Hi Piotrek, Thanks for being so active in trying to improve ALSA support. I've written a couple of these drivers too but someone better than me should do this ;) especially if ESI is only willing to discuss this matter with one developer. Besides, I don't fancy paying £70 for the opportunity. The people at ESI will know what they need to provide: A full datasheet containing things like IO port layout, register descriptions and commands. Source code for current Windows drivers would be helpful but not essential.
If the card needs firmware, then we'll need that too. It's also not essential that the source code for the firmware is provided but I think that's probably preferred as well. In either case, ESI will need to give permission for the firmware to be distributed for it to be well supported by ALSA. Otherwise, users will be responsible for extracting the firmware from their Windows drivers, and that's just not nice.
Like I said, ESI will know will they need to provide: that is to say all the information they gave to their programmers to let them create the current drivers for this device.
It is clear by the ESI response that they are willing to release the information on the provision that a good driver will be produced thereby making them look good. That is fair enough. I would suggest to ESI, however, that to truly create the maximum possibility of this happening, they could allow the datasheet to be held on the ALSA server. By doing this, the relevant information would be available to any developer who wanted to create the driver or make further improvements. You can point them to the address below if they don't think that sounds like something a sane company would do.
http://ftp.mj2.org/pub/alsa/datasheets/
Anyway, good luck and my advice would be to try and get the info first and find a developer later. I don't know if ESI will do that though. There will always be people, floating around, who will code this up, but there's no guaranty that the company will always be as happy and friendly as they were to you :)
Ash
----- Original Message ----- From: Piotrek oponek@gmail.com To: "Adrian McMenamin" adrianmcmenamin@gmail.com Subject: Re: [alsa-devel] ESI MAYA44 PCI - ESI wants to collaborate! Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2007 22:53:53 +0200
2007/8/20, Adrian McMenamin adrianmcmenamin@gmail.com:
On 20/08/07, Takashi Iwai tiwai@suse.de wrote:
At Sat, 18 Aug 2007 09:28:34 +0200, Piotrek wrote:
Referring to the lack of the official ALSA support of ESI MAYA44PCI
(in fact, the card does not work) I would like to ask I there are any
plans
to get this card working with ALSA? I would be thankful to be able to
run my
soundcard properly under Linux. There are also a lot of people that
would
appreciate your work and are waiting for maya44 pci drivers for linux: http://www.esiforum.com/show.asp?db=esi&t=esi1&mode=3&msg=793 I wrote a letter to the UK ESI SUPPORT asking if they were going
to
write drivers for their products for Linux systems as well. There is a reply:
" Dear Piotr
ESI do not provide and have no plans for Linux drivers for our
products
However ESI are happy to provide /share information to an Individual developer within the Linux community That is able and capable to develope drivers and wishes to develope drivers
Regards UK Support ESI Auditechnik "
It means that ESI will collaborate with developers who would like to
write
such driver and share the documentation.
Again the question: Are there any plans to make ESI MAYA44 PCI card
working
with ALSA?
AFAIK, no plan. We don't have this hardware for developing.
I have no idea what this card is like, but if they would be prepared to send me one, I'd be happy to take the project on. I've written one alsa driver - that will shortly be in the stable kernel - so can point to that.
Of course, other developers will probably be able to do the job at a greater speed - but I would be happy to take it on as a pro bono project.
I am in the UK.
Thank you all for your replies. I think we should wait a while for theresponse of the rest of the ALSA dev team and then we would be able to choose the best person for this quest and decide what to do with it together. However, we need to specify what kind of information do we exactly need form ESI before we can start talking with them. Please write your suggestions. When we will know what we need from ESI we can start working on the drivers. I will be glad to be able to test your work.
-- Regards, Piotr Makowski _______________________________________________ Alsa-devel mailing list Alsa-devel@alsa-project.org http://mailman.alsa-project.org/mailman/listinfo/alsa-devel