Ubuntu 20.04: No sound

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 20 May 2020 at 14:25, Ralf Mardorf via ubuntu-users
<ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> Actually computers already existed before the IBM/Microsoft deal. CP/M
> and even MS DOS were no operating systems in the sense of a real
> operating system

I know. I worked with them professionally for the first few years of
my career, in the late 1980s. Yes, I am _that_ old.

But you know what? I don't think I ever saw a CP/M system with
upgradable firmware.

> , but for some domains a real operating system is
> required, hence *nix operating systems are made for computer
> architectures, so they have got native platforms, too.

Lots of proprietary Unix™ variants had native platforms. Even OS/2
arguably had a "native" platform: the IBM PS/2 range.

But Linux? Not so much.

> Updating a basic IO system originally required to replace a ROM or
> EPROM, when soldering and burning EPROMS wasn't required anymore,

Even EPROMs came later, in my experience.

ROMs were real ROMs in the 1970s & 1980s, soldered or socketed, and an
upgrade meant replacing the physical chips. In CP/M, the BIOS was
software, on the floppy diskette.

Very few vendors made ROM upgrades available. Acorn did, but not
Sinclair, Amstrad, Commodore, Atari etc. In the USA, Apple might have
but nobody I knew was rich enough to afford Apple home computers.

> almost all computers allowed to update the BIOS, by the BIOS itself,
> without the need to run DOS or Windows.

I never ever saw that in the DOS or Win9x era, AFAICR. Not until the
21st century.

> Yes, some vendors still rely on deals, hence the OP's computer was sold
> with Windows pre installed. If you jailbreak a phone or mount the
> machine of a Porsche into a Trabant you are on your own. If you buy
> hardware by taking care that it has got no operating system pre
> installed, you typically could assume that updating the BIOS doesn't
> require DOS or Windows.

Virtually all pre-built PCs come with Windows, because of Microsoft's
restrictive and anti-competitive contract practices... but that's not
what I am referring to.

Aside from Chromebooks, which don't have standard firmware anyway, I
don't think any general-purpose x86 computer has Linux as its sole
native OS. Even the tiny selection of new PCs available with Linux
from Dell or System76 or whatever are repurposed Windows models.

> Be careful with comparing UNIX or POSIX operating systems, such as BSD
> with Linux. Linux does apply to no standard and even don't has got its
> own standard! I'm aware of the Linux standard base,
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base , an absolutely
> fruitless attempt of a standard. While systemd supports LSB init
> scripts, it probably is more used to break the Linux standard base and
> this example is just the tip of the iceberg. There are nix* standards
> other operating systems such as BSD fulfil and there always were
> hardware vendors taking care about standardised operating systems.

I am not sure this is relevant, TBH.

-- 
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