Forced obsolescence in Linux

[Gerard Snitselaar]

I'm using a web interface right now, so I can't see the original
post. Is your complaint that the sb16 isn't supported or that
your distro didn't ship with the driver? My impression was the
former so I was pointing out that it is supported by ALSA.


On Tue, February 28, 2006 7:10 am, Victor Odhner wrote:
> 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 . . .
>
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