Tag Archives: Linux

Linux, Network

Nvidia chipset audio now works

I’ve mentioned some of my audio problems on my Linux desktop before, and just the other day a friend suggested I should remove ‘esd’ (“apt-get remove esound”) as a means to fix one of my complaints and frequent annoyance (to get the sound working I had to kill esd first, then reload some drivers etc).

Recently my standard “trick” to get the sound brought to life had started to fail so I needed to get a new angle at this and boy, when I did a reboot now without esound installed my on-board sound works! And this without me doing any manual fiddling at all.

My motherboard’s sound info is displayed like this with lspci -v:

00:10.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP51 High Definition Audio (rev a2)
Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 81cb
Flags: bus master, 66MHz, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 22
Memory at fe024000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities: <access denied>
Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel
Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel

Open Source

They can’t do it so I won’t

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I listened to a recent episode of the Linux Action Show podcast the other day (s9e4), and in that episode the hosts Bryan and Chris really lost touch with reality.

First they started ranting about how “the Linux Desktop” needs an eco system for proprietary closed-source applications. They claimed that we cannot make good quality software entirely open source, that open source products and tools won’t be as good as proprietary ones. They apparently decided that the reason there’s a lack of some tools (notable example that these guys like to bring up: video editors) is that the creators of these tools don’t make them proprietary so that they can sell them.

Of course they had nothing to back up their claims but a few random guesses from their behalf.

Then, after that whole weird segment that seemed to be taken out of the blue, Bryan strikes with announcing how he intends to improve the linux desktop environment by start selling two proprietary tools to the world to show that it can be done and yada yada.

I mean, this guy has never done any particular open source or free software contribution of significance. It’s not like he even tried to contribute and make a living off of something related. They decided that others have tried and failed, so he shall not.

The two tools he now sell are two minor tools that will prove nothing about how proprietary programs can or cannot survive on the Linux market. If he fails to sell enough to make a living it just says nobody wanted his niche products well enough (or that he asks too much money for them), and in case he does get money from the products to make a decent living it is not a proof that he couldn’t have made a business case for an open source version.

These are two guys who tend to praise linux and open source and everything in episode after episode. In my view, the open source world has proven over and over again that it is capable of producing and making just about anything to a quality that matches and surpasses those of the proprietary closed-source world. These guys just happen to come to a conclusion that this concept doesn’t work exactly at the same time when one of them decides it’s time to sell proprietary linux software?

I say hypocrites.

cURL and libcurl, Linux

The hack will still be useful

Okay, in my recent blog entry about Flash 10 using native libcurl I got a bit side-tracked and mentioned something about distros confusing libcurl’s soname 3 and 4. This caused some comments in that post and some further activities behind the curtains, so let me spell out exactly what I mean:

The ABI for libcurl did change between soname 3 and 4, but the change was in a rather subtle area (FTP third party transfers, sometimes known as FXP) which is rarely used. It certainly will not hurt the Adobe Flash system.

I’m not against “the hack” (or perhaps “a hack” as there are several ways an ordinary system could provide work-arounds or fixes for this problem) per-se, I am mainly trying to fight the belief or misconception that the ABI break doesn’t exist.

Since Adobe doesn’t want to provide an updated package that links against a modern libcurl and refuses to provide multiple packages, distros of course need to address this dilemma.

I just want all to know that 3 != 4, even if the risk that it’ll cause problems is very slim.

Update: it seems Adobe will change this behavior in their next release and then try to load either 3 or 4.

Electronics, Open Source

Bright Mobile Open Source Future

There have been so many open source initiatives for mobile phones in recent years it’s not even funny (limo, openmoko, Android to name some of the possibly biggest ones). The amount of actual phones on the market using one of them have been very very limited. Apparently there are some Motorola phones running Linux and you can get the Linux-based Nokia N800 tablets but they’re not even phones!

Obviously something has happened in the market though. Perhaps all those initiatives have pushed the big ones into thinking in more open source ways. The most interesting part of today’s news about Nokia buying the entire Symbian is their stated intension to open source it. (they’ve even already chosen the Eclipse Public License for it). It’ll be intereseting to see if there’s any interesting synergies coming up from Nokia’s previous purchase of Trolltech.

Of course, even Symbian has but a small fraction of the entire phone market as they sold 18.5 millions units in Q1 2008. IDC says 291 million phones were sold in the world during Q1 2008, which thus should position Symbian on roughly 6% of the phones that are sold today in the world!

I’m also curious if this will mean that Nokia will use Symbian on a larger scale on their own phones, as currently they seem to use Symbian only on a very small portion of their high-end phones. With Nokia owning the whole thing, they might see a bigger motivation to consolidate their own use of operating systems.

Linux, Open Source, Web

Download (Yester)Day

I won’t be joining the attempted world record of Firefox downloads on the release day June 17th 2008 since I dist-upgraded my Debian unstable just a few days ago and I got my Firef… eh Iceweasel version 3 then.

Of course, others have also noted that Firefox will miss a few Linux users downloading that version as Linux users all over will prefer to get it using their distros’ ordinary means of getting packages and updates…

Firefox 3

Development, Linux

Blaming Debian packaging

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I happened to read the blog post called Open-Source Security Idiots which really is having a go at the poor Debian maintainer of OpenSSL for causing the recent much debated OpenSSL security problem in Debian and Debian-based distros.

While I think the author Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is mostly correct about his criticism, I think he’s being far too specific and trying to pinpoint Debian and claiming that to be a single specific bad distro (and his additional confused complaint on Firefox vs Iceweasel just made the article lose focus).

As someone who’s involved in a bunch of projects that are being packed by a range of Linux distros, I can’t but to disagree. This habit of changing packages without passing the changes upstream is wide-spread and not limited to changes done by maintainers since it also includes mere bug reports. It is something that just about every distro is doing to at least some extent. It varies from package to package and over time, but given an overview I honestly can’t say that there’s a single specific distro that is worse than the others. It is a disease that follows the distros and we must all help out to exterminate it.

Of course, the upstream projects also need to be aware of this and help pushing packagers of their software to behave.

Linux, Open Source

gnome terms deteriorate

A while ago I noticed that my gnome-terminals all of a sudden started to do blinking cursors. Oh the guys who thought that is a good idea to add it without any option to disable it should surely be given a proper eh well, lesson on how to do things right.

Then, just today I did apt-get update on my laptop only to find out that multi-gnome-terminal is now removed in Debian so my favorite terminal is no more!

Grrr.

Update: checking with gconf-editor under desktop > gnome > interface, there’s a checkbox for “cursor_blink” that I unchecked and wham, now the blink is gone!

Linux, Rockbox

Sansalinux

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sansa e200RWith an unfortunate Sourceforge registry date of April 1st 2008, it could very well be an April’s fools prank but then I can’t see any real reasons why someone couldn’t port ipodlinux over to the Sansa e200 v1 series.

So Sansalinux is working according to their site, and they also provide some crappy screenshots that aren’t really good enough to make it possible to tell if they are for real or fakes.

The uclinux patch on their download page seems genuine and contains a lot of code originating from Rockbox (including copyright lines from Rockbox hackers).

As in the case with the ipod version, it begs the question what they want with this apart from the fun of getting Linux on yet another target. Also, seeing how there’s really no developers around to hack on ipodlinux it’ll be interesting to see if there will be any on the Sansa version. Seeing that it doesn’t run on the v2 version (no surprise really since Rockbox doesn’t either) so there’s no new Sansa e200 to buy to run this linux on.

If someone actually tries this out, please let us know what you find out!

Linux, Rockbox

lugradio s5e14

sansa e200RI listened to lugradio’s season 5 epsisode 14 podcast today and I thought I’d share that at roughly 1:20 into the show there’s a brief mentioning and discussion around Rockbox. The subject came up thanks to a listener’s email explaining how he got his Sansa e200 player to play ogg by installing it.

Unintentionally, it was also quite ironical how Adam (one of the podcast hosts) just minutes before this mentioned how he has an iAudio X5 that can play ogg vorbis (and flac) natively (as a response to a user asking what players the guys would recommend) – without mentioning a single word about Rockbox even though Rockbox worked on the X5 long before it worked on the Sansa and I would think that any Linux- liking Open Source geek should know about Rockbox and use it on their mp3 players at least as long as they have targets that Rockbox is already ported to and working fine on… and when asked, I can only recommend getting any player that can run Rockbox before one that can’t. Of course these days this is somewhat of a dilemma since none of the players Rockbox supports are manufactured anymore…

I also liked in a elbow-poking sort of way how they referred to the ipodlinux project as one of the most pointless projects in existence. Of course, that may very well also be one of the reasons why that project is now more or less dead. This also makes me think of this lwn.net post by debacle, who argues that having Linux on a portable music player is better than Rockbox simply because “there’s where the developers are”. As the ipodlinux example shows, the reality is not that simple.