Ubuntu
alsa-driver package

Why does Ubuntu ALSA lag Fedora ALSA

Asked by David Favor

A few days after ALSA-1.0.21 appeared in the wild, it was available in Fedora 10, 11 & 12.

Ubuntu now has kernel 2.6.31-10 and ALSA-1.0.20 instead of 1.0.21 which means many driver fixes are missing.

By no means am I a Debian package expert and it appears the primary difference between Ubuntu & Fedora which allows Fedora to easily update ALSA is this.

In Fedora alsa-driver is a separate package and in Ubuntu the drivers are rolled into the kernel.

Hopefully someday Ubuntu ALSA can be rearranged so new version of ALSA can be easily deployed as packages, rather than people installing them onto systems outside the package manager.

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Tom
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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

Alsa is a package in ubuntu also, just that the packages that provide Alsa right now are a little behine but there is nothing stopping you finding a PPA with the newer version on and installing from that.

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Best Tom (tom6) said : 		#2

Fedora is made to be cutting edge and highly experimental. You can expect it to try new and unusual things that may get picked up on by other distros sometime later. However it is not noted for it's stability and you may often find Fedora falls over because of it's eagerness to explore new ideas that don't always work outside the testing lab. Ubuntu aims at a lot more stability and a bit less experimental strangeness. This makes Ubuntu much more ideal for people who just want to migrate from Windows without too much trouble - which is quite ground-breaking for linux.

I hope this helps!
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

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David Favor (davidfavor) said : 		#3

Thanks Tom, that solved my question.