The Grumpy Editor's Asian Tour [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's Asian Tour

Posted Nov 28, 2008 14:42 UTC (Fri) by Tet (subscriber, #5433)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Asian Tour

Sadly, it's all too common with Linux these days. Things that used to Just Work out of the box, no longer do. For example, I haven't yet found a box that recent releases of Fedora or Ubuntu will install on without manual hackery. And this isn't with exotic hardware, either. Just on bog standard PCs.

Consider also sound. In the olden days, it would probably work, and if it didn't, you could always try reconfiguring it. Sadly those golden days are long gone. If it doesn't work out of the box (which in my case, it didn't), then you're screwed. Pulse audio doesn't like letting you configure things yourself :-(

It used to be the case that installing and using Linux was simple enough that I'd be happy recommending that any Windows user should give it a go. I can't in all good faith do that any more. There have been repeated claims that standards are slipping in kernel land of late. Whether that's true or not, I can 100% say that they are slipping in userland in the major distributions.

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The Grumpy Editor's Asian Tour

Posted Nov 29, 2008 1:19 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Pulseaudio has no objections to letting you configure things yourself. If
you comment out the gconf module, it'll respect the configuration file
(obviously, the gconf plugin can override that with configuration written
to gconf by paprefs: if it didn't do that, paprefs would be useless).

What problem are you actually seeing?

The Grumpy Editor's Asian Tour

Posted Dec 2, 2008 18:18 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

Interestingly, FreeBSD has long had a very active community in Japan, who have done a lot of the work on ACPI, IPSec (KAME), and other things. A lot of that work happened on Japanese-language mailing lists: perhaps the relatively decentralised FreeBSD model (no benevolent dictator) helps.

The Grumpy Editor's Asian Tour

Posted Dec 8, 2008 0:57 UTC (Mon) by tonyblackwell (subscriber, #43641) [Link]

Pulseaudio has worked well on a new Acer laptop using mandriva 2009 x86_64 where it "just works", wireless works, recent webcam video works, even Secondlife audio shares via pulseaudio.