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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...)"
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!
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
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.
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!
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?
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.
That's as maybe, but if you are implying that sound functioning 50% of the time is somehow worse than sound functioning 0% of the time, then I fear I have wandered into either a Monty Python sketch, the Twilight Zone, or Slashdot.
In any case, it can't be good for my sanity.
RomSteady - I came, I saw, I tested. GamerTag: RomSteady / http://www.romsteady.net
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.
...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
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.
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?
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...
They damn well are to me. If my sound card doesn't work in Linux, and it works in Windows, me AND my MP3s are staying in Windows.
Luckily, sound cards really aren't that difficult to setup in Linux, though there are some hitches to overcome.
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
uhh...no, they don't.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
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.
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.
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!
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.
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).
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 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'!
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.
"I agree. Even Windows 2000 and XP fuck up when you try to play sound in different programs."
Speaking as somebody who uses both XP and 2000 daily, no, you are full of shit. How do you think millions of us Windows users listen to MP3s all day?
"Derp de derp."
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.
...and you don't need to see our identification...
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
I've got an old copy of Windows 95 if anyone is interested. I'll start the bidding at $50.00.
Tech News, Reviews and Tutorials
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.
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.
..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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Linux isn't all that great at sound, though the article is complete FUD. I've never had a problem running a Soundblaster card on a Linux machine. They always autodetect fine. And since Soundblaster is about the most common soundcard on the market...
At any rate, I've hardly ever had a linux machine with a soundcard in it. I hardly ever have the GUI enabled. If I want to play games, I use my windoze box...that's what it's there for, to be a toy.
That's what Windows is for. Not to do anything real, or useful. Can't check your email on it, or browse the internet without worrying that its executing code from every damn website, or that its autorunning attachments. Doesn't come with any useful compilers or development tools. The included webserver sucks. Windows is a toy, and it has always been a toy, and the fact that people are looking at a kick-ass powertool and complaining that it's not a toy is absurd.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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
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?|
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
Ha! Does Linux have a software mixer, you ask. Linux is much better than that! Linux has numerous software mixers! None of them are compatible with each other, much less any player applications, but you bet there are software mixers around! It's all about choice! Of course, they are all userland programs, so they skip now and then, but that's a small price to pay for ensuring that something so trivial does not offend the great Linux kernel by depriving it of some of its low-latency resources. Such resources are critically important towards providing optimal networking, disk I/O, RAID, and other things that are invisible to the user which he or she clearly does not appreciate enough.
I, being an educated and l33t hacker, know that I would much rather get an extra 5kB/sec on my downloads than be able to listen to two streams of audio at once. You already have two ears, isn't that good enough? Software mixer, pshaw.
Random and weird software I've written.
In my experience in 98 and above, it just give you an error. And if you have the right sound card, it plays both, you just need more sound channels.
Comparing Linux now to Windows 95 is like comparing Windows XP to Mac OS 7.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
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'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.
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.
How your tiny brain couldn't find this Windows 2000 Soundblaster Audigy Platinum on the Creatives site?
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.
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.
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
He's not on crack.
The Live does mixing in hardware. It wasn't until the era of the Live, Aureal Vortex, Yamaha PCI, and a few others, that cards were doing hardware mixing. Thus, cards like the SB16 and the Ensoniq/Creative AudioPCI don't. Windows 2000 introduced software mixing through DirectX. Afterwards, cheapie chips went back into not having hardware mixing again. This is why some people have problems with sound in Linux. They have a cheapie, integrated POS sound chip, like the C-Media, i810, nVidia nForce APU, Realtek, etc, and they cannot do hardware mixing. Creative Labs is fortunately one manufacturer that is still making chips with hardware mixing. Audigy series seems to do this. The CS46xx cards (like the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz) are great alternatives as well.
I'm betting that this was the real problem with the author of the article. If anyone wants a high-quality and CHEAP soundcard that works great with the Linux ALSA drivers, they should buy a $5 Aureal Vortex or Yamaha PCI card from Ebay. The Aureal cards do hardware mixing and also have a hardware graphic equalizer. The Soundblaster Live Value cards are also good choices, and can be purchased for $10-$15.
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
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
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
"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
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!"
...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 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.
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.
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
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)
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
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
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.
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...
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.
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
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. -
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'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
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.
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 ?.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
If I read the article right, he installed Windows XP, and had it work with the Intel chip (AFAIK, everything Intel has out NOW works quite well with Linux using the i810 audio driver), but Linux didn't work. So, he installed (a virtual machine app that he didn't mention the name of, but most certainly was VPC, as it's the only one that works well with Windows 3.1 with sound, because it's got SB emulation), and threw Windows 3.1 through XP on it, and got it to work on 95 and up. He also threw (IIRC) 9 distros on, and NONE recognized the SB. Something's fscked up - maybe he used versions that didn't support sound - he only said a version on Xandros (and it was the current version)? After all, Mandrake 9.2 didn't have much trouble detecting my SB-compatible ESS AudioDrive ISA (forget the model number) in this old P233MMX I'm typing this on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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'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.
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.