[LAU] Xfce - OT: RTC/HPET timer permissions

[Carlos sanchiavedraz]

2012/11/30 Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net>:
> On Fri, 2012-11-30 at 13:52 +0100, Carlos sanchiavedraz wrote:
>> We are having a considerable inner reorganization of the project along
>> with the Musix 3 development itself. In addition I'm also preparing a
>> Musix 3 for portable/touch devices, so there's a lot going on.
>> By now the last one was Musix 3 beta 2.
>>
>> Anyway, we still be keeping and eye on hosts and devices with not much
>> horsepower having desktops and environments prepared for them. One of
>> the goals of Musix is not to forget the old PCs and devices, not to
>> follow the "2 year PCs are dated -> buy a new one" tendency that is
>> constantly growing.
>
> It's strange that a project that claims to be for humanity, computers
> for the third world etc. does rebuild Debian packages with i386
> architecture and only does support Intel-based computers with a
> 686-class (or newer) CPU. I don't understand this and I don't like it.
>
> OTOH I do understand that e.g. FreeBSD does drop AC'97 support, but
> instead is interested to support the RME HDSPe AIO. It belongs to the
> manpower and if we can't pay people to maintain support for old hardware
> or to support new hardware, there's nobody to blame.
>
> I don't have the money to pay somebody to support AC'97 for FreeBSD or
> to support the RME HDSPe AIO for Linux and I don't have the time to do
> it myself, learning how to program for the kernel is time intensive and
> can't be done by reading a howto about audio driver writing.
>
> So in some cases I agree, the approach "2 year PCs are dated -> buy a
> new one" is bad, but I understand that there are limits for maintaining
> all hardware.
>
> FLOSS does include "free as in beer", that's good, but the disadvantage
> is, that there's not enough money to care about everything.
>
> Regards,
> Ralf
>
> _______________________________________________
> Linux-audio-user mailing list
> Linux-audio-user at lists.linuxaudio.org
> http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user


Don't know if I understand correctly you criticism, but it seems to me
unfair at least. Maybe I'm wrong.
I don't like to write a lot (you know that in lists it sometimes tends
to start some flame wars and endless mail thread), but I'll try to
nicely make clear some points, just in case.

Musix team is just a few ordinary people (it began with just one doing
it on his own) that do what they can, really, with scarce spare time,
resources, and no money apart from some donations. Just people
learning as they go to be able to do some scripting, some compiling,
some remastering of distro and put some more time to produce and
organize contents about audio in FLOSS world.
In addition we translate a lot to spanish, portuguese and other
languages to make it easy for anyone.

We are very far to be (and far of wanting to be) a complete replica of
Debian for musicians, simply because of lack of resources (people,
money, infrastructure).
We just put a tier of wizards, personalized desktops and environments,
tweak configurations for RT (nowadays is not needed much as some years
ago), compile recent versions of some audio software, etc. on top of
Debian itself with the goal to be easier for musicians and people in
general to have a complete RT easy audio/multimedia system
out-of-the-box.

So everything that Debian has, Musix has (included all architectures).
Given that, it's true that some Musix added packages, as kernel ones,
are not available for all architectures just because what I've just
mentioned about resources. Yes that's not great, we should have a hall
full of PCs with each one of the possibilities, but we don't, so it's
our two cents at least.

About humanity and computers of the third world, well, we surely focus
on that Musix is and has to be 100% FLOSS, but in any point we want to
be the savors of the world - again - just put our two cents about
Freedom and Humanity. Although there's already some public
organizations on many countries that have Musix installed, most of all
on conservatories and schools of music.

But, in any case, and because Musix users so they ask for, we care
about to be as universal as possible having CDs along with DVDs for
machines without DVD reader or USB boot capabilities; not focusing
exclusively on bloated eye candy desktops but having as well lighter
ones to save resources for audio processing and make room to older
machines... But that is not we want to be - or can be - an OLPC-like
project.

Please, Ralf, these words are just to clarify that Musix is not
Ubuntu, Fedora or Debian (that would be great!); just an effort and a
wish to contribute to audio floss community with however little or
much we can for all that we receive.

Regards and beers.

-- 
Carlos sanchiavedraz
* Musix GNU+Linux
  http://www.musix.es