A Journal Comes To systemd

[reflexing]

Another pile of rubbish we don't need that will take 5 years to even work ... The document's justifications are laughable as well, they read like they're put together by someone who is trying to prove their point by using made up justifications that don't match reality (i.e. they don't know what they're talking about).

Pulse audio and network manager all over again. 2 particularly egregious examples of poorly written software foisted upon unwilling users with dubious potential use-cases of limited utility. Despite claims to the contrary these things still do not work reliably, and are not smartly designed or well put together. Although it sounds like the groupies are out in force here trying to beat people into submission.

Anyone would think they were intentionally trying to undermine gnu/linux as a serious platform.

It isn't funny anymore. Go bitching somewhere else.

[DaemonFC]

It isn't funny anymore. Go bitching somewhere else.

You got here first.

The stupidity burns sometimes with these people, doesn't it?

[curaga]

And the sad thing is, he's right. I now wait for the aforementioned groupies to dismiss me too.

[curaga]

notzed that is. Editing still broken in this forum.

[XorEaxEax]

The document's justifications are laughable as well, they read like they're put together by someone who is trying to prove their point by using made up justifications that don't match reality

Which are the points that don't match what you percieve as reality? Reality has a tendency to be very subjective.

2 particularly egregious examples of poorly written software foisted upon unwilling users

Really? Foistered upon? I'm not running Pulse audio nor network manager, noone has foisted them upon me. If I would use them it would be of my own free will.

As for this consolidation and arguable enhancement of syslog into systemd, why would I mind as long as I have the ability to choose to use it or not, which I have (syslog won't magically disappear). Just like the existance of systemd doesn't prevent me from using init, etc.

[DaemonFC]

Which are the points that don't match what you percieve as reality? Reality has a tendency to be very subjective.


Really? Foistered upon? I'm not running Pulse audio nor network manager, noone has foisted them upon me. If I would use them it would be of my own free will.

As for this consolidation and arguable enhancement of syslog into systemd, why would I mind as long as I have the ability to choose to use it or not, which I have (syslog won't magically disappear). Just like the existance of systemd doesn't prevent me from using init, etc.

Pulseaudio is only "foisted" on you if you're using Ubuntu iirc.

systemd is only "foisted" on you if you don't now how to disable it and pull in upstart or sysvinit, I don't know why you want a system that boots half as fast and where init loses track of its children a lot.

Or you could just use distributions that avoid both of them, there are many.

[Hamish Wilson]

Typical "It's not bugging someone in this particular way so it doesn't get fixed until it does". People that FUD Pulseaudio probably last used it in 2008 or something when Ubuntu started shipping their badly broken version of an already alpha quality (at the time) Pulseaudio server.

If they try it again on a modern Fedora or *buntu, they will see it's not bad and when it does fail it's usually because of some broken shit like VLC. Boo hoo. VLC is bad bad bad. Good thing there are options...

Edit, if you need VLC to work, you can set Pulseaudio to use old fashioned interrupt timing, which will cause the entire system to use more power from all the extra wakeup events, but it hides VLC's bugs pretty well. VLC is designed for Windows XP or FreeBSD style sound systems, not ones that work in modern operating systems like Linux + ALSA + Pulseaudio, or even god forbid Mac OS X with CoreAudio. (Yes, I just said OS X does something right. Shock!)

Strange, I have never encountered any problems with VLC and PulseAudio and I have been using both since 2008. VLC has become pretty much my gold standard of media players on whatever platform I am on. My only real criticism is that it will refuse to run as root, which may be thought of as an admirable move to force proper use of it, but gets in the way in certain use cases. And it often misjudges the length of a file when it gives its estimates, not that this is that important. Other than that, it has been smooth sailing.

[DaemonFC]

Strange, I have never encountered any problems with VLC and PulseAudio and I have been using both since 2008. VLC has become pretty much my gold standard of media players on whatever platform I am on. My only real criticism is that it will refuse to run as root, which may be thought of as an admirable move to force proper use of it, but gets in the way in certain use cases. And it often misjudges the length of a file when it gives its estimates, not that this is that important. Other than that, it has been smooth sailing.

Try it on just about anything that uses the High Definition Audio specification. (Which is most motherboard audio on PCs and PC laptops and even a lot of Apple PCs.)

Dropouts.

Pops.

Clicks.

Seek delay of roughly 2 seconds.

It is basically unusable, and I ditched it a while back. Considering it's the only thing left that gives me a lot of grief, I'm thinking it's a VLC problem. There was a time, 2, 3, 4 years back where you could blame Pulseaudio or your ALSA driver more than often, but that is past and now it is seems more likely to me that VLC is misbehaving somewhere along the way. No, I don't care enough about it to try to find out, I toggled all the options in VLC that seemed like they might do something and none of them did. I found I have to set Pulseaudio to operate in "Windows XP/FreeBSD"-like, Linux circa 2007, interrupt mode to get the damned thing to work and it's just not worth that to me. There's plenty of other media engines that work a lot better.

We're just talking technical problems with VLC here, the whole "promoting nonfree and encumbered codecs without giving a damn because it only really affects Americans" is another thing entirely, but I should mention it as another reason why I don't use VLC. (There's a difference between supporting something that is restricted by law, and tap dancing around and telling your users they should use it instead of something free and open source and unencumbered. Their x264 patent violation issue is something I can easily point to where they tell you to use it and spread FUD and nonsense about Theora and VP8).

[Teho]

It is basically unusable, and I ditched it a while back. Considering it's the only thing left that gives me a lot of grief, I'm thinking it's a VLC problem. There was a time, 2, 3, 4 years back where you could blame Pulseaudio or your ALSA driver more than often, but that is past and now it is seems more likely to me that VLC is misbehaving somewhere along the way. No, I don't care enough about it to try to find out,
.

The problems with VLC and Pulseaudio are fixed in VLC 1.1.12 and newer.

The PulseAudio output plug-in was more-or-less rewritten from scratch, as it suffered from a fatal by-design bug. It now has proper time synchronization (backported in VLC 1.1.12).

On the features side, volume management is integrated with PulseAudio, audio device selection was added. With PulseAudio version 1.0, VLC will now negotiate as was S/PDIF digital passthrough automatically (backported in VLC 1.1.12 too).

Native support for PulseAudio input (i.e. source output) is now integrated. The list of available sources is also included in the audio capture panel of the playlist where available.
Besides recording from audio input devices, the native PulseAudio input can also record "monitors". In other words, you can now record the sound that is generated by running applications (without analog whole).

http://www.remlab.net/op/vlc-1.2-linux.shtml

[phred14]

So now I have to ask a question about pulseaudio after reading this thread.

I saw all of the horror stories about pulseaudio years back, and with a little googling learned to use dmix. I've been pretty happy since then. But I do tend to be concerned about power, if only from an efficiency/waste point of view, and from this thread it looks like I'd be better off moving to pulseaudio. True?

Side note... I have systemd set up on 2 systems, but other than a little experimentation, haven't been using it. I run Gentoo, and while they have some support for systemd, it's not system-wide. I've done a little shopping here and there, getting bits and pieces outside of portage, but I haven't managed to make a smoothly running system. I'll admit I haven't spent a lot of time on it, but with limited time I put it into things I can get results in that limited time. Maybe later, maybe when portage gets a "systemd" USE flag.

As for the logger, I'm fearful of anything that can't be fixed with a text-mode editor on a rescue disk.