As any of you who are following me on twitter know I ordered the beautiful, sleek and very white Soundblaster Arena headset last week from newegg and today I moseyed my way down to Puralator to pick em up!  Happy happy joy joy.

Seeing as there are little no reviews of these kind of things specific to linux I thought I would share my thoughts on the first day with my new lover and how they react to my other lover: Ubuntu.  I’m not going to go over packaging and all the other nitty gritty details that most reviews dive into, I’ll just let you know the one thing you care about: How do they sound?

Well up until now I’ve been using  a pair of Panasonic earbuds (Best pair of ear buds I have ever owned for bass which is saying a lot as these cost me 30,000 pesos – 15$ – in Colombia and they out perform my $200.00 Bose buds sitting in my room) and the sound has been fairly impressive up until this point so it would take something pretty special to really make me say ‘wow’.  Obviously an over ear headset is going to outperform buds but the quality of those buds was so high with the music I listen to that I wasn’t sure at how much to expect.

First Impressions

In linux, to be honest, the difference isn’t astronomical as far as what they are delivering.. Clearly these things are 10 times the size of ear buds so the overall sound is a lot richer and a bit boomier when it comes to the progressive house I listen to.  Putting on classical the sound is a fair bit cleaner although it going to take something at 320k to really hear the difference in sound.  Again because it’s an over ear experience the sound comes through richer as well.

In windows you can take everything written above and multiply it by 10.  The sound is insanely deep and booming when the equalizer is adjusted.  These things rattled on my head and massaged my soul with amazing thumping beats.  It’s enough to make me almost want to go into Windows to do as much work as I can.  Shit that sound was impressive..  I made sure only to take a taste of it though, just a few seconds or else I would probably be in Windows right now.  So keep in mind non of the limitations I describe here have anything to do with the hardware, this is a badass headset.  It all comes down to the lack of proper support and drivers for linux.  GGAHHH!!!

Volume

Now this is a USB only headset and I am guessing that is playing a part into why I am unable to really crank these things.  I mean don’t get me wrong it goes moderately loud but it doesn’t pound my head like when I had my Bose set which plug directly into the audio jacks.  I mean I can feel the beats but it’s not leaving my ears ringing after a long session of Jan Waterman which is the only way to listen to such brilliance. I am able to amp it up more through pulse for classical music than I was with my buds but with trance it starts to distort when I dance around 170%.

As you can guess it the same cannot be said for the windows experience.  These things fucking exploded on my head.  It was so loud, so deep and so bloody distortion free that I had to shed a little tear for not being able to experience that in linux.

The Microphone:

Truth be told one of the main reasons I’m buying this is the mic.  I haven’t done an IndustryBroadcast in months and months and month because my old usb mic kicked the bucket.  So a critical criteria was mic quality and most of the reviews had nothing but good things to say about the mic.

First thing that rocks about it is that it is detachable.  So if I’m out or whatever and don’t need it, I don’t need to have it sticking off my head.  Definitely like that.  The quality of the sound is decent.  It’s nothing amazing by any stretch, and this has nothing to do with the software as it sounds the same in windows.  My voice comes across as really damn deep, almost unnaturally so for those who are used to hearing me through my built in lappy mic, and while they claim this is a noise canceling mic, when I was in windows with the proper drivers loaded and software running I really didn’t pick up a crystal clean sound even though all windows were closed and appliances off in my surrounding area.  It was dead quiet in my apartment and i was still getting a bit of noise that I had to clean up with Audacity.  So overall the mic works decently but I wouldn’t buy these just for that.. If you’re doing podcasting you’re better off getting a proper mic and a proper pair of headphones.  If you’re gaming then these will definitely do the trick and make you sound like a manly man while you’re at it.

Size, Shape, Comfort

My ears are totally covered, I picked these up at 2pm today, and outside of a workout and dinner I’ve had them on ever since.  Totally comfortable, no pinching or anything anywhere.  Cushioning is soft and fluffy and I have lots of room inside for my ears

The Design:

See picture above, these things are badass!  I bought these because they received the best overall review of any gaming headset around and they were under $100.00 at New Egg.  I also haven’t bought a SoundBlaster product in 15 years so it felt awesome to support a company that’s done so much to change the audio landscape of the digital world.  But I am not going to lie and say I wasn’t super super stoked to have this gorgeously designed throw-back to 1980′s sci-fi on my head.  I mean if storm troopers are grooving to good tunes they are doing it with the SoundBlaster Arena on their head, and dammit so am I!  This goes for the color and general shape, but these bad boys are sleek and not bulky by any stretch.. I was actually surprised at the small size of the box when I picked them up.  I was expecting, from the pictures, that these things would be much more obtuse and large but they are the perfect size.  That and the black on a white body is brilliant.  Best looking headset on the market in my mind.

So there you have it!  If you want something that just cranks the sound out and you are using linux only I would go for a Senheisser or something else that goes into your audio jacks.

• The sound quality is good in these,  overall decent but nothign to write home about and my ears certainly aren’t going to be bleeding(in the best way possible) anytime soon.  I’m almost considering running VMware all the time just for music because these things absolutely rock in Windows.  So if you’re a windows user put your money into these bad boys, they will rock your world like nothing else.
• Mic is decent, good for gaming, decent enough for podcasting but nothing to write home about at all.  If you’re serious about casting go and buy a professional mic for $70.00 and use a cheaper $30.00 headset.  If you are gaming this is the way to go.  The mic detaches which is a huge plus
• Design rocks the cock, these are wicked looking phones that set your head apart from the rest
• Comfortable as anything else.  But phat padding around the ears with plenty of room will keep the tunes coming for hours and hours without discomfort.

Hope that helps, if anyone has any suggestions for how to improve the audio quality to something approaching windows I would love you forever!

So it seems that I’ve had a similar experience to a lot of people changing their wallpapers in ubuntu.  You’re scrolling through a bunch and in the list you notice this one called cosmos that doesn’t quite looks like the rest.  “Hmmm, what’s this?’ you think.  This looks like a bunch of images stacked on top of each other.  Could it be?  And yes, it is, it’s a multi-image slideshow that can have as your background that rotates on a schedule that you choose.  I immediately sat down and started figuring out how this thing works and in the end it was pretty simple, time consuming to setup as you have to input a ton of values into an xml file but simple.  I’m not going to go into huge detail about how it works if you want to read more head over to http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/create-custom-transitioning-background-your-gnome-228-desktop

So today I stumbled upon a motherload of amazing 3D space art at http://joejesus.deviantart.com and I go completely gaga over space art.. My wallpapers are all sci-fi scenes, I just can’t get over how breath taking some of these are.  So I raided the guys stash and ended up with around 30-40 new pieces for my wallpaper slideshow and like hell was I going to enter all of these in by hand so off I went searching for a nice little script that would do it for me.  I mean come on, one of the reasons I’m a linux user because I gave up the notion that time consuming repetitive tasks were something that you had to do by hand and sure enough I found a wonderful gentlemen over at the ubuntu forums who coded up a beauty of a script that worked like a charm.  So make sure to head over to : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9578962 and give the guy a big thank you hug for saving you hours of work, and read the instructions on how to use it.

Here’s the script, just copy and paste this into a file, chmod it to 755 and you’re off to the races:

#!/bin/bash
echo “<background>”
echo “  <starttime>”
echo “    <year>2009</year>”
echo “    <month>08</month>”
echo “    <day>04</day>”
echo “    <hour>00</hour>”
echo “    <minute>00</minute>”
echo “    <second>00</second>”
echo “  </starttime>”
echo “  <!– This animation will start at midnight. –>”

if [ $# -lt 4 ]
then
echo “usage: $0 <hold duration> <fade duration> file1 file2 …”
echo “example: $0 60 5 /path/to/dir/*.jpg /path/to/dir/*.png”
exit 1
fi

hold=$1
fade=$2
first=$3

#remove hold parameter
shift
#remove fade parameter
shift

while [ $# -gt 0 ]
do
echo “  <static>”
echo “    <duration>$hold</duration>”
echo “    <file>$1</file>”
echo “  </static>”
echo “  <transition>”
echo “    <duration>$fade</duration>”
echo “    <from>$1</from>”
if [ $# -gt 1 ]
then
echo “    <to>$2</to>”
else
echo “    <to>$first</to>”
fi
echo “  </transition>”
shift
done
echo “</background>”

Can’t remember when this happened to me but after some upgrade in the past my gnome-volume-control-applet just stop appearing in my notification area.  From what I understand this is due to the full integration of Pulse Audio in the last linux builds, but either way it was a pain in the arse as this little tool is the easiest way to be adjusting your volume.   After some searching I found a quick fix and that was to simple go into System > Preferences and add the following to the Startup Applications list:

gnome-volume-control-applet

That should do it, upon bootup you should have it back and if you don’t want to wait till you reboot just press alt-f2 and run it there.   Viola! Problem solved

So I was having a problem with my external USB hard drive lately.  The USB connectors on this LG laptop are a bit shady so things get disconnected if you bump them and this would happen with my hard drive.. The problem being that if the Hard drive was disconnected like this and not properlyy unmounted that it wouldn’t come back up 50% of the time when I plugged it back in.

It would show up when I run fdisk -l and in dmesg but when I try to mount the drive it would return with the error ‘special device does not exist’.  The only way I could get it back online was to reboot the machine, until now!

I tried installed usbmount and pmount but neither fixed the problem.

After some research I discovered the MAKEDEV command.  So what I tried was to run MAKEDEV from inside of /dev/ and it would give me an error: “.udevdb or .udev presence implies active udev.  Aborting MAKEDEV invocation.”

So I went on and looked into /dev/.udev/ and found a /failed/ directory which had a blocked file in there referring to the hard drive that wasn’t mounting.  For some reason I ran the MAKEDEV [device] command here and VIOLA, it worked.  Apparently it just needs to be run in a directory that doesn’t have a .udev subdirectory in it

So for me the command was MAKEDEV /dev/sdd and it created sdd1 through sdd10.  Not sure what the other ones are for but I was able to mount sdd1 properly and access my hard drive.  I mean this is a pretty backwards work around but I can access my hard drive without rebooting, so I’m good to go!

So to sum it up, if you have a device that isn’t mounting properly but you can see the device with #sudo fdisk -l then:

1. try creating a temporary directory for your new mount points
2. Then run MAKEDEV [device] inside of that directory.  So if the partition your trying to mount is say /dev/sda1 then you’ll want to run MAKEDEV /dev/sda and hopefully that gives you access without needing to reboot.

I found this article today and wanted to reproduce it and share it around even more as it is such a wicked list.  More and more we are getting to a place where there are so many great alternatives to commercial software that you can almost see the business model starting to collapse.

Enjoy

Graphic Applications

ACDSee 9

Imgv is a unique and feature rich Image Viewer. It is released as free software with full source code. Imgv is portable and can run on Windows, Linux, BSD, OSX, and other operating systems. Features include a GUI that doesn’t get in the way of viewing your images, a file browser, slideshows, zooming, rotating, on-the-fly Exif viewing, histograms, fullscreen support, wallpaper setting, the ability to view 4 images on the screen at once, adjustable thumbnail sizes, playlists, view and download images from Web sites, movie playing, file searching/filtering, multiple directory loading, transitional effects, image hiding and more.

Cornice is a cross-platform image viewer written in Python + wxPython + PIL. It doesn’t pretend to be complete, fast, or even useful, but I like it and it is the viewer I use on both Linux and Windows. It has been inspired by the famous Windows-only ACDSee.
Adobe After Effects

Jahshaka is an editing and effects system. It allows to edit with flexibility and speed, create effects in real time, animate with unlimited features, paint and design on moving video, create music with all the tools the pros use, work in any format at any resolution.
Adobe FrameMaker and QuarkXPress

Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of “press-ready” output and new approaches to page layout. Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.
KWord is a frame-based word-processing and desktop publishing application. KWord is capable of creating demanding and professional looking documents. Whether you are a corporate or home user, production artist or student, KWord will prove a valuable and easy to use tool for all your word processing and layout needs. KWord is a wordprocessor based on frames. This can be used to place components in precise locations, as with many professional DTP applications. KWord can also handle huge amounts of texts and allows you to do professional markup with ease.
Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw

Xara Xtreme for Linuxis a powerful, general purpose graphics program for Unix platforms including Linux, FreeBSD and (in development) OS-X.

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more.

Skencil is an interactive vector drawing appliction. Known to run on GNU/Linux and other UNIX-compatible systems, it is a flexible and powerful tool for illustrations, diagrams and other purposes. A somewhat unique (for a drawing program) feature of Skencil is that it is implemented almost completely in a very high-level, interpreted language, Python. Python is powerful, object-oriented and yet easy to use.
Adobe Photoshop and Corel Paint Shop Pro

Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

CinePaint is a collection of free open source software tools for deep paint manipulation and image processing. CinePaint is used for motion picture frame-by-frame retouching, dirt removal, wire rig removal, render repair, background plates, and 3d model textures. It’s been used on many feature films, including The Last Samurai where it was used to add flying arrows. It’s also being used by pro photographers who need greater color fidelity than is available in other tools.

Krita is a painting and image editing application for KOffice. Krita is part of KOffice since version 1.4. It contains both ease-of-use and fun features like guided painting (never before has it been so easy to airbrush a straight line!) and high-end features like support for 16 bit images, CMYK, L*a*b and even OpenEXR HDR images. Krita supports many managed colorspaces, like rgb, grayscale, cmyk, lab, ycbcr and lms, in 8 and 16 bits per channel. Some colorspaces even support 32 bits per channel.

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

Gimpshop is a free graphics editor for Mac OS X 10.3/10.4, Linux, Solaris/SPARC and Windows. GIMPShop is a Gimp modification that features menu layouts, dialogs and naming conventions similar to those found in Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop users should feel right at home using Gimpshop. (This is a better alternative to GIMP if you are used to using PhotoShop.)
Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw

Unidentified Flying Raw (UFRaw) is a utility to read and manipulate raw images from digital cameras. It can be used on its own or as a Gimp plug-in. It reads raw images using Dave Coffin’s raw conversion utility – DCRaw. UFRaw supports color management workflow based on Little CMS, allowing the user to apply ICC color profiles. For Nikon users UFRaw has the advantage that it can read the camera’s tone curves.
Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro and Microsoft Movie Maker

Kino is a non-linear DV editor for GNU/Linux. It features excellent integration with IEEE-1394 for capture, VTR control, and recording back to the camera. It captures video to disk in Raw DV and AVI format, in both type-1 DV and type-2 DV (separate audio stream) encodings. You can load multiple video clips, cut and paste portions of video/audio, and save it to an edit decision list (SMIL XML format). Most edit and navigation commands are mapped to equivalent vi key commands. Kino can export the composite movie in a number of formats: DV over IEEE 1394, Raw DV, DV AVI, still frames, WAV, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4. Still frame import and export uses gdk-pixbuf, which has support for BMG, GIF, JPEG, PNG, PPM, SVG, Targa, TIFF, and XPM. MP3 requires lame. Ogg Vorbis requires oggenc. MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 require mjpegtools or ffmpeg. MPEG-4 requires ffmpeg.
Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. It supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs. Tasks can be automated using projects, job queue and powerful scripting capabilities. Avidemux is available for Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows under the GNU GPL license.
VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit Windows platforms (95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters. VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images.
Cinelerra is a free and open source software non-linear video editing system for the Linux operating system. (However, it has also been successfully ported to Mac OS X.) It is produced by Heroine Virtual, and is distributed under the GNU General Public License. Cinelerra also includes a video compositing engine, allowing the user to perform common compositing operations such as keying and mattes.

Anime Studio and Toon Boom Studio

KToon is a 2D Animation Toolkit designed by animators (Toonka Films ) for animators, focused to the Cartoon Industry. This project is covered by the GPL License using G++, OpenGL and QT as programming resources from KDevelop as the development platform. By now, KToon is only available for Unix systems but we expect to make it works on Windows systems too someday.

Synfig is a powerful, industrial-strength vector-based 2D animation software package, designed from the ground-up for producing feature-film quality animation with fewer people and resources.
Autodesk 3ds Max

Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.
Autodesk AutoCAD

QCad is an application for computer aided drafting in two dimensions (2d). With QCad you can create technical drawings such as plans for buildings, interiors, mechanical parts or schemas and diagrams. QCad works on Windows, Mac OS X and many Linux and Unix Systems. The source code of the QCad community edition is released under the GPL.

BRL-CAD package is a powerful Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) solid modeling system with over 20 years development and production use by the U.S. military. BRL-CAD includes an interactive geometry editor, parallel ray-tracing support for rendering and geometric analysis, path-tracing for realistic image synthesis, network distributed framebuffer support, image-processing and signal-processing tools. The entire package is distributed in source code form.
Autodesk Maya

Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.
Corel Trace

Potrace is a utility for tracing a bitmap, which means, transforming a bitmap into a smooth, scalable image. The input is a bitmap (PBM, PGM, PPM, or BMP format), and the default output is an encapsulated PostScript file (EPS). A typical use is to create EPS files from scanned data, such as company or university logos, handwritten notes, etc. The resulting image is not “jaggy” like a bitmap, but smooth. It can then be rendered at any resolution. Potrace can currently produce the following output formats: EPS, PostScript, PDF, SVG (scalable vector graphics), Xfig, Gimppath, and PGM (for easy antialiasing).
Adobe Flash Professional (formerly Macromedia)

OpenLaszlo is an open source platform for creating zero-install web applications with the user interface capabilities of desktop client software. OpenLaszlo programs are written in XML and JavaScript and transparently compiled to Flash and, with OpenLaszlo 4, DHTML. The OpenLaszlo APIs provide animation, layout, data binding, server communication, and declarative UI. An OpenLaszlo application can be as short as a single source file, or factored into multiple files that define reusable classes and libraries.

IMPRESS is a truly outstanding tool for creating effective multimedia presentations. Your presentations will stand out with 2D and 3D clip art, special effects, animation, and high-impact drawing tools. IMPRESS has a complete range of easy-to-use drawing and diagramming tools to spice up your presentation. Slide show Animation and Effects bring your presentation to life. Fontworks provides stunning 2D and 3D images from text. Create lifelike 3D images with astounding speed and response.
Macromedia Freehand MX

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more.

Karbon is a vector-based drawing application for KOffice. It allows artists to create complex drawings without losing image quality when zooming in on, or resizing the drawing. You can use Karbon to add finishing touches to diagrams created using Kivio or charts created using KChart.

Skencil is an interactive vector drawing appliction. Known to run on GNU/Linux and other UNIX-compatible systems, it is a flexible and powerful tool for illustrations, diagrams and other purposes. A somewhat unique (for a drawing program) feature of Skencil is that it is implemented almost completely in a very high-level, interpreted language, Python. Python is powerful, object-oriented and yet easy to use.

Xara Xtreme for Linuxis a powerful, general purpose graphics program for Unix platforms including Linux, FreeBSD and (in development) OS-X.
Microsoft Publisher

DRAW – from a quick sketch to a complex plan, DRAW gives you the tools to communicate with graphics and diagrams. You can manipulate objects, rotate in two or three dimensions; the 3D controller puts spheres, rings, cubes, etc. at your disposal. Arrange objects: group, ungroup, regroup, and edit objects while grouped. Sophisticated rendering let you create photorealistic images with your own texture, lighting effects, transparency, perspective, and so on. Smart connectors make short work of flowcharts, organisation charts, network diagrams, etc. Define your own ‘glue points’ for connectors to ‘stick’ to.

Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of “press-ready” output and new approaches to page layout. Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.
Microsoft Visio

ArgoUML is the leading open source UML modeling tool and includes support for all standard UML 1.4 diagrams. It runs on any Java platform and is available in ten languages. ArgoUML provides constraint modeling support on UML Classes and Features. The Dresden OCL toolkit enables ArgoUML to perform syntax and type checking on those constraints. Diagrams can be saved as GIF, PNG, PostScript, Encapsulated PS, PGML and SVG.

Dia can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It currently has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams. It is also possible to add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files, using a subset of SVG to draw the shape. It can load and save diagrams to a custom XML format (gzipped by default, to save space), can export diagrams to a number of formats, including EPS, SVG, XFIG, WMF and PNG, and can print diagrams (including ones that span multiple pages).

DRAW – from a quick sketch to a complex plan, DRAW gives you the tools to communicate with graphics and diagrams. You can manipulate objects, rotate in two or three dimensions; the 3D controller puts spheres, rings, cubes, etc. at your disposal. Arrange objects: group, ungroup, regroup, and edit objects while grouped. Sophisticated rendering let you create photorealistic images with your own texture, lighting effects, transparency, perspective, and so on. Smart connectors make short work of flowcharts, organisation charts, network diagrams, etc. Define your own ‘glue points’ for connectors to ‘stick’ to.

Kivio is an easy to use diagramming and flowcharting application with tight integration to the other KOffice applications. It enables you to create network diagrams, organisation charts, flowcharts and more. Features: scriptable stencils using Python, support for Dia stencils, plugin framework for adding more functionality.

StarUML is an open source project to develop fast, flexible, extensible, featureful, and freely-available UML/MDA platform running on Win32 platform. The goal of the StarUML project is to build a software modeling tool and also platform that is a compelling replacement of commercial UML tools such as Rational Rose, Together and so on.
Pixar RenderMan

Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.

Pixie is an open source RenderMan renderer for generating photorealistic images. You can compile Pixie on Windows (using Visual Studio 2005), Linux and on OSX (using XCode or unix style configure script). Pixie now has a new raytracing engine that automatically tesselates surfaces on the fly to a desired accuracy determined using the ray differentials. This means rays tracing blurry reflections or computing global illumination are faster to trace and sharp reflections and shadows are more accurate. Pixie also contains a memory manager that keeps the memory that is used to keep these tesselations around under control. Similar to texture caching, Pixie will maintain a set of active surfaces and only those surfaces will consume raytracing memory.

Ayam is a free 3D modeling environment for the RenderMan interface, distributed under the BSD license. This means that neither the author nor any contributors make money out of this software. We need your (yes your!) feedback to keep this project alive. If you use Ayam, please submit your pictures, bug reports, or comments.

The current stable version is 1.14, released 4. Apr 2008.

Ayam currently runs on Unix (Linux, IRIX, FreeBSD tested), Win32 (Win95-Win2000, XP), and Mac OS X (Aqua and X11).

So after having the edge of my hand touch my touchpad and mess up an email for the upteenth time today I went around and did some research to see if there was a quick shortcut key or something I could press to turn the bloody thing off and then on again when I was done typing.  Well let me tell you I found something so much better!  There’s a command in shell that will automatically disable the touchpad if you’ve been typing for a set amount of time and then turn it back on automatically when you’re done..  Genius!  Genius I say!!  But what is this command you ask?  How do you enable it to save yourself endless frustration?  Well I’m glad you asked because I was just about to explain it:

The program is syndaemon and it can be enabled in shell by typing: syndaemon -i 3 -d

Where

• -i parameter defines number of seconds to wait after keyboard is used – ( 3 seconds suites me. )
• -d  parameter is used for running syndaemon in background mode ( as a daemon ).

If above command throws some error then you are using other than 9.04 release. To get it working type in terminal,

wget http://people.ubuntuwire.com/~fujitsu/syndaemon
chmod +x syndaemon
sudo mv syndaemon /usr/bin/
syndaemon -i 3 -d

Again type the syndaemon command in terminal, it shouldn`t give any error messages.

Above command has to be executed each time machine is rebooted. To execute above command automatically we can create a tiny bash script and add it to startup items.

1. Create a new file somewhere ( My BSD habits puts files like this in /usr/local/etc/rc.d/ but that’s just me ) and copy paste following into it.

#!/bin/bash
syndaemon -i 2.5 -d

2. To add above script to startup items, go to System > Preferences > Startup Applicaitons >  Add. In new  pop-up box name it something meaningful and type in the path and command.. After that click “Add”.

There you go, done like dinner    Enjoy not having the hell of your cursor selecting 2 paragraphs of text and typing over it before you know what’s going on!

So after running into this problem suddently and for no ‘apparent’ reason(although it became apparent later) I noticed the complete lack of real support docs online in regards to the ALSA underrun problem.  Hopefully I can rememdy this a little bit and help some people out.

Last week I noticed skype audio was getting really choppy, it was the equivalent of seeing the conversation through a strobe light.  Odd I thought but didn’t pay it too much heed, that was until the end of the week when the audio simply stopped all together and skype refused to close down normally.  I would have to manually kill the process in terminal after the sound cut out.  This problem was exclusive to skype, which made it even more frustrating as I could have youtube and/or music playing in exaile while skype was screwing the pooch.

It occured to me today that something indeed had been changed recently right before this problem started and that was me fiddling with pulse’s daemon.conf and enabling real-time scheduling.  I can’t remember what for but this was part of the problem.  In fact there is even a mention in pulseaudio’s man page in regards to the possibility of real-time scheduling causing problems which I’ll quote here:

Alternatively,  if the risk of locking up the machine is considered too
big to enable real-time scheduling,  high-priority  scheduling  can  be
enabled  instead  (i.e.  negative  nice  level). This can be enabled by
passing –high-priority (see above) when starting  PulseAudio  and  may
also  be  enabled  with  the approriate option in daemon.conf. Negative
nice levels can only be enabled when  the  appropriate  resource  limit

RLIMIT_NICE  is  set  (see setrlimit(2) for more information), possibly
configured in /etc/security/limits.conf. A resource limit of 31 (corre‐
sponding with nice level -11) is recommended.

At this point I got a little excited as the solution seemed within reach.  I hashed out real-time schedule and implemented high-priority scheduling, restarted pulseaudio and loaded up skype.  It started fine but when I made a test call I was once again plagued by ALSA underruns.

They key here was to adjust the nice level.  I incrementally went down from -11 all the way to 3 (as in plus 3 not -3), restarted pulseaudio, loaded skype and viola!  Problem solved.  The nice level might be different for you so maybe experiment with that a little bit.

Summary:

• edit ~/.pulse/daemon.conf (or /etc/pulse/daemon.conf if you run as system)
• Hash out realtime-scheduling and realtime-priority
• Unhash high-priority and nice-level
• set nice level to 3 (not -3 or -11 for that matter)

Update:  Bah, I am still seeing these under runs.  The severity of them has gone down as skype doesn’t completely cut out now and lock up but I am getting audio cutting in and out every 2-3 seconds when making a call via skypeout.

Searching around the skype forums I found this and this actually seems to have done the trick completely:

Edit your ~/.asoundrc file

# Part I directly from ALSA Dmix Wiki

pcm.skype {
type dmix
ipc_key 1024
slave {
pcm “hw:0,0″
period_time 0
period_size 1024
buffer_size 8192
#format “S32_LE”
#periods 128
rate 44100
}
}

pcm.dsp0 {
type plug
slave.pcm “skype”
}

# This following device can fool some applications into using pulseaudio
pcm.dsp1 {
type plug
slave.pcm “pulse”
}

ctl.mixer0 {
type hw
card 0
}

pcm.pulse { type pulse }
ctl.pulse { type pulse }
pcm.!default {
type pulse
}

ctl.!default {
type pulse
}

When I finally solve the problem I nearly broke down.  The effect that hearing crystal clear music for the first time in months, especially the likes of Bear Mcreary, is an emotional experience.  For a LONG time I have been plagued with this extremely subtle but in Ubuntu where my music would have this very slight graininess to it.  It is even hard to describe what it was because it was so sublte, the best analogy I can think of would be looking through glasses that were covered in dust, or a jpeg image that has 5-10% too much compression on it.  It really isn’t enough to notice most of the time, especially with loud progressive trance.  Over time you simply get used to it, your brain adjusts but in the back of my mind I knew this was happening, especially when I would put on classical music where this graininess would be more pronounced with the delicate sounds of a violin.  I searched and searched for a solution to no avail and every time I heard the heart wrenching compositions of Bear Mcreary it is like a part of my soul just died in defeat.

I had found a few days back while going through the hellish experience that is Amarok 2 that if I was running pulse as root the audio quality would resume.  But I never really put two and two together as my settings in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf were identical to those in ~/.pulse/daemon.conf .  In fact I even deleted the latter and replaced it with the former.  What as most perplexing is that I would adjust the resampler method from something like speex-float-1 all the way to src-best-quality without any change in CPU usage or any change in quality.

But today I went one step further as I noticed that in my ~/.pulse/ directory I was missing 3 files:  “client.conf , default.pa, and system.pa” .  I am not sure why these were missing, pulse loaded fine without them but they were.  This was the only difference now between my /etc/pulse and ~/.pulse so I went and deleted everything from ~/.pulse and replaced it with what was in /etc/pulse  and VIOLA!!  I now have perfectly crystal clear sound and what a bloody relief.

So if this is you I hope this helps

I was appalled when the first page of search results for this came up with instructions on how to do this for a Windows server.  So I felt it my duty to add to the tutorials out there for people actually running a real web server (BSD/Linux/Etc)

Parse in the .sql file into an already existing DB

In shell simply issue the following command

$ mysql -u root -p db-name < backup-file.sql

To create a new DB and then import

Login to Mysql:
$ mysql -u root -p

Now create database called sales using SQL statement:

mysql> CREATE DATABASE myDB;
mysql> quit;

Now restore database, enter:
$ mysql -u root -p myDB < /path/to/your-DB-file.sql
Easy Peasy isn’t it?

Alright so you have a USB mic and Ubuntu is being a bitch about it.  Meaning it probably is thinking that your primary input device is in your soudn card somewhere as apposed to a USB port.. How on earth do we tell get Ubuntu to use the USB port instead of the Soundcard?  We’ll I’m glad you asked because coincidentally that is what I’ll be going over today

First thing first, for most all applications with the exception of those running in WINE, you can to get your butt over to this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=789578 and get PulseAudio installed.. Pulse is the key to running a proper sound server in Ubuntu(as long as you can get it running properly – something that took me weeks)

The key I found to making sure that pulse works properly in skype with multiple options for inputs is to make sure that in /system/preferences/sound you have everything on auto detect except for the Sound Capture – which is set to Pulse and that your Mixer track is set to ALSA PCM on dmix via DMA PulseAudio Mixer.

The other thing I found was that you NEED to make sure that your ~/.asoundrc file is blank.  This will become key as in the latter part of this post I will show you that you need to fill that same file with a bunch of good stuff if you want to run a USB mic in WINE appz.

So for a lot of you that probably does it for USB mics and Ubuntu.

Now for the rest of you running games and appz in WINE the story is a little different.  This is where my struggles with learning how to get audio properly working in a linux environment when from taxing to hellish.  First a word of advice to all of you wanting to use TeamSpeak and ubuntu with a USB mic or headset – USE WINE and the Windows version.  don’t even bother with the linux version as you will have days and weeks of your life sucked away.  It just doesn’t work

For some reason, at least for me WINE and pulse do NOT mix very well when it comes to the input side of things.  So when I want to use an ingame chat or Teamspeak the first thing I need to do is to shut down Pulse and rely soley on ALSA.  Now this means that a lot of the nice convenient mixer stuff that pulse does needs to be done manually. I posted all this up in the Teamspeak discussion forums and but I’ll save you the trouble of going there and copy it here as well

Now from this point onwards I am going to assume you are using ALSA , if not then you have your own google adventure to go on.

So:

go into your home directory (cd ~) and create a file called “.asoundrc” minus the quotations of course with your favorite editor ( vi ./.asoundrc ) if it doesn’t exist already.. If it does you need to make a backup of it and clear it all to start fresh
The .asoundrc file in your home directory acts as kind of a configuration file that is used to override default settings
Our goal here is to make our default capture device our USB mic and NOT our sound card, this is accomplished by inserting the following text into the .asoundrc file:

pcm.!default {
        type asym
        playback.pcm {
                type plug
                slave.pcm "hw:0,0"
        }
        capture.pcm {
                type plug
                slave.pcm "hw:1,0"
        }
}

***Something to note: “hw:0,0″ and “hw:2,0″ are MY card locations for my soundblaster and my usb mic. Yours might be different. ***

In order to find out what your desired output device is you type the following in terminal:

“aplay -l” and you should receive and output something like this:

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: CA0106 [CA0106], device 0: ca0106 [CA0106]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: CA0106 [CA0106], device 1: ca0106 [CA0106]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: CA0106 [CA0106], device 2: ca0106 [CA0106]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: CA0106 [CA0106], device 3: ca0106 [CA0106]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Obviously My card is 0 as that is the only one that shows up, so I use “hw:0,0″ you need to make extra sure what yours is and use that.

now to find my capture device I type:
“arecord -l” and my output should be something like this:

**** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
card 0: CA0106 [CA0106], device 0: ca0106 [CA0106]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: CA0106 [CA0106], device 1: ca0106 [CA0106]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: CA0106 [CA0106], device 2: ca0106 [CA0106]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: CA0106 [CA0106], device 3: ca0106 [CA0106]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 2: default [AK5370 ], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Now we already know that Card 0 is my soundblaster, which I don’t want to use, so we can rule that out.. The only other option(which is conveniently labeled USB Audio) is Card 2 so that means I used “hw:2,0″ . Yours could be different so edit your .asoundrc file accodingly.

I quickly check to make sure WINE was seeing my usb mic by running the command ‘winecfg’ and going into Audio and making sure that the ALSA WAVE IN device show up as USB Audio.

I have Hardware Acceleration set to Emulation as well as Driver Emulation checked on, not sure if it matters but it is on for me and works.

So there you have it, easy peasy!  Well it is easy to do but figuring this out with next to no documentation on this specific subject was a bitch..Hope this helped

After going through the same problem again and the above solution wasn’t working all that hot for whatever reason.

pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm “combined”
}

pcm.combined {
type asym
playback.pcm “playback”
capture.pcm “hw:1,0″
}

pcm.playback {
type dmix
ipc_key 1024
slave {
pcm “hw:1,0″
period_time 0
period_size 1024
buffer_size 4096
rate 44100
}
bindings {
0 0
1 1
}
}

ctl.dmixer {
type hw
card 1
}