RE: Linux/Pro [was Re: Coding style - a non-issue]

M. Edward Borasky
2001-12-04T02:24:22Z

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Horst von Brand [mailto:vonbrand@sleipnir.valparaiso.cl]
> Sent: Sunday, December 02, 2001 7:23 PM
> To: M. Edward Borasky
> Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
> Subject: Re: Linux/Pro [was Re: Coding style - a non-issue]
>
>
> "M. Edward Borasky" <znmeb@aracnet.com> said:
>
> [...]
>
> > My point here is that just because a composer is *capable* of doing
> > integration work and building or repairing tools (and I am)
> does *not* mean
> > he (or she :-) has either the time or the willingness to do so (and I
> > don't).
>
> So band together with some others with your same problem, and pay somebody
> to fix it. What you saved on propietary OS lease should make up for it.
> Amply.

What I spent on Windows 2000 is $300 US. This converted my $400
top-of-the-line sound card from a useless space-taker on my desk to a
functioning musical device. As for banding together with some others, well,
they are even *more* frustrated than I am, because most of them are *purely*
musicians and *can't* program. Nor do they have the money to spend on
programmers. I'm on a number of musical mailing lists, and their
overwhelming complaint is that they spend most of their time being system
administrators rather than musicians/composers. And these are people using
*commercial* tools -- some *quite* expensive -- on Windows and Macs.

> Oh wait, you are just a troll, right?

Not really ... if you'd like I can be, though. Eventually, when I run out of
other projects, I'll sit down and force ALSA to work with my sound card if
someone hasn't done it already. Of course, now that I have the sound card
running and Windows 2000, why would I need to? So much of Linux is
plug-and-play right now, at least the Red Hat Linux that I'm using. I bought
a sound card unsupported by Red Hat because I knew of two drivers for it --
OSS/Linux and ALSA. I tried ALSA first and gave up on it after a week of
agony on the ALSA mailing list. Then I bought OSS/Linux, which installed
fine but didn't generate any sound. When I sent e-mail to the support desk,
I got a very fast response -- RTFM. The FM in this case consists of a single
page ASCII document which is less than helpful.

What I'm trying to establish here is that if ALSA is to become the
main-stream Linux sound driver set, it's going to need to support -- *fully*
support -- the top-of-the-line sound cards like my M-Audio Delta 66. It
isn't enough to just support the Envy chip inside -- it has to support the
whole card with interfaces to all the sound tools that come with KDE and
Gnome! It has to install flawlessly, boot flawlessly and understand
everything that is in the card. I haven't checked recently to see if the
ALSA situation has changed any -- too busy making music on my Windows
machine :-).
--
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znmeb@borasky-research.net