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Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Herd 4 Random Thoughts

I took the plunge and installed Feisty Fawn Herd 4 on my main machine last night. Doing a dist-upgrade resulted in kernel panic when GRUB tried to load, so I threw in the Herd 4 CD, and did a clean install. (I know, I should be installing alpha software on my main machine, but it’s running so smooth so far…)

If you haven’t checked out Feisty Fawn yet, check out the wiki pages on Ubuntu.com for the different alpha releases (Herd 2, Herd 3, Herd 4).

It’s amazing to see how far Feisty has come just through the alpha releases.

Some random thoughts:

  • Codec installation is awesome. (See the Herd 4 link above). I tried playing a MP3 in movie player, it downloaded the MP3 codec, installed it, and it played. I then fired up Banshee, and Banshee played MP3 files just fine.
  • Looking at the Herd 4 page, the Migration Assistant has been included. I’ve been following the Wiki page for that since it went live. Though I don’t dual boot anymore, this is one of the projects I’m very excited about, as this will help in a big way to get users from Windows to Linux, and Ubuntu specifically. I may play around with my last Windows machine just to try this out. If you dual boot, please help test this.
  • My Sansa e260 MP3 player now shows up as a digital music player, and not a USB disk. Still can’t write to it in Banshee though.
  • Beryl works like a champ using their repositories.
  • Gnomebaker still wants root. I don’t know if this is because I’m using a SATA burner or not, but I applied the fix I previously blogged for Edgy.
  • I got Avant Window Navigator working with some help, I’ll post the how-to after this.
  • Feisty fixed my microphone problems I ranted about last night. Not out of the box, but it was quick. I double clicked on Volume Control on my panel, clicked “Edit”, “Preferences”, “Capture”. Then went to the Recording tab in Volume control, moved the slider bar up, and bam, my mic works in Sound Recorder and Audacity. Thank goodness! Herd 4 seems stable so far, and I know the risk I’m running in potential breakage as the betas and release come up over the next few weeks.

Love & Hate Relationship

I love Linux – last month was my 8 year anniversary of using Linux in some form, and next month will be the 2 year anniversary of using Linux as my only operating system when I retired from gaming.

I love Ubuntu – I love the community, the developers committed to making Linux (and Debian) better (and easier), and the wealth of applications.

But some things drive me crazy about Linux, and today’s rant is about trying to get my microphone jack to work. It’s little things like this, that in my mind should just work, but don’t. If you search the Ubuntu Forums for microphone, it’s amazing how many threads pop up that folks can’t get their mics to work.

I have an Intel HDA audio card built in to my motherboard. I spent a good 4 hours today trying different things to get it to work. When I started, I could listen to audio through my speakers and in my headset at the same time. Now I can’t, after changing some setting I’m not aware of. I spent hours playing with Alsamixer, Alsamixergui, Volume Control, and Sound settings. I tried to record using 2 different boom mics, different ports, different options in Sound Recorder and Volume Control, editing alsa files, all to no avail.

I have a slightly newer motherboard, though stock Intel, with a Core 2 Duo processor. Most threads I saw had problems with the Conexant chip, and I have a Sigmatel. It could be anything – it could be I’ve messed with my settings and hosed it myself, it could be that I’m running Ubuntu Edgy and in the last 6 months either Ubuntu or Alsa have a fix, and I’m just running an old version, or my hardware is still to new and folks are out there hacking on it without an answer yet.

It’s maddening, but I’ll keep trying, and when I figure it out, I’ll post an answer and help out the next folks who get stuck. But I may just install Feisty and see if I have better luck. (I know – it shouldn’t be on a main machine as it hasn’t been released yet, but I’m feeling daring!)

I'm on your desktop, stealing your panel

The 5th time is the charm, as I finally was able to install Avant Window Navigator from subversion today on Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) with Beryl:

avant

Neil Patel is doing some really innovative work with GNOME right now, from creating Avant Window Navigator to Tracker to including metadata information in to Nautilus. You really must check out his blog to see his work in progress on these projects.

Back to Avant Window Navigator: AWN replaces one of your panels, and shows both what applications are open and a launcher for other applications.

I had some difficulty getting AWN installed even after reading this thread on Ubuntu Forums and following the instructions on the AWN Wiki. In the end, I was able to get it installed using Subversion, but I had to change one line from the wiki:

The wiki’s last step says:

cd data<br /> gconftool-2 --install-schema-file=avant-window-navigator.schemas

But there was no avant-window-navigator.schemas file in the /data directory. So I typed:

gconftool-2 --install-schema-file=avant-window-navigator.schemas.in

which was a file in the /data directory, and voila, AWN!

I made notes on the screenshot on Flickr, but on the left of the dock are the launcher applications, and on the 4 icons on the right side are the applications currently opened.

I removed the bottom panel once AWN was running, and moved my workspace switcher, show desktop button and trash icon to the panel at the top.

Overall, I’m quite impressed with AWN. It scales the icons beautifully, I like how they move when highlighted, and I love how it’s both a launcher and a switch application tool. Hats off to the developer for this one. It takes some getting used to not seeing a panel at the bottom of the screen after using GNOME all these years, but I have a feeling I’ll adjust.

HOWTO: Upgrading to Banshee 0.11.6 (SVN) on Ubuntu 6.10

Banshee 0.11.6 was released on Feb. 5th, 2007. Banshee 0.11.1 is included in Ubuntu 6.10, Edgy Eft. Major changes to Banshee 0.11.1 include:

  • Banshee-official-plugins merged with core
  • Radio stations can now be added/edited/removed from the radio plugin; additionally the remote stations can be easily and optionally disabled
  • Usability and interface updates to the podcast plugin

How to upgrade Banshee on Ubuntu 6.10 from Subversion:

Step 1: Create your build environment:

sudo apt-get build-dep banshee

Step 2: Get the required development packages and configure them:

sudo apt-get install libmono-sqlite2.0-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libglib2.0-dev<br /> libtool subversion autoconf automake1.9 gnome-common libavahi1.0-cil

sudo update-alternatives --set automake /usr/bin/automake-1.9

sudo ldconfig

Step 3: Remove Banshee 0.11.1:

<br /> sudo apt-get remove banshee

Step 4: Get Banshee from Subversion:

svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/banshee/trunk/banshee

Step 5: Build Banshee 0.11.6 with Avahi support:

./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --enable-avahi --disable-docs

make

sudo make install

And run Banshee!

I have to say I really like the Internet Radio plugin, the layout is well done and the icons look great. Banshee feels snappier overall as well.

If I feel really brave, I may try to get MTP working later this week.

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn First Impressions

I installed Ubuntu’s latest alpha release, the Feisty Fawn Herd 3, this morning on my development machine. Herd 2 had a bug that wouldn’t install, but Herd 3 installed like a champ.

I’m not going to put up any screenshots – since the release on Thursday, there are plenty of sites that have screenshots up.

Some random thoughts and first impressions:

  • Network Manager comes installed default now. The icon on the taskbar caught be my surprise. I installed on a desktop with a wired connection, but now I’m itching to go install Herd 3 on my extra laptop.
  • Control Center is more intuitive than I expected. For whatever reason, I had in my head that Control Center was just going to be a knockoff of Window’s Control Panel, but it’s not. I like how it groups Hardware, System and Other. The Filter box works very well as well.
  • The Ubuntu color scheme is the same as usual. It is what it is.

  • I installed Compiz from the Ubuntu repositories instead of Beryl, which I’m running on my Edgy Eft / main desktop. I wanted to give Compiz a try and see how it’s different. The best way I can explain it, after only using it for an hour or two now, and not knowing the in’s and out’s of Compiz, is that it seems more vanilla than Beryl. With Beryl being actively developed by the community (not that Compiz isn’t) Beryl seems to have much more eye candy and bells and whistles. I don’t have the stability problem or resources issues others have complained about on Edgy, and Compiz seems to do fine on my Feisty box using the Nvidia binary drivers in the Ubuntu repository. However, installing Compiz out of the box, including the packages compiz, compiz-gnome, and desktop-effects, along with the required dependencies, I had no window borders. The first thread on the Feisty Fawn forums on Ubuntuforums.org didn’t fix it, nor did a post 3 pages in. One post did link to the Compiz forums, and doing the following got it to work:

    sudo nvidia-xconfig --composite<br /> sudo nvidia-xconfig --render-accel<br /> sudo nvidia-xconfig --allow-glx-with-composite<br /> sudo nvidia-xconfig --add-argb-glx-visuals

  • Banshee’s latest release, 0.11.5, is included and feels quite snappy.

  • Other than that, it doesn’t seem too different from Edgy (yet), but there’s still 2 months of development time to go.

Ubuntu 6.10 Burning Problem

Since I built my new computer a few months back, and installed Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft, I have only been able to burn using sudo. My old machine burned fine without sudo, so I was guessing it was because I’m using a SATA DVD-RW drive.

I found this tip on the Ubuntu forums and it fixed my burning problem – Gnomebaker has no problem working as a normal user after applying this fix.

Step 1:

As root (or in a terminal type: sudo gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/15-local.rules This will create a new file called 15-local.rules. Add a new rule in the file:

# SCSI devices<br /> BUS=="scsi", KERNEL=="sg[0-9]", NAME="%k", GROUP="cdrom"

Step 2:

Reboot.

Step 3:

In a terminal type the following (hit enter after each):

sudo chmod 4755 /usr/bin/cdrecord<br /> sudo chmod 4755 /usr/bin/cdrecord.mmap<br /> sudo chmod 4755 /usr/bin/X11/cdrecord.mmap<br /> sudo chmod 4755 /usr/bin/cdrdao<br /> sudo chmod 4755 /usr/bin/X11/cdrdao

That should fix it, especially if you’re running Gnomebaker. If you’re running K3B, run K3Bsetup and hit the above link for more if you’re a KDE user.

Thanks to wilko on the Ubuntu Forums for posting this fix.

Games Delayed

Two of the more high profile games to be released this year, with already announced Linux versions, have been delayed. Both stories courtesy of Blue’s News.

Activision’s latest quarterly statement highlights ET: Quake Wars has been delayed to their fiscal 2008 year, which runs from April 2007 to March 2008.

Unreal Tournament 2007 has undergone a name change to Unreal Tournament 3, with part of the name change reflecting the title’s delay until later in 2007, when it was originally scheduled for 2006.

I’ve built my new machine with a fancy Core Duo, and can’t wait to play both with native Linux binaries this year. Let’s hope for no more delays!

PC World reviews Linux audio players

PC World takes a look at the current state of music playback in Linux, reviewing the different music managers available. The features the reviewer was looking for include browsing and searching, playlists, rip and burning, tag editing and playing internet radio streams.

Rhythmbox (B), Banshee (B-), Listen (C+), Amarok (B), and Exaile (C-) are reviewed, with Amarok being the only KDE app tested as the reviewer, like myself, is a GNOME user.

Matthew Newton, the reviewer, notes that he’ll keep an eye on Banshee as the development is much faster paced than Rhythmbox, but has had problems with Banshee’s stability. I’ve run development and stable versions of Banshee, both from the Ubuntu repositories and compiling my own, without the problems he references.

There’s no question that music management in Linux is still early, and is one of the killer applications that will need to be developed quickly to help with user adoption to Linux.

Ubuntu Dapper + Banshee

Are you a fan of Banshee and using Ubuntu Dapper but frustrated because you can’t use all of the latest and greatest plugins that are available in CVS?

Well, Josiah has put up a webpage that includes a .deb file for Dapper, and the plugins to download, with instructions so you can use the latest and greatest version of Banshee. Included on the page are:

  • The MiniMode Plugin

  • The Podcast Plugin

  • The Radio Plugin

  • The Recommendation Plugin

  • Banshee-daap plugin

  • Banshee CVS

  • Everything above

Hit the link to get ’em. I decided to be daring, and installed the plugins in my .gnome2/banshee/plugins directory, but only the Recommendation plugin worked. Trying to use the Podcast or MiniMode Plugin would crash the default Dapper Banshee – so make sure you download the Banshee CVS deb!

Thanks Josiah! One of these days I should spend some time and take this the next step – compile CVS weekly and set up an apt repository for Dapper users.

Ubuntu Dapper+1: The Edgy Eft

Ubuntu’s sabdfl, Mark Shuttleworth, has announced the next Ubuntu release after 6.06 Dapper Drake will be the “Edgy Eft”.

What is an eft?

An Eft is a youthful newt, going through its first exploration of the

rocky territory just outside the stream. And that’s exactly what we hope

the development team will do with Ubuntu during the Edgy cycle – explore

slightly unfamiliar and uncharted territory that is perhaps a little out

of the mainstream.

The exciting news in Edgy Eft, as posted in the announcement:

And here’s why. Edgy is all about cutting edge, perhaps bleeding edge,

brand new code and infrastructure. It will be the right time to bring in

some seriously interesting but definitely edgy new technologies which

lay the groundwork for the next wave of Ubuntu development.

…

So dream a little about Xen for virtualisation, Xgl/AIGLX and other

wonderful wobbly window bits, the goodness of Network Manager, a first

flirt with multiarch support for true mixed 32-bit and 64-bit computing

on AMD64, the interesting possibilities of the SMART package manager…

and other pieces of infrastructure which have appeared tantalisingly

on the horizon.

We can afford to take some risks with Dapper+1, because Dapper has turned

out so well. We have a great answer for people who need super-solid

and super-predictable results: Dapper is still fresh, will continue to work

on modern hardware for some time, and has plenty of legs in its support

cycle left to run.

One of the reasons that led to my break from my blogging habit over the last month or two was playing with Dapper Drake from Flight 2 on. I’ll post later on my thoughts on Dapper, but even the cutting edge stuff I was playing with, in what will be a Long Term Support release from Ubuntu was amazing – I could play with XGL/Compiz for hours.

I hope to see things like Leaftag, Gimmie, and many other goodies in Edgy Eft.