Well, it depends on what you define crap - are service packs crap? What about device drivers, office suites, compression programs, media codecs, cd-burning software, development platforms? Shouldn’t i use my iPod because it requires iTunes and QuickTime?
Apart from these, I never install crap on my systems, yet all of my Windows systems measurably start up slower and slower as I use them. The time from the boot loader to the desktop changes from 30 s to 180 s. Other performances get worse, too: the time to launch a program, the responsiveness of Explorer, the time between right-clicking a file and seeing a popup menu, and so on.
(Yes, I defragged, scandisked, and I have no antivirus installed, so I think I have exhausted the range of my possibilities of intervention as a user.)
Says who? MS has done precisely that in the past. Why are you choosing to ignore this fact? Microsoft executives have announced explicit intentions on this matter.
Microsoft sues => Linux distros must stop using the.NET framework => Tomboy gets ported to unmanaged C++ via an automated tool => Tomboy keeps on working.
Wouldn’t such tool have to automatically change all uses of a patented API in a binary program? How will it work?
C# is as open as it gets. It's developed through the ECMA (which is so "open" that it maintains the standards for Javascript), it has a full GPL reference implementation, its relevant standards are fully published in all details and are globally available free of charge.
Your point was: Java is not open. I said it is. I never said C# isn’t.
Anyway, since you mentioned it, where can I download the GPL reference implementation of C#?
And how can I follow the ECMA meetings that are shaping the future of C#? I suppose it’s not that a Microsoft internal team develops it behind closed doors and simply submits the finished product to ECMA for standardization.
Because this would mean that for every new C# revision, all non-Microsoft implementations will lag behind before implementing the new features.
Which is precisely what has been happening with Mono in the past five years.
Microsoft and the free software community have conflicting interests.
Not really, Microsoft and the free software community worked together succesfully a number of times. F/OSS zealots have a thing with Microsoft,
Sorry but in this thread, it is only you who have a thing with someone. You just started calling zealots those who do not agree with you, and expose their argumentation with valid arguments instead of insulting.
Although I am indeed a zealot, sometimes I base my opinion on facts, and I’d like to share some interesting ones with you.
- What Microsoft executives think about free software and patents:
Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches
-- S. Ballmer, Microsoft CEO
We spend a lot of money - the rest of the commercial industry spends a lot of money - on R&D. We spend a lot of money also licenses patents, when people come and say 'Hey this commercial piece of software violates our patent, our intellectual property,' we'll either get a court judgment or pay a big check. I think it is important that the open source products also have an obligation to participate in the same way.
-- S. Ballmer, Microsoft CEO
but whatever you can say about Microsoft, you can say about IBM or Sun -- who I am sure they hold countless Java patents.
Thats perfectly true! In fact, before this, RMS has vocally spoken against Java *for the exact same reasons* he is now warning against Mono.
After Java was licensed under the GPL v2, he stopped deprecating Java. That’s because even if Sun held patents about Java, the fact that they released it under the GPL means that they’ve granted perpetual free use of the relative technologies for everyone (don’t take my word - read the GPL).
Besides this, if C# (or the BCL) were really dangerous, then why is th
It’s nothing “I believe”, it’s a well known fact that even Microsoft clearly acknowledges.
I have already posted a link in a previous comment, but I can paste it again for your convenience.
It also points to a response from Microsoft, in particular by one of the inventors of the patent, who states:
“our patents essential to implementing C# and CLI will be available on a "royalty-free and otherwise RAND" basis”
(emphasis mine). It is interesting to note that this particular patent application was filed after the standardization by ECMA.
>C# is important to the discussion because Tomboy, the application Debian decided it must have, is written in C#.
Uhm, and why is that relevant? Once it's compiled it could have been written in any language. Also, C# can be machine translated to unmanaged C++, so I really don't see what the problem is.
With the way things *currently* work, the problem is:
Microsoft sues => Linux distros must stop using the.NET framework => Tomboy stops working.
Of course C# !=.NET, but many applications currently make use of.NET APIs.
>There are plenty of patent issues, and you cannot write desktop apps without using APIs outside the.NET ECMA specs.
Of course you can, see for example the GTK# that implements an totally different layer to Windows.Forms.
It’s true, but that kind of defeats the goal of portability across platforms.
By the way, Tomboy is not a winforms application anyways.
It uses.NET classes.
Nope, it's an open standard (whereas Java isn't IIRC).
Java is as open as it gets. It’s developed through the JSR (which is so “open” that it’s held in stall by the Apache foundation), it has a full GPL reference implementation, its relevant standards are fully published in all details and are globally available free of charge.
You know what the real truth is? Is that since it is a standard coming from Microsoft it HAS to be evil, right?
Microsoft and the free software community have conflicting interests.
We can ignore what Microsoft did to some of its partners, the methods they used to reach their position, and the harm they cause to consumers because of their monopoly.
But we can not ignore that Microsoft has actively tried to harm the free software community many times, and that we have evidence that it meant to do so by “de-commoditizing protocols and applications”.
So every standard coming from Microsoft *must* be handled with care, it’s an issue that cannot be ignored tout court.
A free country would be unwise to depend on an unfriendly country for its oil supply, even if citizens don’t care about where their gasoline came from when they are at the gas station. That said, in the free software world, Stallman may issue warnings, but in the end the developers have the freedom to decide. Nobody (but Microsoft) can limit your freedom to use Mono.
Does anybody really care what he has to say about Mono & C#?
I do.
After fighting a decade+ long losing battle about Linux vs. GNU/Linux naming, he just enjoys trying to continue controlling others and telling them what to do and not do.
I see him as fighting a winning battle about bringing free software into relevance.
The "Linux vs GNU/Linux" naming issue is negligible when compared to the other issues he cares for.
And I don’t think he can actually control anyone. In the free software world, coders have the power.
Sometimes he says, well, stupid things and people just ignore him. In this specific case I think he’s right - his statement have nothing of extremist or preconceived. He’s just issuing a warning that makes sense from his point of view.
I wish some knowledgeable folks would weigh in how possible it would actually be for MS to do this for C# in particular. (Do they already hold relevant patents?)
No. Mono (justly) implements much more than the ECMA spec, and the programs make use of much more than the ECMA spec (which is so basic that you can’t actually code much by targeting it alone.)
For instance, tomboy makes use of classes from the.NET framework that is not part of the ECMA specification.
Since I deem you already know well what you might risk by using.NET on Linux, I’ll rather tell you what you actually get by using it.
You get somewhat-compatible development tools, which always are one or two versions behind the Windows equivalents. The programs you write using them will always run better on Windows, and the users, who do not care about the language a program is written in, will just find that Linux is a worse place to run them.
Compare with what happens when languages are based on truly open standards: C and C ++ get the new features on GCC *years* before Microsoft offers them in Visual Studio. Java (which basically C# is a copy of) has an open source reference implementation with feature parity on Linux from day zero after a new version is out. Of course, the same is true for Python, Perl, Ruby, Scala, PHP, TCL, Groovy, Caml, even Fortran.
The only problem is with.NET. So you see that from a developers point of view,.NET on Linux constitutes a regression. So the smart choice is to avoid it. Mono is great as an interoperability tool, but basing free software development on it is careless.
No, you’re talking about cynicism, which you’re trying to sell as pragmatism.
If you do not understand the motivations behind free software you’re more than welcome to keep using closed software, but you cannot criticize the free software community for trying to survive.
Microsoft has already applied for patents on the.NET framework, and when they will start suing all the companies who distribute free software based on it - just like they have already done with tomtom - all free software based on.NET will be *gone*.
So avoiding.NET from a free software point of view is not “religion” - it is basic, concrete, rational strategy. There are plenty of alternatives to.NET available to free software developers.
Think what we would read on/. if the same policies were carried out by Microsoft.
The iPhone is probably the most closed piece of hardware ever manufactured, but most people on a nerd-oriented site do not care.
I guess that nowadays even nerds prefer to own a shiny box rather than a open system. Sigh.
Uhm? Yes, you can. Sure, you will need ether jailbroken phone
1) it's against the law, so whether it matches the definition of "you can do it" is at least dubious;
2) a jailbroken iPhone is not an iPhone, it's a modified device that is not sold/approved by its manufacturer and that ordinary people can not get;
3) can you jailbreak the iPhone 3GS?
or an iphone dev account (where they will happily give you all necessary keys to run anything you compile on your device), but still - ether is simple and easy to do.
It changes from “simple and easy” to “impossible” if you either
1) do not own a Apple-branded computer;
2) are not over 18.
Moreover, you’re still subject to the SDK agreement when you use it, which just won’t let you code whatever you want, but will only allow you to access a very limited subset of your phone functionality.
I agree that you're nowhere near as free on the iPhone as we were on the C64, but it's just wrong to say that we can't run any code we like on our phone
No, it’s just true.
In order to make any use of the iPhone SDK, you must accept its license agreements, which greatly limits the code you can write for your phone without breaking the law.
So you can’t “run any code you like” on your phone, not more than you can grab as much money as you like from your bank if you’re bold enough.
I think it's also worth pointing out that there are huge potential exploits on a phone that weren't there on a C64. E.g. I could distribute a free app that eventually calls a 1-900 number I own, with no modem sticking out the back for you to disconnect.
This is FUD. The vast majority of the smartphones sold worldwide have the same potential exploits, yet their manufacturers do not enforce any limit on the freedom of their developers. Applications simply popup a warning asking the user to confirm the use of potentially problematic features. And remember that applications are digitally signed, so the authors of rogue applications would be promptly spotted.
Apple’s restrictions on the iPhone offer security as a side effect, but what they really are about is control.
No.
The mere USE of the SDK is subject to an agreement which severely limits what you can do with it.
Among other things, you must be over 18 to use it (I guess many of us weren’t adults when we learned to code using C64s), you cannot use it on a non-apple branded machine, and - this is great - you are not even allowed to talk about the contents of the agreement.
No, you have failed to read the message I was responding to, which asked "What's the end goal of creating newer APIs instead of perfecting the old ones, such as moving from OSS to ALSA", so I answered "Linux dropped OSS because it became commercial". There was no OSS v4 at the time, and OSS v2 performed much worse than ALSA.
I agree.
And I would like to add that most people who have problems with ALSA, would experience the same problems with whatever thing could replace ALSA.
The quality of drivers and the attitude of hardware vendors towards open source would remain the same.
And, in the scenario of adopting OSSv4 and dropping PulseAudio, we would lose the undeniable advantages of a usermode audio manager.
If we switch to OSSv4, people will start whining because we will have three sound systems instead of two. A gift for all Linux FUD spreaders. Drivers quality will not improve in the switch from ALSA to OSS (why should it?) so people will keep complaining about cracks and pops and out-of-the-box hardware support, and new bugs will inevitably crawl in during the process of converting existing drivers from ALSA to OSS.
Of course, developers will have to support ALSA for a long time (dropping ALSA altogether would break nearly ALL the current linux applications, not just flash player) so the support burden for distributions maintainers would become even heavier.
All of this - because ALSA does not match the pipe dream about sound systems of TFA writer. In the end, the features offered to the end user by a OSSv4 stack would be less than those provided by a working ALSA + PulseAudio stack, as even the writer itself states (about hybernation support).
Not to mention the fact that nowadays many applications will make use of high level libraries that hide the details of the sound system from them, so they couldn’t care less about ALSA or OSS.
So no, thank you! Please report bugs, do complain as loud as you can, but yet another fork is the last thing we need now.
Launch alsamixer, select the appropriate slider for the output of your sound card that goes to the amp, then use Q and Z to raise/lower the left channel, and E and C to raise/lower the right channel.
Or, if you’re using KDE, open kmix, select "settings" / "configure channels", then click the "split" checkbox next to the channel you want to tweak. After that, you will get two separate sliders, one for left channel and one for right channel.
Try this, it works out of the box for me with bare ALSA on a cheap AC'97.
Start alsamixer, choose the "capture" tab (press TAB), enable "mix" and "capture" (use arrows then press SPACE). Quit alsamixer (press ESC).
Then you can start recording using your favourite app - for example, you can run arecord -f S16_LE -c 2 -V stereo output.wav
and you get your sound card output on output.wav, with a neat text-based VU meter;).
When you’re finished recording, press CTRL-C to stop arecord.
I really do not understand what you’re talking about, because what I see is that “the mob” is modding +5 whoever posts insightful messages such as “linux audio sucks” and “pulseaudio sucks”, with no argumentation whatsoever.
You say there is “a community of people shouting others down” (which personally I have *never* seen happening, everyone shouts pretty loud in forums and mailing lists) and after ten lines you’re dismissing 10 years of audio development on Linux as “hacks” and “more the problems than the soultions”. Without suggesting solutions.
You say you found a trollish tone in the submission, and then you fall into trollescent practices, such as labeling a whole group of different people as a monolithic “community”, pretending to detect a single “attitude” in it, and claiming this has to be “changed”, or spreading FUD such as “linux has a multitude of audio systems” when actually it only has one, and as a developer IF you choose to use one of the nice libraries you mentioned, you don’t even have to care about that, because the library will hide that from you.
Linux has one (1) API to perform that single task, and that API is ALSA.
Linux dropped OSS *seven years ago* because OSS simultaneously sucked and became commercial.
And nobody complained because, on the contrary of what you say, ALSA provides seamless compatibilty with OSS.
So the statement "we have three common and incompatible APIs to perform a single task" is two times false.
Sadly, the victory was short-lived once we found out that ATI had moved his relatively recent GPU onto a legacy support branch, and that there was no adequate Linux driver - subsequently X crapped his pants and now he has a broken partition, bummer.
If it was dropped by ati’s support, then that card must be a R500 or lower, and as such it has an almost flawless open source Linux driver. How was it indadequate?
ALSA. It will work on any Linux version, on any distro since 2003. It can easily be made to work on earlier systems.
About Gnome/KDE: if you write a KDE- (Qt-) based application, you get an abstraction layer that won’t even let you see what sound system is used beneath. I have no experience with Gnome, but I guess the situation is the same.
If you want to write a DE-independent app, then all you have to support is ALSA.
And by the way, you never have to “modprobe” to get your sound card working. In fact, since the uevent subsystem was introduced in Linux, you never have to “modprobe” to get any hardware working. Every driver gets “modprobed” automagically when you plug the respective hardware in.
I know of a democratic southern Europe country where the government either directly owns, or politically controls, 5 out of the 7 national tv networks.
At least 3 of the most important journalists where removed from key positions for criticising the government, and even 2 comedians suffered the same fate for the same reason.
At every election, support for the government by voters is ever growing.
A blogger has been convicted for “clandestine press” because he did not register his blog at the courthouse.
The government has already announced plans to “limit YouTube” (sic).
Another law is being passed (using a fast-track procedure that substantially allows the government to bypass the parliament), forcing any web site administrator to publish “amendments” and “rectifications” to the materials published on his site, when requested to do so via email by anyone, within 48 hours from the request, with a fine ranging from 8,000 to 13,000 € if he does not comply.
The vast majority of the population (voters) doesn’t care at all about these issues.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it depends on what you define crap - are service packs crap? What about device drivers, office suites, compression programs, media codecs, cd-burning software, development platforms? Shouldn’t i use my iPod because it requires iTunes and QuickTime?
Apart from these, I never install crap on my systems, yet all of my Windows systems measurably start up slower and slower as I use them. The time from the boot loader to the desktop changes from 30 s to 180 s. Other performances get worse, too: the time to launch a program, the responsiveness of Explorer, the time between right-clicking a file and seeing a popup menu, and so on.
(Yes, I defragged, scandisked, and I have no antivirus installed, so I think I have exhausted the range of my possibilities of intervention as a user.)
Actually, if that were to happen -- and it won't:
Says who? MS has done precisely that in the past. Why are you choosing to ignore this fact? Microsoft executives have announced explicit intentions on this matter.
Microsoft sues => Linux distros must stop using the .NET framework => Tomboy gets ported to unmanaged C++ via an automated tool => Tomboy keeps on working.
Wouldn’t such tool have to automatically change all uses of a patented API in a binary program? How will it work?
C# is as open as it gets. It's developed through the ECMA (which is so "open" that it maintains the standards for Javascript), it has a full GPL reference implementation, its relevant standards are fully published in all details and are globally available free of charge.
Your point was: Java is not open. I said it is. I never said C# isn’t.
Anyway, since you mentioned it, where can I download the GPL reference implementation of C#?
And how can I follow the ECMA meetings that are shaping the future of C#? I suppose it’s not that a Microsoft internal team develops it behind closed doors and simply submits the finished product to ECMA for standardization.
Because this would mean that for every new C# revision, all non-Microsoft implementations will lag behind before implementing the new features.
Which is precisely what has been happening with Mono in the past five years.
Microsoft and the free software community have conflicting interests.
Not really, Microsoft and the free software community worked together succesfully a number of times. F/OSS zealots have a thing with Microsoft,
Sorry but in this thread, it is only you who have a thing with someone. You just started calling zealots those who do not agree with you, and expose their argumentation with valid arguments instead of insulting.
Although I am indeed a zealot, sometimes I base my opinion on facts, and I’d like to share some interesting ones with you.
- What Microsoft executives think about free software and patents:
- Samples of past interactions between MS and free software:
Microsoft vs. tomtom
Halloween documents
Patenting other peoples’ideas
Thats perfectly true! In fact, before this, RMS has vocally spoken against Java *for the exact same reasons* he is now warning against Mono.
After Java was licensed under the GPL v2, he stopped deprecating Java. That’s because even if Sun held patents about Java, the fact that they released it under the GPL means that they’ve granted perpetual free use of the relative technologies for everyone (don’t take my word - read the GPL).
Besides this, if C# (or the BCL) were really dangerous, then why is th
I have already posted a link in a previous comment, but I can paste it again for your convenience.
It also points to a response from Microsoft, in particular by one of the inventors of the patent, who states:
(emphasis mine). It is interesting to note that this particular patent application was filed after the standardization by ECMA.
>C# is important to the discussion because Tomboy, the application Debian decided it must have, is written in C#.
Uhm, and why is that relevant? Once it's compiled it could have been written in any language. Also, C# can be machine translated to unmanaged C++, so I really don't see what the problem is.
With the way things *currently* work, the problem is: .NET framework => Tomboy stops working. .NET, but many applications currently make use of .NET APIs.
Microsoft sues => Linux distros must stop using the
Of course C# !=
>There are plenty of patent issues, and you cannot write desktop apps without using APIs outside the .NET ECMA specs.
Of course you can, see for example the GTK# that implements an totally different layer to Windows.Forms.
It’s true, but that kind of defeats the goal of portability across platforms.
By the way, Tomboy is not a winforms application anyways.
It uses .NET classes.
Nope, it's an open standard (whereas Java isn't IIRC).
Java is as open as it gets. It’s developed through the JSR (which is so “open” that it’s held in stall by the Apache foundation), it has a full GPL reference implementation, its relevant standards are fully published in all details and are globally available free of charge.
You know what the real truth is? Is that since it is a standard coming from Microsoft it HAS to be evil, right?
Microsoft and the free software community have conflicting interests.
We can ignore what Microsoft did to some of its partners, the methods they used to reach their position, and the harm they cause to consumers because of their monopoly.
But we can not ignore that Microsoft has actively tried to harm the free software community many times, and that we have evidence that it meant to do so by “de-commoditizing protocols and applications”.
So every standard coming from Microsoft *must* be handled with care, it’s an issue that cannot be ignored tout court.
A free country would be unwise to depend on an unfriendly country for its oil supply, even if citizens don’t care about where their gasoline came from when they are at the gas station. That said, in the free software world, Stallman may issue warnings, but in the end the developers have the freedom to decide. Nobody (but Microsoft) can limit your freedom to use Mono.
Does anybody really care what he has to say about Mono & C#?
I do.
After fighting a decade+ long losing battle about Linux vs. GNU/Linux naming, he just enjoys trying to continue controlling others and telling them what to do and not do.
I see him as fighting a winning battle about bringing free software into relevance.
The "Linux vs GNU/Linux" naming issue is negligible when compared to the other issues he cares for.
And I don’t think he can actually control anyone. In the free software world, coders have the power.
Sometimes he says, well, stupid things and people just ignore him. In this specific case I think he’s right - his statement have nothing of extremist or preconceived. He’s just issuing a warning that makes sense from his point of view.
I wish some knowledgeable folks would weigh in how possible it would actually be for MS to do this for C# in particular. (Do they already hold relevant patents?)
I do not know about C# in particular, but about .NET, yes, they hold relevant patents.
No. Mono (justly) implements much more than the ECMA spec, and the programs make use of much more than the ECMA spec (which is so basic that you can’t actually code much by targeting it alone.) .NET framework that is not part of the ECMA specification.
For instance, tomboy makes use of classes from the
Since I deem you already know well what you might risk by using .NET on Linux, I’ll rather tell you what you actually get by using it. .NET. So you see that from a developers point of view, .NET on Linux constitutes a regression. So the smart choice is to avoid it. Mono is great as an interoperability tool, but basing free software development on it is careless.
You get somewhat-compatible development tools, which always are one or two versions behind the Windows equivalents. The programs you write using them will always run better on Windows, and the users, who do not care about the language a program is written in, will just find that Linux is a worse place to run them.
Compare with what happens when languages are based on truly open standards: C and C ++ get the new features on GCC *years* before Microsoft offers them in Visual Studio. Java (which basically C# is a copy of) has an open source reference implementation with feature parity on Linux from day zero after a new version is out. Of course, the same is true for Python, Perl, Ruby, Scala, PHP, TCL, Groovy, Caml, even Fortran.
The only problem is with
No, you’re talking about cynicism, which you’re trying to sell as pragmatism. .NET framework, and when they will start suing all the companies who distribute free software based on it - just like they have already done with tomtom - all free software based on .NET will be *gone*. .NET from a free software point of view is not “religion” - it is basic, concrete, rational strategy. There are plenty of alternatives to .NET available to free software developers.
If you do not understand the motivations behind free software you’re more than welcome to keep using closed software, but you cannot criticize the free software community for trying to survive.
Microsoft has already applied for patents on the
So avoiding
Think what we would read on /. if the same policies were carried out by Microsoft.
The iPhone is probably the most closed piece of hardware ever manufactured, but most people on a nerd-oriented site do not care.
I guess that nowadays even nerds prefer to own a shiny box rather than a open system. Sigh.
Uhm? Yes, you can. Sure, you will need ether jailbroken phone
1) it's against the law, so whether it matches the definition of "you can do it" is at least dubious;
2) a jailbroken iPhone is not an iPhone, it's a modified device that is not sold/approved by its manufacturer and that ordinary people can not get;
3) can you jailbreak the iPhone 3GS?
or an iphone dev account (where they will happily give you all necessary keys to run anything you compile on your device), but still - ether is simple and easy to do.
It changes from “simple and easy” to “impossible” if you either
1) do not own a Apple-branded computer;
2) are not over 18.
Moreover, you’re still subject to the SDK agreement when you use it, which just won’t let you code whatever you want, but will only allow you to access a very limited subset of your phone functionality.
I agree that you're nowhere near as free on the iPhone as we were on the C64, but it's just wrong to say that we can't run any code we like on our phone
No, it’s just true.
In order to make any use of the iPhone SDK, you must accept its license agreements, which greatly limits the code you can write for your phone without breaking the law.
So you can’t “run any code you like” on your phone, not more than you can grab as much money as you like from your bank if you’re bold enough.
I think it's also worth pointing out that there are huge potential exploits on a phone that weren't there on a C64. E.g. I could distribute a free app that eventually calls a 1-900 number I own, with no modem sticking out the back for you to disconnect.
This is FUD. The vast majority of the smartphones sold worldwide have the same potential exploits, yet their manufacturers do not enforce any limit on the freedom of their developers. Applications simply popup a warning asking the user to confirm the use of potentially problematic features. And remember that applications are digitally signed, so the authors of rogue applications would be promptly spotted.
Apple’s restrictions on the iPhone offer security as a side effect, but what they really are about is control.
No.
The mere USE of the SDK is subject to an agreement which severely limits what you can do with it.
Among other things, you must be over 18 to use it (I guess many of us weren’t adults when we learned to code using C64s), you cannot use it on a non-apple branded machine, and - this is great - you are not even allowed to talk about the contents of the agreement.
No, you have failed to read the message I was responding to, which asked "What's the end goal of creating newer APIs instead of perfecting the old ones, such as moving from OSS to ALSA", so I answered "Linux dropped OSS because it became commercial". There was no OSS v4 at the time, and OSS v2 performed much worse than ALSA.
I agree.
And I would like to add that most people who have problems with ALSA, would experience the same problems with whatever thing could replace ALSA.
The quality of drivers and the attitude of hardware vendors towards open source would remain the same.
And, in the scenario of adopting OSSv4 and dropping PulseAudio, we would lose the undeniable advantages of a usermode audio manager.
If we switch to OSSv4, people will start whining because we will have three sound systems instead of two. A gift for all Linux FUD spreaders. Drivers quality will not improve in the switch from ALSA to OSS (why should it?) so people will keep complaining about cracks and pops and out-of-the-box hardware support, and new bugs will inevitably crawl in during the process of converting existing drivers from ALSA to OSS.
Of course, developers will have to support ALSA for a long time (dropping ALSA altogether would break nearly ALL the current linux applications, not just flash player) so the support burden for distributions maintainers would become even heavier.
All of this - because ALSA does not match the pipe dream about sound systems of TFA writer. In the end, the features offered to the end user by a OSSv4 stack would be less than those provided by a working ALSA + PulseAudio stack, as even the writer itself states (about hybernation support).
Not to mention the fact that nowadays many applications will make use of high level libraries that hide the details of the sound system from them, so they couldn’t care less about ALSA or OSS.
So no, thank you! Please report bugs, do complain as loud as you can, but yet another fork is the last thing we need now.
Launch alsamixer, select the appropriate slider for the output of your sound card that goes to the amp, then use Q and Z to raise/lower the left channel, and E and C to raise/lower the right channel.
Or, if you’re using KDE, open kmix, select "settings" / "configure channels", then click the "split" checkbox next to the channel you want to tweak. After that, you will get two separate sliders, one for left channel and one for right channel.
Try this, it works out of the box for me with bare ALSA on a cheap AC'97. ;) .
Start alsamixer, choose the "capture" tab (press TAB), enable "mix" and "capture" (use arrows then press SPACE). Quit alsamixer (press ESC).
Then you can start recording using your favourite app - for example, you can run
arecord -f S16_LE -c 2 -V stereo output.wav
and you get your sound card output on output.wav, with a neat text-based VU meter
When you’re finished recording, press CTRL-C to stop arecord.
I really do not understand what you’re talking about, because what I see is that “the mob” is modding +5 whoever posts insightful messages such as “linux audio sucks” and “pulseaudio sucks”, with no argumentation whatsoever.
You say there is “a community of people shouting others down” (which personally I have *never* seen happening, everyone shouts pretty loud in forums and mailing lists) and after ten lines you’re dismissing 10 years of audio development on Linux as “hacks” and “more the problems than the soultions”. Without suggesting solutions.
You say you found a trollish tone in the submission, and then you fall into trollescent practices, such as labeling a whole group of different people as a monolithic “community”, pretending to detect a single “attitude” in it, and claiming this has to be “changed”, or spreading FUD such as “linux has a multitude of audio systems” when actually it only has one, and as a developer IF you choose to use one of the nice libraries you mentioned, you don’t even have to care about that, because the library will hide that from you.
Linux has one (1) API to perform that single task, and that API is ALSA.
Linux dropped OSS *seven years ago* because OSS simultaneously sucked and became commercial.
And nobody complained because, on the contrary of what you say, ALSA provides seamless compatibilty with OSS.
So the statement "we have three common and incompatible APIs to perform a single task" is two times false.
Never had such latency problems with Pulse on my 7-years-old machine.
Sadly, the victory was short-lived once we found out that ATI had moved his relatively recent GPU onto a legacy support branch, and that there was no adequate Linux driver - subsequently X crapped his pants and now he has a broken partition, bummer.
If it was dropped by ati’s support, then that card must be a R500 or lower, and as such it has an almost flawless open source Linux driver. How was it indadequate?
ALSA. It will work on any Linux version, on any distro since 2003. It can easily be made to work on earlier systems.
About Gnome/KDE: if you write a KDE- (Qt-) based application, you get an abstraction layer that won’t even let you see what sound system is used beneath. I have no experience with Gnome, but I guess the situation is the same.
If you want to write a DE-independent app, then all you have to support is ALSA.
And by the way, you never have to “modprobe” to get your sound card working. In fact, since the uevent subsystem was introduced in Linux, you never have to “modprobe” to get any hardware working. Every driver gets “modprobed” automagically when you plug the respective hardware in.
The free open source drivers for ATI card have been supporting tear free video for a long time now.
I know of a democratic southern Europe country where the government either directly owns, or politically controls, 5 out of the 7 national tv networks.
At least 3 of the most important journalists where removed from key positions for criticising the government, and even 2 comedians suffered the same fate for the same reason.
At every election, support for the government by voters is ever growing.
A blogger has been convicted for “clandestine press” because he did not register his blog at the courthouse.
The government has already announced plans to “limit YouTube” (sic).
Another law is being passed (using a fast-track procedure that substantially allows the government to bypass the parliament), forcing any web site administrator to publish “amendments” and “rectifications” to the materials published on his site, when requested to do so via email by anyone, within 48 hours from the request, with a fine ranging from 8,000 to 13,000 € if he does not comply.
The vast majority of the population (voters) doesn’t care at all about these issues.