Published on
May 22, 2010 in
Ubuntu.
Last weekend I upgraded most of my home systems to run Lucid Lynx. From the software point of view everything went pretty smoothly and I am really happy so far. I like the new look which is not surprising as I’ve been using the Dust theme prior to 10.04 and they are not very far apart. The new Ubuntu One integration is an interesting way of trying to make Ubuntu sustainable, I do hope however that it will stay out of my way if I don’t want to use it.
I was close to downloading an album through Ubuntu One until they requested me to register my computer. This is something I do not want to do just to buy an album, so I stopped right there and resorted to the wonderful clamz.
Anyway, during the setup I had to realize that CD-Rs have become the floppies of 2010 – not only capacity-wise but also regarding the reliability. I’ve been having this problem with Ubuntu as well as Fedora setups: When you burn the CD-R just before running the setup on another machine with a different optical drive you will often get read errors at some point in time – typically after being halfway through the setup process. This brings me to my request to the authors of Linux distribution setup procedures: If you cannot read a package from the CD please try downloading it from the Internet after asking the user whether it is OK to do so. I fixed one of the setups with a manual chroot onto the new root fs after modifying the sources.list, on another machine I simply used the mini iso which downloads eveything via the network.
Yes, I knew this would happen. However, that does not diminish my frustration. Of all the desktop machines that I work with, I only use three to play audio frequently. These machines currently run Ubuntu Jaunty, Ubuntu Karmic and Fedora 11. For each setup I had the good intention of keeping PulseAudio after installation, but it failed on each installation for a separate reason:
- On the machine running Karmic, vlc (the only player capable to properly play my AVCHD recordings) will drop frames like hell when running with PulseAudio.
- The Jaunty machine is a rather powerful quad-core with a high-end sound card and just listening to music with totem I will actually get occasional buffer underruns (stuttering audio) when running a kernel compile.
- On the Fedora machine I’d like to run mpd on start-up as a different user than the one logged in (who is forced to run PulseAudio) and this is not easily possible (or maybe not at all).
Even worse, it is becoming more and more painful to remove PulseAudio. You will loose ubuntu-desktop and gnome-bluetooth (also on Fedora). For Karmic I had to recompile gnome-session or else it will fully load one core trying to connect to PulseAudio. Gnome will no longer let you control the volume, neither from the panel nor via the keyboard.
So now we have shiny new features (that I never had a chance to use, because I always have to disable PulseAudio), but solid, reliable and easy sound output is history. Congratulations on breaking Linux Audio!
The level of maturity the GNOME desktop has achieved by now, seems to a have a negative effect on innovation. Even for experienced GNOME users it is becoming harder and harder to detect or name the changes that came with the recent GNOME releases. Whether this is a good thing (the learning curve for using a GNOME update is practically non-existent) or a bad thing (boooooring) is still the subject of numerous discussions on Planet GNOME and the GNOME mailing lists.
I am happy to see that GNOME innovation is not dead yet: I just discovered GNOME Do and I am impressed. Obviously I just started using it, so I cannot say whether it will stick, but this tool could severly influence the way I use my GNOME desktop in the future. What it does is actually hard to describe, basically it brings to GNOME what the new location bar brought to Firefox 3. I recommend trying the latest version, which is easy with Ubuntu, with Fedora however you are stuck with the 0.4.0.2 release as even in development the necessary dependencies are not available yet.
Update: Adrian let me know that there is a bug requesting Fedora to update GNOME Do to 0.5.0.1, though it doesn’t look like it’s going to be resolved quickly.
There was a time when Linux distributions automatically started sound daemons for the user. Typically these were aRts for KDE and esd for Enlightenment, Gnome and others. The main goal was to allow simultaneous audio playback from multiple applications.
Unfortunately, using these daemons has side effects:
- they introduce significant latency
- they require applications to be ported and configured to use them
- they block the audio device for either serious or rather dumb audio applications
Then, thanks to an tremendous development effort, a new audio layer for Linux was born that addressed the main goal of these daemons, allowing hardware mixing where available and enabling software mixing when necessary. The daemons became obsolete and were eventually removed from the default install of all major distributions. The only daemon that stayed relevant was JACK as it addressed audio production needs and most sound creation tools were extended to support that interface, too.
Now, guess what. There’s a new daemon in town. It’s better than ESD, but will still block your audio device. And from what I’ve read it is not designed to compete with JACK in the ultra-low-latency sector. A major motivation for its creation must have been a severe allergic reaction to ALSA. And Fedora and Ubuntu intend to force it upon us.
I got aware of that after upgrading my laptop to hardy, when mplayer failed to playback audio until I killed the pulseaudio daemon. Oh man, was I happy when the daemons where gone.
Yeah, I know, they promise some interesting features. I also read that PulseAudio is causing significant load under certain conditions. I’m just not sure that you really need an extra CPU hog just to play audio, unless you really dedicate your machine to audio production in which case I cannot see why we should not stick with JACK.
I really wonder whether investing all that energy into improving ALSA instead (and maybe gstreamer or JACK) might have helped to provide some of the same features without the hassle of yet another daemon with yet another API.
Published on
November 25, 2007 in
Ubuntu.
After having installed gusty from scratch on some boxes and via update-manager on others, I decided it’s about time to upgrade my desktop machine as that was still running feisty. Unlike my previous experiences with gutsy this upgrade didn’t turn out to be as easy as pie as it should have been. Ever since I started using debian I upgrade my sources.list and run an apt-get dist-upgrade afterwards to perform a distribution upgrade, so I chose that path for this upgrade, too. Well I shouldn’t have done so: upgrading this way does not remove the deprecated evms package, that renders a gutsy system unusable.
Additionally I had moved my installation partition prior to this upgrade, but I didn’t know that update-grub keeps track of that in commented lines in menu.lst, so it repeatedly rewrote that file with the wrong boot partition, breaking unattended booting. From previous experiments I still had the xserver-xgl package installed without actually using it. Unfortunately the upgrade activated Xgl as default X server, breaking my desktop setup.
Then I had to learn that my favorite audio player is broken in gutsy. At first I considered capitulation and gave other players a try, but they still don’t behave the way an audio player should. So I investigated the problem further and it turns out that re-building the package with the new upstream release (which is available for a month now) fixes the problem. Rather frustrated I added that information to the original bug report.
No, this not the end of the list, yet. After recompiling VDR (more on that later), I discovered that the system crashes after a few minutes of watching TV. Using the ‘generic‘ instead of the ‘rt‘ linux-image actually fixes this, but I had no problems with the previous low-latency images. So, I filed another bug.
Oh, and while writing this entry I went out for while, just to find my mouse cursor to be dysfunctional on my return. Hopefully the bird in approach will be a little more gentle.