Skip to content

Blog

Volunteering leads me to Foresight Linux

I’ve been trying to spend some time giving back to projects I believe in. I spent a weekend reading through Ubuntu wiki pages on everything from setting up a LoCo, to helping the documentation team, becoming an Ubuntu member, and a lot more. After being a little overwhelmed by some of Ubuntu’s processes (and I do understand why they have them considering the sheer number of users and folks involved), I volunteered to help write some copy for the new gnome.org website that will debut with the upcoming 2.18 release, take a crack at creating a GNOME 2.18 LiveCD, and am helping to try and get the TCLUG back up and running some regular meetings.

I spent a good chunk of last weekend trying to create a LiveCD, using scripts, a few different programs, and lots of research. I quickly realized I was just a bit, to put it mildly, over my head. I’ve been using Linux off and on for 8 years, a full time user for 2 years, but I’m a user, not a developer. I can barely compile my own packages, and even then I’m sure I’m not always doing it the “right” way.

In my travels in trying to build a LiveCD, I met a gentleman by the name of Ken Vandine on the gnome-marketing mailing list and in the #marketing IRC channel for GNOME, who has also stepped up to create a LiveCD for GNOME 2.18. Ken works for rPath, whose goal is “making software applications radically easier to create, deploy, and manage“. Coincidentally, at our last TCLUG installfest last summer, Dave from rPath demoed their technology for us, showing us a really innovative way to create your own software, including things as complex as your own Linux distribution using their toolset. But back to Ken – not only did Ken seem pretty cool and helpful, turns out Ken is one of, if not the lead developer for Foresight Linux.

Foresight is a GNOME-based distribution, that includes a lot of cutting edge software in the Linux community, including Banshee as the default music manager (and we know how much I love Banshee), F-spot, Beagle, among others. I think it’s safe to safe to say Foresight is a smaller Linux distribution when compared to leaders like Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo or Ubuntu.

I did something last Sunday I have done in almost 3 years – installed a different distribution of Linux that wasn’t Ubuntu. It was weird, but strangely comforting at the same time. I’ll post some thoughts on my experiences with Foresight later tonight in my next post.

Banshee, Mugshot, and AWN

I was pleasantly suprised to see that Banshee is now supported by Mugshot. I’ve been running Feisty for the last few weeks, and haven’t found a Mugshot .deb yet, but on my second machine I was testing out Foresight (different story for later), which had an up to date package for Mugshot. I was playing music on my main PC, look over to my second PC with Mugshot, and it’s reporting what songs I’ve just played. What a pleasant suprise! Talking to Aaron Bockover in IRC, it wasn’t developed by Banshee, so I’m guessing the lads at Red Hat are grabbing it via Dbus in the latest version of Mugshot.

In other Banshee news, Snorp has created a Banshee plugin for Avant Window Navigator. The plugin replaces the Banshee logo in your dock with the cover art from the current CD you’re playing. Make sure you have a newer version of AWN from Subversion – my AWN build from a week or two wasn’t compatible as Banshee would just keep crashing on Feisty.

  • in Links
  • 1 min read

Avant Window Navigator on Feisty Fawn Howto

With some help from Pveith on the Ubuntu Forums, I was able to compile Avant Window Navigator from Subversion. Per Pveith’s recommendation, I used checkinstall, which created a .deb for installation. I am running Beryl and an Nvidia graphics card. I added a Feisty Fawn Howto on the AWN wiki, here is how I got it working:

Step 1: Prepare your system

  • sudo apt-get install checkinstall build-essential subversion

Step 2: Download the required dependencies

  • sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev libwnck-dev libwnck-common libgconf2-dev libglib2.0-dev libgnome2-dev libgnome-desktop-2 libgnome-desktop-dev

Step 3: Download Avant Window Navigator from Subversion:

  • svn checkout http://avant-window-navigator.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ avant-window-navigator

Step 4:

  • ./autogen.sh

Step 5: Install using checkinstall

  • sudo checkinstall

Step 6:

  • cd data

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

Step 7: Run Avant Window Navigator

  • Alt-F2

  • avant-window-navigator

Step 8: Have Avant Window Navigator automatically start up on reboot

  • Click System, Control Center

  • Click Sessions

  • Click Startup Sessions Tab

  • Click “New” and type “avant-window-navigator” in both name and command fields

  • Click “OK”

  • Click “Close”

And here is Avant Window Navigator in all it’s glory on Feisty Fawn on my main machine, running in 1920×1080 on a Dell 24″ monitor:

feisty-avant

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!)