Living against the stream

Gnome 3 Refugee in KDE4.7

2011-11-13T07:50:00.001-08:00

Gnome 3 is a failure. Sadly, all what Gnome hardly rescued in its stability, usability and flexibility across Gnome 2.3X versions is lost, and Canonical, focused in keeping alive his risky bet on Unity, doesn't help very much. There is no way in Ubuntu 11.01 to go back and keep safe by using Gnome 2.32.

To be fair, Gnome 3 could be still promising, even after considering its evident flaws and regressions or the whimsical, illogical and inexplicable changes in the structure of the user interface. Most of the critics of the new Gnome release say that Gnome 3 appears to be designed for mobile devices and smalls screens; though those complaints are valid (usability should be beyond of fashion concerns), the technical issues of the implementation are the ones which give the scene an air of disaster.

ATI users, like me, are condemned to a calvary, and our fate is to find one bug after the other. My particular problem, the one that finally made me jump into the KDE arms, was the buggy Message Tray, which replaced both the old and new (short-lived) System Trays. Even after installing the 11.10 version of the ATI propietary driver, the Message Tray causes a crash in the accelerated functions of the Gnome Shell whenever it adds a new notification icon. Then, what was a smooth resize to a tile of active applications becomes an annoying flickering mess of partially rendered windows.

Anyway, after a couple of days of frustrating struggle against major (discontinuous) changes in the interface philosophy of Gnome and its hard-to-achieve-or-explain lack of flexibility and configuration tools, I finally decided to double click the metapackage "kde desktop" in Synaptic... and it was like a deep breathe of fresh air ("oxygen", they like to say).

Despite a couple of problems with memory and CPU consuming indexation daemons, KDE 4.7 shows itself to be smooth, stable and nice looking. Of course, it's far from being perfect, but most of its issues are small and -sorry- related to the underlying Ubuntu dependence on Gnome (I started from an online-updated 11.10 version of Ubuntu). I'm still trying to get used to the KDE-based configuration tools and default apps but, so far, I'm using Linux as my base operating system again.

What's up with Gnome? I don't know, maybe they are betting hard with new usability guidelines, but sometimes I feel sort of a de Icaza's syndrome in the air.

A quotation on Colombian mid-class delusions

2010-05-04T18:36:00.000-07:00

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Pulseaudio and WINE fix for Karmic

2009-12-18T04:00:00.000-08:00

Adaptation. I talked this week with a friend about the crude circumstances that people shall confront along their lives. Such topic is not very nice, specially when the particular cases come around the conversation with their palpable bitterness. However, the conclusion gives, at least, some consolation: human beings are adaptable in front of adversity.

Well, I've got a great variety of adversities, and the one in question here isn't that terrible. But, as long as you cannot solve some issue along the time, the "spine in your foot" hurts more and more. Finally, I accepted that I have to coexist with Pulseaudio. In recent previous Ubuntu versions, I used to uninstall and/or disable Pulseaudio as soon as I installed the system. However, the path assumed by Ubuntu and Gnome (attach themselves to Pulseaudio development) seems to have no return and there wouldn't be an escape to that fact... something really irritating when software functionality is compromised by such limitation. That is the sad case of win32 sound-using applications running through WINE with a noisy and stuttered audio output.

How come they haven't foreseen (nor solved, of course) all issues related to such a deep choice? If Pulseaudio will be around every sound related task, you should have the possibility to tell your software that you [are compelled to] use it.

Well, at least we have clever people working (sadly outside each very project) to solve such problems. Mr. Neil Wilson, from the UK, released a patched version of WINE (1.1.31) with Pulseaudio support. To install it in your Ubuntu Karmic box, you only have to add his PPA to your software sources:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/neil-aldur/ppa/ubuntu karmic main

deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/neil-aldur/ppa/ubuntu karmic main

and import the fingerprint 1024R/D3E49C82

Once you have reloaded the repository information, uninstall the package wine and install the package wine1.2. Start your win32 application and you will get clear audio output.

These last two BLOG entries have shown that, after some hacking (not very "for human beings" as Ubuntu claims to be) it is possible to have a fully functional 5.1 surround system with the Sound Blaster Live! (ca0106) sound card using Pulseaudio. I guess these hints could be useful for different hardware configurations running Ubuntu Karmic (and, I hope, later distributions too).

Reconciliation time... (More on Linux Sound, Pulseaudio and SB Live!)

2009-12-16T13:11:00.000-08:00

As a militant atheist (remember Dawkins), Xmas has become for me that strange season in which you're almost obliged to be happy and to waste more money. However, in the spirit of the time, I have to admit that, certainly by coincidence, several unexpected reconciliations have happened.

First of all, my appreciated friend "la mona", now living in Canada (tomorrow... who knows?) smoked the peace pipe after several months. So, certain... "conversational understatements" finally showed themselves as they really are; main conclusion: a sensitive topic, causing arrogant or aggressive reactions when approached, could hide complex aspects that you have to infer and deal with carefully... but intuitive inference is a subtle virtue hard to achieve (and even harder to apply when it's really needed).

On the other hand, it seems I got a truce in my long term battle against Linux sound system and, specially, Pulseaudio. The improbable mediator was Ubuntu Karmic, whose strange addiction to Pulseaudio finally mutated into an advantage cause', being the most popular Linux distribution nowadays, a lot of people (some of them really brilliant) have striven to give some order to that mess.

Don't misunderstand me, Pulseaudio is still a buggy and problematic piece of software, and sometimes it seems to have been programmed by a twisted cracker focused in destroy the Linux user nerves and patience. In fact, I'm still having the annoying syslog bug, in which Pulseaudio acts like a hacker doing a DoS attack against the disk free space by stuffing that file with error messages (not to mention the high pitch noise that appears sometimes).

However, there are still some competent programmers and tweakers out there. If you're a middle experienced Linux user, you are familiar (at least you have heard about) mplayer, the well designed command line media player for Linux. Well, mplayer, as threatening as it could appear at first sight, could be your solution if you have to struggle both with the bullies from Creative and the beta stage of Pulseaudio last releases.

This time, I bypassed the inability of Pulseaudio to set up a functional 5.1 surround music system with my ca0106 card (because of its incompatibilities with ALSA lowlevel configuration) by squeezing Pulseaudio's performance directly from mplayer. The solution: use mplayer "filters" to redirect sound from main stereo channels when needed. In my case, a 5.1 (subwoofer, stereo duplication) playing is got with:

$ mplayer -af "channels=6:6:0:0:1:1:1:2:0:3:0:4:1:4:0:5:1:5:0,sub=100:5" aSong.mp3

Yeah, it looks quite cryptic, but the question is really simple. First, the modifier -af tells mplayer that you'll use some of its filtering capabilities (modifiers to the basic stereo reproduction). Then, you tell mplayer that you'll use 6 channels and, of course, 6 redirected outputs. After that, you specify the actual "redirections": channel 0 to output 0, 1 to 1, 1 to 2 and 0 to 3 (stereo duplication), 0 and 1 to 4 and also to 5 (mixed -mono- output for center, 4, and subwoofer, 5, channels). Finally, with "sub", you say that you have a subwoofer in channel 5 with a cutoff frequency of 100Hz.

Yes, I know: "my girlfriend will break with me if I say she has to type all that stuff to hear a single song". Don't worry... this is *NIX: you have known the backend, but there are nice frontends for mplayer which manage playlists, show VTR-like buttons and so on. I chose SMPlayer, in Ubuntu official repos:

$ sudo apt-get install smplayer

which uses a SDL interface and, of course, allows you to set the filters:

Options->Preferences [Preferences Dialog appears, then] Advanced -> Options for Mplayer tab

There, you only have to paste, into the audio filters' entry, the quoted parameter for the Mplayer filter system... and... voilà, you have a full featured media player using the whole set of speakers again... enough to concede a truce to Pulseaudio, isn't it?

Later, I'll show how to fix the problem between WINE and Pulseaudio.

ALSA, SB Live! (Audigy) and 5.1 surround in Jaunty: a solution (at last)

2009-08-29T20:10:00.000-07:00

For those ones who often remark that I'm a bitter guy, I'm now in a sweet mood. My 5.1 sound card and speaker set are working again... in Jaunty! I burnt half a year fighting against Pulseaudio, but I finally won this battle.

Determination is the right attitude to actually deal with a problem, and Pulseaudio, more than a sound server, is just a problem (sorry, guys, that's the crude reality). Today, I simply took a deep breathe and completely removed pulseaudio... then... voilà!!!

I can understand that Pulseaudio is still in beta releases (no matter what their developers want us to believe)... maybe it has a future... but why do the main distros choose to include it as a basic component? -- the package ubuntu-desktop depends on pulseaudio and its complementary stuff since Intrepid, and it's a must to launch a complete distro update. However, the real bad guys here are the same ones as always: the Creative gang that abuses of its quasi-monopolistic position to torture their customers, no matter if they are inside or outside Windows. Of course, they'll never open their driver API... one thing is sure, since now I won't buy a Creative card again, not even for my family or friends. Seems I'm getting bitter once more.

Anyway, for people interested in making their Sound Blaster Audigy SE (ca0106) cards work in Ubuntu Jaunty with 5.1 surround support (stereo duplication/subwoofer bass redirection at least), here is the solution I managed to assemble, like a Frankenstein, from several ideas and tutorials found in the Internet:

• Ensure that the last ALSA version (1.0.20) is installed

sudo apt-get install alsa-base alsa-utils

• My favorite step: completely remove pulseaudio and replace it with esound

killall pulseaudio
sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio
sudo apt-get install esound
sudo rm /etc/X11/Xsession.d/70pulseaudio

• Add the following code to ~/.asoundrc

pcm.ca0106
{
type hw
card 1
}

ctl.ca0106
{
type hw
card 1
}

pcm.!default
{
slave.pcm surround51
slave.channels 6
type route
ttable.0.0 1
ttable.1.1 1
ttable.0.2 1
ttable.1.3 1
ttable.0.4 0.5
ttable.1.4 0.5
ttable.0.5 0.5
ttable.1.5 0.5
}

• And also create the file /etc/conf.modules adding to it the following lines:

# ALSA portion
alias char-major-116 snd
alias snd-card-0 snd-ca0106
# module options should go here

# OSS/Free portion
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0

# card #1
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

• Go to System -> Preferences->Sound and set every entry to ALSA
• Boot the system

P.S. This nightmare is the same even if you're "dreaming" in Windows. For those looking for a functional driver, I've got the original installation CD as ISO image... just ask.

Honduras: on what makes "democracy" a void concept

2009-06-30T16:57:00.000-07:00

Some countries are always walking on the edge, often falling to situations of instability, turmoil, agitation. Such places have highly distorted social interactions with a predominant feature that could be described as the lack of "social momentum": the ability of a people as a whole (the bulk of the nation) to react in a conscious, organized, strong way to correct their path according to their convenience and countering the actions motivated by personal interests. In those countries, most of the people assumes a passive role, acting, at most, as cannon fodder for conflicting factions.

But, how come an entire nation --millions of people who know their basic individual interests-- keeps itself in such a prostration state?

In real words, most countries (including some developed ones) are now "evolving" to a similar stage, in a sort of collective conscience regression. The case of Italy, where an eccentric (and noticeably immoral) millionaire got an almost complete control of the State --and is using it for his personal profit--, shows that even the "first world" is exposed to that risk. Against this tendency, another countries have recently experienced violent convulsions with military coups, massive rallies, controversial elections, constitutional reforms and so on (will someday the "dystopic prophet" Fukuyama recognize his huge miscalculation?).

So, what is the intrinsic dynamics of all this mess? Some hints are now emerging from an improbable source: the little, poor, conservative Honduras, in Central America. In the core of the conflict there is a crude, deaf war for tipping the scales on the public opinion preference, all under a strong coercive pressure from the establishment --especially through the military.

Mass societies, with millions and millions of individuals, are complex systems with subtle mechanisms and almost unpredictable turns --the same ones which overwhelmed some ultra orthodox interpretations from certain ideologies--. Power in these inhomogeneous, unequal, conflictive systems must be applied with particular violence to give such "machines" a minimal stability, a condition that, hopefully, guarantees the short--term survival of their complex, fragile tissue of relations, hierarchies, etc. (with some time, that tissue converge to the well known clientelist character of every contemporary "democracy", with few exceptions).

The method to apply that violence has been under progressive refinement during the last decades in the so--called "Western World" and, today, it has a sharper face: a mixture of generalized ignorance, an official propaganda deluge through the mass media (though in general they're owned by huge private groups, their interest make them the main support of the political elite) and the systematical spread of fear from the government officials and their spokesmen. Any familiar recall of the vaunted "war on terror"? Well, under such an oppressing use of information and education, could be surprising the advance of LePen, Heider, the BNP, the KKK...?

Honduras is usually classified under the euphemism of "developing country". Actually, it has been a underdeveloped country along its history: a failed State emerged as a wasteland from the cinders of the Spanish empire, invaded by the U.S. in the early XX century, and dominated by an ignorant, reactionary elite whose main inversion and political tool is a dreaded Army, one which has taken the power by coup several times. Honduras was also in the "coalition" that invaded Iraq, supporting the military adventure of the ineffable G.W. Bush. As if all that wouldn't be enough, the outrageous gangs created in the U.S. by young emigrants are returning under the name of "maras", adding a concerning dose of criminal chaos.

In 2006, in resonance with the wave of political changes across Latin America, Mr. Zelaya, a centrist which has slowly slipped to the left during the last years, become president of Honduras, challenging the sclerotic political structure of the country. Since then, the tension between the President and the trio Parliament--Supreme Court-- Army, has noticeably increased. Finally, it broke with the last Sunday's coup... then, the tragicomedy started: the de-facto regime sent a crowd of Air Force units to the presidential house, kidnapped the president, took him by force to Costa Rica, used a coarse resign apocrypha --supposedly sent by Mr. Zelaya-- to support the rise of the Parliament chairman as the new president, militarized the streets, censured international news channels such as CNN (specifically during the Zelaya's discourse to the U.N.), turned off the official TV and radio stations and abused the population in many other ways.

But the main lesson of this crisis is that the so-called "democracy" is merely a fiction under the emerging conditions of the contemporary societies: to keep the power, the establishment has to maintain a loyal base of snobbish followers, mainly urban mid-class conservatives highly malleable by hate and fear discourses. Then, in underdeveloped countries, where the mid-class is a thin layer, this implies that any political participation will be unreachable for a significant portion of the population; the same portion excluded from the formal economic activity and submerged in a deep poverty.

Indeed, in some places like Colombia, popularity polls talk about record numbers which vanish when the electoral process gives its results. How could a president with an hypothetical 75% of popular support finally win an election signed by a participation below 45%? The traditional "democratic" forces inside the State and their private clients (big company owners, religious hierarchies, etc.) are, after all, the first enemies of the potential rise of a real democratic regime. They provoke, sometimes intentionally, the citizens' skepticism and, then, the abstention, constraining the vote to the captive followers, preserving their position and privileges. The only risk for such regimes is the appearing of an heterodox popular leader capitalizing the pseudo-democratic forms around the elections. So, it is possible that the breaking leadership mobilize the previously dormant votes from the marginal and skeptic ones --mostly poor people. This is the case of Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Central America nowadays. Even the U.S. last election exhibits some analog features.

The tale is far from a happy ending. Breaking leaderships are generally based on shocking personalities and discourses. The leader often become the incarnation of the whole process, diverting the attention of the people from the relevant social goals and exposing the leader weaknesses more and more. So, the political change is focused on the leader's personality and, with the predictable fatigue proper of governing a country for several years, the leader falls and the opportunity disappears with him. Then, the people get another frustration and a new cycle of skepticism is guaranteed once more. The desperation of the Honduran elite, terrified by the perspective of an increasing left-wing power under the influence of the president and his foreign allies, only show a clumsy attempt to accelerate this process.

"Democracy", at least its liberal representative version, shows itself as a mere façade, a method to control spontaneous social agitation, driving it into the sandbox of the clientelist parliamentary system, the electoral processes handled by the mass media and the growing gap between political activity and social needs, hidden by the imposed silence of the excluded ones and by their inability to understand what's going on.

Quotation

2009-06-29T09:41:00.000-07:00

To smooth a little the bitterness of my last post, I wanna remember here the motto I used for my PhD Thesis and, so, retrieve the final goal of this BLOG (and, hopefully, of my entire work):

Es ist nicht genug, zu wisen, man muß auch anwenden
Es ist nicht genug, zu wollen, man muß auch tun

... what means:

It is not enough to know, one must apply
It is not enough to wish, one must do

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Ubuntu, PulseAudio sound support and the hara-kiri of the Open Source initiatives

2009-06-29T07:06:00.000-07:00

This is my very first BLOG entry and I have to admit that I publish it moved by desperation... not a healthy motivation to start a BLOG, huh?

However, people (I mean here: the conscious ones from the Open Source world) should get involved more actively in the key discussions (no matter their level of generality -- specificity) related with the future and evolution of Free Software and Open Source initiatives. This is the only way such an inhomogeneous, diverse, huge, "asynchronous" community could achieve some level of organization, at least the minimum to ensure the things will become better and better with time, work and cooperation.

Of course, and regarding the desperate inspiration of these lines, I'm talking about that lack of orientation/organization of that world... I can't conceive that successive versions of the same software tool --namely a Linux distribution-- offer a worse functionality as them advance in the time and increase their complexity (and, also, as the gathered knowledge grows). That is the sad case of the sound support in the last official releases of Ubuntu.

The thing looks like a sort of curse. PulseAudio, a great idea on the paper, is suddenly implanted as the default client-server approach for sound management in Intrepid. A lot of complex features, almost hidden, undocumented and hardly configurable in previous versions are now --supposedly-- active "out-of-the-box". The first simple tests (system sounds, playing mp3/ogg songs in a media player, etc.) appear to go right... then you, impulsed by a sensation of success, start to think you'll finally have a 100% functional system. However, you're about to discover the sad reality.

PulseAudio is not a sound system, it is a sound server, an extra layer which is supposed to give a hardware abstraction to sound apps. First problem: sound streams now have another bureaucrat office to pass through, which noticeably slows the sound playing and causes an awkward delay in applications where synchronization is a must. Several symptoms of such limitation became popular last years: games where the sound effects are played a lot of time after the events causing them occurred, communication apps with staggered, discontinuous sound streams due to the inability to process every package received while playing the previous ones, etc. Better not to talk about audio capture... it's enough to say that the microphone is absolutely invisible, under the PulseAudio default setup, for recording apps and for ALSA-based communication software, such as the last versions of Skype. The simple task of mic configuration requires now a lot of hacking and, eventually, to disable PulseAudio as much as it can be done...

Because of the way Pulseaudio has been merged with the Linux desktop in Ubuntu, it's quite hard to get rid of it... furthermore, even if you choose to use pure ALSA (robust, stable, predictable as it is), PulseAudio is still around there, so it is impossible to access to the complete ALSA options set, then you'll be unable to specify the surround setup nor the channel redirection directly (the infamous ~/.asoundrc file), reducing your 5.1 sound system to decorative furniture.

One of my last tests was to give Pulseaudio's last release (0.9.15) a chance. To do so, I installed an ALSA 1.0.20 ppa. The result? Now there's another feature removed from Pulseaudio: the subwoofer is not mapped and only the 5 normal speakers give some noise, no matter what you hack in the /etc/pulse/default.pa file. Obviously, all the "features" (problems) of previous versions are untouched. Amazing.

I don't pretend to blame PulseAudio of all my disgraces. I know that the bullies from Creative Labs.are making our lifes, their customers' lifes (I have a card with the CA0106 chip), a little harder. However, why did I have a working 5.1 sound system while I was using Hardy (w/ALSA) and now I only have a stereo system that hangs really often when playing a Youtube video in Firefox? How could you convince your wife, girlfriend, father or boss to switch to Open Source if you can't offer you'll make their hardware work in a decent way?