Artem Kachitchkine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Solaris lags considerably in terms of removable media and hotpluggable
> device management on the desktop. A detailed problem statement and some
> recommendations can be found in the Solaris Desktop Gap Analysis:
>
> http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/desktop/communities/jds/roadmap/solaris_gaps/#Volume_Removable_Device_Manageme
Let me add a short (currently incomplete) review:
>On Solaris, this has been a painful experience in the past. Vold (the only
>volume manager on Solaris)
>has only recently (Solaris 10) been fixed to handle USB memory sticks. Vold
>has historically been so
>unreliable that many people disable it by default, preferring to handle
>devices using the CLI commands.
Since July 2005, vold has been enhanced to nicely work with cdrecord
and did not show up any further problems.
An important issue is that the problems that could be found with vold
on Solaris before Nevada ~ build 24 never have been as big as the problems
that could be observed with the solutions found on Linux.
In case you don't know already, the biggest problem on Linux is that solutions
(e.g. found on RedHat) frequently cause buffer underruns while writing CDs and
DVDs,
something that is unknown on Solaris.
>While Solaris has been crippled with Vold, on Linux, under the umbrella of the
>Free Desktop
>Foundation, the project HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) was born. This
>project aims to provide a
>framework for the main desktop platforms (GNOME and KDE) that allows
>application developers to
>off-load much of the hardware dependencies to a single layer which would
>enable applications to iterate
>over devices on the system, but also monitor hardware level events in an OS
>independent way. HAL is
>built upon another Free Desktop project, called D-BUS, that provides a
>light-weight, asynchronous
>and, again, OS independent, IPC layer.
We should be very careful here:
Linus Torvalds recently announced that he is not wiling the current HAL
implementation into official kernels.
For this reason, I see a chance to carefully check the API and architecture
of a new piece of software and even make it possible to influence the future
Linux implementation.
>In the case of Sun Ray, a HAL backend will be provided that will enable HAL to
>dispatch events and
>provide information about any devices plugged into Sun Ray. It it currently
>thought that this will be
>provided by the SRSS software, and HAL will be able to pick up the library
>dynamically.
About a year ago, I did some research with the Sysadmin of the Technical
univertity of Berlin and found that I would only need to add ~ 10-20 lines
of code to libscg in order to allow e.g. cdrecord and cdda2wav to run
seamlessly on a Sun-Ray. Unfortunately, SunRay does not yet offer USB-2.0...
>The Removable Media project team have taken ownership of HAL, with the
>intention of providing
>volume management on Solaris. They will also write a desktop independent
>volume manager that will
>continue to provide the necessary support to handle devices like CD-ROM and
>mass storage devices so
>that they can be used on head-less systems or in other desktop environments
>like CDE.
A desktop independend seems (as we have on Solaris for a long time) to be
extremely important in order to provide useable and stable unterfaces for
various other programs.
......
> Digital Cameras
It may be necessary have a new pfcs soon in order to support bigger
memory-cards from the next camera generation.
.......
> ... iPod....
Will there be a JPod (Java POD) from Sun ;-)?
....
>It's difficult to see where Sun would stand on this from a business point of
>view. Sun's own policies do
>not allow people to store illegal MP3 files on Sun hardware. Backing up a
>device would effectively do
>this. On the other hand, there are many uses for such devices - such as being
>able to download
>corporate communications (e.g. Mc Neely Report) and put them on the device so
>that it can be listened
>to later, on the bus for example (this is effectively known as a podcast).
Why should Sun try to find out whether a MP3 is "illegal"?
Sun currently does not try to find out whether a generic binary file
is illegal.
In any case, Sun shouls deal with OGG media.
...
> Mobile Phones
Will there be Bluetoth in Solaris soon?
...
>Scanners on Unix are best supported using the libsane library. This provides
>access to various scanners
>that are connected to a machine either via USB or SCSI.
Be careful here, my previous experiences with SANE show that
last time I checked, sane was still "insane" :-(
The SANE SCSI "layer" is not cleanly separated from the
Scanner drivers and the scanner drivers expect the same
problems in the SCSI transport as found on Linux.
Some years ago, a friend did port SANE to use libscg and
tried to make the scanner drivers more clean, but his patch
was rejected.
....
>Webcams
Until spring 2005, we had a person at Fokus who did work on USB camera
integration...maybe it makes sense to contact him although he already
has a new job.
.....
> CD / DVD Support
>Authoring a CD generally is quite simple.
This depends on the point of view..... Authoring a CD-Audio may be much
more than a simple task if you like to support all features that
cdda2wav & cdrecord provide.
> Authoring a DVD is a little more difficult
If you are talking about DVD-Video authoring (creation of IFO files),
this is true and I would be happy to see a solution soon.
Mkisofs is one of the first tools that supports to create DVD-Video
Disk images.
...
>Recommendation: Nautilus on Solaris should start to use cdrecord for CD
>writing, now that it's being
>shipped by default in Solaris. This doesn't however cover the DVD writing side
>of things. But this is
>likely to change in the near future since approval has been given for the
>inclusion of the dvd+rw tools
>on Solaris.
Take into account that cdrecord provides the same type of interface for CDs
and DVDs while dvd+rw tools are centric to the DVD+RW view which is completely
different. People seem to have less problems with having only one interface.
Also note that dvd+rw tools have a questionable license that forbids shipping
together with "commercial Solaris projects".
....
> xcdroast
This is my favorite.
Given the fact that Sun needs to work a lot on Nautilus in order to work
around portabilitiy problems (Solaris is not Linux...), it may be that
it is worth to look at xcdroast. Xcdroast also has the advantage of being
Platform Independent because it "asks" the platform independen cdrecord
for information instead of looking into /proc/scsi/......
Thomas Niederreither did stop working on xcdroast some time ago, but he
is willing to help a future maintainer that could be "Sun".
...
> Audio / Video Playing
Where is OGG?
And BTW: I recommend to use cdda2wav even to play Audio CDs as cdda2wav is the
best DAE tool available:
- It best extracts and plays scratched disks thanks to libparanoia.
Note that the libparanois found in cdrtool is the only one that
uses the code revised by me and includes many bug-fixes.
libparanoia will become LGPL with the next release (thanks to
Monty - also the Author of OGG).
- cdda2wav is the only tool known to be able to extract/play illegal
defective disks from the Music mafia (e.g. Sony-BMG).
- Even on Win32, experienced people prefer to use cdda2wav.
- Cdda2wav will soon be available under CDDL.
....
>Video DVDs present another problem. While it is possible to play DVDs, it is
>only possible to play then
>once they have been decrypted. On Linux this is normally done using the DeCSS
>library - this library
>has problems due to the way it was written - essentially it was reverse
>engineering of the encryption
>mechanism used by movie companies to protect their films that this library was
>written - there is some
>dispute about the legality of this, as such many companies don't ship support
>for DeCSS
DeCSS is not illegal in Europe.
We just need to make it available from a European download site.
....
Due to lack of time, I stop with my review at thjis point.
More to come after CeBIT is over.
Jörg
--
EMail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (uni)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
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