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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...)"
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'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?
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.
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've heard of not reading the article, but didn't you read the summary? It said clearly 9 distros.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
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.
Winders does devices well because that's where the market's been. Linux would smoke Winders boxes in all tests if it had better drivers.
You have the cause and effect backward. Windows has drivers because it's popular. Popularity came first, vendors bending over backward to help Windows work with their products came as a result. The technical framework for third-party drivers is there for Linux. But it's not being used by most vendors.
You *are* aware that Microsoft doesn't write the drivers for most devices that work with Windows, right? It's the hardware manufacturer that makes the devcice that does that work.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Umm, Pardon me for interjecting here, but in my experience, being able to play sound from more than one program is a function of the sound card's capabilities, (being able to play and mix both sound streams. My sister complained loudly about the fact that she couldn't hear IM sounds while listening to MP3's. Replaced the Sound Blaster PCI128 with a Live 5.1 and all was peachy. there are also cards still more advanced than that and have multiple independent stereo outputs that could blay your MP3's on the front speakers and the IM sounds on the rear.
$alsactl store
/usr/sbin/alsactl restore >/dev/null 2>&1 || : /usr/sbin/alsactl store >/dev/null 2>&1 || :
will save the current mixer settings for the next b oot. You can add the following lines in your modules.conf file:
post-install snd-card-0
pre-remove snd-card-0
$cat
And it isn't for lack of trying either. I've tried several dists, I've patched the 2.4 kernel with ALSA, I've built the 2.6.5 kernel but NOTHING works. ALSA sees the card, but it is muted even if you run the mixer and unmute everything and stick on the max. Yes, I have the speakers plugged into the right connection and yes I'm certain I've double and triple checked everything. It still doesn't work. I'm not alone in this - the internet is filled with people in the same boat as me.
At least 2.6.x comes with ALSA out of the box which is a blessing. But even so, if it takes major kernel surgery (and in my case it still doesn't work) there is something seriously screwed with the model.
On Windows or OS X, at most you stick a disk into the machine or click an exe. That's assuming it doesn't just work automatically. On Linux you could waste a day applying patches and rebuilding to do the same.
Linux really, really needs to sort out the whole driver issue because it throws a wet blanket over widespread adoption. Expecting people to rebuild kernels, or be in possession of a toolchain to build a module is unacceptable.
A single unified ABI for drivers would be a good start. I can understand if Linus doesn't care to support such a thing, but I can't fathom why the dist vendors wouldn't.
Yes, if Linux is going to be the OS for newbies. Yes, if Linux is going to be the OS for the desktop. The users won't care *why* it doesn't work, just *that* it doesn't work.
I call bullshit. At work, I routinely have to install win2k on older machines, some of these drivers are damned near impossible to track down, even when you know the manufacturer of the device. ...and don't even get me started on older Sony Vaios; they've got all sorts of custom hardware and Sony doesn't bother writing drivers for any OS other than the one they shipped with.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Actually, Linux does support his sound hardware. He got it working with every distro he tried, and then muted it, and decided that this was somehow a driver issue. In fact, it's because there are a ton of ways your audio can get muted in Linux, from rebooting without a script to save the volume or set it at boot to running a program that has its own ideas of what your volume controls should be (Konqueror, IIRC, mutes everything if you go to a page with sound; the flash plugin mutes everything when it starts, etc).
Solution: get a volume control program for X, and leave it running at all times, thereby blocking other programs' attempts to control the volume.
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)
Unless you're looking to do pro audio. Then you'd want a Mac-compatible card from CreamWare, Alesis, Digidesign, Event, Lucid, Ensoniq, Opcode, Lexicon, RME, Lucid, Sonorus, Echo, or M-Audio, among others.
What, did you think that all those Macs in recording studios were using the built-in audio to run ProTools?
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
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
Funny thing is, Windows requires you to upgrade your sound card.... Its not suprising at all that win95 worked fine when his "virtualization" software made it look like a SB16. They have been around for a while. Now, try to run an SoundBlaster AWE 64 in a Win2k box. Oh, that's right, you can't. Because SoundBlaster didn't release drivers for it, Win2k can't use it. Works fine in Linux ALSA tho. This is a smear article; if you use the newest of everything windows drivers will work because the hardware vendors write windows drivers for their stuff. If they released the specs to their hardware and/or put one person on Linux drivers, or paid one kernel developer to write Linux drivers for their stuff, it would be supported. But most of them don't and we have tards like this blame Linux? Whatever.
andy
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
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