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ru.linux
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From : Sergey Lentsov 2:4615/71.10 27 Sep 2001 17:29:12
To : All
Subject : URL: http://www.lwn.net/2001/0927/desktop.php3
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On The Desktop
The sound of Linux. While the desktop is often associated with
graphical environments, word processors, spreadsheets, and games,
there is one area that is often overlooked completely: audio. The
Linux operating system is rich with audio support, especially in the
2.4 kernel based distributions. But the state of audio is rather
confusing.
Desktop users are looking for various things from their audio support,
from playing simple sound files to streaming media support for things
like radio, MP3, or Ogg Vorbis broadcasts. According to Dave Phillips,
author of [43]The Book Of Linux Music & Sound, Linux has done
remarkably well in its support for these activities, especially when
it comes to audio players.
"Anyone migrating from other platforms will be looking for familiar
software, things like media players," says Phillips. "Any media player
that doesn't support audio is sort of a half media player. No one ever
says much about audio but everybody expects it to be there. It's like
salt in a cake: you know if it's gone."
So where does audio come from for Linux? For most users with current
distributions it comes from the kernel itself via the sound.o and
soundcore.o kernel modules, plus a soundcard-specific module (users
can run "lsmod" from a command line to see which modules are loaded,
or "modprobe" to look for them and load them if they aren't already).
These modules are sufficient for day to day desktop use for any of the
available audio players, tools like XMMS or RealPlayer, and work with
a majority of the available sound cards. Phillips adds, "You should be
able to play 16 bit, stereo, CD quality sound files with no trouble,
and that's the baseline audio for the desktop user."
But the kernel drivers currently available aren't really sufficient if
Linux is to make it into professional level audio markets. The OSS
Linux drivers provide commercial support for audio that is somewhat
better. But the future of Linux audio comes from the open source
[44]ALSA project. ALSA supports the OSS/Lite (the free version of OSS)
API with a fully modularized sound driver. However, with ALSA the
typical user will end up with half a dozen or more kernel modules
loaded, rather more than with the current scheme. The hope is that the
ALSA drivers will replace the kernel drivers with the release of the
2.5 Linux kernel sometime in the near future. Alan Cox has been
amiable to this option but only Linus can make the final decision to
make the switch, and that decision has yet to be made official even
though many kernel developers fully expect it to happen.
Phillips says that audio support has normally been pretty good for off
the shelf Linux. "Kudos have to go to the major distributors. They did
not ignore audio," he said with emphasis. Creative Labs and Hoontech
have been very forthcoming (recently) with driver information. And
laptop support has gotten better. "IBM is making special efforts to
make sure their machines support sound right out of the box." Laptops
and notebooks are often the toughest area of sound for the desktop
user.
But, like the difficulties encountered by the XFree86 project in
trying to get programming information for new 3D cards, the audio
world on Linux has to deal with the lack of information coming from
audio hardware vendors. "I've lost track of how much energy has gone
into cajoling and arm twisting the manufacturers," notes Phillips,
"that it is in their interest to provide that information."
And that is keeping Linux out of the professional audio arena.
Phillips says, "We still don't have fully supported 3D audio or even
hardware acceleration for audio. [45]OpenAL is very promising with
good cross platform support. But its success depends on its ability to
compete with Direct3D. As far as I know we're still lagging there."
Direct3D, however, is tied closely to Windows which gives OpenAL a
chance if cross platform support is something the audio world really
wants.
The professional world has many needs, including 3D Sound and Dolby
Surround sound. Both are very important for a number of professional
applications, though he admits the most obvious use would be in games.
"But in the world of academic music making, the wider
electro-acustical music community want these features badly," he says.
Simulation environments would also benefit from this support. Say
Phillips, "You have to have multi-channel support for this, in other
words fore and back speakers. This is just beginning to see full
support out of the drivers for the Creative SBLive card."
Interestingly, there are three different drivers for this card:
Creative's, ALSA's, and OSS's. And each offers different features even
though the source is open for this card. The reason for such
differences is not clear but probably has something to do with the
fact that the API for the card is rather extensive. "Effects
processing is just being introduced with ALSA while Creative's driver
provided it from the beginning," says Phillips.
As far as applications go, for the desktop users wanting access to
streaming media, Linux offers xmms which actually supports a variety
of video formats such as MPEG and AVI along with the audio formats.
Browser plugins with audio support include RealPlayer and RealVideo,
Flash (which comes directly from Macromedia) and the Crossover plugin
from CodeWeavers which now provides both Shockwave and Quicktime for
Linux.
Blame Apple?
Phillips noted that Quicktime is actually based on the Sorenson's
codecs which Apple doesn't own. The lack of support for Quicktime on
Linux hasn't actually been Apple's fault (at least not completely)
since they're bound by the rules of the Sorenson codec owners.
Sound mixers are available in many forms. Phillips likes the mixer
designed specifically for the ALSA drivers, alsamixer, and its
graphical cousin, alsamixergui. Alsamixergui uses the [46]FLTK toolkit
which isn't provided by default with most Linux distributions.
Phillips like this mixer since he uses ALSA himself but suggests there
are plenty of other mixer applications out there. For example, Red Hat
Linux 7.1 comes stock with the simple but effective aumix which can
control audio levels and left/right channel output, as well as GNOME's
mixer, gmix.
At the professional level the most sophisticated application at this
point is probably [47]ardour, by Paul Davis. "Ardour is a very
ambitious project that is in very capable hands," says Phillips. "It
is designed to be a fully professional, multitrack, multichannel, hard
disk recording system." It's designed around the RME Hammerfall, a
Hollywood post-production level card. RME provided the development
specifications necessary to support this card by Ardour. Additionally,
the application will work with just about any ALSA supported audio
hardware.
Professional level audio support may become a more pressing issue as
the visual effects industry in Hollywood begins to adapt more and more
Linux solutions. Phillips thinks the problems can be solved, but they
haven't been addressed yet. "Some people from the Maya group
[Alias|Wavefront's sophisticated 3D modeller and renderer] noted that
audio is still a problem for them, and I believe the reason is that
OSS 3 as it stands doesn't offer the kind of audio support they need
for professionals and ALSA isn't quite there yet. So we're in a bit of
an uncertain state, but our direction is clear and there are some very
capable hands working on it."
What audio lacks at this point is the killer app, the GIMP of audio.
Phillips says that comment is made often. "Users coming from Windows
often ask 'Where is the fucntional equivalent of CoolEdit 2000?', the
most widely used sound editor on Windows. And we haven't really had an
equivalent. There are maybe a dozen or so editors for Linux, all in
various stages of development and many not very advanced." Some, he
says, are nice, long lived programs such as DAP. But with that
particular application you can only edit files in memory. That limits
the size of the file you can edit to the amount of available RAM.
Modern sound file editors are hard disk oriented, what Phillips called
"non-destructive," and capable of handling much larger files. Snd, a
sound file editor, is probably the most advanced along these lines but
lacks a reasonable user interface. Phillips is working with the author
of that program to address that issue. "Hopefully some of the
advancements to snd will make it due for people looking for the audio
GIMP." Or perhaps Ardour. It's just a matter of effort over time.
With so many editor projects we have to wonder if there are too many
projects or simply not enough developers. Phillips says we have plenty
of both. The real answer is more about time and commitment. "Someone
like Paul Davis is so committed to doing Ardour. CoolEdit has been in
consistent development since the late 1980's. Linux has only been
around since about 1992," which means the low level audio is just now
getting to where the applications have begun to be written. "It's easy
to write basic audio applications for Linux. OSS's API is pretty easy
to work with. But when it comes to writing professional applications,
OSS isn't enough. ALSA is needed, but not finished yet. So if you're
writing a program like Ardour you can't have your 1.0 release till the
audio reaches 1.0." And that means application developers have to be
committed to their work, and patient in waiting for the underlying
support.
Phillips also says young programmers come along with the wrong ideas.
"We don't need another MP3 player. We also don't need another sound
file editor. Paul is dedicated to such a project and has been for some
time. How many audio applications can you say that about? Not that
many. Comparing the problem to the GIMP is useful - look how long it
took for GIMP to become as good as it is." And in the process GIMP
spawned things like GTK+. The same thing could happen with audio. With
the right application, you'll have spinoffs. "But there just isn't
anyone working on it yet", says Phillips.
Audio Links
Focus groups:
* [48]Linux Audio Developers
* [49]Linux Audio Users
Drivers:
* [50]ALSA
* [51]OSS/Linux
Applications:
* [52]Ardour
* [53]ecasound
* [54]Snd
* [55]XMMS
* [56]alsamixergui
* [57]Crossover Quicktime plugin
Listings:
* [58]Linux Sound & MIDI Applications
Desktop Environments
KDE initiative aims for corporate desktops (ZDNet). ZDNet looks
briefly at the [59]KDE::Enterprise project which was [60]announced
yesterday. "KDE::Enterprise is an attempt to remedy one of the
persistent limitations of Linux: its failure to achieve significant
use as a desktop platform. This failure stands in stark contrast to
Linux's success in back-end systems and particularly Web servers,
where it controls up to a third of the market, according to some
estimates."
KDE 2.2.1: Linux desktop approaches maturity (ZDNet). ZDNet reviews
[61]KDE 2.2 (and 2.2.1) and says it will ease migration from Microsoft
platforms. "A comprehensive user management program, KUser, lets you
create, modify, and delete user logins on multi-user Linux systems.
KCron provides similar functionality for managing automated background
tasks. And KDE System Guard, like Windows' Task Manager, lets you view
current tasks and kill problem applications. And since KDE is merely
running on top of the X Window System, you can perform remote
administration of any KDE-enabled system by redirecting application
output to another X server on the network."
Red Hat RPMs for KDE 2.2.1. There are now [62]KDE 2.2.1 RPMs available
for Red Hat 7.0 and 7.1.
An Analysis of KDE Memory Usage. A SuSE employee notified [63]KDE Dot
News of an analysis he has done on the [64]memory usage of KDE. His
results apparently show that about "650KB of memory wasted per KDE
application not launched via KDE Init", something he has reported to
the GCC/binutils teams.
Installation Guide For GNOME 1.4.1. GNOME Gnotices noted that a new
installation guide covering [65]GNOME 1.4.1 has been posted to the
[66]karubik.de site. This new guide joins the 1.2 guide prevously
posted to this site.
New GTK 1.3.8 libraries Released. A new [67]developers version of the
GTK+ toolkit has been released. This version is dependent on the
JPEG/PNG/TIFF libraries and pkg-config 0.8 and addresses mostly bug
fix issues.
XFce 3.8.8. Olivier Fourdan has announced the release of [68]XFce
3.8.8. This release includes improved sound support, better theme
support and plenty of bug fixes.
Office Applications
Evolution 0.14. Ximian has announced another beta for [69]Evolution.
The announcement includes the list of updates since the 0.13 release.
AbiWord Weekly News. Two more issues of the AbiWord Weekly News have
been published. [70]Issue 58 notes that the release of 0.9.3 is not
expected soon since there are still quite a few issues yet to be
resolved.
[71]Issue 59 adds information on the work being done on dictionary
RPMs, the availability of Darwin/X builds and details on release
engineering requirements for the project.
Desktop Applications
Linux browser wars (Canada Computes). [72]This article on Canada
Computes compares six web browsers for Linux. "It was a close call,
but of the browsers tried, Galeon appears to be the best choice. Its
not the fastest loading, it doesn't render pages quicker than the
other browsers, nor does it look very nice. The fact is though, of the
browsers tried, it offers what I feel is the best trade off between
features and performance."
KDE Edutainment Project Takes Off. [73]The KDE Edutainment team
officially launched the KDE Edutainment project today, noting the
project already has several applications available for educational
purposes including a form based exam tool and touch typing
applications.
gtkdial & gwvedit release. Modem configuration on Linux has always
been a difficult proposition for the uninitiated. Part of the solution
has been the evolution of wvdial, a system for setting up connections
to multiple ISPs. A GTK based front end to this system, [74]gtkdial,
had a new release this week. Version 0.4.0 manages first time setup
for users new to wvdial/gtkdial, and allows for secure and simple
management of account data. Along with this application comes a new
application - gwvedit - allows for direct editing of the wvdial
configuration files.
Rune For Linux Review (evil3D). Games site evil3D reviews the recently
released [75]Rune for Linux, from Loki. "I tried Mandrake 8.0, but the
game wouldn't even load there. Someone later discovered a symlink
issue that caused this, and proposed a fix for it in Loki's Fenris bug
tracking system.. However, they still couldn't save games. Personally,
I had to go all the way back to Mandrake 7.2 in order to get the game
to run correctly. Not good. But like I said, only one other person
reported as to be having the same problem."
Sodipodi author interviewd. The author of Sodipodi, [76]Lauris
Kaplinski, was interviewed by Linux.com this week. "The good thing
about using a published standard is that I do not have to spend time
creating an imaging model. I just have to implement it. No extra
headache keeping file format upwards/downwards compatible. Using SVG
natively may give Sodipodi slight advantage in web development, as it
will preserve 99.9% of hand-written structure."
Sodipodi is a vector graphics project which is listed as part of the
GNOME office suite. It offers a number of SVG based [77]clipart files
from the web site.
And in other news...
Interview: Trolltech's President Eirik Eng. KDE Dot News is carrying
an interview of [78]Trolltech's President, Eirik Eng which includes
both business and technical Q&A. "We don't generate income from KDE
directly, but KDE has certainly been instrumental in our success.
Through KDE, many of our current customers learned about us. Many
engineers hack on KDE in the evening, and then go into work in the
morning and typically work as a developer. If they like Qt, they ask
their boss if they can buy it."
City of Largo uses Balsa as the e-mail program of choice. GNOME's
Gnotices reports that the City of Largo, which reported its widescale
use of Linux, [79]is currently using the Balsa mail client. "I just
looked, and there are about 50 people logged in right now and we are
using about 200MB of memory for them. So in theory, we could run about
500 concurrently before it would swap. That is excellent."
Section Editor: [80]Michael J. Hammel
September 27, 2001
Note: An asterisk (*) denotes a proprietary product, (w) denotes WINE
based tools.
Desktop Environments
[81]GNOME
[82]GNUstep
[83]KDE
[84]XFce
Window Managers (WM's)
[85]Afterstep
[86]Enlightenment
[87]FVMW2
[88]IceWM
[89]Sawfish
[90]WindowMaker
Minimalist Environments
[91]Blackbox
Widget Sets
[92]GTK+
[93]Qt
Desktop Graphics
[94]CorelDRAW (*)(w)
[95]GIMP
[96]Kontour
[97]Photogenics (*)
[98]Sketch
Windows on Linux
[99]WINE
[100]Win4Lin
[101]VMWare
Kids S/W
[102]Linux For Kids
Send link submissions to [103]lwn@lwn.net
[104]Next: Development
[105]Eklektix, Inc. Linux powered! Copyright Л 2001 [106]Eklektix,
Inc., all rights reserved
Linux (R) is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds
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URL: http://www.lwn.net/2001/0927/desktop.php3 |
Sergey Lentsov |
27 Sep 2001 17:29:12 |
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