Can someone please tell me if this code is safe?

[Infohawk]

I have an aureal soundcard. On sourceforge, there is an aureal project. There are CVS drivers. People, including me, have been having trouble with the drivers and redhat 8.0 and gcc 3.2. Anyway, a guy came along and posted his own drivers here:

http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=741013&forum_id=25250

The driver is at http://ssingh.150m.com/

Can I trust this code? I am a linux newbie and I don't know how to read code. I was wondering if someone could unpack the code and tell me if it's legit...

Why couldn't he/she just have uploaded the code to CVS?

I wouldn't want to install some trojan on my system.

I trust the aureal cvs drivers but in this case I don't know where the drivers are coming from and who the author is...

Thanks

[furrycat]

You can't "just upload" code to CVS. Only developers with permission to commit code to the tree can submit code. If the chap in question hasn't ever submitted patches to the developers before, he won't get commit access.

Of course there's no real reason to trust the people who start the aureal project any more than this guy, since anyone can start a project on Sourceforge. However it's usually safe to assume that someone there will have checked out the drivers the guy posted and since no-one's complained yet, they're probably safe.

However you risk nothing by sticking with the existing code, which always worked for me (don't have my Aureal card in any machines now).

[Infohawk]

thanks for the reply.

... I would definitely trust the fact that nobody complained EXCEPT they've only been up a couple days and nobody's really posted about them.

I realize I'm being paranoid but 'better safe than sorry'.