it ain't done until Lotus won't run

[waider]

There's an article over at Infoweek (referenced by Dan Gillmor, in turn referenced by Karlin Lillington, which is how I stumbled across it) about how Fred Langa tried to install Linux on new (but unnamed) hardware and couldn't get the sound working. Fair enough; sound support in Linux is lamentable in places, particularly if you're trying to get real-time sound/video sync going on, but also if you've got stuff like the emu10k1-based cards that aren't documented because, you know, frobbing the speaker is a trade secret and all that. Langa then went to try a Virtual PC running on the hardware, emulating a SoundBlaster, and lo, 8 different Linux distros still refused to work the sound interface. The followups to the article appear to be the usual flood of kneejerk responses ("Infoweak", "What do you expect from a windows user" "sure, sound is broken, but have you tried running Windows$version on $esoteric_hardware" etc. etc.) but in typical Linux flamer style there's no actual thought behind the posts. Me, I had a look at the article Langa references when he mentions the Virtual PC software, and lo, it's a review of Microsoft's Virtual PC. Now, why on earth would a bog-standard SoundBlaster interface fail to work under Linux? Could it perhaps be because Someone Doesn't Want It To Work? (mutter mutter where's me tinfoil hat mutter mutter millennium hand and shrimp I telled 'em)

Comments

[wisn.livejournal.com]

Doubt it. Virtual PC was an independent vendor's product since '95-ish or earlier - there was a market with both hardware and software PC emulators selling to Macs for a while then. MS only snapped up Connectix a year ago. I thought it was part of Microsoft's campaign to throttle Apple, but now I'm beginning to suspect they're somewhat sincere about keeping it alive as a cheaper way to sell Microsoft products to Mac owners than re-porting everything. As such, they don't gain anything by arbitrarily crippling it.

[waider.livejournal.com]

Well, right, but he's talking about running VPC on a PC. VPC as purchased by Microsoft was a Mac product, and a Virtual PC isn't something that's trivially easy to port from one platform to another - in particular, in going from Mac to x86 you'd be going from full processor emulation to partially-native code. If you didn't, things like VMware would kick your ass all over the market. Well, I guess, except that they won't have seekrit h00ks into the OS layer.

[wisn.livejournal.com]

The Windows version also predates Microsoft's purchase.

[waider.livejournal.com]

Aha.

The only options left for a non-working SoundBlaster emulation are (a) the guy writing the article had the volume turned down (note, this was the solution to using ALSA) (b) the guy writing the article was shilling for Microsoft, or (c) Microsoft really did break the SoundBlaster emulation but only for Linux.