Update 25 Sep 2008: Lennart Poettering has posted A Guide Through The Linux Sound API Jungle. This document covers which ALSA functions are safe to use with a sound server such as PulseAudio.
Point of order: my old blog on linuxworld.com, where I used to work, is no more. You can read this continuing version of my personal one here at http://zgp.org/~dmarti/index.rss. Check your feed readers.
I converted this site, by the way. It's now powered by Ikiwiki and Git. Yes, I'm going to put comments on here, but only after I have a couple of anti-spam measures figured out. (No, not CAPTCHAs or Akismet. New stuff. And I'm betting that this site's Google Juice isn't a big enough target to justify writing spamware to beat it.)
The entry
on quotation marks is now fixed. I put that
up there to test that I had the UTF-8 settings
fixed on the web server, and it's working now.
In .httpd.conf:
AddCharset UTF-8 .html
If you have a clean install of up-to-date Free stuff, or even if your proprietary web software vendor was conscientious over the past few years, you're good. Unfortunately, a big chunk of the HTML being written now has to pass through something at some level that doesn't get UTF-8. And even if the body copy passes through the software fine, if you call a story something like...
Legacy Vendors’s UTF-8 Support “Moronic”
you're likely to see a mangled <title>.
So I'm willing to go all UTF-8 here, since I can change anything on the system to get it working, but that doesn't mean everyone else should.
I wrote a few pieces for LWN about the Linux Plumbers Conference.
Lennart Poettering writes, "I must really say though that calling that article 'It's a mess' and highlighting my critical comments on the situation this way makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, though. Sure, we have some issues to fix and it's the words I chose at the conference -- but it's only part of the story. Things are not really all that bad, and we have enough good stuff to focus on."
I hope this doesn't train Lennart to start talking like a politician or a software marketing weenie.
I woudn't have used the "mess" quote unless there was enough other messy-sounding stuff in the miniconference to justify it. The current problem is the same as what Mike Melanson from Adobe wrote, in "Welcome To The Jungle" last year. There is no document that you can hand to an application developer and say: if you do it that way, your app will play on Linux. There is a way to do it, as Lennart pointed out. Write to the PulseAudio-safe subset of the ALSA library API. Then the distribution can configure the library to play through PulseAudio, or possibly dmix, and you're good. Anyway, see the LWN story and discussion. It looks like LSB could be a big help here. (Non-subscribers who are working on audio, mail me and I'll send you a link.)