Recently in Audio Category

My feelings for Ubuntu have run hot and cold since I first discovered the "Linux for human beings"-nicknamed reimagination of Debian during the Dapper (6.06) era.

I've had Ubuntu be the best distro on a given computer, sometimes it won't even boot, I've had terrible trouble with Intel video, and upgrade-delivered changes have forced me to rewrite scripts on the fly. OK, it's mostly Intel video, which for any user of Xorg over the past 2+ years has been an absolute nightmare.

And lately I've thrown another wrinkle into the mix: I fixed my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 (circa 2001) laptop's dead sound with a sub-$3 USB Headphone Set sound module from DealExtreme.com. In Debian Lenny I managed to configure it to play all sounds except system sounds and Flash sound. That means audio and video files will play, but the system beeps and bleeps and any sound from Flash video or audio can't be heard. I can even record via the USB sound module I got for a couple bucks and change (shipping included).

I've been using Debian Lenny for the last few weeks, ever since my other Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 running Ubuntu Karmic developed an eventually fatal crack in its LCD screen. I had the other "backup" laptop set up to test fully encrypted LVM in Debian Lenny, and I pretty much had everything configured, so I took my Ubuntu backups and rolled my files into the Debian laptop, where I've been ever since.

The constant X issues I had during my time with Ubuntu Karmic didn't exactly endear me to the distro at that point. I know the problems are most likely upstream with either Xorg, the Intel driver or the Linux kernel itself, but the average user like myself can be totally thrown by the seemingly constant breakage.

Anyhow, nothing lasts forever in the world of operating-system software, especially the free, open-source variety, so I'm on the lookout for where I want to go with the hardware I have now as the year wears on.

To take a peek at the near-future of Debian, particularly the Squeeze testing branch, I chose to run the live DVD of Sidux 2009-04.

In anticipation of the next version of Ubuntu, which will be an LTS (long-term support) release that will get three years of support on the desktop (and five years on the server) when it is officially released in April of this year, I downloaded a DVD image of Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2.

Why DVD? My Toshiba's DVD/CD-ROM drive neither burns discs nor likes to properly read CD-Rs burned just about anywhere. It has no problem with traditional CD-ROMs or DVD-ROMs. And curiously it also has no trouble booting from and running distros burned to DVD+R discs, so unless I get a CD directly from Ubuntu, or use a commercially made OpenBSD disc, I pretty much have to use DVD images that I burn on other computers (remember — this laptop doesn't have a burner).

So I burned the Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 DVD image and booted the Toshiba Satellite 1100 on it.

At first X died. I tried "safe graphics mode," which worked. I was soon in the usual orange/brown world of Ubuntu. A look at /etc/X11/xorg.conf revealed that I was running the VESA driver. I've known for a long time that VESA can get many a troubled PC to run X, but I've rarely had to resort to it in order to make things work on my particular PCs.

Well, now I guess my Intel 82830 CGC (aka Intel 830m) chip needs VESA to work with the current Xorg. That would've been good to know over the past few months.

But now I do know, and I not only booted Ubuntu Lucid but also Sidux 2009-04 using this information.

Now on to Ubuntu Lucid: I quickly configured the system to use my USB Headphone Set sound module, and I was pleased to, for the first time since I got the $2-and-change USB sound card, actually have system sounds and sound in Flash.

Yep, everything works. As in the past, when Ubuntu works, it works well. It recognizes lots of hardware, plays multimedia without a lot of jumping through hoops ...

I was able to get into the newish NetworkManager applet and tweak the network settings to suit the quirks of my own networking situation. Firefox 3.5 ran great. And even in the live environment I found the GNOME-based Ubuntu very responsive.

I wrote plenty about the value to users of long-term-support releases in Ubuntu, Debian (where every release is an LTS), Red Hat/CentOS (ditto the LTS philosophy) and even FreeBSD and NetBSD, which don't send those like myself into a flurry of configuration nightmares every six months ... or more often as in the case of Ubuntu Karmic, where Xorg and kernel updates continually broke and fixed my system in a seemingly random fashion.

Anyhow, with the VESA driver I was able to successfully boot and run Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2, I had none of the X issues that plagued my system in recent years, sound worked great, Flash ran well, and the desktop, which looks pretty much like it does in Karmic, offers plenty of functionality.

"Everything works" is what I want. And thus far, except for a potentially ominous failure of the system to recognize the mouse buttons (it happened during my first Ubuntu Lucid session but not at all during the second), the near future of Linux is going swimmingly for my aging Toshiba Satellite laptop.

Curious aside: Having sound work in Flash with my USB Headphone Set sound module was a major "breakthrough." After I quit out of Ubuntu Lucid the first time, I booted into Debian Lenny, where I still had the ability to hear sound in Flash. However, after today's Ubuntu session, I again booted into Debian Lenny and didn't have sound in Flash anymore. Another Linux mystery.

But once again (and after much Ubuntu bashing on my part as the transition from Hardy to Karmic caused me untold — OK, mostly told — grief), Ubuntu appears to be the OS with the best fit for my current hardware.

I'll miss the speed of Debian (it's that much faster than Ubuntu, I've found), and I may indeed give Squeeze a tryout in the future, but I'll be keeping my eye on Ubuntu Lucid as it wends its way toward release in three months.

If I know what's good for me (and clearly that's not often the case), I'll wait a month or three after Lucid's April release, then roll it onto one of the Toshibas and see how well everything works at that point.

All I know is the prospect of two to three years of "stability" is something I would welcome at this point in my computing life, where I'm using free, open-source operating systems and applications to get increasing amounts of work done and just don't have the time to continually fix update-delivered breakage or get new hardware that is presumably more in the minds of developers and potentially is better served by "today's" software.

Unlike previous Ubuntu released based on (I think ...) a snapshot of Debian Sid, Ubuntu Lucid, an LTS release, is supposedly being pulled from Debian Testing (currently Squeeze), making for greater stability out of the box. I'll take it.

Ubuntu Lucid isn't even in the beta stage, let alone a release-candidate or fully baked release, and on my hardware it's looking very, very good. I'm no fan of free-software hyperbole, but Ubuntu Lucid really does look like the best Ubuntu LTS release ever, and I'm anxious to see it at release time in April.

PulseAudio was updated in Ubuntu today to correct a security vulnerability that goes by the "common vulnerabilities and exposures" number CVE-2009-1894.

I finally did find a description of what's going on.

The fix presumably has been going out for various Linux distributions, including Gentoo.

I'm doing all I can to stick with Ubuntu 8.04, the long-term-support release of the world's most-talked-about Linux distribution.

But when a bug threatens my desktop harmony, I begin both attacking said bug and exploring OS alternatives because the most important thing about this particular installation — my main Toshiba 1100-S101 laptop — is that I keep working with little to no interruption.

I've had a few "issues" now in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on the Toshiba (1.3 GHz Celeron / 768 MB RAM). Here are the problems and their solutions.

Remember: I'm no coder, so unless the solutions are relatively quick and easy, I probably won't do 'em.

Problem: Every once in awhile, the keyboard stops working in mid-session.

Solution: This could be a hardware issue, or it could be something in Ubuntu. This doesn't happen all that often, but when it does, killing X with ctrl-alt-backspace brings back the keyboard. I consider this a less-than-optimal solution, but a solution nonetheless. I'll be keeping an eye on the issue.

Problem: When I use Flash to, say, watch a video, everything works fine. But then when I try to listen to an audio file with Rhythmbox, the sound doesn't work. Rebooting brings back non-Flash audio.

Solution: A little Googling revealed that this is a common problem. I consider this a serious bug in Ubuntu 8.04, and I can't believe that it hasn't been automatically solved for all users. Turns out it's a problem with the "new" Pulse Audio for Linux. To fix the problem, add the following package (either through Synaptic, apt or Aptitude):

libflashsupport

Yep, just this one package will fix the problem with Flash and Pulse Audio. I quote from the package description:

Support library for sound output of Flash 9 with pulseaudio Due to various bugs in the Flash 9 plugin sound output of Flash 9 through the pulseaudio soundserver doesn't work properly. This library adds a clutch to make Flash 9 sound output in pulseaudio possible.

For further information see http://www.pulseaudio.org/ticket/43 and http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/FlashPlayer9Solution

Problem: Flash periodically dies and takes the Firefox browser with it. This happens occasionally with YouTube video but all the time in the Brightcove 3 console, which I use to manage video on our site. Having a critical Web/Flash-based app become unusable is a huge problem.

Solution: I ran a test on my Debian Lenny laptop, which is using a Flash 10 .deb package direct from Adobe. No problem there.

I'm trying not to install lots of packages from outside the usual Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) repositories, and I've been mostly successful in that regard, even though there are more than a few packages for which I'd love a newer version.

Since Ubuntu Hardy uses Flash 9.0.159, I figured that going to Flash 10 one way or another stood a very good chance of solving my problem.

But I didn't want to leave the world of Hardy to do it. So first I tried the Hardy backport of the Flash plugin.

What are backports, you ask? Following that link in the last sentence will tell you all about Ubuntu Backports, but I'll just sum up and say that backports are newer versions of packages that are built to run on older distributions so users can stick with a version of their operating system that is known to work with their hardware (or for other reasons) but get either one, a few or a lot of newer packages without resorting to an upgrade.

Backtracking briefly, I did consider:

• Replacing Ubuntu 8.04 with Debian Lenny
• Upgrading Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10
• Replacing Ubuntu 8.04 with either Slackware 12.2, Zenwalk 6.0 or another OS to be named later (once I scraped together a few more candidates)

After reading the Ubuntu Backports page, I decided that rather than mess around with my repositories, or resort to the Debian-user practice of mixing Backports and Stable package management through the use of what's called "pinning," since I was only interested in a single package, I'd just grab the .deb and install it on my local machine. (Disadvantage to the latter: Packages not in repositories not recognized by the system won't automatically update. Advantage: It's a simple, intuitive process.)

I easily found the Flash 10 backport for Hardy. But it wouldn't install. The package tries to fetch a file from Adobe/Macromedia, and that particular file is no longer on the Adobe server.

Translation: The package wouldn't install.

The next step: I went into Synaptic and removed the flashplugin-nonfree package, which even though not installed all the way was still "there." (There IS a bug report for this issue, and if this bug is fixed, I still think that Hardy backports is the best way to deal with this issue

Then I went to the Adobe Web site, got the .deb package for Flash 10 and installed it.

Since I didn't mention it, installing .deb packages is easy. In GNOME (Ubuntu's GUI), just click on the package (either double-click in the default setup or single-click, since that's the way I have my Nautilus file manager set up) and then enter your password when prompted.

So far, Flash 10 from Adobe in Ubuntu 8.04 is doing great in Brightcove and appears to be doing just as well with YouTube video. And after about a dozen or more Firefox/Flash crashes Friday night, if this fix turns out to be the right one, a large measure of stability will have re-entered my computing world.

I realize that Flash is a closed-source technology controlled by a single company, and therefore is a huge pain in the ass for all concerned, including myself. But in my particular situation, I need to have it, along with Java, to get a couple of critical tasks done.

In the end: I was ready to hop off Ubuntu 8.04 onto another distro. I had already eliminated Ubuntu 9.04 due to my X issues (although it's possible those issues have been fixed in subsequent 9.04 updates), but I could've easily (or not so easily, given setup time and effort) moved to Ubuntu 8.10, Debian Lenny, Zenwalk, Slackware or even FreeBSD.

I did strongly consider an 8.04-8.10 upgrade, since that would've given me Flash 10 from a Ubuntu repository. If Ubuntu 8.10 would've have also given me OpenOffice 3.0.1, I would've been more inclined to upgrade, but since 8.10 includes the same OO 2.4 I'm running now, I decided to stick with 8.04 (and OO 2.4) and just get Flash 10 manually from Adobe.

For the moment I'm glad to have another Ubuntu 8.04 problem solved. I've bought myself more time with the LTS and don't have to do a reinstall or major upgrade (and risk developing more new problems than I'm solving old ones).

Final, final word: I'm sure at least some of you are thinking, "He should file a bug report." It's possible that this bug is close to mine, although my specific issue (with the Brightcove3 console) isn't one anybody else has come across.

(Begin rant.)

I thought the deal with Ubuntu — at least in the 8.04+ era anyway — was that if you tried to play a not-totally-free form of multimedia, the system would open up a window asking you whether or not you wished to download a proprietary codec or some other form of nastiness to facility the playing of such verboten media.

And I even remember one time downloading a Quicktime movie on a Ubuntu box and having just this sort of dialog pop up, soon after which I was happily playing the video.

But today I decided to bring some podcasts into Ubuntu's Rhythmbox music player.

Yes, they were MP3s. If I had known that a friendly Ubuntu dialog box wouldn't pop up, and I'd have known beforehand that I had to dip into Add/Remove programs and add the "restricted extras," I would've done that.

Instead, I added my podcast feeds to Rhythmbox. (First of all, you have to find the feed on your own and add its RSS URL manually; that's not a deal-breaker, especially since the latest rendition of iTunes makes managing podcasts less fun than ever.)

So far, so good. Then I tried to actually play one of the .mp3 files. Nothing. No warning that says something like, "This is a restricted format, you free-software-hating pig, but if you wish to play it, click here and evil codecs will flow into your formerly pure Ubuntu system and you will be awash in .mp3 goodness."

OK, so it's clear that I'm not in the business of writing dialog boxes for Ubuntu.

But I had to resort to Google and find the customary five unhelpful Ubuntu Forums pages before I stumbled upon this page, which directed me to open up my repositories to include non-free software and then add ubuntu-restricted-extras with the Add/Remove Applications tool and then tried to play an MP3 again in both Rhythmbox and Totem.

Still nothing.

I rebooted the system.

Now I have MP3 support, everything plays fine, and all is (almost) all right in my Ubuntu world.

So is my question/problem the same as yours?

I hope so. I've been running Linux and BSD operating systems for about 2 1/2 years at this point, I've had to do a lot of hacking to get things working properly, and I understand that the average Linux or BSD system is not ready for new-user prime time. I know when things don't work that in many instances a little hacking around with a package manager, at the terminal or even (horror!) in the GUI itself will fix whatever happens to be broken.

Yeah, even Slackware isn't all that hard ... if you've been working at it. And while in Slackware you don't expect things to be easy, you are often surprised when it is.

But Ubuntu is supposed to be different. Maybe something got screwed up in this particular Ubuntu 8.04 installation, but I thought that at the very least an attempt to play an MP3 on a system without the proper codecs to do so would at the very least bring up a dialog box with some kind of direction as to what the next step would be.

Having NOTHING happen just isn't a good option if Ubuntu in particular, and Linux and other FOSS operating systems in general ever hope to bring non- or less-geeky users into the fold.

I'm a huge believer in the ogg audio format and in open media formats in general. And depending on how important that sort of thing is to you, I applaud the lengths the most fervent of us will go to in order to keep whatever degree of purity is in keeping with your own personal software philosophy.

I ran an OpenBSD system as my main desktop for a full six months. And before my audio hardware just plain broke, I knew that adding a GUI music player and the proper packages to play the various audio formats was something I needed to do. And I did just that. Getting xmms to play MP3 and OGG files was relatively easy, and nobody who runs OpenBSD expects "easy." (And for the purposes of this rant I'm ignoring the fact that X is pretty much broken on my Toshiba 1100-S101 laptop in OpenBSD 4.5 after having not a single problem with it in 4.4. And while I'm on that subject, I really miss running OpenBSD. I became quite accustomed to it, had done a lot of setup, and now getting segmentation faults and core dumps every time I run X has really shaken my faith in it as an OS.)

I know — I know — that if I or any user wants all the multimedia to work right away, there are always distros like Mint that can make it happen.

And Ubuntu already takes enough crap for not being as pure as Debian (which in turns takes crap for not being as pure as GNewSense).

But for a project/distro/movement that wants to preach not to the choir but instead to the unwashed, Windows-using masses, either let 'em play MP3s out of the box, make it easy to add that functionality (i.e. don't make 'em Google it, for heaven's sake) while at the same time educate them as to why MP3s, MOVs, Flash and all that other royalty-carrying, proprietary crap is bad, or just say right out front: "If you're geeky enough to figure out how to play multimedia, go ahead. But otherwise, reinstall Windows and everything will be fine."

It took a little more Googling before I figured out that merely opening up my repositories either in Add/Remove Programs or Synaptic (or directly in /etc/apt/sources.list) would be enough to get the automatic Ubuntu dialogs to pop up and ask me about restricted-media codecs.

So you have to KNOW you need a restricted driver before the system will prompt you to install one.

OK, I understand that Ubuntu/Canonical is treading a fine line with free-software purists, but in the minds of said purists, the distro has already crossed far over that line.

Here's what I think: Ubuntu should let new users who click on a restricted-media file know that there is indeed a way to play said file, even if they haven't yet opened up their repositories to non-free software. Only giving helpful information to people who really don't need that help is just not ... helpful.

I want ogg to succeed. And I also believe that Flash is the worst thing to happen to open-source software, freedom, security and everything else in the past five years. But with Linux and other free operating systems continuing to languish in the low single digits (some say 1 percent) of the market, not giving new users an easily made choice of what kinds of media they wish to play on their computers is no way to increase the uptake of free software among those who barely know what it is.

The people we need to bring over to free software wouldn't know "Debian" if it put on dark eyeshadow and started picking fights with too-close cousins on "Jerry Springer."

When a lifelong Windows user finds his or herself in a system awash in applications, icons and ways of doing things they've neither seen nor heard of, something like allowing them the choice of whether or not their music files will play is the least we can do to keep them from running away from the keyboard with their heads in their collective hands.

I hold Ubuntu up to a higher standard than I do almost any other Linux distribution or BSD project. That's because I think that Ubuntu is currently free software's best shot at breaking the Microsoft/Apple stranglehold on desktop computing.

I might even run GNewSense myself now that it supports my Ethernet card on my laptop. And I love the Debian Project, Slackware and OpenBSD. I'm getting ready to convert my now-testing laptop to NetBSD just to see how it performs in my work environment.

But when it comes to bringing new people into the free-software world, Ubuntu has a critical role. I think it's up there with Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice as one of the key pieces/collections of software that can change hearts and minds.

And a little help for new users when it comes to media files, even when it doesn't toe the free-software party line is, in my opinion, a very small price to pay for the opportunity to educate those users about the bigger, greater picture.

(End rant.)