Devuan adds third init option in sixth birthday release

Devuan, the Linux distribution that came into being after the 2014 disagreement over Debian’s adoption of the systemd as the operating system’s init daemon, has celebrated its sixth anniversary by adding a third init option. On February 14th, the self-described Veteran Unix Admins behind the project reminded users that their …

[David 132]

PulseAudio?

I suppose it’s too much to hope for that the distro could remain completely clear of Poettering contamination. Still, PulseAudio, after many many hours/years of work by actual competent programmers, is at least functional.

Anyway, not my place to snipe, cos I haven’t done all the hard work of creating this distro - I’m just an armchair commentator. Fair play to the Devuan team, and a symbolic pint for their efforts!

(And thanks for bringing this to my attention Simon - great article. Feel free to share that pint.)

[Joe W]

Re: PulseAudio?

At least that one can be swapped out pretty painlessly, I imagine. The next machine I buy will be less "exotic" in components (= not a laptop), so hopefully drivers will be more easily available, so I can give Devuan a try. Many helper programs / installer packages to install e.g. network card drivers assume that you are connected to the internet...

(but those were my thoughts exactly, both the author and product in general - in the beginning pulse audio was a complete mess, but nowadays it seems to work well enough for me)

[steelpillow]

Re: PulseAudio?

AIUI PulseAudio is harder to swap out, as the mess it was created to solve has not yet been solved any other way. Any "oh yes it has!" type replies would be most welcome.

I stick with it for that reason but the way it restarts if you kill it is surely a gaping security hole; pwn it, kill it and the target system infects itself for you. Yecch! No audio the other side of my airgap, sigh.

[jake]

Re: PulseAudio?

Slackware-current has a note from Volkerding on how to nuke Pulse Audio for a pure ALSA system (in the update dated Thu Apr 26 01:34:12 UTC 2018) ... It's not a HOWTO guide, but it contains pointers about where to look for more info.

http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=x86_64

Personally, I've seen no issues with either method from a user's perspective for many years now ... my servers don't have sound, so that's hardly an issue ... however, I'll admit to avoiding Pulse Audio because quite frankly I don't trust the ability of the twat who invented it.

[Graham Dawson]

Re: PulseAudio?

You shouldn't. One of the touted features of Pulse Audio was that it could synchronise streams across a network to multiple devices, which I thought might be lovely for a whole-home audio system. It worked great on ethernet, as far as I tested it anyway, but the moment you introduced a wireless device, the entire network would be swamped with traffic and fall apart. It was a very well documented and reported bug.

Poettering marked it WONTFIX and refused to address it for years, presumably because he couldn't understand why someone would want to stream audio over wifi to a device that wasn't in a position to be wired. I suspect it's still not fixed, even today.

[tekHedd]

Re: PulseAudio?

Blocking pulseaudio works pretty well--I run a pure Devuan/ALSA system for DJing and Bitwig. Some "happy desktop end user" apps will choke without pulse but... well... TBH if I want to watch youtube videos I grab the old now-useless-for-pro-audio-because-slower-with-each-release Macbook Pro.

Pulse Audio still sucks. There I said it. Not sorry.

[MacroRodent]

Re: PulseAudio?

> Pulse Audio still sucks. There I said it. Not sorry.

That's a "your mileage may vary" type statement. For my part, i think I last had trouble with PulseAudio maybe some 8 years ago, but in the Mint and Fedora installations I now mainly use, sound just works for what I need it for (video/audio files, streams and teleconferencing). Probably due to the distro makers doing a lot of grunt work to make it happen.

[simpfeld]

Re: PulseAudio?

Interestingly a planned change for Fedora 34 is PipeWire to replace (and remove) PulseAudio and Jack.

Claimed to "PipeWire can support both Desktop and PRO Audio use cases"

Another unpleasant upheaval in the audio system or a decent audio system finally? I don't know....does anyone?

[FrankAlphaXII]

Re: PulseAudio?

I certainly hope so, not being quite a "desktop" audio user but not quite a "pro" because of a musical background where there's certain things that I do a certain way for a specific reason that fall into the cracks of recognized use cases, I've been stuck with Windows and macOS with no real alternative because PulseAudio is flaky (and mind you, I don't mind systemd, it has its advantages and disadvantages like any other piece of software) and JACK is well, itself. In theory I should be able to use it like an expert, in practice its hit and miss.

The thing is, I don't always work in Windows or macOS so hopefully the Fedora folks get it right and it gets adopted outside of Red Hat World (and even Linux land because if I'm using a UNIXlike its most likely FreeBSD or GhostBSD), though if I'm using Linux its most likely a Red Hat-esq distribution.

[Steve Graham]

Re: PulseAudio?

PulseAudio needs a fully-working ALSA layer anyway, since talking to actual hardware was too difficult for its developers. So you just have to nuke the PulseAudio daemon, permanently or temporarily, and your sound applications can then interface directly to ALSA. Even applications which are compiled with PulseAudio support will almost always work fine with ALSA if they don't find the daemon running.

Except Firefox, whose Linux audio developer declared that interfacing to ALSA was too difficult for him.

ALSA is an ugly carbuncle stuck on the side of the kernel source tree, and its configuration language is nearly incomprehensible -- and mostly undocumented, but it does generally work, functions with a multitude of hardware, and can do quite powerful sound operations.

[tekHedd]

ALSA

"ALSA is an ugly carbuncle stuck on the side of the kernel source tree, and its configuration language is nearly incomprehensible -- and mostly undocumented"

IMO, PulseAudio would not have happened (the way it did) if ALSA had been properly documented, maintainable code, because the unfathomable, undocumented style of the ALSA project makes devs run as far away as possible from Linux audio subsystems.

Perhaps the developers didn't want anyone outside their team to understand the system. More charitably, perhaps they were so deeply immersed in the code that they didn't realize exactly how awful it is. I mean, it works great, but... when I wanted to port my windows audio drivers to linux, spent a few hours getting to know the ALSA code, and literally ran away screaming. Literally.

Beware the truly brilliant programmer, because they will write code that nobody else will be able to maintain.

Yes, something _like_ PulseAudio will always be necessary for "happy little user apps," but I believe the byzantine ALSA code has repulsed good developers away from the audio subsystem and left a developer vacuum the shape of PulseAudio. :(

[Citizen99]

Re: ALSA

Decades ago, my boss told this anecdote as we travelled to a meeting - The Chairman ofr the Gas Board made the proclamation "Sack all clever programmers"

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: PulseAudio?

Why don't Linux people just port the OSS from FreeBSD, and then you won't need all these silly hacks to solve a problem FreeBSD solved around 25 years ago?

[Baudwalk]

Re: PulseAudio?

OSS was the Linux sound system when I started on the Righteous Path of Tux in '96.

There was some kerfuffle about 4Front and licence terms, and (IIRC, which I may very well not) that lead to the development of ALSA.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: PulseAudio?

"NIH". FreeBSD had working OSS (multiple audio channels etc) long before ALSA.

Rather than fix the buggy OSS on linux, they wrote ALSA. I suppose that's sexier than fixing stuff, but look where you are now. Unfortunately, as some things are written to only support some kludgy soundserver, the FreeBSD ports also need some version of said sound-server for audio to work.

[Ozan]

Re: PulseAudio?

OSS then turned proprietary. Noone talks about how OSS started this with sudden turn to proprietary. Linux had two choices, update old OSS or create their own. They created ALSA.

[Simon Sharwood, Reg APAC Editor]

Re: PulseAudio?

Fax me the pint and I'll dive right in ;-)

[David 132]

Re: PulseAudio?

Sorry, I don't have a fax, I'm Internet only these days. Can send it that way - if your client supports the TCP/IPA protocol. If not, well, that's the way it Gose :)

[guyr]

I don't have a fax, I'm Internet only these days

If you have Internet, you have fax. :) I've been using fax1.com for years because there is no set monthly cost, and when you buy credits for faxing at 12 cents (US) /page, it never expires. Would likely get expensive if you fax in high volume, but I bought $10 probably 8 years ago and haven't used it up yet.

[guyr]

I don't have a fax, I'm Internet only these days

If you have Internet, you have fax. :) I've been using fax1.com for years because there is no set monthly cost, and when you buy credits for faxing at 12 cents (US) /page, it never expires. Would likely get expensive if you fax in high volume, but I bought $10 probably 8 years ago and haven't used it up yet.

[Quando]

Re: I don't have a fax, I'm Internet only these days

Seems like you comment like a fax - two copies or none....

[Will Godfrey]

Re: PulseAudio?

I never have a problem with it. I just delete the server. All the apps that consider it essential continue to chat with the client, which then has nowhere to send the data. ALSA and JACK then fill in my needs perfectly, and I hear exactly what I want to with no random beeps and burps interrupting

[Blackjack]

Re: PulseAudio?

PulseAudio has done things like detecting a video card as an audio card, always resetting to be onboard soundcard on default and ignoring blacklists without me having to manually edit configuration files but when it works it works well.

[jake]

In other Linux news ...

... volkerdi just dropped "I'm not quite ready to call this beta yet, but you can call it 15.0-alpha1. :-)"

LTS kernel 5.10.x, glibc 2.33, Plasma 5.20.5 or XFCE 4.16, no systemd-cancer, no wayland (unless you want it), GTK but no Gnome, Pulse Audio or not, your choice. What's not to like?

They are also putting in major work on the ARM port of Slackware. Worth checking out.

Slackware change logs here.

[keithpeter]

Re: In other Linux news ...

Posting from a Slackware 14.2 32bit install on my old Thinkpad X61. Some assembly required (e.g. for an encrypted SSD using lvm &c) and you do need to read the documentation. Once all set up just chugs away.

I prefer xfce4 and no real upgrade pressure until libraries get so old that the current Firefox binary release version no longer runs.

I need to try out the alpha though...

[Baudwalk]

Re: In other Linux news ...

I ran Slackware Current for some years.

It was the most stable OS, I've ever used.

But as it didn't come with a huge set of packaged applications, it did take more time to manage and keep current than most distros. Not helped by me compiling everything non-core from original sources.

The thing really was rock-solid, though.

When that PC needed replacing, general life had gotten in the way, so I went the way of the lazy and installed Debian.

[IGotOut]

Naming conventions.

Ok I'm sure its been around a while, but what the heck is a pre-alpha? Is that like a release 6.0-.1??? A time traveling release where its actually released before the first release so therefore isn't actually a release?

Or has this bizarre naming simply passed me by.

[jake]

Re: Naming conventions.

Pre-Alpha is what we used to call pilot build. It's usually an internal-only engineering release that helps test not only the product, but also the fit & finish and end-user initial reaction without alerting the competition that you are near a public Alpha release. Alpha is a limited "best customers only, use at your own risk" external test program. Beta is a general release, but still use at your own risk.

Devuan overloaded the term to mean "We're running this up the flagpole, is anyone other than us interested in such a release?". The answer has been an unequivocal YES! ... I would probably switch to it if Slackware were to go TITSUP[0] tomorrow.

[0] Totally Incapable of Transferring Selected User Packages

[TonyJ]

Re: Naming conventions.

Interesting. I was always under the impression that Alpha = internal testing and Beta = public testing.

[Unicornpiss]

Re: Naming conventions.

Pre-Alpha = production Microsoft 'Feature Update'

[Sceptic Tank]

Probably the same naming issues that large telescopes have now: eg. The Really Really Extremely Large Telescope, etc.

[Sitaram Chamarty]

telecom secor naming...

3gpp has "evolved nodeB" and "next generation nodeB".

Damned if I know which comes first!

[FeepingCreature]

Re: telecom secor naming...

I mean, those mean the same thing... you have to have a next generation to have mutations, so the next generation would be the "evolved" generation. So this really is maximally confusing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: telecom secor naming...

Rather like when someone decided "modernism" would be a good label. It almost immediately became out of date, requiring "postmodernism", then "post-postmodernism" etc.

[Mage]

Re: Modernism

Though underused compared with Art Deco (just before 1928 Modernism) and now used to to describe anything older than about 1965. Art Nouveau is confusingly before Art Deco. Then before that you have the Pre-Raphaelites who are confusingly long after Raphael.

Modernism is sort of related to Bauhaus, 1919 to 1935, which was shuttered by the Nazis. Some of the Bauhaus furniture still looks pretty modern, nearly 100 years later. The architecture in a way was developed into brutalism. Falling Water looks pretty as do many 1930s industrial buildings, but is a maintenance nightmare. A survey a few years ago got the public to rate buildings and found that the longer the Architect has been in practice the less the public liked them. Ego takes over from practicality, beauty and function.

Really anything after 1939 is probably post-modernist.

Don't get me started on retro, especially as regards styles of appliances and radios. Gah!

[Steve K]

Re: Modernism

Off-topic but Falling Water is an amazing building in a fantastic setting - there was a documentary a couple of years ago here in the UK on Lloyd-Wright that had a tour of it. It's hard to believe it was designed in 1935.

[jake]

Re: Modernism

Fallingwater (one word) is a tchotchke for rich people. A work of art that is only useful if you have the money to own a nick-nack rack large enough to display it.

Yes, it's pretty (from some angles ... from others, not so much). But as a house? Isn't that what it was supposed to be? It's cold, dark, and dank in places, like the back of a cliff overhang. It's hard, not soft and comfy. Inside, you feel like you're in a fishbowl, with no place to hide. Outside, you have to watch your feet or you'll trip and fall. Overall, it's completely unlivable. Which in my mind makes it bloody useless ... what good is a house that's unlivable?

[Steve K]

Re: Modernism

I called it a building, not a house......:-)

[jake]

Re: Modernism

A portion of the definition of "building" is "permanent structure". Anything built on a waterfall is, by definition, non-permanent right from the git-go. As a building, it is designed to be a failure.

[Martin an gof]

Re: Modernism

the longer the Architect has been in practice the less the public liked them

It can go both ways. It has to be said that Richard Rogers designed a very practical and economical building for the Senedd in Cardiff bay, and had been in practice for many decades at that point. According to Wikipedia many of the cost overruns were directly attributable to additional anti-terrorist security measures added-on to the design after work was started. What many people don't realise is that while the "flagship" building is very obvious, it essentially only holds public spaces and the debating chamber with the government offices mostly being housed in a bog standard office block that was already there.

The original designs for what became the Wales Millennium Centre next door to the Senedd by Zaha Hadid - who had been in practice for (I believe) less than a decade at that point - were too radical either for the public, or for the government. Even the National Lottery refused funding. In hindsight the building would have been very pretty but rather expensive and probably impractical.

The commission was given to another architect - Jonathan Adams - who had been in practice for just a few years more than Zaha but came up with an immensely practical building that was a little odd on the outside (people call it the Armadillo) but works very well on the inside.

As for Fallingwater. I remember the first time I saw pictures of it thinking how "clever" it was, but then realising after a while that it was probably dark and damp and all those concrete cantilevers were going to be trouble in later years...

M.

[Tom 7]

Re: telecom secor naming...

Should really be email-modernism or uber-modernism I guess.

Or possibly meals-on-wheels-modernism for old gits like me.

[Doctor Syntax]

I wonder if they've updated the drivers - must go and take a look.

Meanwhile the old laptop is resetting its W10 (it was ex-demo from ex-Staples - goodness knows what the original HDD had on it) so I can donate it to a school who'd probably have screaming hab-dabs over Linus. I'd forgotten just how long it takes Windows to do anything.... And UEFI - it hasn't even noticed the HDD has been changed and still thinks there's a "Debian" (yes, Devuan) on there.

[Claverhouse]

And yes, I've had to run a few Windows machines --- for a particular app --- recently, and even allowing for the extra abstraction of virtualization, I was stunned at the wading through mud uphill speed.

.

[ The Linux and other virtual machines proceeded normally, so not just down to virtualizing. ]

[keith_w]

Thank you for highlighting some of the fun issues with Linux. I think I will stick with W10, which, for me and my 4 machines, just works. I looking forward with a joyousn heart to the downvotes I will receive.

[my cats breath smells like cat food]

Meh

I've come to really like systemd (and gnome 3.x fwiw)

Even if the first year of systemd was a little painful, I never loved sysv init enough to really care -- and I've been using various flavours since the late 80s.

[Claverhouse]

Moving On

My latest --- and probably final, since I ran my ex-beloved OPENsuse [ current version ] in a virtual machine and was so horrified at the blocky dark modernism I shall never go back ( and the hideous secret about all the alternative themes etc. in KDE on offer and done by artists who like clean black minimalism ) --- OS, PCLinuxOS, is systemd-free.

Can't honestly say it ever concerned me much, but it's nice to shun a cruddy universal. Like not watching Come Dancing.