Slashdot Mirror
Aureal to release Linux drivers/source code
Anonymous Coward writes "According to an article at GA-Source, Aureal Semiconductor will be releasing Linux drivers for their sound cards "much sooner than you think" along with the source code. " Excellent - coming on the heels of the Soundblaster announcement, things are going to be sounding much better.
These days, it seems that there are lots of companies that are releasing their drivers/software on linux.
/. have a new section for this stuff instead of just having it part of the news.
/. readers about how committed these companies are to Linux. ( Are they doing it only to help their stock or are they big time penguin fans? The Penguin Meter )
Some are releasing the source code, others are releasing binaries. What ever their motives are? Anyways, this is probably just the start.
May I suggest that
It is nice to know that more and more companies are releasing their products for linux. But the novelty wears out really fast.
Also it would be nice if the section had a counter of the number of companies that released software and also a ranking by
where does it say open source in the article you say you got it from? Linux only drivers are useless to a BSD user like myself. and i think people forget how many of us there are.
I'm not the developer - I'm just the email-cut-n-paster. Take a look at the package, the developer emails are in there.
DirectSound3D was hacked together by the engineers at Aureal. They did it, they wrote it, MS used it. At least that's how it was explained to me back at WinHEC. (Ironic. The only convention I've ever paid money to attend was WinHEC '97. Definitely was worth it though, if only to see the Rendition guy get disturbingly flustered when I started comparing their product to the Voodoo solutions coming out of 3DFX. Incidentally, this was also the first the world had seen of the Riva 128, A.K.A. the return of nVidia. nVidia was the first 3D card manufacturer for PCs, but their card was so slow that it was better just to operate in software. Telling people nVidia was coming back from the grave was like announcing PC Chips as the one of the higher quality manufacturers in the industry...heh, wait a second...)
As for me, I use a SB Live Value because I compose music and the SB Live's MIDI support is light years beyond anything the rest of the industry has supplied us with. I'm truly looking forward to seeing what audio hackers can do with the power of that DSP.
I've still always lusted after a Vortex 2, though, and might just grab one for the hell of it.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
From the DXR2 ReadMe:
/dev/dxr2 120 0"
.VOB file (it is set up to play the sample
Readme for DXR2 driver v0.9b
This is still a DEVELOPMENT driver, because parts of it are still not properly
tested, and a few parts are missing (see "Todo").
Also, VGA overlay is not yet supported.... output is to a TV connected to the
video output of the card.
The current IOCTL interface is TEMPORARY and WILL change... probably to be
compatable with the prototype DVD interface on linuxtv.org's web pages.
The current major device number (120) is TEMPORARY, and only for development pur
poses.
it WILL change when the driver is finished.
It has only been tested with kernel 2.2.8
To use:
1) compile each of the following modules
anp82, bt865, dxr2, pcm1723, tc6807af, vxp524, zivaDS
2) insert the modules into your kernel:
insmod anp82
insmod bt865
insmod pcm1723
insmod tc6807af
insmod vxp524
insmod zivaDS
insmod dxr2
(it doesn't matter which order the first 6 are in, but the dxr2 module
MUST be loaded last)
3) Make the device file "mknod c
4) Extract the DVD microcode from Creative's windows driver. You can get this
by installing the windows version (say into
"c:\Program Files\Creative\DXR2"), and copying the file "dvd1.ux" from the
install directory. Currently, put this file in the driver's "test" directory.
5) Get a sample
"CREATIVE.VOB" from the driver CD), and put it in the driver's "test"
directory.
6) Compile and run the test program in the test directory.
If all goes well, you should see the test video on the TV screen.. this will
probably have a number of glitches, which are being investigated.
Ok, sorry this is offtopic, but it excites as much as the Aureal stuff. :)
From the LiViD mailing list:
Hi, I'm one of the developers of the DXR2 driver.
The version on Creative's site is an older version which doesn't work properly. They haven't yet given us upload access to their CVS server, so we cannot update it.
You can get the current version from http://www.geocities.com/dxr2linux
This is temporary though, until we get CVS upload access.
--
adq
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
(ie: Who's standard are they going to adopt, or are they going to use their own?)
Don't get me wrong - drivers from manufacturers are wonderful news for Linux, but how much do they really understand about Linux, the OSS concept, and everything else involved?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Expletive Deleted. After waiting 6 months for driver support, I went out and ordered a Hoontech 4DWave card.
NOW they announce drivers for Linux!!!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Check out opensource.creative.com Read the CVS section: Anonymous CVS To access the anonymous CVS service on this site, set your CVSROOT environment variable thusly: CVSROOT=:pserver:cvsguest@opensource.creative.com: /usr/local/cvsroot Next, use the `cvs login' command to connect to the server. The password is "cvsguest". Then you can use "cvs -z3 checkout emu10k1" or "cvs -z3 checkout dxr2". Interesting huh? Haven't actually checked it....but I hope its true...cause if it is...I think I wanna go out and get a Creative Labs DVD!
It might warm your heart to know that IT started out as a clone of ST3, and hence has the same wonderful interface. But given the choice between S3M and XM (format-wise, anyway) I'd take XM, given identical interfaces. S3M is just so *limited*. Of course, I'd happily choose IT over XM. :)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
Oh, I'm well aware of the sam9407 stuff. I'm on the dev list, but haven't gotten around to unsubscribing myself. It just isn't worth the effort, loss of functionality in Windows, and CPU drain. (I thought I'd mentioned all of that in my previous post in one way or another :)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
Aureal has always been one of my favortie companies, and their recent announcement is quite intriguing.
Much of the industry is obsessed with "meeting the marks"--x amount of video RAM, AGP/PCI/VLB(way back in the day), Direct3D, OpenGL, etc.
Essentially, the complexities of various products are simplified down to a set of necessary functions supported and some "speed scale" created by a semiobjective source.
Creative Labs' announcement signified not only a new level of support for Open Source driver development models, but also a relatively drastic turnaround in company policy. It wasn't that long ago that Creative was flatly refusing to open their drivers to anyone but OSS Sound Inc. under NDA. Now they're saying they'll support any and all comers, and even overcome the starting barriers(CVS/Bugzilla) so that development can begin ASAP.
Such full fledged support is reserved only for items considered integral for the success of a product--in other words, a line item, a necessary feature.
A checkmark.
That Aureal(whose stock symbol always seems to confuse the hell out of every engine I check it with) is following suit means that, for the first time, not only Linux support but full, open access to driver development infrastructure is becoming a line item checkmark for a segment of the PC Hardware Expansion industry.
Such developments bode well for future developers, who will hopefully not need to painfully reverse engineer nearly as much in their attempts to get network cards, 3D Graphics boards, or any other custom hardware to function now and long after a company decides to cease support for a given product.
When ZD Net reports closed drivers as a downside to a given piece of hardware, we'll have truly won.
However, it should be noted that while the SB Live is a full DSP architecture that developers should be able to exploit to unimaginable degrees(though I'm not expecting a Perl RegEx module using the SB Live *LOL*), much more content is hardcoded within the Aureal chipset. Indeed, this is a risk of a open development process--companies may feel that, to protect their intellectual property, they need to lock it up within the chipset instead of releasing it in the drivers.
Of course, a chipset and a card that remains viable for significantly longer periods of time is far more appealing to both OEMs and consumers, and this is a benefit that both programmable circuitry and open development foster.
This isn't to say, though, that I'm not extremely excited about Aureal's announcement. I first heard Aureal's A3D at WinHEC '97 a few years back, and it was the first time I had truly heard 3D Sound that actually worked. Aureal is one of the great stock price tragedies of the last few years, mainly because of some rather nasty innuendo and patent litigation. (Yes Virginia, that ugly USPTO spectre pops up again.) Their technology is sound(no pun intended), and their cards are uniformly high quality. I'm quite interested at seeing what the Linux community will do with access to the extensive 3D Sound modeling that Aureal has implemented--literal 3D environment models are used to determine reflections, reverbs, etc. It's all quite amazing, and very, very well implemented.
It's definitely an interesting time to be a sound engineer in the computer industry. One thought--BeOS ought to be supporting some new very powerful sound processing cards very soon, if it doesn't support them already.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
My old sound card was ISA (The cheap version of the SB16) and when I started using Linux, there was no support for it, except from OSS and they were charging $20. I know it's not much, but I never shelled out the cash and then finally the Linux kernel added support for it. My new card, an ES1371, is detected without a catch.
With all that's been going on in the Kernel with sound drivers, let's not overlook the app-level sound system. As it stands, I don't believe the kernel allows multiple programs to output sound. Programs like ESD are great for doing just that, and I think the new version of KDE's audio daemon has ESD support. Linux is starting to sound pretty good.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Oh, and their tech support, such as it was, consisted of one person who barely understood English, who, no matter how much I explained the problem, could only offer the advice of reinstalling the drivers.
The fact they're still around indicates that they must have gotten better in some regards, but I'm still unwilling to trust any of their hardware. With all the time I spent trying to get the ST128 Ruby working (and failing), I could have spent that time working for $7/hour at my university admin job and afforded a professional studio soundcard - and a real one, not one that claimed to be one.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
This is still a very Good Thing(tm), though, since it takes more dominoes to fall to keep a domino effect going.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?