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.'"

Comments

Wht not sound?

[Anonymous Coward]

X virtualises user interface devices: mice, keyboard, display. Why sound has always been outside? Is not it another part of user interface?

Why we have these incompatible "sound servers", if the X protocol could be used instead? Tunneling a video with sound through X through ssh through Internet? No problem.

Re:Wht not sound?

[ChrisMP1]

Am I the only one who's never had a single problem with Pulse? What is it doing for everyone else that makes it so bad?

Re:Wht not sound?

[fa2k]

I think the reason people don't like it is that it introduces a fair number of problems, and it only has benefits in some rare, specific circumstances

Pulse seems to have been introduced at the wrong level, for what it is. Because it works on top of ALSA, it relies heavily on some little used functions, such as getting the true decibel level of the volume controls. (This causes the PA volume controls to fail for some hardware, such as muting the audio at 25 %). On the other hand, it doesn't make use of all ALSA functions, so it does resampling and mixing in software, instead of relying on (possibly superior) hardware. It also doesn't expose all functionality of the underlying devices, and I think it was difficult to get passthrough of digital audio to work about 6 months ago. So it's a rich API built on top of another rich API, offering little benefit, and introducing some bugs.

Re:Wht not sound?

[ffflala]

Pulse killed the possibility of multitrack recording studio on Linux. You can still look back and witness the dramatic die-off of multitrack Linux uses and discussion that coincide with the introduction of Pulse. It's like going back and looking at MySpace, or Friendster.

Right before Ubuntu brought in Pulse, I'd finally hit a sweet spot with Linux audio. With ALSA + qjackctl I was able to manage low-latency multitrack audio recording, and simultaneously have discrete control over the audio of all media players. Before pulse, I was able to use my terminal as a giant mixing board, managing recording and various media playback simultaneously. Different mixes and levels for different apps -- I was able to discretely control the audio levels and mixes for *each channel* in surround sound.

Pulse completely destroyed these capabilities, it eliminated the low-latency capability necessary for multitrack recording, and replaced it with frequent crashes, inconsistent behavior, and was tied in so deeply that Ubuntu has never since been capable of the audio layout I'd been using about five years ago.

Pulse is the single worst Linux move I've ever seen. In the interest of removing audio from the kernel space (necessary for low-latency), it simply eliminated what used to be advanced capabilities. Lennart Poettering, author of Pulse simply disregarded these concerns, waved his hands and said "that's not the concerns Pulse was designed to address!"

No shit, Lennart.

Re:Wht not sound?

[Hatta]

It's really time for the kernel guys to take another look at OSS4. Fully GPL compatible, it belongs in the kernel.

Re:Wht not sound?

[RobbieThe1st]

To be honest, I agree with it's choice to hardware mix/resample in software - Most cards(by volume) are just dumb DACs, and the few that aren't(like my audigy 2) have enough bugs to make it useless to try - Just use ALSA straight on those cards, or only use Pulse for that application(which works perfectly well when you have a hardware mixer).

Re:Wht not sound?

[LizardKing]

BSD people look at you strangely if you try to get Pulse working

That's because Pulseaudio was designed to solve issues that for the most part have never existed on BSD systems. The BSD's evolved their existing OSS based audio subsystems to fix the few issues it had, whereas Linux chose to adopt a poorly implemented new system. I speak from experience, having tried to write an OSS shim for NetBSD that emulated the ALSA MIDI API, and became frustrated by the incomplete, innacurate documentation. I was also bemused by the ALSA API itself which looked like it was designed to be object oriented, but actually implemented by people with no real understanding of good OO princples.

Re:Wht not sound?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you're flaming, I can flame harder.

Disclaimer: I've sent some patches to pulseaudio and alsa.

Pulseaudio is possibly the best thing that has ever happened to linux, the introduction was unquestionably problematic, but dmix that it replaced will not be missed. It also contains features that decrease the amount of interrupts needed, and it didn't work around problems in hardware but fixed. If you feel like it you can STILL use jack, in fact with -rt kernel I ran pulseaudio on top of jack in a 2.5ms maximum latency configuration with 0 underruns for native jack clients.

In the time that only dmix existed, a lot of features were missing and you couldn't guarantee that something that happened to work on your card would ever work on someone else's card and all names for the master channel was inconsistent and the dB levels were usually garbage. You have the people who worked on pulseaudio and fixed the upstream bugs instead of hacking around them to thank that those problems were actually fixed.

Re:Using X's power?

[Greyfox]

It's so not complicated to export a window to another display. Just set an environment variable to tell it where to display and authorize the machine on the remote display. Nothing to it. Despite that, the companies I've worked at that have needed to do this just set up VNC and work on the machine remotely instead.

If you want to do something like Sun, where you authenticate and it finds your session out there and pops it up on your machine, that's a bit more complicated. Pretty cool, but more complicated.