On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 10:29 AM, Dave Phillips <dlphillips@woh.rr.com> wrote:

On 06/15/2012 10:23 AM, Thomas Vecchione wrote:

Firewire has always been rarer hardware.

Probably so, but both my older mobos support it, my older laptop had it, and my (relatively) newer laptop does not. It has ports aplenty - USB, HDMI, multiformat card slot, etc - but no Firewire. Nothing I looked at had Firewire it when I bought the laptop, and I did specifically look for it.

Laptops and firewire in particular were always an iffy combination. Part of why I went to Apple a while back was because they tended to have FW ports, that being said I just ordered one of their new 'retina' laptops, we will see how much I regret that later, that has no direct FW, but as mentioned elsewhere in the thread there are thunderbolt to FW adaptors, and that is what I am counting on. In this case I am likely to keep OS X on the laptop for various reasons though.

On my desktop I just built a bit over 6 months ago IIRC, there is certainly FW on it;) Still not to hard to find it on desktops. Was always a pain to find laptops with it.

Thanks, Thomas, I'll check out activity on those developments. Have Linux-compatible audio/video devices appeared for PCI-E and Thunderbolt ?

PCI-E yes, from RME if nothing else is my understanding, but I suspect a few others by now. Thunderbolt, well the trick with that is likely to be more an issue of support for Thunderbolt than anything, as audio interfaces using it will likely show up as PCI-E interfaces is my bet. Then the same old same old would apply, but from what I have heard thunderbolt support is slow in stabilizing in Linux.

Seablade