7 Jun
2011
7 Jun
'11
12:50 p.m.
On Mon, 2011-06-06 at 22:27 -1000, david wrote:
Paul Davis wrote:
:D
On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 5:09 AM, Ralf Mardorf
<ralf.mardorf(a)alice-dsl.net> wrote:
Debian works here. Has for many many years. I can't blame Debian for
perfectly supporting the Audiophile 2496 on the desktop machine ... or
the fact that Behringer (manufacturer of the USB audio I use on my
laptop) decided to name its hardware device "default". Figuring out how
to make my setup recognize the USB audio as the default ALSA audio
device took some figuring out because of that ...
Ubuntu is not Debian. Ubuntu is Debian quirked by a bunch of people who
are (in my opinion) slowly but surely working their way to their own
proprietary Linux derivative. Ubuntu doesn't just work on my boring,
stodgy old bog-standard hardware. Ubuntu usually barfs when trying to
use the Intel i855GM video hardware built into my Toshiba laptop. It
doesn't even get to the point of dealing with the audio hardware. When I
boot an Ubuntu on the laptop, I always have to force X to use the VESA
driver ...
The last couple of Ubuntu releases have not included RT kernels because
Ubuntu thinks no one needs one. After all, Ubuntu is for desktop Linux
users: those people only use one audio device that does only stereo
output, and they only use it to play MP3s. (Well, Debian still doesn't
provide an RT kernel as standard. They also see no need for one.)
I think some folk on the list have mentioned that Linux audio use is a
small percentage of Linux users, and pro-audio users are an even tinier
percentage of that, so pro-audio users routinely are ignored as being
too tiny a minority group to pay attention to ...
I understand that the newest incarnation of OSS solves all the problems
that ALSA has ever had and does it all flawlessly ... yah, being
sarcastic! ;-)
When searching for a new 'professional'
sound card I got the information
or misinformation that most cards are firewire devices and firewire
should be without issues only for Mac. Even Windows users reported that
firewire is tricky.
firewire can have issues on OS X too. i have at least one friend who
has a fiendishly hard time getting his fireface 800 to "boot" with the
right sample rate or to change it afterwards, and i've heard similar
stories about MOTU firewire gear.
The problem is that with each Linux upgrade X
becomes more and more
pain. I'm happy that my monitor settings are ok for all installs on my
machine, but for all new installs the mouse wheel randomly and very
seldom works, usually it don't work. I've got no issues with old Linux
installs regarding to X (I still kept one old install).
Setting up X is a PITA and using common distros PA was a PITA regarding
to my old Envy24 cards, Debian doesn't use PA, that's why I switched.
i find these discussions funny. i used to read that the reason to use
Ubuntu or Debian was that stuff just worked, especially "new stuff".
i've been using a different distribution that has a long history,
regularly gets criticized as not appropriate for the desktop, and i
just don't have the kinds of issues you're describing.