Andreas Wacknitz wrote > That’s what I hate about Linux: nothing is stable and everybody reinvents > everything every now and then. And if the many Linux distributions use the > same > modules you can be sure that there is a race for the newest version of it. > My Solaris VM doesn’t use ALSA. I tried alsa-lib for OpenSolaris from SFE > repository but it’s not needed and thus I removed the library.
I got a chuckle out of your comment. "Yes," I thought, "if only Linux could be stable and refrain from reinventing things like Pharo!" More seriously, your annoyance should be aimed at Canonical who have a dreadful habit of shipping Ubuntu releases like clockwork ... releases that are almost finished. When they added PulseAudio in 2008 it was a integration disaster. Then they tried (unsuccessfully) to push the blame upstream and they were still resolving issues a year and a half later. I think it was the release just before that one where they broke printing for a lot of people. I stopped using Ubuntu when it became clear they weren't satisfied with copying the Mac look but were trying to become an open source version of Apple. The thing is, ALSA wasn't broken when they decided to "improve" it with PulseAudio. ALSA replaced OSS as the default audio driver in the kernel starting with the 2.6 releases. Not to put too fine a point on it, but ALSA has been a stable part of the Linux kernel for over a freaking decade! PulseAudio is a sound server that sits on top of ALSA, and I'm stumped why anyone would be using it unless they have a specific need for network audio. (Well, sure, they could be stuck with it because they're using Ubuntu.) If you have a serious audio application you're probably better off with JACK2 which has better latency than PulseAudio. But for ordinary office/home operations ALSA is proven and it works fine and it comes free with virtually every modern Linux. Unfortunately, Canonical likes to change things and Ubuntu is popular, so people pick it as their target for a generic Linux target. But there are plenty of Linux distributions out there are more stable, perhaps most notable in this context being Debian which uses the same packaging system as Ubuntu but with an effort not to break things in their releases. I'm not familiar with the specifics that Esteban is wrestling with, but I'd wager a beer that his work has been complicated by a Canonical screwup somewhere along the line. Tyler (A happy Arch Linux user) -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-3-and-Sound-tp4757392p4757897.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Developers mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
