Forced obsolescence in Linux

[der.hans]

Am 27. Feb, 2006 schwätzte Victor Odhner so:

> Joshua Zeidner wrote:
>> First off, Microsoft is making that claim.
>
> That doesn't make it false.  I made an off-handed comment to the

No, but there is a vested interest willing to pay for negative results.

> Slashdot post that was contradicting Microsoft's claims.  That
> post pointed to a very brief article that just said, "I found some
> distros that work OK on old stuff."  But my complaint was based

Did that article mention that he had every device working? Especially when
reading on the Net keep in mind the source and what questions weren't
answered :).

> on my own experience, having gone through a number of modern
> distros that would not talk to this sound card, and said annoying
> things such as "No soundcards detected".  Gimme a break!  Go
> to a little trouble, you can see that *something* is there, even if
> you can't make a noise with it.

Actually it's a lot of trouble for ISA. One of the reasons ISA isn't used
anymore is that probing random ISA devices to find out what they are can
cause lots of problems. Having installs hang due to poking an ISA device
is not a selling point.

> Oh and by the way, XP can run this old 16-bit sound blaster.
> So there you go.  (Never mind that I can't resurrect his XP setup

Well get Creative to maintain the driver for Linux as well as maintaining
it for m$.

It didn't do it then, it won't do it now.

Creative did pay for Linux support for SB Live and some other devices,
though, so it's not completely evil :).

> because I don't have the original disk or the key.  Reminded me
> why Stallman rebelled in the first place!  But I digress.... )
>
> Siri Amrit Kaur wrote:
>> Have you tried Vector or one of the distros that's optimized for
>> older hardware?  I think Vector and Slackware still use an older
>> 2.4.* kernel by default. Maybe it would have drivers . . .
>
> Similarly, Dennis Kibbe wrote:
>> I know PLUGers that have installed Slackware on old 486
>> ThinkPads. ... Many distros (like Slackware, for instance)
>> have versions going back to release 1.0 still on the servers.
>
> I don't want a different kernel, I want to add a driver.

You want to add a driver from another kernel. If you want to use a
carbeurator from a 1968 whatever on a 2005 whatever you're gonna have a
lot of work and will never be allowed to drive in .ca.us.

> Like I said, I am not interested in distro shopping.  This distro
> does most of what I want done.  The current kernel is set up to
> have drivers added, and the driver is the only change I want to
> make.  Why regress to an older kernel, with bugs that have been
> fixed?  Why can't I just plug in a binary driver, as with Windows?

One of the major complaints against Linux and/or GNU is that APIs do
change ( not to mention ABIs as Sun loves to point out ). Hopefully the
changes are improvements, but they are there nonetheless.

Seriously, I take a lot of flack from Sun people and *BSD-heads about the
API and ABI changes that seem to be inherent with Linux and GNU software.

I'll still take GNU/Linux over the others, but it's not perfect.

> Suppose I tried an older distro that worked fine with the sound
> card, but complained that it would not read my USB thumb drive.
> I'm afraid I would have heard the same thing:  Try another distro,
> or upgrade the kernel to get that support.  My complaint is that
> upgrading a kernel *loses* the support for the sound card.
> Ya can't win fer losing.

Or maybe it just causes you to need to look through more documentation.

pnp.txt.gz in the kernel docs for 2.6 explains the state of working with
ISAPNP. Maybe that'll help you. I only glanced at it, so can't say.

A zgrep in the Documentation leads to many references for some
SoundBlaster CD stuff. Don't see anything about the card.

I also see some sb stuff in the kernel drivers.

$ ls /lib/modules/2.6.11-1-k7/kernel/sound/isa/sb/
snd-emu8000-synth.ko  snd-sb16-dsp.ko  snd-sb8.ko
snd-es968.ko          snd-sb16.ko      snd-sbawe.ko
snd-sb16-csp.ko       snd-sb8-dsp.ko   snd-sb-common.ko
$ ls /lib/modules/2.6.11-1-k7/kernel/sound/oss/sb*
/lib/modules/2.6.11-1-k7/kernel/sound/oss/sb.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.11-1-k7/kernel/sound/oss/sb_lib.ko

> ... Which takes us to Kevin Brown, who wrote:
>> at some point the devs do have to stop trying to keep lesser used
>> drivers up to date with a newer way of doing things.
>
> Are you saying the older drivers don't plug in the same way that the
> newer ones do?  Why would they invalidate an API that was working?

Because Linus said to :).

Things change. Note, for instance, all the firewalling/NATting changes.

> Note, Windows XP did a lot of that, for security reasons; but those
> were old drivers that required dangerous privileges.  I would have
> thought Linux drivers would be safer from the start.

They are ( no activeX in the Linux kernel ), but that doesn't mean there
are no problems.

What we get down to is trying to figure out why your install isn't
recognizing the sb card.

Can you just modprobe sb?
Read the pnp documentation and see if that helps.

If you're willing to spend a couple of dollars on a distro go to the
computer swap meet and see if you can get a used PCI sound card that works
for a buck or two.

Since sb used to be the 'standard' I bet it still works somehow. Indeed
the post from Gerard makes me think it does.

ciao,

der.hans
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