r3dux.org

Linux.conf.au 2012 kicks off next week in Ballarat at the UB Mt. Helen campus (commuting win – 10 minute drive!) so I’ve just spent a few hours working out my conference schedule… You might think this is perhaps too long to be pondering over schedules, but as the conference runs for 5 days and is organised around multiple sessions in streams, you can pick and choose which sessions you attend each day. For example, options for Tuesday the 17th (with my planned sessional route in blue) look like this:

Even reading about each talk takes a while, nevermind deciding which ones to attend - but it's a nice problem to have

So, yeah, it’s taken a bit of reading and thinking to figure out which sessions I’d like to attend (of-interest or fun stuff), which sessions I should attend (useful learning opportunities but not necessarily fun) and which sessions I’m not particularly fussed about, of which I’m not finding many – quite the opposite in fact, I keep finding multiple sessions I’d like to attend which are on at the same time! Looking forward to a great week of Linuxy shenanigans and learning stuff. Should be fun =D

Update: Update/fix at bottom of post…

Flash on Linux has always been a mess, especially on 64-bit, so when I upgraded my flash plugin the other day to the latest 11.2 beta I wasn’t in the least bit surprised when it broke. This time, watching videos with people in them had the people looking like they were from Avatar – all the skin was blue, and in general the colours were well off. For example:

Flash being, well, Flash...

To fix this up, you need to twiddle with the flash settings at /etc/adobe/mms.cfg, or if you wanted to, do the twiddling through the Flash-Aid plugin like below (in my final working config I actually use the top option of GPU validation as enabled and disable VDPAU):

Flash Plugin Acceleration Options

Once that’s done, restart your browser and hey-presto – correct colours in Youtube:

Flash Colours Restored

You may have to turn on or off some combination for it to work with your particular machine in a trial & error style, because what might work in YouTube might crash when using other flash video sites (vimeo, gametrailers etc). After some playing around, I’ve decided to live with the bad youtube colours and use the following settings in the /etc/adobe/mms.cfg config file:

$ cat /etc/adobe/mms.cfg 
OverrideGPUValidation=1
EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=0

And as I’m a curious lad, I thought I’d make a table of what works and what doesn’t (on my setup – LMDE w/ NVidia 290 drivers):

Looks like there’s no clear winner that works for everything… Oh wells, there’s a good write-up with alternate solutions and things over on WebUpd8 here – even though they talk about flash 10.2 on Ubuntu, this is the first time I’ve had this issue and it’s on LMDE (Debian based) with the flash 11.2 beta and the same fixes work here. I guess if you’re that bothered, you could always downgrade to some previous flashplugin (like something from the 10.x series) and see how that holds out.

But on the upside, it’s kinda funny watching things in Avatar mode =P

Update: You can fix the bad colours in Flash 11.2.202.221 by setting the following options in /etc/adobe/mms.cfg:

OverrideGPUValidation=0
EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1

With NVidia 295.20 drivers (although I’m not sure if that’s part of the problem) Flash video plays fine without any colour issues. Hurrah! =D

I’ve tried for months to get along with the standard desktop choices for Ubuntu 11.04, but none of the “big 3″ are doing anything close to what I want:

1. Unity crashes. A lot. And I don’t like having to click on an application icon multiple times to get a display of all open windows and then have to click on the window I want. For example, if you have multiple browser windows open, it just seems to pick the first one or a random one (as opposed to the last window of that application which was open) when you click on on the Unity icon for the app. And that sucks. I do like the menu integration into a single panel to save vertical space – but asides from that it’s just subpar.
2. Gnome 2 doesn’t frickn work properly anymore and also crashes a lot (far worse than ‘back in the day’, and Deskbar doesn’t work anymore either), and finally
3. KDE3 renders fonts really badly (yes, I did turn on and experiment with the sub-pixel hinting options) and although it can look quite nice, it just feels like a bodge. I spent hours trying to configure it properly and it was never as good as stock Gnome even after all the extra effort.

So, what options are left? Well, there’s LXDE (the Lightweight X Desktop Environment), and there’s XFCE (which Linus Torvalds recently switched to because he’s hating the desktop brokenness as well). I installed LXDE on my work laptop earlier, and there’s nothing particularly wrong with it which couldn’t be fixed up , but I installed XFCE earlier on the assumption that Mr. Torvalds knows what he’s talking about – and you know what? He does…

Some notes for if you decide to try out LXDE

In LXDE wireless networking doesn’t work right off the bat, so you might want to grab a copy of wicd before you plunge headfirst. Also, compositing isn’t natively supported with just LXDE, so you’ll also want a copy of xcompmgr, which you should kick off like this:

xcompmgr -c -f -F &

You can man xcompmgr once it’s installed to get all the switches, but for this example it just fades windows in and out nicely – and actually looks rather nice (not to mention blazingly fast).

I like LXDE, and if XFCE didn’t exist I’d use it without hesitation and be perfectly happy with it. Only XFCE does exist – and I choo-choo-choose that – at least for now. I also like the huge range of packages available for any *buntu, so that keeps me from jumping ship entirely. At the end of the day, it’s all up to personal choice about what features you absolutely must have, what features you would like, and your own personal preferences.

Step 1 of 1 – Install xubuntu-desktop

If you like dockbars you can use docky with XFCE without any arguments, but I kinda prefer a bottom ‘window-icon’ panel (ala Gnome 2) so I’ve just set things up that way on mine. And the entire thing goes on fine with the following simple command:

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

It’ll drag in a whole heap of other dependencies, but it’ll all install nicely, at which point you just need to log out and log back in selecting Xubuntu Session as the desktop environment to use. Wireless networking worked straight away with no hassle for me, but in all fairness to LXDE, I only installed the LXDE package (and its immediate dependencies), and not the lubuntu-desktop package which (may) have straightened all that out.

The end result

After looking through the themes, adding a few bits and pieces to the top panel, and creating a separate bottom panel for the window-icons, this is what I’ve ended up with:

First draft XFCE desktop - click for larger image.

Honestly though, I just couldn’t go on using a desktop environment that would crash if not once per day, then many times per day. I mean, really – WTF is with that? Why would you even ship a desktop windowing environment in that state? Since I actually like to get some work done and not have to be killing and relaunching processes all the time, XFCE is officially doing it for me at the moment. So no more unity –replace, s’long killall nautilus and sayonara panel has stopped responding – it’s time to be able to actually concentrate on getting some work done.

Saw this on the net somewhere and it made me grin so I thought I’d share…

1. We admitted that we were powerless over Microsoft Windows and that our computers had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that an operating system greater than Microsoft Windows could restore us to greater productivity.
3. Made a decision to turn our hardware and data over to the care of better software as we understood it.
4. Made a fearless and searching inventory of our wrecked data, wasted time and thrashed hard drive.
5. Admitted to our higher power, ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of Microsoft Windows.
6. Were entirely ready to have Linux remove all of these defects from our computers and from our working lives.
7. Checked that our hardware was compatible with Linux.
8. Made a backup of all files that Microsoft Windows had harmed.
9. Corrected data to such files where possible, except where such corrections would harm other files.
10. Humbly installed Linux onto our hard drives.
11. Searched through man pages, HOWTOs , the Internet and Slashdot, to improve our understanding and use of Linux.
12. Having had a productive awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to windowholics and to practice these principles in all of our affairs.

Flippancy aside, once you make the switch to Linux, I’d say that it’s pretty unlikely that you’d ever willingly go back to running Windows as your main OS – because overall, and once you get used to it, Linux is simply better.

This isn’t to say that a *nix system will do you for absolutely everything – I still run a little MS Office in a Windows 7 virtual machine (via VirtualBox) because it makes life easier to be able to natively edit docx files and powerpoints for work, but that’s pretty much it. So I guess the message here doesn’t have to be abstinence but moderation. If you’ve got high-end Windows-only applications that you can’t live without and which require 3D hardware acceleration, then you’re pretty much stuck, but any other 2D Windows apps tend to work just fine under virtualisation (Flash, Photoshop, Office etc). The only thing that’s not so good under Linux is gaming (and this can be a deal breaker for many people), but if I want to game these days I just get on the 360 or PS3 anyways, and if PC gaming’s really your thing then you can always run a large number Windows games under Wine.

If you’re going to try out a *nix, most distros (Linux distributions i.e. flavours of Linux) allow you to try out the OS entirely from CD or DVD and make zero changes to your hard drive, and then you can install it later if you like, or not. Linux will also happily sit beside Windows in a dual-boot configuration so you can choose which OS to boot at startup. One thing to add though is that you shouldn’t judge the performance you get from a live distro instance as anywhere near the performance you’ll get from a proper install – running an OS from a disc (as opposed to hard drive) is really pretty slow and clunky, but the facility exists if you just want to have a look around, or take a Linux distro around with you. A better solution (even for trialling a distro) would be to find a USB stick which is a couple of GB in size, and then install the distro to that and boot it. If that appeals, then a list of USB compatible distros can be found here (Ubuntu’s included via the bundled usb-creator tool).

The main problem with trying to convert people to *nix (apart from the whole zealotry thing, and that Windows users are commonly happy with their lot, as they [usually] don’t know how much better things can be) is that it’s different to Windows. The interface is different, things work a little differently, and if something doesn’t work perfectly out of the box then it can be tricky for newcomers to fix. Also, nobody likes change – so there’s definitely an inertia thing involved too. But if you stick with it, put in a little time and effort, and look up how to fix stuff on sites like UbuntuForums, you’ll be rewarded ten-fold with an OS that does exactly what you want, when you want it done, quickly and stably – for free!

There are stacks of distributions out there, geared towards things like multimedia, stability, security, flexibility or ease-of-use – why not have a look to see if there’s one there that speaks to you? I mean, what have you got to lose? If I had to recommend one, I’d have to say most standard to advanced users should be happy enough with either stock Ubuntu or Linux Mint (a customised version of Ubuntu with tweaks and improvements for eye-candy and ease-of-use).

Finally, if you want to see how people have customised their *nix desktops, check out UnixPorn (tagline: It’s not Porn, it’s Unix!) – I even have an old desktop up there

Bonus Gubbins: That UnixPorn desktop was kinda old and Windows-y, so I’ve just posted my current desktop setup which uses Jix’s Artistic Wallpaper HD no logo along with Kouri1977′s Streets theme for conky (which uses the bring tha noize and the B.O.M.B fonts):

The CPU/RAM etc. counters along the bottom update at 1 second intervals - conky is sweet =D

Anyways, if you’re not already converted, are you maybe tempted? If not, why not? I’d love to know, and as always, comments/flames are always welcome =D

Woo-hoo! Microsoft’s Kinect computer vision hardware for the XBox 360 (which uses the structured light technique for motion detection) now has open source Linux drivers available for it – and it took one talented hacker a whole three hours to do it!

Read more here.

To re-appropriate Sony’s marketing pitch: This changes Everything =D

Unrelatedly, the dude in the video has the exact same laptop as me – an Acer 8920G, unless he has an 8930G which has an additional TV-Tuner card.