Christian Klippel wrote:
hi all, esp. @ suse !
in the past time i ran into several "problems" with suse's style of "messing up" the kernel sources in respect to the standard ones. there are some enhancements/patches i really would like to use, and that i also would recommend suse to somehow integrate it into their's ... first of all, there are the low-latency patches, this is esp. usefull when working with realtime audio manipulation/generation .. always had problems to get this into a suse kernel, while at the same time it is often hairy to get a "normal" kernel running on a suse system .... (at least i had never real luck with this, it boots, ok, but half of the system wont work if not heavily changed to non-suse defaults, as found on other systems) next thing is the kgi extension (http://kgi.sf.net) to get somewhat faster graphics handling in linux. i have seen/worked with this a little on another machine, where install/patch/etc. of the kernel and that package went fine, but no go under suse (im using 7.2 at the moment) this is something i really miss, since output to default x windows is somewhat slow without such enhancements. not to think about about realtime video manipulation (which im currently programming) ....
so, would be nice to hear if someone ever got one of the mentioned extensions running on suse, and esp. to hear what suse has to say about that. just packing tons of picture viewers and audio players doesnt make any distribution usable for real multimedia usage, and what suse offers in its distributions is (forgive me) an almost toy-ish try to give the impression of multimedia under linux .... but not only the apps itself are important, also enhanced support for handling multimedia in general is a _very important_ thing, so i really wonder about the usability of the two packages mentioned above together with suse ..... remember, i had no problems (two times !) to get these working on non-suse linux distros, but always failed on suse ..... but to get high performance these are needed/very usefull ..... i want to use suse in the future too, but if this lack of multimedia support is continuing in suse in the future, i have no other choice than to switch and drop suse ........ at least suse should provide packages of the above that work on suse systems ....
It's NOT difficult to get a vanilla to work on SuSE. People do it ALL the time. Yes it would be nice if the low-latency patch would be applied by SuSE but wouldn't it be even better if it was officially put in the vanilla kernel. SuSE tries to provide a STABLE kernel that will work for as MANY people as possible. I don't see a SUSE-MULTI-MEDIA distrubution. Maybe that's what you would like. Maybe that would be a good thing for them to do. Again though, the vanilla kernels work just fine for a SuSE distrubution. You just have to manually setup some things like ALSA.... I have the same problems with other patches I need that won't apply to SuSE's already heavily patched kernel. I just get the vanilla sources and patch away. All on SUSE.... -- Mark Hounschell dmarkh@cfl.rr.com