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Creative releases Linux GPL X-Fi drivers (Fudzilla)Creative releases Linux GPL X-Fi drivers (Fudzilla)Posted Nov 8, 2008 18:27 UTC (Sat) by Ed_L. (guest, #24287)In reply to: Creative releases Linux GPL X-Fi drivers (Fudzilla) by jengelh Parent article: Creative releases Linux GPL X-Fi drivers (Fudzilla) Totally ridiculous it may be, but as long as their EULA is not in total conflict with GPLv2 -- other than there being a EULA at all -- then its no doubt a typical case of someone not yet being completely clear on the concept, and trying to play it safe by what they understand to be their corporate rules. Corporate legal might also have been involved... Whatever anyone might think of Creative's hardware and drivers, lots of folks like them, and there is a lot of X-Fi cards out there, including many bundled with high-end GigaByte motherboards. We should all welcome this development, and those of us who can't contribute technically to making Creative's drivers Linux worthy can at least express our appreciation Creative is finally allowing its being done at all. Better late than never, etc. (Not intended as a criticism, just echoing JoeBuck's suggestion we display a positive attitude and let Creative know it.)
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Creative releases Linux GPL X-Fi drivers (Fudzilla) Posted Nov 8, 2008 21:52 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> Totally ridiculous it may be, but as long as their EULA is not in total conflict with GPLv2 -- other than there being a EULA at all -- then its no doubt a typical case of someone not yet being completely clear on the concept, and trying to play it safe by what they understand to be their corporate rules. Corporate legal might also have been involved...
It doesn't matter if it's in conflict or not. It's their copyright and they are under absolutely no obligation to follow it or not.
Probably what has happened is that they have their website setup by default to issue a EULA for every download and the guy didn't want to bother putting a special exception in for the source code. Or they didn't think about it.
I still remember driver for IBM Etherjet ISA Posted Nov 9, 2008 0:49 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] It was probably first time I've downloaded "driver for Linux". Over 10 years ago. The driver was supplied as .exe file (for Windows, of course) which tried to create "driver floppy" when run (and failed under Wine). After some quest of finding the floppy and Windows system to run the stuff I've got it. The perfect "driver floppy" with .tar.gz file on it! EULA is obviously there for the same reason...
Creative releases Linux GPL X-Fi drivers (Fudzilla) Posted Nov 9, 2008 1:16 UTC (Sun) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
>Whatever anyone might think of Creative's hardware and drivers
Sure sure, there are much worse things like totally crappy cheap no-name on-board soundchips that can't do hardware mixing, have no volume control and support only one sample rate, or NVIDIA still releasing blobs only.
Creative releases Linux GPL X-Fi drivers (Fudzilla) Posted Nov 9, 2008 1:47 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Well not having hardware mixing is very common. Even on very nice and professional cards. With hardware mixing your going to have the audio card itself doing the mixing and resampling. Hardware being what it is; it's static and cost is a big factor it is probably less then ideal to have the sound card doing the mixing for you, in terms of sound quality.
But these creative cards aren't designed for audiophiles.. they are designed for gamers and that's something else entirely.
Creative releases Linux GPL X-Fi drivers (Fudzilla) Posted Nov 9, 2008 3:32 UTC (Sun) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
>But these creative cards aren't designed for audiophiles.. they are designed for gamers and that's something else entirely.
Even as a gamer, I would wholeheartedly want these features. Been there.
Many a commercial games, among them UT99, still use the OSS interface. (No, LD_PRELOAD is not gonna work with static binaries.) The ALSA mixing layer might mitigate missing volume control or hardware mixing, but with the OSS interface this is not the case. Which means I get excessively loud sound output, and note that gamers often use headphones instead of speakers, usually which have no volume control either, and an uncontrollable sound level in the ears is hardly what I need. Furthermore, opening the OSS interface blocks other applications when you do not have hardware mixing. This means you cannot listen to your mp3 collection while in a game. It also means that games spawning an external process in direct output mode (e.g. timidity but not using -Or) won't have any music, because surprise, two programs trying to open /dev/dsp will fail.
Creative releases Linux GPL X-Fi drivers (Fudzilla) Posted Nov 9, 2008 6:08 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Well I don't know about this volume mixing stuff. I don't think there is any card in my experience that didn't have volume controls on it. Even any onboard card or whatever. So I guess I am confused about what your talking about. Maybe if I had more specifics I would be able to understand you better.
Although I am very far from being a audio expert. Just a hobbyist.
Modern systems with integrated audio come using the "HD audio" stuff, which has supplanted the old AC'97 standard as the 'vesa' of sound cards. With that you get surround sound output, spdif, and all that happy stuff. That stuff is as good as anything that came out in the market just a few years ago. I know a lot of people don't like it, but it's just fine for the majority of people and outperforms the rest of the components of hardware.
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I don't know about UT99, but UT2004 uses SDL libs so that's not a big deal.
With ID engine'd games like RTCW and those ilk you can get working with SDL in short order with et-sdl-sound hack. It works much better then other more generic pre-load hacks.
http://nullkey.ath.cx/et-sdl-sound/
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The way I see it this sort of stuff works just fine for other OSes. (Well windows, anyways). So it's not really a hardware issue, but a Linux issue.
Sure with XP your audio will go through kernel-level software mixing (kmixer) for video games and all that if your card doesn't support hardware mixing for DirectSound, but it's not going to stop your game from working or you getting sound. It just tacks on a extra 30msec of latency to absorb some of the jitters.
Of course with Vista everything goes through software mixing, even DirectSound, so this has left Creative up shit's creek without a paddle. There is functionally very little difference a high-end gaming card will have vs onboard audio on a modern machine for Vista users. (Unless the game decides to use OpenAL for audio, which none of them are going to do)
So it would be smart for Linux folks to be VERY friendly to Creative. We may have the only OS left, aside from XP (which Microsoft is trying to bury as fast as possible) that allows them to take advantage of their card's hardware features.
Creative releases Linux GPL X-Fi drivers (Fudzilla) Posted Nov 9, 2008 6:18 UTC (Sun) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
>Well I don't know about this volume mixing stuff. I don't think there is any card in my experience that didn't have volume controls on it. Even any onboard card or whatever.
Well, here goes. https://bugtrack.alsa-project.org/alsa-bug/view.php?id=2250
>I don't know about UT99, but UT2004 uses SDL libs so that's not a big deal.
Many programs use SDL only for video. UT99 seems to use openal for audio output. However, the problem here is with programs using OSS in general - some of them can may be tweaked to use ALSA, but not those that have OSS open/ioctl etc hardcoded.
Creative releases Linux GPL X-Fi drivers (Fudzilla) Posted Nov 9, 2008 18:52 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
wow. That chipset is real POS. I guess that is a problem I've just managed to avoid accidently. (then again I've always avoided buying anything Sis-related)
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