I'm glad to see 4-Front diversify themselves somewhat away from just doing OSS. I hope they are planning a commercial product based on this.
Being a commercial entity that basicly "owns" much of the current, standard Linux sound drivers that may be eventually replaced by ALSA in many Linux distributions and the 2.3 kernel, they seem to have a nice outlook:
"It works on most unix systems with sound, preferable OSS, but on i386 systems, any sounddrivers that is OSS compatible should work without problems"
They did, however, take down the ALSA output plugin, which is at http://iznogood.bohemians.org/
I was talking about the sequencer/MIDI portion of ALSA and some of the more advanced dsp features (hardware mixing) in current development, or in the next phase in the 'will be's'. Everything else is already there.
And it takes about 5 minutes to set up a PCI or PnP (if you have the resources) sound card with ALSA...
Also, ALSA does a lot of things that OSS/Lite doesn't and won't:
1) Full Duplex on ALL cards that support it. 2) Hardware mixing (multiple sound streams) for hardware that supports it. 3) Very sophisticated midi infrastructure 4) Patch management for soundcard synths 5) Documented API 6) Multiple card support (up to 8 per system) 7) Modular system 8) Extensive mixer control system 9) Card autodetection 10) PnP autoconfiguration (for PnP cards)
And that's just the stuff off the top of my head.
OSS is a very basic sound interface. ALSA is very structured, professional interface (or will be).
1) Playing MP3's,.wav's,.au, and.ram files... 2) Microphone recording. 3) Playing Quake/Quake2/Civ:CTP 4) Creating CD's from audio tape (FD definately worked for that)
MIDI is coming but not here yet for general use. Anything else you would need it for?
1) VIA isn't THAT tiny. Intel's chipset sales were 1.2 billion. VIA's was 200 million. That's still 1/6th of Intel's sales, which isn't too shabby. Also VIA sells chipsets at bargin rates and Intel doesn't. That means that VIA has shipped a lot more chipsets than Intel has, per dollar amount.
Also, VIA has to compete with ALI, SIS, and a few others for AMD/Cyrix sales. Intel has no such competition for the Celeron/PIII sales.
2) VIA is very close to AMD and I believe that AMD licensed VIA's chipsets for AMD's 640 Socket 7 chipset. VIA will also be one of the main manufacturer's making K7 chipsets.
3) VIA is trying to do an endrun around Intel by using National Semiconductor's license with Intel for the basis of their chipset. This was also done by AMD and Cyrix back in the 486 days, and it worked. However, it's almost a natural that Intel should sue.
4) VIA is mostly owned by FIC, who is a major OEM manufacturer in Taiwan. If they, and other Taiwan manufacturers could purchase Celeron and PIII chipsets locally, they would in a hearbeat. VIA already has very good relationships with all of them (most use the MVP3 chipset already).
Sorry, I was using 'standards' in a generic sense and in that Microsoft likes to mess with them. Of course there is no ANSI or ISO standard for PERL.
There is a "Standard Perl", which is the official codebase designed and released by the PERL core team. That's what I don't want messed with. PERL modules are fine....
Having been involved with him for the last 3 years as a driver tester, it is nice to see Jaroslav (or Perex, his old handle) getting some attention and credit for his hard work. He is truly a quality human being and is one of the unsung hero's in the Linux world.
About three years ago, I had a Gravis Ultrasound. The DOS/Windows drivers were buggy, and the OSS drivers weren't much better. I suffered along awhile, having to load Windows to to anything sound related, until I found the UltraSound Project, Jaroslav's first driver project.
The UltraSound Project was an attempt to provide an OSS compatible driver, written from scratch, that 1) worked, and 2) supported all the features of the Ultrasound cards.
The project was wildly sucessful in both goals. At the end, the/dev/dsp emulation was almost perfect, and it had a very, VERY nice/dev/sequencer emulator that did patch management, MPU-401 emulation to the Ultrasound's onboard synth (which allowed the use of ANY MIDI program written for linux). I was quite happy.
On the sucess of the Ultrasound Project, Jaroslav started ALSA. The nice thing about ALSA, though, was that it was no longer a project to create an OSS compatible driver , but to create a better sound system (with backwards compatibility) with features like full duplex for every card that supports it, hardware mixing of multiple sound streams, RT (or close to it) recording, and an professional quality MIDI subsystem; along with an API (alsalib) for programmers to easily write software for it.
At this moment, ALSA is at version.3.1 However, the PCM interface is pretty much completed and working great. The mixer interface is pretty much completed (after a recent major overhaul). The sequencer interface is currently under major development, and the onboard synth support for soundcards, with patch management, etc. is just starting to get going.
I have found it very usable over the last year or so for day to day work, and I strongly encourage anyone who is interested to try it out. Here is a short list of supported soundcards (note this is PCM, no MIDI. MIDI support (as stated) is just starting for soundcards):
Gravis Ultrasound (Classic, Max, ACE) AMD Interwave (Gravis Ultrasound PnP) CS4232,CS4236,CS461x OPL3-SA SoundBlaster 8,16,AWE es1688 es18xx ess solo1 Ensoniq AudioPCI, SB PCI {32,64,128} Trident 4DWave {DX,NX} (I have one of these! Works great) S3 SonicVibes MSS
And more coming all the time. And in case no one mentioned the web site, it's http://www.alsa-project.org. There are also developer and user mailing lists available..
Anyway nice article, and if you want to help, please do. Users and testers welcome.
That's just it. They apparently started sending the same data to everyone because they didn't have enough resources to store and process the returned data. Basicly, they put it into an idle loop until they could get the resources they need.
The other option would be to tell everyone to stop and they would lose much of the momentum they had.
Yes, the lack of communication sucks. But these people are bigger nerds than we are (trust me!), and communication skills aren't their forte.
jf
PS.. BTW I'm sure all the data is interesting to them...
ActiveState may not be out to 'embrace and extend' PERL, but MicroSoft probably is.
This is probably the first step toward a Microsoft PERL[tm]. Then, after they have distributed it with the the operating system (probably in a Service Pak) and given it away to thousands of developers and developer CD, the embracing and extending comes.
Many of us will know the difference, but many, many more will not. What we need to do is be able to educate developers on what the word "Standards" means (MS has a really weird definition) and come up with further strategies on how to prevent corporations from hijacking our software. The GPL is good, but nothings been tested yet.
When, OH WHEN! are we going to have a distribution standard? When?
Is it really that hard to do for RedHat, Debian, Caldera, SUSE, and TurboLinux (Pacific-HiTec) to agree on a base set of libraries and partial system layout?
The article starts out implying that due to the some kind of bug, all the effort so far as been wasted. THEN it states later that the SETI people have been trying to get it to scale to 500,000+ systems (which is 3x the origional number expected) and have been sending out the same information to everyone for testing and sanity checks.
Why all the negative vibes because of this? People volunteer and then get mad because SETI stopped to try to get the system to scale?
It's very hard to do testing on something like this. How could you stress test a new distributed system with 500,000 nodes beforehand? You probably can't.
Distributed.net had to start over a couple of times due to programming errors. Granted, the communication about this could have been better, but do they HAVE to tell you that they are in a test mode? Cut the ET watchers some slack.
On another note, does anyone have any information about the "Unix and Linux" uses that are 'cheating'? If you know anyone doing that, SLAP THEM HARD!
First Carmack getting mailbomed, now this. Some people on the Internet are REALLY starting to suck...
I make MP3's of my CD's and burn them to a CDR at an 168K bitrate. A CDR is 650MB.
I tend to be able to put 8-10 albums on a single CDR. With a 6-7GB drive, you should be able to store 90-110 albums. WHEE!
jf
Intel's been losing market share...
on
Cool PC Cases
·
· Score: 1
And they found out what to do about it. They must have fired their entire engineering staff in a bold new move:
Intel's Bunnypeople[tm] characters fashioned the new PC designs for the PC Fashion Show at IDF.
They've gone to the "Shoemaker and the Elves" model of modern business! Fire all the engineers and have wonderful, magical beings design your products!
Personally, I'm waiting for the BunnyPeople[tm] cartoon to come out.
Re:Why the bitterness?
on
Cool PC Cases
·
· Score: 1
> Then Dodge came along and made the Ram and > Dakota sexy, and stylish. Why can't computers be > the same?
Because the Dodge Ram is still a helluva truck and is still useful as a truck to haul things around in.
On the other hand, these PC's are limited and minimally-upgradable to ensure planned obsolescence. Can you say Packard Bell? I thought you could.
I believe this is a Netscape problem, not really a X font problem.
Netscape tries to render fonts at a 12 point font base. This doesn't allow enough pixels to render the fonts correctly.
Try typing in '16' for the font size in Netscape's preferences/fonts. It makes a huge difference, and renders the fonts closely to how Windows Netscape appears.
Note that Netscape (stupidly) doesn't save the 16 point setting. You have to type it in for each session.
One of the main design goals of 4.0 is to provide a standard driver format so that vendors can write their own driver files, possibly in binary-only, which would be a drawback.
ATI would have to write their own, or release specs so someone else could.
If you are using Netscape to compare small fonts sizes, then you may be misled by the poor font quality on some web pages.
It seems that Unix Netscape has a very old and well known bug that causes it to only use 12point fonts for scalable fonts. What this does is make very small fonts nasty and almost unreadable. You can only make a font so small before it is unreadable, no matter the system.
What I do is when I start Netscape, immediately go to the preferences/fonts and type '16' in the font size box (this is assuming you are using a TTF font like Ariel, and have the 'scalable' box checked on.
This makes things MUCH nicer and makes those small fonts behave.
You need to upgrade to the entire 3.3.3.1 XFree package. Don't know about the 128, but the Velocity 4400 ROCKS! with the new drivers.
Still a lot of work to go, but the Mesa Demos run great (170+ FPS on the 'gear' demo;), Quake 3 SORTA runs okay (actually had it running as good as my VooDoo 1 with GLIDE at one point), and bzflag is GREAT as long as you reduce your desktop to 640x480.
Really good for a first cut at Beta drivers using just GLX. The DRI stuff should be great!
Slashdot Mirror
XMMS's output plugin system allows the use of native ALSA, Solaris, and other drivers to be used.
Very nicely done.
Also, ALSA will (according to Alan Cox) be the (or is it an?) official sound driver included in the Linux kernel 2.3. Whee!
jf
I'm glad to see 4-Front diversify themselves somewhat away from just doing OSS. I hope they are planning a commercial product based on this.
Being a commercial entity that basicly "owns" much of the current, standard Linux sound drivers that may be eventually replaced by ALSA in many Linux distributions and the 2.3 kernel, they seem to have a nice outlook:
"It works on most unix systems with sound, preferable OSS, but on i386 systems, any sounddrivers that is OSS compatible should work without problems"
They did, however, take down the ALSA output plugin, which is at http://iznogood.bohemians.org/
Other plugins are here
I hope they are saving their nuts for Winter...
I was talking about the sequencer/MIDI portion of ALSA and some of the more advanced dsp features (hardware mixing) in current development, or in the next phase in the 'will be's'. Everything else is already there.
:)
And it takes about 5 minutes to set up a PCI or PnP (if you have the resources) sound card with ALSA...
And KDE has it's share of "will be's" too...
Also, ALSA does a lot of things that OSS/Lite doesn't and won't:
1) Full Duplex on ALL cards that support it.
2) Hardware mixing (multiple sound streams) for hardware that supports it.
3) Very sophisticated midi infrastructure
4) Patch management for soundcard synths
5) Documented API
6) Multiple card support (up to 8 per system)
7) Modular system
8) Extensive mixer control system
9) Card autodetection
10) PnP autoconfiguration (for PnP cards)
And that's just the stuff off the top of my head.
OSS is a very basic sound interface. ALSA is very
structured, professional interface (or will be).
jf
I've used it from everything from:
.wav's, .au, and .ram files...
1) Playing MP3's,
2) Microphone recording.
3) Playing Quake/Quake2/Civ:CTP
4) Creating CD's from audio tape (FD definately worked for that)
MIDI is coming but not here yet for general use. Anything else you would need it for?
jf
1) VIA isn't THAT tiny. Intel's chipset sales were 1.2 billion. VIA's was 200 million. That's still 1/6th of Intel's sales, which isn't too shabby. Also VIA sells chipsets at bargin rates and Intel doesn't. That means that VIA has shipped a lot more chipsets than Intel has, per dollar amount.
Also, VIA has to compete with ALI, SIS, and a few others for AMD/Cyrix sales. Intel has no such competition for the Celeron/PIII sales.
2) VIA is very close to AMD and I believe that AMD licensed VIA's chipsets for AMD's 640 Socket 7 chipset. VIA will also be one of the main manufacturer's making K7 chipsets.
3) VIA is trying to do an endrun around Intel by using National Semiconductor's license with Intel for the basis of their chipset. This was also done by AMD and Cyrix back in the 486 days, and it worked. However, it's almost a natural that Intel should sue.
4) VIA is mostly owned by FIC, who is a major OEM manufacturer in Taiwan. If they, and other Taiwan manufacturers could purchase Celeron and PIII chipsets locally, they would in a hearbeat. VIA already has very good relationships with all of them (most use the MVP3 chipset already).
Could be interesting...
jf
Sorry, I was using 'standards' in a generic sense and in that Microsoft likes to mess with them. Of course there is no ANSI or ISO standard for PERL.
There is a "Standard Perl", which is the official codebase designed and released by the PERL core team. That's what I don't want messed with. PERL modules are fine....
Having been involved with him for the last 3 years as a driver tester, it is nice to see Jaroslav (or Perex, his old handle) getting some attention and credit for his hard work. He is truly a quality human being and is one of the unsung hero's in the Linux world.
/dev/dsp emulation was almost perfect, and it had a very, VERY nice /dev/sequencer emulator that did patch management, MPU-401 emulation to the Ultrasound's onboard synth (which allowed the use of ANY MIDI program written for linux). I was quite happy.
.3.1 However, the PCM interface is pretty much completed and working great. The mixer interface is pretty much completed (after a recent major overhaul). The sequencer interface is currently under major development, and the onboard synth support for soundcards, with patch management, etc. is just starting to get going.
About three years ago, I had a Gravis Ultrasound. The DOS/Windows drivers were buggy, and the OSS drivers weren't much better. I suffered along awhile, having to load Windows to to anything sound related, until I found the UltraSound Project, Jaroslav's first driver project.
The UltraSound Project was an attempt to provide an OSS compatible driver, written from scratch, that 1) worked, and 2) supported all the features of the Ultrasound cards.
The project was wildly sucessful in both goals. At the end, the
On the sucess of the Ultrasound Project, Jaroslav started ALSA. The nice thing about ALSA, though, was that it was no longer a project to create an OSS compatible driver , but to create a better sound system (with backwards compatibility) with features like full duplex for every card that supports it, hardware mixing of multiple sound streams, RT (or close to it) recording, and an professional quality MIDI subsystem; along with an API (alsalib) for programmers to easily write software for it.
At this moment, ALSA is at version
I have found it very usable over the last year or so for day to day work, and I strongly encourage anyone who is interested to try it out. Here is a short list of supported soundcards (note this is PCM, no MIDI. MIDI support (as stated) is just starting for soundcards):
Gravis Ultrasound (Classic, Max, ACE)
AMD Interwave (Gravis Ultrasound PnP)
CS4232,CS4236,CS461x
OPL3-SA
SoundBlaster 8,16,AWE
es1688
es18xx
ess solo1
Ensoniq AudioPCI, SB PCI {32,64,128}
Trident 4DWave {DX,NX} (I have one of these! Works great)
S3 SonicVibes
MSS
And more coming all the time. And in case no one mentioned the web site, it's http://www.alsa-project.org. There are also developer and user mailing lists available..
Anyway nice article, and if you want to help, please do. Users and testers welcome.
jf
That's just it. They apparently started sending the same data to everyone because they didn't have enough resources to store and process the returned data. Basicly, they put it into an idle loop until they could get the resources they need.
The other option would be to tell everyone to stop and they would lose much of the momentum they had.
Yes, the lack of communication sucks. But these people are bigger nerds than we are (trust me!), and communication skills aren't their forte.
jf
PS.. BTW I'm sure all the data is interesting to them...
ActiveState may not be out to 'embrace and extend' PERL, but MicroSoft probably is.
This is probably the first step toward a Microsoft PERL[tm]. Then, after they have distributed it with the the operating system (probably in a Service Pak) and given it away to thousands of developers and developer CD, the embracing and extending comes.
Many of us will know the difference, but many, many more will not. What we need to do is be able to educate developers on what the word "Standards" means (MS has a really weird definition) and come up with further strategies on how to prevent corporations from hijacking our software. The GPL is good, but nothings been tested yet.
Hang on. It's going to be a bumpy ride.
jf
When, OH WHEN! are we going to have a distribution standard? When?
Is it really that hard to do for RedHat, Debian, Caldera, SUSE, and TurboLinux (Pacific-HiTec) to agree on a base set of libraries and partial system layout?
jf
They do a pretty good job at doing newish builds at the normal gnome mirrors. Look in gnome/gnome-1.0/redhat/i386 for base and devel sets...
jf
The article starts out implying that due to the some kind of bug, all the effort so far as been wasted. THEN it states later that the SETI people have been trying to get it to scale to 500,000+ systems (which is 3x the origional number expected) and have been sending out the same information to everyone for testing and sanity checks.
Why all the negative vibes because of this? People volunteer and then get mad because SETI stopped to try to get the system to scale?
It's very hard to do testing on something like this. How could you stress test a new distributed system with 500,000 nodes beforehand? You probably can't.
Distributed.net had to start over a couple of times due to programming errors. Granted, the communication about this could have been better, but do they HAVE to tell you that they are in a test mode? Cut the ET watchers some slack.
On another note, does anyone have any information about the "Unix and Linux" uses that are 'cheating'? If you know anyone doing that, SLAP THEM HARD!
First Carmack getting mailbomed, now this. Some people on the Internet are REALLY starting to suck...
jf
SETI is an extremely long term project
I make MP3's of my CD's and burn them to a CDR at an 168K bitrate. A CDR is 650MB.
I tend to be able to put 8-10 albums on a single CDR. With a 6-7GB drive, you should be able to store 90-110 albums. WHEE!
jf
And they found out what to do about it. They must have fired their entire engineering staff in a bold new move:
Intel's Bunnypeople[tm] characters fashioned the new PC designs for the PC Fashion Show at IDF.
They've gone to the "Shoemaker and the Elves" model of modern business! Fire all the engineers and have wonderful, magical beings design your products!
Personally, I'm waiting for the BunnyPeople[tm] cartoon to come out.
> Then Dodge came along and made the Ram and
> Dakota sexy, and stylish. Why can't computers be
> the same?
Because the Dodge Ram is still a helluva truck and is still useful as a truck to haul things around in.
On the other hand, these PC's are limited and minimally-upgradable to ensure planned obsolescence. Can you say Packard Bell? I thought you could.
Besides, they're ugly.
It doesn't save font size IF you are using a scalable font. It always assumes 12.
:) I spent an afternoon trying to hack round the preferences.js to get this to work all the time and had to admit defeat.
Trust me on this one.
This is on both my work and home machines.
>Netscape tries to render fonts at a 12 point font base. This doesn't allow enough pixels to render the fonts correctly.
Sorry. This should say "This doesn't allow enough pixels to render TINY fonts correctly"
jf
I believe this is a Netscape problem, not really a X font problem.
Netscape tries to render fonts at a 12 point font base. This doesn't allow enough pixels to render the fonts correctly.
Try typing in '16' for the font size in Netscape's preferences/fonts. It makes a huge difference, and renders the fonts closely to how Windows Netscape appears.
Note that Netscape (stupidly) doesn't save the 16 point setting. You have to type it in for each session.
jf
One of the main design goals of 4.0 is to provide a standard driver format so that vendors can write their own driver files, possibly in binary-only, which would be a drawback.
ATI would have to write their own, or release specs so someone else could.
jf
If you are using Netscape to compare small fonts sizes, then you may be misled by the poor font quality on some web pages.
It seems that Unix Netscape has a very old and well known bug that causes it to only use 12point fonts for scalable fonts. What this does is make very small fonts nasty and almost unreadable. You can only make a font so small before it is unreadable, no matter the system.
What I do is when I start Netscape, immediately go to the preferences/fonts and type '16' in the font size box (this is assuming you are using a TTF font like Ariel, and have the 'scalable' box checked on.
This makes things MUCH nicer and makes those small fonts behave.
jf
Note that the last line should read:
"as well as 3Dsupport Precision Insight's DRI stuff (which looked really excellent at LinuxExpo), Mesa, AND SGI's GLX."
Subtle but important for all of those who want/need to run GLX apps.
You need to upgrade to the entire 3.3.3.1 XFree package. Don't know about the 128, but the Velocity 4400 ROCKS! with the new drivers.
;), Quake 3 SORTA runs okay (actually had it running as good as my VooDoo 1 with GLIDE at one point), and bzflag is GREAT as long as you reduce your desktop to 640x480.
Still a lot of work to go, but the Mesa Demos run great (170+ FPS on the 'gear' demo
Really good for a first cut at Beta drivers using just GLX. The DRI stuff should be great!
The README states that it includes the VMWare patches in the X binary...
jf
Autosave is in the 1.1 patch. Or at least is is for the Windows version..