Draft of Tomorrow's 05/21 Print Interview w/Lennart Poettering
*The Sound of Fedora 11 - Audio Control with Lennart Poettering* Where would we be without sound? It's the most primitive of communication methods, and yet it has spawned so much technology around it. Whether you're a musician, a DJ, riding a bus to work or even just stuck in a cubicle listening to the radio somewhere, sound has become an integral part of our daily experiences. When Fedora 11 lands along with it will land more than a handful of enhancements to the sound subsystem, including unified volume control, per stream and per device monitoring and proper Bluetooth audio support. I recently caught up with Lennart Poettering, Red Hat Desktop Team Engineer and resident audio guru. Here's what he had to say about the upcoming improvements and what the future holds: *1. Please introduce yourself and give us a brief intro to how you started working on the upcoming audio improvement in F11.* I am Lennart Poettering and have been working for Red Hat in the Desktop Group for two years now this month. I live in Berlin, Germany. PA has been part of Fedora since F8. Since then we used to ship two volume control appications: the GNOME volume control and a PA specific tool (pavucontrol). The latter was mostly a showcase what can be done with PA and I wrote it mostly as a demo, not because I thought it was any good as an UI. Of course having these two volume control UIs in Fedora was a situation that badly needed fixing. Especially since both UIs exposed too many unnecessary options: the GNOME volume control exposed a lot of low-level hardware-specific features that only a tiny minority of people actually really understood, and the PA volume control exposed a lot of low-level software features that a slightly larger minority of people only actually really understood. Now during the last year we reached a point were the feature set of PA for volume controls became very complete (with such things as arbitrary meta data on every stream/device, per-stream and per-device monitoring, hardware volume range extension, flat volumes and lots of other stuff) and Jon McCan with help from Bastien Nocera finally took up the work to fix the UI situation. They basically designed the new UI from scratch with input from usability experts. It implements many of the features the old pavucontrol tool did, but in a much nicer, streamlined way. Also it integrates sound theme/event sound control with general audio configuraton and volume control in a single UI tool. *2. Can you give us some background on the upcoming changes to the audio subsystem in the Fedora 11 Release.* If you want to know more about the Volume Control, I'd just refer to the Feature page: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/VolumeControl We moved PA 0.9.15 into F11, a nice overview over the new features you can find here: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/oh-nine-fifteen.html However that overview is a bit out-of-date. There are quite a few additional features that went into 0.9.15, most prominently full Bluetooth Audio support: Together with Bastien Nocera and the BlueZ guys I worked to make Bluetooth audio easily accessible -- the bluetooth applet now exposes an easy dialog that allows you to pair and activate a bluetooth headset. After that is done it will automatically appear in PulseAudio. If you need to reactivate it later, you can do that with a simple click in the applet menu. It works surprisingly well. It even works fine for lip-sync video. Which is kind of magic, given that Bluetooth Audio doesn't actually offer any timing interfaces, so syncing up audio with video is not really possible. I spent a lot of time to make sure it does work nonetheless, and it seems to work on the majority of headphones although I cannot say for sure if it does for all of them. *3. Where did the ideas to change all this stuff come from. Didn't audio always work in Fedora?* Depends what you mean by 'work'. Sure, basic audio output worked. But in many ways what we had on Linux was not comparable to what MacOS or Windows supported. And it still isn't in many ways. However in other ways we have now surpassed those competitors. A lot of the changes we introduced with PA are not directly visible to the user. For example the so called 'glitch-free' logic in PA is very important for a modern audio stack, however the normal user will never notice it -- except maybe because when we introduced it initially a lot of driver bugs got exposed that people were not aware of before because that driver functionality (usually timing related) was not really depended on by any application. In fact even now many of the older drivers expose broken timing that makes usage with PA not as much fun as it could be. A more detailed explanation of this 'glitch-free' logic you may find here: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/pulse-glitch-free.html Both Windows Vista and MacOS X have similar g-f logic in their
Fedora 11 DVD artwork test and FLISOL material
Hello guys! I published today in my Blog[1] some pictures of the mktg material produced for Brazilian FLISOL and Fedora 11 Label printing tests. Take a look at www.rodrigopadula.com -- Rodrigo Padula de Oliveira M.Sc. Student - COPPE/UFRJ Fedora Community Manager - Latin America Red Hat Community and Academy Relations http://www.proyectofedora.org http://twitter.com/rodrigopadula http://www.rodrigopadula.com -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
Re: Draft of Tomorrow's 05/21 Print Interview w/Lennart Poettering
Awesome. Thanks, Jack Paul W. Frields wrote: Awesome. I made a couple minor spelling and other trivial fixes throughout. New version below: * * * *The Sound of Fedora 11 - Audio Control with Lennart Poettering* Where would we be without sound? It's the most primitive of communication methods, and yet it has spawned so much technology around it. Whether you're a musician, a DJ, riding a bus to work, or even just stuck in a cubicle listening to the radio somewhere, sound has become an integral part of your daily experiences. When Fedora 11 lands, along with it will land a number of enhancements to the sound subsystem, including unified volume control, per stream and per device monitoring, and proper Bluetooth audio support. I recently caught up with Lennart Poettering, Red Hat Desktop Team Engineer and resident audio guru. Here's what he had to say about the upcoming improvements and what the future holds: *1. Please introduce yourself and give us a brief intro to how you started working on the upcoming audio improvement in F11.* I am Lennart Poettering and have been working for Red Hat in the Desktop Group for two years now this month. I live in Berlin, Germany. PA has been part of Fedora since F8. Since then we used to ship two volume control appications: the GNOME volume control and a PA specific tool (pavucontrol). The latter was mostly a showcase what can be done with PA and I wrote it mostly as a demo, not because I thought it was any good as an UI. Of course having these two volume control UIs in Fedora was a situation that badly needed fixing. Especially since both UIs exposed too many unnecessary options: the GNOME volume control exposed a lot of low-level hardware-specific features that only a tiny minority of people actually really understood, and the PA volume control exposed a lot of low-level software features that a slightly larger minority of people only actually really understood. Now during the last year we reached a point were the feature set of PA for volume controls became very complete (with such things as arbitrary meta data on every stream/device, per-stream and per-device monitoring, hardware volume range extension, flat volumes and lots of other stuff) and Jon McCan with help from Bastien Nocera finally took up the work to fix the UI situation. They basically designed the new UI from scratch with input from usability experts. It implements many of the features the old pavucontrol tool did, but in a much nicer, streamlined way. Also it integrates sound theme/event sound control with general audio configuraton and volume control in a single UI tool. *2. Can you give us some background on the upcoming changes to the audio subsystem in the Fedora 11 Release?* If you want to know more about the Volume Control, I'd just refer to the Feature page: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/VolumeControl We moved PA 0.9.15 into F11, a nice overview over the new features you can find here: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/oh-nine-fifteen.html However that overview is a bit out-of-date. There are quite a few additional features that went into 0.9.15, most prominently full Bluetooth Audio support: Together with Bastien Nocera and the BlueZ guys I worked to make Bluetooth audio easily accessible -- the bluetooth applet now exposes an easy dialog that allows you to pair and activate a bluetooth headset. After that is done it will automatically appear in PulseAudio. If you need to reactivate it later, you can do that with a simple click in the applet menu. It works surprisingly well. It even works fine for lip-sync video. Which is kind of magic, given that Bluetooth Audio doesn't actually offer any timing interfaces, so syncing up audio with video is not really possible. I spent a lot of time to make sure it does work nonetheless, and it seems to work on the majority of headphones although I cannot say for sure if it does for all of them. *3. Where did the ideas to change all this stuff come from? Didn't audio always work in Fedora?* Depends what you mean by 'work'. Sure, basic audio output worked. But in many ways what we had on Linux was not comparable to what MacOS or Windows supported. And it still isn't in many ways. However in other ways we have now surpassed those competitors. A lot of the changes we introduced with PA are not directly visible to the user. For example the so called 'glitch-free' logic in PA is very important for a modern audio stack, however the normal user will never notice it -- except maybe because when we introduced it initially a lot of driver bugs got exposed that people were not aware of before because that driver functionality (usually timing related) was not really depended on by any application. In fact even now many of the older drivers expose broken timing that makes usage with PA not as much fun as it could be. A more detailed explanation of this 'glitch-free'
Re: Non English Podcast?
Yes!!! I'm on it! I have a good microphone and I think I can take some time on lunch for do that. Do I need to have some text? are free podcast? is a translation? ... :D But I have to be honest... I have voice of a squirrel :D 2009/5/20 Jack Aboutboul j...@redhat.com: Does anyone on the list who speaks another language, fluently, such as French, Spanish, German or any of the languages in India have any interest in recording a podcast with a feature owner who can speak the same? Might be good to have some audio in something other then english, what do you think? Jack -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list -- tatica Maria Gracia Leandro http://www.tatica.org http://www.iseit.net http://www.latinux.org http://www.latinux.com http://www.fedora-ve.org http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MariaLeandro LinuxUser= 440285 GPG Public Key: E1CDCC56 Be yourself... Don't be anyone else -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
Re: Fedora 11 DVD artwork test and FLISOL material
Excellent! 2009/5/21 Rodrigo Padula de Oliveira rodrigopad...@projetofedora.org: Hello guys! I published today in my Blog[1] some pictures of the mktg material produced for Brazilian FLISOL and Fedora 11 Label printing tests. Take a look at www.rodrigopadula.com -- Rodrigo Padula de Oliveira M.Sc. Student - COPPE/UFRJ Fedora Community Manager - Latin America Red Hat Community and Academy Relations http://www.proyectofedora.org http://twitter.com/rodrigopadula http://www.rodrigopadula.com -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list -- tatica Maria Gracia Leandro http://www.tatica.org http://www.iseit.net http://www.latinux.org http://www.latinux.com http://www.fedora-ve.org http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MariaLeandro LinuxUser= 440285 GPG Public Key: E1CDCC56 Be yourself... Don't be anyone else -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
Re: Non English Podcast?
Am 19.05.2009 22:34, schrieb Jack Aboutboul: Does anyone on the list who speaks another language, fluently, such as French, Spanish, German or any of the languages in India have any interest in recording a podcast with a feature owner who can speak the same? Might be good to have some audio in something other then english, what do you think? I think that's a really good idea! I'd be interested in making some but unfortunately I'm on vacation for three weeks (including the release day of Fedora 11) and don't necessarily have a net connection. German Podcasts would be possible with the following persons: - Harald Hoyer (20SecondStartup) - Peter Hutterer (Evdev2.2, InputDeviceProperties, SynapticsUpdate) - Phil Knirsch (PowerManagement) - Lennart Poettering (VolumeControl) Henrik Heigl is doing the FWN in German for a German Linux Radio Project. Maybe he is interested in doing interviews with those persons. Felix -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
Re: Non English Podcast?
Henrik Heigl is doing the FWN in German for a German Linux Radio Project. Maybe he is interested in doing interviews with those persons. Felix ^^ To be honest, and also Henrik know, there were several people who are interested in translating the FWN in German and have that talk in the German Linux Radio; ... If somebody needs German Speaker for an interview we have in the German Community more that one person who is able to talk ... Regards -- Regards Gerold Kassube Fedora Ambassador Deutschland / Germany Schweiz / Switzerland Email: gerol...@fedoraproject.org 1024D/F33128B9 4ABC A903 F1F4 D9CC C422 AACA EDF1 DF42 F331 28B9 signature.asc Description: Dies ist ein digital signierter Nachrichtenteil -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
Re: Non English Podcast?
Am 20.05.2009 21:37, schrieb Gerold Kassube: Henrik Heigl is doing the FWN in German for a German Linux Radio Project. Maybe he is interested in doing interviews with those persons. Felix ^^ To be honest, and also Henrik know, there were several people who are interested in translating the FWN in German and have that talk in the German Linux Radio; ... If somebody needs German Speaker for an interview we have in the German Community more that one person who is able to talk ... Sure. I am aware of that but I just gave a hint in a direction because I already heard some of Hendrik's works and thought it could be highly likely that he wants to do these podcasts. Of course it would be great if other people from the German community would step up and do something like this. Felix -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
Re: Non English Podcast?
Hy, Henrik Heigl is doing the FWN in German for a German Linux Radio Project. Maybe he is interested in doing interviews with those persons. Felix ^^ To be honest, and also Henrik know, there were several people who are interested in translating the FWN in German and have that talk in the German Linux Radio; ... If somebody needs German Speaker for an interview we have in the German Community more that one person who is able to talk ... Sure. I am aware of that but I just gave a hint in a direction because I already heard some of Hendrik's works and thought it could be highly likely that he wants to do these podcasts. Of course it would be great if other people from the German community would step up and do something like this. Hy, thanks both of you. I also agree with both and thats why I not answered so far to this. I do the FWN in german, because I was asked to and nobody else stepped in (maybe they know that it is a time-eating job if you are not an Translation Expert and you work under a littel bit of pressure, because the FWN come out monday and the RadioTux show is in thursday). I can also do some more Interviews for podcasts but I would prefer if there are some other/more people who are interrested and could step into this. If not maybe I can make some of those for the Linuxtag RadioTux shows or produce some with others at the Linuxtag itself (I can bring some stuff for that if needed). But until that I prefer to wait if others step in. mit freundlichen Grüßen / best regards Henrik Heigl - wonde...@fedoraproject.org P.S.: Just a short reminder that there is also a request for a jingle https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork/DesignService#Fedora_FWN_and_FUDCOn_Jingle_.28music.29 (and, yes, I also _can_ do it, but i think and hope that there are much more experienced musicians around and we could use that jingle also for podcasts and stuff...) -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
