On Fri, 2006-09-22 at 11:25 -0700, iainduncan@xxxxxxxxx wrote: > Am I the only one who feels like getting pro audio working these days is > *harder* than two years ago??? It seems to me that in the race to make a distro > that has everything working out of the box, we now have a bunch of things that > are really screwed up for those of us with unusual needs, and now they are much > harder to untangle. =( I think you're right that the situation is getting worse, but I don't think it's the distros fault - I think it's hardware. As PCs get cheaper and cheaper, the proliferation of hardware varieties has become exponential. For example, in 1998 99% of machines had a PIIX4 chipset and you never heard of a distro not seeing someone's disks unless the user did something wrong. Nowadays there are several different ATA, SATA, PATA, etc. chipsets from many different vendors several of who STILL don't bother to make sure Linux works with their hardware. For example Marvell just last week gave the Linux kernel guys the documentation to support their chipsets, which have been shipping for months (years?). HDA intel is another example, where the design is such that in order to make it work you would need a sample of every f**king laptop make and model on the planet, or documentation from every vendor, where in the past it was enough to have the chipset docs. The proliferation of hardware has nothing to do with performance - it's just to make cheap junk cheaper and to fool users with useless "value added" features like fakeraid. Lee
