ALSA:Community Portal

From the ALSA wiki

Welcome to the Community Portal of the ALSA wiki. On this page, general things and major changes are being discussed. Any comments are appriciated! If you want to help, pick one of the points on the todo list below or just go ahead and change what you think that needs improvement. Maybe it's a good idea to read Help:Editing first.

Contents 1 Todo 2 Other discussion pages 3 Discussion 3.1 2007-02-11 - Reorganizing the wiki 3.2 2007-01-19 - Navigation bar 3.3 2006-01-02 3.4 2005-12-27

Todo

• ALSA:General_disclaimer and ALSA:Copyrights need to be created!

  Both are default pages of the wiki software and links to them appear everytime a page is edited. See ALSA_talk:Copyrights for details.

• Currently only 6 of 24 ALSA plugins have their own page. All of these pages need to be created, even if its only one tiny example with explanation.
• The FAQs need to be reorganized. At the moment, the page consist rather of rarely asked questions instead of frequent ones. Also, some questions are unanswered. See Talk:FAQ for details.
• The following articles need work:
  • ALSA does not explain what ALSA really is, which is a crucial information for someone who has to do with it!
  • Bug tracking should explain better how and especially when to use the bug tracking system
• Reorganize the front page main index, perhaps the sections should relate to categories, these sections/categories should have links in the LHS menu area so they are instantly available from all pages
• Create a 1 to 1 driver category with drivers in sync with the current ALSA release, at least half the drivers would have pages that already exist with some useful info, at least stubs for the rest

Other discussion pages

• There is a discussion page for every article in the Talk: namespace. Just take the articles name and prepend Talk:. E.g. the discussion page of the article FAQ ist Talk:FAQ. Changes to a certain article should be discussed in its discussion page.

• Although these changes are quite important, the discussion about how to change the Main Page have been hold in Talk:Main_Page:Proposed and AlternativeTOC. Future discussions on that topic should be hold here.

• The main discussion page of old wiki has been hold in the ThisWiki page. Please don't use this page anymore, so general discussions are concentrated here.

Discussion

If you want to start a new discussion, create a new subheading with the current date and the subject (like this: === yyyy-mm-dd - Subject)===). Then start your post with ~~~~: which will be replaced with your username and the current date (like this: Ingomueller.net 07:02, 12 February 2007 (EST)). Indent follow-ups with one more leading colon than the post you are replying to (like this :~~~~:). Just look on what other people did or read Help:Discussion.

2007-02-11 - Reorganizing the wiki

Ingomueller.net 09:59, 12 February 2007 (EST): Since I started my work on this wiki, I'm thinking about a general work over. Discussions have been led in various places, that I'm going to list here:

• There are two proposals of new main pages which would be guide of the new structure of the wiki:
  • Main_Page:Proposed and its discussion page
  • AlternativeTOC
• Some statements on the Talk:Main_Page site
• My kind of wiki diary

I like the points markc and Saul made on Talk:Main_Page:Proposed a lot! But want to discuss the changes first and - if anyhow possible - not do everything alone.

markc 13:27, 20 February 2007 (EST): It's only a matter of setting up an alternate test page to try some ideas out on and if the changes make sense then put them in place on the real page. If that move then proves to be... awkward, then we can obviously back out to an earlier version easily. In other words, feel free to try something out. I think seeking a better new Main Page, and overall site layout, is more important than strictly maintaining the current old setup (within the constraints of trying to maintain as many old wiki links pointing to the equiv new one). The main aspect I feel would be better is basically to have the front page links being to sections (categories) which then links to the real pages of into. Then if the Main Page does not change much (because it doesn't have links to individual pages) then I could copy the Main Page to an index.html file (a static page) which would load faster. I also think the main feature of the site should be a complete list of all the drivers with any unique info relevant to each driver. The hardest part for a newbie is to figure out stuff like something called the "emu10k1" driver is meant for Creative SBlive audio cards, and then how to get the most out of that driver (hence the card they are using). When an experienced user gets a new card, or forgets the nuances of their current card, then they should be able to easily get that info again, perhaps by having their cards main intro page bookmarked etc. How to compile and install the drivers, and ALSA and it's libs, should be buried in the developers (Advanced?) section as 99% of folks (especially newbies) these days have ALSA and drivers already pre-installed. Utilities and application info is secondary. Eventually a real developers doc section would be great but that will be like bleeding blood from a stone. Just some thoughts.

Ingomueller.net 09:09, 21 February 2007 (EST): I justed finished my try for the main page. Now we have 5 versions to pick from (including the current one). What I tried to do is (1) seperate in new user and advanced user sections, (2) make available important pages with few clicks (19 of the 25 most popular pages are accessible directly), (3) avoid too long explanations (like on the current version) but still have the possibility to have small note on each category, (4) use the existing categories and pages as much as possible to keep changes minimal, (5) keep it short to avoid scrolling, (6) probably more I can't think of right now. The colors are just bad hackery for the moment. I wanted to have to boxes of equal size but didn't want to bother about such technical stuff for the moment. I also thought about adding icons like on the gentoo wiki.

What I think we should do now is analyze the different proposals and merge the best things together. Once we are happy with the result, we may have to reorganize the categories (like my new category "Configuration") or create new articles (like the hardware matrix in your proposal). And when this is more or less done, just like you said, we can replace the main page with our new one.

2007-01-19 - Navigation bar

Ingomueller.net 01:59, 19 January 2007 (EST): I just stumbled upon a wiki, which extended the navigation bar on the left. I think that's good idea, that could be implemented in this wiki, too, once it is refactored, there is a new index or similar. See it at http://help.fonality.com/index.php/Main_Page. It's realised by changing the system message "sidebar".

2006-01-02

Saul 10:39, 2 January 2006 (EST): Is this wiki eventually going to have pages for all of the API functions? Personally, I would like to see this. I know that it would be a lot of duplication of effort (not to mention a lot of effort) but the API descriptions of the ALSA project fall far short of being informative (IMO) and it would be nice to have the shared experiences of other programmers on how to access API functions. It also would seem to be a good way of narrowing down bugs in ALSA if the problem can be discussed on a specific functions "Talk:" page, as opposed to generating a RAQ (Rarely Asked Question) article. (Tutorials might be easier to write if they could just link to the appropriate function/structure article.)

I wouldn't mind creating API articles (or editing/commenting on existing ones) as I learn to use the function and data structures in my programming but am wondering if that is one of the long-term goals of this wiki.

markc 07:49, 3 January 2006 (EST): I don't see why all the API functions could not be included, as long as someone is interested enough to at least seed the area well enough to establish it as something more than just an idea. So yes, please go ahead and start with a developers section that could eventually become a complete API reference. (Note: this is not a Talk page so I am following on with a discussion rather than top posting.)

[[User::Vadiim|vadiim]] I believe on API documentation front there is URGENT need of good tutorial on ALSA Mixer programming, it seems that for the moment there is maybe 2 or 3 persons in the whol world who REALLY understand this stuff.So most of people who need to do some simple thing as playback volume control fall back to use OSS emulation for this...

Saul 01:10, 12 January 2006 (EST): I agree Vadiim. I have spent the last few days reading up on Dmix and still don't know if there is a way to call it directly from an app; guess I will have to use trial and error (again).

PS: you can have your Name and the Date automatically inserted by typing four tildes in a row ("~~~~").

2005-12-27

Saul 18:04, 27 December 2005 (EST): Some advice to this Wiki's administrator(s): the Special:Recent changes page should be the "bookmark" that you use when visiting the wiki (you deleted a lot more than just edits to the Main Page when you re-installed the database).

markc 01:00, 28 December 2005 (EST): Please, by all means, help us make this wiki work as well as it can, any operational advice most welcome. As far as Special:Recent changes is concerned, I'm not sure what you mean (we are WikiMedia novices) but perhaps you meant Special:Recentchanges (with no separating space) ?

Saul 04:47, 28 December 2005 (EST): Yes, I meant Recentchanges (I am not sure why my erroneous spelling is not red). If you visit the Special:Recentchanges page you will gain a much better idea of what has been contributed than just going to the Main Page.

I had created a few pages on the 24th that apparently were deleted. As you might imagine, I am somewhat discouraged by this, although I blame myself for not saving them locally. If you somehow have a way of retrieving a page called "Asynchronous Playback (Howto)", it represents over two hours of editing and I should not like to have to repeat that.

markc 05:22, 28 December 2005 (EST): Oh wow, I apologize for that. There is no backup as I could not even see or use the database after I made some changes (using non-standard Debian packages) so the shortest path was to do a complete reinstall of the MediaWiki database itself. Please let me know the URL of the original page(s), and where it/they should go, and I will put in some time on (re)marking it/them up myself.

And for RecentChanges, are you suggesting that it should become the front page for the whole site ? Either way, do you know how I would force that the site to start with a different page other than (it seems) the default Main_Page ? FWIW I just use the RSS feed on RecentChanges in akregator to alert me of any changes.

Saul 06:08, 28 December 2005 (EST): Regarding "RecentChanges", I am not suggesting changing the Main Page and pretty much withdraw my suggestion. I have been the manager of a small wiki for about ten months now and have found that for administrators the recent changes is the most important page (especially once the Viagra and "enlargement" spambots attack). It also might be a good idea to edit a member's "User" page once you are confident that they are "legit". If the User page exists (it doesn't matter what is on it) then the user's name will appear in blue on the Recent Changes page. When an admin sees a red user name, he will know that he should check that edit to assure that it isn't a spambot or other malicious editor.

Regarding these discussion pages, I instructed in the Help:Discussion article that comments be placed in reverse order. I personally prefer that they just be appended at the end (like this page) but was basing my instruction on the previous ALSA wiki. You should probably decided which way you would like to do this. :-)

markc 06:32, 28 December 2005 (EST): BrickFilms looks like a very useful site, I'll have to spend some time their. You know a lot more about how MediaWiki works than I do so please feel free to make any suggestions.

So do you find that even with enforced user registration for edits that spam bots are still a problem ?

I'll make a point of dropping a simple welcome message into new users home pages.

And as you can see I reversed the initial order of this page to match your Help:Discussion article :-) I'm a bit concerned about how long these Talk pages might get and how to manage them so with the latest addition at the top of the page then, for both viewing and dealing with the editable textarea, there is minimal scrolling involved. Let's try it on this page and see how it works.

I feel like such a novice with this software, it's all so new to me, but I must admit... quite a nice shiny brand new toy to play with. Yeah right, so what else do I do on Xmas day... go mess it up and have to manually reinstall the database! At least I have it working in a nice multi-hosting mode (multiple sites off a single codebase) and nice short URLs like the old Wiki site.

Ingomueller.net 07:10, 12 February 2007 (EST): I just changed the order of the thread again, because I think this style of posting is more comfortable for users who join the discussion later (they can read the thread in the same order as it has been written). If I'm still happy with this style, I'll change the Help:Discussion page appropriately.