Forced obsolescence in Linux

[Victor Odhner]

Gerard Snitselaar wrote:

>On FC4 this is what I get from modinfo for snd-sb16 :
>
>snits at newton:/home/snits/src/linux-2.6.15.4/sound=>modinfo snd-sb16
>filename:       /lib/modules/2.6.15-1.1831_FC4/kernel/sound/isa/sb/snd-sb16.ko
>author:         Jaroslav Kysela <perex at suse.cz>
>license:        GPL
>description:    Sound Blaster 16
>vermagic:       2.6.15-1.1831_FC4 686 REGPARM 4KSTACKS gcc-4.0
>depends:
>snd-sb-common,snd-opl3-lib,snd,snd-mpu401-uart,snd-sb16-dsp,snd-sb16-csp
>alias:          pnp:cCTL0024dCTL0031*
>alias:          pnp:cCTL0025dCTL0031*
>alias:          pnp:cCTL0026dCTL0031*
>. . .
>  
>
Thanks, Gerald.  You are apparently right.  Although the output of the
modinfo command is a lot simpler on my machine:

      "modinfo: could not find module snd-sb16"

The output from modinfo is at the moment meaningless to me, except
that it seems to be defining an interface.  The hacker in me knows that
it's doable -- everything is doable, if you have the time and the 
resilience.

My complaint is that Linux is not ready for *this* desktop, because
someone else decided that sound card didn't matter any more (as I said,
everything worked just fine with an earlier Kanotix).  Only really poor
people on welfare need to use it, and that's just their tough luck.

So there you have it:  My complaint is political, you know, the whole
populist vs.  aristocratic schtick.  I'm a Bush voter, yet it's the
predominantly liberal/populist Free Software community I see leaving
the poor behind in this case.  Ain't nobody consistent on either side,
I guess.  There's not enough stuff for everyone, even if it's Free.

I've been digging through the dollar stores and dumpsters of the net,
looking for an old, used distro that would do this, and all of them leave
something out.  So I took the most officially respectable distro I could
find, and am trying to force-fit the sound card.

I've acknowledged right along that if I want to do the whole cvs,
source, compile business I could probably work this out.  Programming
is what I do for a living.  If you work all day as a mechanic, do you want
to come home and machine the parts for your grandmother's old
Studebaker, even if you do have a lathe buried under the junk in your
shed and the blueprints are out there somewhere to download?

My whole complaint is not really on my own behalf.  It's just that Linux
could so easily *support* an old sound blaster so that joe sixpack could
just do an install.  Here I am trying to do a favor for Joe, and it becomes
brutally clear to me that a distro that will support his whole machine is
not available, while if I wanted to pay tribute to Redmond I could go out
and buy him XP and it would work.

I'll probably find time this evening to figure this out.  My old lathe must
be behind that lawn mower that I'm gonna fix some day . . .