Category: Hacking

For Ronald

It happens that I was (re)installing Ubuntu Dapper on my laptop this afternoon too, like Ronald was on his new Mac.
The laptop has been dist-upgraded since I first installed warty on it, and on the development repositories for most of the way. It had accumulated a bit of cruft because of all the hacks I had to do when things broke during the dev cycles, and I’d never been able to get either hibernation or suspend to work at all.
I copied /home, /etc and /var off to another machine and did a complete reinstall, which worked flawlessly.

Here’s some notes from the post-install. There aren’t many, because by and large things worked flawlessly for me:

  • X had the wrong resolution by default. I had to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and change it from 1024×768 to 1400×1050.
  • The 3D stuff was set up automatically, using the open source DRI drivers. For better DRI performance (xorg doesn’t get them right on its own), I added these lines to the xorg.conf:
    • Option “AGPMode” “4”
    • Option “AGPSize” “64”
  • Multimedia.
    • plugins – the usual story – too many formats are encumbered for one reason or another and can’t be included in the default install, so playing anything from Apple Trailers wouldn’t work. Following the instructions in the Ubuntu wiki, I added the universe and multiverse repositories to my apt configuration in /etc/apt/sources.list and installed the packages for restricted formats:
      • gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-pitfdll gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse
    • After that, I could play trailers on the Apple trailers site, and Rhythmbox could play the few m4a files I have access to.
    • I only partially agree with Ronald about the ‘cryptic fd://0 errors’ when trying to play things in totem’s mozilla playing.The title of the box was poorly labelled ‘Could not play fd://0’ (this should be fixable in totem to show the URL instead), but the text of the dialog box clearly stated something along the lines of ‘You do not have a decoder installed to handle this file’ and put me on the right track. However, it doesn’t say what format or plugins to look for, which sucks. There’s been some discussions in the past about building a mechanism for telling the user exactly which plugin/package they should look for, but noone has ever built it.
    • software – totem & rhythmbox are the main multimedia apps I use. Both were installed, but the totem-gstreamer-firefox-plugin wasn’t for some reason. Simple enough to install that.
    • ALSA set itself up nicely with DMIX, so no worries about sharing the sound card between applications. Unfortunately, that tends to cause shuddery video playback in GStreamer and (to a lesser extent) xine for reasons that are best explained in another post.
  • Hibernation:
    • Encouragingly, worked the first time I tried it – immediately after installing and logging in, before doing any configuration or anything.
    • Sadly, failed in the old way an hour later after I’d installed stuff, copied some pieces of my home directory back across, and had a few apps running it failed in the same way as before the reinstall: by getting as far through the hibernate as ‘turn the screen off’ and then sitting there flashing the hard-disk-access light for the next 10 minutes until I switch it off via the power button.
    • I really wish I knew how to fix it – the hard disk in this machine is so slow it takes a good 4-5 minutes to boot up, so I hate turning it off, and carrying it around still turned on isn’t much better.

Guadec roundup

Had a ball of a time at Guadec last week. It was nice and close to Barcelona, which made a nice change – traditionally it’s been held in the opposite hemisphere from me and I haven’t been able to get there.

Got to meet a bucket-load of interesting people that have previously just been hackergotchis on various planets, or nicks on IRC channels.

Socially, it was an absolute blast.

Technologically, wonderful: loads of great hacks being shown off, and heaps of in-depth technical talks.

Business-wise, it was nice to feel love from the community about the things we’re trying to do with multimedia at Fluendo, and great to see everyone wearing our hats 🙂

The Elisa guys did some very nice demos, and for anyone that missed it, all the source code for Elisa is available in Subversion. Check out the project page for more details.

Edward gave a nice lightning talk showing off some of the things he’s been doing in Pitivi. It came off nicely, but I think made it hard for the audience to see just how cool it was – appending video files in multiple source formats and resolutions to a timeline and then scrubbing through them in realtime like it was nothing really shows how much polish he’s added to GStreamer and Gnonlin since last year. I know the Jokosher guys certainly appreciate it, since it’s made things considerably easier for them.

Andy and Wim gave a talk on some new things in GStreamer 0.10, including a neat ~20 lines-of-python demo of distributed synchronised playback using GStreamer’s network clock implementation.

It was also nice to meet a bunch of new (to me) people that are doing fabulous things with GStreamer 0.10: MDK (from Diva), the Jokosher gang, Nokia N770 people, Opened-Hand, Iain Holmes (from Marlin), MacSlow, Burger, Zeenix, and the Elisa guys – even though they work for Fluendo too, this was the first time I actually got to meet Phil and Loic. And of course, Bastien and Tim – always good guys to hang out with.

We (the GStreamer team) have worked really hard to make GStreamer 0.10 as good as it is, and it’s nice to see people reaping the benefit of our collective labour.

I found Jim Getty’s talk on the OLPC project quite exciting – a project that really has a chance to make a big difference to the world. We took possession of one of the dev boards, and I’m looking forward to seeing what we can do to help them in the multimedia area.

We had a good audio BOF on Friday afternoon, talking about Pulseaudio and how it can be more than a better-ESD for the Gnome desktop. Monty from xiph.org talked about writing a FUSD based wrapper for OSS, and possibly even ALSA devices. This would replace the existing system of LD_PRELOAD hacking using padsp and esddsp, and make pulseaudio a serious candidate for The Linux Desktop Audio Solution. I’m really keen to see whether we can make it fly, since the Linux Audio swamp has needed draining since forever.

I need to write up a summary of some of the things I’ve been hacking on lately, but I might leave that for another night. I’m also looking forward to putting in some GStreamer related talk proposals for LCA next year.