Sound problems in Ubuntu Hardy

So if your like me, you’ve been suffering through some painful sound problems in Ubuntu Hardy, apparently its a known kernel issue, so just sit tight. However, if your like me (or 90% of nerds) then you need some sort of music to code. A little digging revealed that I did not in fact have any of the alsa kernel modules installed for my current kernel. apt-get left me high and dry (also without an nvidia driver yet, but that’s an easy fix).

The simple remedy is to just build the alsa modules yourself, a pretty painless task. The problem is, if you want to have any hope of keeping your install halfway clean, then you need to get those files tracked by dpkg so we avoid conflicts when the modules are fixed. There’s a simple solution:

sudo apt-get install module-assistant
sudo m-a update
sudo m-a prepare
sudo m-a a-i alsa


This utilizes the handy module-assistant package to automatically build alsa for you. Reboot and enjoy!

Major PhotoBlog Catchup!

Ok, so some of you may have noticed I’ve been a little quiet lately, over this time of non-blogging I built up a dozen great ideas for entries, and collected the photos to flesh them out. However, I am far to lazy, so you all get this little summary post instead. Let me apologize upfront, these were all taken with a cruddy phone. I’ll have another post with my technical musings later this week.

1. Who knew Utah was so cool! After attending the Ubuntu-Utah group meeting, I was floored at how active the area was! Not only was the user group active, social and plenty fun, but I quickly learned about the Utah Open Source Foundation, which is (for lack of something more elegant) just plain awesome, the guys that run it could not be doing a better job. It was at a Multi-Distro Release Party (graciously hosted by Novell at their Open Source Technologies Center) that I caught this amusing moment, after Ubuntu is Linux for Human Beings, there aren’t age limits

   

2. Some (hopefully legal) shots of the Novell Provo campus, its quite nice:

   

   

3. Another fun tidbit about Salt Lake City, they have not only the best burrito joint on earth, but random neon orange flags at street crossings…

Google Docs Presentations: A Major Disappointment

Google Docs has revolutionized the office suite, namely the word processor. Collaboration is easy, smooth, integrated, and automatic, whats more all your documents are accessible from anywhere, and all the common features I need are present. While I don’t really use spreadsheets very often, my few simple instances of using Google Doc’s for spreadsheets were easy enough. Needless to say, when I heard that a Presentation component was to be added I was excited.

Now, I’m a far cry from a Powerpoint Guru, I’ve used it maybe 2 times, but with an upcoming presentation and the Ubuntu Utah user group, I figured I should probably slap a few slides together. Since I want to have a sane contingency for the exploding laptop, forgotten laptop, or limited presentation machine, I figured this would be a great chance to stretch my presenting legs and give it a try. Too bad I’m not that lucky, I was unable to save _any_ changes, just create a new presentation, modify it as much as I wanted, but any close would lose all my work… lovely (this is in Firefox 2.0, 3.0 trunk, IE7, and Opera 8.24). I’m willing to give Google a few hours and then try again (its possible its some small downtime, its still beta after all ).

Another gripe (as I read the Help to try and find similar reports of such bugs) is that there is a very limited selection of templates, while I might be able to upload new templates authored in PowerPoint or OpenOffice, couldn’t they at least let me change the color schemes? (If I can and I’m just missing how to do it, please share!)

I’ll post an update soon, and let you all know if I had any luck saving anything….

Update: This is fixed, and now its kinda cool! I’m going to try it this Saturday at the Ubuntu Utah users group and see how it goes.

Updated Beagle Packages for Gutsy Available

Beagle support in Ubuntu has been less than stellar up until this point (across all releases), and unfortunately, the best that we can really hope for in the immediate future is acceptable. This is mostly because only a few of Beagle’s developers are running Ubuntu, and accurately reproducing common errors is difficult. To top this all off, the defacto Ubuntu contact at this point is me, and I haven’t had the available time to really track down some of the more difficult bugs.

However, this problem reached an all time low when the beagle source package stopped building in Gutsy. This spurred us into action (our urgency increasing as we realized how close Gutsy was to shipping) and as a result there exist updated Ubuntu Gutsy packages (based upon the new 0.2.18 bugfix release of Beagle) available for testing. Thanks to Launchpads new super-awesome Personal Package Archive system, you only need to add the following sources, or download from the corresponding link. (NOTE! the versioning of these debs will not force an update if they are accepted into main, you will need to reinstall should they be accepted at their current version number!)

deb     http://ppa.launchpad.net/kkubasik/ubuntu gutsy main 

deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/kkubasik/ubuntu gutsy main 

Please report bugs with these packages either to Beagle in launchpad or the dashboard-hackers mailing list. The more feedback we get in the next few days the better the chance that Ubuntu Gutsy will ship a solid Beagle.  

 

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, linux, beagle, desktop search, mono, C#, launchpad, debian, ppa, gutsy, gnome

Beagle Ubuntu Package Update

Technorati Tags: beagle, gnome, mono, ubuntu, gutsy, deb, bzr, bazaar, launchpad

With everything that has been swarming all over my plate lately, I haven’t had a chance to really keep on top of the Beagle packages in Ubuntu, and as a result, they are currently pretty crappy. I have a branch (meant to be feisty-updates, but I was in a hurry, and didn’t feel like branching), with a building deb configuration for Gutsy. I hope to have binaries/sources available for testing later this week.

The branch is hosted here:

https://code.launchpad.net/~kkubasik/beagle/feisty-update

Just do the following to try and build:

 

   1:  bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~kkubasik/beagle/feisty-update

   2:  cd feisty-update

   3:  sudo apt-get build-dep beagle

   4:  bzr builddeb -w --split

Ubuntu – That About Sums it Up.

Its been an awesome week, its done justice to the last 6 months of blood tears and sweat that were poured into the great release that is Feisty Fawn.

A few things I wanted to mention, but first off, I should say Hi! My Ubuntu Membership was just approved, and I wanted to give a shout out and say hello to all those I haven’t met yet. Second, I wanted to do a little introduction, but given the general excitement, I figured I would link to my wiki and launchpad page, where most of you can get an idea of what I do, and where I can help. I’m always looking for new ways to get involved in the community, and if your working on something that you think I could help with, drop me an e-mail or find me on the IRC, and theres a good chance I’ll be all over it . That said I look forward to all the great releases down the road.

Just a few minutes ago I figured I would help the Ubuntu servers as best I could by seeding all the i386 iso’s, at the moment, there are close to 4000 seeds. I couldn’t ask the Ubuntu community for anything more, I downloaded the whole thing in close to 2 minutes, and am seeding now. Seeing as the bittorrent community needed no help, I decided that I would host the most popular iso on my site to help as best I can. (I thought about trying a full mirror, but this late, I figured it would do more harm then good, if I’m wrong, let me know!)

Here are the links, I know they aren’t for the main mirror site, but if you read my blog or one of the planet’s I’m on, and are thinking of grabbing the iso, consider using this link. If it doesn’t work, it means I could only be so generous, and I was going way over the 2TB limit this month, but I don’t think I’m that popular.

http://kubasik.net/files/ubuntu-7.04-desktop-i386.iso

http://kubasik.net/files/ubuntu-7.04-server-i386.iso

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, feisty

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Applying for Ubuntu Membership

As I find myself getting more involved with the Ubuntu community and specifically the packaging of Beagle, I decided that it might be about time to apply for official Ubuntu Membership. I always feel a little odd in these situations, much the same as when I applied for membership to the Gnome Foundation. It feels weird trying to itemize and quantify my contributions, and moreover, I’m not a very good bragger when it comes to computers.

While the application process isn’t my favorite, once I commit to it, I find that there are plenty of tools that simplify the process, my blog not being the least of these, as its a nice reminder of what I have worked on. The harder part is deciding when its appropriate to apply, most guidelines on such topics are pretty vague, and to compound things, the most visible members tend to be hacker rockstars that are so above and beyond the accepted norm for membership that intimidation is almost impossible to avoid. I don’t mean any of this as a critique or attack, just my personal feelings and observations as someone slowly getting more involved in the community.

But I digress, The purpose of this post was to ask for anyone who was willing to give a quick glance over my wiki page at Ubuntu (its more or less your resume near as I can tell) to do so, and if willing, share their feedback. The next Community Council meeting isn’t until April 17th, so theres plenty of time. I would appreciate any of the following:

• Feedback on if I am applying too early (ie. not enough Ubuntu experience)
• Feedback on wiki page (formatting flukes, missed information, broken links etc)
• Anything I might have worked with you on, but forgot to include
• General Comments on life and/or its meaning

So yeah, I appreciate any feedback I can get!

Technorati Tags: gnome, ubuntu, linux, membership, gnome foundation,

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Swiftfox, why are’t we good nerds anymore?

So the past few weeks have seen me getting more and more frustrated with the performance lockups in Feisty. As a developer who’s been running it for several months now, I can say I’m very tolerant and never upset, just try my best to help, mostly by just finding my own solution. So cruft and buildup is inevitable, lots of random libraries compiled out of the packaging system to get something working last minute, and I know my kernel is a wreck, as its seen more than a few major upgrades. However, when I started to read benchmarks where Feisty was taking a significant beating in startup times, I started to get concerned. I agree with the reasoning that dropping the heavily optimized kernels was a good idea, I had stopped using them a bit before, due to my own stability problems.

Anyways, this prompted me to make good use of my 500 GB external drive, and I am backing up everything as I speak, then doing an all-out optimization of my system with no regards to consequence (just for some numbers/fun ) and then installing the beta fresh (on a LVM’ed hard drive). I hope to have something of a comprehensive optimization guide for Ubuntu after this, but whats most likely going to happen is I get ansey for the new Feisty and LVM

However, as I started my quest for a meaner and leaner Gnome/Ubuntu harmony, I trudged through the debates on prelinks, preloads, and readaheads (do what you will, nothing fantastic either way for me). But the first thing that truly changed my day to day desktop experience and in an incredibly positive way was Swiftfox. Its nothing revolutionary in terms of ideas, its just done well. Swiftfox really isn’t even a separate distribution of Firefox, its almost the exact same code, just with highly optimized releases for each processor. My initial thoughts were that it was going to be worthless, and maybe for your processor, it is, but with the Core Duo, its a world of difference. At first I assumed it was placebo, or something else I had done, but when my benchmarks showed no real differences anywhere else, Swiftfox outpaced Firefox, by a lot.

Just for fun, I have a few links below for rough web rendering performance benchmarks, make of them what you will, but let me say, drop your composting manager first, both beryl and compiz hated me when I tried, its too many rapid refreshes.

http://scragz.com/tech/mozilla/test-rendering-time

http://celtickane.com/projects/jsspeed.php

http://www.24fun.com/downloadcenter/benchjs/benchjs.html

Feel free to share your times, either way, I’m interested to know if this was a ‘My Firefox was so messed up’ or if Swiftfox is truly that awesome nerd inside that drives the speed of software.

Technorati Tags: mozilla, firefox, swiftfox, ubuntu, gnome, linux, optimize, speed

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Bittorrent Software on Linux: Part 2

A follow up to my earlier post.

In my post last week I complained about how linux had no real torrent client that could go toe to toe with utorrent. Over the last week or so, I have been trying to follow up on all the awesome comments and suggestions that I got from readers. I found an answer.

Deluge is a Bittorrent client written in python and using libtorrent as a backend. Now, the release in Ubuntu Universe, and even its most recent 0.5 release were nothing to write home about, but the current SVN of Deluge shows serious promise. While I do *NOT* encourage users to try the SVN, as it is under active development (and I don’t want to force the project maintainer to answer a million questions about rapidly changing code) , I do feel that Deluge’s next release could match utorrent, or even surpass it! I found that while Deluge was taking a little longer to bootstrap less populated torrents, and the plugin/preference selection leaves something to be desired, Deluge is making huge progress in the speed area. Once I got torrents rolling, I found that Deluge was averaging about the same up and down as utorrent had been, and without the memory overhead of wine!

In short, I thank everyone for their awesome feedback, and thanks Deluge for stepping up and filling the niche for a full-featured and fast native linux client!

On a somewhat unrelated note, please consider filling out my survey on OpenID use if you haven’t already!

Its Always the Little Things

I love Linux, I use it all the time, my windows partition is constantly being ntfsresize’d to make room for some new (and completely pointless) project. So please believe me when I say, I mean no offense to anyone who has worked on a project I might cite here, its just me venting a general frustration.

Why is it that uTorrent is such a great bittorrent client? Even under wine, it outstrips every other client I have found for download and upload speeds, but whats more, its still running in a smaller memory footprint! Now, I’m not someone who claims that every line of open source code is holy, and that if code is developed openly it is by nature incredible, its just aggravating how often I find myself turning to wine.

Now, for some things (aka the DirectX unit in my game design class )  you just know your going to use something, be it Vmware, qemu, wine, or (god forbid) actually booting into windows. but Bittorrent is ours. Its an open creation through and through, its open source, an open standard, and an important element of the open source communities infrastructure. In fact, the distribution of Linux ISO’s is one of the few mainstream legal uses….. *sigh* I know its a pointless rant, but wouldn’t it stand to reason that the open source world would hold the key to the fastest, lightest, and most reliable bittorrent client?

I don’t want to sound like I’m attacking the open source clients, they’re solid, generally reliable, and never a major pain to use, but no one really offers what utorrent does.

Its a silly and pointless ramble, and I’m open to thoughts, questions, or ideas, so fire away

Oh, and one last thing, can I just give Wine some incredible, huge, and mad props for the past few months have been big, and the hardwork shows, many thanks.

Mirrors are Awesome

Ok, so as many of you know, I run Ubuntu on my laptop, and generally like to lend a helping hand wherever its appropriate when working on/with Ubuntu. With the latest release of herd-5, I realized the Feisty release is not far away. I happen to have a hosting plan with quite a bit of bandwidth that isn’t really used for much beyond this blog and a few of my own packages/sources. So, to lend as best a hand as I can for release time, I have decided to host an iso release mirror.

The actual mirror url is here.

I encourage anyone who is going to be downloading Feisty iso’s to try and use mirrors like mine (generally extremely low usage) to help us keep the master servers alive on release day. I expect my mirror will have the images within 35-45 minutes of release (if not before, maybe there’s some awesome way for those of us planning on mirroring to grab releases before the craze starts).

technorati tags:linux, ubuntu, mirror

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