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Seems that Ubuntu and Debian get more similar again...
Seems that Ubuntu and Debian get more similar again...
Posted Oct 17, 2005 22:30 UTC (Mon) by cantsin (guest, #4420)Parent article: Ubuntu and Debian look forward
...if Ubuntu forces such a stabilization process upon itself, and Debian speeds up its release cycle. This gives me some hope that a radical Ubuntu/Debian fork can be avoided.
(That said, it's fantastic what Ubuntu has achieved on the desktop. I installed 5.10/AMD64 on my mother's PC yesterday and am truly impressed by its automatic hardware recognition, graphical bootup, integration of the Gnome system tools, automatic media mounting and simple package update/installation tools. It's the first free desktop Linux with Mac(OS 7/8/9)-like simplicity, ease and usability. Conversely, I would never trade in Debian for my own Unixy, commandline-centric home PC and server setups. Both distributions complement each other perfectly and show how far free software has come.)
-F
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Seems that Ubuntu and Debian get more similar again...
Posted Oct 18, 2005 2:04 UTC (Tue) by csamuel (subscriber, #2624) [Link]
That said, it's fantastic what Ubuntu has achieved on the desktop.
I'm mostly happy with Breezy (with KDE), though the upgrade did kill my home system by trying to load both the dpt_i2o driver and the I2O subsystem at the same time, which leads to a kernel panic. Even the Breezy Live CD panics on it.
The machine was tied up prior to the release so I couldn't do any testing on it, but I've put a bug report in now (17897) with a description of how I worked around it. I sure hope this gets fixed before the next kernel update! :-)
That said, KUbuntu works well on both my laptop and my machine at work!
Seems that Ubuntu and Debian get more similar again...
Posted Oct 18, 2005 8:22 UTC (Tue) by stijn (subscriber, #570) [Link]
> impressed by its automatic hardware recognition,
I wonder, how hard is this problem (hard presumably) and how easy is it to deduplicate efforts between different distributions to solve it? Or is it an inevitable exercise that each has to solve on its own?
Seems that Ubuntu and Debian get more similar again...
Posted Oct 18, 2005 10:29 UTC (Tue) by csamuel (subscriber, #2624) [Link]
I wonder, how hard is this problem (hard presumably) and how easy is it to deduplicate efforts between different distributions to solve it? Or is it an inevitable exercise that each has to solve on its own?
This is one of the beauties of open source, if everyone working on this has compatible licensing then anyone can pick the best bits and tricks from others for what they need.
But from my experience things like hotplug, udev and the device-mapper are fairly pervasive across modern distributions.
Seems that Ubuntu and Debian get more similar again...
Posted Oct 18, 2005 13:52 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Well, not hotplug, soon, one hopes, since udev is meant to supplant it. :)
Seems that Ubuntu and Debian get more similar again...
Posted Oct 18, 2005 18:49 UTC (Tue) by gurulabs (subscriber, #10753) [Link]
udev is not replacing hotplug. Take a look, you'll see that udev is launched by hotplug.
hotplug is a standardized kernel to userland interface (netlink is another).
udev is purely userspace.
Seems that Ubuntu and Debian get more similar again...
Posted Oct 18, 2005 19:45 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Well, if you're talking about the kernel hotplug interface, of course it's pervasive across Linux distributions, because the Linux kernel is; and indeed udev won't work without it.
I thought you were referring to the hotplug scripts, which are moribund.
Seems that Ubuntu and Debian get more similar again...
Posted Oct 20, 2005 9:21 UTC (Thu) by gallir (subscriber, #5735) [Link]
New versions of udev replaces hotplug. Ubuntu Breeze has a relatively oldversion. Check it out.
Seems that Ubuntu and Debian get more similar again...
Posted Oct 18, 2005 21:10 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
With 2.6 series kernel it seems to be standardizing... I mean in Debian I don't have to install kudzu or discover or anything like that anymore to detect hardware or load anything. I expect that it will be like that for most distros.
The 'best practices' thing is definately at work here. Knoppix benifits Ubuntu benifits Debian benifits Knoppix benifits Debian benifits Ubuntu etc etc etc. For hardware detection I think that Knoppix helped out a lot as well as stuff developed with the help of Freedesktop.org.
Now with /sysfs, udev, hotplug, hal, d-bus, and the like we are able to not only get the kernel modules loaded and /dev files configured but they allow individual programs themselves respond well to new hardware. (after adding your user to camera group) I can plug in my camera and the gnome desktop detects it and launches a nice little program for me to deal with it as a example.
Things that I see that need big improvement is getting X.org to use Linux hotplug and related stuff. X is off in it's own little land right now, practically it's own OS in the way it has it's own hardware configuration and drivers that are seperate from anything the OS itself does. Getting it to be able to respond to new hardware like mouse button configuration, wacom tablet, keyboard configuration and even monitor detection, would be very cool. I think that modular X will go a long way to making this easier.
Then the only other thing that I can think of is getting distros to automaticly setup stuff like dmix software mixer plugin and get rid of the last OSS-only audio program holdouts. Most new sound cards don't support software mixing, most people just use on-board nowadays, and it realy gives the 'hey it's 1995 again' impression when they try to start up a mp3 song player and it won't work becuase the browser took over the sound card with flash or mplayer or whatnot. Just say no to OSS! (sound, not open source software) Problems with sound cards with no hardware mixing capabilities are probably one of the most common problems that I see people asking about on forums and such. Maybe a new type of sound deamon or whatnot, but in reality dmix works if it wasn't for OSS-only programs and programs that default to OSS setup instead of Alsa... and OSS has been obsolete/depreciated for years now.
I used to say 'get a card that doesn't suck', and tell them about dmix and point them to a webpage about setting it up and that's all I could realy do for them.. but it's tough sell when only 1 out of a 100 new sound cards support the nessicary features to get Linux to work with them properly.
Seems that Ubuntu and Debian get more similar again...
Posted Oct 22, 2005 1:37 UTC (Sat) by set (subscriber, #4788) [Link]
You dont even have to set up dmix anymore, recent versions of alsalibare smart enough to do software mixing automaticly. Recent discussion
on lkml is proposing janking OSS out. Alsa's OSS emulation cant solve
the mixing problem, though, so we are probably stuck with 'sound daemons'
and legacy OSS software for a while yet...
Seems that Ubuntu and Debian get more similar again...
Posted Oct 22, 2005 2:29 UTC (Sat) by csamuel (subscriber, #2624) [Link]
Alsa's OSS emulation cant solve the mixing problem, though
Is that can't as in is not possible with the architecture or as in nobody has implemented it yet?
Seems that Ubuntu and Debian get more similar again...
Posted Oct 24, 2005 10:19 UTC (Mon) by jdthood (guest, #4157) [Link]
dmix is currently not able to do everything a sound daemon does. dmix does not provide mixing capability on all kinds of hardware. Unfortunately this means that sound daemons will continue to be required for some time yet.