[CS-FSLUG] Sound without X

[Ed Hurst]

On Thu, 18 Jun 2009 08:22:49 -0500, Josiah Ritchie  
<josiah at ritchietribe.net> wrote:

>> The issue is now past because I had a raft of other problems with it and
>> gave up on Lenny. Thanks for your effort and sorry to waste your time.
>
> I don't know what you've moved too, but Gentoo was always very tweakable  
> to allow for no-X when I was using it.

Yes, same as FreeBSD in that. However, FreeBSD has very poor laptop  
support. I've seen the expansive documentation for Gentoo, often using it  
to fix things in other distros. However, I'm just too stinking lazy to go  
there. I've grown tired of such extensive exploration.

Lenny's version of X.org is really unpleasant for me. I've tried it with  
GNOME, LXDE, and XFCE. I didn't like any of them, particularly on this old  
Inspiron 4100. It made everything crawl. I read where one developer wrote  
a bug report on the issue about needing a version of the "snd"  
meta-package with a 'nox' tag, and even wrote a patch. The maintainers  
liked the idea, but said they had no time to deal with it. That was some 6  
months ago, IIRC. I found plenty of other 'nox' packages from outside, but  
any package related to Alsa required lots of GTK stuff.

In the end, it was all a washout effort for other reasons. There was no  
problem for me in the things I like to do with a computer. However, I do  
too many things for other people which require having access to OO.org,  
printing, and some multimedia capabilities. Staying on the console, as it  
now exists and is supported, would have been a selfish move. I switched  
back to CentOS.

On this older laptop, I'm running up against the bloat factor in anything  
related to Linux. This is particularly an issue with the X server. I've  
never really liked X that much, and the more I learn about it, the less I  
like it. I'm not a software designer, so all I have is my own experience  
to go on, and it's all less than pleasant. I don't expect any relief out  
of anything done in Linux or BSD. I don't see any serious attempts to  
replace it for common desktop use. I suppose if Haiku really gets going  
soon, I'll have a way of keeping this thing alive in my ministry. I've  
also tried Syllable; it's faster than anything I've ever seen with a GUI,  
but they have no Radeon drivers, and no near-term plans for wifi or ACPI  
that I can see.

-- 
Ed Hurst
------------
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