Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems
Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems
Posted Sep 8, 2014 12:33 UTC (Mon) by nye (subscriber, #51576)In reply to: Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems by pizza
Parent article: Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems
Except they don't.
A couple of examples:
My home machine has both the front channels and the rear channels connected, for a total of four audio channels. In Windows, I go in to my sound properties and pick the 'quadrophonic' option; now applications like games or VLC will mix the available channels appropriately so that I get sound correctly coming out of the appropriate speakers - not only all four channels, but all four channels *correctly*, so that, for example, 5.1 audio is appropriately remixed by the application without any configuration needed.
I had a look at how I might get this in OpenSuSE earlier this year, and eventually concluded either that PA simply can't do this *at all*, or that if it can, nobody knows how[0]. I did find some instructions for how to set up something like this using a custom ALSA configuration, though that would have required that applications be configured to know about it (rather than doing the right thing automatically), and I never got around to trying it out before giving up on OS for a multitude of reasons.
Another example:
I have a laptop running Kubuntu. Occasionally, I can persuade it to make a wireless connection, but mostly it just doesn't - no messages, just nothing happening. It also doesn't properly manage the wired network, especially if the cable is unplugged or replugged. NetworkManager is essentially just a black box that might work, and if it doesn't then you're screwed. I eventually persuaded it to kind-of work without NM, though it then required some manual effort to switch between wired and wireless networks.
A related example:
For several consecutive releases, the Ubuntu live CD images didn't have fully working wired networking out of the box, due to some DHCP cock-up. Sadly I no longer remember the specifics for certain, but I *believe* it was ignoring the DNS setting specified by the DHCP server, and manually disabling the DHCP client and editing resolv.conf fixed the problem. There may have been something more to it than that, like getting the default gateway wrong; I don't recall.
It's great that some people have more reliable wireless thanks to NM, but it's not great that this comes at the expense of fully-functional ethernet.
[0] Some more recent googling has turned up more promising discussion of configuration file options, but I no longer have that installation to test out.
Posted Sep 8, 2014 13:14 UTC (Mon)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link]
The last three motherboards I've had, with multi-channel audio, have JustWorked(tm) once I selected the appropriate speaker configuration under Fedora/GNOME. Upmixed and downmixed PCM output, and even the analog inputs are mixed properly too.
(Of course, some of the responsibility for handling this is in the hands of the application, even if only to query and respect the system speaker settings instead of using a fixed configuration)
> I have a laptop running Kubuntu. Occasionally, I can persuade it to make a wireless connection, but mostly it just doesn't - no messages, just nothing happening. It also doesn't properly manage the wired network, especially if the cable is unplugged or replugged. NetworkManager is essentially just a black box that might work, and if it doesn't then you're screwed. I eventually persuaded it to kind-of work without NM, though it then required some manual effort to switch between wired and wireless networks.
NM has been effectively flawless for me for several years now (even with switching back and forth), also with Fedora, but that shouldn't matter in this case -- I hope you filed a bug report. Folks can't fix problems they don't know about.
> For several consecutive releases, the Ubuntu live CD images didn't have fully working wired networking out of the box, due to some DHCP cock-up. Sadly I no longer remember the specifics for certain, but I *believe* it was ignoring the DNS setting specified by the DHCP server, and manually disabling the DHCP client and editing resolv.conf fixed the problem. There may have been something more to it than that, like getting the default gateway wrong; I don't recall.
I can't speak to Ubuntu's DHCP stuff here (did you file a bug?) but I've seen a similar problem in the past using dnsmasq's DHCP client -- the basic problem I found was that certian DHCP servers were a bit..special in their configuration and the result is that the DHCP client didn't get a valid DNS entry. dnsmasq eventually implemented a workaround for the buggy server/configuration. This was maybe three years ago?
> It's great that some people have more reliable wireless thanks to NM, but it's not great that this comes at the expense of fully-functional ethernet.
Come on, that's being grossly unfair. Before NM came along, wireless was more unreliable than not, with every driver implementing the WEXT stuff slightly differently requiring every client (or user) to treat every device type slightly differently. Now the only reason things don't work is if the hardware itself is unsupported, and that's quite rare these days.
Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems