[prey] installing prey

[Ryan C. Gordon]

> derivate based on Elyssa if that matters.  Just a wild guess: perhaps 
> dsp can be considered the lowest common denominator, since /dev/dsp 
> should be present on all (or most at least) Linux systems?

It tends to be present, but lots of times, it's a fake thing, like a 
wrapper script that catches open() calls to /dev/dsp and pipes them to 
something else, like PulseAudio or ALSA...and usually poorly. Even 
ALSA's in-kernel /dev/dsp emulation can produce bad results where 
talking to the same hardware directly through ALSA works...which is 
somewhat baffling to me. More baffling: sometimes talking to the 
/dev/dsp emulation works better than talking to the hardware through ALSA.

The fundamental problem is there are two hardware APIs for audio in 
Linux, several daemons sitting on top of them, and many emulation layers 
between them. All of them are buggy, all of them work in some machines 
and not others...and chances are they'll be replaced by another standard 
with the same problem sooner than later, adding to the support matrix.

I think it's nice that SDL lets you pick the one that happens to work 
well on your system, since we simply can't tell that one definitely will 
or will not work...but the bottom line is that it's an annoying scenario 
at best, from both a product standpoint and an engineering one.

I don't really trust the people that decided esd was a good idea to ever 
get this right, though, and they're the ones that control the Linux 
desktop experience.

--ryan.