August « 2006 « tigert.com | my life and stuff

28Aug/064

Linux sound and multimedia

So. Sudddenly I got no sound from my laptop. I have had ALSA (the "advanced linux sound architecture") act on me also before, so I suspected the master audio got muted, like happened ages ago.

But no. I search, run alsamixer, the Gnome mixer app, trying to figure out what the problem is.. but nothing. I even tried headphones, to see if the built in speakers are broken. Nothing seems to help. I am really starting to suspect the hardware has simply broken on this Thinkpad. All the software plays just fine, no error messages or anything - I just simply hear nothing. I try spells like "killall esd" and others, but in vain..

Then a friend wonders whether it could be that the digital output toggle of the sound driver would be somehow enabled, thus routing everything there.

I look again at the mixer, and now, once I enable *everything* to show in my mixer app (the defaults had just a main and dsp sliders, which is nice) and I toggle everything. Suddenly I hear music!

So it turns out that "Line Jack Sense" was the thing. Now, why does this get turned on by itself, and why I need to hunt down such a hidden setting anyway is a good question. I think in a few years we can all pat ourselves in the back and laugh at this kind of stuff..

Filed under: gnome, software 4 Comments

18Aug/065

Gee, I wonder…

You'd think most blogs have a "post has more than n links => I think this is spam!" -filtering now and the morons wouldn't bother, but I was wrong..

Hmm.. My dear reader has a lot of interesting links to offer me..!

Filed under: blogging, software, spam, web 5 Comments

17Aug/062

Testing maemo-blogger…

This post comes from the N770 with the native tool. Hmm. (edit: Looks like it worked ) Testing blog tools is kinda awkward when you are syndicated in at least two planets.. Sorry about that

Hmm.

I think I would like to see at least a few things implemented, here are some suggestions:

It's nice that I can add images to the post. I am not sure if it works with my Wordpress installation though. But it would be nice if I could set a predefined maximum size that the images get scaled to. Apply a slight unsharp mask sharpening afterwards too for the nice crisp look..
It would be sweet if posting the blog would not freeze the whole UI, but would rather show a spinner animation and would tell me it's going to take a bit of time..
I think "source view" could be accessible via a menu, it feels a bit too prominent in the UI right now. I'd rather just use the wysiwyg view most of the time - the source is a last resort and the tabs take one line off the screen.
It should wrap the lines (though I know this must be planned, it's very early version anyway so its a bit unfair to complain )

All in all, it worked, so that's nice.

Filed under: blogging, general, maemo.org, software, web 2 Comments

10Aug/063

Eating the Sardine

On a more positive tone, we're trying to get a apt-get update'able bleeding edge Maemo build out for developers, to get new development faster out for the application writers and other interested geeks. It's called Sardine, and it's hot!

Check it out!
Check out the wiki also!

See my shiny, grouping application switcher toolbar!

Oh! One thing: Since you will be upgrading a lot of stuff at the first update, it is definitely better to install sshd first from the "maemo repository" and log into the device from your desktop computer. Since it's likely that maemo-launcher gets updated and thus restarted, your xterm might die, and your upgrade would otherwise not get finished.

(And if you install sshd make sure you change your root password for pretty obvious reasons... )

Filed under: Work, maemo.org, software 3 Comments

10Aug/062

Things to avoid when integrating Linux with hardware

We got the Samsung ultra-mobile PC (the "origami" device I think?) to play with at the office, and I thought of sharing my experience with you. Maybe this will help us, Novell, Ubuntu or someone else who might be thinking of bundling Linux with laptops or other hardware in the future.. But let's move on. This opinion below is biased, is solely my own and not of my employer's etc etc.. you get the idea.

The box was nice, very Apple'isque black shiny cardboard and the device itself looked nice, though the glossy "piano black" finish gets fingerprinted quickly. The thing has an integrated flip-stand in the back to make it stand upright by itself when on a table. *snap!* All I can say is it took 2 seconds to break it, way too fragile design.

Otherwise the device feels nice and solid, though a bit large for something that is not a laptop (no keyboard!) or something you can put on your pocket (ipaq or a nokia770 or whatever) But it's a cute geek toy anyway. Costy one, though.

What really boggled my mind was the user experience after turning the unit on. Up until this point, it was smooooth (if we don't count the unlucky "snap" earlier). One gets greeted with the standard XP boot screen, and I started to enjoy it. But just then a wet towel gets thrown at your face from the screen: Create an user account! Come on, this is a tablet! Why not just have one preset there? Up comes the familiar windows user account creation tool, on the 800x480 screen. But since this is a tablet version of XP, and since we have no keyboard, we also get this pretty large popup keyboard window that is on top of everything. No, not the fancy translucent one you saw on the origami preview photos (we'll get to that later) - but a simple and functional floating window. The only problem is, it obscures the user account wizard, so I cannot see anything. Splat! What's even worse, is that if you try to move it on the bottom of the screen to interact with the user account tool, it promptly moves itself back inside the screen area. Argh..

Anyway. Off I went to create the account and everything was nice again. XP boots, we get the standard XP desktop etcetera. The start menu and applications menu are their usual overpopulated ones you are used in a default XP installation. The biggest problem is, this device has vertical resolution of 480 pixels, so nothing really fits. The menus grow several sub-menus deep, all dialogs etc have their buttons clipped off screen and interaction is cumbersome at least. Someone could have done a very good job here customizing the menus with useful things and hiding the stuff nobody needs.

Welcome!

What is even worse at this point, just when you start to doubt how much they really did to integrate the XP installation with the device, it dawns on you: not much at all. More wizards, license agreements, antivirus software activation and update! - and Windows update. Windows Media Player Setup Wizard! Everything starts up at once. It finds new devices (hey, look, we have a bluetooth adapter! and wavelan! Who knew?) At this point I seriously gave up. What started with great anticipation and curiosity and impression of a smooth experience turned out to be a total flop. They just built the device and slapped XP tablet edition on it. Without thinking about you, the user at all. Gee, thanks!

Handy menu to open the on-screen-keyboard

I know I am not the best person to write about this, as I am very biased due my work with Gnome, Linux and the Nokia 770 community and user interface, but uhh.. this is how it feels to be ignored as a user. Please, let's not do this with Linux. It feels like crap. It would not have taken that much effort to make it a lot better.

Filed under: Work, general, gnome, maemo.org, software 2 Comments

4Aug/061