PCMCIA Audio Support In NetBSD

jmcneill writes: "NetBSD is now the first non-MS operating system to support PCMCIA audio adapters. A driver was added to the tree today to support the EigerLabs PCMCIA Audio Adapter. See the announcement for more details."

Good Job !

[SirGeek]

Now it will get ported into FreeBSD (my preferred BSD) and prolly OpenBSD.

Nice to have native choices other than Open Sound [opensound.com] although 20 bucks isn't that much to spend.

Unfortunately...

[edhall]

The EigerLabs PCMCIA Audio Adapter has been discontinued. Also, the claim that this is the first non-MS OS to support PCMCIA sound is incorrect; there is a Linux driver for the CAC Bullet II, which is a PCMCIA DSP/sound card (an impractically expensive one at about $700 unless you really need its DSP) -- although it may well be discontinued also. (I'm a BSD fan, but I believe in giving credit where it's due.)

EigerLabs' decision to discontinue their sound card is unfortunate, but I'm sure that now that a PCMCIA sound driver exists, it will be extended to work with other cards. There's a need for such things; even though almost all laptops have onboard sound, and many do a passible job of sound output, most are far too (electrically) noisy for useful sound input other than speech -- if they support input at all.

-Ed

Re:Unfortunately...

[jmcneill]

The CAC Bullet II driver hasn't been updated for any kernel version over 2.0.x (according to Mobilix.org [mobilix.org]), and was never shipped with the official kernel.

Re:Unfortunately...

[edhall]

Yep. My guess is that maybe three people in the whole world ever used that card with Linux. Unfortunately, the places I checked for the EigerLabs card didn't have it any more, so unless there are a lot of NetBSD folks who have the card already or have better luck than I did finding it, this driver won't get much more use than that.

Still, this announcement gives me hope that PCMCIA sound will become feasible on free Unices sometime soon. I'd love to be able to do field recordings with a laptop... without an MS OS.

-Ed

Re:Unfortunately...

[GoatPigSheep]

Apple's laptops are good alternatives for portable music uses

Code theft

[mr]

The only way it is 'theft' is if you do not honnor the copyright. Given the lack of a core team across the 190+ linux distro market, someone will 'steal' code.

At least with the BSD license, sharing is not mandated. So when someone shares back, you know it was because they wanted to share, not because they are forced to share.

cool!

[zentex]

Now I can have "The Microsoft Sound" (from WIN95) Play after I login :-)