[Gllug] Fedora Core 4 sound - just an observation

[Nix]

On Mon, 31 Oct 2005, Adrian McMenamin yowled:
> On Mon, 31 October, 2005 2:14 pm, Nix wrote:
>> This operates at a level below ESD: the problem is almost certainly ESD
>> itself. ESD is a horrific little piece of bugware notable, at least in
>> my experience, for gratuitously stopping me hearing anything thanks to a
>> busted `authentication' system, for producing jolting and gap-filled
>> sound with a vast interrupt load, for insane latencies in the sound it
>> does produce (at times >2sec!) and for not providing access to most
>> capabilities of the underlying sound system (its `volume scaling' and
>> software mixing systems don't work and are fundamentally broken, so
>> you can't even change the volume via esound!)
> 
> Actually the new esd binary seemed to solve the problem - but the old one
> did display many of the characteristics referred to above.

The authentication system has been `fixed' in the latest release by,
er, totally ignoring the .esd_auth file --- although it still writes it
at the drop of a hat to sensible places like /.

The insane jolting is still present, as far as I can tell. It seems
to be a bad interaction between ESD and OSS because it's missing if
I use ALSA's OSS emulation instead...

(and let's not get into the brilliant idea of putting the esd *daemon*
in /usr/bin, *just* where you expect system daemons to go. Mind you
polypaudio does the same thing... gah. They might belong in /usr/sbin
or /usr/libexec, but no *way* do they belong in /usr/bin...)

> Rather more worryingly I had to completely abandon an attempt to install
> FC4 on a new machine on Sunday after there was a kernel panic on boot -
> two ide processes looking for the same spinlock.

Ack. What kernel?

> It looked like a pretty serious bug (in ide-io.c) but I was so fed up with
> it all I didn't bother to note the details (I'd already had a mass of
> trouble with Fedora and my network card), just used a torrent to download
> ubuntu and installed that - what a great system.

Different kernel, I assume. It seems odd to switch distros because of
the kernel, but then I've never used anything but Linus's upstream
kernels anyway (and now the -stable branch, too).

-- 
`"Gun-wielding recluse gunned down by local police" isn't the epitaph
 I want. I am hoping for "Witnesses reported the sound up to two hundred
 kilometers away" or "Last body part finally located".' --- James Nicoll
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