[gentoo-mips] O2 Sound and Misc Stuff. [Was LiveCD RC6]

["J. Scott Kasten" <jscottkasten@yahoo.com>]

I've seen the old driver patch you refer to floating around out there. 
After I've done my USB and firewire experiments, I wouldn't mind taking a 
look at this to see how bad it is.  An SGI without sound is kind of like a 
car without wheels....


Over all, I've been quite impressed.  Most things that I try seem to be 
generally working.  I've already succeeded in building the box up as a 
general desktop system.  X11, WindowMaker, transparent Xterms, NLS, DDD, 
gvim, GIMP, Firefox 2.0, QT, openGL (some GL works, some crash the X 
server), XFIG, gv (pdf and ps viewer), xv, gtk, imagemagik, tetex, 
ghostscript, etc...

I've also done some work to verify IPv6.  The kernel module loads, the 
machine auto addresses, and the 6-to-4 driver loads.  I still need to 
rebuild some userland with USE=ipv6 to fully check it out, but I'm not 
expecting any surprises at this point.

The PPTP and PPP-MPPE vpn support is working.  I've spent entire days 
plugged into my work VPN during my work from home days using the O2 as an 
X console and VPN access node.  No surprises here.

The file system chosen for my box is IBM's JFS.  In work life, I've been 
doing embedded stuff with JFS for a couple years now.  I first tried it 
with gentoo and mips under kernel 2.13 about a year and a half ago.  And 
under 2.17.10-mips, it is still proving to be solid and exceptionally well 
performing as I've emerged about 500 packages in the last couple weeks - 
no crashes, no oops, no data corruption, rock solid.  I know people on 
non-intel are skeptical of it, but I've been warming up to it a lot and 
have never seen issues, but I've had issues with reiser that made it 
unacceptable.  There's a lot in terms of performance and features to 
recommend this file system - assuming stability of course.  :)  It's 
definately worthy of consideration when setting up a new non-intel box.

Cheers,

-S-

On Fri, 9 Feb 2007, Kumba wrote:

> J. Scott Kasten wrote:
>>
>>  [1] From looking at other configs there, and having just walked through
>>  the 2.17.10 config process, it looks like the alsa mips ip32 sound device
>>  has been disabled.  I cannot even select it in 2.17.10.  I was wondering
>>  what the status of this driver was.  Judging from submitted configs, it
>>  looks like people had been enabling it at 2.16 or earlier.
>
> O2 doesn't have a working sound driver.  I dunno what the alsa mips thing is, 
> but it's probably dead code.  A few people have, apparently, created a 
> working sound driver, but they've never released the source, so, it's kinda 
> like Duke Nukem Forever.
>
> The only known driver was designed in the old 2.5 days and 2.6.1 timeframe, 
> but attempts to forward port it never do too well.  It can be compiled, but 
> all it does is make ears bleed with static.  Someone with an O2, free time, 
> decent knowledge of sound hardware and kernel development, and a few pots of 
> coffee needs to step forward and help us get the thing to work.
>
> --Kumba
-- 
gentoo-mips@gentoo.org mailing list