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 | tzaf...@jabber.org | VIM is http://tzafrir.org.il | | a Mutt's tzaf...@cohens.org.il | | best tzaf...@debian.org | | friend _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
