Linux 3.0

[Tzafrir Cohen]

Hi,

On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 10:16:49PM +0300, geoffrey mendelson wrote:
>
> On May 29, 2011, at 9:23 PM, Nadav Har'El wrote:
>>
>> I know you said this as a joke, but to rain on your parade, BSD is not 
>> GNU-
>> free. As far as I know *BSD distributions typically use quite a number 
>> of GNU
>> packages, such as gcc, groff, bc, and probably a bunch of others. They 
>> also
>> include, I believe, a bunch of other GPL (though not GNU) software.
>
> Some do, some don't they are not needed. As for C compilers, there is  
> more than GCC.
>
>>
>> Linus's intention is to change the kernel numbering scheme, and  
>> nothing
>> else - the move to 3.0 (or 2.8) will not (apparently) be used as an
>> oportunity for massive depracation of old features, cleaup of defunct
>> drivers, or major restructing of the code. These things have been  
>> happening
>> slowly in every version, and nobody is waiting for a specific version 
>> number
>> (like the big three-oh) to do them.
>>
>
> Good, there was among other things the major I/O driver change from 2.4 
> to 2.6 leaving many devices with 2.4 drivers not working in 2.6, and 2.4 
> without drivers for many new devices until the fact that 2.6 was not 
> being universally accepted and 2.6 drivers were backported.

That's old news. That switch was over 5 years ago. Since then Linux (the
kernel) has avoided that long development cycles.

>
> Then there was the alsa/oss disaster, when lots of things stopped  
> working because there was no alsa support in the applications that used 
> them, oss support for them in the kernel was dropped, and no oss  
> emulation under alsa. This covered probably 90% of the TV capture cards 
> and many sound cards in use.

OSS was dumped long ago for licensing issues. They later went free, but
then re-rejected due to coding issues (doing too much in the kernel).

There were indeed initially devices with no (or no good) ALSA drivers. I
suggest that you come up with non-obscure devices that actually have
better OSS4 drivers than ALSA Linux drivers.

>
> I had to give up on MythTV because I could no longer get a packaged  
> system that would work with my capture card.
>
> I recently installed the latest Ubuntu (11.04) on a system with the card 
> and it does not work. There was a work around using /dev/dsp? but it just 
> disappeared in this release.

/dev/dsp using actual OSS drivers? Or ALSA emulation? The latter can
also be done in userspace. No need to keep it in the kernel.

>>> Will audio ever work right?
>>
>> Audio has been working "right" for me for at least 10 years (before  
>> that,
>> I had a lot of problems with proprietary and half-working drivers)... 
>> What
>> kind of problems are you having?
>>
>
>
> See above. Also the various sound daemons that have come and gone and  
> never worked right, ESD, and something new I don't remember (it's in  
> 11.04) and so on.

There is now basically a single audio server (PulseAudio). This has been
the case for the recent 4 years or so. If you missed it, you must have lived
under a rock, and never really bothered trying ot configure a sound
system.

There's also Jack, but only for those who actually bother configuring
and tuning it.

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen         | tzafrir at jabber.org | VIM is
http://tzafrir.org.il |                    | a Mutt's
tzafrir at cohens.org.il |                    |  best
tzafrir at debian.org    |                    | friend