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Creative Labs and Linux
redemption wrote
in to tell us that Creative Labs has a
Soundblaster Developers page
for Linux. Not much yet, but it looks like the start of
support. Perhaps just as interesting is that redemption wrote
in to tell us that 4Front
has announced an Alpha (and very incomplete) driver for the SBlive.
There' s no Creative driver yet. I'm glad though they at least Created a Linux
page instead of a dumb link (Linux Comin' Soon).
As for older ISA cards like SB16 and the like, I bet they will never bother to make
new drivers for them.
What's cool about the old cards is they had to give out the low level interface specs so people could write DOS games to support them. For example, the PCGPE has most of what you need to do 8-bit audio on an SB (or clone). I believe the SB16 is a simple extension to this.
Doesn't look very open to me. Looks like shareware. Yuck.
You'd think a product that has been out this long would have some kind of free driver support. Especially a card that retails for $100 or $200. Sound Blast has definately lost their reputation with me for this lack of progress.
Its in arial, which is pretty damn common. You should install a TrueType font server for x (its really easy). I recommend you go on over to freshmeat.net and search for 'xfstt'. Then stick arial into a dir and run xfstt on it. Then set the proper xset vars (this is covered in the xfstt documentation). and off you are. Wow.
Well, then screw them and their hardware. I run modified kernels myself, and more than just x86 hardware, so their closed source Intel only drivers are worthless to me.
The SB Live will never work for me without source; I've made modifications to the Linux kernel and no modules will load without being recompiled.
Needless to say, I won't be buying any sound card that doesn't have a driver with open source code.
I am SO going to assume that was sarcasm, if not, time to dust off my Ranting Hat(TM).
I know slashdot isn't a Linux-ONLY site, but face it, it's easily a Linux-DOMINATED site. If you've been visiting slashdot regularly for at least a month, you'd know that there's WAY more than an "occasional" post about Linux. To be fair, every other OS gets about the same amount of play here(MacOS, Be, Windows, BSD), although Apple has been in the spotlight recently. Also, I'd say a good majority (or at least a plurality) of visitors and contributors to slashdot have some, if not much, experience with Linux. One can even look at the sites that link to slashdot: most of them are Linux sites, easily.
It's VERY easy for someone new to slashdot to get the impression that this is a Linux site. It takes time to realise that it's not. Oh, and don't tell me that the motto "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters" should explain it all, because Linux is considered a very nerd-trendy thing to be involved with, so to many people, Linux news==Nerd News.
Thank You for your support.
I still won't get any hardware with binary-only drivers. What are the chances of Creative rebuliding the SB Live driver for the 4.0 kernel five years from now? Almost zero. Linus promised that binary-only drivers will break with each new version, and so far, even source drivers haven't recompiled so well. Binary-only is a bit too dead end. I'll wait for Creative to offer something better before buying their hardware. For now, I'll stick with Trident sound cards (Trident makes a really sweet sound chip set called the 4dwave, and they wrote GPL Linux kernel drivers for it that will be included in the next release of ALSA).
While creative labs would rather keep their hardware API secret and release binary-only drivers, Trident's linux support is much better - open source specs and drivers.
h tm
Trident is actively supporting the ALSA project and there are already 4dwave DX/NX drivers for Linux.
http://www.tridentmicro.com/HTML/Drivers/audio.
http://www.alsa-project.org/
look at the article header /.?
Creative Labs and Linux
Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday April 25, @01:41PM EDT
from the support-our-OS-already! dept.
Doesn't that give a nice hint at the OS of choice with most of
Peter Marc Kueth
Hardware companies aren't going to spend too much time and effort writing drivers for linux until they feel they can increase sales because of it. There just doesn't appear to be enough people buying hardware for it's linux compatability at the moment. Though it would be interesting to find out exactly how big of an impact the linux/*bsd users make on any particular hardware market. One would think hardware manufacturers would get a clue by now, as users of linux and freebsd would probably own more hardware than your average windows tool.
They probably won't release developer information because much of the difference between their cheap cards and their expensive cards is just different software (e.g., different code for the DSP). That makes them very paranoid about that information.
Damn, I've got only mp3's around.. What to do?
You should look at this 'Ask Slashdot' thread too.
I plan to buy no Creative products.
Recently, I bought a supposed ES1371,
based sound card, because of ALSA Linux support.
But the card has an ES1373(Creative ) chip.
It didn't work, and Creative has refused to release any information.
For now, I'll buy a Trident sound card, as they release product information.
Hopefully, someday, Creative will grow up too.
OK, now I am confused. Several months ago I read that Creative had hired an engineer whose sole job was creating binary Linux drivers for Creative products. So whats happened? Is that still the plan? Did he quit? I don't know.
Now why does Creative have a link to 4Fronts page if they are going to do the drivers themselves? And if Creative is, I'm guessing "paying" 4Front, then why does 4Fronts page still talk of reverse engineering the SBLive? It doesn't make any sense.
I understand 4Front is a small company just trying to make some money by leveraging their Linux kernel copyrighted work and the morality of this is an issue I don't want to discuss now. But what are these companies thinking? Have they lost their minds? OK, making a deal with 4Front might make the Linux support headaches go away but at what cost?
For example, if you use Linux and you want to buy the professional RME digi32 board, which I hear still has incomplete support, you have to buy an $80 driver from 4Front? Are the people at RME stupid or something? In this sort of business model it should be the manufacturer of the exotic and expensive audio equipment that ships the driver with the board!!
This sort of arrangment is just wacked, lets forget opensource for a second, if commercial Linux is going to succeed and we must have this proprietary ugliness then this model is NOT the way to do it. It really doesn't support the end user and if its closed, proprietary and it costs then the customers are going to demand a higher level of integration.
I'm just confused, maybe 4Front did the RME driver for free just to have sole distribution rights?
This is not a pretty picture and I personally hope this type of Linux business model doesn't become predominant.
Does anyone know if 4Front is making any money?
Or are they seriously in the red?
Not only for the audio hardware, but for all of their hardware. I own there Encore DVD kit, and i like it very much, but i have to boot Windows to watch DVDs, and can't do anything usefull while having the DVD running (sometimes i want the DVD only running in the background while i'm working...). Creative Labs didn't even answered my email asking for help.
This is not fully right. All DVDs i have are readably by ISO9660 complient standard drivers. Additional there is a UDF driver available for linux. Both drivers have the problem that they can not readout the data of some of the DVDs. I'm afraid that the problem in this DVDs is the Content Scrambling System (CSS). But as there are software only DVD players for Windows this can not be a real problem.
Posted by cosman:
nVidia must give the detonator sources or good specifications about riva chipset for that driver (for Mesa) can be made. But it's not going to happen in a hurry!
TedC
nVidia is also working on its own GLX/Mesa drivers already, so they'd probably wait for them to finish that first anyway
Where did you hear that?
The ALSA drivers should support the SB 128 very well.
-adnans
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
HOW did Creative Labs get that impression?!? Granting that there's an occasional posting about Linux here, there's a lot more to Slashdot than just one operating system.
Oh, well, more links == more clickthrus. There's no such thing as bad publicity.
I've been visiting Slashdot for WAY more than a month at a time, so I know how much Linux is discussed here. I'm just kind of concerned that Slashdot doesn't get put into a ghetto of some sort or another. There's something more to it than just a single operating system. A site that has a poll about whether you like the Beatles, the Stones, or the Who the best can't be solely about a single operating system.
Maybe it would help if Rob got more into Beat Farmers-SCOTS-Mojo Nixon. Or maybe not.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Creative thinks they know what fonts I like better than me, eh?
Well, their thoughtfulness has made the entire site completely illegible to me. I can't read a single word in their crappily fonted web site.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Why does there seem to be more support for the OSS package than for writing pure open-source kernel drivers for linux? If we're putting together a nice Linux box without paying for the OS, the Windowing system or any of the millions of programs we use, it starts to seem a little unfair when we need to pay for something as simple as a sound driver, when Creative Labs could just release the specs of their boards.
:)
I know that there are some chipset manufacturers that refuse to let companies like Creative release the chip specs, but does is this really a good business practice? I can't see a manufacturer holding an advantage over another by holding on to the specs. It might stop the practice of cloning, but Creative Labs wasn't hurt by this during the early 90's.
Never trust a program you don't have the source to!
æeee!
Hey thanks, I just got the xfstt rpm from the redhat powertools collection. rpm -ivh blar. Followed the simple instructions in /usr/doc/xfstt. And wow!!! That page is beautiful now.
-matt
Four Front Tech / OSS. They are not free drivers. I have a question. If I buy a sound blaster Sound card shouldn't the drivers come from Creative? OSS is getting no help from Creative so this is not really support it is a 'front' to support. It is a put-on. I am disappointed in Creative. Real support woudl be them helping OSS or them supplying the drivers themselves.
Only 'flamers' flame!
It is not just for the soundcards that creative does not give hardware specs. Just my luck- of all the CD burners to get-
y ees/joerg.schilling/private/cdr-unsup-1.8. html
I end up with a creative labs burner that is unsupported by cdrecord.
Here is the latest from the cdrecord web page:
http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/emplo
The following CD-R drives are not supported by cdrecord-1.8:
Drive type
Description
Support status
Creative Labs CDR 4210
Absolutely no support, Based on the Panasonic CW-7501
never
OSS is just that, a _system_, an api for sound support. There are free GPL'd OSS drivers as well as the commercial OpenSound product. It's just an API.
SB128 drivers my ass. These drivers suck. Thanks to OSS' restriction to have only 3 line mixers, I can't use my video in/CD in 2 line on my SB128. I doubt they'll fix that little "oops" any time soon, either.
Heck, forget the video card audio line.. give me CD audio. That line mixer doesn't work either. (And believe me, I've tried.. Red Hat 5.2 didn't let me mix it, and neither did kernel 2.2.6..)
[grumble]
Fork
I called tech support about my encore kit because I was having problems (surprise!) in windows. Once we solved my problem, I asked about linux. He told me that he's been hearing "good things" about linux support from _within_ creative. Now, he didn't say "dvd support this month!" but he _definately_ didn't say "we have no plans to support it at this time." I am hopeful.
I seriously doupt they would ever make you pay for drivers. But the point is they want to leave the source closed, because they fear having it open will allow thier compitition to discover how to make compatible devices. I'm sure these closed source drivers could very well even be included in a distrubution.. just not the source of them.
The driver coming from Creative themselves will not be shareware, the OSS driver on the other hand is shareware.
.. listening to Van Halen right now using it .. wahoo!! :)
I'm just happy now cause I can finally listen to my CD's again in Linux with my Live! with OSS' alpha driver
They are still refusing to provide info on their
DVD products, on their sound cards, and only plan
a binary only driver of some sort it seems.
The trident 4D wave cards on the other hand have
vendor provided Linux drivers for ALSA, ESS tech
have provided reference source code for some of
their PCI cards which Im working on currently.
USB audio is an open spec.
Creative only needs to make their own drivers if they don't release the necessary technical information to the open source community. Support for older ISA boards has been in the kernel for some time now. Even the PCI 64/128 boards are supported. You won't get tech support from Creative, since they didn't write the drivers, but you can get plenty of support from the Linux community.
The problem with the SB Live is that Creative refuses to release specs on the EMU-10K1 chip without an NDA. Apparently they're afraid that Aureal will use this information to create a "Vortex Live". Personally, I wouldn't mind the competition, but then I'm not a Creative employee or stockholder.
That's why Creative is probably developing a binary-only driver for the SB Live. I would prefer open source drivers myself, but I'll be happy either way when my SB Live works under Linux.
The Linux guy was hired with the sole intention that he should write SB Live drivers, he himself has in newsgroup postings stated that he might make other drivers after the sb live is done but thats up to Creative Labs.............