Reply With Quoteor lack thereof.the Creative Labs X-Fi series is one of the most complained about pieces of hardware for its Linux support or there the lack of
Creative Tries Again At Linux Drivers
Phoronix: Creative Tries Again At Linux Drivers
Next to drivers for graphics cards and (Atheros and Broadcom) wireless chipsets, the Creative Labs X-Fi series is one of the most complained about pieces of hardware for its Linux support or there the lack of. The Creative X-Fi sound card series is a few years old, but it wasn't until a few months ago that open and closed-source drivers started coming about for this hardware. However, this sound card has still been left in a sorry state, but this week Creative Labs has finally pushed out another Sound Blaster X-Fi Linux beta driver. But does this driver correct their wrong doings from the past?
http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=12231
or lack thereof.the Creative Labs X-Fi series is one of the most complained about pieces of hardware for its Linux support or there the lack of
It has the most ridicule package ever I've seen: a tar.bz2 inside a tar.gz
So this is "Open Source" finally? Where's the "GPLv2 or later" license text in the code? I see a few details weren't so well explained in the news or maybe it's my inaccurate English :P
If not (it seems they use a binary blob somewhere), I find the name of the side quite ironical. Where's that "Open Source"?
What's so confidential about them in the source code? Being a bunch of incompetents with overpriced and underpowered hardware?
It's legal using a binary blob with ALSA? I'm against binary drivers at all, don't understand why being permissive at them as they gives lots of problems to users and FOSS projects depending on them.
Last edited by timofonic; 04-18-2008 at 09:08 AM.
These drivers are not GPL. You will have to wait for the native ALSA drivers for that or the OSS drivers.Originally Posted by timofonic
What's the point of duplicating the effort? Why not just making their developers work into the GPL ALSA drivers directly? :P
It's because Creative wants to incorporate the EAX extensions into their drivers. the opensource drivers will not have that support.
Why do they want to do that? What do they gain by not including EAX in the ALSA driver?
I don't know, it wouldn't really benefit them I don't think. I mean nothing in Linux uses EAX, and there probably will never be anything that will use EAX. I mean Creative has never released a EAX compatible driver outside of Windows, the only reason why you would do that is if you're getting ready to shift to another market or Creative thinks/knows that the Linux market is worth betting on. I don't know, its all speculation right now.
Last edited by Malikith; 04-18-2008 at 12:47 PM.
openal can support eax, and it is platform agnostic. it also happens to be pioneered by creative.
OpenAL can support anything that handles the effects, given appropriate drivers. Considering this, it would behoove us to evaluate handling OpenAL in a SH stream, in a separate DSP piece, or in some sound device that hands us a DSP edge to work with.
Creative needs to provide us with EAX or become irrelevant.
We don't need EAX, though.
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