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Creative Labs to open SB Live Drivers
Several people wrote to us to let us know that Creative Labs has decided to make the drivers for their Soundblaster Live open source. They made the announcement and also said they will be setting up a CVS/Bugzilla system to aid in development. Jon Taylor, of S3 and nVidia fame, along with several other coders have been asked to oversee the development. Additionally, they confirmed that they are working with Lokisoft to work Environmental Audio and "3D
Audio" on the Linux platform. Lokisoft makes most of the uber-cool games for Linux.
When I built my dual celeron almost a year ago I got a sb64 when I could have got a live but.. open drivers didnt look like they would happen well guess what im buying now :) a sblive
Alot of people aren't going to get the significance of this announcement--they'll think, "Cool, another sound card that I can play with on Linux w/o resorting to closed source drivers."
This is beyond that.
The SB Live is based on a single, ridiculously powerful and extremely programmable DSP. Almost all functions the chipset performs are executed in DSP level software, meaning suddenly Linux is getting full specs on a complete digital processing environment.
The impacts of this are substantial. The SB Live chipset is cheap enough that it's a contender for "standard sound" in many machines. Open source algorithms for everything from MP3 encoding to analog synth simulation to the more esoteric, non-sound related stuff(GIMP graphical filters, datastream analysis, etc.) should, if the drivers are clean enough, start popping up over time.
The uses of such a powerful digital signal processor on an open platform are honestly unpredictable at this point in time. While there are hardcoded design issues in the SB Live chipset(most notably, all signals are upsampled to 48khz before processing may occur), the sheer flexibility of this chipset will blow Linux programmers out of the water.
This is truly excellent news, and shouldn't be ignored as a mere fun thing for the gamers to play with. If only 3D graphics hardware was as programmable...or as open.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
I've been thinking (a dangerous thing indeed) that perhaps the reason for Creative adopting open source is the fact that it simply isn't in their best interest to have dedicated Linux coders working on the drivers. In the long run, it could be cheaper for them to open the design rather than pay someone to write drivers for an OS which is still only used by a small fraction of their customers. (Although a very vocal fraction.)
It does make sense, Creative gets the work done for free, and they'll get QA on it to boot. Economically, it makes perfect sense, and it's an all-around good decision. This is a good case to use in citing why Open Source is a Good Thing(tm). Look like the Live! will win over a lot of people who wouldn't have bought it before now.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Use any PCL3 driver. The printer will still work. The printer specific drivers for windows are usually just a different picture so the user sees the printer they bought on the screen.
If you ever have driver trouble with a HP Laser, select LaserJet 4 - always works because it's straight PCL 5, no extra crap.
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
...for soundcards, at least.
It's pretty short, too.
http://www.alsa-project.org/black.html
A bit more thought on this: :-). They're actually going the extra mile and providing not only the source but a development environment for coders to come, watch, and learn.
Wow, creative is setting up CVS/Bugzilla. They're not merely opening the source; they're not just trying to grasp a bit of extra PR out of the Linux mindshare gods(Taco and Hemos
This is amazing, and deserves a retrospective profile in around six months to see how this great, precedent setting experiment panned out.
Of course, Creative isn't dumb. As I mentioned in another post, Creative stands to have their card become the standard DSP component in innumerable Linux machines--their foresight in developing a programmable sound card is very likely to pay off handsomely in increased sales.
The economics of Open Source just got much more interesting.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
I fully agree on this matter! Emailing the manufacturer, especially their software design department, works! Also putting up a site will draw the attention of the software developers and the people responsable.
Check some of my correspondence: Europe developer support and US developer support
The amount of people that do this, is also important and remember, look at things from their perspective when emailing. Things like this, will eventual frustrate them and make 'm think...
Manuël Beunder, maintainer of The SB Live! Linux page
ps, I also forgot to mention that releasing a GPL-ed source, means they support GPL, making it also possible for ALSA to start working again on the drivers...
Even more sound support for linux. This might just make me go out and buy an SBLive.
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
If im not mistaken this is a "winprinter" right? this may fall under the same realm as winmodems. Of course I could be totally wrong. Just a thought
"We hope you find fun and laughter in the new millenium" - Top half of fastfood gamepiece
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
[OFF-TOPIC]
This is excellent news.
However, I'm not entirely happy with the assertion that Lokisoft makes 'most of the uber-cool games' for Linux! This article was about how cool it is that Creative are open-sourcing their SBLive drivers. And it is very cool. So remember, that Loki don't make open source games.
Now, I do of course understand why they don't. And I do think Loki is a very exciting company, and they're doing exciting things for Linux, and I'm sure it won't be all that long before we see some more open source offerings from Loki.
But, I'd just like to remind people that there are some excellent open source games for Linux. My personal fave has to be FreeCiv - http://www.freeciv.org/ - and pingus will be excellent when it goes 1.0 - http://pingus.seul.org/
For many other superb linux games, many of them open source, pop over to http://happypenguin.org/
Jules
-- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a perl script.
Hi there. I'm not saying buy this instead of SB Live. If you are interested in going to a local store and hear a Trident 4DWave DX/NX, I found a list of international distributors at http://www.hoontech.com/main2.html click Products :-) :: Sound Track Digital NX ( Supports Optical OUT, Digital AMP ) BTW there is already driver for Linux with source under GPL license, for this chipset by Trident 4DWave DX/NX. Advanced Linux Sound Architecture - Supported SoundCards: http://www.alsa-project.org/src/soundcards.html if you'd like to know more about ALSA go to http://www.alsa-project.org then read by clicking introduction, applications, bug reporting, download, documentation ,api, mailing lists
The comcept of having custom dsp algoritms would rock very much, but I dont think its gonna happen. Creative will probable ship the DSP-code as a binary as many users have stated before, and this is logical, because they probably dont want to "give away" the sourcecode of their nice reverbs and stuff, even if its quite dependant of the EM10K1 dsp, it could surely be rewritten to use on other processors..
But I really hope Im wrong, and there could be other possibilities too, that they provide their algorithms as precompiled libraries or something but keeping other parts of the DSP code open..
This is awesome, I thought I was going to have to sell my SBLive or something. This rocks, it isn't just another soundcard. Finally, great midi under linux (?)
... I can't wait for mature drivers and software for this thing. CL might be cool after all. This might just turn out to be the most popular sound card of all time.
This is truly great news
support gun control: take guns from cops
Let's try to remember that Linux isn't the only OS that will gain from this step by Creative. The *BSDs, Solaris, and more will all win. And not just x86 architectures... PCI-based SPARCs, Alphas, and PowerPCs, which Creative never considered "cost effective" to develop drivers for, will finally have an option aside from the horrid on-board sound.
:) )
I'm endlessly pleased by this. Now, to work on them to release specs for their DXR decoders and the like. (Give an inch, take a mile.
--
Brandon Hume
hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
Brandon Hume
hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
Binary firmware in "open source" drivers is a tradition, even in the linux kernel... why would this be different?
that they're now opening their top of the line hardware drivers too.
Now I can sleep with ease knowing that my Linux machine will be running Creative Labs sound drivers. Who else knows more about their hardware then they do?
Hopefully this will inspire vortex to release code for their A3D chipset, instead of having to pay OSS for a driver
I just sold my SB live. why couldn't they have done this from the start?
Michael Dikkema Systems Administration Moot Technologies
Yay, this makes me even more happy that I chose a soundcard by A3D, hoping to support competition rather than the market leader, when I bought my computer way back when. A year later, and now those who chose SB Live's have a opensource drivers, and what do I have? A $30 closed source (crippled and buggy) solution from Opensound, and Aureal support claiming they might have drivers out "towards the end of 1999" (though they also claim they will be "more open-source" whatever that means).
Never the less, I am not bitter. It's great that Creative are seeing the light here, and I hope that more companies (cough, cough) could follow in their footsteps. It just feels so wrong that the only way to get good sound support in Linux is to support a huge company with a defacto monopoly in this area. That was sort of what I was trying to get away from...
-
I recall reading in one of ESR's essays that the release of driver source code is a logical and beneficial step for hardware manufacturers: they benefit from having the open source community to working on it, while effectively broadening the range of operating systems their hardware can run on. Hopefully, other hardware manufacturers will emulate Creative in this move towards open source. The point is, hardware companies generally don't make money from their drivers: they make money from pushing their hardware for sale to you, the consumer. I foresee that more Linux users will want an SBLive! now. =)
my 2 cents.
Be kind. There are too many mean people out there already.
...when will Linux get a decent, uniform, games API? DirectX (But done properly ;) )for Linux would, of course, be useful...
its great that Creative has released these drivers, but the coolest part of the announcement is the possibility of the creation of some sort of universal sound API out of the Loki/Creative collaboration...
it would definitely be nice to have sound programming be as easy to use as network programming...
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
Grrr. my nick is "Forward the Light Brigade"...
WoooHoo! 3 Cheers, Hip Hip Hooray!
I think your totally wrong. ;-) Using the same logic, you could say all hardware is "Winthis" or "Winthat." Just because it comes with a Wndows driver and not a Linux one does not mean it is a "Winanything".
----------------
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
But we can always program our own reverb algorithms. Already, the Turtle Beach Fiji/Pinnacle cards have a Motorola 56001, fully programmable under Linux. See Sound & MIDI Software For Linux for details.
I'm sceptical though towards seeing sound card DSPs used in general data processing. Isn't the data path too slow? It's only 48000 kHz * 2 channels * 2 bytes/channel = 192kbps. For example, mp3 encoders such as LAME are already a lot faster than this on fast PII/III's. And on the Athlon, doubly so.
I'm using slackware with kernel 2.2.12, if u just force the insertion of the module, it will work even though it says wrong kernel version. It's working fine and so far nothing bad has happened.
_______________________________________________
There is no statute of limitation on stupidity.
Sorry to spoil the party, but don't get overexcited.
They say in the announcement, there are two sets of drivers, one open source and one BINARY ONLY.
The FAQ has the same information, and suggests that the open source driver will only be a loader for the binary only module to avoid recompiling the kernel.
So it seems that we have a lion in sheeps disguise.
Also, if the free loader is GPL'ed, you must not redistribute the driver, because you can't provide the source for the binary only module. Sorry guys, I am suspicious until I see the full details.
Is this under the GPL or BSD license or something else?
>48000 kHz * 2 channels * 2 bytes/channel = 192kbps
Oh no, not again. Ignore the logical errors in previous post.
What I meant was 48kHz * 2 * 2 = 192 kilobytes/s.
But it's still slow in mp3 coding, since the input stream cannot be faster that real time.
um... be careful with insmod -f ... bypasses a lot of sanity checks and could hang your system or worse, depending on the module used.
I will never doubt an AC again. I thought you were lying, but after about 5 minutes I came up with this!!!!!!!
OK, I guess the cat is out of the bag now. Like the article says,
Creative is opening the sources to the existing SBLive (Emu10K1,
technically) Linux kernel driver. The current sourcebase is what would
have been release as beta4 of the driver, with 4-speaker support (stereo
mirroring only at present) and SPDIF output being the main changes from
beta3. Also being released are beta sources for a DXR2 driver which
were donated to Creative by Andrew de Quincey (thanks, Andrew!). The
source for both projects will be released under the GPL. We are
planning to submit kernel patches as soon as possible, after the
open-source development community has had a chance to beat on the driver
sources for a bit and whip them into shape.
Also as the article mentioned, Creative is going to launch an
open-source development support site with FAQs, CVS repositiories,
CVSWeb tracking, Bugzilla, mailing lists, and all the other standard
open source project website services. The site will be up and running
sometime early next week - PLEASE do not overload
developer.soundblaster.com with repeated checks to see if the site is up
yet, OK? We'll announce loud and clear when the server goes live.
So, that's where things stand as of Friday evening. All of us here at
Creative are really excited about this, and we have all worked hard to
get to this point. Huge numbers of people have been asking for the
source since we announced the driver development project early this
year. Many of those same e-mails were from people who wanted to be able
to hack the driver sources themselves. Well, here's what you all have
been asking for all year, and what we promised you back in February.
Happy hacking!
Jon Taylor
Linux Driver Engineer
Creative Labs
jtaylor@creativelabs.com
I got one of those Creative TNT boards as well. in fact, I went out and bought it SPECIFICALLY because it works well under Linux. (my old card, with an i760 chipset, did NOT until 3.3.1, if I remember correctly) cheers to creative for figuring out that this is a Good Thing, and we're likely to buy a lot more hardware now.
has anyone else been emailing them and bugging them like I have? every single time I have a problem with Creative's hardware (which, given the DxR2, is a lot) I stick in a "oh yeah, and WHEN will this work with linux?"...
now I'm waiting for them DVD drivers. even closed source. software decoding is fine too. just let me watch the movies!!!
Lea
There are such things are "winprinters" which rely on specific parts of Windows and can't run without them. They're even more tied to Windows than the winmodems, though I don't know if this actually is one.
From talking to someone at Loki, who is doing the majority of the 3D sound API programming, it is not in Creative's best interest to release the binary only part in source code. If Creative did that, they would be giving away the heart and sole of the SB Live. It would make it literally an overnight project for one of Creative's competitors to create a card that can match the SB Live and come in at a lower price point.
(that was a Dr King-ish pun for the unknowing)
.au files, but sound none the less.
:)
this is probably some of the greatest new i have ever heard - i grabbed the SBLive! value when it came out, and after running it for months in my windows machine and loving the eviornmental audio, when i upgraded my linux box to rh6.1, i decided to swap the sound cards and try out some enviornmental audio in linux (oh how silly i was).
much to my chagrin, i went to creative's site and found (oh the horror...) object files!! YUCK! I was not happy. And as if that wasn't enough of a kick in the head, the last kernel they compiled it for was 2.2.10 - i would have to DOWNGRADE my kernel to run it! No way! I didn't feel like doing that, so a couple days and an "insmod -f" later, i had sound.
of course, no special features or anything, and i couldn't play
So i was happy for a little while, but it didn't last very long, eventually i just became bitter towards creative - wrote them some e-mail asking for better drivers (them:"we'll have one out early 2000"). and so i eventually just decided to live with the fact that i had an awesome soundcard made by a bunch of bastards.
and then comes this story! woo hoo! I love creative!!! - i'm proud to own a card made by such a wonderful company
---
After reading the article, it seems that Creative will have two sets of driver for linux. They will have their official "binary-only" driver, and the Open Source(tm) driver.
This is a first. Where a company not only released their source for a driver, but are also making their only closed driver. Creative, and any other company, will see first-hand at what opening up source will do. Because they will have something to test it against with the binary-only driver that Creative is making.
In a couple months, Creative will realease their new binary-only driver and say "our driver does this, that, and the otherthing", and whoever is taking up the Open Source lead will go"our driver does all of that, is more stable at doing it, and has features that you never would have though of"
Let's hope that other companies see the light of what opening up drivers can do. Not only does it make for a better product, but I bet opening the drivers sold about a couple hundred thousand SB Live! cards to linux users that would have sooner pissed on the card yesterday then bought one due to linux support and drivers.
Buy a trident! Buy a trident! Cheaper, faster, open..er..! Although I'm happy Creative has decided to lean towards OS I'm still pissed at them. I bought an sblive and was unable to use it in linux for a long time. I doubt they'll open up the card completely, which is what I want and what I *can get already* from trident. My next sound card will be that trident everyone's talking about. That is *the* card for linux at the moment. Get that and a g400 and have some fun!
The current binaries do not support for smp boxes. Anyone know why and will this continue? Hopefully and probably not but just seeing if anyone else has an answer.
I imagine the reason is quality control. Their job supporting their hardware on the windows platform would be made a lot harder if they had to support 'Joe Bob's L33T SBLive drivers" with hacked vqf playback support as well as their own drivers. ;-)
I am actually surprised, beyond the thread of reverse engineering their other concern has to be product support - bad support looks horrible on them, and they have no way to support drivers that other people are making.
I imagine they just got convinced that the new drivers couldn't possibly be worse than the existing ones, and that they could weasel their way out of supporting people not using windows
A while back I suggested slashdot keep a blacklist of hardware vendors that do not release specs to opensource developers, this would have a profound effect and expediate a company's support of the opensource world, they CANT take bad press. I still think its important to do this... make some noise :) P.S: you have the right to speak, but can you afford to?
I am glad to finally see the drivers for the SB Live opened up. Considering my box is made up of almost all creative labs products I would really love to see the specs opened up for my dvd decoder card a dxr3.
Yes!! We all should be writing as many companies as possible out there and explaining to them the benefits of supporting Linux. I was on the phone with a representative from National Instruments about their LabView product for Linux. I encouraged them to step up their driver support for their hardware and he seemed pretty enthusiastic about recommending this to others in the company. So keep it up boys n' girls! Let them know what we want and pester them until we get it!
This is exactly what a lot of people are thinking right now. I bought a SBLive several months ago because I saw that creative had released a driver for Linux. It was only later that I found that the driver was horribly crippled, and not open source.
People have been bugging them forever to open it, but their response has been that the functionality of the SBLive is "1/3 hardware, 1/3 software, and 1/3 DSP code" (these were the approximate words of the Creative person who replied).
Unfortunately, some of that code will likely stay closed, simply to protect their IP. All I can say is that whatever they open, it's about time! Creative has a policy of not responding to emails or posts to their newgroups, and so there were endless floods of frustrated, bewildered people. Nobody really knew what was going on behind the doors at Creative, and there was precious little in the way of authoritative info from them. It was only recently that they even put up a FAQ. I have to sympathize with them a little though... There were some people who flamed them mercilessly (publicly), and I'm sure there were even more who did it privately via email.
I wonder if this will include support for Creative Lab's newly released cards, which have MP3 acceleration (whoo, my old Pentium needs a break). They've also got something called the "Live! Drive" that fits in a 5 1/4" drive bay with all the plugs on the front. Mega-cool.
Does anyone know if there is any support for external MIDI devices on linux right now? (keyboard, etc. for MIDI input).
So far, Loki has only ported existing games from Windows. They licensed the code themselves, so they're in no position to open source anything. Of course, they're in no compelling position to do so even if they had the right.
I remember I got a TNT card just becuase NVidia released open source drivers for them. However, it didn't matter that much, becuase they haven't gotten any real updates besides having xscreensaver opengl hacks to not flicker. I also heard even the lowly g200 is faster than a TNT under linux, becuase they have actual programming specs.
So, I would like to ask, will specs be released and are they needed to make sound card drivers? I am pretty sure that I will not contribute anything besides maybe bug reports, even if specs are released, but with specs, I would suspect a better driver would be released. I hope it won't end up like the TNT drivers, where nobody changes them becuase they have no idea what to do without specs.
I know I will be moderated down for this, but . . . Vincent
DSP code isn't a problem. There is no problem uploading firmware to the card to do its work.
Creative doesn't stand to lose much by making the interface to the DSP available-- it will only work with their card anyway, so it can't do anything but increase their sales.
opening up their hardware will hopefully convince others without open drivers (you know who you are) to open up their source. Big companies opening their source like this shows some appriciated confidence in Linux. Woohoo
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I'd just add that these Win-Devices are a bad idea even when you are using a supported OS. With a normal printer you can troubleshoot problems by just dumping plain text to the parallel port. In addition, since the drivers are more complicated there is more chance that they won't work when you upgrade your OS or may conflict with other software on your system. Of course since these are normally cheap devices the odds that the vendor will spend the money to update their drivers are lower as well. You can also forget using drivers for some other "compatable" device until yours is fully supported (how many printers are there that can use either Epson or HP drivers in a pinch?)
I've been an avid gamer since the days of the Apple II+. I'm not an audiophile, and I've always had a bah-humbug attitude towards frilly little features like 3D audio, but I had a good sized budget for my last machine, so I decided to get a SB Live and a Dolby Digital 5.1 speaker system to go with it. I was blown away. It is incredibly immersive, not to mention a big advantage in gameplay - you can hear which direction gunfire is coming from. You can hear which direction enemies are approaching from even when you can't see them. I now consider 3D audio to be a crucial element of my games, and an important step in making Linux a rocking game platform.
;-)
A while back, I got a dualshock controller for my Playstation - just for the analog joysticks, but I was amazed at how effective those two little vibrators in the handles are at making the game come to life. I'm now a convert to force feedback as well. I picked up a Logitech Wingman Force the other day, and I absolutely love it. Implementing the IForce library in Linux would be a very good thing - has anyone heard about programming specs for the Wingman Force? They have a 16 bit controller onboard and a USB connection - just think, we could make a Beowulf cluster
I've always felt that Aureal's Vortex cards were better technology than the SB Live, but with this announcement I might get an SB Live anyway. Currently, the only way to get any sound support in Linux with a Vortex or Vortex 2 is by purchasing the OSS sound drivers (and even then it's only beta). I actually did this for the Vortex 1 I have now, and I have been thinking about upgrading to a Vortex 2 soon. But even when the drivers are out of beta this won't give you 3D sound in Linux, just regular sound. It seams that Aureal is beginning to take the Linux market more seriously as they have announced they will develop their own Linux drivers which will be available for free, but they still won't be open and at this point all we have is a promise. They may very well delay the drivers as companies often do.
Compare this to Creative, who are now not only announcing that their already available (and free) drivers will be made open, but they are also planning on actually implementing 3D sound in Linux. I don't particularily like Creative, but you've got to love this!
As I said before, I think Aureal has better hardware. And their 3D sound is considerably more sophisticated as they implement "wavetracing" in which the path of the sound wave is actually modelled. But does this matter if they don't have 3D sound support in Linux? OK, 3D sound is mostly used in games and most games are still in windoze, so I pretty much have windoze on my computer for the sole purpose of playing games. Lack of 3D sound in Linux didn't bother me before because there were nothing in Linux that could actually take advantage of it. This situation is thankfully starting to change. 3D video support in Linux is improving by leaps and bounds and many more games are being made available for Linux. But until now there just hasn't been any 3D sound.
So, just in case anyone from Aureal is here, if you don't offer something comparable my next sound card will be a SB Live even though I think it's inferior technology and I don't like Creative. OK?
I am not an idiot. Please use my name to email me.
"That's right, I'm quoting myself."
-Upsilon
I meant winprinter in the same vien as winmodems.
"We hope you find fun and laughter in the new millenium" - Top half of fastfood gamepiece
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
I was almost about to sell mine. I brought mine thinking there was linux drivers for it and found out they only worked on UP kernels. So it was the choice of having 1 processor and sound, or get a SB16 and use two processors.
I might keep my card now and see what happens.
Check out the pbm2ppa project (via freshmeat or this site.) Color support is lacking though, and the last code update seems to have been a year ago.
Certainly there are other printers that are better suited for Linux, and HP deserves a large raspberry for refusing to reveal details of their printer protocol.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
About time... I needed to hear this :)
When I bought my latest computer last year, I naively decided to get a SB Live! since it seemed like such a cool card, and it was by Creative, so how could there not be Linux drivers for it?
When I discovered there were no drivers, and that Creative was not releasing the specifications, I was understandably disappointed. After the first beta drivers came out, I could at least get some sound out of the card. But some games didn't work with it, and it still had less functionality than the AWE32 driver. So my younger brother got a free upgrade from AWE32 to SB Live!, and I got a free downgrade that gave me more functionality. If the driver at that time had been open source, I honestly would have spent my whole summer hacking it to do cool stuff.
My point? This is a VERY SMART MOVE by Creative. There are a LOT of DSP hackers in college, just itching to write cool DSP code. Sound has been an often neglected field of hacking. We are on the verge of a Renaissance in sound. Under Linux, there is a good abstraction layer between the programmer and the soundcard. All the demo programmers, trackers, general code hackers, etc. are coming to Linux. The Linux crew has traditionally been made up of more 'mature' programmers. But with the rise in popularity of Linux, the migration is inevitable. And these people will bring new ideas of what is "cool" to program. Look for lots of cool sound programs in the next couple years.
No, YOU'RE wrong. WinPrinters are a special class of hardware (similar to WinModems) that require a (currently) Windows-only driver developed by the manufacturer in order to work. And don't say something like "Well, why doesn't someone write a driver themselves?", because it's damn near impossible.
The reason I say that is because printers normally contain a bundle of hardware to handle interpreting the commands sent from the computer, buffering data, in some cases handling rasterizing, etc. For example, an old Epson printer would buffer and interpret commands in the Esc/P language, which meant that you could write a driver that output Esc/P (the specifics of which were generally available to the public) and send it to the printer. In the case of PostScript, all the computer has to do is throw the PostScript file (which can be plain ASCII) at the printer - the printer would buffer the PS data (in higher-end printers, the buffer might be 8MB or more), rasterize it (usually with a RISC processor dedicated to the task) and then print the end result.
Of course, all of that costs money, so some bright spark came up with the idea of WinPrinters, which are basically only a buffer. The computer does everything else - command interpretation, rasterizing, whatever - and blasts the result at the printer in pure binary form, ready for printing. This means that unless you have a VERY precise idea of what binary data the printer is expecting, you don't have a hope in hell of writing a driver, not to mention that doing all the work on the computer side can be quite a strain for older machines.
Then they will find out that have definately have gotten at least one more new SB Live customer, ... and possibly developer!
I have a 6x/3dxr DVD decoder kit, and I've been dieing to couple it to the SB Live (so I get four speaker output.) The Linux angle was the only thing holding me back.
The only question now is... Regular or Platinum?
Is it released already? I thought that they said that CVS and Bugzilla is not going to ready for at least a week, or so.
--
It's good to see them making this bold of a move and I'd like to add my voice to the thanks that other posters have given.
With that said, I just hope that I can get the software for my Creative Dxr3 DVD board and player sometime. I know it can't be OS due to patent/copyright/whatever problems but I'd accept any from-Creative ware that lets me reboot to Windows even less than I do now (actually, with a DVD player for Linux, that would only be for Halflife playing. Valve?).
The other problem is that some manufacturers, here in europe at least, will mark a printer as "windows" if it only includes a parallel port, and "windows+mac" if it includes a parallel and serial interface. Some of the printers marked "windows only" actually work fine on linux.
For example, the Epson Stylus Color 640 does not differ much from the old 600, except that it leaves out some of the more obscure ESC/P2 commands, but it is badged "windows only"...It worked fine on my amiga, let alone linux...
This is different to the "WinPrinter" models you describe, which are marked, often with identical logos, as "windows only". This can get very irritating, as I'm sure you can imagine - but we can blame it all on microsoft - they push the "windows printer" mark, presumably to encourage lock-in....
Choice of masters is not freedom.
now that you mention it, i want a beowulf cluster of sblives running seti@home on linux!!!
(yeah yeah yeah, if you're gonna have a beowulf, why run something like seti..... but it goes w/ the theme of the post)
Need a Catering Connection
I love my trident-nx based hoontech card. US$35, optical/coax spdif out, 64+1 channels/voices, 4 speakers, tons of inputs, and best of all - awesome linux support.
I read the ga-source article on this, a open-source and a binary. Doesn't this mean that they are going to make a opensource driver that uses the binary file yo the actualy program Live prosessor? It feels more open than it actually is, no actual programming specs for the prosessor...
Or then the other possibility will be that there will be a full and limited opensource driver and a different binary driver with more features.
But don't get me wrong, it's a good thing they make drivers for linux and even make a 3d sound api, but I really would like to see how you program that live prosessor (and do something weird with it)..
Wow sounds cool.
I remember the original NeXT hardware had a general purpose DSP included. Unfortunately, nobody really knew how to program it or what to with it. I hope some Linux hackers figure it out.
I have a SB live running under 2.2.13 and I have had no system problems what so ever. I think I am using the 2.2.10 driver. Don't scare people so bad ! I don't think anyone is runnig a SB live in a production server anywhere.
I DO happen to remember on the kernel mailing list.. when Creative was first talking about linux driver development (and they were looking for a couple of experienced kernel hackers), that they said the drivers would be open-sourced once there was a working example driver out there...
:)
that was the gist of it anyway...
smash(just bought an SB-Live last week too...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
This makes a lot of sense for everyone. Creative makes excellent hardware. Software (drivers) is not their core business. By opening the source under an appropriate licence (I believe GPL in this case), they get access to a all the benefits of open source development (thousands of skilled programmers, many eyes to spot bugs etc)
What they risk is that it makes it a bit easier for their competitors to reverse engineer their products. This is a very small risk. I am sure their competitors are quite capable of reverse engineering without the source.
The benefit is that this could give them a serious competitive edge. Their drivers should become significantly better than those of their closed-source competitors. They also stand to gain a significant amount of customer loyalty from Linux geeks.
This should allow them to increase their focus on producing great hardware.
I am a bit disappointed that they haven't opened the source to their drivers for other platforms. I suspect this is because they don't think there are enough open-source Win32 programmers. I think they are wrong on this. However, with the Linux source it should be possible (not easy, but possible) to write drivers for Windoze etc. if we want to.
I hope other hardware manufacturers follow. I have seen several brilliant bits of hardware totally compromised by shoddy drivers.
The problem with 3D sound card drivers is that they are not drivers in the pure sense of the word... theres a lot of IP caught up in them. In fact Id be totally surprised if the "open source" drivers from Creative Labs didnt have some large pieces of binary code to be uploaded to the soundcards processor. (not my idea of open source, but hey Linus says its ok... so who am I to make judgement) For Aureal it is even more difficult since most of their software is host side... but there are solutions for that as NVIDIA has shown, just deliver an OS independent low level library. Their library is even platform independent, the source is included... its just run through the preprocessor, useless from an open source perspective but works well for platform independance. But no tears lost for Aureal, they might be the underdog they are still anti-competive, bit of the 3dfx of soundcards.
This is very good, I just upgraded to RH 6.1 and found out that the current SB-Live drivers weren't compiled for 2.2.12. :-)
Now I'll be compiling it on my own next monday
Sincerely,
Alexander
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
Would be a colossal waste of resources if they didnt... but hey thats what opensource is about I guess :)
As you might or might now know, I'm running a
SB Live! under Linux page, I just have some things
I like to say..
A lot of ppl already know, Creative went a long, long way from releasing a binary only kernel specific driver, developing at a slow speed with loads of bugs, towards finally even having a FAQ and supporting CVS under GPL and supporting
people who wants to make their own driver under Linux. I you look at Creative, at first being not willing to provide 4front with the nessary information, to continue development and also not seeming to understand the need of having the source available or chopping up the driver into a kernel independant part with source
and a binary part for the DSP
(just check my page on the details..)
that's a big difference...
And Creative also didn't spend much resources
on Linux, because that's not where to money comes
from (We don't buy any Live Ware 3 or whatever upgrades)
But it now seems like Creative fully changed course and is also spending more resources on this thing (also with hiring Jon Taylor, a very good move) they even are working on finding a way
to support 3D audio or EAX, since Aureal thinks,
that's up to Creative, this is a very important step...
I think this move looks very good, also since
Aureal is also working on Linux support,
it really shows that times are changing for Linux
and that even heavy commercial compagnies like
Creative are realizing this..
This is sure much more than I ever hoped for
and to be honest, after seeing a message that
someone was going to buy a SB Live! because he
saw that there was at least a page that supported
it, was almost a reason for me to dismantle it.
Because I only started this page out of the frustration, not being given any support from Creative (like a FAQ or proper install instructions)..
Manuel Beunder (also going under MBr)
http://www.euronet.nl/~mailme
The SB Live! Linux page
They may have changed their minds since then.
We'll have to see.
First MP3 speeds are in kbits/sec not kbytes/sec
I have no idea what the specs on the SB live are, but they are alot faster then that. For one thing, it is 4 channel not 2, so 48k * 4 * 16 bits = 3Mbits/sec. But that is totally imaterial as that is the is the output speed of the sound samples. While it is spitting out 3Mbits/s, the DSP needs a whole lot of clock cycles to apply all the effects. In addition it needs time to combine all the seperate digital input channels as well as sampling the line-in, mic-in and other analog inputs.
Trust me that DSP can process a lot data at once.
Trident denied me some info on their chip providia-9685. Ineed that info to develop a driver for my TV board. They dont answer my mail anymore. So now I have to wait (forever?) for they going open-source...
I'm sure that some compliments couldn't hurt their commitment to making the SB Live! work better with Linux (and other OSes, by the way). Pat them on their collective head and tell them they've been good. :)
Comments developer relations can be emailed to dev-questions@creative.com or submitted by web at http://developer.soundblaster.com/feedb ack/.
If anyone has any other addresses which may be appropriate, feel free to post 'em!
-W-
Is it all journey, or is there landfall?
--Ellison & van Vogt, 'The Human Operators'
I've never found a need to purchase a sound card other than Sound Blaster. I have just a simple PnP ISA SoundBlaster 16 card, and there's nothing else I've ever needed for Linux (except for, of course, PnP kernel support). It's great to be able to listen to MP3s and brouse the web at the same time without worrying that one stupid little memory packet could bring the whole machine to a halt.
:)
Except, now, I can hear my MP3s in 3D!
Besides, why make an MP3 player using DOS software and a simple sound card when one can now whip up a box w/ a SBLive card and surround sound speakers on Linux (which is far less prone to crashing)?!?
I hate to be an AOLer, but "Me Too" :-)
I specifically bought my HoonTech Trident 4DWaveNX because of the ALSA support. (http://www.project-alsa.org) It took me a while to find a company that sold 4Dwave but I am glad I did instead of buying one of the SB cards that all the local stores are pushing.
Hoontech can be found at http://www.hoontech.com/.
If you are in Canada you can order HoonTech products from Votron Electronics (in Ontario) at http://www.votronelectronics.com/hoontech/order.ht m
Thinking of HoonTech, does anyone have one of thier amps? I was thinking of getting the PA2000 to connect my machine to a couple of nice big unpowered speakers. It looks like it should fit into a 5 1/2 drive bay, does it?
Well, this is the final impetus I needed to order Redhat 6.1 from CheapBytes--I'd been holding off before because the Live! binary driver only worked with the 6.0 kernel I plastered over my 5.9 system (and then only grudgingly, complaining about the -15 version indicator of all things). I've emailed at least twice asking for the SBL! source to be opened; I'm glad that against all odds, Creative finally listened to reason and agreed to do so.
Gonna be nice to be on the bleeding-edge side of the non-experimental setups again.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I doubt their reverb is so incredibly innovative and I know their 3D sound algorithms are shite and as for midi... the only differing factor between soundcards has been the sampleset for ages now and that has copyright to protect it. What else is there to steal in there? It would be nice if you could use it to make a SB-Live fully compatible clone, but thats impossible anyway since they use their own processor. You can only steal some algorithms and reimplement them, it doesnt save you a whole lot of work.
Thanks for the above advice and for emailing these companies asking for drivers. I also hope that everyone who asked Creative Labs for open-source drivers now emails them and thanks them.
HH
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
I hate to tell you this, but the 700 series of HP printers are what we would like to call "Win-Printers", I.E. they only work on Win32. I work for Deskjet support, and I get tons of calls about people telling me that they're trying to use this printer under DOS, and it isn't gonna happen... sorry, man. all I can tell you is try to get a refund on it, as it will prolly never work. (posting as an AC because I fear for my job otherwise :-)
Thanks for making me feel small and insignificant in my total lack of knowledge. I appreciate it. ;-)
----------------
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
At last!
I'm proud to say that I've mailed SoundBlaster at least twice to tell them politely that I think they should OpenSource their drivers, pointing at other companies doing so, at the ALSA team's (admirable and steadfast) refusal to use the emu10k1 code as long as it isn't opened to the public, and at what they've got to loose (nothing, or close to it).
What they achieve by doing this is, at least, that I won't throw my SB Live out the window and buy a card from a company that's opensourced their drivers. And, as many others have pointed out, it's a public stunt, and probably gives them a feather in the hat on Wall Street as well. I don't care that they didn't OpenSource the Windows drivers, and I think it's appropriate too, as Windows itself isn't particulary OpenSource. Let them have their model, and we will have ours.
What I really wrote in to say is that if you have a piece of hardware, whose spesifications isn't released, you shold go to the website of the companiy that made it, search out the appropriate email address, and write them (politely!) about it, explaining the need, the motivation and the reward. Customer feedback is important fuel for decision making.
After all, without customers....
The Trident 4D Wave cards are better and cheaper.
Trident has been open longer, and help writting ALSA.
What about HP's drivers for their newer printers? I have a 712C and would love to have it work under Linux. Don't tell me to write it myself, because I'm not quite there yet (working on it). It seems with the interest HP has taken in the "Open Source" movement, they would be interested in this. They would also sell more printers :-) I do know that Linux Mandrake has Alpha/Beta drivers for it.
----------------
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
I don't know when I will buy my next desktop computer, but what I know is that with the actual trend I will try to buy hardware whose company are supporting Linux with Free Software drivers.
Even though the Creative Live looked really great before (I had a friend with a Soudblaster Live Player and I was jaw dropping when he made a demo for me) the problem was the driver.
Like some people say, vote with your dollars (well with my Francs, my Pounds or my Euros since I'm a French doing is studies in the UK
One more time: THANKS
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
There were a few revealing messages posted to the creative labs newsserver last year by emu engineers about the emu10k1. They seemed to imply that the chip isn't really all that flexible or powerful. Most of those "MIPS" come from the fixed-function resampling engine, and there are limited amounts of effects-units and internal busses. The posts were prompted by a user complaining about the chip's extremely weak resonant filters.
try http://www.golgotha.org
First yeah!!!
As large-scale vendors slowly move to add linux to their list of preloaded OSes. Perhaps they requested a driver from Creative. "Or we will have to use another Card" As it would be in Dell's or Gateway's best interest to limit the number of soundcards they have on hand.
Get a free ipod.
I bought a SB live value a year ago for Q2 on my windows box. It would crash the box after about 10 min of use. I went to the SB live web page and down loaded the latest drivers. Still crash-city! So I pulled the SB live card and put my old SB 16 back in. The SB live has been sitting on my shelf for almost a year. A couple of week's ago, I thought I would give it another try. I downloaded the 2.0 windows drivers and it finally works. I even went out an bought another one. The Linux drivers work on Suse 6.2 but don't work on Mandrake 6.1 Bummer! Now, if I had a working Voodoo3 driver for Q2-3, I could finaly wipe Windows. AC.
I have been looking for a while now for a replacement PCI soundcard, as my current card (a ISA Gravis UltraSound MAX) is getting a bit dated.
Not that the GUS is not a fine card, it is supported by both the OSS and Alsa drivers and works like a charm (if only I could figure out how to get MIDI working). But is is my last ISA card, and feel it needs to be replaced in the near future.
The SB Live specs looked interesting, but the lack of an open source driver have kept me away, and the same for Aureal cards.
So a Trident or Crystal chipset it needed to be, the problem however you quickly run into is that these cards are not available in the average computer store (the only thing you find there are Creative cards and so now and then a Aureal based card).
I've been running Linux at work (unofficially, of course) for a long time. I finally upgraded my laptop a couple of weeks ago, and now I have no reason to run Windows at work at all (even though I am officially a Novell/NT geek at work).
/. loading (very slow connection here), and what a shock - the first story is exactly what I wanted. Thanks, Creative, and thanks, /.
I have still been reluctant to switch my main home machine over, though. I decided I could deal with rebooting for DVDs and games, but I didn't want to live without a good audio system, as I have MP3s playing all the time.
So I made some room on my hard drive, and my first task of this morning was to track down a driver for my SB Live card before I installed RH 6.1. So I put on the coffee, started