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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 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.
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 had reams of problems getting my AC'97-compliant (Intel 80210) sound card working with the OSS modules that come bundled in kernel 2.6. However, when I installed ALSA, everything worked like a charm; I think this is, once again, an outside observer identifying a flaw in "Linux" when he really just means an oversight in the standard distros. Once they start bundling ALSA, we'll catch up (to Windows 95, anyway).
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Doesn't help if you're the nontechnical user stuck with the bad card because the nice man at the store said it works just fine.
Kneejerk response prediction- "I am so SICK of people saying Linux has to work for nontechnical people! If you don't get it then you suxxor and shouldn't have a computer anyway and we're taking over teh desktop anyway!" How, without any non-technical users, is of course a mystery.
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.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
It's crap, actually.
I had a dual booting box at work, and my boss, being a total asshole, refused to give me the driver disk for the super jazzy sound card on the damn thing, I guess thinking that music might ruin my productivity. Now for WINDOWS, this was a huge problem, because you couldn't install the drivers without the original cd, don't ask me why. Couldn't download them from the site, couldn't do crap.
With Linux, on the other hand, the card autodetected and played fine, using, of course, the hacked up, jury-rigged driver that linux always has to use because NO MAJOR SOUND CARD VENDOR RELEASES LINUX DRIVERS, a point not mentioned by the dumbass who wrote the article.
What was the card, you ask? Soundblaster Audigy Platinum To my tiny brain, that would qualify as mainstream.
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.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Who uses sound cards anymore?
I've had my $15 USB sound system for a couple of years now, and have never had trouble with it under Linux.
At least he's complaining about something that is actually part of Linux though. I remember a similar article where the guy was complaining about Linux, but he really meant to complain about Gnome.
The only thing sadder than articles like this, is the fact that people give credence to it.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Also:
- Some distros have the mixer volume at 0 by default.
- Some distros suck at configuring sound even when it is supported by Linux drivers (Mandrake's biggest weakness IMHO).
- Microsoft has enough clout to get every manufacturor to ship Windows sound drivers with their cards. Not really Linux's fault that they won't write drivers or open the specs.
- The author's tone would not help him get any support from the regular channels (forums, IRC, tech support, etc). If nobody was very helpful to him, it was likely his own fault.
So yeah, the article is both a Troll and very much an exaggeration of the real situation. And all this whining because one card doesn't work well under Linux (either not supported or takes some effort to get working). How much would a supported el-cheapo replacement cost I wonder?
Of course researching supported cards and spending a whole $20 bucks wouldn't make nearly as good of a story as installing 9 distros and ranting about how much Linux sucks.
..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.
This is assuming we give a shit about average mom + pop situations. Personally, I use Linux for development and my servers. If you want an OS for a mom + pop situation, get Mac OS X.
"What's with all the Troll articles lately?"
A legitimate criticism of Linux is not a troll. When sound works great in Win95 but it's a pain in Linux, complaining about it isn't trolling. Frankly, I wish Linux users were more open to criticism. This attitude that Linux is fine the way it is really rubs me the wrong way, and it's what keeps me from adopting it. If the community is so hesitant to change, then why should I stay behind?
"Derp de derp."
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)
Is that so? I've never seen that happen. But if you try the same on Linux or *BSD, the last program that tried to access /dev/dsp will hang politely while waiting for the first one to let go of the device[1]. That's why most distros will use esd or artsd, both of which are crap, and will occupy /dev/dsp for apps that aren't aware of the sound server. Yes, Linux does suck a bit when it comes to sound, although its capabilities are quite OK. If only all apps and distros would standardise on JACK, it could become great. In my experience it's quite a bit better than for the author of TFA, though. All sound cards I've tried have worked. Seems like he's just bitter because his particular brand is unsupported, and most of the time that is the vendor's fault.
[1]Unless you have a soundcard with hardware mixing supported by ALSA or OSS.
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'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.
His actual testing environment was a virtual machine setup programmed to emulate a "a plain-vanilla SoundBlaster card".
Hello... that's the worldwide standard for plain sound cards, one that for years many vendors other than Creative followed. Even if you don't have the right drivers for a card, most sound cards will gladly accept the plain SoundBlaster driver and deliver the basic features in return.
To flunk that test is a little embarassing, especially when you have to go back to Windows 3.1 to find an MS operating system that fails to figure out what to do with a funky sound card. In short... Linux distros should try to install a generic SoundBlaster sound driver if it can't autodetect the sound card.
Well he said it was an Intel onboard one - ie. not actually a card itself ;)
I presume if it's recent it'll be the i810_audio driver then. Probably didn't add himself to the audio group or something - but we'll never know since over three pages he doesn't manage to describe the problem in any detail or provide much of a hint as to the exact chipset we're working with...
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.
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
Exactly. Which is why this isn't really an issue with Linux - linux works fine given the proper drivers. How many drivers has MS had to reverse engineer inorder to get it compatible with Windows?
All of this is moot anyway. Noone claims Linux is ready for grandma, it's bottom - up evolving - it will get there, especially now that major vendors are rolling out Linux PCs. Linux has proven the most important - stable, secure, reliable. A sound card is gravy. I know I don't need a sound card on my linux dns server, cvs server, webserver, mailserver, firewall - and I wouldn't trust Windows to perform any of those functions reliably. Neither do a majority of others. Fine, condemn Linux because your particular sound card doesn't work - shit I've had similiar problems in the past ( although I always eventually got them to work after much gnashing of teeth), just don't call it Linux's "Achilles Heel" - if Linux NEVER got soundcards to work, I will still run all of my servers with it, and probably still have it as my desktop as well. As far as I am concerned, Linux has been fine for me on the desktop since RH 6.2.
ymmv
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
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.
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!"
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
...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..."
Creative has also released official drivers as well here. Unfortunately, the damn trolls will get modded up, but our comments wont.
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.
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.
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
VIA82xxx sound card you say. Whats that I hear? Is that the sound off merry music playing on my VIA82xxx sound card in Gentoo Linux using Kernel 2.6.3? No it cannot be! For we all know that linux has very poor support for sound cards and that the VIA82xxx sound card does not work in any distro or with any kernel. Neither did it work with kernels 2.6.0 rc1 through to 2.6.2 it was all in my head.
/. poster who managed not to say 'sucks' in a post amazing... ah shit!
On Windows or OS X, at most you stick a disk into the machine or click an exe.
Thats utter garbage. I have more than once had to spend a great deal of time with hardware problems on windows. Registry edits to get my DVD writer to work. TV card drivers that reset the PC during install. No drivers at all for my scanner. Those little gems were just from XP.
Interesting side note that I had a machine I put Mandrake on for my sister and it detected all hardware and ran with little configuration other than setting up the modem. Even the printer was autodetected and set up fine. Same computer needs 5 driver downloads/installs to work properly in Windows XP. XP on it is unusable without installing graphics card drivers as the XP ones are terrible.
Does my anecdotal evidence prove XP hardware support is rubbish any more than this authors problems with one sound card prove linux hardware support is rubbish? Of course not. Linux hardware support isn't brilliant but Windows XP always as simple as double click and you are done.
I know a
Wait, since when do automatics get faster 1/4 mile times? I thought raw acceleration was one of those things where standards outpace automatics.
This is assuming we give a shit about average mom + pop situations. Personally, I use Linux for development and my servers. If you want an OS for a mom + pop situation, get Mac OS X.
/really/ doesn't want to teach my dad how to use UNIX. We've had this discussion, believe me.
But you can't have it both ways; you can't say 'Linux will conquer the desktop world' as many people seem to do, and then simultaneously say '...but we don't give a shit about average mom + pop situations.'
Linux as a server environment is great; I run two fairly high-load Linux servers in a colocation center, and -- despite my periodic grumbling about RPM dependency nightmares -- I am more than happy with the performance I get out of them.
But Linux as a desktop environment? I would not want to try and introduce my parents to Linux as a desktop environment in the state any of the current distributions are in. Yah, getting printing working under Linux is certainly doable; install CUPS and the appropriate driver, configure it all, poke at the CUPS internal webserver if you need to check things out, etc. I'm more than willing to take the plunge on that. But I don't want to have to explain CUPS to my parents; they're used to a Windows box where they can go to Best Buy, buy a printer, plug it in, and put in a driver CD. Or the new digicam they just bought; they want to be able to plug the camera into their computer and get their images out into a graphical program where they can e-mail it. They don't want to have to go looking for drivers for digicams for Linux or whatever, they want to just plug it in and put in the CD.
And for another one, let's go into security updates. Sure, Linux (and open source in general) have a much better track record than Windows of fixing security problems! That's great for sysadmins like myself, but it's not going to do a whit of good in some cases; my parents aren't going to want to stay on Bugtraq to discover that their print daemon has a remote-root exploit they'll need to download a patch for and recompile. They're used to Windows Update, where it'll find the critical updates and download them, then prompt them to install. They don't have to worry about it.
This isn't to say 'Linux sux!' or anything like that; I happen to think it's a great UNIX server and dev environment, and am happy with my own Linux boxes. BUT, that notwithstanding, it's not a desktop environment I would like to introduce my father to. The investment in user education is more than I want to get into; my father doesn't want to have to learn about autoconf and make, or patch and diff, or worry about watching Bugtraq or whatever. He just wants to be able to surf the web, print things, and use Word and Excel. And my mother, a former AIX user, would feel at home in Linux userland, but doesn't want to muck about with security fixes and upgrades, and
And my situation isn't completely different than a lot of people's; there are some success stories with teaching parents or relatives enough to encourage Linux adoption, but there are also lots of failure stories. And 'well, I can't use my new digicam because I'm running Debian' is not good sales pitch to other potential Linux users.
If the Linux world is fine with that, then that's great; Linux is great in the server arena, and within that area it does what it does very well. But if Linux wants to take over the desktop world, right now, it's not as approachable as it needs to be in order to be an effective desktop OS for 'mom + pop' situations...and it needs to approach those situations if Linux is to 'conquer the desktop world.' I'd love to see Linux become a solution that I could give to my parents and know they'd be on a stable OS; in the meantime, as you say, the desktop UNIX variant of choice for non-techy end users seems to be MacOS X.
There's my $0.02. (Or more like $0.20, since this post was a little on the long side...)
--Rachel
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.
"Should I write an article saying that Windows sucks because I need to instally all kinds of drivers to get it working on my computer??? Or that Windows 2000 sucks because it doesn't support my video card? Or even that ATI sucks because it doesn't have a driver for my exact configuration??? No, that would make me a troll."
I don't agree. I think you should have written that article. It's a legitimate complaint. It sucks having to track down drivers for Windows. Fortunately, they almost always exist, but I've had people pay me $50 an hour to go through that mess. (Serious! At one point I had to go out and buy somebody a new modem because I just plain couldn't find a 2000 driver for it.)
Sound and video are very basic elements of computing. You HAVE to have them. If the OS makes it difficult to make these work, then noise needs to be made about it. Windows DOES suck because it doesn't have built in generic drivers like Linux has. Windows DOES suck because some companies only support certain flavors of it. Even if the OS isn't an issue at all, it *does* suck that somebody couldn't get their configuration to work.
I could sit here all high and mighty and tell you that Windows works great with every bit of hardware out there and that you must be an idiot for not knowing what I know about how to make Windows work. But where's the benefit there? Why wouldn't it be more beneficial to me to listen to your complaints and come up with a reasonable solution? Why is my treating the article like it's a troll a valid response?
That's really my basic problem with the handling of this article here. Dude had a problem, but in order to defend Linux's reputation, it's branded as a troll and people move on. Why not simply address it? Drivers in general on any OS are a pain in the ass. Nobody's done it right yet. Well maybe Apple, sadly that involved having a virtual monopoly over how the machines are made, there. That methodology simply wouldn't work in the general PC market.
"Derp de derp."
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
Sadly, wannabe "racers" like you reject technological advance, even when it hits them in the face. I really lost track of the count, but I smoked numerous wannabes like you who had manuals with my slushbox.
It's almost as bad as when you attempt to put a vanilla Hayes modem or tulip NIC in a Windows box.
Sound Cards stopped being SB compatible when games stopped being written for DOS. I doubt any current sound card would accept an SB driver (or Roland or Adlib for that matter), especially seeing as many variations of the SB aren't really compatible in that manner. But I am interested in being proven wrong.
A Usenet Troll Triumphs on Slashdot
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'
It would actually be really nice if there were some way a card could have its own driver. Then you would need one standard query interface on every card to fetch the driver, which every piece of hardware and every OS would need to support, and whatever code came back from it would have to be somehow runnable on every device conceivable with support for the way the card is plugged in.
You know something, I often wonder why things like Java weren't designed for this sort of purpose, rather than wasting time developing games on mobile phones they could have developed some kind of Java driver interface which worked on all operating systems the same way.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
"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
In a high-performance vehicle, designed for making good 1/4 mile times, an automatic transmission can typically be better off the line as well as shift gears with less "off-throttle" time than a standard.
This is especially true with forced induction engines. When you release the throttle on a forced induction engine, the boost pressure drops and it takes a significant amount of time to build it back up. With an automatic you don't have to release the throttle at all.
For an autocross or track racing car, a manual is more benificial.
Oohhh fs.. this is going to take ages... *rolls a cigarrette*
Okay, I'm going to talk from personal experience here. I use Fedora for my desktop at the moment.
Linux isn't just ready for handing to mum and dad (I'm English), no one is saying it is, and it's not going to be hackers thinking 'I know what mum and dad need!' that're going to fix that.
It's going to be people like IBM and Novell (I'm just thinking Gnome here for an example), who have the cash to put in for useability studies and so forth. These will be implemented by the development community, but not instigated by them.
Before you see every digital camera and soundcard supported out of the box, there are more important considerations, like interoperability with business applications, which will be concentrated on so that Linux can be used on the desktop *within companies*. That's always going to be the first step.
Once Linux is ready for deployment on the desktop within companies that have IT departments with real sysadmins, then will be time to start worrying about mum and dad. We need app stability, desktop integration with apps, consistancy between between desktop environments (ala freedesktop.org), more improvement to OO.o and so forth, before easy GUI management of the system for things like hardware management, firewall setup, and so on).
In terms of system updates, well an icon on my 'taskbar' flashes red when I have system updates to perform, I click it, say yes to a couple of wizard questions, and bingo, not only my OS, but also any RPM apps that are included in RedHat's repositories (i.e. the majority of software I'll need, and probably all the software mum and dad will need) are updated, just like that. No dependancy problems, no going to multiple websites looking for app fixes (does Windows update Trillian? Photoshop?).
Personally I use apt-rpm on the command line for doing those updates, but that's only because it's quicker, using RedHat's built in updater based on yum does the job just as well.
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 ?.
Funny thing : I have a P3 450 sitting on the other side of the room from me, running Slackware 9.1 with a - get this - Creative Soundblaster in it. And it works. Makes me wonder if his VM was configured properly, because if he was testing using a 'vanilla Soundblaster,' it should have worked.
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."
And now we come full circle to my original post:
I think it's worth pointing out that Linux would also have drivers by now if they wouldn't keep up this religious crusade to get source only drivers.
How about a little less religion and a little more compsci + logistics management + good coding practices? Making a stupid piece of code your god/way of life tends to blind one to using the intelligence that God gave them.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
People can't figure out what is wrong with MS systems simply because they are so complicated and arcane. And Linux is even more complicated.
You are correct that Linux is more complex, but that's what allows me to figure out what is wrong with a Linux setup to begin with. Windows is less complex, but more convoluted, such that I can no longer diagnose Windows XP systems. Linux is easy for me though.
Regardless, to the average user complexity is indeed as bad as convolution.
True, but the RedHat RPM updaters only work for if you /are/ using an RPM for a package. Speaking as a sysadmin, I often end up having to roll my own installs, and sometimes it can be a pain trying to get RPMs built of stuff. I don't want to build an RPM every time I'm going to tweak an option in my PHP ./configure call, for instance. Similarly, a lot of stuff like drivers (which Windows /does/ check for updates on automatically) is not in RPM, so doesn't get caught by it.
:)
I suppose another way of putting it would be that Linux puts the burden of doing app updates on the packaging tool (which can be a hassle if you install anything under a different packaging tool or whatnot), and Windows puts the burden of doing app updates on the application (with the exception of system-critical updates). Neither's perfect, but if I have to install specialized CUPS drivers or whatever outside of RPM, it's less likely security updates for those will get noticed automatically, since Linux software doesn't tend to do 'new version available' checks itself. Hopefully that clarifies.
As for the rest, you're absolutely right about OOo and other stuff needing to be fleshed out for business desktop use before it can conquer the desktop more fully. I addressed the home-user standpoint because that seems to be where the 'conquer the desktop' argument was being taken in this thread.
--Rachel
If the released the source/specs some guy at ATI could see what nvidia does to make XYZ work well and that would put nvidia at a disadvantade.
I think nvidia could safely open source their drivers if their main competitor needs to look at their drivers to understand how to make the 3d coordinates work well.
Moreover, it's destructive criticism because of those same points. On the board on the page, many people have asked what is the card, who made the computer, etc, because they were willing to try and give him some help on getting Linux working on that machine. Mr. Langa has consistently ignored those requests and attacked any silly conspiracy theory that posters have suggested.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
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.
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.
The inside of a computer is a pretty noisy place, electrically speaking; that makes it pretty hard to get high fidelity sound into or out of a computer. For playing back MP3s, playing games, or similar things, the limitations aren't a major concern. For mastering a CD, or a movie soundtrack, or other such things, they are.
If you need the equipment, you'll have the ability to pay the dosh needed for a top end card, and you will be able to justify the cost. If you don't, nobody's forcing you to pay for it.
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
Next soundcard i'm going to buy will be by a company that actively supports linux or opens up the specifications: a product that can't work with both the OSs i use is a crippled one.
/dev/dsp, all at the same time, you'll realize that the SB Live is the standard by which everything else should be measured. Are there any cards other than the SB Live and SB Audigy that can leave /dev/dsp unlocked no matter how many sounds are playing at the same time? Software mixing is terrible in comparison.
The only soundcard I ever use with Linux is the SoundBlaster Live. The first time you see goofy app #1 playing sound through artsd, goofy app #2 playing sound throguh esd, and goofy app #3 playing sound directly through
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!
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)
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.
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.