Vitaliy Margolen wrote:
I have noticed significant increase in crashes and lockups in winecfg's audio page. Could we do something about that before the next release?
I agree with you but can you be more specific?
There is a bug in arts itself which causes arts to crash. I believe this has been fixed in the latest arts libraries.
There can be a short hang in the esd driver if esd in not configured properly.
One person reported a computer lockup with OSS but that is probably a kernel driver bug.
Winecfg is now really using all compiled in audio drivers to do hardware probing of all available hardware. OSS with a real OSS kernel driver (not ALSA emulated OSS) is the only really stable setup now. All the sound drivers need to be looked at more closely now so they either work properly on a wide range of hardware or fail gracefully on misconfigured or marginal setups.
This makes it hard for any first timer to configure wine. Especially knowing that most people will have to change hardware acceleration to "emulation" and they will not be able to do so.
This is a good example of a workaround for a broken driver, soundcard, or driver/soundcard configuration. The same is also true for Windows where this same workaround works the same way there for broken drivers.
Contrary to popular belief, sound can work very well in wine and even work better than on Windows but only with some hardware and with some versions of linux. In general, both wine and the sound systems that it uses have a long way to go before they will work well for everyone out of the box. Even Windows has problems doing sound well for everyone out of the box.