I downloaded 2.5.70 'coz I wanted to see if fbdev for the 3dfx was improved (had dreams of hacking DirectFB). It wasn't but I found a lot of other niceties.
1. Low latency patches now part of the stock kernel options (but I think the preemptive kernel patches were rejected... very conservative of Linus...) Could this be why I can now drag OpenGL and SDL windows and the insides continue rendering without a hitch? 'Doze can't do this for rendered gfx because it has some kind of lock (ironically Java Swing apps running under Windows do not have such a lock). Interestingly, when playing videos, there is no such problem. Switching between VTs, including to and from X seems to be smoother and more glitch free now (could be my imagination - maybe it's always been that way). 2. Suspend YAY! Virtually the equivalent of ME/2K/XP's very convenient hibernate (which by the way stopped working for me - huhuhu - when I upgraded to either SP1 or 512MB). Still, be vewy vewy careful and RTFRM vewy vewy carefuwy. I can't use it yet (forgot why) but it's nice to know Linux is now gonna have some sort of hibernate functionality. 3. Sound OSS is deprecated and ALSA becomes the default. Mixed bag. Some OSS drivers are still more mature. I think... On a side note not directly related to 2.5.70, I also discovered some kewl Linux Audio related projects. JACK and LADSPA. JACK (JACK Audio Connection Kit) is low-level plumbing that allows coordination between different sound-using apps. It does stuff similar to artsd and the other sound daemons (and I think, Cakewalk's Rewire) but is supposed to be really low-latency and suitable for high end audio work. LADSPA (Linux Audio Developer Simple Plugin Architecture) does stuff similar to VST... i think this has something to do with audio effect plugins. Unlike the situation wrt GUI toolkits, the Linux audio community seems to have a smooth API path. OSS is deprecated, ALSA takes over. JACK and LADSPA seem to be widely accepted as the defacto standards without much competition. The linux audio scene is burgeoning! The goodies are just amazing (direct to hard disk recorders, sequencer systems, softsynths, software DJ mixing, and much much much more), there are way too many to mention here. Just check out these metalinks: http://www.linuxdj.com/audio/lad/faq.php3 http://sound.condorow.net/ 4. 3D Latest DRI drivers for Voodoo3 from dri.sf.net worked the same as it did with 2.4.20 - only minor glitches that were very livable with (so far...). 5. XFree minor glitch. mouse cursor frozen on entry, and only activates a few seconds after moving the mouse around first. I boot back to 2.4.20 and the problem disappears... weird.... -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
