Planet GNOME-NL
Pascal de Bruijn (pmjdebruijn)
Richard Hughes has recently been rocking my world in a very big way… Color management on Linux/GNOME has been too hard for much too long and GNOME Color Manager is about to fix that. The hardcore groundwork of reading colorimeters and color calculus had already been taken care of by Graeme Gill with ArgyllCMS. GNOME Color Manager built on that by providing users with a very easy going GNOME user interface, while in the background driving ArgyllCMS to do all the hard work.
Another “problem” of using the commandline utilities of ArgyllCMS was, that display profiles consist of two parts. A VideoLUT which has to be applied by X11 or loaded into the video card, and a color matrix with gamma shaper which has to be applied by the color management aware applications like GIMP and UFRaw.
In the past, I’ve always built simpeler (and less accurate) profiles, to prevent me from having to load the VideoLUT every time I logged in. GNOME Color Manager solves this by introducing a service which does this fully automatically. Making it easy to use more accurate profiles.
Last but not least, GNOME Color manager also adheres to the XICC specification, and makes sure color management aware applications like GIMP and UFRaw can automatically see for which profile the VideoLUT had been applied, and thus dictating which profile to load in the application.
As could be expected, I’ve been building Ubuntu (Karmic) packages from regular git checkouts, which are available at my PPA.
Op Digiplace wordt ondermeer geschreven over de ervaringen met de Bubba|Two homeserver. Deze kleine en energiezuinige server is op veel terreinen in te zetten. Lees in dat verband ook de ‘Bubba|Two: introductie en inleiding“, “Bubba|Two: deel 1”, “Bubba|Two: deel 2“ en “Bubba|Two: deel 3“.
Bubba opnieuw installeren?
Op 16 oktober kwam er een update uit voor Bubba|Two. Met die release 1.2.3 werd eigenlijk alleen maar Logitech’s Squeezecenter opgewaardeerd.
The 1.2.3 release includes only one upgrade, Logitechs SqueezeCenter which is now called Squeezebox Server to the latest version 7.4.
Die update verkrijg je door vanuit de web interface van Bubba de update te activeren.
To upgrade a running system, make sure you don’t have any activities running such as uploads, downloads, print jobs etc. Then log in as admin in web-ui. Choose “settings” menu entry. Choose “Update” in the sub menu. Press the “Update” button.
Maar dat had ik dus niet gedaan. Ik wist ten eerste niet dat er een update beschikbaar was gekomen. Ik controleerde toevallig zelf of er updates waren door in een shell te kiezen voor “apt-get update” en “apt-get upgrade”. En toen ik zag dat de langverwachte update van Squeezebox beschikbaar was ging ik meteen door. En dat had ik mogelijk niet moeten doen. Want al snel kwam er een probleem m.b.t. de Mysql database. Er werd om een wachtwoord gevraagd en wat ik ook probeerde, niets was goed. Afijn..uiteindelijk kon de Squeezebox server geen muziek meer van mij vinden.
Opnieuw installeren
Dat was eigenlijk een prima aanleiding om eens te kijken naar de mogelijkheden om de totale software van Bubba te herinstalleren. Ik was daar wel nieuwsgierig naar. Dat bleek uiteindelijk heel eenvoudig te zijn. Je hoeft alleen maar een image te downloaden en uit te pakken naar een usb stick.
Je sluit daarna Bubba af en verwijderd de netspanningskabel. Je plaatst vervolgens die usb stick in een van de twee vrije usb poorten en drukt op de powerknop terwijl je de netspanningskabel weer terugplaatst. Daarna blijf je die knop nog 5 seconden ingedrukt houden voordat je hem weer los laat. En na circa 15 minuten is Bubba weer voorzien van haar standaard installatie.
- Download the recovery image at: http://update.excito.net/install/latest/bubba-two/
- Insert the USB memory stick in to your PC (minimum size 256 MByte) and format it, select FAT32 as file system if prompted. The USB stick must have a partition table.
- Unzip the downloaded recovery image to the root catalogue on the USB stick.
- Shut down Bubba|Two.
- Remove power to Bubba|Two.
- Place the USB memory in one of Bubba|Two’s USB ports, which one doesn’t matter.
- Make sure that Bubba|Two’s WAN port is connected to internet; this is needed during installation (to set time etc.).
- Hold the power button pressed, keeping it pressed, and plug in the power cord to Bubba|Two again.
- Wait until Bubba|Two begins to flash its LED (at 4Hz), hold the button pressed for 5 seconds then release it. Bubba|Two will now automatically format the disk, and install the Linux file system on it. The installation will take about 15 minutes to complete with a 1 TB disk, 20 minutes with a 2 TB disk. Wait until the LED stops flashing.
- Enter the web interface and perform a software update to ensure that your Bubba|Two runs the latest software: Click ‘Settings’ and ‘Update’, then press ‘Update system’. (as described in chapter Software Update).
Daarna moet je dan wel weer je muziek terugzetten maar dat is snel genoeg gedaan.
Note: All your personal data will be lost if doing this operation. A complete hard drive format will be done.
Overigens is het ook mogelijk om die image te installeren zonder het overschrijven van je data partitie. Er staan daarvoor instructies op de supportpagina van de fabrikant.
It is possible to boot up your Bubba|Two from a USB stick without formatting your hard drive. This could be useful if you by mistake have “locked” yourself out from your Bubba|Two. In the ‘\install’ catalogue you will find the ‘bubba.cfg’ file. Edit the settings in this file to fit your needs. Please notice that editing the config file in Windows with Notepad or Wordpad will destroy the file. Use an editor like Notepad2 or ConTEXT. If choosing ‘rescue system’ a SSH connection will be available at the WAN port. You will need to have an DHCP server as Bubba|Two in this mode will obtain an IP address automatically.
Op dit moment draait de boel weer als een zonnetje. Mijn enthousiasme voor deze kleine Homeserver blijft dan ook onveranderd groot. Vooral in de combinatie met een Squeezebox werkt het uit de kunst.
During my graduation a new opportunity popped up on my path. After long contemplation I decided to take it on. Since October 1st, I am a PhD student in the Computer Systems group at LIACS, Leiden University. Under Professor Wijshoff I will be working on databases and compiler optimizations. For most of our implementation work we are using LLVM, which is incredibly nice to work with and its future is looking very promising. Exciting times.
I also remain associated with Lanedo, providing expert help and advice.
Linux is natuurlijk hét voorbeeld van Open Source software. Maar het staat ook weer niet op zich zelf. Er zijn nog veel meer voorbeelden van te vinden. En dan heb ik het niet meteen over OpenOffice.org of andere bekende voorbeelden die populair zijn onder Linux desktop gebruikers.
Want je kan ook Open Source toepassingen vinden voor onder Windows of Apple OSX. Op de website Open Source Software Directory vind je een zeer verzorgd overzicht. Verdeeld over Home users, Businesses, Administrators en Developers. Met een huidig totaal van ruim 800 toepassingen is er voor ieder wel wat te vinden.
Why?
The squeezebox classic has been something I drooled over for many years. I always considered it to expensive to buy and because I mostly had my old mac mini running constantly with mpd so no real need for it.
But the squeezebox classic is EOL (end of line) now, the price dropped. For € 149 you now get the Classic with wifi. I also stopped running a machine constantly so I always had to wake up my mac/main pc, turn on the monitor just to play music.
I tried to solve this problem by using a BeagleBoard as low power mpd server, but this turned out to be very unreliable.
So with the price off the squeezebox dropping, I decided it was a good solution.
(note for gmpc users, no I am not going to abandon gmpc)
Setting up
The squeezebox consists of 2 parts.
- The player (the squeezebox classic in my case).
- The server.
The first thing you need todo is install the server (SBC: squeezebox server). SBC runs on osX, windows and linux. Installing it was very easy, add the debian repository, apt-get update and apt-get install squeezeboxserver. So in just a few minutes you can login to the server (http://ip:9000) configure it and let it scan your music.
Next it was time to setup the player, this also was very easy. Power + network cable , follow on-screen instruction, let it update it firmware and done.
This process is done in just a few minutes. So far so good.
(Importing my full music collection took 45 minutes on my low powered server).
First Impression
First impression of the setup is very good:
The player itself is especially nice; It has a very readable screen, even from a distance . This type of display was for me the biggest selling point, and a reason not to get the (more expensive) squeezebox touch with high resolution screen.
The interface is fast and fairly intuitive, so you can start using it out of the box. When reading some guides on the Internet you discover a lot of ‘hidden’ things (like keeping the button on the remote pressed for several seconds) that are very pleasant to use.
The PSU does not make funny noises, like the charger from my nokia phone, or my laptop.
The remote control is comfortable to use, the width is just right so you can effortless hit all the buttons. You never have to press twice because you did not hit the button right or the player did not pick it up. It feels pretty solid and heavy (compared to other remotes that size).
The server webinterface is a bit slow. I have been playing with the player most of the time, so until now it did not seem a problem.
Sound Quality
The specifications from logitech indicate it has a Burr-Brown™ 24-bit DAC with an SNR of 100dB and a THD of -93.5 dB.
The sound quality is good, I did not have scientific equipment to test it, but I did a comparing to the edirol UA1EX soundcard I had and it sounded equal to a slightly bit better. (Test done with a NAD C320BEE amplifier and Beyerdynamic DT990 headphones).
I also compared it, using the same setup, against my Marantz CD50001 cd player, I could spot the difference for some music (setup a script to randomly select the one or the other via a IR blaster) but I could not objectively say what was better, feeling indicates the CD player was slightly better.
All in all the sound quality is good enough for me.
You can find a lot of tips on the internet on how to improve the output of the squeezebox classic, it seems you can get a decent improvement by replacing the PSU by a linear one. There are also several DIY modifications on the hardware itself.
Extendability
This is where things are fun. The server (and so the player) can be extended using plugins. Plugins can be easily installed and updating using the plugin manager in SBC.
One of the first things I installed was the custom search plugin. Normally if you search on f.e. Clapton you would have to press “222 555 2 7 8 666 66″ (like the old system to sms), with this plugin pressing only the number the character is under is sufficient. So you only need to press 2 5 2 7 6 6 for Clapton.
Another nice plugin is the IR Blaster plugin. You add an IR blaster to the headphone output off the squeezebox, you then (using SBC) can tell the blaster to send certain IR codes when powering on/off and changing volume. You can easily learn codes by pointing any remote at the player and pressing the buttons. Very nice. (better then messing around with lirc) I use this plugin to turn on my amplifier, switch to the right input and redirect volume control.
There are tons of more plugins available. You can add rss feeds to your player display, re-organize the menu structure. Show weather forcasts and a lot more.
Ipod Touch as remote control
Installing iPeng on my ipod touch made that a perfect remote control for the squeezebox. It has cover art a nice playlist, and shows the same menu structure as on the squeezebox classic.
Impression after using it for a few months.
The player itself is still great, I have no problems with it. I did some testing on the build in wifi and it manages to out performce my laptop and ipod touch easily. Where my laptop looses connection I can still play flac files without any re-buffering or delays. The only negative thing is that it is a dust magnet.
The server is another story though. The webinterface is to slow to do any serious browsing through your music collection. You are constantly waiting for the page to update and fully drawn. I tried to improve this by tips I found on the community forum, but no real gain came from it (see here for me ranting). The performance issue is so big, it would be a reason for me to stop using it and sell the squeezebox classic. Creating a larger playlist (say a few thousand songs) is fatal, search is slow and updating the playlist on the webpage can easily take 30 seconds.
I hope with future releases (they intent to move to sqlite instead of running there own mysql) improves this. I know the hardware the server runs on is not the fastest, but this should not be needed. (It is a via esther @ 1.5 ghz with 1 gig of memory running Debian).
Conclusion
Because off the large difference in experience between the server software and the player it is very hard to say. The player is very hard to top and if your goal is to have easy access to your music sitting behind your stereo, I would strongly advice it. If you mostly play music sitting behind your computer (and so use the webui) you are better off with MPD + a nice client. MPD is faster on every account, scanning the db, searching the db and creating large playlists. In mpd I can add 22000 items to my playlist with no noticable delay, with SBC I can easily get a cup of coffee while waiting it to be done.
Het doel is om een bruikbare, complete en solide metadata bibliotheek te bouwen. Met uitgebreide (tot in thet extreme toe) unit tests. Wanneer het om jouw files gaat willen we kunnen garanderen dat het correct zal gebeuren.
Dit alles kan je vinden op Gitorious. De code zit in de photo-support branch van de mainline repository, master is een kopie van de SVN repository voor upstream Taglib#. Momenteel ondersteunen we JPEG en TIFF, met Exif en XMP (zie de wiki voor meer details). We zijn van plan om dit verder uit te breiden naar alle andere formaten. Meer instructies in verband met het verkrijgen en testen van de code kan je hier vinden.
Wat is het grote plan? Eerst gaan we de git versie op zich verbeteren. Wanneer die klaar is zullen we deze beginnen gebruiken (en shippen) in F-Spot om ze verder te laten rijpen (tegelijkertijd houden we de hoofdrepository in gitorious up-to-date). Op lange termijn zullen we met upstream werken om dit terug te mergen. Ik heb reeds gepraat met Gabriel Burt, deze "fork" zal dus niet eeuwig blijven bestaan.
We zijn nog op zoek naar mensen die mee willen helpen. Ofwel door het te testen (zodat je zeker bent dat het je files juist behandelt) en natuurlijk door er aan te hacken. Tot mijn grote verbazing moet helemaal geen superhero hacker zijn om nuttigs te kunnen doen, het schrijven van een metadata library is niet zo heel moeilijk.
Zin om mee te helpen? Zet je IRC client op, kom naar #f-spot (op irc.gnome.org) en praat met mij (rubenv) of Mike (tigger).
I fiddled a bit with the Gpx::Graph widget to make it more flexible. It can now also display elevation.
I hope to release this soon.
Q
p.s. offcourse a screenshot
Tumbler’s maintainer wrote an interesting tutorial on how to use the thumbnail DBus API today.
Check it out if your application needs to use thumbnails.
Last few weeks I have been working on the new thumbnail infrastructure for future Maemo products.
Last year I made a specification for requesting thumbnails over D-Bus. Afterward I made a quick prototype and replaced the hildon-thumbnailer library of Maemo with it. This prototype will be deployed on the standard N900 image. It’s too late to replace Fremantle’s thumbnailer with the new stuff. It takes time to properly test it.
While I was developing both the specification and the prototype XFCE developer Jannis Pohlmann contacted me about rewriting my prototype for use in the XFCE project. Tumbler was born.
The nice people at Nokia are more interested in working with upstream projects instead of maintaining own products separately, so I shifted my focus from hildon-thumbnail to contributing to Jannis’ Tumbler project.
We realized that we needed different kinds of schedulers so while Jannis was developing Tumbler I kindly asked to consider abstracting scheduling a bit. Tumbler now has two schedulers. The background one sets I/O and scheduler priorities to IDLE and processes its thumbnail tasks in FIFO order. The foreground uses LIFO and will instead of grouping Ready signals together, emit them immediately after each single thumbnail is finished. Default is of course foreground.
We also realized that thumbnail flavors are going to be platform specific. So we added some support for this in the DBus APIs that we further fine tuned and versioned.
Congratulations and appreciation to Jannis who made Tumbler’s code and design really nice. Also thanks a lot for constructively considering our requirements and helping adapting Tumbler’s code to cope with them.
I know you for example worked one long night on this stuff, so I officially owe you a few beers and/or cocktails next conference.
How about FOSDEM?
Pascal de Bruijn (pmjdebruijn)
It’s been a while since Ubuntu One was announced, but now in Karmic Koala it’s getting included by default, so I finally decided to try it… And it really works like a charm. I’ve configured my home workstation, my laptop and my workstation at work all to my Ubuntu One account, and now I have a quick and easy way to getting files in sync on all three… In the past used used to scp files around, which could get pretty bothersome… Ubuntu One makes this all automagical!
Canonical has received some flak from the community about keeping the server backend closed source… Lets keep some perspective on this… First Canonical releases their Enterprise (LTS) version binaries for free… RedHat (RHEL) certainly doesn’t, Novell (SLES) even makes it bothersome to get to the sources of their Enterprise product, or at least it wasn’t obvious to me. Google doesn’t release the sources to their search engine either… We still (sortof) love Google, don’t we?
My point being there is nothing wrong with Canonical wanting to make a buck. And their offer for 2GB of storage for free is more than generous. Especially since it’s not really ment as a replacement for regular file transfer protocols.
And most important of all… I don’t need to install some oddball proprietary binary on my workstation (in the hopes it won’t send some of my user info to some company in secrecy) to use Ubuntu One. Remember the client is very open source, so we can verify, that at least the client is to be trusted.
I’m usually not one for showing off my desktops, but hey… why not…
If you want to have a similar desktop, make sure you have the gnome-themes-ubuntu, gnome-themes-extras and gnome-colors packages installed. Then go to System, Preferences, Appearance. In the Appearance dialog on the Theme tab, select the New Wave theme, and then press Customize… In the Customize Theme dialog on the Controls tab, select Inverted, then go to the Colors tab and press Reset to Defaults, then go the Icons tab and select your favorite icon theme, I used GNOME Brave from the GNOME Colors project, but Fortrot works very well as well. To finish things off you can use this as a background.
Credit should be given where due, the basic New Wave/Inverted/Fortrot combination was suggested to me by Loe Spee. Thanks!
The mobile phone saga.
Last year my abo ended and I could get a new abo with new phone. I opted for the nokia n78. The choice was not to well thought out, but in the store it felt ok enough strength wise and I could sync it with my mac. It also had wifi, so I could easily use it as mpd controller.
It turned out the telephone has an impressive amount of features, but utterly fails to implement even one of these features decently.
* The phone is ok, quality is decent. But picking up and hanging up can be a pain. (more about that later).
* It is a crappy agenda.
* The camera is useless even for quick snap-shots that do not need to be good. The 2nd camera is even worse.
* Wifi is ok, but useless without a decent browser or mail client.
* Syncing with mac results in duplicate entries in a contact, frustrating as hell. I do use the official nokia plugin for iSync.
* Who needs a FM transmitter?? even if you want it, you need to wrap the antenna around the phone inside the radio to get a decent reception.
* Software crashes constantly. It has a multimedia key (or how they call it) that gives you a cover-flow ish access to the multimedia keys, this crashes constantly.
* it has a scroll wheel (apple style, you need to scroll your finger over the edge of a button). Until now I haven’t found anybody who could scroll to the right item with it. (I asked several people to try it). And it is non-functional in most part of the gui.
Given all this, I could have lived with it. I can make a phone calls, I have contacts synced with my agenda (sort of).
The phone seems solid enough. I dropped it many times, even when riding my bike. It survived with only a few dents.
But the buttons, are the real problem. The number buttons is a bar (full width, 1mm high) you need to press the bar at exactly the right place with your nail or top of finger (to closed spaced, to small button).
The buttons to pick up, answer and enter option menu are embedded in the top cover. You need to press the top of phone down. However the top is one part, so pressing the right side in (where the hang up button is) can also result in clear or the option menu (located below and above it).
So hanging up a call 1/2 the time results in switching the call to handfree mode. Clearing a character results in pressing hang-up key, causing your sms to go lost, etc.
So all in all, I need another phone. Either I will go for a linux based phone (andoid or n900) or a very very basic phone.
To get to the point off the rant, I need some advice for the following 2 things:
* What is the best (price efficient) linux based telephone to get.
* What is the best cheapest (preferable clamshelf so it screen is well protected) phone to get. iSync sync is a huge plus but not a hard requirement.
Off-course donations are very very welcome, as budget is non-existing. Current level in the donation pot is € 30.
Q
p.s. If people wonder what I did with previous donations (as it was insufficient to get a new battery for my laptop), I bought books and a few linux games from it. I also used some of it to make donation to one or two other projects and also for gmpc icons.
Pascal de Bruijn (pmjdebruijn)
It’s been almost a year since I last updated my Canon EOS 400D color profiles (for UFRaw). I’ve learned a bit since then, and made a new set of profiles. The set includes an accurate daylight profile, and five Canon picture style emulation profiles, which should get you the general look and feel of camera generated JPEGs out of UFRaw while using these profiles.
You can download the profiles here, or get them nicely packaged for Ubuntu Karmic from my PPA.
Did some long planned gpx-viewer updates.
The tracks (now per file) are listed in a treeview instead of drowdown. It also stores window size and pane position.
http://images.sarine.nl/gpx-viewer-24102009.png
I’m still figuring out how to do the same thing with cmake, but various bloggers and comments appear to be promising that it’ll be even more easy.
But this is a message for probably all Nokia teams who are making Qt-based libraries:
First open your src/src.pro file and add this stuff:
CONFIG += create_pc create_prl QMAKE_PKGCONFIG_REQUIRES = QtGui pkgconfig.files = packagename.pc pkgconfig.path = $$(DESTDIR)$$[QT_INSTALL_LIBS]/pkgconfig INSTALLS += target headers pkgconfig
Now open your debian/$package-dev.install file and add this line:
usr/lib/pkgconfig
You’ll be doing all the autotools people a tremendous favor.
Next, open the README file and document that you need to use qmake-qt4 on Debian or make either qmake-qt3 or qmake-qt4 work flawlessly with your build environment. Perhaps also mention how to set the install prefix, how to make qmake find and install .pc files in another location, stuff like that. I find that this is lacking for almost every Qt-based library.
You’ll be doing everybody who wants to use your software a tremendous favor.
Onder Ubuntu 9.10 (beta op dit moment) is het niet zonder meer mogelijk om onder Compiz de kubus te laten draaien met behulp van je scrollwiel. Dat is op te lossen door gebruik te maken van je Configuratie-editor.
Je start die configuratie editor op door gconf-editor in te tikken in je terminal. Klik dan op het pijltje naast apps en klik door naar onderstaande vermelding en kies daar dus voor Button 5 en Button 4
/apps/compiz/plugins/vpswitch/allscreens/options/next_button Button5
/apps/compiz/plugins/vpswitch/allscreens/options/prev_button Button4
Pascal de Bruijn (pmjdebruijn)
A few days back both UFRaw 0.16 and Lensfun 0.2.4 were released. I have made Ubuntu packages available for both in my PPA, built for Ubuntu Jaunty and Ubuntu Karmic. These milestones also mean I’ll stop tracking development releases for a while now. So no more svn/cvs releases until interesting things start popping up again. Since both these builds are release grade quality (knock on wood), I’ll be dropping support for my Jaunty repository and builds. Karmic will be released very soon.
Er zijn meerdere mogelijkheden onder Linux om de status van je hardware te kunnen volgen. Denk b.v. aan Discover, hwinfo etc. etc. Maar CPU-G kende ik nog niet.
CPU-G is an application that shows useful information about your CPU, RAM, Motherboard and some general information about your system
Reinout van Schouwen (reinouts)
The battery of my old laptop had died and it wasn’t worth replacing it. So, just in time for the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, I bought myself a new laptop. After an exhaustive search on the web for the best device within my budget, I settled upon the Asus X56V. My previous experiences with Asus were good and, as it turns out, they are the first laptop producer to receive a European Eco Flower award (
Unfortunately it came preloaded with Windows, there was no way around that. However, I managed to get a €24 refund from Asus after I returned the sealed recovery disc and license sticker. Better than expected!
As someone who always wants to run the latest and the greatest software, I installed Mandriva 2010 (currently at Release Candidate 2) on it. In general, the machine works very well under Mandriva 2010. Even the built-in webcam worked out-of-the-box. But as always, there are some things to be aware of:
- At times, the screen brightness will be dimmed in reaction to the surrounding light conditions. However, this functionality seems too agressive: sometimes it’s hard to make out what’s on the screen. To prevent this, use the following command as root:
echo 0 > /sys/devices/platform/asus_laptop/ls_switch. Filed as bug 51931. - The video chip is an ATi Radeon HD3470 (r600 based). This means that 3D acceleration is not yet working well with the Free radeon driver. R600/R700 Kernel Mode Switching support has been promised for Linux kernel 2.6.32, so I look forward to trying out gnome-shell soon, just as the other cool kids are doing.
With that said, I can recommend this laptop. Now, I just need to find some device to benefit from the HDMI connector…
