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X11 7.7 Released, Brings Multi-Touch Input
First time accepted submitter Jizzbug writes "The X Window System made release X11 7.7 last night (June 9th): 'This release incorporates both new features and stability and correctness fixes, including support for reporting multi-touch events from touchpads and touchscreens which can report input from more than one finger at a time, smoother scrolling from scroll wheels, better cross referencing and formatting of the documentation, pointer barriers to control cursor movement, and synchronization fences to coordinate between X and other rendering engines such as OpenGL.'"
X has had multi touch for YEARS. It was a patch. it's only now that it's a part of the official.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The X Consortium (the follow-on to the MIT X Consortium, i.e. the original x.org) started to do audio back around 1994.
Nobody gave a toss then and the project died when the consortium folded at the end of 1996.
And BTW, before that there were two competing audio extensions, one from DEC and the other from NCD IIRC, and neither one caught on.
It used to be very crash prone, laggey and with a whole lode of audio glitch issues. It has not caused any serious issues for me for about 2 years now, and complaints form new users have dropped dramatically so it seems to have improved quite a bit. You do not want to use it for low latency audio and there are a few specific pieces of hardware that do not work but most complainers either oppose its design principles or still hate it due to long memories rather than current issues.
Sound works fine on FreeBSD, no need for ugly hacks like PulseAudio, just in-kernel low-latency sound mixing and a full OSS4 implementation, complete with per-application volume controls, surround sound, and all of the features you'd expect of a modern operating system.
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I recently updated from debian squeeze to wheezy, and in the process it reinstalled pulseaudio. Surprise, surprise: my computer crashed frequently until I got rid of it again.
Sound on Linux has been very problematic the entire time I've been using it -- since the late '90s. It's turned into this weird tinker-toy arrangement where nothing quite works right, and debugging problems when you have them is extraordinarily painful.
Right now, the best solution I've found is to nuke all of the ALSA, pulseaudio, and other userland crap and go with OSSv4 -- it's been very stable for me over the last few years, and since it's self-contained at least solving problems doesn't take finding a needle in a haystack. The biggest downside is that (at least, AFAIK), it's not supported by mainstream distros, so if you're not comfortable recompiling your kernel and modules it's not usable.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Despite your dig at the command line, it really doesn't get any simpler than 'ssh -X remotehost remoteapp'.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Pulse killed the possibility of
Why not use jackd directly on top of alsa and pulseaudio as a client for jack? You could use pulseaudio for all desktop stuff that doesn't need low latency which I believe would only use one jack slot (or whatever it is called) and all latency critically things could connect directly to jack.
pacmd suspend true
sudo jackd -d alsa
pactl load-module module-jack-sink channels=2
pactl load-module module-jack-source channels=2
pacmd set-default-sink jack_out
pacmd set-default-source jack_in
pacmd suspend false
Or something like that.
"but it was a pain to set up and get it working."
Yup, I mean look at these examples for how devastatingly complicated it it:
"xterm -display [host ip]:[display id]"
or if you're feeling even more l337:
export DISPLAY=[host ip]:[display]
xterm
But I guess if you wet the bed at the thought of having to use a keyboard instead of a mouse then you're pretty screwed.