS too! Beat that, so called Linux
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I had this same thing rejected not 2 hours ago!
:(
gandy909's Recent Submissions
Title Datestamp
Linux Has an Achilles Heel? Monday April 19, @02:55PM Rejected
See it in my Journal
Who do you have to do to get something accepted around here?
(Stolen sig) Remember: it's a "Microsoft virus", not an "email virus", a "Microsoft worm", not a "computer worm
No mod points here, so all I can give you is MAD PROPS BROTHER!!!!!!
And your sound card that worked fine with Windows 95 may not work at all with Windows XP either. Such are the breaks - if it's not made or supported anymore, that's not Linux's fault. Usually Linux is substantially better about supporting several generations back hardware out of the box than Windows is.
Great then linux saves people from having to listen to garbage sound from beefed up 90's adlib/sb8 ( or worst ) sound cards. Thats not a flaw thats a service. Set the standard : "if your tweeter can do better it will NOT install the feakin soundboard." ( you know how hard it is to force a GUS max not to work properly ? ).
-- forget
If they didn't want to spend the effort on linux support, there is a third choice: PUBLISH THE INTERFACE SPECIFICATIONS. Its not like the company doesn't develop these pieces of documentation for internal use.
Then the community will write drivers for it and support it.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Is in mixing multiple audio sources. On Windows, when I bring up Mozilla and load a page with flash, the audio simply overlays that of my OGG player, on Linux, I don't hear anything at all out of my web browser while XMMS is playing music. Some Linux apps (video games like Barrage, for example) refuse to even run when the auio card is in use.
I just spent two hours yesterday dicking around with ALSA and OSS and who knows what else, trying to get sound working on Linux. This is also with an Intel onboard sound card that worked fine out of the box under XP, sorry to say. The best part is that, even working, only one application can play sound at a time. I feel like it's 1991 again.
Talked to a LUG for a bit, got the dmix plugin working to get two programs playing at once -- but now whichever program started first will freeze after playing audio for a few minutes. That's really just super there, guys.
And, of course, what little documentation existed was out-of-date and unreadable by mere mortals, even technically skilled ones.
When you buy cheap no name crap hardware i find that i have a tough time getting it to work in linux. Is that RedHats fault? NO! Just cause he's got some soap box doesnt mean this guy is any different from all the rants over at linuxnewbie.org except on linuxnewbie.org you can get some help. Posting as an editor means you get jack for help. And if this guy bought RedHat/Suse/Mandrake didnt he get support with the purchase?
Hardware supprt under Linux is abysmal. It seems modelled on a proprietary hardware development system, as though Linux were somehow tied to a particular hardware vendor, but of course it isn't.
Hardware needs to come out of the kernel and into a mature dynamic loading environment. One that is easy for people to add/remove drivers, and easy for developers to create new drivers.
Note the word: mature dynamic loading environment.
Most of the ones I've tried have worked fine, whether I needed them or not. I have noticed though that OSS drivers were flakey.
PlanetCCRMA simplifies ALSA installation and configuration on Redhat and Fedora. It's worked with all the on-board sound cards I've run across, which surprised me. Works great with most cards.
The only ones that seem to stink are the ones targetted to gamers, with lots of explosions and bikini babes on the box. I've tested these and they tend to suck for various reasons, locked sample rate, very noisy, etc... The less expensive ones are actually better.
See the ALSA sound card matrix before you buy.
=R
My current machine is the least Linux-friendly machine I've used, and I haven't gotten sound working under Slackware. But it DID work under Knoppix 3.3.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
This guy needs to get a clue! Don't tell me that this "Enterprise Linux Distribution" lacks a Hardware Compatibility List! Don't go blaming your lack of investigation on a failure on the part of this (and other) Linux Vendors to develop a device driver for someone else's product!
He stated which distros he had issues with but not which sound card. "Mainstream Onboard Intel sound system" isn't quite specific enough. Conveniently this doesn't allow anyone to refute his claim. Smells like FUD. The ALSA working once until reboot stinks of the common mute-by-default confusion.
The article does mention approximately what he's trying to use, though not the specific hardware. It says he's got an on-board Intel sound system. I'd be interested to know what brand system he owns; it's probably some standard sound system that's been munged by the system manufacturer.
It also says he's tried 10 distributions (I find this hard to believe); his forum replies indicate he hasn't yet tried Mandrake (9.2 or 10), and he hasn't even gotten through Red Hat 9 yet. What's he testing, Red Hat 5.2?
Let us live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry -- Mark Twain
I cannot remember the last time Windows detected and installed the correct driver for all of my hardware. I always assume that I am going to have to install the video, sound and network drivers after installing Windows.
Some of the most annoying days of my life were spent trying to figure out what drivers I needed, and then finding them, when installing Windows 98 on a Compaq laptop that only came with a Windows 2000 restore disk. The sound and video drivers were very difficult to come by, and since Compaq did not support Windows 98 on this machine, there was no help from them.
One of the things that most Windows users do not realize is that the disk that they "reinstall" from on most computers sold in the last few years does not contain the operating system, but a disk image that restores everything back to the way it was when it was baught. The drivers and such are already installed and configured before this disk image is made.
I've invested more than two full working days on just the sound problem
...none of the Linux distributions I've tried so far on this PC succeeded in getting the sound working. That includes majors, such as two versions of Slackware, two versions of SuSE, plus Debian, Xandros, and Lindows; as well as several specialty distros like Knoppix, Knotix, Morphix, and Gentoo.
;-)
I call shenanigans. No way he could have installed Gentoo in less than two days.
pretty much covers a lot of the ground these days. sure, you may have to shell out a whopping $20 for an annula licesning fee, but it's worth it. with OSS, you get a nice graphical configuration window, that even allows for things like manual or automated Sound Starting at boot.
....
it's really time to blame the manufaturers for this problem. if the can't adhere to a standard in manufacturing and have to re-invent the wheel every time they produce a piece of hardware, then the hardware companies should be the ones carrying the bad rap.
as far as comparing any Linux distro to windows 95, HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHHHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA. OMG GOOD ONE!!! nice troll! maybe redhat 5.1 or earlier
a recent diary at k5 pointed to the fact that a Brand Newbian Windows XP Pro boxed version of this 'super software' would not recognize his old video card, which was previeously recognized by win98. go figure.
in short, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHA.
..as it is an achilles heel for desktop linux as competition with windows on the x86. Yes there are a lot of problems getting vendors to add linux support for their hardware. My old Voodoo5 still has problems displaying some alpha-layer transition textures (bullets in halflife are just black squares), mainly because the company went out of business soon after releasing the card. The same is true for many sound cards. I have found that Linux is actually quite excellent at supporting old hardware interfaces. Many old sound, video, webcams, etc. used chipsets which were so similar that a linux user could easily just load the driver module based on the chipset and not the model of the hardware. Windows users tend to have a hell of a time trying to adopt old chipset drivers to match old hardware when a driver isn't available. Granted,that the driver is usually much more available to windows users, but a windows user can be just plain stuck where a linux user could at least have their soundard 'sorta' working.
Debian on a new laptop (we all know how laptops have funky hardware), and everything worked except the wifi and acpi straight out of the box, this inludes the cdr, the wired network the ati display card, and yes the sound card.
He's prolly got some strange fucked up old card, He must think because he can't get his going no one else can get thiers going, idiot.
Oh and BTW Windows *DOES NOT WORK* on my laptop, sure XP Home that came with it worked, but 2K with vendor supplied vid drivers crashes on boot every time, ringing tech support tomorrow!
Now it can't go mainstream because one pundit has trouble with one easily-replaced $10 sound card. Next, they'll say it can't go mainstream because the borders on the "Cancel" buttons are not quite the right shade, or because you can't install MS security patches.
This guy didn't want to write the story this way. IT writers know that they'll be deluged with emails and calls contradicting the claims in their columns--especially when the column is as overwhelmingly negative as this one.
His negative experience says more about the lack of help he received (from support and from the PR folks) than it does about the general compatibility of sound cards with Linux.
What is so interesting about the author ranting about sound card support?
.
Firstly his distro from the start did not do ALSA, which is a mistake for the most part. Second he said that he did get it to work, until he rebooted, which indicates that he simply did not update the start scripts to use alsa, and REMOVE oss.
Actually this makes me wonder if the machine in question is a laptop. The only time I have seen hardware support issues is when using a laptop, where sound card always seem to report themselves as something else.
By the way, why is the author saying "even windows 95 can handle this". No it can not. Have you ever installed a new sound card in Win95. Yes one that did not come with drivers. Can not be done. How about the one made in 1996 with XP, such as Ensoniq AudioPCI. I tried, and I could not get the microphone to work. Support is gone, and generics just do nothing.
AFAIConcerned, linux has much better generic driver system than windows. My computer for example has never managed to boot windows 98 or 2000 (when I first built it, I was still dual-boot) It would simply lock up the moment the screen went into graphics mode (or a few seconds later). Disable AGP, everything is fine.... Linux booted up perfectly, even with AGP. I later learned that the TVtuner was crashing the AGP bus given windows's drivers, and there were no workarounds.
From that I can say with as much credibility as the author that no version of windows could even offer me a chance to figure out what is going on, and linux had no problems with this, before it even had proper hardware support, as it does now (2 years later).
Anecdotal evidence is not a conclusive anything. All it does is fuel a rant. And unfortunately the author's rant is long and pointless, and now mine is too.
badness 10000
Harware manufacturers Achilles Heel, they do not support Linux.
For it was they, not Microsoft who made their hardware work with windows.
This guy is just a typist.
Get a free ipod.
You know hardware would be easier to support if the companies that make the hardware would either supply more information for people to write the device drivers or supply linux drivers for download.
Only so much can be done without the needed info.
(But yes, things like this are quite annoying to Joe Computer User)
-- taking over the world, we are.
the same thing happened to me when i installed gentoo, i didnt have emu10k1 compiled into the 2.6.3 kernel, instead as a module, which caused the sound to not work, i bet that since it seems like he is using a pretty automatic install that the sound drivers were compiled as modules, to increase compatibility without increasing kernel size, to broaden hardware compatibility, and thus caused the sound to not work. or he just didnt env-update so the modules/drivers didnt autoload on boot.
..he did (sort of):
The system was based on an utterly mainstream Intel motherboard with an on-board Intel sound system.
Windown 95 did not support sound "out of the box" on my ancient (as in, P90-era) laptop.
Not to say that I couldn't get it to work under Win95, but it required a driver from the manufacturer. Piece of cake - Go to the website, grab the driver, and poof, all set.
Now, why can't I do the same under Linux?
Because the manufacturers don't provide drivers for Linux (Actually, in my case, it used some ESS variant, and I managed to get a hacked-up workaround, but nothing as simple as "Stick this on your system and do an insmod").
So, should we blame Linux for this? IMO, Linux has just as good sound "support", at the OS-level, as Windows. It just lacks 3rd-party support, with most of what it does have coming from people who took the time to track down specs (from hardware vendors who balk at even giving out the most basic info even though your work will potentially increase their customer base) and wrote a driver themselves.
...he'd just have to RTFM
The documentation is out there, just the problem that people don't read them!
Quantum hacker.
I wonder if there is any possiblity that the writer deliberately or accidentally selected distributions that would not work. From the Langa Letter: Linux's Achilles' Heel
Personally, I'm surprised and disapointed re: Suse. However, I'm also a bit surprised that someone who is seriously trying evaluate Linux and get a sound card to work didn't try either Mandrake or Red Hat.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Hey, they _finally_ found the Achilles Heel of Linux - that's a pretty major story, no? And it took them _how long_? :)
:)
Seriously, though, Linux's Achilles Heel as far as hardware support goes is hardly sound cards - it's accelerated 3D drivers for current video cards.
Hey, think they'll show what Achilles' real Achilles Heel was in the upcoming movie TROY? I bet it's Jennifer Anniston.
If he wanted to prove Win 95 supported the new sound card, he would have to install it natively on his test box, not in a Virtual Machine.
I'm sure the responses in the discussion of this article have already touched on these points, but here it goes:
none of the Linux distributions I've tried so far on this PC succeeded in getting the sound working. That includes majors, such as two versions of Slackware, two versions of SuSE, plus Debian, Xandros, and Lindows; as well as several specialty distros like Knoppix, Knotix, Morphix, and Gentoo.
I think the above empirically shows that, despite its many good points, Linux still has some huge, gaping holes--holes that Windows plugged almost a decade ago.
Bottom line: For broad hardware support, Windows is still much better than Linux. That's not bias--it's a demonstrable fact.
1.) We have no way of judging the competence of this user with respect to Linux. Just because he got it working in Windows - sometimes with "from CD" drivers, means only that he knows how to setup hardware in Windows. Does he know he'll need to manually enable kernel modules in Debian with modconf? Did he know what he should be searching for in usenet? Granted, these are things that average user will not know or want to know, but I strongly suspect this author has a much stronger grasp of the Windows way of doing things.
2.) If his hardware is "new" as he claims - it wouldn't really be fully supported in win9x. But because he (IIRC) never gave the card type, we won't know just how "well" it worked in Windows.
3.) Most Windows users do not install their own OS and do not add their own hardware - they call on skilled friends or shops to do it for them. A sound card is not a printer, scanner, or camera (though we can talk about the ease of using those in Linux at another time)
and the most important argument:
4.) One computer with one type of hardware and one user is a laughably small basis to claim that Windows has more broad hardware support than Linux. Absolutely absurd. It may be able to be argued on some levels. This article is better suited as an anecdote of how Linux should continue to try to improve its automatic hardware recognition and Xandros' customer support quality.
I'm sure this article can be criticized from many more perspectives, and that my four can be refuted in some respects. However, that this passed as some sort of journalism makes me lose what little faith I have in the tech-writing community. If you want a decent end-user perspective on technology, read Walter Mossberg (sp?) in The Wall Street Journal. He's not perfect, but he's certainly better than this guy.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
When I upgraded to Windows 2000 my sound card stopped working. Seems the company went out of business and no new drivers were released for anything later than WinMe. On the other hand there was plenty of info on getting the sound card to work in linux.
with drivers, then how compitable would windows really be then? 90% of the device drivers for linux, is made by hobby programmers that program this for free.. Linux would have great hardware support, if only the hardware manufacators bothered to release drivers for other systems than windows..
The reason for Windows having great hardware support, is because of their giant monopoly..
He compares the cost of the unnamed commercial Linux distro to the cost of Windows XP _upgrade_ edition. While that may be the cost analysis that being done by many Windows users considering a switch to Linux -- it is not a fair basis for his comparison.
Of course the dead give away to his trolling effort is that he never names a single distro or specifies his sound card. I beleive most "desktop distros" have an entry level version that would be the best feature/price comparison point to an XP (Home version assumed) upgrade. At the entry level, most distros come in far below even the XP Home upgrade price.
--Aaron Greenberg
Windows can have problems with sound cards too, especially if they're creative sound cards. You could have a SB PCI 128 and have three different drivers for the same OS! You could have board versions CT4700, CT4750 and CT4780 and a common chipset of ES1370. But because you have different board versions, you have to download the right driver or it won't work.
NT is notorious for this problem because it won't tell you anything. The driver will install. You'll be prompted to reboot. And you'll get a error in the event log saying the driver couldn't start. That alone could lead to hours of frustration.
But there's also the issue of OEM compatibility or OEM pat on the back ability. Microsoft and Intel go together like white on rice. Those to have worked together for years. Of course an Intel board is going to be supported with the default drivers, let alone an intel soundcard. But for 95 to support a new board with a new sound card with no additional drivers is very hard to believe. 95 probably needs updated chipset drivers for the board alone. And he didn't mention what version of 95 he used, either. If any version of '95 could support a new sound card, which I doubt it would without a driver from the manufacturer, it would have to be 95 OSR 2.x. And that's still stretching it. Out of the box, 95 will support most ISA cards with Microsoft provided drivers. But PCI support is more dependent on support from the manufacturer.
I've seen Linux kernels with a module under sound that says,"AC'97". And if there's one thing to learn about drivers is that especially in Microsoft's case, the manufacturer's drivers should be used first, if they're available.
I've had an utterly ridiculous time trying to get all my hardware on my months-old Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop working under Debian GNU/Linux 3.0. It's a real chore, and the costs aren't really worth the effort. I'll just reboot into Windows XP if I want to play music or watch movies now.
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
Look at who you are dealing with.
The person (Fred Langa) is on Bill's side... Just look at he article track record... I have read a few already.
The unfortunate thing is that he is published in Information Week and is obviously NOT interested in accuracy...
I have wasted time reading the article.
-GO
i switched to linux only, just because i got fed up with M$. i still dont have a fully functional sound card. granted, this card (turtle beach santa cruz) has many known problems with linux, and some people have been able to get it to work fully - but i have not talked or read a response from any of them. sure the card has hardware decoding, 4.1, many effects, and good recording, but does any of it work-- sometimes, and never all at once all things that worked without a hitch in M$. i love the santa cruz, not the best for linux, but a solid card, my favorite of its time, still [would] hold up against new cards (so little overhead)
even the cards that do have good alsa support still have problems. say you get a new audigy 2 or some other widespread commercial card, does the surround work in all applications? does the optical in and out work? does it transition well between applications, and can it do multi channel effects from different sources? can it record? are all of the knobs and jacks even usable? i could go on and on.
i will say that they have made many improvements over the years, but how is linux going to become a viable home multimedia platform (which i would say most of the home pcs sold today are used for) with such a slow curve on sound! crap i like fewer viruses and better stability, but i like my music, games, and instruments more. were not talking enterprise here, just my home pc, web, music, games, papers, schedule, ya know? big win still wins in the "ill play nice with your hardware".
mental note: next box, make sure all hardware works 100% in linux
|plastic....or gasoline?|
...but how about at least reading the summary? And that goes for moderators on crack too.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
He mentions that he is installing on a virtual machine - yet he doesn't mention which virtual machine. Since he seems to lean heavily towards Microsoft I'd guess its not VMWare. Since he doesn't tell us and I have to guess I'd guess it the one that Microsoft recently bought, didn't they virtually cripple Linux support?
Come on Mr. Lang if your are going to compare, how about comparing oranges and oranges, not Microsoft in a fully enabled environment and Linux in a crippled one.
Ok, so we have one guy who couldn't get one un-named sound card to work under Linux. All we know is it's "An utterly mainstream Intel Motherboard". Uhh, yah, thanks for the details so someone can replicate your findings, Fred.
The fact that there's onboard sound, or a soundcard that isn't supported by Linux just isn't too surprising. Why this gets posted as "news", or as "Linux's achilles heal" is beyond me. Is 'ol Fred going to buy a soundcard for his Mac, and then pronounce that lack of support for every soundcard to be the bain of the Macintosh?
I'm actually surprised sound support for Linux is as good as it is. The sound on my laptop worked out of the box when I installed RH9 on it, a first for me! There's also sound support for my N-Force motherboard. Sound support is actually something that's matured quite a bit in the last few years.
I won't say Linux is perfect. There's plenty of things to complain about as far as Linux desktop usage is concerned. My personal complaint is the fact that copy/paste support is still kind of crappy. I can copy/paste between emacs sessions (as long as they remain open), but I can't copy/paste from emacs to somewhere else. That's just pathetic. Windows has supported universal copy/paste since 3.1
AccountKiller
Despite my very positive first impressions, I couldn't get XYZ to work with my sound card at all, even though I was testing XYZ on a brand new PC from a major vendor.
He acts like having new components is a good thing. As far as linux support goes, you're better off having old stuff. Non-embedded old stuff is even better.
He didn't mention exactly what sound chipset he was using, so I can't say whether he just didn't know how to configure it (this should not be an argument from the windows users perspective).
I've got at LEAST a half a dozen devices INCLUDING a Soundblaster Live Value and an Astra scanner that worked beautifully under Win98 and Win2K that either didn't work at all or worked only with hacks under Windows XP.
By his logic this proves that Windows XP has a mighty achilles heal!
Mmhh, did he turned the volume up?
The ALSA sets the sounds to zero by default, a dumb default if you ask me.
I doesn't matter if he installs the N+1 distros out there, they all very likely of use ALSA and in all cases the volume is going to be set to zero.
I'm just saying
I don't remember my password. or even username. i don't often do the comment thing at slashdot. anyhow, this is the way I lean:
If somebody bitches that linux sucks because {winmodem,sound_card,printer,gnome,kde,games,*}, my standard answer nowadays is: Use windows.
It may sound like I don't care about the linux community, but quite the opposite is true. Working in a retail store, I know very well that customers who are habitual gripers are not welcome. They tend to make the atmosphere unpleasant wherever they go, and if they would go away, then everybody else breathes easier. Same concept, different application.
All other things being equal, I prefer people to be free, but some people have not earned their freedom, and tend to take what they have for granted. To those people, the ones who are willing to let microsoft bend them over a table and fuck them up the butt, i say: bravo! At least you're not one of us; having you in our group would degrade the quality of the group as a whole.
It sounds harsh, I know. But there is a difference between being ignorant, self-serving, and demanding, and being ignorant, wanting to learn, do the right thing, and being willing to help people after they have been helped themselves.
Regarding the former: It is my fervent desire that they continue to enslave themselves voluntarily to the Redmond Megalith. I think it's the least they deserve (especially when they're trolling for banner impressions).
EVERY sound card I have ever used with linux(Old ISA SoundBlaster, EMU10K1 SB Live!, ESS Maestro) has worked "out of the box." It's video cards I don't like. The only distro I have found that supports my video card(Radeon 9800) with 3D easily is Gentoo. I know this is ATI's fault for not allowing the drivers to be shipped, but why can't other distros make it is easy as Gentoo("emerge ati-drivers")?
To summarize the article:
For broad hardware support, Windows is still much better than Linux. That's not bias--it's a demonstrable fact.
No that is an opinion The problem today is too many people think their opinion makes it a fact. Consider who would believe this argument:
"The gas cap from my 68 Corvette doesn't fit the 2004 Subaru Outback. Imagine that. A cap that fit a car 30+ years ago not supported today."
The problem here is that information week editors considered this news and a scientific experiment. A single unsupported sound card, could not be installed on a linux distribution. Must be a real slow news day.
Let's see...
1 Sound Blaster Extigy + WinXP == No Sound! Had to download drivers.
1 Sound Blaster Extigy + Mandrake 10 == Sound out of the box!
Yes, I am a Linux newb, and an OS agnostic.
Linux achilles heel is sharing stuff on networks with Windows computers and the install process for programs. apt-get and urpmi are nice, but the lack of a GUI interface might be prohibitive to some Linux newbs.
There's some truth to the article. ALSA still requires running a configuration program to get it to work with even major sound cards (and when the autoconfig doesn't work, it still requires tweaking IRQ's, yuck). And when I try to set up my sound card through KDE, KDE still insists on using the 'snd_' prefixes to the ALSA module settings, which ALSA stopped using quite a while back. And there are also lots of apps which use OSS instead of ALSA.
Windows 95 succeeds in other areas where Linux fails, too. One minor one is that Windows 95 boots with a pretty graphic splash screen while Linux spews ugly status messages too quickly to even read; what's the point of that? (There's a bootsplash patch for the Linux kernel, but it hasn't been updated for 2.6.5 yet, and it requires the ability to patch and reconfigure a kernel.)
But I'd say the biggest place where Win95 beats Linux is this: I could run Win95 quite comfortably on a PC with 8MB RAM and it would give me a somewhat friendly UI and a consistent interface across applications, with buttons and menus that would all look and work similarly. On Linux today I have two choices: use a desktop environment like KDE which requires more than 128MB RAM to run comfortably, or else use a bare-bones window manager like fvwm2 or icewm and put up with the fact that every app's buttons and menus are going to look completely different (xterm still has that weird scrollbar that requires a three-button mouse!).
Linux has every other operating system beat in terms of stability and robustness. But even Windows 95 still beats its pants off in terms of friendliness and usability in a desktop environment.
I think thats not really "Linux" fault.
The thing is, when Windows came to market, especially from version 95 on, it became the "standart" OS on PCs, so, naturally, sound card makers started developing drivers for windows; also working closely with Microsoft, got most of these drivers bundled with Windows instalation. Even if a SC driver didnt came with windows itself, most of the time the driver supplied with the card was easy to install.
The Linux catch, wich everybody already know, is that "Linux" doesnt support ALL hardware, especially new hardware (like windows), wich doesnt help wide adoption of Linux on the desktop, wich, in turn, prevents the majority of hardware manufacturers from spending much effort in supporting Linux.
That said, Linux user base is growing despite this and so many others problems, wich may lead to Linux reaching that point in it will start a sinergy with hardware makers, and maybe sooner than later, hardware makers will spend their efforts in making windows drivers so much as in Linux (maybe closed?) modules, and like they did with Microsoft, will start working closely with kernel maintainers to get these (maybe open?) drivers built into the kernel itself. Actually, its already starting to happen. In fact, if things keep going like they are, we are very close to this scenario, where we wont have to worry a bit about hardware support in Linux.
Of course, a better driver model in Linux (better meaning easier) would help speeding up this A LOT!
--- []'s, McGiver
I've sometimes had problems getting a sound card to work in Linux (other have worked out of the box with no problem at all). However, Windows 95 is NOT immune to sound problems. The first time I built a computer, I bought a plain old PCI SoundBlaster 16 sound/game card because I didn't want to use the crappy on-board system my MOBO came with. I installed Windows 95 as my OS, and it had an IRQ conflict between the two cards, and refused to release either. So, I go into my hardware profile and disable the crappy on-board card so the SoundBlaster will work, then (of course) reboot. What happens when I reboot? It autodetects the stupid on-board soundcard that I had disabled and sets up the same conflict. I played with it for months and could never get it to work. Now, two points. First, maybe there is some registry hack that I didn't know about that would have allowed me to permanently disable the card I wanted to get rid of, but if the point is that Windows "just works," I shouldn't have had to know that. The highly superior Windows 95 operating system should have just done it for me. Second, this was not an issue of the manufacturer just not writing a supported driver (as is usually the case with Linux sound). The fact that it kept re-installing hardware that I kept disabling is, in my mind, a design flaw. I've had problems with devices in Linux, but I haven't had problems with devices for which drivers have been provided.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
Anyone notice that he mentioned Intel when referring to the motherboard?
Why? Come to think of it, I've encountered other brand mobos only when building boxen; aren't most off-the-shelf boards (like at Best Buy et al.) all Intel pretty much? Seems to me he is (perhaps unintentionally) suggesting that Intel and Microsoft simply "go together", especially as far as Joe User is concerned.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
...if the card would not work in Windows XP, would he blame it on Microsoft or the card manufacturer? I bet he'd pick the card manufacturer. With his problems he chose to blame Linux because he wanted to get to bash it in an article.
That is exactly why you don't go to a store, buy the soundcard first, then go home and wonder why it doesn't work... do some homework people, especially when using linux.
Yet another personal example.
I had a hell of a time with the CM8738 drivers (ALSA and non-ALSA) working with the sound card built into my IWill KA-266 Plus motherboard. Interrupt problems, no sound, choppy sound, computer locking.
I modified just about every setting known to man (BIOS and OS). I finally decided that my time was better spend buying a Creative Labs PCI card, sticking that in and using it, than to mess around any more with the horrible sound drivers.
Almost plug and play. It was a shame that (even after seeking so much help and reading so much documentation) that I had to go buy even more common sound hardware to get my sound working right.
But yes, I'm just an unfortunate example of something similar.
But now that ALSA is nicely integrated within the 2.6.x things are much more better!
Openss is dead, long live ALSA!
M.
--
Numismatica
Good point...awful article.
I have said many times that I would easily trade the fancy dancy UI's of Gnome and KDE for plain Jain MWM or even TWM if I could get universal hardware support (drivers) out of the box. However, the sound card is not the hill you want to die on buddy....You could buy 10 sound cards and 9 of them would work.
Save your frustration for 802.11G or A, USB PVR, MP3 players that are not mass storage compat., firewire video cams, or any number of devices that will be in museums or obsolete before they ever fully work under Linux.
I remember at one point I had done my homework and carfully purchased Vdeo Cards, Scanners, TV Cards, USB Card Readers, Joysticks, MP3 players, 802.11B, etc....that all worked perfect under Linux, I had the perfect system. All proven hardware that worked great (most likely because the people that had the talent to reverse engineer this stuff had a reason to because of one reason or another...).....The bottom line -- I spent the next year praying that none of this stuff broke, because I could not just go back to best buy and purchase hardware that was 4 generations obsolete.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
himself.
Could it be that he's just a dumbass?
I've played with every distro out there, including some of the most far-out oddball distros and never had any serious problem like this dummy had.
I suggest that Mr. Dummy try Suse 9.0 Professional, or better, 9.1 in a few weeks.
Works, straight out of the box, no tweaking required. I've gotten it to work flawlessly on some of the most antiquated crap you could ever imagine, I have a recycling business and I have some real bow-wow dogs and I run Linux on some really fonky crap..
Me thinks this article stinks. Me thinks I smell some M$ paychecks in this guys mailbox...
...the problem is that it doesn't - at least on Linux.
How your tiny brain couldn't find this Windows 2000 Soundblaster Audigy Platinum on the Creatives site?
She had a hard disk go bad, bought a new one, thought she could just reinstall windows and be ok, didn't recognize here PCI cards - modem or sound. Don't be fooled.
I had the exact opposite experience.
My current sound card (Monster Sound MX300, based on an Aureal Vortex chipset) is fully supported on Linux - but unfortunately, the Win2k/WinXP driver has issues - I guess mostly because Aureal went out of business around 2000.
I guess that shows that RMS had some right ideas about this free software.
Real life is overrated.
a sound card to get my work done.
Those damned viruses, tho, they just really ruin my productivity!
I had the same problem with yamaha 724 card. I had to recompile the module after correcting the code. The error bit for Alsa is the same as the standard card code. Every other card I used worked perfectly, even the integrated AC97 cards (which BTW didn't work in Windows without special drivers).
Just a thought.
There are things I do and use in Linux that are un-supported in Windows. Ever try to run a DOS application that uses the hardware clock under Windows? It don't work, while under Linux and dosemu the same app works great.
He, by his account, installed:
Xandros 2.0 Deluxe. [...] two versions of Slackware, two versions of SuSE, plus Debian, Xandros, and Lindows; as well as several specialty distros like Knoppix, Knotix, Morphix, and Gentoo.
Not to mention Win95, 98 ME 2k & 2 flavors of XP
In 2 Days??!!??!!
Hell, the last time I installed Gentoo, that took almost 2 days all by itself.
Just what I was thinking. I've installed Mandrake on a fair few machines without issue - it happily picks up even the obscure onboard soundcards on cheap motherboards during the install with no extra drivers needed, which is a much better than Win95 or even 98 - they don't even like certain soundblasters without tweaking.
the intel8x0 driver "just works" every time I use it. (I assume he has one of those chipsets: just about anything labeled Intel I've tried has worked with it, even the Nforce shit).
So what's the deal? Did he care to look up his audio codec to make sure what he was doing was sane? Did he try Redhat or Mandrake, those "mainstream" distros? No...
Even if the autodetection tools on those distros sucked, someone needs to show this guy "modprobe" and "lsmod". ALSA was a step in the right direction (he probably should have ran "chkconfig --add alsasound" to make sure it was running at boot and not just installed... he should read the things labeled README)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I listen to web radio on my Mac, while I work under Linux. It just doesn't do sound well.
OSS is still the best and Alsa has not left the crap mode yet. The people at OSS have done a good
job and it's worth the price they ask for.
I fail to see the logic in the comment "better than where it used to be (OSS)"
It is a ridiculous non informed comment. OSS has
only got better with time and I would never choose
Alsa shit over OSS.
1. What kind of sound card was it?
2. Did it play under windows95 without loading a driver from the company that made the soundcard.
3. Shouldn't the hardware companies supply drivers for there hardware???? If a soundcard company made a board that did not work with WindowsXP and never released a driver for WindowsXP wouldn't you be complaining about the sound card maker and not MicroSoft?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
How about installing windows on a SPARC, PPC, or other non-x86 architecture?
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
Because on my Linux machine, I can't get it to work. So clearly it's unimportant. ...
What's that? Oh - there's a working sound driver for my sound card now?
Yeeah!! w00t! Linux is da-shizzle! Boo-ya! Boo-ya! Take that Micro$uck! I gots'da sound my nizzle! Bwahahaha!
(Kernel panic:)
Umm... so yeah. Sound is ghey. Who needs it.
Is it me or are these "reviews" seem to fit the formula of:
1. Write a review of product X and say it sucks
2. Notify crazy zelots of product X
3. Crazy zelots go ape-shit and tell other zelots to look at review
4. "Journalist" gets lots of visits to their article and a big check for attracting "readers"
On the forum he even quotes another reader as stating that that reader had the exact same problems. After that statement from Fred it gets a bit fuzzy however: when trying to install Red Hat 7 a year ago the reader ran into problems with the Promise ATA/66 disk controller [Could it be set up as a RAID controller...?]. Only later in the letter is it mentioned that on a certain SuSE install the user had the same problem.
It seems to me that the whole article is a lot of trumpet blowing on a minor detail: unspecified versions didn't work on unspecified hardware. Fred mentions the Windows versions he used, I guess it was too much trouble to find out if he used Slackware 5 or Slackware 10...
There's no place like 127.0.0.1
Linux still has some huge, gaping holes--holes that Windows plugged almost a decade ago
Microsoft didn't plug these holes, well not all of them anyway. The soundcard manufacturers did. They had to, or nobody would buy the card. Perhaps in the very early days MS made a few to try and make Win95 more bearable.
man, this guy has no clue. he installed 9 distros and couldn't get sound to work. what can i deduce from this? he doesn't know how to configure his sound card properly. we have no idea whether this guys is a complete newbie or a paid Microsoft employee...
and here's another thing i'm sure some other people agree about: why does your corporate PC need sound? (your secretary sure as hell doesn't!)
dan
Any criticism of Linux will be met with insulting your hardware, technical specs, or blaming the user instead of any self examination or evaluation of the state of Linux. Soundblasters have a lot of trouble (even retail versions), does that mean the cards necessarily suck? Yeah, let's just write off the main soundcard vendor because Linux doesn't work with them. It *has* to be the sound card, even though it works fine in all flavors of Windows and even BeOS (!!!!!!!).
Things pointing out real flaws in Linux are not automatically trolls.
People forget M$ are in bed with the chip designers.
Looking at the hurdles the Linux coders have to do to get *hidden* stuff to work, it's a wonder it works at all - and if it doesn't, or is really obscure to do, who do you blame?.
If the soundcard OEM's released the specs and full working code, it will work. Better.
But we can't have that, can we.
Nick
is a USB-audio device. Works great, standardized, and you can move the DAC away from your computer and power cords to prevent undue noise. Plus it usually means easily accessible headphone jack.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
i have a biostar ideq 200v which has a c-media 9379/A but fedora detects it as a via 8233 and it works but there is no low frequency sound. strange
lose != loose
Have you heard of MADWIFI? It works for Atheros chipsets( DLink). It works for my card perfectly, except for the drivers being a bit plotted.
I'd hardly call it an achilles heel, Linux has such crap hardware support because hardware companies just dont support it! Even companies that do support it often do it badly, if your fighting deadlines to get a sound card to market and the boss is on your back your gonna give priority to windows - where most of your customers come from. Ok so not all hardware isnt supported, but you better make damn sure before you buy something that it _is_ supported and that means checking forums, because if it isnt your gonna be screwed, personally ive had most problems with a Diamond S90 (vortex) sound card, a VIA apollo chipset and a Sagem F@st 800 USB ADSL modem.
However the most popular and best hardware is often supported, what would really help is a central regularly updated list/forum to say what actually does and doesnt work and whos tried it.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
By the by, I wonder what distro he was buying that was as expensive as an XP upgrade... That's *way* too much for software that you can get free.
/tim
Sometimes there is bad interaction on certain motherboards in terms of interrupt handling.
Actually, I can attest, from personal experience, that Linux has better support for legacy cards. I tried to put one of my old sound cards in my mother-in-law's computer. It was an Ensoniq soundscape from 1995. I managed to find some legacy drivers for it on Creative's website, but it just would not work under Windows 98. This card works flawlessly under Linux.
Where Linux tends to have problems is with the latest bleeding edge cards that require some sort of funky drivers. Legacy cards are rarely a problem for it.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Creative drivers and software is just crap, admit it. The simple fact that you NEED the CD to install the drivers bugs me out. I have a SB Audigy 2 Platinium and I still need to get the drivers on CD installed before installing whatever I downloaded from Creative.
Also, its technically possible to have multiple outputs out of your soundcard (read this like in "i got some music playing from the speakers, and also game sounds from earphones plugged in the front panel"). But you know what? Creative drivers makes this thing impossible. But the hardware admit it!! Sucks, isnt it?
Heres your savior: The KXProject.
If you dont mind going into complicated stuff (you use Linux, right? it shouldnt be a problem then), you can control how the soundcard should behave when it got some audio input. For example you can shoot the line-in to the front earphone plug, normal (aka WAV/mp3) sounds to the main speakers, so on. that picture speaks for itself.
Did I mention free, too?
So there. Have a nice day!
"...a generation of kids has grown up thinking Trance is the shittiest music since country and western." - Paul van Dyk
No, sound support is definitely not as good as it should be (non existent in some cases), particularly for on board sound. However, the Linux community does not have manufacturers writing drivers for it as they do for Microsoft. Sound cards working on Windows is not down to how hard poor Microsoft or Windows have been working - it is about weight of support from manufacturers.
Wake up, folks, this is the world of the average first-time linux user. I spent *weeks* getting my first copy of RH(7) up and running how I liked it, which wasn't all that long ago. I was persistent, this guy was not. Why should he be? He even bought an OEM system so wasn't paying *directly* for a copy of windows in the first place.
Windows-type coordination between HW/SW vendors and OS developers takes a lot of work, a lot of careful management, and still has its problems. I don't understand the huge push for the mainstream Linux desktop. I like it fine the way it is. Anything else, I'm afraid, would kill the Free in F/OSS.
I know a lot people here on /. plug Linux as the best thing short of the Second Coming...
But... The real issue is that most people don't install their own operating systems. They take what comes on their PC from the factory, and that's it.
That said, the only way in which Linux is going to gain significant ground on the desktop is if:
Linux's big hurdle for the desktop is that for most people, Windows is Good Enough(TM). Any difficulties installing Windows are simply irrelevant because the average user never installs their own OS - when it crashes, they take it back to the store.
For Linux to succeed on the desktop, hardware detection and driver installation is going to have to be completely automatic. A distro which can't autodetect the video card or sound card would do better to inform the user that their hardware is unsupported than ask them to select their hardware from a seemingly endless list of meaningless names.
Linux developers are going to have to stop following Microsoft's lead and start really innovating.
* - yes, I know that many windows apps mangle the system. Let's just ignore this and pretend that they work as advertised for the sake of argument, shall we?
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
He tried it with several distros: Xandros 2.0 Deluxe, two versions of Slackware, two versions of SuSE, Debian, Lindows, Knoppix, Knotix, Morphix, and Gentoo.
"one of the Linux distributions I tried specifically claimed compatibility with the sound system in question"
He didn't like the advice of "get rid of the brand-new, fully functional sound card and install a card from a few years ago, and Linux would work just fine".
The Achilles Heel is "For broad hardware support, Windows is still much better than Linux." It's not "My sucky OEM sound card didn't work."
Yeah, it sucks that he didn't mention the card. It sucks that he didn't try distro X, and that Knoppix couldn't detect it. It sucks that the forums didn't help. It sucks that he didn't try a half-a-dozen things. But, the fact is, a good amount of hardware that works out of the box with Windows won't work with Linux. Every user that trys and gets a bad experience will hold the opinion "Linux Sucks" until they are proved otherwise, years later perhaps.
If there is anything in this this story that truly needs to be dealt with it is this: the automatic reaction of a Windows user is to reinstall the entire OS after 3 minutes looking rather than working the problem in a methodical manner. Unlike the comparison operating systems, Linux, or indeed most UNIX-like operating systems, do not need to be completely reconstructed just to solve a problem. After all, you don't rebuild an entire car when the battery is flat.
Is this reaction of Windows users the fault of Linux. No. However, to coerce Windows users from their world Linux must provide answers in a form that the average Joe Windows user can digest. I suggest that this is the fifteen second sound-bite : reinstall the driver. This facility is not obvious in Linux. Perhaps a packaging method capable of dealing with loading/unloading kernel modules, and guided ALSA config, is in order.
It's also interesting to note that our intrepid Windows trail-blazer didn't try the single most obvious Linux distro - RedHat/Fedorah - which if memory serves have excellent auto-detection systems and is probably the most likely to work in Windows fashion. I can't believe for a moment that he tried the built-from-source Gentoo. Why? If he had he would realise that support for his sound card was present and that any failure to get it going would be his own and not that of the kernel or ALSA drivers. Of course, he may have discovered that suport for his audio hardware was definitely not present, but that would mandate an different rave wouldn't it.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
I didn't say it was ok that it didn't work, I merely suggested, by way of weak sarcasm perhaps, that him considering the hardware installation problems of Linux + soundcard (or any other hardware/drivers) are an Achilles' heel is overblown.
To more seriously address his article, I would say that his comparision of Win95 and Linux regarding soundcards is not reasonable, given that either MS or the soundcard manufacturer wrote the driver for Windows, whereas typically (except for more progressive hardware companies) Linux hardware drivers are written by OSS folks (and in some cases reverse engineered since some companies refuse to divulge specs and apis).
I'll stop now, I've already wasted too many characters on an AC.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
The thing I always recommend to people wanting to install Linux on an existing machine or one they plan on buying from a store is to preflight the thing with a live distro CD, be it Knoppix or what you will.
Within minutes, you'll see if your hardware is compatible.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
The British road system is completely failing. I drive in the standard international mode, and all the lights start flashing followed by a crash. Obviously they need to replace all the roads.
so I don't use it as much as I normally would.
"Bottom line: For broad hardware support, Windows is still much better than Linux. That's not bias--it's a demonstrable fact."
Bottom line: For broad hardware support, it's a dmonstrable fact that OS X is much better than Windows. So, then we should all buy Macs? Probably not. His rhetoric is mind numbing.
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
1) Buy Windows XP for $200
2) Download Linux for free and buy a $20 soundcard
I'm really having a hard time making up my mind...
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
but at least it was POSSIBLE.
Consider that for a second. In a less open environment you'd be screwed.
Like me with the fucking Monster Sound MX440 which absolutely DOES NOT WORK in Win2k+ on an SMP box (and it crashes lots in UP). Goddamn Diamond had to get bought by Rio and then dropped just as soon as I bought that stupid goddmamn card that only works in 98.
I wrestled with that through many card inserts and removals, wrong-localed Taiwanese OEM driver installs, and a few OS rebuilds. I'd say you had an easier time.
So retarded. But GUEEESSSSS what? Works fine in linux.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
My Sound Blaster Live! worked in Mandrake up until around 2-3 years ago, and hasn't since. I've tried every version of Mandrake for the past 3-4 years, almost all of the Red Hat versions for the same period, and they all fail at installing a Sound Blaster Live (other than Fedora 1.0). I tried "a couple versions of SuSE" too, and I can't name the specific versions, but they failed also.
This was installed in an ASUS Athlon mobo for a few years, and in an Intel P4 mobo lately. Same story with an SBLive at work (Athlon/MSI mobo). Same problem. No crappy hardware, no OEM parts. Always worked in 98, 2K, and XP every time.
Linux usually detects and then ignores it. Or (bonus!) it gives me an irritating high-pitched note at full volume, without anything else working. Sometimes I've been able to figure out the problem, but it's usually so frustrating and with so little utility, I just give up and reboot into XP.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
This is a classic case of someone blinded by his own M$ conformity complex. An affliction commonly exhibited by posers.
But I couldn't get my soundcard to work with any of it! Despite following instructions step-by-step, re-installing, following instructions step-by-step, rinse, repeat... What a freaking waste of time. After wasting many hours over the course of a week, begging for help on linux boards, etc., I finally had to give up and go with something that I knew would work.
(I should also say, my soundcard wasn't the only thing that I had problems with. I use a Wacom tablet to write notation, and it was no joy trying to get that work...)
I ended up going back to Window 98SE, primarily because there is a free version of Pro Tools available for this OS, and because all my hardware works with it. (Pro Tools Free doesn't work with anything more recent, 'cause Digidesign, wisely, doesn't want to undercut their professional level products.) I'll probably also install either Win2K or Win XP and get Sonar and upgrade my iBook so I can use Garageband.
One of these days Linux sound will be ready for real, non-geek, users. I'm particularly keeping an eye on the EU funded Agnula project (see http://www.agnula.org/). (That was another thing I wasted quite a few hours trying to install.) But for now, unless you're time is worthless, you're way better off sticking to commercial OSs like MS and Mac OS X.
Good thing I didn't buy that mp3slim device (embedded linux mp3 stream server), or invest anymore money into my tivo (pvr running linux), or work on the Linux Professional Recording Studio (recent article in linux journal). Nope they are right I cannot hear a damn thing out of a linux system, well other than my x-bell. :p
I also have a hard drive that won't work with Windows, specifically XP. For some reason, the hard drive won't leave "slave" mode. The BIOS is happy. Linux is happy. Windows XP won't boot.
Windows XP, however, will wipe out the boot sector of this hard drive if you run Setup. I hate to infer "priority" based on that datum, but the fact that the boot sector whacking is more robust then the actual install procedure is at the very least fertile ground for speculation.
Unless I completely missed it, this nut case never did say what sound card he was trying to use or what "XYZ" distrubtion is or what he was doing to confirm operations.
Yes, sound is a difficult thing to setup in linux. The fact that he had it running once is proof that it does indeed work. What ever he did in getting it to work the first time obviously wasn't persistant. I've never had a problem setting up sound under Linux, but I know what I'm doing.
What we have here is a n00b. Please move along.
With all the stupid +5's that have been handed out, I can't believe this isn't yet. Ah, why I generally wait until moderation is over and done before reading comments...
I have installed many, many windows 95's, 98's, ME's, 2000, & XP's. I have also installed almost as many SuSE Linux distobutions. I can tell you from first hand experience that M$ DOES NOT support sound cards better than SuSE anyway. As soon as the PCI based cards (non-soundblaster compatable) came out, M$'s support went out the windoze! However, Linux (SuSE) worked most of the time. Linux (SuSE) could/would even guess at closesed match and at least TRY something. Seems like the farther along M$ gets, the more the DON'T include drivers for anything unless the company is willing to pay big buck to get Hardware Certification from MS. Linux, on the other hand, seems to be including more and more drivers the more hardware comes out. Very easy to disprove this in the REAL world! B-)
A friend will come and bail you out of jail, a true friend will be sitting next to you saying, "damn that was fun!"
There are those who will whine "When will Linux get sound cards working". My reply "Oh, my sound card worked back in 95 (YES, 1995!!!). So why can't this guy get his sound card working 9 years later? Is is because ALSA doesn't support his sound card? Lets see: go here: http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/index.php3?ve ndor=All#matrix
gee... 500 different soundcards supported. And his soundcard isn't supported? Is the author trying to boldly go where millions have gone before? Is the power to the computer turned on? Is it dark because the light switch is not turned on, or because there is no electricity? Eee-lec-tri-ci-tee?
What we need to do is get some shady smoke-filled back room deals to pre-install a Linux distribution on 50% of all desktops shipped. Then the problem will take care of itself! Pretty cool eh?
interestingly he did not test with RedHat, even though he tested with two versions of Slackware. i think it is much easier to buy RedHat and support for it than Slackware (which is my first love :-) ).
I might be paranoid, but I smell FUD.
ato
I've experienced sound problems with two mainboards, only one of which I know the make and model. One was an old AMD K6-based eMachines mini-tower. Installing Red Hat 9 GNU/Linux on it produced no working sound until I ran the sound configure application for old sound hardware. I was able to get the sound working by trying a variety of configurations with that application. The second was far more trivial problem--an Asus A7V8X-X mainboard with a misstamped metal backplate that indicated what port served what function. The line-level audio out was not where the metal plate said it was, so some time was lost trying to get sound to come out of the mic-level audio input jack. Once I thought to experiment and place the 1/8" speaker plug in another port and heard my test signal I knew what had happened.
However there are still mixing problems--on Fedora Core 1 GNU/Linux I can't get many applications to simultaneously play their audio. The OS stays up and running but some applications can't be heard at the same time as others.
If I run bzflag, for instance, I know I won't hear audio from GAIM. XMMS seems particularly uncooperative with other applications preventing me from hearing KPFA while also hearing sounds from Totem. Sometimes Tux Racer (the version that ships with FC1) will play its theme song for a minute or two and then not play any other audio. Quitting Tux Racer becomes impossible after the sound dies unless I kill -9 the program.
I don't have a complete list of applications that conflict in this way and I'm guessing that compiling such a list would not reveal the real problem. Obviously, I'd like to be able to run any number of programs and hear all their sounds simultaneously.
Will switching to a Linux version 2.6 kernal-based distribution (like Fedora Core 2 when it comes out later this year) help solve the sound mixing problems I've had?
I don't see this as a showstopper problem, just a hurdle that can be overcome with time, effort, and sharing information. I've experienced this problem with other OSes (even proprietary ones) so I'd hardly say this is something to fret about. Just something I'd like to better understand and ultimately fix.
Digital Citizen
At least one of the mods marked this as Funny (rather than Interesting), which I hope was the intention of the author. Creative windows drivers are just fine downloaded off the net w/o the original cd, and Creative hosted (and I think was primarily responsible for) the emu10k1 (SBLive, Audigy/Audigy2) opensource driver project (one of the few counterexamples to the overstatement in ALL CAPS).
I know many people who "hate computers" for this same reason. They remain wilfully ignorant of the amazing tool at their fingertips and bitch when it breaks.
The salvation follows: The same random users who blow up their drivers, dl spyware, etc. are the ones who have problems with their sound cards, video resolution, can't print, broken cupholder,etc... Average users don't blame the OS if their sound card doesn't work - they're miffed because it doesn't work on whatever machine they bought at Wal-Mart, OfficeMax, or Best Buy. It will be a long time before that same average user starts swapping sound cards, and until then it remains the responsibility of their PC manufacturer to test the hardware. If you're going to install linux on older hardware, find a geek & make a new friend. Learn how to RTFM from someone who has already R'dTFM
This article belongs in the "Users need more education" circular file, instead of the "OS Wars" limelight.
-- In Soviet Russia, radio listens to YOU!
Not once did Mr. Pundit claim to have run Linux and Win95 on the same iron - he only mentioned having run it (at most of his windows flavors for that matter) in the emulated environment. Of course Win95 and later are going to have a vanilla SoundBlaster driver... this article is wrong on so many levels.
/. to take down there server... or at least raise their bandwidth bill. I certainly did my part with a few full refreshes here and there...
I almost feel dirty for letting him troll me and many others so effectively. It is purely disgusting. I personally vote we harness the mighty power of
While proclaiming that Linux isn't ready for prime time based on the failings of one sound card install is a little far fetched, I can see where he's coming from. I've recently spent a few hours trying to get an admittedly crappy SoundBlaster 16 card to work with Debian Woody. It appears to be recognized on boot up, but I still don't get any sound.
However you want to spin it, from the end user perspective, it's a much simpler prospect to get basic functionality working with Windows XP (the Windows 95 comparison is a little silly, but I expect he's exaggerating to make a point). Playing MP3's and CDs on a PC is an expected behavior these days and should work without much effort. This simply isn't the case with many card/distro combinations. In retrospect, I probably should've gone with Red Hat/Fedora Project, but the recent changes in their business model had me a little skeptical.
I must say that the apt package install system in Debian does outweigh my annoyance at my inability to get the soundcard working and the machine that I'm using is really for web project testing anyway.
I would love to see some proclaimed Linux advocate to explain what is wrong in this article (all the arguments are below in the /.ers' comments) in an open statement.
Maybe the people from the ALSA project could do that? So that all the great work they have achieved so far be recognized?
I doubt MS will also link to such an answer... but hey, it would be better than nothing.
That's why I always make sure that I mute main volume when I want to hear something...especially the second time around after I install the latest version of ALSA. Gotta mute that sucker so I can write a great article about the whole thing.
Yes, and I truly believe that my mother should setup Gentoo for a simple and troublefree user experience.
...he concludes that his experience... shows that... Linux still has some huge, gaping holes--holes that Windows plugged almost a decade ago.
Nice to know Microsoft's plugged at least ONE of their 68,000+ holes.
By the way, I have used Knoppix on at least 15 different systems (at work and home) and it's detected EVERY sound card perfectly, even the ones Windows 2000 needed me to search for drivers online for. Unless he's trying to set up a recording studio with 150 channels of high-def audio, Knoppix works perfectly "out of the box."
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
I'm not sure if this article warrants the attention it gets and I don't like overblown titles, but *every* article get a *wild* title so don't blow your fuses on that.
But some of the reactions here on a Common Problem are funny as hell "is this guy qualified to do a Linux install?", "Is it Linux's fault that there are no drivers for his sound card?" etc.
I think a lot of linux advocates have stated that hardware compatibility and installer ease of use are weak points in Linux.
I'm now toying around with the native Pre-Alpha KDE for OS X. It comes wrapped up as an OS X-default mpkg, which means it uses Apple's standard Installer.app, and that's the only way I can enjoy OSS programs because all my other install attempts be it under X11 or on external disks have failed, because
1) installing indeed requires someone "qualified", at least on my OS and in my experience; and
2) my hardware isn't supported unless I want to wipe out my system disk and make the jump. The more I see first hand on Linux usability, the less likely that becomes.
Now I don't give a *** who's to blame. I don't blame anybody, for me it's a harmless hobby and you guys provide it to me for free, so what's to complain.
But there are only two conclusions - one is not helpful.
1) This Is A Problem
2) This Guy Is Too Stooopid To Use Linux And I'm L33T.
I don't care how you look at it, it's "your" platform, but if you like the idea of widespread adoption of Linux, you'll have to live with media attention. And that means that if there are Problems, they'll be mentioned.
Overall, I think there's an incredible amount of goodwill towards Linux at the moment. And there are a lot of people who - like me - are happy to keep looking at OSS despite some bad experiences.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Because its the same god damn sound card I am using: SoundBlaster Live 5.1 (made by Dell). Mandrake 9.2 CRASHED on me whenever I tried to play any kind of sound. Creative didn't give me any drivers so I was stuck until I came acrooss a web site that sorta helped me out (only problem was that I forgot to install a compiler to the OS).
The thing is that most Dell sound cards are not supported by Linux. Why? I have no clue. But the problem is still quite real for people who doesn't even know what a compiler does.
Newsflash for the editor there: my old mac boxes all came with sound built in, before 95. I used to get quite a chuckle over my windows friends saying they had to fuss with their sound cards, or even go out and BUY an extra card to get sound! I was always "wazzup with that..lack o noise from those companies, how cheap can you get, no sound? Huh?"
With that said, I have had good luck with sound on linux, but will admit to some rather strange looking "screens" before a lot of adjusting. Hardest part for me wasn't looking up specs to use with the configurator, but the dang monitor company not labeling the monitor what it really was, like a "public" model# slapped on the back, and the "real model #" that was hard to find.
Not to mention how most boards are generic, using only dressed up reference drivers.
Feh.Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
This is off topic, and I know it's been said before, but out of the box support for Linmodems is far larger of a problem for the non-technical user.
JP
You say self-important egomaniac like it's a bad thing. - Peter Dragon
Because ONE "journalist" had trouble getting ONE sound card to work, even though he tried SEVERAL distributions (but not Red Hat or Mandrake, but he included TWO versions of SlackWare).
Linux SUCKS on sound support and that is why Linux has problems?
Now, if the "journalist" ran a real test, say of a DOZEN differnt sound cards, across a DOZEN different distributions, and identified which distributions worked with which sound cards, then I'd believe him.
To me, this reads like someone who found ONE piece of hardware that Linux has problems with, but which works well with Windows, and then tried to find out how MUCH of a problem Linux has with that ONE piece of hardware.
I don't expect anyone to try 9 different distributions to get the sound working. Sound cards are $10. If you want sound, it would be easier to spend th $10 and get one that is well supported rather than waste your time and effort trying to see if that ONE PIECE OF HARDWARE is supported in any other distribution.
Or, you could, gasp!, do some RESEARCH and find out if there is a distribution that supports that ONE piece of hardware.
There will ALWAYS (until Linux hits 51% of the desktops) be hardware that does not play well with Linux. This is not a disaster nor will it prevent anyone from migrating to Linux.
Even if Linux supported 99%+ of the hardware out there, that article would still be as correct as it is now. But it would be worthless, just as it is now.
::Tries on pair of pants:: Doesn't Fit! No pants shall ever fit me...I guess its back to kilts for me.
Not for me, it doesn't.
I have a SoundBlaster Audigy2 ZS, and Mandrake always installs drivers that don't work. I do as the author of this article says he did; I poke and prod until I get it to work (usually loading up harddrake2 and asking it to use different drivers). I was *just* messing with this yet again on Sunday as I installed Mandrake Official 10.0 PowerPack, and I spent longer trying to get the sound to work than I did on the install.
So yeah, I understand that newer hardware may not work out of the box; Linux will need to get more mainstream so hardware vendors will start releasing drivers earlier (or at all) so there's a chance for it to be on equal footing with Windows in that regard. But my point is simply that the author is not incorrect about the state of drivers under Linux; it's actually pretty obvious, and he didn't need to beat the subject to death.
- Leo
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
Or that a so called "Expert" didn't bother to check whether his hardware was compatible with the operating system in the first place...
Conor "You're not married,you haven't got a girlfriend and you've never seen Star Trek? Good Lord!" - Patrick Stewart
I've been a Linux user, pretty much continuously, since 1993. I use it constantly, and have become deeply familiar with Gnome/KDE environments since both were < V1.0. (prior to those I was an fvwm guy, although I'll always hold a soft spot for twm).
/., where the ignorant roam free) by the ostritch-like, "there ain't no problem here" posts that seem to have mushroomed as per usual.
As a server OS, Linux is great. But I'm flabbergasted (hey, this is
They are all wrong.
Sound under linux sucks. Big time. It always has.
If it's not drivers, it's sound daemons. Yes, it's possible to get everything working just fine providing you don't want to use more than one. Mandrake linux is the only distro that works sensibly with sound. And believe you me, I've pretty much tried them all.
So it's piss poor. But as linux is primarily a server OS, what more can we realistically expect? Sound is utterly unnecessary in this capacity, for the most part.
The best unix desktop by a country marathon is Mac OS X. By some considerable margin. Anyone denying this simple fact is kidding themselves. Really.
Read my online journal: http://chris.carline.org
Why don't you wake up. If you want to support the sound card for mam and pop by all means knock yourself out. Mean while I will write the code that I want to write. I am pretty sure that I speak for quite a few open source people...get a clue man..we are not here to serve your needs or the needs of any one else. I don't care if you use linux...never have never will.
what?
So I contacted XYZ's paid tech support--remember, this was a commercial Linux that cost as much as a Windows XP upgrade, and tech support is built into the price.
The support staff asked for some log files and diagnostic dumps. I sent them. They then had me manually set some software switches and edit other settings, but that made things worse--the system then lost all graphics modes. I could login only in text mode; otherwise, the system was unusable.
Things rapidly went downhill from there, but this column isn't about XYZ's weaknesses in tech support, but rather about a general Linux problem. I can say that because I later duplicated the failure with eight other versions and separate distributions of Linux before I gave up. Not one could get the sound working for more than brief periods.
I booted Knoppix recently, and everything worked fine without tweaking, except for sound. Just a single counter-example, but it does happen.
It is like how much easier you can play movies under linux. You get a mediaplayer and hunt down a dozen codecs all of wich conflict. This is much easier then doing that CLI thing of "emerge mplayer/aptget mplayer". All my movies just play under linux. Under windows I get upside down Xvid, missing OGM, missing subs, dubs wich constantly select the wrong language.
Frankly I thought the old "soundcard" trouble had been replaced by "digital camera". Hey, the 20th century called, they want their flamebait back.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The facts:
Some guy sais that some anonymous sound card doesn't work with Linux. Even after being asked in the discussion forum numerous times, he refuses to reveal the card type.
Another fact: Even if that problem really exists (which I kinda doubt), without knowing what card he is talking about it can't be fixed.
A lot of posts seem to say "Well, it's not LINUX's fault that the manufacturers don't have drivers for his sound card (Whichever sound card it is, it's probably an M$ sound card, he used to work for Windows magazine *insert nerdy snort here*).
Well, right there in the article it says it DID work on SOME Linux distros. Why would it work on one and not all? Why isn't there a centralized LINUX device driver database that every distribution uses in it's install? Why should we depend on HW manufacturers to write umpteen odd versions of their drivrs for umpteen odd flavors of Linux? One centralized repository, one way to handle devices and drivers. If someone doesn't want to use this DB, they are welcome to try a DriverDB-less distro.
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
I would venture to say there are far more sound cards supported than there are wireless cards supported. That seems to be the largest pain in the ass. Especially when your manufacturer changes chips on you every other week...ala linksys
See Sig! See Sig Zig! Zig Sig Zig!!!!!
The hell you say?
Buy a fucking sound card that isn't compatible with Windows and it won't work in Windows either.
How 'bout bitching out your harware vendor instead?
Yet another dumbass that somehow has credit as an expert.
I run Mandrake 9.1 and artsd. It took me several tries to get a working driver. As it is, many applications, including sound players, IM Clients, and Opera, do not play sound. Fortunately KDE, Kit, and XMMS work fine, so I am mostly covered. Who else has these issues? A fix? Note on Opera: The new mail sound does work. Just none of the others.
Simon's Rock College
How do people get away with publishing this BS windows sound support has nothing to do with windows it has everything to do with that is what the sound chip makers release drivers, for. I'd love to see how good hardware support would be if Mickyshaft had to write all their own drivers. I think the level of hardware support is incredible on Linux given the fact that the community has had to reverse engineer the hardware and write the drivers with no help form the manufactures in most cases.
Now lets talk about Windows 95 for a moment sall we since he used it as an example. Go to CompUSA and grab the most expensive newest sound card off the shelf that has linux support. Good Luck trying to get it to work on Windows 95, betcha the drivers require a later version and you're screwed. Now find an old Linux 2.0 system (that should be about where the kernel was in 95) Chances are the drivers been back ported already or if not its probably relatively simple to do so yourself if you know some C given OSS has been pretty stable for quite sometime.
So Fred Langa why don't you compare the systems on a level playing field and see what results you get. Most off the shelf desktops have $20 sound cards at best these days, Fred because you can't get the stock card to work it should not be a show stopper for Linux. Did you decide not to buy a PC because you can't just plug in that Apple Writer? Why pass up Linux because your cheap crap sound card won't work.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
450+ outraged responses and no one actually tried it. If they did, they'd see that Linux doesn't detect the SB16 card that VPC uses, and Fedora (for one) doesn't seem provide any mechanism to tell the system that the card exists other that editing the modules config file.
It would be appreciated if someone could tell me (a) how to fix it, and (b) where the information on how to fix it can be found. Google searches have been less than rewarding.
thats bs. its not that windows "plugged the whole", windows as 10 yrs of development above linux. and way more people develop for windows than linux. Linux will be the #1 os. Quality takes time. it will get there. chris.
Vendors make more windows drivers than Linux drivers? I am absolutely over-f*cking welmed.
Heavens crickey, man. Get a grip. Are you shure you want to write about computer stuff?
And mentioning Win95 to rave about hardware support is so utterly silly it hurts. It's like showing the Amiga as a good use of grafics.
I suggest trying a Mac if you want out-of-the box multimedia support and 100% hardware compliance.
Otherwise I'd suggest you don't buy the hardware if the vendor doesn't offer drivers for your choice of OS. This is common sense. And this article displays a tad lack thereof.
Or maybe it's just the usual nowadays user who can't sort the various concepts out. It'll be interessting watching these people entering the Linux field. I recently met a hardware vendor who told me he wouldn't deal with Linux because Microsoft would buy Linux anyway anytime soon. I presume this article was written in a simular perception of things. Not that he was stupid, he just didn't know what he was talking about.
Linux advocates or computer savy in general are about to get more of this kind of crap as OSS becomes mainstream. I for my part am practicing in staying calm. Not that I always manage. QED.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Funny thing the timing of this article. I've been using Linux for quite awhile on my servers and love it. I don't install gui's on them and do everything from the CLI. On my desktop I've been using XP, and as much as I don't want to, I love it as well. I went to the Real World Linux conference in Toronto last week and talked to some of the Xandros guys, and decided I'd dual boot my XP box in the hopes that I could eventually replace XP with a good Linux Desktop.
The install was incredibly easy, and it handled partitioning my HD and installing the MBR with minimal input on my part. That part blew me away, it was easier than installing Windows (any version).
Unfortunately, I had no sound and my printer wouldn't work. I have a Sound Blaster audigy2 card and a Canon I320 printer...both very common and both work flawlessly on XP. After messing around for a couple of hours I got them both to work.
I also use 2 monitors on this box and have a 128M Nvidia GeForce video card. The install handled my video card without any user input and set a decent default screen resolution. Unfortunately again, it would not support the dual monitors. After googling for awhile I discovered Xinerama and reconfigured my XF86Config-4 file to support the dual monitors...which now work as well.
I discussed this with a friend who also wants to see huge adoption of Linux on the desktop. I explained that as much as I was impressed with Xandros it still is IMO not ready for your average computer user. We agreed to disagree on this point, but until you can install a Linux distro without having to drop to the command line to get things working, it's going to be a hard sell to Joe Q Public.
Now I realize that my setup may be a little out of the ordinary compared to regular users and they may not experience any of the problems that I did but the point is this all works out of the box on Windows. I prefer the command line and didn't have that much trouble getting everything working that I wanted too, but you can't expect the average user to put up with it...not when it just works with Windows.
We've still got aways to go but we're definitely getting there.
-Pat
I'm also a bit surprised that someone who is seriously trying evaluate Linux and get a sound card to work didn't try either Mandrake or Red Hat.
:-}
The Soundblaster Live 5.1 Digital I stuck in my Fedora FC1 box did work - once i'd worked out how to enable my Gnome-resident speaker icon (editing one line in a system config file) and unticking the "mute" setting after a reboot.
In most other ways (including printing), it's as near to instant pudding as you can get.
Getting Mozilla browser plugins working for Java, Flash and Acrobat take some doing and is currently more difficult than on Windows - but everything seems to be heading in the right direction.
Well, until you try to share that working Linux printer with any Windows XP boxes on the same LAN. I've been at it for three days so far, and I think I need some real help. Looking at Google searches on the same error messages, it looks like i'm far from alone
Know any good Samba diagnosis how-to guides?
Ian W.
Maybe my comment is getting off track, but I remember when we upgraded our Pro/ENGINEER workstations from Windows NT Workstation to Windows 2000 Professional.
Our $1500 high end Pro/E graphics cards were not "Windows 2000 Certified", so we had to eat 10 of these graphics cards. (Accelgraphics GMX 2000)
If Pro/E on Linux was an option back then, we might have been able to use our existing hardware since people have the capability to write their own drivers, even if the hardware makers are too lazy to provide a Linux driver. Once a Linux driver is out, you don't get any "This hardware isn't Linux 2004 certified, you'll have to get new hardware.", as you can typically make it work.
Since Pro/E will work on Linux now, I've been tempted to drag my old GMX's out and try to find a driver, but its less work to pop in one of today's "Bargain Bin" Geforce cards and get the same performance!
Doesn't Gentoo take something like 36 hours (depending) to install? At any rate, with 5 versions of Windows and 9 versions of Linux, he must have one hell of a fast machine to install all that in just 2 days.
IMO, his time would have been better spent solving the problem on the original install (or first re-install) with a cheap sound card.
His entries in his forums are interesting as well, especially the one about his really wanting to run Linux on his new machine, but can't because he doesn't want to buy a decent sound card -- yet he's willing to spend 2 days of his presumably valuable time chasing a red herring simply because Linux *ought* to be able to support brand new proprietary hardware out of the box. I smell a shill.
No matter how many of my rights are taken away, somehow I still don't feel safe. -Frigid Monkey
2 things need to be said about that
1. There are not as many cards as there are chipsets. And for a card to work most of the time You only need to support the chipset. The problem is that most drivers are called by their chipsets and it is hard to find the correct driver for your card if you don't know the chipset (lspci often works better than looking at the card, because I often don't know what I am looking for).
But it is still sometimes not trivial to find the correct driver with lspci information on hand. That all doesn't apply for joe user anyways, since Mandrake, Knoppix and the pack support them all out of the box.
2. Would Linux really become better if all companies would write their own drivers? Windows problems often get blamed on Microsoft when some crappy sound driver crashes a computer often, because some guy was too cheap to spend more than 8 bucks for the soundcard for the US $ 3000 Computer, since he doesn't need sound that much. I am sure that some of those are You guys among the slashdot crowd. Buying a cool new toy to compile faster, and since You never play You don't need a soundcard. But maybe sometime You need one, so You pop in the cheapest You can find.
Same for Windows guys. Then Windows gets blamed for the bluescreen.
So do You really want to install a binary only driver from some crappy shop?
It would be the best if they would just open the specs.
On a sidenote I was considering getting an expensive soundcard for some creative stuff. And there was a card with drivers from the company and there was this really cheap offer for the Terratec EWX 24/96. Terratec doesn't develope drivers for Linux nor does it hand out any specs, but the Alsa driver is very stable. Guess which product I purchased!
Linux developers can simply ignore this whole issue. When the productivity suites and desktops work in a way which allows big companies to retire 95% of their Windows boxes in favor of Linux machines, the sound card industry will fall all over themselves to get us drivers.
Meanwhile, the companies who will do this first, as they hunt for productivity, will either not give a hoot whether all sound cards work (just the one they have 10,000 of) or will be actively happy that sound DOESN'T work.
As Linux makes the climb to corporate desktop prominance, the first step comes first. Forget about the second step, as you won't have to do the work for it. Unless, of course, it amuses you to do that work. If so, HURRY, because the big adopters are coming, and six months after they do, our conversations on this topic will be our anger at the lack of source code, not our embarassment at the lack of drivers.
Gentoo. A minor distribution. Maybe for a Microsucking FUD spammer who can't even figure out how to install a sound card. Well what do you expect from someone who still uses Windows 95.
RTFM? FTFM!!
come one what a jerk off. It's obvious he researched forever to find a card (or should i say motherboard with a unsupported onboard sound chip)that WOULD NOT work on linux. With a nice payment from M$ to dis on linux, goes and installs 9 distros in a virtual manager! WHAT A FUCKING DILDO. Vm's are already glitchy enough.
the fact that he doesnt name the m-board or sound chip is evidence enough that he doesnt care about accuracy. Hell he is a windowz dittohead(as in rush the dickfuck limbaugh), without the brains enough to jerk off much less get linux, with all of it's options, setup correctly.
FRED..go back to sucking your mothers tit...or did you have trouble with that as well?
Really though, a fair comparison would have been between his Windows computer and a system with Linux preinstalled.
I dare say that the sound card would have worked out of the box had he done that.
Most Windows hardware will work with Linux, but that doesn't change the fact that the hardware is built for Windows. Complete interoperability--expecially with the newest devices, for which noone has had time to write drivers--is just not something to expect.
Despite all the FUD and propaganda espoused by both Linux and Windows advocates, I believe that hardware support IS MOST DEFINITELY the biggest issue with Linux. I'm a software engineer of 8 years with a CS&E degree, and I still had to spend a few days getting my hardware working in Mandrake 9.2. For instance, my Sound Blaster Audigy worked with the default installation, but I had to build Alsa from scratch if I wanted it to actually output 5.1 channels. I had to extract firmware out of the windows driver for my Midiman Oxygen 8 controller to get it work with Hotplug. I had to edit XF86Config to get my mouse to work properly. I had to guess at a compatible older printer to get my HP Photosmart 7960 to work.
Anyway, thi will ALWAYS be an issue until there is a critical mass of users that makes it economically viable for hardware manufacturers to create and test linux drivers. When individuals (kindly) reverse engineer and write drivers on their own, they are of widely varying quality, easy of use, and completeness, as opposed to the Windows world, which has a certification standard that at least helps with some level of easy of use and quality.
Anyway, I think this critical mass of Linux users will arrive.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
It sounds... bad. Like perhaps we all have scabies or crabs or something. I don't know who started the 'scratches a personal itch' analogy, but I think it's time to drop it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I wonder if the author tried taking his new shiny and installing it in a Windows 98 machine. I bet the driver search would be equally as frustrating.
I guess this is directed more towards the mindless windows users who were thinking of trying linux...
I wonder if the author has written any articles on poorly written windows drivers taking down the whole OS, but I guess at least there were drivers.
--WooooHoooo--
What I find most interesting, however, is that the author makes a jab at Linux while withholding any information which could be used to independently verify (and/or troubleshoot) his claims.
I've had the same problem, but in reverse, where Linux was working fine with a new system I had built, but Windows couldn't find half the devices. After getting the latest drivers for each component, I came to firmware. After updating the firmware for the motherboard chipset, Windows was happy and everything started working.
I suspect there is a similar situation at play here, but this time Linux is on the receiving end of the dodginess. Of course, the author obviously just wants to sling mud at Linux while shielding every other component which may be involved.
He could have just as easily asked why the sound card vendor wouldn't throw a bone to a project (eg., ALSA) that really wants to support any and every sound card. Or the whitebox vendor, if the same sound card worked in other systems.
I think this is more a problem with the current crop of sound cards than with Linux.
Some sound card manufacturer out there will one day realize that there's a lot of money to be made by writing a Linux driver for his card. It can't be rocket science... after all, he knows what his card needs, and he can easily get the source to the OS.
The fact that there are various Linux distributions may complicate things a bit, but it really shouldn't be that much of a problem. And if the manufacturer doesn't want to bother constantly updating for 10 different distro's, he can always open source his driver. (This is surely the sticking point, though... fear that other manufacturers will gain from that sort of thing.)
On the other hand, many Linux programs can't use the sound device if you set the desktop to use it for system sounds.
The cake is a pie
Windows doesn't actually support much more hardware than Linux. It's the hardware vendors who support their own hardware, and virtually all of them provide Windows drivers, while the Linux community has to write its own.
To hear this nabob tell it, there are hordes of Microsoft programmers slaving away, writing drivers for every last piece of oddball hardware out there. The truth in 99 cases out of 100 is that Microsoft publishes (or sells) an API specification, and hordes of programmers working for hardware vendors write drivers to interface with it. If the vendor doesn't believe it's worth the effort to write additional drivers for Linux (or MacOS, OS/2, DOS, NetWare, et cetera), the driver only gets written if some Linux programmer gets stuck with a piece of hardware he can't use and decides to spend many hours coding one instead of returning the hardware for something that is already supported. Needless to say, this doesn't happen very often.
For example, I have an HP scanner at home that I can use under Win2k but can't use under Linux, not because "Linux doesn't support it," but because Hewlett-Packard doesn't support it on non-Microsoft operating systems.
Linux's "Achilles heel", when examined rationally and without the desire to drive ad revenue through baiting the Slashdot crowd, boils down to the same problem every Microsoft competitor has: Microsoft is a monopoly enjoying the benefits of a massive network effect and ineffectual antitrust laws.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
This guy is a knuckle head....
Buy a supported sound card...wtf. I mean If I went to the store and bought a sound card and it don't work with windows...and I didn't even bother to check...would anyone take me seriously.
"I got some sound card that don't work with linux...and I never checked to see if it did until afterinstall time"......knuckle head. And It makes news...next up...My PixieDumblecrap Video Capture Card dont' work with MAC OSX. What a head line.
You can do printing without Samba - use CUPS as an ipp server that Windows will pick up if you install the Unix services add-on (or something like that). Look for help on printing to Unix/network printers in Windows.
I'm sitting here in my den, with two fairly recent computers in on my desk. Both have newer sound cards. Actually, there's also a spare sound card sitting next to one of the PCs. Two are AC '97 compatible, one is a Creative MM product. I got news for this guy: None of these standard soundcards work with Windows 95!. Oh my lord! That must mean that every version of Windows since isn't suitable for any task.
Anyway, all the cards work fine under Slackware (k.2.4.24) and Windows XP.
I'm sorry, was there an issue here? He doesn't name a distro, kernel version, specific brand and model of sound card, or give any other specifics about it. I've seen lots of trollers use this same tactic on Usenet, and the sound card turns out to be some 8-channel pro thing that requires a monster third-party driver and application suite to function properly under Windows. I'm exaggerating here, but I seriously want to know the specifics.
I could say this:
" Fred Discovers Achilles Heel of Windows
So, I was installing this expansion card the other day, and I booted up and got a blue screen with some register values shown in white. Now, other people give too much leniency to XYZ Monopoly, but I paid ten times as much for X[YZ]P. This is a card that works fine in Linux!"
Anyway, the article is extremely light on detail, and some of the things he says make absolutely no sense, so I have no clue what he did/didn't do.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
Mod the parent up, I've been saying this for years!
Fred was editor-in-chief, but I think I have the time period wrong. According to this web page Fred was editor-in-chief from 1988 to 1991. This was after the change from Robert Tinney paintings on the cover to photographs, but still while Steve Ciarcia had his Circuit Cellar column there.
Wonder how many compatible sound cards one could buy with the money one would have to spend to buy Windows XP....
PjotrP
Sure... XP detects and manages sound cards just fiiiiine. Like my SB Audigy on my VIA KT333 Soyo motherboard. No wait - I forgot. I attempted to install either drivers from Creative's site or from the enclosed CD and both say that it can't find any Audigy hardware installed in my system. Which is funny, because I get a nice loud windows chord playing on my speakers when aforesaid dialog box pops up. .exe, extract files from the archive, manually update the drivers, then just ignore the 1394 Network Interface that perpetually has an error in the Device Manager.
Soo.... I have to hack the
Or I can switch over to SuSE 8.2 which loads it fine, autodetects the hardware and plays things without a hiccup.
This isn't (entirely) a problem with XP, it's also a problem with the hardware detection that Creative wrote into their drivers. But the OSS stuff bypasses whatever tomfoolery there is and just plain works.
reading at +5 all I get is the usual "RTFM and buy another card you cnut!" attitude. Yes, certainly, I am a masochistic idiot and want to subject myself to such behaviour when something which worked before now doesn't on this "better" OS. Face it guys, Linux will suck as being mainstream as long as it doesn't do everything Windows and OS X do, and it better does it even better.
I was using an S3 card for years before dumping my previous PC.
Debian if you should know...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
My ass! This guy doesn't have a clue about cars and you call it informative...
I think this is a legitimate point. Although I don't know if Windows or the hardware vendors are more to blame here.
The Nforce audio drivers for linux are not great. You are limited to one program accessing the device at a time (no hardware mixing). Apparently this is because the soundstorm drivers are only available for Windows at the moment and Nvidia's linux drivers... well they suck I guess.
Still these any many other small thing are the reason I still need a dual boot. Otherwise it would be bye-bye Winblows.
"Take that Lisa's beliefs!" - Homer Simpson
Is there a name for journalistic trolling? [ala the author of the "letter"?]
If not, how about we call it "michealism"?
It's quite unpopular to go against the grain on /. with an opinion like this, but it's the truth.
IMO, the biggest thing that's holding Linux back from making a big leap into the desktop realm is hardware support. You can have all the "Linux equivalent of Windows" apps you want, but if the average person can't get their hardware to work, it's gonna leave a bad taste in their mouth. You and I might not have problems sitting down for hours trying to nail the problem, but others certainly don't wanna do that crap, and I don't blame them.
A lot of the blame should be placed with the manufacturers for not releasing open source Linux drivers. In this day and age, this is absolutely no reason whatsoever for major players to hold back from releasing drivers for Linux. For example, anyone with a Linksys WPC11 v4 (wireless pcmcia) is screwed when it comes to Linux. That's bullshit and Linksys needs to wake up and smell the coffee and push out some drivers.
Unfortunately, a lot of these manufacturers are closed minded and feel that if they release a driver, they'll somehow, through the power of magic and mystic OSS voodoo, reveal the innermost workings and secrets of their company.
On the other hand, if you buy hardware that's known to work with Linux, it works like a charm! The problem is, if someone wants to taste what Linux is like, they don't wanna go out and buy all new hardware.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
I've only once manaed to get proper mixing working for my soundblaster live pro.
I've tried a number of distributions,
e.g mandrake 7-9, Corel Linux, Gentoo with kernels upto 2.25 and 3.6 betas.
The probablem seems to be clasic lights are on but no-nes home syndrome.
from alsa-mixer or several guis i have tried I can adjust the wave volume, but not mix devices or record without huge anounts of noise or silence. I've folowed all the tutorials, read al the documentaion, looked at the code and asked on mailing lists all to no avail.
Does the card ork pperly under linux, or are all the mixing tools crap.
Try Knoppix. My personal experience with hardware identification with Knoppix has been better than any other distro on this point.
Fred Langa, the writer of the letter, is not sophisticated about marketing and is not completely honest about advertising. It's possible that the article is a paid advertisement from Microsoft about the superiority of Microsoft Windows. Or, it's possible that the article is just due to ignorance.
Langa produces a newsletter called the LangaList. Both the free and paid versions are mostly about Microsoft Windows. There is a paid version that supposedly doesn't have advertising. However, it does have considerable advertising for Langa himself.
Langa's newsletter is for people who know little about computers. People send him information by email, and he publishes it, often with apparently little checking. Often the little articles start with something like, "You are so wonderful. I am happy to pay for the paid version of your newsletter." The LangaList sometimes reads like a badly written informercial.
In the most recent issue of the LangaList, he says "The system was based on an utterly mainstream Intel motherboard with an on-board Intel sound system. This is not some weird, off-brand system using unknown components: It's about as mainstream as it gets."
He could easily have named the motherboard. It seems possible that it isn't named because he doesn't want people to know the truth. I remember that we supplied "utterly mainstream" Intel 815EEA motherboard systems with sound systems that NEVER worked perfectly in Windows 98 because they were so proprietary. That was back when Intel was first integrating sound into their motherboards. Intel had bought the sound system from some other company, and they had not yet found all the bugs.
Remember that Intel shut down its consumer division because it was not able to produce products that were successful in the marketplace! Before the shutdown I bought two Intel video camera cards from Fry's for $20 each. I took them back because they were of such poor quality. They weren't even worth $20.
In any case, Fred Langa often writes about problems in Microsoft Windows that are far, far bigger than problems with sound cards. In the most recent version of the LangaList, linked above, one of the articles in the paid version is "Icon Problems In XP, Win98". I know long time Linux users will have a difficult time believing this, but Microsoft Windows sometimes trashes its own desktop icons!!! The article in the LangaList is about how to fix this.
This most recent paid version of the LangaList, which supposedly does not have advertising, has two sections of 13 that are completely advertising, 6) Don't Make Me Beg!
I have installed many sound cards and have still to see one that fails me.
The last few ones Ensoniq, Sound Blaster (several models), and the integrated in two Shuttle machines' motherboards (FX41, FB61) of which I don't even know the model, which is the way it should be.
In one of the Shuttle machines I had to install my last copy of Windows (W98) and ho and behold, nothing was recognized automatically.
Now tell me Linux is worst regarding sound cards and that the article is not trollish....
That is why several Linux enthusiasts find the article trollish in nature.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The last line of the article is:
/dev/dsp pseudo-file directly, rather than passing their requests through some user-space program. This means that contention for the device can cause unpredictable failures in multiple applications. (Where by "failure" I mostly mean one program is totally hung until another quits)
Bottom line: For broad hardware support, Windows is still much better than Linux. That's not bias--it's a demonstrable fact.
That's plainly wrong. Even if it's easier to get Windows to use soundcards, just try to get WindowsXP to run on a PowerPC, StrongARM, or Alpha CPU, and then tell me if it has broader hardware support than Linux.
However, there is a major flaw in Linux's sound-card support that this author doesn't mention. In my experience, it's reasonably easy to get Linux+ALSA to recognize common modern sound cards. But due to the design of the sound-card interface, the performance from then on is inadequate. Mainstream linux programs that need to output audio write to the
Compare this with the video card situation on Linux: only oddball applications would consider writing to the VGA card directly. All normal programs write either to X11 or the console "stdout", which allows a user-space program to handle the distributing those visual needs to the graphics card in a fair manner.
As long as Linux programs continue to access sound directly, they will be inadequate with much audio hardware. But there's still little movement towards adopting an accepted alternative sound interface. There are multiple competitors for the role- primarily esound, artsd, and JACKS- but none of those appears close to universal acceptance. (And they all have problems that might keep them from ever winning the standardization race)
i!
He said Intel chip, so SuSE and the Knoppix variants should have picked it up with the i810 audio driver (they did on all Intel audio-based systems I tried), and I'm suprised that Slack and the other Debian-based distros didn't work. Mandrake is a BITCH to get sound working (on 9.2 - it's called sitting a few minutes while sndconfig works its magic), but RH (8) (wa|i)s pretty good about sound.
Can I buy some of that pot from you?
i remember using redhat 6 on my old presario laptop. i remember having issues with the suondcard. in fact i had a similar issue. the sound would work for a few seconds then stop. it was always like this with each session. i read up on my cards drivers in the linux kernel docs and found that there are some special settings that needed to be set. i configured my card, reloaded the kernel module and lo and behold i never had a problem since. when i tried the same card in freebsd i have the same trouble. not that the drivers didnt work, but that i had some extra settings to tweak because my card supported those extra features. one included how the card handled buffered streams. this card was an ESS 1688. tricky card if you ask me. today i have a new system. nforce2 based. the only thing i have idea whether it works is the nvidia MCP eth card. and i think that might be due to lack of drivers which nvidia doesnt want to give out or something like that. everything else works. OUT OF THE BOX. to make matters even more interesting most of my media works in windows xp and linux (slackware 9.1.0) i cant find a media type that doesnt have support in linux. my only problem is .doc i want to be able to work with anything MS can output, but right now its still a little tricky. all that said, the only reason i keep windows is simply for games and homework. i dont trust it for anything else. i have lost to much data to windows crashing in the past that i periodically move my homework and save game files onto my linux parition just incase. so far i have lost whole albums i ripped to my computer in wma format during software upgrades. windows xp is a pain in my ass.
so if you ever read this langa, you are simply wrong. look deeper into your setup. most of the answers are right there. can you at least point out WHY your soundcard doesnt work in linux? you opint out a software problem, you ever thought of a user config problem? plus you seem to have forgotten that most manufactures develop FOR WIDNOWS! their drivers are designed to work best with windows. they send their drivers to be bundled in with windows to give the appearance that peripherals work out of the box. truth of the matter, i have some hardware here that windows can not support natively. hardware that would not work correctly without the manufactures drivers. and depending on how well the manufacture makes their drivers i usually have to keep updating my drivers with each new release to benefit from the improvements. i dont quite see that as much of an alternative lifestyle. ill tell you this though, once i got my soundcard workin on my laptop, i never had an issue with it. that's why i like linux. its reliable when configured properly.
mind you if your opinion is that this is the achilles heel because it requires users to configure their own systems even after an install, remember that windows gets all that work done for them in great part by the manufactures developping drivers that WILL WORK with windows. you dont see that many manufactures making drivers for any distro or any version of the linux kernel. windows has years of support in this form. linux does not. and in the time linux has come i think it is infinetly more usable than DOS ever was. anyways.
Why doesn't someone just zip off and write a winxp sound API wrapper for all those drivers, load up their ntfs partition, copy drivers, and voila.
Not to trivialize the whole process, but if youre not going to get new drivers for 20 year old sound cards that window supports, sitting on your ass either a) complaining or b) studying the circuitry of said sound card, youre going the wrong way.
If people are running a server, sound won't be in the kernel as it is, so you can forget about your precious few TCP/IP stack cycles and use a few emulating the windows sound API.
RTFA:
"Distro "XYZ" even costs roughly as much as a Windows XP upgrade"
"I'll tell you that the "XYZ" software in the above was Xandros 2.0 Deluxe"
On it's face this seems like a questionable article, probably part of the Microsoft FUD machine.
HOWEVER!
There IS a problem with Linux support for a lot of hardware devices out there. Personally I have had a hard time with WiFi, DVD read/write and battery status monitoring in a recent vintage laptop. In all cases it will be possible to get going, but will take a level of knowledge and experience WAY beyond most users.
I realize that this is mostly a problem with the manufacturer not providing a driver or even specs and I think this is unacceptable. With IBM and other major corporations and industry leaders embracing Linux it is high time these manufacturers either supply drivers or give out the specs and let someone else do it. Firms that refuse to do either should be made to feel the heat until they realize they will lose future business because of their lack of support.
LOL, what a dweeb - I've been using sound in linux since we were playing doom on slackware back in 1995. Yes, it was a bit of a chore to get sound configured back then, but since about 1997 the sound cards just work, on the distros I've used since then, suse and redhat/fedora for the most part.
I wonder if he deliberately chose some card known not to work in linux, or he made some basic blunder such as forgetting to unmute the sound (alsa comes muted by default)
Thing is, if he's not bullshitting about the brand of the card, the standard i810 audio module SHOULD handle it!
BTW, I thought Gentoo, while known for compiling instead of just installing, was available as precompiled.
There are two things that really bother me that make me believe this person flat out fabricated their testing:
1) The system is a brand new, state of the art, Intel system. Windows 95 wouldn't recognize half of the components on the system. It wouldn't recognize the USB, it wouldn't recognize the chipsets, it wouldn't recognize the video, etc.
To get all of this to work, he would have to download drivers from Intel - assuming they're even available (unlikely). If he did download drivers, then that probably included the sound driver - game over.
2) It is inferred that the sound card is very recent technology. That being the case, Microsoft must have been exceedingly good to create drivers 9 years in advance!
It's also worth recognizing that Intel is notorious for making hardware that is dependent on specific Windows functions. We all owe Intel a big thanks for the wonderful WinModem.
LarryD
Bush makes our troops prey...
I have had but a few (3) problems with sound cards over the past four years and dozens of installations with Linux. For the most part, I caused the problems in the first place. Either the author here is being "silly" or I'm really damned good with Linux - and I am not all that skilled with the OS - yet.
He installed win 95 in a Virtual PC environment. Doesn't the Virtual PC software handle all the low level device driver stuff, including sound cards? I think his testing strategy is invalid.
>>I reinstalled the whole operating system, from scratch, four times! I poked. I prodded. I tweaked. I FAQed. I How-To-ed. I searched Usenet. Nothing solved the problem.
um, this man gets paid to work with computers?
it looks like he just hasn't get the ALSA daemon started, all he needs to do is go to "XYZ" distro's service/daemon control applet, and set it to start at boot.
it's not any more complicated than it would be in windows, and it's a hell of a lot easier than trying to get cheap nasty soundcards to work with windows, even the latest version. believe me, i've just been trying.
>>The support staff asked for some log files and diagnostic dumps. I sent them. They then had me manually set some software switches and edit other settings, but that made things worse--the system then lost all graphics modes. I could login only in text mode; otherwise, the system was unusable.
>>Things rapidly went downhill from there, but this column isn't about XYZ's weaknesses in tech support, but rather about a general Linux problem.
It obviously is about "XYZ's weaknesses in tech support", no self-repecting linux techie would screw up the xfree config because of a sound problem.
if anyone is having problems of this sort, i recommend you check out Linux Questions, the community is generally great, and you're likely to get your questions answered speedily and accurately.
...these aren't my real teeth.
"Now tell me Linux is worst regarding sound cards and that the article is not trollish....
That is why several Linux enthusiasts find the article trollish in nature."
I can understand that. I've been there. Lotsa Windows FUD floating around Slashdot. The problem with that attitude is that treating it like it's a troll doesn't help the new guys trying to start with Linux. I myself have had similar problems that the author of the story has. I can honestly tell you I haven't gotten sound to work while trying to switch to Linux. I've had issues getting video to work correctly as well. It's supposed to be 'blindingly obvious' how to set your refresh rate or have the distro automatically find your sound card and make it work, but alas, I've had difficulty. Treating it like it doesn't ever happen just isn't the solution.
"Derp de derp."
We are not talking about a brand new card here!
The article specifically states that even an emulated SoundBlaster is not supported by Linux.
By the way, is there a Sound Driver Development Kit for Linux that makes it easy for manufacturers to provide a driver? The GPL actually works against Linux here.
They should try and get a creative sound card to work properly under a current M$ OS or any other application. It is not the OS's problem, it is the MORON's at creative, their crappy hardware and really CRAPPY drivers....
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
It's a steep learning curve, but why throw out what you have already done? Find a distribution you like and use it. If it doesn't have what you want download the bit you want and install it. There are almost no linux programs that will only run on Redhat, most will run on all distributions and even on Irix, Solaris and *BSD.
That's not really the game - it's about being a useful alternative, linux is a unix clone, it's never going to out-windows windows. Linux has walked over MS windows in some areas for years - you have to remember that MS is still the new kid on the block in server space while linux has unix behind it - but if the game is to provide a Microsoft Desktop Experience(TM) why even bother to compete? The answer is to do something useful and easy to use in X instead. The KDE desktop in knoppix looks very usable to me, but being someone that still uses twm occassionally I am disqualified from comment.If you want to put your company logo on a million pages of documents the windows way is find a program that will do it and to click on a lot of things, the *nix way is to cat the files in one hit to a program that does it. They are very different ways to do things.
The people who set up slashdot previously had linux and enlightenment themes websites, so linux and X are always going to be items of discussion here.In my experience on Linux, the biggest sound card problems are any Creative Labs Soundblaster cards. They dont supply Linux drivers.
I have a real problem with Creative Labs cards, their drivers are always buggy (even the windows ones).
Sound Cards based on the Yamaha DSG1 or the Via Envy 24 both work upon install under SuSE and Mandrake. A Chaintech Via Envy 24 8channel sound card runs about 24.00 at NewEgg and sounds better than any Creative Labs card I have used.
I know this isn't a troubleshooting thread, but I've seen many people complain about this exact SBLive! (emu10k1) sound card problem.
It is an incredibly easy fix for such an annoyance. (One I experienced with Mandrake 10)
Of course, I am disappointed this slipped through quality control at Mandrake...
"Be afraid to die until you have won some victory for humanity" -Horace Mann
I had my sound card working fine back in high school (1998) under redhat, and later, debian (the debian distro I downloaded across a 33.6kbps connection. ah, those were the days). The sound card was a generic no-name ISA deal. Later, I got my sbLive working just fine using an early emu10k1 module. Hell, at that time, that linux box could play quake, serve webpages, and later get me into trouble due to my administrative follies (my computer port scanned the DOE while I was on vacation? Whoops!). Perhaps the finest moment in my whole mulitmedia linux experience is when I had my 450 pIII playing DVDs (and doing everything else from class codework to productivity to playing the occasional game of starcraft).
However, Linux has plugged many thing years ago that windows left wide open. Like not opening ports that don't need to be open. Or changing IP addresses on the fly. Or inserting / removing drivers without rebooting. Or not crashing for an unspecified reason and then requiring a reboot. Or multitasking.
Essentially, somebody needs to stop benchmarking an OS on sound card installation. Remember, even a four year old can use linux.
Before I get started: I like Linux. I use it everyday. I like it even more because it makes Microsoft look over their shoulder.
That said, sound support in linux sucks....but it's not always "Linux's fault". My 5 year old IBM 600E Thinkpad has an unsupported sound card. I DO NOT have the option of "getting a sound card that doesn't suck" as some have suggested.
I use the laptop with Linux, but every time I realize that my sound card doesn't work it makes me shake my head and think: "Maybe Microsoft will have something to worry about in 5 years....."
While i'm ranting...how about better wireless network card support? I've got a bunch of spiffy new 802.11 A/B/G cards and none of them work in Linux. I have to resort to my 3 year old Cisco 350 series card to connect on my laptop.
Here's a better illustration of the problem:
Go to compUSA and try to find a scanner that DOESN'T work in windows. You probably won't be able to find one.
-ted
That post was completely on topic. It's unfortunate that minimal intelligence isn't required to moderate. And no, it wasn't my post.
Java is the way to go
Your post is so typical.
Even more so then the "I like linux" posts.
Basically you're just repeating the same post, that's been posted in just about every thread, in every story, every day.
Look, the fact of the matter is that 90% of your hardware is going to work out of the box in Linux today. I install Mandrake, Fedora, whatever. They all pick up my hardware fine.
The problem lies when you have bleeding edge hardware with no Linux support. Or if you have some $5 sound card/video card/firewire card with no documentation and no linux drivers.
It's not necessarily the developers. It's the hardware vendors. And don't tell me you've never ever had a problem getting hardware to work in Windows.
I'm not saying there's no room for improvement. In many ways I like the canned driver packages you get for Windows systems. They *usually* work and require minimal effort to install. But it's often quite easy to get hardware working in the big linux distributions too.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I have Mandrake 9.2 and it took me several hours and trying out two different sound cards before finding something on-line about KMixer. There were NO options in the "Start" menu about configuring sound except for picking and configuring I/O for the sound card driver. I had to use the command line to start KMixer and turn on the right channels and turn off the wrong channels to get the sound to work. That's with on-board sound and finally an SB Live. It works great now, but what a hassle.
Here's a simple scenario illustrating the solution to the problem where the nice man at the store says something works and it doesn't:
Hope this helps.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
I don't think I've ever had a problem getting a sound card to work, and I even had an AST with some weird ass sound card in it for the first computer I ran linux on.
Maybe this guy's just an idiot.
`which fortune`
I'd hate to imagine what it sees a Pentium 4 as. And let's not forget about the exclamation points in the device manager due to lacking drivers for the pci bridges. This is all assuming that Windows 95 would even work correctly because a new system has more memory than Win95 can handle. 95's memory support maxes out at 128 MB. This is further proof that the article is a fraud.
His gripe is legitimate. I mean he's got modern hardware and he expects it to work with the OS he's chosen. People would and do bitch just as much when Windows does the same thing.
Unfortunately, Linux is at a huge disadvantage until it does pick up more of the desktop market. Some hardware vendors aren't going to invest the time and money in writing Linux drivers unless there's a market for it. And there must not be a big enough one for this sound card maker to make it worth their time.
I know enough that if I'm going to run Linux on a machine, I usually buy the hardware with that in mind. Meaning, I wouldn't get the latest tweaked out sound card unless it came with Linux drivers. But most people who haven't run Linux wouldn't think of those kinds of issues.
So he has a legitimate beef in some respects, but at the same time, he has to factor in the unfortunate situation that not all hardware vendors will supply Linux drivers and Linux developers aren't necessarily going to hack one together either.
But mostly, it's not that important. I mean, I doubt this one guy's opinion is going to have much impact on how Linux does in the market. Hardly qualifies as news, really.
...because I had to buy a new soundcard when windows 2000 came out. They dropped support for my sound card because there was no vendor around to bully into upgrading the driver for them.
So windows 2000 also cannot do what windows 95 did, which is 'work with my pro audio spectrum 16'
Not one could get the sound working for more than brief periods.
You know what, I'd definately have to bite as "troll" on this one. Not only does the article not state the model of the soundcard (Intel card on an Intel board is the best you get), but it doesn't adequately describe the problem.
I'd say that the author either trolled around for a sound device he *knew* wouldn't work well. And excuse me, but doesn't it seem odd that this supposed new PC and new motherboard worked with the driver using "built-in" OS support all the way back to windows 95?
Now, let's go here. Every board I've checked either has a "soundmax" (I have one which doesn't autodetect on XP much less 95, not sure about 'nix) or an AC'97 (works just fine with 'nix on any mobo I've used that has it, NOT in windows 95 in many cases). I'm sorry, but this is just BS.
So, even if he got the Intel wrong what chance in hell is it that this MainStream board would be using a card based on an (technologically speaking) ancient model? Hell, I'm sorry but many times 95 won't even work well with my motherboard let alone the onboard sound
Intermittent problem: Maybe Fred forgot to set the mixer volume to pop up above 0 on bootup? The sound won't just "work sometimes," either it works, or it doesn't, or you're doing something weird.
What I would do is give Mr. Langa a well-built linux distro - installed - and windows 95. Then allow him the choice between the two after a month.
This isn't a legitimate criticism of Linux by far... it's a criticism made by a moron who either handpicked criteria or made it up.
I've heard of a lot of windows machines where hardware stops working after an OS upgrade. The much hyped XP compatibility with previous versions of windows is still a disappointment on many levels - but it's a start.
Step one) goto www.google.com/linux
Step two) Enter name and model of component
Step three) If lots of people complain about lack of support then pick a different component.
Note to self - Do this before spending money.
Well only a couple of years ago I put a Guillemot cheapo sound card into my Windows XP machine which had on board IDE raid and once installed it promptly split the RAID 0 volume !!
Fortunately the volume was only used as a scratch disk so no real harm done but it could have been much worse.
Throughout the years, I have formed the opinion that you have to be a complete novice or a serious asshole of a programmer to crash windows 2000. Simple as that. Other than some hardware failures on my part due to me taking out and replacing ish on a regular basis, windows 2000 has crashed only twice in the 3 years I've been using it in massive development and server environments. TWICE. I've yet to crash linux, openBSD failed to install 3 times but installed on the fourth for no apparent reason, FreeBSD was awesome until I got bored with it, NetBSD is not as cool as OpenBSD and now I'm using windows 2000 more on a regular basis than I use any UNIX variant. Linux is rewarding once you've learned the archaic knowledge within that beige, or Alien-Ware-Queered-Out box. A lot of end-users don't need to know what type of sound card they have, the model number of their NIC, or their monitors refresh rates. They just don't. So I propose this: Linux for the Technical Community (researchers, scientists, etc.) and windows/macs for everyone else. I truly don't see the point in crusading Linux to end-users who only need it for word-processing and net surfing. Yeah, Linux has all that, but once again, a novice has to hurdle a considerable amount of configurations just to get to that point. Forget the desktop market and your Marxist dreams, it's not gonna happen when microsoft is soooo easy to use compared to Linux. I say we all branch off, begin a completely different computing society just for us dorks who love command prompts and endless lines of code. Let us continue to scoff and sway from the horde and start becoming comfortable in our own utopian hopes and dreams of a "Linux Forever" creed, an oath we should all swear to protect for ourselves and by ourselves. Fuck the end-users.
The reason he didn't list the exact card or the name of the distribution, is that doing this might have been construed as a support request, and people might have helped him get it running.
But of course there are this class of users who when they have a problem, just give up and rant about it on major news sites, instead of asking for help. And unlike with Microsoft stuff, you will actually get some degree of help if you prod your distribution's support channels.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Apparently this guy didn't realize Mom and Pop's don't install sound cards, nor do they install Linux. They buy Dells and Gateways, that come with it all set up. Or they go to CompUSA and have the tech install it for them.
So, I guess I don't see the problem. This guy is a techy right? So figure it out. If he can't, he has no business being inside his computer installing a sound card. It's not really THAT hard.
Did you even RTFA?
"Despite my very positive first impressions, I couldn't get XYZ to work with my sound card at all, even though I was testing XYZ on a brand new PC from a major vendor. The system was based on an utterly mainstream Intel motherboard with an on-board Intel sound system. This isn't some weird, off-brand system using unknown components: It's about as mainstream as it gets."
I've had a few Linux installs where my sound was muted by default. I have to wonder if he could have solved his problem by simply opening up a mixer (kmix, alsamixer, whatever) and making sure it was unmuted and the volume wasn't at 0..
On a side note:
What was XYZ distro's (Xandros') tech support doing telling him to make changes that affected X? When mucking with sound stuff (either ALSA or OSS/Free) there shouldn't be anything you change that would stop XFree86 from working..
End of line..
Apparently that wasn't just present in Windows 98. I had exactly the same problem with a digital camera under Windows XP just last week.
Plugged in the camera, waited a few seconds, and.... blue screen.
So if anyone reads this, don't plug a shitty DC530 digital camera into Windows XP! However I'm led to believe it works on Linux but the post I was reading said support was experimental.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
it's a regular PCI sblive. Nothing mac specific.
I was just wondering if he tried to see if that sound card works in W2003 cause from my personal experience most sound cards don't, especially ISA ones (namely SB16), that on the other hand are still supported in linux...
And it is not just a problem with Mandrake.
I guess it was too much trouble to find out if he used Slackware 5 or Slackware 10... actually slackware is currently at 9.1
(but hopefully soon)
.. .printers, aaaaahhhh!!!!
Jesus, I hate CUPS.
I hate CUPS.
I hate.
The reason that Linux doesn't have support for all of these sound cards is because the vendors:
A) Didn't provide drivers
B) Didn't provide specs
Windows didn't solve this, the companies that sold the cards decided to release Windows drivers.
Incidentally, there's no version of IIS for Linux either, that I know of.
"It's the hardware manufacturer that makes the device that does that work."
It is to laugh. I'm trying to remember when that was ever the case. I'm sure it once really was. Actually I remember once hiring someone that had on their resume that they wrote printer drivers for a US company back in the late '80s. That's probably about the last time.
This was one of the first IT chores to be outsourced. It's an easily defined bit of black box code - inputs and outputs and who cares what's in between as long as it works well. In the 90's they seemed to be mainly in N. Europe - I recall talking to a lot of guys in Rotterdam about details of their driver implementations (and why it was conflicting with our stuff).
Probably all been moved in Mumbai by now, though I still hear from BIOS writers doing contract work for the big guys from the flanders area.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
As it is written: "There are no good excuses for binary modules. Some of them may be technically legal (by virtue of not being derived works) and allowed, but even when they are legal they are a major pain in the ass, and always horribly buggy."
You know, there's a reason Linux doesn't work well with binary-only drivers. And that's because binary-only drivers are a bad idea for Linux.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
On some major Micro$oft certification test I took, the correct answer was:
d: do nothing, sound is not a critical business application on a computer.
WTF?
And, how do I get on Micro$oft's payola payroll? Is it worth it to sell my soul to the devil?
All I'm saying is you don't see poor people praising Micro$oft products (simply because they can't afford them.)
Apparently its too hard for him to notice that this is the effect of M$'s near monopoly and the knockon effect on driver support. No, its all those Linux developers at fault for being the victims of a monopoly.
Its not so cosy in Windoze land in any case, after 10 years of PC soundcards I may finally have my first relatively bug free driver (for the integrated nForce2 sound on my mboard). Its only taken 3 driver updates to stop it gradually lagging its linein but it works now. The previous 9 cards failed to fully work as advertised or crashed PCs repeatedly ever since DOS days. Driver support for sound cards is appalling and the hardware screws up systems all by itself a lot of the time.
The assholes that wont support Linux cant get their Windoze drivers right anyway.
There are sound cards (and videocards) that are not supported in Windows XP that are supported in Linux (and Windows 95 and Windows 98). So because Linux supports supports some sound cards that Windows XP does not, and Windows XP supports sound cards that Linux does not that means Windows XP is better. I don't really follow.
Now I'm not going to dig too deep into claims that Windows 95 supports sound cards better than Linux. The most obvious example of where this is false is USB Audio adapters, which are *NOT* supported correctly under any version of Windows 95. Also PCMCIA Sound cards in Windows 95 never were very well supported either.
I am far more interested in evaluting Linux based on it's usability. Hardware and software compatibility is not as important as people make it out to be. Remember ages ago when DOS gamers had to buy sound cards that games supported rather than funny ones that might only have some DOS support and maybe a Windows 3.x driver? Eventually the hardware vendors started offering "Sound Blaster" compatibility, and then later offered "100% Sound Blaster Compatible". Back then we chose the hardware based on what our software supported. I'm not saying this is an ideal situation, but apparently it was acceptable to us before.
What's really funny about the way things work is that Macs can run Windows applications fairly well(no games, but most normal apps run fine), but PCs can't run Mac apps at all. But then the claims are usually along the lines of Macs not being compatible with PCs, when to me it appears to be the other way around.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Dude, how can you have a driver for a sound card that is (1) Brand New (2) Has no public documentation available and (3) for a platform which very few if any hardware companies support? What you ask is completely ridiculous and impossible.
Until all vendors start releasing public docs or drivers for linux, we will see much of the same. Which is, complete idiots saying "uhhhhh this thing I have doens't work on linux! Linux suxx0rs!!!"
Rule One: Buy hardware that is known to work with linux, if you seriously intend to use linux.
Rule Two: If you can't manage to spend the time researching this, go with old products. They produce the same result, and are more likely to work with linux. Soundblaster Live! is a reliable option for soundcards. NVIDIA geforce and the recent ATI cards are really the only viable video cards for linux at the moment, but most older video cards should probably work (though without hardware opengl support).
Let's see windows handle *that*!
...So I wouldn't post as AC and be ignored. But I've had friends go off on this very rant. One of them was:
"Can you believe that no hacker anywhere had ever gotten off his butt to write the driver needed for ?"
I got miffed. I asked "But Microsoft did."
"Yes, it worked fine in Windows."
"Because the hardware company wrote a driver for Windows, and then refused to either release one for Linux or tell everyone else how their proprietary piece of hardware works so that Linux programmers could do it. Your argument is that, in this ONE INSTANCE, Windows wins because of what amounts to an incredible amount of collusion, and *blaming* that on Linux?"
I then pointed out how, actually, his faith in volunteers and Linux companies was actually pretty darn high. His expectations:
Microsoft: Able to put drivers on the newest Windows CDs without breaking your machine all that often.
Linux: Able to reverse engineer proprietary specs and write drivers and put them in the latest distro and not break your machine.
He sort of stopped ranting when I pointed out that he was expecting a lot less of the highly paid M$ engineers than the open source community (he's a logical guy in general).
I have a long string of devices which work on Linux but have some sort of issue on Windows... my PS/2 mouse only works on Windows if I connect it with a USB adapter, my digital camera bluescreens Windows without fail, and I have various writer devices which require dodgy hacks to make them work on Windows.
Oh, and let's not forget trying to get a S/ATA disk working...
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
"Subject: Special Report: Linux's Achilles' Heel
m
. jhtml"
Hello, InformationWeek Daily reader!
Occasionally, we have news or analysis of such importance that it
warrants a special alert to you. In those instances, we send a
note pointing you to the content.
Right now, InformationWeek has special coverage demonstrating
important areas in which Linux doesn't measure up to Windows.
InformationWeek columnist Fred Langa says tests of several new
commercial Linux distributions fail a task that's handled easily
by Windows versions dating back to Windows 95, undermining the
operating system's efforts to compete head on with Windows.
In Langa's words: "If Linux is a truly superior operating system,
shouldn't it be able to do what a 9-year-old copy of Windows can
do? Why is it still struggling with a problem that Microsoft
solved roughly a decade ago?"
Find out specifically what Fred tested and where numerous Linux
distributions fell down.
Read this critical and counterintuitive appraisal now.
http://www.informationweek.com/985/langa.ht
Afterward, tell us your opinion about the viability of
Linux in our online poll.
http://www.informationweek.com/polls/linux
The email is worse then the article. When seeing this I figured that there was some major problem stopping Linux to be truly completive Like a major bug or some massive virus that is beyond what ever happen to windows. No it was some guy ranting on how he couldn't get his sound card to work. Yes Installing any sound card should be easy but this is not the the end all and be all of enterprise computing. This is like on the major news broadcasters saying "Important message to all people regarding the downfall of america. There are some people who don't like U.S. and out products are more expensive then the rest of the world"
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I can't completely disagree with an article, but I can hardly call this an "Achilles Heel". Computers without sound are still usefull.
For about 4 years, my PC was an IBM Thinkpad 390X with the most god awful sound card ever made: an ESS Solo 1. The only operating system that this card actually worked in was Windows NT 4.0. In Windows 95/98/ME, 2000, and XP the output was distorted and jarbled, but barely tolerable. Neither OSS nor ALSA modules worked in linux 2.4. In 2.6 I could get 8bit 11250Hz. I had considered trying various USB or PCMCIA alternatives, but never got around to it.
Well, I absolutly refused to use NT 4.0. I would bounce back and forth from debian to XP. Using debian linux several months I would get frustrated by the lack of sound and goto XP. After a week of XP i would become frustrated by the distorted and jarbled sound, or a new kernel would be released, and I'd switch back to sweet, sweet silence. And this continued for the full 4 years, until I recently bought a new desktop computer (with an emu10k1).
During this constant switch back and forth from Windows XP to Debian GNU/Linux unstable, i learned that neither operating system is perfect. There's obviously tons of non-standardized hardware in this world, and noone can expect any one operating system to support everything flawlessly.
So here's my solution: Instead of paying $100 (or whatever) for Windows XP, use that $100 to buy an emu10k1 (or another known compatible sound device), donate the difference to the linux distribution of your choice, and use their free operating system. Or if you're greedy you can just keep the money you saved.
He didnt mention if it was 95 a or b Its alot easier to be specific with windows seeing as how there arent transfinite versions
It is not sound support, per se. Rather, I am beginning to suspect that the modularized nature of the sound system is just blowing peoples' minds. Kernel compilation, ALSA drivers, and .conf are just too scary for the neophyte, or for the user that does not yet grasp the *NIX topology/philosophy. If the distro installer does not get the sound configuration perfect, then the beginner is left with no idea what to do. At this point, the tenacious settle in for many, many hours of Internet reading. The rest return to the familiar, safe OS.
Now whether or not Linux should be designed for "the rest" is a different matter. I happen to think not; but at the very least, we should think about making sound issues easier for the tenacious learner.
===---===
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
It's not necessarily the developers. It's the hardware vendors. And don't tell me you've never ever had a problem getting hardware to work in Windows.
You're tellin me... Shit I have a belkin USB serial port for my Sony Vaio Laptop. Without the docking station it doesn't have a serial port, and as a Sys Admin I need to console into a bunch of things from time to time.
The Windows driver is a piece of shit, whenever I hit disconnect I can not reconnect again without rebooting. The Windows driver comes from Belkin.
The Linux kernel detects this just fine, assigns it ttyUSB0 and it works every time. No added driver, no magic, and supports disconnecting from USB. Personally I think it's Linux that has hardware support right. Windows has a wider array of hardware support, but none of it is supported as well as in Linux.
If you don't believe me, get a new machine with an EtherExpress 100 nic, Linux will detect it no matter the iteration. Windows will say what's an EtherExpress Nic. So you download from intel or the manufacturer of the pc only to realize that there are literally dozens of different EtherExpress, each with 10-50 mb driver downloads. So you download them, burn to cd and then try to install it on the Windows box. Eventually one will work. That's not the case in Linux....
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
"'Occasionally, we have news or analysis of such importance that it warrants a special alert to you.'"
A simple editing mistake, here are the corrections:
"Occasionally, we have news."
and
"We rarely have any news or analysis of such importance that it warrants a special alert to you, most of our stuff is delibarately offensive to certain strong-minded groups, such as Linux and / or Mac users."
Penguins don't have heels! This sig will self destruct in 5...4...3...2...
A new operating system requires old hardware when it has not yet finished coding support for the -new- hardware. Old hardware is often (unless maliciously obsoleted) -more- likely to work properly out of the box because all the OS people have had more time to get the drivers working properly.
So why does Windows already work with the latest hardware when these 'other' OSs don't? Because hardware vendors consider (and rightly so) MS support to be crucial to their sales, and thus make sure that the boys from Redmond always get early NDA access to any new hardware.
It makes sense just fine, when you think about it.
I don't have anything intellectual to say about what Linux is great for and what it lacks. Most people know it well enough. But ... when you read that article that says nothing but FUD, and see that guy's photo with an evil smile on a face that says it all--don't you just want to punch him in the face?
Seriously, he claims that Linux usenet users told him to downgrade his hardware. He is falsely exagerrating on the unfounded stereotype that Linux may not support state of the art hardware. I use Linux for a few years now. Unlike him, I never rushed to ask questions, so I end up searching for answers on questions people already asked. I never ran into an answer that tells someone to downgrade their hardware.
A while ago, I had to help someone reinstall Windows XP on a brand new laptop (since we didn't like the way it was preinstalled). Even Windows XP didn't come with functional video (it stuck in VGA mode), ethernet, wireless ethernet, sound, and modem drivers for the laptop, and I had to install all these from manufacturer's driver CD. Now, you ask, wouldn't it be nice if hardware vendors could start providing user-installable drivers on Linux?
I once had a signature.
It's not just sound cards that lag behind in drivers, I convinced my company to open the specs and Windows source for our networking chip and the "if you release it they will come" theory is definitely not true.
I can attest that a hardware manufacturer's first three attempts to get Linux drivers written for any product look something like this (aka How Open Source Drivers Don't Happen:
1. Sales guy makes mistake of letting engineer talk to users. Engineer listens to users and drinks the Linux kool-aid.
2. Engineer spends the next six months telling management why they need to go open source.
3. Engineer's argument is simplified by management to "if you build it, they will come." (in best Field of Dreams voice).
4. Engineer releases package on sf and corporate web site.
5. Release is ignored for six months. Slashdot post is rejected. The only activity from the project is near-hatemail that the filenames have spaces, things are zipped instead of tarred, and the mother-****ing code reads like it is "totally corporate."
6. Engineer gives up and pays a contractor for clean-room code to support his customer.
7. Management says "****, now that we've PAID for it, there's no way we're going to give it away."
8. There is a knee in the kernel and the closed-source code breaks. Calling the contractor back was not in the budget. Return to step 2.
The poster didn't mention what OS his Desktop was running. On Win9x/ME you had to install drivers with the Win9x/ME CD in the cd drive, otherwise it wouldn't find system files needed. It wasn't until 2000/XP that this was resolved. This may be what he was talking about, although I could be wrong....
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
Actually, you can really tell someone has no business installing Linux when they go on what I like to call a "multiple distribution installation rampage", or MDIR. Its what n00bs do when one particular distro doesn't setup something automatically for them. Its sad really, especially when someone writes an article actually ADMITTING to MDIR, they are basically admitting they didn't do one lick of homework before attempting to install...or even consult an expert. Kinda hard to take what he has to say seriously when he can't even do some simple research.
All the guy needed to do was look and fscking see if his sound card was supported by ALSA. Is that so hard?
Anyway, I hope that this message reaches someone and saves them from MDIR. Learning how to use Linux correctly is a lot more fun than installing 9 distros.
This article should have been release April 1st.
I have used lots of sound cards with Linux and never had a problem. I do tend to buy main stream cards like SoundBlaster and Hercules. Most of the cards have a SoundBlaster compatable mode too...
...those who don't want to take the effort to use Linux should leave it the heck alone. I don't use Linux mainstream but that doesn't change the fact that I hold an enormous amount of respect for it. I find that article nothing but insulting.
Read the story; He never actually installed Linux on his hardware - he installed it in a virtual PC (A PC emulating a 'generic' PC).
The problem most likely comes from the author's confusion between a real and virtual computer. His REAL PC might have had a perfectly ordinary mainstream video card. That does not mean that the emulated PC has the same features, or could use the same driver.
If he had manually configured his virtual linux installation as sound-blaster compatible it probably would have worked, but then again who knows what kind of sound hardware the latest version of MS VPC likes to emulate.
This also explains why he was able to run Windows 95 and Gentoo on the same computer - imagine trying to build a real computer that will happily run both.
If such resources had not existed when I began my ALSA-kernel adventures, I would have surely been lost. Let's return the favor to the community at large; even the beginning user can contribute to Linux in this fashion...instead of passively waiting for godlike C hackers and bearded demidevelopers to fix the problem for them. That kind of dependent thinking will not be good for Linux in the long-term.
====---====
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
Linux has problems - yes. Frustratingly, many are not specific to Linux per se, but rather what happens in the creation of a 'distro' (a modern-day Utopia, I feel, and just as unattainable).
However, one has to step back and see that the writer is a victim of a market, virtually monopolised by a well-marketed OS with the complicit partnership of many hardware manufacturers, still ravaged by it's own demise.
In time, I see no serious hardware manufacturer avoiding Linux, if only because - logically and naturally - competition in any system is vital to it's survival.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
But isn't that part of the idea behind Linux? That it will serve your needs because someone, somewhere is working on it? The question here isn't that Linux can't support these soundcards (or other hardware) its that people still haven't chosen to support them. Now, being that these are commercial devices, they should have the proper Linux support included when you purchase it. But, if they don't support it out of the box, it should be up to the community (not necesarily you, but someone(or a group of someones) who knows how) to support it. If you want Linux to truly topple Windows, then you must help people who don't know how to do it themselves.
I bought a box off ebay sans OS. Did a dual boot with Windows 2000 Pro (which cost a few hundred dollars) and the Lycoris distro of Linux (which cost a few ten dollars). The sound card manufacturer didn't offer w2k support, and the 9x version they had available for download locked up the system. But Lycoris autodetected the card, and it worked just fine.
I concluded that some really nice person who used Linux also used the same sound card that was in my box and cared enough to support it, which is more than I could say for the company that was paid to make the darn card. Nothing more, nothing less. Unfortunately, the author of the article doesn't have my wisdom.
I can't even name the sound cards (uh, chips) that came with my motherboards, but they work like a champ. Why do I care if there are a couple of thousand Brand name cards that don't work with Linux.
I have had nary a problem with wave playback in Linux, although there have been times when I had to RTFM and play around to get things to work. That doesn't bother me that much, and as I managed to learn a few things from it, I don't see it as being that bad of a deal.
What does bother me is the utterly pathetic MIDI/synth support that I have encountered throughout the years. A handful of cards work fantastically, others can do MIDI playback, but not in/output, and a good number do not work at all. For example, I have never been able to get the synthesizer with an SB Audigy/Live! to work under Linux, and I have very desperately tried. I've installed different distros, tried different hardware combinations, used both ALSA and OSS, tried tweaking the settings/drivers by hand, etc.
As a student musician and composer it's very frustrating to not have access to something I need to work. And the problem doesn't just have one root, either; it's a combination of the hardware companies not caring enough to release the specs or write a proper driver, it's a result of the distro developers not caring enough to ensure that MIDI support works from first reboot, and it's a result of the people who need MIDI not voicing their complaints.
Granted, musicians who use Linux are a minority within a minority, but it's a big enough problem that it has turned off several potential converts that I have talked to.
I especially like the part where he got it to work, and then rebooted. When it didn't work he reinstalled the distro! Congradulations, you are inept.
Next time he might want to figure out *what* is going wrong, and fix that. Of course, it's thinking like this that created linux in the first place. Why fix things when you can just reinstall windows again (which, of course, you have to do every 6 months anyway, just to maintain a useable system).
Also, amazing as it may seem, when you have a room of servers, the LAST thing you ever bother with is sound cards and speakers !
Has he ever tried rebooting a Windows 95 machine remotely after its been running for a few months file/print serving ?.
Other than some of the more boutique features of some sound cards being missing and the sound mixer interfaces SUCKING, I've never had an issue of any soundcard failing to work, or even having difficulty with them. My issue is the glibc updates breaking things.
Derek Greene
With most current PC models ive not had any driver problems..
Most people in business own newer models ( not all.. but most ), and sound is NOT reqired to do your job 99% of the time anyway...
Seems pretty flimsy of an excuse and they are hard pressed to find REAL reasons OSS isnt 'ready for primetime'...
Who pays their salaries... ?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Thus the point is proven totally false by the fact that Linux is capable of doing 2 things a Windows 2000 box couldn't: 1) use a mainstream sound card, and 2) be a server.
So he was talking about Windows 2000. According to the post, his boss refused to provide the driver disk.
If the problem were the Windows CDs, couldn't he wait a week to come back to his boss and ask for the CDs using an excuse like "Hey, I unfortunately deleted that file with the bear icon and need the Windows CD to get a fresh copy of it"?
Langa is most certainly a troll. His study is almost as 'scientific' as the experiments that proved Communist seed corns were superior to decadent Capitalist seed corns in the Stalinist USSR.
Think global, act loco
I'm amazed..
He decides to bash Linux because he can't make some anonymous sound card work. He does say Intel onboard of some sort..
I had problems with an Intel onboard sound card too. Some other people are using identical PC's to mine in an office environment, and they have problems with sound in Windows too. Ha! At least I got mine working with a newer kernel.
Actually, with a little (very little) effort, I find it's rare that I can't get something working. Just open your eyes, and look at what options are available.
He says that he was getting sound occasionally. Sounds like a conflict of some sort. I had a problem with some older distribution and some sound daemon that was running, which would do something like this. Some sounds would work, but once the x manager made a sound, it would be hosed. There was one option to turn that off.. But, that was an older distribution, I don't even remember what the program was (some three letter process I found running).
He can write 3 pages about how he couldn't fix it, writing for a technical publication??
You know, it took me 1/2 hour to get WinXP even to begin installing on my girlfriend's new computer? It's because it didn't have any freakin' concept of what a SATA hard drive was. I had to make a floppy driver disk, which had to be in the A: so I could hit F6 (or whatever) to add extra drivers. It was nice of them to supply a *CD*, which did me absolutely no good for putting the drivers on. I rebooted into Linux (ahh, dual boot) to copy the files over. The other computers near-by didn't even have floppy drives to use. This was the only one.
BTW, Linux installed in less than 1/2 hour for the complete install. XP, well, we went to the store, and came back to watch it still be installing. It took half the day to get an operational system going. If I was being paid by the hour, I'd love it, but I was doing it for my girlfriend, when we could have been doing something fun, instead of me watching "estimated time to completion: 32 hours"
[extend on for 3 pages, and submit to Information Week]
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
He's pointing out a problem with Linux distributions, not asking you to cry him a river. From a consumers perspective he has a good point. It should just work. From what the article says he seems to have a fairly standard sound chip which at least one of the distros claimed to support while others vaguely allude to "wide" support.
As a consumer product Linux distributions do need to improve in this and other similar areas. I bought a new printer and it didn't work out of the box and it didn't work properly after several hours of fudging around with CUPS and foomatic. I got bored and just resigned myself to printing only using my XP laptop. I haven't even bothered trying to use a new scanner on my Linux desktop. It just works with my laptop so I find myself using that and Photoshop Elements rather than The Gimp now.
Commercial distributions live on the interface where the product(s) of a community become a consumer product. I agree that the problems he and I just mentioned are probably not community failings. The community achieves fantastic things but wide ranging and solid third party hardware support is going to require greater involvement from those third parties. The community has a role to play there but the corporates probably have more leverage (and more incentive).
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I just installed Mandrake 9.2 for my inlaws, who struggle even to operate Win95 without problems (on a Via C3 800, cuz they couldn't pop for more, not having endless computing resources at their disposal).
It went off without a hitch, the install even configured both printers (one HP Laserjet 6p, the other a pretty new OfficeJet printer/scanner/copier/fax color printer).
Out of the gate, both printers worked, one USB the other parallel. The OfficeJet had great resolution and color printing, printing from Konqueror and Galeon both cleanly.
Their email was a snap to configure, and they worked out the games themselves. I even left them on their own, and they discovered how to attempt to install more software from the distro (without the root password, which I kept, they could not complete it).
More impressive, my 18 year old sister-in-law who'd never used Linux in her life had plopped down and worked gaim and the web browser without any instruction. Oh yes, and the sound card was configured by the install and there was no issue at all.
They were all completely impressed and it probably won't be much longer before they decide they want to use CrossOver Office to make sure there are no font problems or macro issues with their Excel spreadsheets they bring from DCX to work on at home.
Soundcard problems indeed. What a plant, for all the M$ fans to point to and say 'look, we _told_ you it would never work'.
You hear that? That is the sound of inevitability.
one two three four five ?!! That's the combination on my luggage!
I may sound like a troll here, and I don't post that often, but there seems to be a solution lately. Try Linspire. I only use the bleeding-edge Fedora for my other desktop but I have used Lindows before and I'll be damned if that distro doesn't have awesome compatibility with most of my stuff. The ONLY thing it doesn't pick up on my laptop, and two desktops that I've tried is my wireless connections. That is all it has ever missed. Period.
Automatic printer setup really impressed me the most, the OS installed in 15 min and was ready to go out of the box.
Plus (for now) you can't beat a software warehouse like CNR or Lycoris' Iris Gallery. Dependency issues never happened on my Lindows box. But I definitely do not recommend using apt-get on the bastard. If you don't know what you're doing, it will break your box.. (I don't know what I'm doing)
It appears he used "alsamixer" to set the volume, but didn't run "alsactl store" to save his configuration. This is an annoying problem for many new Linux users though.
MADWIFI is indeed for Atheros based cards, but the Atheros chipset is for 802.11g - the DWL-520 is an 802.11b card.
Which chipset he needs depends on the exact revision, I know they used both Prism2 and acx100 chipset in that line. Also found this link which is for the Rev. E specifically which may be of some help.
HTH.
Despite my very positive first impressions, I couldn't get XYZ to work with my sound card at all, even though I was testing XYZ on a brand new PC from a major vendor. The system was based on an utterly mainstream Intel motherboard with an on-board Intel sound system. This isn't some weird, off-brand system using unknown components: It's about as mainstream as it gets.
It sounds as if he's running it on hardware, not some virtualized system. Also....
Maybe it's me, but that oft-cited suggestion has always seemed a little odd. I can see where a new operating system might require new hardware, but why should a new operating system require old hardware? And if the hardware was to blame, how could XP handle it out of the box, with no special drivers or setup?
Again, the reference is towards hardware, not some virtualized box.
But I try to keep an open mind, so I entertained the thought: Maybe there was something truly strange about the hardware.
Again, hardware.
THEN he switches to virtualized hardware.
Right..............
At which point, you can't tell whether the problem is with the Linux drivers or the virtualization software. So he has no case.
The problem could very well have been in how the virtualization software presents the virtual system to Linux.
I can crash my VMWare sessions with DMA calls to a CD burner even when I'm running Win2K guest on Win2K host.
I don't blame Win2K for that.
I don't blame the CD burner for that (AOpen).
I believe the "blame" is with VMWare, but so what? It isn't important to me and I can still use the burner fine with either Win2K or Linux as the host.
The last 4-5 workstations I've purchased had Linux preinstalled. Amazingly, sound worked no problem.
Well, actually, when I read about this poor fellows sound card woes, the firstr thing that came to mind was the blood sweat and tears I spent trying to get a Mandrake distro to work with an ISA PNP sound card
My attempts failed.
Oh yeah, when I installed RH8.0 on another partition, the SBLive work with no work on my part.
word.
Also, there was no Slackware 5.
Read all the posts by the Linux elite - those who *want* Linux to be hard to use to keep it 'l33t', and then understand why Linux will not replace Windows and why Microsoft will continue to dominate.
You people bitch about lack of support from OEMs for driver development and yet you can't even understand that unless something is mainstream *it will not get support*.
Pity Redhat didn't understand this, and when will Mandrake, SUSE, et all also wake up?
I want Linux to succeed, but it's biggest impediment is the fools that have posted 80% of the responses here with that attitude of "who cares". Well you wackos, what if Nvidia had that attitude?
That's what people know, so that's what people use, for better or worse. People don't know that there are alternatives; they don't want to change from one email app to another; they don't know people who'd help them; they don't know if there are apps on other platforms for doing what they currently do; they don't know if all their hardware will be supported; they don't know if and they worry greatly about file compatibility.
Some of these concerns are justified; some are not. But the biggest concern underlying these is fear of change. To get people to switch, you have to provide benefits outweighing that fear. These benefits may be killer apps, greater security, greater ease of use, lower cost, inertia (if something else is pre-installed on a new machine)... currently Linux has some of these, but falls down on others. Mac OS X falls down on different ones. But nothing completely outweighs that fear at the moment. And while fear of change is there, Windows will continue to be popular for no better reason than that it's popular.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Linux not autodetecting and configuring an onboard sound system is a "Big Gaping Hole"? I wouldn't consider it such. Maybe a mild disapointment but not a BGH. I guess it depends on who you talk to though.
:)
Now, Windows leaving an unprotected Remote Procedure Call interface open... THAT'S A BIG GAPING HOLE! But then again, I guess it depends on who you talk to.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
my first tech job (1996) was fixing windows computers with problems, most dealing with the soundcard.
i spent HUNDREDS of hours searching for drivers and changing default settings trying to get soundcards (from turtle beach to via to sound blaster compatible...) working in windows 95. as another poster said, it's not because of windows that these worked (or didn't work) it's because the drivers were well designed (or sucked ass).
it's the manufacturers fault for not providing linux drivers. but we have to remedy the situation by picking up their slack.
that said, i've configured around 8 computers with linux. i never checked the HCL first. and i got the sound to work (even on board sound) to work every time. maybe i'm just lucky but it seems that if you know what you are doing you'll get it to work. i didn't say it's easy.
fear is the mind killer
it is the PCM volume being set to maximum by default. This causes some clipping to happen and the sound is really scratchy. I wished that by default volume would be set to 50%.
I don't think linux is/should be 'ready for the desktop'. As has been said, if your mom wants to 'surf the intarweb' then get her OS X or Windows. If your mom wants to code, get her linux. I do not see why so many people are bent on linux on the desktop. It was not designed for desktop use. I already find the amount of userfriendlyness appaling. Urpmi, apt-get, emerge. Hogwash, all of it. If you don't care to configure it, if you don't care to understand it's dependancies (as many do not) then you don't care to use linux. Nuff said.
I use XMMS, and that works fine. Also, I have Redhat 9 on the hard drive (DSL on CD), and the sound works ok in that too.
Now, I have tried to get older Redhat's to recognize sound cards, and had problems, so I can see where the author is coming from, more or less.
Unfortunately the people you describe are the ones who make most purchasing decisions.
You go and evaluate the viable combinations of OS, critical business server software, and appropriate hardware options for each possible vendor.
You identify the patches that are going to be required for each product to work together.
Then upper management at the client site proceeds to order completely different hardware from an alternate supplier who can't even run the critical software. When the project is late and the heads start rolling, you can bet those original recommendations are long lost...
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Maybe I'm reading the article wrong, but it looks to me like he used VPC to emulate a Soundblaster and let the Windows installs run off that, but required the Linux installs to detect and run using the actual hardware (which could be something more obscure and less well supported in Windows as well).
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
So, why didn't you read further and find out that an OUT OF THE BOX install of windows 95 could do this without issue?? That's a windows install from almost 10 years ago for god's sake! All versions of windows he tried back to windows 95 worked, without any configuration required.
The problem is that Linux cannot handle this hardware that is obviously able to be handled by windows created well before it was made because it can't handle 'compatible hardware'. This soundcard is obviously made to be compatible with the soundblaster standard, and the old versions of windows just see it as such AND WORK! If Linux is unable to handle that, and can't handle things that aren't EXACTLY what it's expecting, then it's F&*ked before it even gets off the ground because it will always have the problem of being 'a little behind'.
That doesn't cut it.
If linux can't identify a new soundcard as a soundblaster compatible and run with that until optimised drivers are created for it it's screwed.
If linux can't identify a digital camera as a standard 'mass storage device' and run with that until specific drivers are made for it (if they even need to be), then it's screwed.
All I'm seeing here is excuses, and that's why Linux is screwed, because the zealots all say:
"It's not a problem if you know what you're doing"
OR
"It's not a problem at all... why would you want to do that?"
OR, my favourite
"So, write a driver yourself"
This WILL NOT be the year of linux as long as this head up your arse attitude continues.
Look at creative.
You have the Soundblaster...or is it the SB16, SB AWE, SB32, SB Live! SB Audigy (1 or 2). Okay...all those pretty much are the same. But then you have other cards with completely seperate chips (ES1371 or something) also labeled as SB PCI.
Modems are pretty bad with this as well. Change a component and one number but call it the same product, and then make 20 special versions for OEM's.
What a pain.
To begin with.
1. He bought hardware without drivers, his mistake, should have checked
2. He complained to a whole lot of people who couldn't care less.
We didn't sell you the hardware its not our problem (you payed them for support, not us). If you have a problem with your hardware driver support complain to the hardware vendor.
READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE ASSHAT!
(Sorry, but if you're going to be insulting, you deserve it)
"Try this: plug a brand-new sound card into a Windows box and when Windows asks for drivers, don't supply them. Does the sound card work? No? Wow, Windows must suck! "
Did you read the article? Did you read how he installed Windows 95 on his brand new machine with the brand new motherboard which has brand new built in sound which didn't exist 9 years ago? Did you read how he didn't install ANY extra drivers, and guess what? IT WORKED!
So it IS the fault of Linux, it can't treat things as 'generic'... if it did what Windows does and installed a 'generic' Sound Blaster driver because the hardware is sound blaster compatible... then it'd work. Then, if the Linux crew can be bothered to create a specific driver for the soundcard then they can install that with whatever optimisations that might carry with it... but until that YOU COULD USE YOUR SOUNDCARD!
So your smartarsed comment only proves that Windows HAS got this part right... it can handle hardware it hasn't yet seen as treating it as 'generic' if it can... whereas Linux is a little... 'snooty' in this department.
I know a lot more about linux than my mother and I think I know how and where to look for information. I'd have more difficulty figuring out the compatibility of hardware on linux than I would on windows. When I can't find a compatibility information for windows for some arcane webcam a friend owns, I fault the manufacturer for not supplying adequate information. But I would be able to say from their website that the webcam would work with what the manufacturer supplies with its product, because I've been able to before with many other products. All the relevant information I get is from a single, logical site. The MS site doesn't come into it, because the power of MS has pretty much ensured that manufacturers tell us whether and how they're compatible.
Check it's supported before you buy.
If the webcam was brand new, I would look at the box. If there's an XP logo I know it will work, without a doubt. No testing required. No searching required. Me not being the shopping type, I find the box info on the product page. I expect it there and it is in almost all cases.
Some manufacturers don't support their products well at all, then I'm down to OEM hunting or mailing them a complaint; again no MS involvement. Manufacturer's fault. I wouldn't expect my mother to know what OEM stands for, let alone know how to find it. I steer her away from habitually getting poorly supported products, because she's about 20,000km away from me. She's constantly on the lookout for a techie in her area to help her when she gets something unsupported... (but that's another story).
Lets take a look at a webcam driver for linux. First place I'd look: the manufacturer's site. beforehand I might sift through the CD that it came with in some vague hope. In most cases it will be no more than one drivers if anything. Often there won't be any support or information pages on compatibility (let alone useability). Where to now? I don't instinctively fault the manufacturer for not having it. Why? Because for I'm not really expecting a driver from them. Who's forcing them to? Why would they bother?
I now must go to google and from there to the webcam linux module site(s) and a myriad of messageboards, newsgroups and howto pages. I don't expect an answer from anywhere that doesn't include "you'll need to recompile your kernel" by someone in jest or otherwise or something along the lines of "we haven't been able to test this yet, but it works with XYZ, so it should work with your device".
There's no single way of dealing with peripheral support on linux. There is on windows. MS made sure of that. Who's making sure that people can expect without chance that a driver exists for linux when they get something out of the box?
Wow, one piece of hardware isn't supported.. It's a shame, but shit happens..
It's not simply one piece. You've got blinders on if you don't see the bigger picture. A printer here, a sound card there are just the tip of the iceberg. Take any random less-prevalent USB device. Can you say by only checking the manufacturer's site if it will work on linux?
Yes all hardware supports Windows, but that's hardly an achievement by Windows, it just shows off the power of monopoly.
Power brings with it the ability to have an impact and achieve something. I wish linux had the power to achieve half the of the things MS has in the peripherals market.
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.
It is the job of those hardware providers to provide drivers, and can not be credited to M$ or be required of Linux. Besides, there are pc manufacturers that ship pcs with preinstalled linux and working sound cards, so this sound card problem obviously is a series of isolated incidents. In general this comparison with Achilles' heel is an over-exaggeration, and the word "hole", as in "security hole" is definitely out of context.
Further, this lack of drivers most likely involves ISA cards rather then PCI cards. ISA cards have been completely phased out for several yers.
This guy can write a real review or go fuck himself.
Distro XZ? Please. The first thing that comes to mind when I hear someone say shit like that is "Asshole". I applaud anyone who could manage to read the whole article. It must be great to have a brain that can shut off on a whim.
I was modded down to flamebait for mentioning sound card install issues wrt the groklaw documentation project. And heckled for not having an up-to-date-kernel (it is). Good to see there's actually someone else voicing their opinion and being heard.
--original newbie commentary was
i've used linux at work before. but never had to maintain/install it. i was there for the emacs and faster compiling. Anyway, as an end user, there's a lot of work to be done. Basic setup issues with redhat (fedora core) can be extremely annoying. I.e. Sound didnt work, and I couldnt find documentation through searching google (docs that actually worked). End user install issues:
1) Sound problems. XMMS and ut2004 works after many hours of research. Most everything else doesnt, i.e. Realplayer
2) Webcams. None of the defaults/helpers apps work with my (widely sold) logitech cam. I had to use the command-line and do research and create a little script to use my logitech camera.
3) video card setup needs more work. and now theres an nvidia splash screen that i really shouldnt have to figure out to disable. (app land) 4) Why doesnt mozilla install/configure plugins correctly/regularly? PLEASE? flash/real audio installs but either ownly recognizes some files or doesnt work at all. (documentation)
5) How am I(newbie) supposed to divine where to look for information/help? Google tends to direct searchers to links that involve pay-per-answer crap.
6) Updates--the red hat subscription system seemed nice. But registration, etc, paying for services, isnt what people expect to see when using a free system.
--------------
All your preview button are belong to hello kitty.
yellow journalism
n : sensationalist journalism [syn: {tabloid}]
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
SBLive cards of all soundscards are very well supported, and have been for at least 3 years.
I run multiple version of Slackware 8.0 through to 9.1, plus I still have a Mandrake version on a laptop
(which has ac97 onboard). I have never had a problem. I don't even use alsa,
with the either types. Creative drivers + OSS for SBLive and just OSS forthe ac97.
There is NO tweaking to be done. After all the work that Alan Cox and many others
have done, sound playing on Linux is rock solid!
IT really is video that is still a bit of a problem.
I can tell you this, my grandma could install Slackware and have to do nothing special to get the SBLive to work.
Personally I think MR. Langa is trolling again. I just cannot believe
that a person with his technical experience cannot get sound to work. He admitted having read the how-to's etc...
From Fred Langa's article:
I couldn't get XYZ to work with my sound card at all, even though I was testing XYZ on a brand new PC from a major vendor. The system was based on an utterly mainstream Intel motherboard with an on-board Intel sound system. This isn't some weird, off-brand system using unknown components: It's about as mainstream as it gets.
Wrong. No onboard sound chips are standard, and some are as impossible to work with as "winmodems", possibly for the same reason. Their configuration details are often proprietary secrets, and I expect that at least some of them are doing nasty background stuff with the CPU.
Linux does work with any Sound-Blaster compatible sound card.
How do I know these things?
I volunteer as a Build Instructor at a computer recycler (Free Geek, in Portland, OR). I assist newbies in learning the fine art of skimming the garbage flows for re-useable components, putting those together to make working PCs, and installing a variant of Debian on top of it all. Some of the results go to non-profit organizations but many go to the volunteers as reward for their services. Donate 24 hours to busting up recycled computers into steel, aluminum, and plastic bins and you get to take a Freekbox home (233 MHz, 96 MB ram, 4.5 GB HD, 15" monitor, speakers, CD player: all stuff that isn't going to the dump).
I have sometimes been able to get on board Crystal sound chips to work under Linux, though usually it means fussing with configuration settings. I have never been able to get a Yamaha sound chip to work and I have never heard of anyone who has. When we can't get the onboard sound to work, we disable it in BIOS and drop in a 16 bit sound card. We sell used ones that work just fine from our store for $2.00 for anyone who is doing this at home.
Fred Langa needs to look at appropriate technology resources when he ventures from the world of marketdroids into things Linux.
What he didn't reveal clearly enough is that the damn card does NOT work in Windows 95 or 98 as he claims it does. It only does so through a virtual machine that provides an emulated hardware layer.
His point is thus moot and shown for what it really is: FUD. Big, stinking, FUD of the worst kind.
Couple this with the fact that he does not give out the chipset model of the built-in sound card and I do not believe a word he wrote and neither should you.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
Replace the "put in a driver CD" step with "click the K menu, go in 'System Setting' sub-menu, click 'Printer Configuration' and answer a few simple questions"
Only to find that the answer to the "few simple questions" is that there exists no working driver for one or more of your printer and your scanner. This breaks switching a machine to GNU/Linux that had previously been 100 percent Windows with peripherals received as a gift before I had even thought of switching this machine.
There should be pun here with Linux on the mainframe, but I'm just too tired this morning...
My last two sound cards were declared "soundblaster compatible" on the package. Guess what, they weren't.
This is marketing bullshit, many soundcard chipsets provide a "soundblaster" or "soundblaster pro" emulation, but first after some special initialization, which you indeed need a native driver for. Those soundcards aren't in "soundblaster compatible" mode right after booting your computer, that's why the Linux soundblaster driver can't access them. Point.
[Device driver implementation] was one of the first IT chores to be outsourced. It's an easily defined bit of black box code - inputs and outputs and who cares what's in between as long as it works well.
So why do so many device manufacturers seem so reluctant to outsource development of device drivers to the free software community by providing the details of the "inputs and outputs" to the public?
Good grief - Nine linuxes. If it won't work for one, it's unlikely to work for any. The driver has to be written and if the manufacturer refuses to release the specs or write it themselves, it's hardly surprising. Hit this guy with a 'clue stick' please. Talk about dumb and dumber !!!
However, I'm also a bit surprised that someone who is seriously trying evaluate Linux and get a sound card to work didn't try either Mandrake or Red Hat.
Jeebus. Isn't the whole point that they shouldn't have to try two additional distros just to get their bleeping sound card to work? Who the hell cares that they didn't try Manfred Linux or Dilrod Linux?
For those who may be too dense to get my subtle sub-point, the names Manfred and Dilrod will mean just as much to most people as Mandrake and Red Hat, so I won't be a bit "surprised" that someone who is just trying to evaluate Linux will fail to try them out.
The point is this person tried several distros, they all failed. Was it the fault of the distro? Not really. Was it the fault of Linux? Not really. But the end user could care less whose fault it is. All they know is this supposedly wonderful and desktop-ready operating system has failed them. Linux just ain't ready for everyone, despite what we would like to believe. This is not something that should just be sidestepped by telling people to try another distro. Unless you know of some new magical distro that will solve 100% of problems like this for every user.
To top it off, this person appears to have gone much farther than most people would ever go. Last time I had problems like that with Linux after trying only a couple of distros, I just said "eff this" and went back to BeOS. Not everyone has the time, money or patience to try out nine different distros.
I agree with this guy 100%, windows only has a small library of sound drivers. I've had problems with sound in windows before and it was caused by windows not having the drivers. For pretty much all of the hardware I've seen, windows drivers are included, but on the other hand no linux ones. The problem is people who use linux have to make their own dirvers since most companies do not and that is why there is a lack of support for windows hardware.
For God's sake I have a Aureal Vortex card and it's worked with Linux for hmm, well I bought this machine 4 years ago, so it's worked the whole time.
compared to Windows. Yes this is probably due to lack of support from hardware vendors, but it is still a problem. I am a Linux newbie, but have been a PC "techie" type guy for 15 years now and have tried Linux on my home PC's several times, but have always went back to Windows in frustration due to sound card issues. The specifics really don't matter here, but I'll list them later anyway (I still REALLY want to re-load Linux on my home PC's.) The important point is that only recently have the mainstream sound blaster type cards loaded properly in the Linux installs I have tried. Even then, there are odd issues and fixing them is MUCH harder than it should be. What I think needs to happen is for it to be easy enough to get the basics running and then let you pick-up the rest in a hobby mode. Something like a generic driver that just works with a GUI config and a nice help that points you to the actual config files. This way you can get some quick positive feedback and then slowly assimilate the details. Fro myself, I started with my previous PC and tried a couple of Red Hat and Mandrake with my previous PC and its SBLive card, but could never get it to work. I even went to Creative Lab's web site and "gave em an earful" about the lack of Linux drivers. A while later I got a newer PC (didn't even buy a MS OS as the hardware I bought was shown as being supported on Mandrake's web site) but ended up buying XP. A version or so later (by the way the versions I tried originally were not free downloads-I payed for retail boxes to get the manuals hoping it would help-NOT!) I did get it to work with my new PC's Audigy card and a nice surround sound system/ This was great, I'd play DiabloII (within a Windows emulator) on the net and brag about running Linux to anyone who would listen in hopes of encouraging more people to try it and create a larger user base-thus encouraging hardware vendros to supply drivers/info. However, I moved last year and my PC is in a different room than my surround sound, so I broke-out the old Cambridge soundworks 4.1 digital speakers and guess what, my PC is now mute in Linux! I cheked around the web and found lots of people with the same issue. Apparently getting something that requires a checkbox in Windows (digital output) to run in Linux involves something akin to sacrificing a heard of goats, changing the setting on several config files with acronyms I've never heard of before (ALSA, etc) and lots of luck! So for now, I am going to wait for Mandrake 10.0 to be publicly downloadable (I have given them enough of my money until they make somthing this simple work or at least build a help system that is user friendly to English speaking people) and try again. If it works, I'll but it but not before.
Fred has been dancing in the streets and promoting microsoft products for years. Not being able to get his soundcard working under Linux is just another example of Fred's expertise' Years ago after subscribing to the Langa List which was recommended by a friend, I quickly grew tired of Fred Langa's bitchin' and his advertisements in his newsletter. Can you belive this bastard makes money by selling subscriptions to this lama-, I mean langa-list ++Plus or whatever he calls it now? Only diehard MS idiots still read the langa list. I wonder if Fred even posted a message on any of the Linux mailing list, asking for help with his soundcard problem. Who? Fred Langa ask for help, nah...never happen in a million years. He's an expert you know.
Damn! This XYZ Distro sucks. Write it down folks. Stay the hell away from XYZ! It doesn't support soundcards.
In all seriousness, what the hell does the distro have to do with soundcard drivers? How about taking the first step and learning how to install a driver in Linux? He can install an OS but he can't do some research on Alsa and OSS? I suppose that with his logic... If his new soundcard worked under 2000 but not XP, then he should downgrade to 2000 right?
As a new linux user (exactly one week ago today, how cute, right?), sound was the least of my worries. My gfx card wouldn't provide any 3d acceleration until I found and installed the kernel source (maybe you take it for granted, but as a new user, I didn't even know at first how to find out what kernel version I was runnig). Then just run through a few jibberish terminal commands, a super friendly text-based x86config something or other which asks questions that I wasn't sure how to answer, and voila, everything was peachy!
:-\
Or installing software. Since I'm new, I still don't understand what software will work on my machine with my desktop environment with my kernel with my distro (this makes me annoyed just thinking about it). What's the difference between a redhat rpm and a SuSE rpm? Do SuSE rpms actually exist, or am I limited only to software that I want to compile myself or get through YaST? In windows, it's pretty darn easy for most programs (setup.exe).
It would be very easy to turn this post into a bitch fest, but the prior two paragraphs not withstanding, it's not what I intended. I'm frustrated but knew I would be going into it. Frustrated != writing it off. I haven't rebooted into windows since I first installed SuSE 8.1. However, I have s small bit of knowledge, patience, forgiveness, and the desire to learn that other folks may not have. The whole point of my post gets to this: it just seems silly to me to point at sound card compatability as "the one achilles heel" of linux
I couldn't get my sound blaster audigy to work at all. Even tho creative released drivers for linux I had to do all this funky recompiling, reinstalling, script editing and crazy stuff. I consider myself a talented programmer, but even after a week of linux tinkering I was TOTALLY lost getting my damn sound card to work! I popped a friends hard drive into my machine to fix something for him. Windows 98 and my spankin new (i guess 2002) sound card works perfectly fine. Granted there was no EAX or 5.1, but it worked enough :-)
Like it or not linux freaks, but this is a real problem if you want to go "mainstream"
http://brandonbloom.name
I smoke Many a car in My slushbox.. but on the track, I would *NOT* be driving a slushbox.. not enough control for my liking... sometimes you just gotta downshift.
One problem with his "variety" of Linux distributions is that several of them are Debian derived - He tried Debian, Xandros, Knoppix Knotix and Morphix, all Debian~ish.
I agree that trying RedHat, Fedora or Mandrake may have helped out.
I'm a Mandrake user myself, and sound is usually not too hard to get working. However, I do have a big problem with the current state of things with ALSA - as of the version that's with Mandrake 9.2, it's buggy, "doesn't play well with others" (as in it has device-locking problems). I'm currently using the OSS drivers instead of the ALSA drivers on my 2 main Linux workstations - a generic Intel PC w/ SBLive! and a Dell i8500 w/ Intel sound, because neither of them worked reliably with the ALSA driver.
I'm going to try Mandrake 10.0 on one of them soon, I've read in some threads that ALSA support is supposed to be improved in the 2.6.x kernel. I hope it is...
No, that demonstrates that the distros you tried have issues with *ONE* single piece of hardware. How is this broad AT ALL?
I haven't had issues with sound in any distro in the past 2 years at least, with many different soundcards, including some professional home studio oriented ones.
Besides that, hardware in linux is completely distro independant. Hardware support (with a few exceptions) is 99% kernel dependant. Download your kernel, configure your driver support, go.
for me its personal. I (and scores of other people like me) spent a LOT of time and effort desperatly fighting IBM's FUD and risking our careers for the chance to have a flexbile, configurable system on our PC's and in our networks. I can't tell you how many user groups meetings I attended (from 3Com 3+open until it evolved into the MS NT netowkring user group) where we freely gave our best ideas and invaluable feedback to make MS's network products better. You all know what happened then: MS got greedy. They decided that a TINY percentage of casual piracy prevention was worth a HUGE break in faith with their customers (XP activation.) Anyone who has ever fought some odd PC problem knows that the last thing you need is one more FRIKKIN' thing to worry about (especially if its when you are working late or on a weekend) especially something as assinine as a software key. While this is relatively easy to use now, its almost guaranteed those jokers in Redmond will eventually decide to list it as "unsupported" and either completely stop automatic activations or make them hard enough that most people will give up in frustration and be forced to buy the latest greatest MS OS (and enjoy the new DRM "features" - Oh I just can't wait.) So, to finish-up my rant, its because I beleive that Linux is the OS that has the best chance against MS on the desktop and MS must be overthrown. Growlor
I know anything pro-BSD is consider a troll on /., but at least hear me out.
After having used Linux for a few years, I tried out OpenBSD, and hardware support was a major reason. It was operating system bliss compared to Linux or Windows.
The kernel detects your hardware when you boot-up, and loads the appropriate drivers
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
not linux, when 90% of the desktop market is windows and your soundcard hardware vendor only writes drivers for that os and doesnt publish open specs. This is hardly a limitation of linux.
as always, pull your head out of your ass and wake up.
The road between democracy and tyranny is paved with secrecy in the name of security.
I know anything pro-BSD is consider a troll on /., but at least hear me out.
After having used Linux for a few years, I tried out OpenBSD, and hardware support was a major reason. It was operating system bliss compared to Linux or Windows.
The kernel detects your hardware when you boot-up, and loads the appropriate drivers. If you smapped your soundcard, you wouldn't have to re-configure a damn thing, everything would just work. Same goes for networking cards. Well, you do have to change a letter in one config file, but that's a hell of a lot better than having to reconfigure and recompile a linux kernel, or mess around with modules.conf every time.
In Linux, you have to spend a lot of time and effort to get your hardware working. In OpenBSD, it will be detected and working from the instant you install it, and in the off chance that it isn't working, there's no driver for it.
Some people here are claiming that vendor support is needed, or lots of documentation, or whatever else, and OpenBSD is a perfect example to prove that none of that in necessary. Every piece of hardware is usually one of a dozen distinct chipsets, with a few minor bugfixes for different sub-sets of the chipset. People that make Linux drivers just don't do things that way, which is why it's such a huge hassle. The same could be said of the Linux kernel itself, but that's another rant.
I agree that Linux hardware support is sub-par, but I needed to make it equally clear that most of the solutions being paraded are snakeoil, and the BSDs are proof that Linux can do better.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
You are a manufacturer of sound cards. You decide to offer a driver for Linux. M$ tells you they will no longer include a driver for your card on their disk. They revoke your right to put "XP Compatable" on your box. Windows users stop buying your product. You go out of business. It's called a MONOPOLY folks!
By the perception of illusion, we experience reality
Well, duh, he expects you to read his mind. After all, he expects free software developers to be able to just know how sound cards work despite NDAs and all the sounds of silence you get from the manufacturer.
Let's take a guess. Intel chipset that works with Windoze 95... is it a 386? I know that I can't run XP on a real 386, 486 or even a 586. That cinches it.
Really, it's hard to take this guy seriously. He claims to have done a web search but did not come across any of the sound card support pages in the time it took him to load 9 Linux distros and four versions of windoze? He must have been working on it for a week but did not find:
It's hard to believe.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If the sound card doesn't work with Linux, it's clearly the fault of the sound card manufacturer.
You can download it and test out all your existing hardware.
The FUD is fake.
One download, one reboot, all your questions are answered.
And if you don't like it, nothing on your computer has changed.
I think you might do better reading the article instead of just typing your uninformed rants.
In the ARTICLE, he stated that he tried a bit, but then resorted to VIRTUALIZING software.
The bug might have been in Linux, or the bug might have been in the software he was using to virtualize his hardware. When he could have just booted the Knoppix CD on his machine.
Personally, I've had almost 100% success with booting Knoppix, including sound.
All you Linux-hating 'bots are the same. BASIC troubleshooting would indicate that you boot WITHOUT the virtualization layer.
If the bug was in the virtualization software, then NONE of the Linux distributions would have worked. (Hmmmm, that seems to be exactly what he said happened.)
The easy solution would be to try Linux on the machine itself. But no one can do that because he didn't say what his hardware was. I wonder why someone would skip over such a BASIC item. Maybe because he wanted to write an article about how bad Linux was?
And you Linux-haters just eat that shit up.
I'm typing this on a brand new Gentoo box that I bootstrapped last week with a 2.6 kernel. Granted I did compile my own kernel, something I've done many many times, and correctly include the driver for my Santa Cruz sound card and ALSA support. Sound is working fine, I'm listening to The Grateful Dead on a shoutcast stream as I type this. There were no problems whatsoever, it just worked, out of the box.
Well okay there was one weird problem, I had to emerge alsamixer and fiddle with the levels because for somereason this card defaults having the left channel output set to zero. Go figure. A minor although slightly annoying hangup.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
As in "Listen (hear) to what this person has to say!"
Or "It's worth hearing this person out!"
Etc.
It does not mean "This place; this place!" or "Over here!" as your spelling seems to indicate.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Now, granted, not everyone has an Ultra80 or RS/6000 sitting on their desks, but those who do, have money to blow. Why don't most companies write for those architectures?
Probably, because supporting 95% of their customers seems good enough to them - better than paying for a pack of hackers to debug a PA-RISC / SPARC / MIPS / PowerPC / x86 / x86-64 driver for a commodity component with razor-thin margins.
Given that the Linux is the kernel and a distro is just a series of programs combined with that kernel, it seems ridiculous that they tried 9 distros with approximately the same kernel to get the card working. The problem doesn't exist in Linux, either. If the companies who make the cards don't write the drivers, nothing will get done.
volunteer work is always biased in favor of satisfice of the creator and to the consumer. corporate work is always biased in favor of the bottom line, which is more correlated to the favor of the consumer than volunteer work. this bias cannot be overcome without selling out or drastically changing the way humans behavior works. sorry.
Philosophistry
At my office I seem to inherit all the hardware that DOESN'T work. It's not that it is actually dead or anything, it's that the company that made it has most likely vanished, and so new drivers are not available. When I plug these devices into my faithful Linux laptop, it just works fine. And I'm not exactly talking old hardware (like the SCSI2Go PCMCIA Future Domain SCSI controller, which I've had since about 1996 sometime), but NEW hardware (like a USB-to-Serial adapter that was released in late 2001).
Funnily enough, the only thing that I have hardware-wise that doesn't work with Linux is a Mustek gSmart 350 digital camera, and that has experimental support now with gphoto2, so I'm not too fussed. With any luck it'll be working soon.
Creative SoundBlaster products don't
follow the damn PCI spec. It seems
that some Intel chipsets had faster
timing than their spec (which is fine)
and creative made their hardware depend
on the faster timing. (Which is wrong.)
The Creative SoundBlaster in your
machine is itself crappy hardware.
I have a simple script to get that working in less than 5 minutes. If you are interested, marktaff AT comcast DOT net
is to set up a call the manufacturer day. Every one on slashdot calls a manufacturer that they know doesn't support linux and asks if their most expensive product suports it. When they say no or try to tell you that you don't want linux you tell them that what you really don't want is their product.
Not to mention if it was a new card 95 certainly would have only supported a mere fraction of it's features with the default vanilla install...who cares if it beeps when it's supposed to sing...this guy is a fucking liar...if he wasn't he'd have said what card it was. But he didn't because people whould have proved him wrong...this is just a bunch of FUD
This guy states that cost is comparable to windows. Note that the licence states he can install it on unlimited home computers for his/her personal use + one commercial machine. All for $89.
For that he gets a Debian based system which opens up all of the myriad of Debian packages for his use. Cheap at half the price.
From the Xandros licence:
A. Xandros Desktop ("Software Product") is a modular operating system made up of individual software components that were created by various individuals and entities ("Software Programs"). The End User may install the Software Product on unlimited home computers of his or hers for non-commercial use and one commercial use computer.
Wow! Hardware DESIGNED for a particular operating system doesn't work with another. There is a more hardware that only works with 1 OS than you can shake a stick at. I'm sure the author couldn't get his cell phone to work with a different embedded OS either if he tried. "My Motorola just won't turn on after I installed the boot code from the Casio. It must mean that Casio doesn't care about me... Waahhhh!!! Waahhhh!!! I don't understand anything!!! Someone designed somthing without me in mind??? FU idiots! That fucking hardware was designed as cheaply as possible to work with 1 OS and nothing more. They made a pile of money off of it. They didn't choose to build a self-aware system that can co-exist with every other system. How hard is that to understand? OH I understand!!! The author owns a particular stock and wants it to mature more aggressively.
Nor did he try Mandrake, which markets itself as the most consumer-friendly distro, as well as the easiest install and configuration. I think you're right about your last point, and they probably did work but didn't support his thesis.
barzelay.net
It was good strategy for them to bring it to Windows 95, because it was Last Windows what supported Gravis UltraSound (GUS) Soundcard.
It still works with Linux kernel 2.4 - I haven't tested 2.6 series yet.
Trying nine distros to fix a driver? That's like comparing performance of different color options of the same car model. They're all the same. Trying Knoppix vs some-basic-distro (RH/Mandr/Deb) would've made more sense.
:-)
The articles "achilles heel" is the same "lacking driver support" that has been around for ages. If your buying a linux box you might want to buy known linux-compatible hardware. Nothing new but the author seems to have some problems grasping the situation. If there's a device whose manufacturer doesn't share the data required to make a driver and no-one wants to spend months to reverse-engineer it, there will not be support, never ever, regardless of how many years windows has supported it.
But I wouldn't say that windows unilaterally has things better: I have a batch of creative CT4810 (SBPCI64 series) that have no official drivers anymore. If you plug it into a new WinXP it won't recognize nor work!
As for trying virtual PCs, that's a load of crap. Virtual Machines generally have only mock-up devices that emulate a simple well supported model. What VPC would use a virtual sound device that wasn't supported by the operating systems it's supposed to run?
Back at my school years we run our assignements on virtual computer - e.g. with pencil and paper.
I have a MoBo with an Aureal Audigy 8810-based audio chip on it. It is hit-or-miss whether I'll be able to get it to work in Mandrake (from various Linux audio websites).
As soon as I solder together a cable for my speakers that my FINE puppy chewed through, I'll work on it, and probably buy a Soundblaster Live card, then...
About hardware that works with FREE Linux and not with Windows XP. Example:
IBM Home&Away PCMCIA network card.
Another example:
Nomad II used as USB disk corrupts files under XP,
works fine under Linux.
And this guy should have stated his sound card
as most DO work.
After a little fiddling about with the settings, I have both my soundcards (SBlaster Live! 5.1, Midiman Delta 44) working just fine in Linux Mandrake 10. In windows you have to install a driver. Linux setup installs the driver for you. It's just that sometimes, the volumes may be turned all the way down as default. All you need to do is turn them up and voila! Sound in Linux. It relatively simple isn't it? pfft.
RebateFX.com - Spread rebates for Forex traders
The original poster misses a BIG, IMPORTANT point: that Linux developers usually have to reverse engineer hardware specs for writing drivers. Take win-modems for example: they were designed to work on Win only and every win-modem added to the Linux compatibility list is both a big success and a whole lot of time wasted because of the manufacturer of the card (video, audio) doesn't release tech specs of their product to Linux developers.
Further to this and FYI:
/dev/dsp, and FreeBSD will give it to them all and mix everything down in-kernel. Works like a hot damn.
FreeBSD 5 will autodetect your sound card(s), load the appropriate drivers, AND automatically multiplex the devices and do in-kernel mixing.
That means you can start all the programs/sound daemons/etc. you want, all using
...that doesn't work with Linux, can I get a story on slashdot too? I mean seriously, he tried nine different versions of Linux with the same sound card, and it never occured to him, that it could be the sound card that was responsible. In my case it is AFAIK an original Sound Blaster card, which is in the computer. And when playing sound it starts fine, but suddenly the computer locks up completely. But I don't whine, I start debuging the problem myself. This particular scenario is hard to debug, so I haven't fixed it yet. Longer time ago, when I had problems with an ALS120 sound card, it didn't take me much time to modify the kernel so it would work. Remember, the Linux developers don't have access to every piece of hardware in existence. But all hardware developers have access to Linux, they just don't care about it. So if you are the only person who have that hardware and care about the problem, you have to help making it work.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
If you want Linux to work out of the box, you buy Linux pre-installed on Linux-compatible hardware; there are plenty of vendors that offer that. That's the same as you do with Windows or Macintosh or any other operating system. If you try to install Linux on hardware that wasn't designed for it, it will often work very well, but you may have to fiddle.
Over the last few years, I personally have had more problems installing Windows than Linux. The last machine I installed Windows on, Windows didn't recognize the graphics card, the wireless card or the sound card (it was a bare-bones machine) and I had to hunt down drivers on the Internet for both. The Linux distribution (SuSE), on the other hand, just booted up, installed itself, and everything worked right away.
And lots of hardware will never work with Linux (or MacOS or Solaris, for that matter) because it has never been documented sufficiently by its vendors. Some hardware also is so poorly designed that you wouldn't want to run it with Linux.
Let me fill in a gap for you by saying the Sound Card on my Linux box, some old ESS card, wasn't detected upon install by Mandrake, and there doesn't appear to be an option I could find to add one post-install. Knoppix, for the record, detects the same card fine. Seems to me that, for any given distro and sound card, YMMV.
The only reason a manufacturer will pay a driver developer to writer Linux drivers is if it is financially viable.
How do they know how many people want to (or already do through an unofficial driver) use their product in Linux?
The first thing I did when I got my Highpoint rocket raid controller was to e-mail them and thank them for supporting FreeBSD.
Auto-check your UK lottery lines
Three items about this article that makes me think the writer is all about BS! i. Windows 3.1 - that he said he installed on this system. Windows 3.1 can't read drives larger than 8 GB. hmmm... sounds fishy. Where can you buy a modern pc with only a 8gb hard drive? ii. The author of this dribble did not specify his hardware platform. He wrote this article based on tests with a 'new' PC. Considering it's becoming harder, and harder to find a 2.2Ghz system I would beLIEve he's full of it. Why you ask? Try it yourself - Windows 98 will crash boom ( yes even more than before) when installed on a 2ghz system. iii. Hey WinNT 4 was released about the same time as Win95. Knowing that WinNT 4 (no service packs) could only recognize disks 8GB or smaller(yes I know WinNT 4 SP1 could) one could assume win95 had this same limitation (I don't recall the limitations (if any) on disk size for Win95) -- therefore he probably ran into this same issue installing Win95. So the question becomes where did he buy the system with only a 8GB hard drive in it? I was disapointed when I found a link to the same article on www.osnews.com -- now it's really sad to find it on /.
My bad, you're right. Misread it...
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
Are live CDs a security threat to corporate desktops? A user can login as root from a live distribution running on their CD and modify restricted configuration files on their PC.
Don't know about SELinux, but this seems to be the case in my experience.
Dude, he probly just forgot to unmute alsa or whatever deamon he was using. Most are muted by default and you have to manually unmute it to hear sound.
linux sucks and everyone who uses it is a complete loser with nerd glasses and buck teeth. Hey linux lusers: you suck, also take more showers pls!!!!!
I am fiddling with Linux since '98, and I am Debian cultist since '99. I've tried out SuSE and Red Hat, too. I'm never going back to M$ for anything.
:)
Yes, I did have a hard time getting my sound to work, because of ALSA and Debian's ALSA configuration. But my AC97 crappy onboard sound works well, my old SB16 compatible works well, and I have great players for sound (XMMS, mpg321) and video (mplayer, xine) that can kick the shit out of anything shipping with Windows... and a lot of commercial mainstream software, too!
BTW, I needed to unload ALSA and load OSS drivers to play Quake2... missing mmap feature from the driver at that time. But still no show-stopper.
I do not know why having problems with sound is a killer, either, and I am a BIG fan of music, and have ripped my CD collection to MP3. Sound is only important for listening to music and playing games. The 1st one you can use your CD-Player for (most likely Joe Average User does not rip CDs, and getting CDs to work in computer drives gets harder all the time, you should know), and maybe even need to, and the 2nd one is the Windows/DOS/console domain anyway!
Having a 500 - 1200 Euro computer (depending on the configuration and where you buy it), and making trouble about a 20$ sound adapter (and investing two days of time, and installing Slackware twice, uhhh!) does sound pretty much like trolling to me.
Besides, commercial driver offers suck often enough even from the good hardware providers - TerraTec! Needed to delete files to stop it hanging up IRQs in DOS that killed Windows sound... hm. Should have returned the whole computer, and asked the money back from Billygruff Gates, shouldn't I? That's actually a bizarre thought IMO.
With ALSA being finally the officially adopted sound standard solution, with a really nice archtitecture and professional sound capabilities, Linux sound is actually capable enough to do some real stuff with it, where supported.
Oh! And if the card was a clone, most likely it would have worked, but the correct driver wasn't loaded. The PCI device info would show the real manufacturer, and a driver for the chipset would have been most likely be available, but maybe not loaded during autoprobing. A complete autoprobing devince information database BTW is the only reason I could think of why one could try installing several dists to try solve the problem. Simply trying to load - one after another - all sound modules may have accomplished more. OK, just a guess, but a worthy guess!
Had to do this with a "Linux compatible" ethernet, where the manufacturer doesn't even name the driver to use... but the card works fine!
My 2 cents... Euro cents!
Who's this mysterious "you" everyone keeps refering to? Look there's two groups of people. There's the people who got into Linux for all the right reasons, and help build Linux up to were it is today. Then there's the other group. The one's that want to beat microsoft so badly they could almost taste it. Here comes a seeming white knight out of nowere. A knight that unlike IBM, or Netscape, or any of the others might actually have a chance. So here they rally around Linux, patting him on the back and telling everyone how wonderful he is, BUT. He needs to ditch the cheap armour, and dress up in this nice shiny gold one, and he needs a new majestic steed. That old broken down mare will never do. Image is everything when fighting the evil dragon you know. But for our poor old knight, this group has suggestions, unfortunately they are rather cheap, and don't want to contribute in any way to these "improvements". So what's our knight to do? Listen to one group, and end up becoming something he's not, or be true to what he is, and tell the other group "I'm fine the way I am. Why can't you just accept me?".
I have a pretty normal sound card which doesn't work with Windows, but works with Linux just fine. And I'll bet that if I were to install all the other versions of Windows, they wouldn't work with it either.
Who moved my sig?
That card is supported. I use to have that card before I got rid of it, and I use to be on the mailing list. The author of the driver had ZERO help from Guillmont (kind of like my PowerVR card(1), so I spent over a year without sound. but yes it does work.
(1) The PowerVR wasn't well supported under Windows eithe when Windows decided to move on. Me and a lot of other people complained about that on a now defunt web forum. The graphics quality was outstanding, but the support wasn't.
$90 + 2 days pay? Why not do what the rest of us do and get a $10 sound card? Motherboards designed to run on Windows platforms (did he forget to mention the Windows install CD?) often have problems with on motherboard hardware. A cheap NIC & sound card usually solve all of your hardware problems. It certainly costs less then 2 days pay. FYI, Windows costs more then $90. Last I saw 2003 enterprise server (with simular features to Linux) lists for $5k, limited to 5 users of course.
have you ever tried buying some shitty taiwanease crap ? You know, the kind of "4.0 sound card for under 20$".
If you're happy enough, the crappy Windows 9x drivers that are shipped will work actually. But by the time you switch to Windows XP, the company will be out of buisness, and their drivers will be only compatible with Windows 9x and NT 4.
Except for some very new chipset (that are still kept secret by their companies, but that are already getting some reverse engeneering by some young hacker) or very old and obscure, you can actually have more luck finding ALSA drivers, than Windows XP drivers for your outdated soundcard.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
My Sound Blaster Live! worked in Mandrake up until around 2-3 years ago, and hasn't since.
So, you missed every single post on every Mandrake mailing list covering the SB Live! driver?
Mandrake switched the SBLive! to ALSA in 9.0 or 9.1 IIRC, and by default, ALSA mutes the output on the card (to prevent doing something nasty), and until 9.2 it was not being unmuted by default.
However, if you simply used any supplied mixer and unmuted the card, you would have had working sound. (I think there might have been another issue, to do with the analog output jack or something, but google will tell you in under a minute).
Why did Mandrake switch the SBLive to ALSA? Because then it supports up to 32 simultaneous output streams and can load Midi sound fonts (again, you will need to google, since there isn't a GUI for setting this up yet).
So, I wonder if the review had similar issues.
IE, blaming the OS instead of at least doing some research into their hardware and how to utilise it. Yes, I agree this should not be necessary, but it's a lot better than not having working drivers at all.
So, other posters will note that Creative provided drivers for the outdated sound system and some utilities, and due to the information available, the ALSA people provided working drivers and ensured that all features worked. But, ALSA integration work isn't complete, so in some cases you may have to fiddle with the mixer.
Yes, I spend about one hour getting my SBLive! to work well under Mandrake 9.1. I don't have the box at present, so I can't tell you much about Mandrake 9.2 and 10.0 and the SBLive and whether things have gotten better, but judging from the fact that there were no bug reports for the SBLive for the 10.0 development, I would guess it hasn't gotten worse.
Installing a beta of SuSE 9.1 _almost_ did the trick, but now I get sound only in one channel. And the other if I use the audio in front plug. Running from a Live-CD or Windows works fine.
Where is the 'Configure ALSA from scratch' guide???
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
I upgraded my sound card from an Ensoniq 1371 (SoundBlaster PCI 128) to a Terratec DMX XFire 1024. When I play anything (including Windows' sounds) in Windows XP, the machine spontaneously reboots. Works perfectly in Linux.
I tried using the motherboard's inbuilt sound (CMIPCI) in XP, instead. It works ok most of the time, but occasionally games lock up. Turning off sound in games fixes the lock ups. Works perfectly in Linux.
I was a bit sick of this, so I removed my flashy new sound card (the Terratec) and replaced it with the old Ensoniq. Playing sounds in XP gives a loop over the first approx 0.2s of the sound, forever.
So I'm just not using XP anymore. It doesn't seem to support mainstream sound cards. Linux supports them out-of-the-box, and I didn't even have to download a driver for the Terratec.
Is this XP's achilles heel? No. It's just good old fashioned incompatibility problems. There are probably hundreds of thousands of different devices for PCs. They are combined with each other in a myriad of variations. No operating system is able to resolve every conflict that occurs.
I'm hoping that in the future, there will be more standards for hardware devices, following on from Good Things like USB Mass Storage, which has allowed people to carry USB flash devices around without too much worry of them not working on some PCs.
Rik
My first experience with linux was RedHat 5.1. It was many years ago, maybe 6 or so, and I was only in my early teens. It was installed on an old machine in my house as a firewall by a friend of my father who was a real genious. It did have limited UNIX experience, so I wasn't completely lost, but I didn't know anything really and never tried to do much with it. A year or two later, I decided to really take a stab at linux, and I actually went out and bought a copy of RedHat 6 in the store. I was hoping that the support you get by buying the boxed version would be helpful with any problems...it wasn't.
The machine I was installing it on(dual boot) had a Realtek network card and a WinModem, niether of which worked. I had linux running, but no internet or networking capabilities. I tried to find drivers, asked for help from redhat.com, and even switched out the network card with another, but to no avail. All I could do with linux now was use the gcc compilier(which I rarely used at the time) or play the games that came with XWindows(the games were pretty fun, actually). That was experience two with linux.
A while later, maybe another year or two, I finally built a new machine for myself out of a combination of spare and new parts. I decided to try again, this time with RedHat 7. Most things worked, besides the sound card of course, and I was somewhat happy. I now had a functioning linux boot on my computer. I played around with server settings and things for about a week, then never booted into it again. There just wasn't anything in it for me. I hadn't coded in years and I didn't need to run a server or anything. All my games and programs I knew were on Windows, and linux equivalents either did not exist or were not nearly as good. With no reason to use it, the linux boot sat there for no reason.
Skip to about a year and a half or so ago. I am now in college, and start having limited reasons to use linux. I wanted to learn the system well, and I could only do that by using it. So I load up RedHat 9. It installed and worked fine. Every so often I needed to do something, like coding, and its was there for me. I logged onto linux once a month or so, for one reason or another. I was kinda annoyed with myself. I wanted to learn linux, but I never seemed to use it since windows had everything I wanted and linux was lacking in many areas. Finally when I purchased my new laptop about 6 months ago, I decided to do linux only. However, the video, wireless networking, and touchpad all barely worked. It took me hours of scouring the net and 3 installs just to get XWindows to even load. I finally got some functionality, but nothing beyond basic video and crappy touchpad. It wasn't good enough for me, so I reformatted the system and installed Windows 2000 on it. I also saved some space and installed Fedora, which seemed not to have all the old problems with video and such. However, with windows on the machine, I only find myself using linux when I need something windows doesn't have, or doesn't have something better, which is rare. I'm sorry to say this, but linux is not worth the effort for me. Unless I can get flawless installs, complete device supportage, many mainstream games and the ease of use that comes with Windows, I can't seem myself using linux. Regardless of the reason, linux is still way behind Windows in some areas, and until they catch up, myself and others won't be willing to switch for our desktop use.
if you:
1) Use a sane repository. Check with apt-cache for the big blunders(unresolved dependencies) you need to stay away from.
2) Behave according to the rules of any package management: do not install software that other packages depend on outside of the package manager.
Then you will be fine wrt to dependency hell and security updates.
now please quit wining about mom and pop, windows breaks down with them too: the computer can not improve their stupidity anyway. There are storms of email virusses out there to prove that.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
OK, before I go any further there are a couple of points I should make: (1) I haven't read the original article because, well frankly because I've got better things to do and I just can't be bothered. (2) I'm not a Linux advocate: I use Windows almost exclusively and am generally quite happy with it, although I CAN use Linux when I need to. However, my one experience with Linux and sound cards was back in April 2000, when I installed SuSE Linux 6.4 on my (new at the time) 600 MHz Athlon, which is kitted out with a Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live! card -- I can't remember exactly what version of this card. I booted from the DVD and used YAST2 to install, and guess what? The sound worked first time with no problems at all... and this was 4 (FOUR!!!!!) years ago when Linux was MUCH less user friendly than it is now. I don't know what sort of card this guy was using, but I have to doubt his competence if with either RH9 or the latest version of SuSE he can't get the thing to make some sort of noise. Honestly! I don't want to be rude but where do they get these people?
Because somebody posted, that ALSA is the solution to the mess. Alsa is a mess on its own. First you have the drivers, fine, then you have a butload of cryptic config files, additionally you have a daemon process and on top of that because alsa does not enforce multiplexing on driver level you have to add your usual sound daemon which basically blocks out the low level driver interface for non daemon apps. I still havent figured how you can plug a software midi synth on top of this mess so that it works seamlessly for all the other apps. This thing is hilarious. OSS did defenitely many things wrong, but one thing it did right, you just started the driver and you had sound or not! What we would need probably would be something like that ( I posted this on osnews also) start soundcard driver start optional midi driver for the software synth, and be done... No daemon processes no sound servers nothing... Alsa is a typical piece of total overdesign on the user level, it might be excellent for sound technitians but from a user point of view this thing is even a bigger mess than the XFree configuration!
I honestly never had a problem with getting basic sound working under linux. Not with my SB Live or with this integrated VIA soundcard in my laptop. What I do have a problem with on linux is getting midi to work or getting multiple programs to use sound at the same time.
Also the sound servers really suck, I recently switched to KDE with arts and I had to shut down arts because it seems that when I use arts output my laptop just deadlocks after a while and I have to push the power button to shut down the laptop.
I am using ALSA so that might be the problem. (Maybe arts doesn't like ALSA) The only shame is all the native KDE apps don't have sound now I killed arts so suggestions are welcomed.
I'm using a fully up to date gentoo FYI.
I haven't used ESD for ages, but when I used it I hated it just as much as I hate arts now.
The way to corrupt a youth is to teach him to hold in higher value them who think alike than those who think differently
Please read the article:
I understand he said Win9X, Win2K and the rest supported the sound card - under emulation (probably VMWare), while Linux wasn't supported "on the bare machine".
If anyone used VMWare, he/she should know that the sound system of VMWare is emulated as (usually) a Sound Blaster 32. And of course you can run linux (with sound) in that configuration (I do).
If the comparison was to be fair, he should have made all installs on "the bare hardware", or under the "emulated environment", not compare apples and oranges.
Ok so Windows 95 supported your soundcard or printer or whatever -but its not like Mircrosoft wrote the drivers for every printer and soundcard so that their OS would support them!
The manufacturers of whatever periferal wrote the windows drivers for it.
Currently they (manufacturers) tend not to (although some do and good on them!) write linux drivers for periferals, this is a shame but as it becomes a more widely recognized desktop OS - which it is doing - this may change.
So linux would be ready for the desktop if hardware manufacturers wrote their own damn drivers instead of waiting for the linux community to do it free for them ?
Its not true though really is it, there would still be pleanty of times that required cli intervention, there would still be all those stupid copy&paste issues between gtk+qt+ other apps like mozilla and opera which seem to have yet another clipboard independant of X
I've tried to get some friends to adopt linux for their needs in past and everytime issues arrise, cli is required and they get scared and start wimpering about going back to m$
to me its definately _not_ ready for the luser desktop, and i've run it on my desktop full time for 4 years now, when will it be? probably never !
not until the hardware people make their own drivers for it for a start!
they provide drivers for MS/OSX why not linux too? after all, i bought the hardware didn't i? so they've made profits out of the sale anyway, just because my OS is free, doesn't mean my printer was!
And if they'd rather not gpl the drivers then fair enough, distribute binaries if you must! (please no rpms! we're not all using mandork and dedrat)
It is. It takes no time at all to just "tar -xvvjf" a .tar.bz2...
That's because Aureal only ever released a closed OSS driver for 2.2 and (I think) early 2.4 kernels. The reverse-engineered and re-written ALSA drivers for au88x0 chips only went into ALSA 1.0rc-something, so if Mandrake 10.0 is using a recent kernel/ALSA version your Aureal should work.
This guy seems to be going to an awful lot of trouble to find situations where linux' hardware support is incomplete. He could have made his point much better by pointing out the state of support for winmodems, wi-fi and modern video cards. By and large sound cards (especially the bog-standard on-board sound that Mom & Pop would likely have) do just work under linux - they aren't an issue.
:-)).
Basically, although there are some genuine problems, they aren't the sort of things total newbies are likely to be faced with simply owing to the type of hardware total newbies are likely to buy.
Even the genuine "gaping holes" are not too bad. Video cards generally work okay under linux even if the accelerated functionality is missing, and that's fixable quite easily using binary drivers anyway. Wi-fi works fine so long as you check the hardware compatibility list first and buy something supported (almost any 802.11b and quite a few 802.11g cards now). Winmodems remain a problem, but even if yours isn't supported you can pick up a serial Olitec modem for 30 (or get a proper network connection
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
> Any my grandma would know this how?
I guess that the Achilles Heel of computers is that you have to know how to use them. Cars and power tools clearly have this same weakness -- but oddly, no one ever complains about needing to know how to drive, or to use a radial arm saw.
I don't know if it's available in compUSA, but try the HP 4300 in Windows NT4... It will not work. Try the HP4300 in Win2k or XP on a machine without USB and it will not work. Try an Gravis ultrasound plug and play on any windows after win95 and it will not work (I found some beta drivers that work for nt4 and win2k) A crystal sound card (forgot the number) on any nt4/win2k/xp doesn't work. I agree it's somewhat older hardware. And the GUS and crystal are indeed isa-cards. But don't tell me that it is a snap to use it with Microsoft because it isn't. However, I think it is up to the vendors to supply drivers for all the OS'es.
Company meets with Bill Gates for coffee. Company gives binary driver under the table to Bill and Bill gives a check. Binary driver included in next windows version.
:(
Next thing you know, windows XP detects out-of-the-box the new VIA82xxx builtin sound card and linux doesn't even see that there is a sound card somewhere. Linux sucks. Windows rocks.
Seriously though, linux has big problems with those in-motherboard VIA soundcards. In 2 laptops I have linux doesn't see any soundcard device
To be honest, I don't see this story as a troll. True, everybody and their uncle writes drivers for Windows and not for Linux. True, that some people couldn't care less for supporting sound on less than optimal hardware...etc...But the fact of the matter is that on one of the most popular motherboard/soundcard combinations there is, sound is iffy. If you don't believe me, look at the C code for i810_audio.c. A developer put in the comment "This driver is cursed." Add that to the fact that this is one of the most asked about drivers in the ALSA-Sound news-groups and the one with (IMHO) the most unresolved issues.
Stock replies to the poor folks that can't get it to work are usually 1) Unmute the card, 2) Download the commercial OSS drivers, or use a "real" sound card. Excellent documentation for these sound cards is really hard to come by. (Don't worry - if I can fix my issues, I WILL document.)
That said, Linux sound works fine on all of my production boxes and with no tweaking at all. And while their wares aren't perfect, I've got to give praise to the OSS and ALSA folks. They've done lots with little to go on.
This is a copy of an e-mail I sent as an "Letter to the Editor" to Information Week.com, I hope Fred reads and recieves it. As for the /.'ers, feel free to critique it, I was hoping Mr. Langa woud print a retraction or rebuttal to clear up the misunderstanding. It's my vain attempt to help the media to see the true light. :)
I hope your humble enough to accept this critique of the article, maybe even print a part two in an effort to clear up some of these points.
What I believe to be errors in the article
:
First mistake in your article:
What Sound Card did you use?
Second Mistake:
Sound card hardware makers write drivers their hardware to run on Microsoft OS (BIG MONEY)
Third Mistake:
Linux has to write drivers for the Sound Card hardware makers, see the difference, as most Sound Card Manufacturers lack desire or will to release any of their specs of their drivers on their hardware thus making it difficult for linux developers to write drivers for linux to make the sound cards work.
Forth Mistake:
Let me name a few Distributions of linux that autoconfigures sound cards for you that I know of, I'm sure others could add to it.
1) Suse
2) Xandros
3) Knoppix (Free)
4) Kanotix (Free)
Lets see I use the Kanotix distro (Free), and voila I have 5.1 Surround sound :)
I have to agree. I have been using desktop Linux as my primary OS at home since middle of last summer, and my biggest frustration was the sound support. I do NOT have a special setup - and have jumped through hoops on mult. occasions to get things working. Even today it seems touchy. This is my biggest gripe with Linux to date - and one of few things (maybe the only thing?) that would keep me from installing it on someone's machine who was not savvy. I do think that support is coming as more and more of the industry adopts Linux and the IBM's and Sun's of the world start pushing it here in the US as a desktop solution. Vendors will have no choice but to start publishing their own drivers - some already do.
Righto: "Linux will never have a world-class browser"... "Linux will never take over the server market"... "Linux will never support pro-audio A/V"... I've lost track of the number and variety of "Linux will never [your favorite hobby horse here]" messages and screeds I've read here and elsewhere on the Web in the nine years I've been using Linux. Fine, bitch all you want, it's certainly much easier than working on the problems, isn't it ? And don't whine if you're not a coder: neither am I, but I've made efforts to learn the basics of enough programming languages (it ain't rocket science: learning to play the guitar is harder) in order to make a contribution beyond whining and whinging.
/. crowd when it comes to Linux sound issues. The level of ignorance here regarding the simplest issues about sound is truly impressive. But I've been using Linux for sound work since 1995, and I've successfully installed and utilized at least nine different soundcards. Hopefully you can understand my lack of interest in responding to the slashnoise regarding audio under Linux. The lack of support from manufacturers is appalling enough, and I'd rather spend time trying to motivate *them* than explain things to /. readers (who typically fancy ourselves as the technical elite). I have no time to assist someone (regardless of their technical savvy) who:
Wake up guys: If you're not part of the solution, you're a part of the problem. Write to those manufacturers who won't release specs to the ALSA team, or start a Web page to advise new users on what sound cards work (or don't) for you, or just do something constructive. Blaming developers for a situation forced on them by manufacturers is a red herring that leads away from the real issue of non-support from those manufacturers. And in a world that increasingly litigates against reverse engineering we find ourselves in the nasty trap of being unable to acquire specs and being at risk if we try to reverse engineer an audio chipset.
Oh, and stop paying attention to predictions: that's just journalistic bullshit meant to impress people who thrive on journalistic bullshit. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and while you're resolutely not helping, there are crews working quietly and consistently to improve every "weak" aspect of Linux. So if you're not here to help, well, have a good time with the work being done by others, but don't expect to get much respect from us.
Normally I don't respond to comments made by the
Didn't check first to see if his card was supported under Linux;
Didn't bother reading the installation and configuration instructions;
Didn't check Google for the possibility that someone else has dealt with the problem;
Didn't ask the development group for help before starting to publicly bitch about problems.
Okay, Fred Langa's response would probably be "But that's my whole point! No-one should have to go through all that just to get their soundcard working!". I agree, but I'll say it again: This is Linux, not Windows, and where M$ gets device drivers written for it by the manufacturers, we can't even get specs. Is it possible that in all the time you and Fred have been using Linux that you really don't know about the logjam created *not* by any unwillingness or inability of Linux audio driver developers, but by the intransigence and/or lack of interest from the card manufacturers themselves ?
Btw, this reply isn't especially aimed at you, Mr Tommy (consider the "you" as the collective "you"), but it is aimed at what I perceive as a common mindset. This is Linux, people, and it isn't what *any* journalist makes it out to be, it's what *you and I* make it to be.
A final note: Nine different distros ?? Umm, there are exactly three well-known sound systems for Linux: ALSA, the deprecated OSS/Free, and the commercially available OSS/Linux. Alas, the distribution's soundcard detection and configuration may be faulty, which is why I normally configure soundcards *without* the aid of distro configuration tools. But again, if I'm going to bitch about that, perhaps I'd better write some messages to the developers first...
Disclaimer: I use and love Gentoo.
But . . .
Does the author of this article REALLY expect us to believe that he was intelligent, knowledgeable, or persistent enough to bootstrap a source-based OS from a partial image or LiveCD??
Either his Gentoo experience was limited to just using the LiveCD, or he is lying.
Either way, this speaks volumes about how much effort he honestly spent in trying to make things work, as opposed to finding something that he could plausibly claim didn't work.
Also: why, oh why, do people complain when devices aren't supported which no one ever claimed were supported in the first place???
Linux isn't for people like this. It never was and possibly never will be. That doesn't mean there aren't problems, or even that the specific problem he's complaining about isn't a valid one (although he ever so helpfully omitted details that would have helped confirm it or fix it).
But I don't think it's fair to blame Linux for the author's failure to use supported hardware, learn a little about the OS he is being paid to write about, or even demonstrate a plausible degree of intellectual honesty.
Nonaggression works!
I'm about to buy a couple of wavlans for myself, i'd like to know which ones he had sucky experience with.
--Coder
unfortunetly reading most of these replies i noticed a common uniting thread. Who cares about a linux desktop, i dont want or need one, who cares about the average user who wants to get off of windows.
and its this kind of linux elite-ism that will ultimetly drive a wedge in the FS movement and stall
anything productive from coming around that is a real solution. one that gets ppl away from windows permanently. The sad thing is for a movement filled with such smart ppl this is a very predictable outcome.
prove me wrong , but not with words.
ROFL. It was probably a proprietary sound card, or a sub version of the same. Ever try installing OS/2 off a CD in 94? You know how many proprietary CDROM Interfaces there were back then?
Sound is the same way right now. It was great in the Sound Blaster days (IMHO, a 'standard' sound card) - but now it's all shot to hell.
OTOH, he also dis-proved another myth: That all Linux distributions do things radically different. They obviously all behaved the same way with his proprietary hardware.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Might also be nice to know what the sound card was... I haven't met a sound card other than the NForce brand that didn't Just Work(tm) under any Linux.
What was the model? Who is the manufacturer? Or is he just going to whine about it? He gave us the names of the distros, why not the name of the hardware he chose?
Mention Windows and Linux in the same breath is like throwing a match in naplam with the /. crowd.
/usr/sbin/alsactl restore >/dev/null 2>&1 || :!!", "CUPS internal webserver!". :)
Linux proponents strike up the band and start the chorus singing "We will overcome", while someone starts the "I Have a Dream" speech.
Very moving to the believers who start rolling on the ground shouting in tongues bewildering to the ear; "post-install snd-card-0
Meanwhile the accolytes are moving through the crowd handing out distros labelled "Linux - the Word According to Debian"and "Linux - the Word According to Mandrake", and "Linux - the Word According to SuSe" and (ah hell - you get it). A man in the crowd timidly asks why his wife's copy of The Word is different than his. The accolyte screams "It's up to you to pick the distro that's best for you!!! That's the beauty of The Word!!" Another man timidly asks, "I tried installing The Word on my system and my sound doesn't work". Another member of the crowd comes up and states, "Yeah! And what is this root and what permissions do I have to set to access the internet?" The accolyte holds his arms to heaven and howls, "GEEEAAAARRGGGHH! How many of these asshats are there?" (a post further down
Anothr mans throws his copy of The Word in the trash and says loudly - "I think I'll stick with my quiet little church where I'm treated with respect. I pay my tithe to the Church of Bill and he takes care of most of my worldly problems without telling me I'm an idiot. Just yesterday he told me; "Blessed are you my son for you support our work here on earth. Leave the techno-geek to the priests. Go with my blessings and assurance that we will make your work easy with very little work on your part. Be productive and successful in your endeavors! (subtitled - 'Leave the drivers to us!'".
The crowd starts thinning as they head up the street to the Church of Bill.
"Wait!" the accolytes scream. "We know what's good for you - you're just too stupid to understand right now! We'll teach you!".
regards,
BubbaJon
Yes, I think you may be right. There is something they call a stage 3 tarball that is supposed to be a precompiled kernel and other goodies. I tried it once but did not have much luck with it -- probably my own fault. Gentoo does seem to be designed for hard core Linux users, not newbies. I'm not a noob anymore, but neither have I reached that elite status where I can make Linux do anything I want on just about any hardware. That's why I run Mandrake.
That said, I've been MS free for over a year. W00T!
I agree with you about the sound card too. Personally, I suspect the guy is either lying through his teeth, or he is afraid to name his hardware because he doesn't want anyone to provide him with an easy fix, thereby negating his argument.
No matter how many of my rights are taken away, somehow I still don't feel safe. -Frigid Monkey
So he got it to work but it stopped for some reason
In other words there *is* a driver, and it *does* work, it's just the installation messed up somehow. Maybe it's just him
Like me with Windows - I can never get dial up networking to work. Just a personal thing but I don't grok the menus and I always end up tearing my hair out over it.
This article is a complete beat up over a non-issue.
Personally I'm happy, I have Linux working with my professional grade 8 channel ADC/DAC - a very esoteric and expensive piece of equipment.
I don't care if some journalist on a slow day wants to spend a thousand words telling us how he messed up an installation yesterday, and for emotional reasons wants to rant at his readers instead of working through the problem in a logical fashion.
* I've had several cases where Win 95 and Win 98 didn't accept different sound cards. It has less to do with Windows currently supporting "every soundcard" and more to do with every soundcard manufacturer supporting the Windows platform standard. Don't give MS credit where it's not due.
* The fact that he tried several different distros rather than trying one and just tinkering with it shows exactly how much credit his "research" has.
Someone should pickup an old soundcard made for Win 3.11 and try to get it working with Win XP. When it doesn't work or work correctly - as I expect plenty won't - write the same article for the Windows platform.
If you're going to attack Linux, do it correctly. Aim at Linux's learning curve; where the "researcher" fell short at.
The problem is, then the "Linux will take over everything" guys come along and bitch and complain that Linux isn't widely accepted. Often they'll blame a "M$ monopoly" or some other similar scapegoat.
Basically, what you and the other poster are confirming is that Linux is, indeed, made by developers for developers, and that's it. I'm tired of elitist morons who think just because Linux dares support something like a mainstream soundcard (gasp!), somehow it loses its ability to be a powerful web server and development environment.
But hey, this is the same community that bashed Microsoft's interface, then subsequently ripped of the taskbar, start menu, integrated file/net browser, and so on. Sometimes I wonder if anybody has their heads on straight anymore.
The late 1999 golden child that Linux was in the media is over, people--now we're all wondering where the big jump in acceptance was supposed to have occurred. The hype is gone, and now it's all about RESULTS. It hasn't happened, and with the attitudes displayed here, it never will.
Newbies DO install operating systems. I guess you never knew that a lot of people upgraded Windows 95 to 98, or 98 to 2000, 98 to XP, etc....
The upgrade procedure is that easy. Can you upgrade a Linux distro and expect usable results? I've never gotten a Linux upgrade to work--I therefore always reinstall from scratch (which sucks).
Until Linux gets a unified sound library standard, we'll always have four or five different sound libraries, all conflicting with each other.
Windows? You just use waveout or DirectSound!
Are you saying suddenly everything is justified because he didn't try a distro that "might" have worked?
A newbie would gawk at you if you told him, "Well, don't try that distro, try this one...oh, wait, to get that working you need to try this one..." Out of about 10 distros.
They'll just go back to Windows.
I have to buy a new soundcard just to run Linux?
I love that you automagically assume its a cheap $10 "easily-replaced" card. Because it couldn't be a Linux fault, right? The guy just had to be biased.
So if you buy 24 inch tires for your car and they're not supported because there are no 24 inch rims, then your car is to blame? Does this mean the car isn't worthy of driving over some other model? Nope, it just means you need tires your car can use!
So lets say you have a choice between a ferrari and a volvo and the ferrari is cheaper for whatever reason. Are you going to whine because you have to buy some new tires?
I remember it being mentioned on the mailing list when it still existed. The mailing list is long defunct and if the driver was completed it never made it into any major disro for a detection check and an automated install of the driver.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
I consider a troll article to be "Microsoft Violates Human Rights In China," or "New Microsoft Hole" when it's about a user-ran executable attachment.
Notice the word "Apparently" placed into the headline...
So, why can't Linux just use Windows' drivers?
Someone else already mentioned it, but use aumix to set the volume (command line utility). For some reason, other mixers sometimes fail.
Life's a lot like money-- you spend it, then it's gone. Spend wisely.
I'm posting this so that you (the moderator) have some context to consider twitter and not mod him up whenever he posts his filler preformatted rants about installing Knoppix or whatever that unfortunately get him karma every single time and allow him to continue posting his trademark toxic crap (read on) day in and day out. You may consider this a troll - I consider it community service. And I ain't kidding.
If you're a /. subscriber, I invite you to look through some of his posting history. I guarantee that you'll be hard pressed to find someone that is more "out there" than twitter. You'll also probably notice he's got quite an AC following. Don't just read his posts, make sure you go through the replies.
For example, in this recent post twitter not only calls the OP a troll but attempts to "tell it like it is" while making some vague argument about "GNU". Yes, if you're confused, you're not alone. The reply (modded +4) proceeds to simply destroy his bogus argument. You will notice he did not reply. This is what some people call "drive-by advocacy". A sort of I'll just leave you with my thoughts here and move on to the next flamebait kind of deal. In fact, he almost never replies because he knows that his fanatical arguments simply do not hold up to any sort of discussion. It's not that he's chosen the wrong cause - he's just going at it in a completely wrong way.
More? Just read though this post and the subsequent replies. I guess this stands on its own.
More? Bad spelling in astounding conspiracy theories, more offtopic FUD and uninformed "I'm right, look at me" rants, promptly proven wrong. Worse even, twitter wants to be RMS, apparently (that first one is a winner). I mean, really. You think?
FUD, FUD, FUD, FUD, offtopic FUD, and more FUD. This guy is like the Monty Python SPAM skit, but with FUD and more FUD instead of canned meat. Amazed
I never would have thought that is the reason that is holding Linux back! Our sound support sux, it's true, i use wine all the time for anything that needs to produce sound.
Who is this fool?
Perhaps that is the reason Linux is the only modern os where you can still use your GUS (gravis ultrasound) on? because, oh, that _great_ card is no longer supported since windows2000. no problems on linux, sweet as ever, my girl uses it for all her mp3 playing pleasures.
Or, is it the excellent support for an SoundBlaster Audigy? it is _so_ good on windows that a friend of mine gave the card to me for _free_ because he never wanted to see the damn thing again. it works mighty fine on my linux box though, that could not be said about windows where the driver created a BSOD fest.
Wait, it gets even better, use multiple soundcards, fill up those pci slots!
there must be something wrong with linux...
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Windows 95 came out in 1995, 9 years ago. If it included drivers for this motherboard's integrated sound circuit, then said motherboard must have been in production when it was released - 9 years ago. And this motherboard is supposedly in a brand new PC.
The article also failed to name the motherboard in question (no, "Intel motherboard" is not specific enough), preventing any further checking into this.
Also, if I understood the article correctly, he installed a PC emulator inside Linux and then installed Windows inside the emulator, after which Windows was able to produce sounds. This, of course, is only possible if the emulator itself can access the sound card, which it can't if the host operating system (Linux) can't access it...
Also, getting the soundcard working until reboot and the loss graphics indicate a module configuration problem. Which, in turn, means that the distro did come with the neccessary module (he wouldn't have gotten the sounds to work even momentarily otherwise). I found it hard to believe he really didn't find any documentation or help on the matter, especially after describing the symptoms...
And, of course, since he installed ALSA by himself, I found it unlikely that he was uncapable of figuring out it might have something to do with modules...
So, overall, this smells of FUD.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
slushb0xx 0wnz y00, l4m3r!111~~~
I had the same experience and tried news groups and message boards. I usually got snotty replies like "it works fine on my box your card is broken" or "your card is muted it works fine," and nothing useful.
Wrong.
Why didn't you just unmute it? Isn't that how simple it is? Isn't that all that's required?
I spend about one minute getting my SBLive! to work well under XP, 2000, ME, and 98. It shouldn't take a damned hour to get your sound card working.
I cannot understand all this bitching and moaning. Jeez. I am a slackware user (currently 9.1), with an SBLive 5.1, ATI Radeon 9600XT (with hardware 3D available), USB Logitec wireless mouse. I have a Cannon S45 camera and use USB mass media to view, move, modify pictures. Every printer I ever tried to configure was a success (Ghostscript magic scripts are damn near universal). I used to use an external Zip drive and a scanner.
Heck, I used to play Quake III in Slackware 7.0, and found it better than on Windows (NVidia GeForce GTS).
Am I some kinda prodegy or something? Sure, I can build a kernel and run modprobe. BFD. I find Windows 2000 Pro at work (where I develop enterprise IT software) infuriatingly annoying compared to my Gnome desktop (with dynamic update via dropline). Soon, I'll have VNC set up so I can use my Linux from work, too, and I won't have to spend $150 for the software (only to find it only works on Windows anyway).
There is a lot of room for improvement, but by Goddess, this system is damn effective - and virus free.
Everybody stop complaining and work together to sand down the rough edges!!!!
David
I've used onboard Intel sound under Linux a few times, and I haven't had any problems. So, I guess you should try Arch Linux 0.6 then, and upgrade to the latest kernel, like I did, and everything should work, right?
Hmmm... I guess all those capital letters must have had the wrong effect.
Please, mods, could you try reading the post to the end before deciding it's a troll? It wasn't meant to be one, honestly.
I just meant to say that software mixing referred to esd and artsd, not programs like Kmix. I then said artsd is a terrible piece of code, which any honest linux user should know is not FUD.
Was my sin the act of saying that windows does mixing better than Linux? Perhaps someone could explain how this is not true, because that would be really helpful to me.
Shinsengumi de gozaru
Why didn't you just unmute it? Isn't that how simple it is? Isn't that all that's required?
Yes, for basic sound. But that hour included setup of sound fonts (which at present isn't very intuitive
I spend about one minute getting my SBLive! to work well under XP, 2000, ME, and 98. It shouldn't take a damned hour to get your sound card working.
But that doesn't get you working sound fonts. For that you have to run the proprietary provided installer from Creative, which takes about 20 minutes to set up sond fonts etc etc.