[CS-FSLUG] Sound without X

[l4c]

Ed Hurst wrote:
> 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.
> 

Try NetBSD.