Since I've upgraded to 2.4.13 I've weird problems with my Soundblaster Live. It seems whatever programs use the sound seem to do so fine most of the time, but the rest of the time corrupt crap comes through. Does anyone know about an error with the driver?
Perhaps you have heard of the Ogg project, and its audio codec Vorbis which is currently gaining popularity. Its been feature on here before, but here is a quick summary. The Ogg project is an attempt to create a patent free streaming audio and video specification along with an LGPL'ed implementation. Vorbis has been under heavy development recently and now beta 4 is available (or should be, I've only kept up with cvs). Tarkin is the recently named video codec that is now part of the Ogg project. Supposedly it will incorporate wavelets (the new techno buzz word that seems to be going around), however other technology such as curvelets are being looked into also. Granted, Tarkin isn't available now and wouldn't prove a quick solution but it might very well be a viable open source alternative in the future.
I tried installing 2.4.0 however I noticed that NVIDIA doesn't officially support the 2.4 kernel series with their (ahem, binary only) kernel driver. Has anyone tried using 2.4.0 or any of the 2.4 test kernels with an NVIDIA card and gotten successful results? If not, I'll have to stick with 2.2 until the next driver comes out.
Not that I'm trying to defend a bad product. But the first generation of the DS 818 player (commonly known as Genica or MPTrip) did have lots of problems like the ones you are describing. I have one of the very first models and have used it for over half a year and its still running fine, although almost all the paint scraped off. The newer versions of the DS 818 work just fine, although there are a few newer players out there that are more asthetically pleasing. I personally love mp3-cd players, however if you consider buying one I would advise you to read the mp3.com portables message board to help decide.
Testing (as far as I know) is for packages that have been tested long enough so that they don't break every other package on your system (a similar event happened earlier when glibc was updated many db-dependant packages like apache and exim broke). The idea is that packages first go into unstable where little is known about how they work, then after some time they (automatically?) filter into testing. Then testing will eventually fork into frozen which slowly solidifies into stable. Difference is that testing is frequently updated with somewhat-new packages whereas frozen generally only accepts bug fixes.
Testing has the ovbious advantages of being new-enough, without all the hastles and worries about breakdowns. Stable is still the best for production servers, and people who don't want to apt-get update/upgrade very much. Testing is good for some server situations, and the majority of desktops where apt-get update/upgrade should be done maybe once a week or so. And unstable is as always, unstable (well in Debian terms, I'm sure most find it plenty stable).
Apt-get mesag3, mesag-dev, glutg3, and glutg3-dev if you don't already have them. Then download the NVidia driver. Then you have to do a little work to get things to work together. Move/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/extensions/libGLcore.a to/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/extensions/libGLcore.a.debi an,/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/extensions/libglx.so to/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/extensions/libglx.so.debian ,/usr/lib/libGL.so to/usr/lib/libGL.so.debian, and/usr/lib/libGL.so.1 to/usr/lib/libGL.so.1.debian. After you rename those files you gotta telll dpkg to divert them. Do that with dpkg-divert --divert/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/extensions/libGLcore.a.debi an/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/extensions/libGLcore.a, dpkg-divert --divert/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/extensions/libglx.so.debian/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/extensions/libglx.so, dpkg-divert --divert/usr/lib/libGL.so.debian/usr/lib/libGL.so, dpkg-divert --divert/usr/lib/libGL.so.1.debian/usr/lib/libGL.so.1
After all that dirty work you should be able to install the NVidia GLX drivers by their instructions, and it will replace the libraries you moved with its own GL implementation. The idea here is that you can still develop OpenGL apps and you still have the GLU/GLUT libraries. Diverting those libraries will allow apt to update Mesa to newer versions without overwriting NVidia's implementation. After doing all that you shouldn't have any problem.
This might be slightly off topic but I believe that it has relevence to the issues between the cards (and ultimately the companies). In late 1997 I purchased a Riva 128 because I didn't want to buy a video card, then a Voodoo 2 when it finally came out, and the Riva 128 was supposed to be better than a Voodoo Graphics card. Although 3dfx dominated with the Voodoo series, many early Nvidia fans like myself saw promise in this little company. With the release of the TNT, TNT 2, and GeForce, they have seemed to surpass their longtime rival 3dfx.
However, Nvidia has done some things recently that pissed me off. Also in 1997 I found this cool little program (rather distro) called Debian 1.3. Almost two and a half years later I'm running Red Hat 6.2 while patiently awaiting Potato to be released as stable, sometime in the next millenium. For as long as I can remember, Nvidia and 3dfx both were commited to supporting, or eventually supporting Linux. Long before DRI showed up 3dfx released open source Linux drivers. Nvidia, however, has only released two hacked up drivers that run Quake 3 worse on my TNT 2 Ultra then a Voodoo Graphics would run it. Also, since then XFree86 4.0 has been released, 2.4 is in now 2.3.99-pre stage with DRI support, and 3dfx has continued to release drivers that take advantage of this support. However, not even a word (or updated drivers for XFree 3.3.6 or 4.0) has came from Nvidia about their driver situation. I'm also under the impression that when XFree 4.0 gets "more stable", or is included in distributions, and the 2.4 kernel is released, they will release their own closed source driver that will use a rendering interface similar to DRI, but not DRI. I remember having a discussion about Nvidia drivers back in December, but it has been four months and I think my Loki Quake 3 tin has recieved more use from me than the game itself. Does anyone know what's going on with the drivers?
What's wrong with OpenGL? Its an excelent and stable graphics API (see Quake 2 / Quake 3). Now I'll admit until NVidia either comes out with their OpenGL driver or I trash my TNT 2, I can't effectively use OpenGL, but that's besides the point. As far as OpenGL not being developed for games in mind, it isn't the API as much as the implementation of it. That's the reason why an OpenGL program (or possibly IrixGL) running on an SGI machine would blow away the same program running on a TNT, Voodoo, or G400, or whatever. But an OpenGL game would probably not play as well on the SGI machine.
Esound isn't a requirement, as far as I know, because as more pci sound cards come out with drivers that allow multiple '/dev/dsp's to be used, there really isn't a reason for it.
Enlightenment is being replaced with Sawmill because Sawmill is simpler in terms of features (many of Enlightenment's are included in Gnome) and seems to have a much simpler but powerful configuration system. Although my understanding is Enlightenment was never a part of Gnome. I just thought that Linux distributions always included it as the default gnome window manager.
The only thing is why replace Imlib with gdk-pixbuf? I thought that Imlib did its job well. Does anyone know why they decided to do this?
I knew that AbiWord wasn't being developed by the Gnome team, but I assume that it is being included in Gnome Office. It did, however, slip me for a moment that it has multiple ports too. I have yet to try out the win32 version, but when it turns 1.0 and runs real nice, I'll probably run it on any NT machine I use. With what I've seen of it so far, it is looking really good so keep up the good work!
The one thing I would love to see come out (either as part of a Gnome Office release or on its own) is AbiWord. I like the 0.x releases of it, but it isn't just up to par yet with the other available choices. I agree that Gnome does need a solid Gtk+ based IDE, something that I've been looking for a while and (well other then gIDE) doesn't exist. We still have to keep in mind yet that Gnome isn't completely done yet (in terms of Gnome itself and outside Gnome applications). The first stable release was almost a year ago (correct me if I'm wrong), and since then only two apps do I know of really seem stable, Gimp and Gnumeric. Of course, Gimp predates Gnome and it is why Gtk+ was spawned. Hopefully with the release of Gnome 2.0 later this year, we will a slew of nice applications to accompany it.
I feel for some reason compelled to address this issue, although I don't know why because it won't change anything, but oh well.
I don't understand why it is that everytime there is a post on Gnome or a post on Kde that the opposite group of zealots decides to reply to the post with their trolling and flames and whatever. What doesn't make sense is that, the reason why most of us switched to Linux (either permanently, or for use in conjunction with Windows) is because Linux gave us a lot more freedom with what we can do with our software. As of now, there exists two very good desktop environments, Gnome and Kde. Each has its pros and cons, its advantages and its problems. But since the choice is up to the user as which to use (especially since every distribution I know of distributes both Gnome and Kde), why argue over it? Personal preference isn't that big of a deal. Just because user X uses Gnome doesn't mean that you can't use Kde. And no amount of flaming will somehow stop development on one of the environments, and increase development on the other. I think it is good thing that we are presented with a choice as to which desktop to run (or none at all). This is the best competition we can get in the free software world, which is a good thing.
Of course, the other issue is that, if there is so much flaming on Gnome and Kde, why is it that people never argue over Enlightenment or Sawmill, or AfterStep and Window Maker? I'm not encouraging this, but I think that these flame sessions are getting quite childish.
To get on topic, I'm very excited with the future of Gnome and I think that with the pending 1.2, 1.4, and 2.0 releases we shall see something that will compete very nicely with Kde 2.0.
It seems like any.0 release of anything always has worse bugs than the betas. Another example is the newly released xmms 1.0 which broke support between the OSS output plugin and the aureal driver.
I am one to admit that the United States Foreign Aid policy is a little drastic, basically letting any country overpopulate to the point where they destroy their environment, yet we still feed them. But the real reason why we do it has nothing to do with the policy. North Korea spent all their money (not much) researching nuclear arms and letting people in their country go hungry. They finally got some halfway decent ICBM (about as good as we had in the 50s mind you), and they threaten to take our westen coast if we don't feed their country. Now why they just didn't spend that money on food, I don't know, evil intent? Our real problem is that the use of nuclear arms as a deterrent and using an offensive as or defensive doesn't work. One scare with Y2K was the possibility of China or Russia's nuclear missiles going off without control, and since we have no real defense if a missile does go off, we're screwed. Now to bring this all on topic: I love NASA and I'm interseted in what they have to do but honestly, we are having lotsa problems back here on Earth that could do better without loosing some multi-billion dollar space probes every two years. Although I guess if we can get to Mars, and stay there for more than a week sometime in the next five years then it might as well be worth it (well until people don't give a damn anymore and you hear more scares about MTBE and crap).
The Aureal Vortex 2 chipset isn't supported, correct. Yes that does suck, I have a Diamond Monster MX300 and a Sound Blaster AWE32 in the same machine (one for win, one for lin). It's really the fault of Aureal that there is no free linux support because Aureal will not support the ALSA project.
There is more of a variety of input plugins for winamp which are useful. For example,.nsf and.spc players (nintendo and snes music, well okay it's not THAT cool but it's still a feature when you want to annoy the hell out of someone). Also, winamp's mod plugin is a little better because you can skip to different parts of the mods and there is actually a file info box. But if you only use mp3s, there really isn't much to be missed.
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He did patent it. It was supposed to protect his $100,000 investment capital.
Since I've upgraded to 2.4.13 I've weird problems with my Soundblaster Live. It seems whatever programs use the sound seem to do so fine most of the time, but the rest of the time corrupt crap comes through. Does anyone know about an error with the driver?
Perhaps you have heard of the Ogg project, and its audio codec Vorbis which is currently gaining popularity. Its been feature on here before, but here is a quick summary. The Ogg project is an attempt to create a patent free streaming audio and video specification along with an LGPL'ed implementation. Vorbis has been under heavy development recently and now beta 4 is available (or should be, I've only kept up with cvs). Tarkin is the recently named video codec that is now part of the Ogg project. Supposedly it will incorporate wavelets (the new techno buzz word that seems to be going around), however other technology such as curvelets are being looked into also. Granted, Tarkin isn't available now and wouldn't prove a quick solution but it might very well be a viable open source alternative in the future.
-- BLarg!
I tried installing 2.4.0 however I noticed that NVIDIA doesn't officially support the 2.4 kernel series with their (ahem, binary only) kernel driver. Has anyone tried using 2.4.0 or any of the 2.4 test kernels with an NVIDIA card and gotten successful results? If not, I'll have to stick with 2.2 until the next driver comes out.
-- BLarg!
Not that I'm trying to defend a bad product. But the first generation of the DS 818 player (commonly known as Genica or MPTrip) did have lots of problems like the ones you are describing. I have one of the very first models and have used it for over half a year and its still running fine, although almost all the paint scraped off. The newer versions of the DS 818 work just fine, although there are a few newer players out there that are more asthetically pleasing. I personally love mp3-cd players, however if you consider buying one I would advise you to read the mp3.com portables message board to help decide.
-- BLarg!
I believe what it means is that X will compile and run under Mac OS X (as it does under WinNT). So you will be able to run your X apps on a mac.
-- BLarg!
Testing (as far as I know) is for packages that have been tested long enough so that they don't break every other package on your system (a similar event happened earlier when glibc was updated many db-dependant packages like apache and exim broke). The idea is that packages first go into unstable where little is known about how they work, then after some time they (automatically?) filter into testing. Then testing will eventually fork into frozen which slowly solidifies into stable. Difference is that testing is frequently updated with somewhat-new packages whereas frozen generally only accepts bug fixes.
Testing has the ovbious advantages of being new-enough, without all the hastles and worries about breakdowns. Stable is still the best for production servers, and people who don't want to apt-get update/upgrade very much. Testing is good for some server situations, and the majority of desktops where apt-get update/upgrade should be done maybe once a week or so. And unstable is as always, unstable (well in Debian terms, I'm sure most find it plenty stable).
-- BLarg!
Apt-get mesag3, mesag-dev, glutg3, and glutg3-dev if you don't already have them. Then download the NVidia driver. Then you have to do a little work to get things to work together. Move /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/extensions/libGLcore.a to /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/extensions/libGLcore.a.debi an, /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/extensions/libglx.so to /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/extensions/libglx.so.debian , /usr/lib/libGL.so to /usr/lib/libGL.so.debian, and /usr/lib/libGL.so.1 to /usr/lib/libGL.so.1.debian. After you rename those files you gotta telll dpkg to divert them. Do that with dpkg-divert --divert /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/extensions/libGLcore.a.debi an /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/extensions/libGLcore.a, dpkg-divert --divert /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/extensions/libglx.so.debian /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/extensions/libglx.so, dpkg-divert --divert /usr/lib/libGL.so.debian /usr/lib/libGL.so, dpkg-divert --divert /usr/lib/libGL.so.1.debian /usr/lib/libGL.so.1
After all that dirty work you should be able to install the NVidia GLX drivers by their instructions, and it will replace the libraries you moved with its own GL implementation. The idea here is that you can still develop OpenGL apps and you still have the GLU/GLUT libraries. Diverting those libraries will allow apt to update Mesa to newer versions without overwriting NVidia's implementation. After doing all that you shouldn't have any problem.
This might be slightly off topic but I believe that it has relevence to the issues between the cards (and ultimately the companies). In late 1997 I purchased a Riva 128 because I didn't want to buy a video card, then a Voodoo 2 when it finally came out, and the Riva 128 was supposed to be better than a Voodoo Graphics card. Although 3dfx dominated with the Voodoo series, many early Nvidia fans like myself saw promise in this little company. With the release of the TNT, TNT 2, and GeForce, they have seemed to surpass their longtime rival 3dfx.
However, Nvidia has done some things recently that pissed me off. Also in 1997 I found this cool little program (rather distro) called Debian 1.3. Almost two and a half years later I'm running Red Hat 6.2 while patiently awaiting Potato to be released as stable, sometime in the next millenium. For as long as I can remember, Nvidia and 3dfx both were commited to supporting, or eventually supporting Linux. Long before DRI showed up 3dfx released open source Linux drivers. Nvidia, however, has only released two hacked up drivers that run Quake 3 worse on my TNT 2 Ultra then a Voodoo Graphics would run it. Also, since then XFree86 4.0 has been released, 2.4 is in now 2.3.99-pre stage with DRI support, and 3dfx has continued to release drivers that take advantage of this support. However, not even a word (or updated drivers for XFree 3.3.6 or 4.0) has came from Nvidia about their driver situation. I'm also under the impression that when XFree 4.0 gets "more stable", or is included in distributions, and the 2.4 kernel is released, they will release their own closed source driver that will use a rendering interface similar to DRI, but not DRI. I remember having a discussion about Nvidia drivers back in December, but it has been four months and I think my Loki Quake 3 tin has recieved more use from me than the game itself. Does anyone know what's going on with the drivers?
-- BLarg!
What's wrong with OpenGL? Its an excelent and stable graphics API (see Quake 2 / Quake 3). Now I'll admit until NVidia either comes out with their OpenGL driver or I trash my TNT 2, I can't effectively use OpenGL, but that's besides the point. As far as OpenGL not being developed for games in mind, it isn't the API as much as the implementation of it. That's the reason why an OpenGL program (or possibly IrixGL) running on an SGI machine would blow away the same program running on a TNT, Voodoo, or G400, or whatever. But an OpenGL game would probably not play as well on the SGI machine.
I didn't know anyone from APK, or even Cleveland, knew what Linux was. =)
-- BLarg!
Esound isn't a requirement, as far as I know, because as more pci sound cards come out with drivers that allow multiple '/dev/dsp's to be used, there really isn't a reason for it.
Enlightenment is being replaced with Sawmill because Sawmill is simpler in terms of features (many of Enlightenment's are included in Gnome) and seems to have a much simpler but powerful configuration system. Although my understanding is Enlightenment was never a part of Gnome. I just thought that Linux distributions always included it as the default gnome window manager.
The only thing is why replace Imlib with gdk-pixbuf? I thought that Imlib did its job well. Does anyone know why they decided to do this?
-- BLarg!
I knew that AbiWord wasn't being developed by the Gnome team, but I assume that it is being included in Gnome Office. It did, however, slip me for a moment that it has multiple ports too. I have yet to try out the win32 version, but when it turns 1.0 and runs real nice, I'll probably run it on any NT machine I use. With what I've seen of it so far, it is looking really good so keep up the good work!
-- BLarg!
The one thing I would love to see come out (either as part of a Gnome Office release or on its own) is AbiWord. I like the 0.x releases of it, but it isn't just up to par yet with the other available choices. I agree that Gnome does need a solid Gtk+ based IDE, something that I've been looking for a while and (well other then gIDE) doesn't exist. We still have to keep in mind yet that Gnome isn't completely done yet (in terms of Gnome itself and outside Gnome applications). The first stable release was almost a year ago (correct me if I'm wrong), and since then only two apps do I know of really seem stable, Gimp and Gnumeric. Of course, Gimp predates Gnome and it is why Gtk+ was spawned. Hopefully with the release of Gnome 2.0 later this year, we will a slew of nice applications to accompany it.
-- BLarg!
I feel for some reason compelled to address this issue, although I don't know why because it won't change anything, but oh well.
I don't understand why it is that everytime there is a post on Gnome or a post on Kde that the opposite group of zealots decides to reply to the post with their trolling and flames and whatever. What doesn't make sense is that, the reason why most of us switched to Linux (either permanently, or for use in conjunction with Windows) is because Linux gave us a lot more freedom with what we can do with our software. As of now, there exists two very good desktop environments, Gnome and Kde. Each has its pros and cons, its advantages and its problems. But since the choice is up to the user as which to use (especially since every distribution I know of distributes both Gnome and Kde), why argue over it? Personal preference isn't that big of a deal. Just because user X uses Gnome doesn't mean that you can't use Kde. And no amount of flaming will somehow stop development on one of the environments, and increase development on the other. I think it is good thing that we are presented with a choice as to which desktop to run (or none at all). This is the best competition we can get in the free software world, which is a good thing.
Of course, the other issue is that, if there is so much flaming on Gnome and Kde, why is it that people never argue over Enlightenment or Sawmill, or AfterStep and Window Maker? I'm not encouraging this, but I think that these flame sessions are getting quite childish.
To get on topic, I'm very excited with the future of Gnome and I think that with the pending 1.2, 1.4, and 2.0 releases we shall see something that will compete very nicely with Kde 2.0.
-- BLarg!
It seems like any .0 release of anything always has worse bugs than the betas. Another example is the newly released xmms 1.0 which broke support between the OSS output plugin and the aureal driver.
-- BLarg!
I am one to admit that the United States Foreign Aid policy is a little drastic, basically letting any country overpopulate to the point where they destroy their environment, yet we still feed them. But the real reason why we do it has nothing to do with the policy. North Korea spent all their money (not much) researching nuclear arms and letting people in their country go hungry. They finally got some halfway decent ICBM (about as good as we had in the 50s mind you), and they threaten to take our westen coast if we don't feed their country. Now why they just didn't spend that money on food, I don't know, evil intent? Our real problem is that the use of nuclear arms as a deterrent and using an offensive as or defensive doesn't work. One scare with Y2K was the possibility of China or Russia's nuclear missiles going off without control, and since we have no real defense if a missile does go off, we're screwed. Now to bring this all on topic: I love NASA and I'm interseted in what they have to do but honestly, we are having lotsa problems back here on Earth that could do better without loosing some multi-billion dollar space probes every two years. Although I guess if we can get to Mars, and stay there for more than a week sometime in the next five years then it might as well be worth it (well until people don't give a damn anymore and you hear more scares about MTBE and crap).
The Aureal Vortex 2 chipset isn't supported, correct. Yes that does suck, I have a Diamond Monster MX300 and a Sound Blaster AWE32 in the same machine (one for win, one for lin). It's really the fault of Aureal that there is no free linux support because Aureal will not support the ALSA project.
http://www.alsa-project.org/~goemon/
There is more of a variety of input plugins for winamp which are useful. For example, .nsf and .spc players (nintendo and snes music, well okay it's not THAT cool but it's still a feature when you want to annoy the hell out of someone). Also, winamp's mod plugin is a little better because you can skip to different parts of the mods and there is actually a file info box. But if you only use mp3s, there really isn't much to be missed.