Creative GPLs X-Fi Sound Card Driver Code 369
An anonymous reader writes "In a move that's a win for the free software community, Creative Labs has decided to release their binary Linux driver for the Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi and X-Fi Titanium sound cards under the GPL license. This is coming after several failed attempts at delivering a working binary driver and years after these sound cards first hit the market."
Sound cards are irrelevant (Score:5, Informative)
Not even gamers buy sound cards anymore [steampowered.com]. I bet Creative's sound card business is small fries compared to their consumer electronics business.
Re:Soundcards? (Score:5, Informative)
Musicians (like me) will buy better-quality hardware than Creative. :3
Re:At last! (Score:3, Informative)
That's funny it doesn't with my nVidia 7900GS or my 6800GS cards in either of the boxes I just installed it on.
Re:At last! (Score:5, Informative)
Vista does, yes.
Re:List of Binary-Only Kernel Drivers (Score:1, Informative)
Linuxant driver for Conexant WinModems is one.
In addition to drivers, there's lots of weird binary-only firmware-loaders for things like scanners, in which the device simply doesn't work unless you load a binary firmware blob every single time you use the device. Not quite the stability/security risk of a binary driver, but still impedes free GPL distribution of working drivers.
My Latest Ubuntu/Linux Problem (Score:1, Informative)
Ubuntu 8.10 came out and I wanted to start with a fresh install, so I copied everything in my home folder to a backup drive (all your stuff is in your home right?). I had a few other backup copies on the drive and not all were from the same user (but they were all mine). I tried to view one of the other backups, but had to be root to do it. Instead of randomly switching between my user and root, I selected all the backup folders and changed their permissions to allow everything. Suddenly, errors started popping up, icons and text disappeared, and GNOME died. On restart, it booted to the command line and won't let me log in.
Turns out that somewhere in my backups I had a link to / or something similar. Changing permissions followed through and changed everything on my computer. It removed executable from everything. In the permissions tab, I never changed the executable field, so I didn't think it would apply that field too.
Not all problems have to be a driver issues.
Another thing I hate: Ubuntu windows don't have 'Apply' or 'Cancel' buttons, only 'Close'
Re:At last! (Score:2, Informative)
One more than one computer it wouldn't detect the monitor resolutions correctly, so I had to edit xorg.conf to make the correct resolution available.
Although an irritation, I don't have any problems dealing with it, and I doubt that any normal person I know could do that(/. users are exceptions, not the norm).
Re:Sound cards are irrelevant (Score:5, Informative)
Not even gamers buy sound cards anymore.
It does make you wonder what the 30% "other" is though.
They've got Creative Labs represented at about 3.5% between Audigy 2 ZS, Audigy, and X-Fi. But is that accurately counting all the X-Fi variants? What about the multitude of Audigy 2's that aren't "ZS". Ditto for the diverse original Audigy line. The venerable SoundBlaster "Live" series that preceded the Audigy isn't represented at all. I wouldn't really be raising the question, except that we've got that giant 30% "other" sitting there. I could easily see another 5 or 6 or more percent being various creative labs cards.
In any case, I agree with you that that even gamers aren't buying sound cards the way they used to.
That said, some of those steam numbers look WAY out of whack.
Take a look at 16:9 (widescreen) aspect ratio monitors, which they claim make up 26% of all monitors. And within widescreen 34% claim 24" or larger (24" @ 15%+ over 24" @ 19%).
That equates to 9% of all users using a 24"+ screen. Yet if you compare that to the primary display resolution table, a mere 2.29% are running 1920x1200 or larger. 1920x1200 is the native resolution on 24"-26" screens, with 30" being 2560x1600 (and not represented at all in the chart).
I call bullshit.
Re:Why is this even closed source in the first pla (Score:3, Informative)
No, I believe it was that they had licensed some functionality for XP but not for Vista, so they were no longer enabled in the Vista driver. Someone posted hacks to reenable the functionality under Vista, which required Creative to do some legal bitching as they probably feared those they were licensing from. In any case, maybe their lawyers realized that even if the open source community implemented something patented or whatever it's not going to make Creative liable.
Re:GPLv2? Why not GPLv3? (Score:3, Informative)
Not wanting to get into another flame fest thread over GPLv2 vs GPLv3, but I'm curious as to their reasoning for choosing v2. Did they say?
Not that I've heard, but one reason is patents. If Creative hold any patents over the driver, or even the hardware, they may be at risk when using the GPLv3 (the risk doesn't have to be real, only perceived). There's also the licenses of ALSA and OSS. I checked both, and they're GPLv2-only. GPLv3-only source code would be useless unless they relicensed their entire projects, and I don't think they'd be in any hurry to do that.
Re:hardhack?!? (Score:3, Informative)
People are free to tag any way they want.
People are idiots.
Put one and two together.
Re:Finally (Score:3, Informative)
Realistically we're still not going to see much for quite a while. From all accounts creative's attempts at a linux driver were crap(I didn't bother trying them after reading what people were having to do to make them even compile), and there will still probably have to be a complete rewrite, but at least with the new license they'll be able to reuse some of that code and it might speed things up a bit.
Re:Finally (Score:3, Informative)
Well, the summary says they're releasing the binary driver. Not the source.
Presumably as a LGPL, cause you can't really release a binary as full GPL, unless you created it in a hex editor and never used a compiler.
So I wouldn't get my hopes up for this leading to any better drivers from the community.
Anyhow, why would we want better drivers for a card that's hampered by hardware? It can only work completely in 48 kHz, so audio has to be converted, with a resulting quality loss.
There are far better cards available far cheaper that aren't fettered this way, and most any of them will produce better quality unless your source happens to be 48 kHz.
Re:Soundcards? (Score:4, Informative)
One popular card is the good old M-Audio Audiophile 2496, which costs around $100.
Don't get the newer Audiophile 192 unless you need 192 kHz or balanced outputs. It is dumbed down, with reduced duplex, and you can't route the SPDIF input from, say, a TV at the same time as you route analog sound from, say, the GUI. You get one or the other, but not both independently.
There are many other popular choices, but the M-Audio is one of the more rock solid ones for Linux use.
Re:At last! (Score:3, Informative)
Back up your assertions or be silent.
Re:Soundcards? (Score:5, Informative)
Headphones.
No one else gives a damn about headphones. The quality issues with on-board sound become quite apparent with a good set of headphones, and even most other consumer sound cards treat it as an afterthought, doing whatever they would do with a set of stereo speakers. The X-Fi (at least under Windows) has an absolutely excellent headphone spatialization algorithm for general listening, it completely resolves the fatigue issue that results from hearing only a single audio channel in each ear without naturally occurring crossfeed. As for gaming, Creative (or rather Aureal's) head related transfer function tech for 3D audio is second to none; it's better than 5.1 speakers and is the only thing on the market right now worth a damn for 3D audio on headphones.
Unfortunately I'm not sure how much of this would be usable under Linux. The spatialization issue in particular drives me nuts.
Re:Soundcards? (Score:3, Informative)
It's a VERY [pcavtech.com] high-performance card. That said, it is a professional card, and thus rather expensive. Compatible with windows, mac os, Linux, and FreeBSD. Possibly other BSDs as well.