Linux is a long way from mainstream. (Suse 9.1/nVidia/codecs problems)

[Jeriko]

First let me give you the system:

Shuttle SN41G2 (nVidia chipset)
AIW 9100 Pro
Hauppauge PVR-250
Dual boot with WinXP Pro


I'm speaking as a total noob to Linux save for some experience hassling around with Suse 8.2, just so you know where I'm coming from.

I'm trying. Don't get me wrong. But after I installed Suse 9.1 I felt that, in its current state, it probably won't be ready for mainstream anytime soon.

Installation went very smooth - much smoother than version 8 of Suse. It automatically detected my network adapter without the need to download and install a driver from nVidia's site. Seems nForce support is quite good. It automatically detected and installed the drivers to my video card. It even, on first try, supported my monitor's unique resolution, which was a pain in the butt to get working last time.

All in all, much better support out of the box than the previous version.

But then there are some issues. Chief among them being that, although it recognizes and installs drivers for the nVidia Soundstorm (AL650) chipset, it still doesn't work with the SPDIF optical out that I use for the output.

According to nVidia's latest drivers, they have now added that ability:

Link

But on that page, you will see no RPM release for Suse, only Red Hat, Fedora, and Mandrake, along with a tar file in case you have a different version of the OS.

Which leads me to problem number 2.

Installation. Installing new drivers, or even software for that matter, under Linux can often be a real pain. In Windows you just click and run the executable.

But it seems near impossible to find such a simple one click installation process for many of the things I need to install under Linux. The nVidia drivers, for example. They come with some instruction, which I think I figured out, but every time I tried it the message given back for the list of files it tried to install was something along the lines of "unable to find buildmeister, using root instead" or "unable to find /adm, using root istead" and I got the overall impression that the installation had failed (it said something like Result: 0 at the end).

And of course the SPDIF still refuses to work.

But that's not all.

Oh and let me give some more credit where it's due - Suse recognizes NTFS file systems out of the box so it immediately gave me access to the files on my Windows partition. But when I tried to run a Xvid or Divx video file from my Windows drive, I soon discovered that it did not ship with either codec.

No problem, I'll just go to Koepi's xvid website, the place where I always found the compiled Windows executables, to download their Linux codec.

Under binaries I see xvidcore-1.0.1.tar.bz2. I don't know whether this is what I'm looking for or not. And I don't know how to install it.

So I do some searching and see a lot of people bringing up mPlayer. They tell other people to download that player and its codec package and you'll be all set to play almost anything.

So I go to mPlayer's website.

Once against I see Red Hat RPM's.

Now, I know RPM's from Suse. They're the files you just double click on and everything gets installed like it should be. I like RPM's - they remind me of how easy it is to install things in Windows. RPM's are good.

But there's no Suse RPM. Only another damn tar file. Apparently the source. I don't know if the source will do me any good:

MPlayer v1.0pre4 source

So now I'm thinking, you know, maybe you should have gone with Red Hat. But that's not right, because I know people use this program under Suse all the time. In fact, it was in response to a question in a forum asking about xvid/divx on Suse that mPlayer was recommended. So obviously the problem is with me, and my inability to know how to properly install or compile these files.

Switching to Red Hat or Fedora isn't the answer, then. I can't depend on RPM's to save me every time.

But this brings me to the point of the thread, other than asking for help with these issues. In its current state, Linux is just not going to appeal to the average user. It's interesting to me because I like new things to figure out, but for 90% of the computer buying public, this stuff is going to be way, way over their heads. Add to that the drivers seemingly in a constant state of being a year behind to get full capability, and I just don't see it happening. No one's going to want to wait a year to be able to use all the features of their shiny new hardware.

I don't even wat to THINK about getting my TV tuners (I actually have two in the system) to work, or something resembling full function from the AIW. But all in due time. Sound and codecs are first.

-J

 

[drag]

90% of the buying public has no desire to install any OS, weither be it Suse or Windows. They buy their computer and they use what is on it.

Mplayer from a source install is going to be a huge pain. It'll provide you more functionality then you'd probably want anyways.

Check out Xine.

As for your sound check out alsa-project.org. I doubt your going to get close to the same functionality in Linux as Windows because Nvidia has a incredably crappy attitude when it comes to Linux drivers. Not much you can do when the maker of the hardware refuses to help out in any way shape or form.

Next time get Via. I have a creative audigy card and it works great. Creative helped out with these drivers.

Properly supported hardware is easier to use in Linux then Windows, however the attitude of the OEMs isn't to great for good support. You see if you don't make sure that you have drivers for windows, you can't sell jack sh!t. Lots of OEM don't care about linux because it's only about 2-3 percent of the market. That's not going to change until Linux gets more market share, and that's not going to change till Linux gets better OEM support, it's a catch 22.

So that's why Suse's and stuff are aiming at businesses and such. Linux has good high-end support because it's has about 30% of the server market share. Almost every company in existance has at least 1 linux server hidden away somewere, even if most people aren't aware of it. Including management.

So they got that done. Next will be business desktops. Intel support is pretty good, as is Via's.

Also the higher end hardware you get into, the better quality stuff, your more likely to get good linux support.

Blame Nvidia for your driver's shortcommings, not Linux. My hardware I didn't have to do jack to get it working well... except of course for the nvidia card. Laptops are even worse, generally they are completely propriatory.

As for the codecs, Linux programs can usually run Window's codecs just fine. So you find them all scattered around your Windows computer, or find a rpm for them or whatnot, then you copy them to something like the /usr/lib/win32 folder or something like that. Or you use a search engine just for RPM's

Whatever. Check out Xine, you'll like it. They'll explain a bit on how get your stuff going on their website. Mplayer is for power users (developers are of the snotty kind). Wait a while and it won't be so hard once you get used to it. (mplayer's gui sucks anyways. Use the command line version if you ever get it installed)

Tv cards? I have 2. Generally suse was very good at detecting my bttv-based one... a ATI wonder VE. Worked like crap in Windows XP (garbled images, crashes).. due to conflicts with the Nvidia drivers (go figure). Works great in Linux.

My other card is the hauppage Win-PVR250. It's going to require a bit of knowledge to get that working, it's a beta and you'd need to know how to compile and patch kernels to get that to work. It's nice though, spits out mpeg2 streams.

 

[Jeriko]

Check out Xine.

Suse actually comes with Xine. In fact, that seems to be the default program for video under it. It just doesn't have the codecs that I need installed.

As for your sound check out alsa-project.org. I doubt your going to get close to the same functionality in Linux as Windows because Nvidia has a incredably crappy attitude when it comes to Linux drivers. Not much you can do when the maker of the hardware refuses to help out in any way shape or form.

I tried the ALSA website but didn't have much luck finding what I needed. The Soundstorm is a Realtek ALC650 which I don't see listed on their site. I'll look again, though, just in case.

Next time get Via

Well that wasn't really an option on the Shuttle. It's one of their small form factor XPC's, and you get the motherboard that comes with them.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Jeriko

Check out Xine.

Suse actually comes with Xine. In fact, that seems to be the default program for video under it. It just doesn't have the codecs that I need installed.

You can try installing the codecs and reading the docs on Xine to find out how to get it to support them.

As for your sound check out alsa-project.org. I doubt your going to get close to the same functionality in Linux as Windows because Nvidia has a incredably crappy attitude when it comes to Linux drivers. Not much you can do when the maker of the hardware refuses to help out in any way shape or form.

I tried the ALSA website but didn't have much luck finding what I needed. The Soundstorm is a Realtek ALC650 which I don't see listed on their site. I'll look again, though, just in case.

Make sure you installed the nVidia drivers correctly.

Next time get Via

Well that wasn't really an option on the Shuttle. It's one of their small form factor XPC's, and you get the motherboard that comes with them.

VIA puts out some REALLY nice SFF machines.

 

[Jeriko]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey


Make sure you installed the nVidia drivers correctly.

Well that's easier said than done for a noob because I don't know enough to know.

But what I can say is that on further inspection Suse seems to recognize all aspects of my sound device, including the existence of the S/PDIF port judging by the inclusion of various "IEC958" options in the ALSA Mixer.

For some reason it just won't give me any sound. It's like it isn't quite capturing the port, or maybe it's not configured to use the port and is instead looking to the analog.

I just don't know yet.

 

[pitupepito2000]

Hi,

First of all, I want to say "welcome to the wonderful world of linux." As you can probably tell by now things in linux may take a little longer to do in linux during your learning stage, but once you learn them, linux is a lot easier to administer and update your windows box. For example, I can update my whole linux box by doing "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade" and whola. I would say try to take it easy, focus on one task to do and try to get it done, and the most important thing is to learn from it. Try to jot down what steps you took to get it working because sometime you may have problems with it or try to reinstall your drivers and this info will be priceless at the time. Also, with linux the www.google.com/linxu and www.tldp.org are your best friends. In linux, people enforce and encourage RTFM, read the friendly manual

With respect to your software/confiuration problems. I would try using the package manger of SUSE to get Mplayer or Xine working, both of them are very good players, and as long as you have the codecs installed they can pretty much installed. I wouldn't try installing them from source because they are so complicated when it comes to their dependencies.

For your sound card, I would definitely try using "ALSA" which stands for Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. It makes configuring and installing sound cards in linux a breeze. They usually have pretty good documentation in their website. First make sure that your card is supported. When looking at things being supported in linux, you have to know what "chipset" your card is using, that is very most important piece of information.

With respect to your Nvidia video card the main reason why it sometimes gives you trouble is because the company has closed drivers meaning they don't allow open source programmers look at the source code or contribute in the building of the drivers, which makes it harder to deal with compared to other drivers which would sometimes work out of the box in some linux distributions. I would suggest you look in www.google.com/linux or in www.tldp.org for how to's in getting your nvidia card working with 3d acceleration. Also, a very good place is the freenode irc channel "nvidia" were there are a lot of people who can help you specifically with getting your nvidia card working on linux.

Last but not least is just to remind you, that although linux may not seem easy at first compared to linux, you must remember how hard it was the first time you used windows or did things like installing drivers or reinstalling the OS. The fact that something isn't easy doesn't mean that isn't as good as something that might be easy to do. Remember with power comes responsibility, that's why in linux you have to do a lot of reading to understand how things work. Linux will give you a lot of power and flexibility, but it comes with the price of spending time learning how things work.

Good luck,
pitupepito

 

[silverpig]

nVidia's soundstorm support is pure ass. There isn't a full hardware driver for the soundstorm chip, so the driver people use under alsa is a generic intel8x0 driver. spdif support works but you have to edit an alsa config file to make it work.

 

[Jeriko]

Originally posted by: silverpig
nVidia's soundstorm support is pure ass. There isn't a full hardware driver for the soundstorm chip, so the driver people use under alsa is a generic intel8x0 driver. spdif support works but you have to edit an alsa config file to make it work.

On your clue, I was able to find the following. One message is froma poster who has exactly my system:

At http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/doc-php/template.php?module=intel8x0 I have found the following information:

I have been able to get AC3 / DTS output via the digital SPDIF on my
system with this chipset. This means I can playback DVD's using xine
with full Dolby Digital 5.1 sound.

I have a Shuttle SN41G2 system running Gentoo Linux. The motherboard
has an nforce 2 chipset and an intel8xO sound chip. I have also
purchased the extra spdif add-on giving 4 digital connections

(1 optical in, 1 optical out, 1 coax in and 1 coax out). I am running
with CVS alsa-driver and CVS alsa-libs, and have the following
.asoundrc (based on the one above by Lars G). There is one small
change to the pcm value in the slave device.

pcm.nforce-hw {
type hw
card 0
}

pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "nforce"
}

#0,0 is analog out (i.e. headphone socket on the shuttle), and 0,1 is
#spdif out.

pcm.nforce {
type dmix
ipc_key 1234
slave {
pcm "hw:0,1"
period_time 0
period_size 1024
buffer_size 4096
rate 44100
}
}

ctl.nforce-hw {
type hw
card 0
}

Everything else is as per the intel8xO sound card matrix.

HINTS
-----
o) KDE
By default KDE uses artsd to mix sounds, but since we are using the
dmix plugin this is no longer necessery. artsd holds the device in
such a way that it blocks any other programs from generating sound
output (unless they have an artsd plugin) which causes programs like
xmms, xine and even alsaplayer to just hang.

With the above .asoundrc, you can go into KDE, load the control panel
and turn off artsd and all sounds will work fine.

o) Noise / pops and interferance with aplay and KDE.
I found that with this .asoundrc I was getting annoying pops and
spikes at the end of sound clips when played with aplay (KDE uses
aplay to play sound clips such as the login / logout wav files). The
problem appeared to be with the CVS alsa-utils. I de-installed those
and then installed older ones (I used emerge in Gentoo which I think
loads version 9.2)

And specifically from above:

By default KDE uses artsd to mix sounds, but since we are using the
dmix plugin this is no longer necessery. artsd holds the device in
such a way that it blocks any other programs from generating sound
output (unless they have an artsd plugin) which causes programs like
xmms, xine and even alsaplayer to just hang.

^^ I couldn't install this plugin if my life depended on it at this point, having gone to the site, and I don't even know if I need it.

#/etc/asound.conf start:

^^ This seemsto be the file they're editting, but Ido not have ths file.

The SP/DIF support in this chipset currently requires a CVS version
of ALSA.

Why this is so is not up to me to answer, but the required device
under /dev/alsa is not created with the 'release' drivers and the
mixer is unable to see the SPDIF out controls as well.

I'm not sure if this has any relevance.

Could someone perhaps translate?

 

[drag]

Xine should support most everything. It just needs the codecs to be copied to the correct directory.

On my system Xine can play realplayer files/streams, wma files, dvds and so on a so forth. For dvd's you usually have to install libdvdcss libraries for breaking the encryption most companies put on DVD's.

These codecs and libdvdcss are in a legal gray area, so main distros like Suse and Fedora can't supply them for you.

as for different codecs, find the respective windows DLL files and copy them to /usr/lib/win32 (usually)



CVS = Concurrent versioning system.

It's a system designed for programmers to share code with one another. Different versioning and tracking of changes made in files so that multiple people can work on multiple parts of a program at once and allow them to aviod stepping on each other's toes, for the most part.

Since it's open source they allow users to download the code that they are actively working on, although they are not going to garrentee it's stability or functionality and will probably ignore you if you want lots and lots of help getting it working.

I've used stuff like that before (well for my mpeg2 card for instance), but it's risky business because your dealing with code that interacts directly with the kernel, and if that crashes so probably will your machine.