Forced obsolescence in Linux

[Craig White]

On Tue, 2006-02-28 at 07:10 -0700, 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 . . .
----
I've kind of been staying out of this thread...time for one and lack of
deep knowledge for the other reason.

My very un-analytical impression is that the 2.6 kernel has pretty much
dropped support for ISA bus. I think it may be possible to get ISA
support back into a 2.6 kernel by compiling your own but then you
introduce a number of other issues that most of the distributions would
rather not deal with.

The soundblaster 16 probably implements soundblaster compatibility of
the ISA type and thus the typical 2.6 kernel doesn't work for many of
these sound blaster cards.

Perhaps less of desire to 'force obsolescence' than a desire to be
responsive to the vast majority that don't have an ISA bus to be
supported.

Craig