Re: Replace Tomboy with Gnote?
On 19/06/2009 Alan Pope wrote: 2009/6/19 Danny Piccirillo danny.picciri...@ubuntu.com: And sadly, Banshee (mono) may soon be replacing Rhythmbox in Ubuntu Lets not go down that road huh? I have nothing against mono myself but in my opinion rhythmbox and gthumb cover the basic needs one may have. I sometimes wanted to use f-spot but the fact that it copies all the pics in its own folder gives an alien and feeling to it, in the sense that it seems to me the program is doing something I didn't ask for (pictures take lot of space). Regarding tomboy, I want to point out this: many times in the past, I have been told that my requests of reverting certain upgrades (e.g. the intel driver, which is currently badly broken in jaunty, even if there are hopes for karmic) are not well motivated because you got to know how frequent is the use case. That's a good excuse for everything, then: how frequent is the tomboy use case? I NEVER saw anybody using it at all. Please do not reply I use it. I know there are users, indeed. The point is, having it by default makes few sense if less than 10% uses it. So if we really wished, we could make mono optional. Even if it will surely not happen. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
F-Spot Import Was: Replace Tomboy with Gnote?
2009/6/20 Vincenzo Ciancia cian...@di.unipi.it: I have nothing against mono myself but in my opinion rhythmbox and gthumb cover the basic needs one may have. I sometimes wanted to use f-spot but the fact that it copies all the pics in its own folder gives an alien and feeling to it, in the sense that it seems to me the program is doing something I didn't ask for (pictures take lot of space). In F-spot the import dialog has a check box Copy files to the Photos folder which you can turn off to prevent that behaviour. http://popey.com/~alan/Screenshot-Import.png Cheers, Al. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Replace PulseAudio with OSS v4?
On Sat, 2009-06-20 at 01:47 -0400, Danny Piccirillo wrote: After reading this post on Insane Coding (via Slashdot) it seems that PulseAudio is actually a very bad choice in the long term due to horrible latency [Data needed] and lower sound quality [Data needed] and that we should work to use OSS v4. It's a long read but seems to be worth it. What do others think about this? That the blog post was long on verbiage and contained no data. Also that the author concentrated on the audio-mixing role of PulseAudio to the exclusion of its other, in my opinion more interesting, features such as audio hotplug. Oh, and that the comments suggest that the OSSv4 kernel components would apparently require extensive work to be accepted into mainline. There may be value in considering OSS v4, but the foundation of that consideration should be actual data. I don't believe that blog post (a) contained any data, or (b) made a particularly strong argument for OSS v4 over ALSA. Members of the audio-team may have more interesting and informed contributions. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
RE: Replace PulseAudio with OSS v4?
Personally, I would welcome just about anything which would help us to lose PulseAudio. Or magically transform PulseAudio into something which doesn't suck. Either way would be fine. Allow me to elaborate (or skip the rest of this post if you don't care): I've had an SB Live for ages. One of the most redeeming features of this card is hardware mixing. Meaning that I didn't care about OSS lockups or ALSA's dmix. Things just worked. Most users like it that way. Recently, when loading Win7 to be able to play some windows-only games, I've found that windows hasn't had proper SBLive support since, well, XP. XP picks up the card on my system but doesn't output sound to it. Win7 seems to think it's a relic from a distant age and refuses to work with it. Creative, apparently, don't care. So the card that I've used for years because of how it rocks under Linux had to go -- I want a system I can just reboot to play my games (that is all windows is good for, imo). I tried using PA's mixing and multiple output to use USB headphones and the onboard Realtek HDA audio. Worked for a while but often left PA locked up. I would have to kill and restart. My nett conclusion is that PA doesn't do well with multiple soundcards, despite the advertisements. So now I use the onboard sound exclusively. PA behaves (mostly) for me, but the sound is a little latent -- and I'm not a person who creates music or anything like that. I can deal with the minor latency because it doesn't really affect me. Someone who mixes digital music on the other hand (and I have a friend who does) can't use PA. Now, when mixing wasn't an issue (ie when I had my SB Live), OSS was all I needed. Apps which wanted ALSA would also work because the kernel supplied the API. But ALSA didn't give me anything I needed. Then again, neither would have done the multi-card output seamlessly. I guess I have to agree with the general consensus that sound is not Linux's stronger suit. I guess it comes back to my initial comment: I would welcome (and I'm sure other users would agree) any subsystem which: 1) Worked (all the time, without random lockup) 2) Wasn't latent 3) Wasn't a mission to set up 4) Just handled mixing -- it's not something the average user thinks about when Redmond has never really made it an issue -- multiple win32 sound apps have just been able to work simultaneously since, well, almost forever. 5) Could handle multiple soundcards easily -- those USB headphones might still come in handy instead of the extension cables from my onboard sound (my keyboard has a USB hub on it -- it was well convenient). Personally, I have yet to see that list met by any system. OSSv4, from the posted article, looks like it handles the average user's requirements quite well. I guess it's up to whether it's worth patching into the Linux kernel for *buntu distros or if the kernel devs want to include it. On the other hand, I have, in the past, after much frustration, managed to get ALSA's dmix to work -- oddly enough, some distros actually have tools to make it work for you. I haven't seen something like that on *buntu (though I have to admit that I didn't look *too* hard because those were the days of the SB Live). It would indeed be a great step forward to have sound work under Linux in the same manner that windows users are accustomed to: it just does (barring stupid sound card providers who drop driver support, of course). -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Replace Tomboy with Gnote?
On Saturday 20 June 2009 6:30:07 am Vincenzo Ciancia wrote: I have nothing against mono myself but in my opinion rhythmbox and gthumb cover the basic needs one may have. Agreed on Rhythmbox. Not so much on GThumb. AFAICT, it displays the images as though cataloged...and then as soon as I remove the SD card or unplug the camera, it's all undone again. It doesn't make any sense to me. I sometimes wanted to use f-spot but the fact that it copies all the pics in its own folder gives an alien and feeling to it, in the sense that it seems to me the program is doing something I didn't ask for (pictures take lot of space). Seeing as that's optional, yes you did. I find the copying useful since well...if it didn't copy them, it'd be like GThumb, pretending to organize my camera (not actually changing the filesystem by the way, just pretending) and not getting the images onto the computer. You'd have to manually copy all the images from the camera to the hard drive, then run GThumb/F-Spot. In that case, why are they set to start when a camera is plugged in or an SD card inserted? They'd be rather useless for the getting stuff of the camera usecase (the usecase implied by their autolaunching). Regarding tomboy, I want to point out this: many times in the past, I have been told that my requests of reverting certain upgrades (e.g. the intel driver, which is currently badly broken in jaunty, even if there are hopes for karmic) are not well motivated because you got to know how frequent is the use case. That's a good excuse for everything, then: how frequent is the tomboy use case? Several of my classmates have asked me about it, since the linking between notes is quite useful for taking notes in class. -- Mackenzie Morgan http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com apt-get moo signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Replace PulseAudio with OSS v4?
OSSv4 is driver stuff. It'd be an ALSA replacement, not a PulseAudio replacement--and like hell ALSA's getting replaced. -- Mackenzie Morgan http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com apt-get moo signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Replace Tomboy with Gnote?
On Sat, 2009-06-20 at 12:16 -0400, Mackenzie Morgan wrote: f-spot but the fact that it copies all the pics in its own folder gives an alien and feeling to it, in the sense that it seems to me the program is doing something I didn't ask for (pictures take lot of space). Seeing as that's optional, yes you did. I find the copying useful since well...if it didn't copy them, it'd be like GThumb, pretending to organize my camera (not actually changing the filesystem by the way, just pretending) and not getting the images onto the computer. You'd have to manually copy all the images from the camera to the hard drive, then run GThumb/F-Spot. In that case, why are they set to start when a camera is plugged in or an SD card inserted? They'd be rather useless for the getting stuff of the camera usecase (the usecase implied by their autolaunching). In my case, I keep all photos on a large external drive to conserve space in my home directory, and import only the thumbnails into f-spot, so I must remember to uncheck this box each time, or it copies over the full jpgs to home/tim/Photos. This would quickly wipe out my free space, and needlessly make a duplicate of each photo (I already keep backups on another system). So in my case, as with Vincenzo, it is a feature I don't like. Tim -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Replace Tomboy with Gnote?
On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 12:41 PM, Tim Zakharov tzakha...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, 2009-06-20 at 12:16 -0400, Mackenzie Morgan wrote: f-spot but the fact that it copies all the pics in its own folder gives an alien and feeling to it, in the sense that it seems to me the program is doing something I didn't ask for (pictures take lot of space). Seeing as that's optional, yes you did. I find the copying useful since well...if it didn't copy them, it'd be like GThumb, pretending to organize my camera (not actually changing the filesystem by the way, just pretending) and not getting the images onto the computer. You'd have to manually copy all the images from the camera to the hard drive, then run GThumb/F-Spot. In that case, why are they set to start when a camera is plugged in or an SD card inserted? They'd be rather useless for the getting stuff of the camera usecase (the usecase implied by their autolaunching). In my case, I keep all photos on a large external drive to conserve space in my home directory, and import only the thumbnails into f-spot, so I must remember to uncheck this box each time, or it copies over the full jpgs to home/tim/Photos. This would quickly wipe out my free space, and needlessly make a duplicate of each photo (I already keep backups on another system). So in my case, as with Vincenzo, it is a feature I don't like. I happen to quite like this feature, since I use it to copy pictures off my camera and onto disk while importing them into F-Spot, and I think that ought to be a fairly common use case. I would vote against removing this feature, however perhaps the default should be to have it unchecked. Someone should talk to upstream on that. Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Replace Tomboy with Gnote?
On Saturday 20 June 2009 5:31:31 pm Evan wrote: On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 12:41 PM, Tim Zakharov tzakha...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, 2009-06-20 at 12:16 -0400, Mackenzie Morgan wrote: f-spot but the fact that it copies all the pics in its own folder gives an alien and feeling to it, in the sense that it seems to me the program is doing something I didn't ask for (pictures take lot of space). Seeing as that's optional, yes you did. I find the copying useful since well...if it didn't copy them, it'd be like GThumb, pretending to organize my camera (not actually changing the filesystem by the way, just pretending) and not getting the images onto the computer. You'd have to manually copy all the images from the camera to the hard drive, then run GThumb/F-Spot. In that case, why are they set to start when a camera is plugged in or an SD card inserted? They'd be rather useless for the getting stuff of the camera usecase (the usecase implied by their autolaunching). In my case, I keep all photos on a large external drive to conserve space in my home directory, and import only the thumbnails into f-spot, so I must remember to uncheck this box each time, or it copies over the full jpgs to home/tim/Photos. This would quickly wipe out my free space, and needlessly make a duplicate of each photo (I already keep backups on another system). So in my case, as with Vincenzo, it is a feature I don't like. I happen to quite like this feature, since I use it to copy pictures off my camera and onto disk while importing them into F-Spot, and I think that ought to be a fairly common use case. I would vote against removing this feature, however perhaps the default should be to have it unchecked. Someone should talk to upstream on that. Or put it in the Preferences dialog. There's a section about importing photos already. So add default to copying photos and then that'd decide whethere that checkbox is checked or not by default in the dialog. -- Mackenzie Morgan http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com apt-get moo signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Replace PulseAudio with OSS v4?
On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 1:47 AM, Danny Piccirillodanny.picciri...@ubuntu.com wrote: PulseAudio is actually a very bad choice in the long term due to horrible latency and lower sound quality, and that we should work to use OSS v4. It's a long read but seems to be worth it. What do others think about this? Adding more layers inevitably results in increased latency if not done correctly. PulseAudio's glitch-free mode addresses the interrupt-based problem in a different fashion. Unfortunately, the state of Linux drivers for common audio hardware in laptops is abysmal. Yes, it's trivial to experience high latency using PulseAudio, but that is not necessarily PulseAudio's fault. If you've seen any of my presentations[0] on audio, you'll walk away seeing that Linux audio is a complicated stack to troubleshoot and to improve incrementally. Ubuntu has shipped with suboptimal configurations in the past, but Jaunty was a fairly significant step forward (although many people will dispute it because sound is broken for me). Karmic, by all indications, will be better by virtue of more people spending cycles fixing bugs in ALSA and PulseAudio. For instance, significant buffering issues and audio anomalies have been identified and are nearly resolved in the common case in Karmic, Rawhide, and elsewhere. Closed-source software continues to be problematic. Lower sound quality is a red herring. ALSA's default resampler has known and quite audible limitations. The available resamplers in PulseAudio demolish the lower sound quality FUD. Jaunty shipped a configuration using a craptastic one in an attempt to balance CPU usage with perceptive quality. Lessons learned: Karmic will ship with a much better (but more CPU-intensive) resampler. Now let's consider why replacing ALSA with OSSv4 in Ubuntu Karmic would be a bad exercise: 1) No upstream mainline Linux support - Canonical and the Ubuntu community would have to devote resources to supporting OSSv4 as out-of-tree software, which is nontrivial for an area as significant as the audio stack. The kernel team's lessons learned in supporting such out-of-tree patches has indicated that no one would rather continue down that road. To date, no one has stepped forward to address the significant architectural concerns with merging OSSv4 into mainline Linux. 2) Lack of feature parity - while some HDA codecs are marginally better supported in OSSv4, that list continues to shrink. Creative X-Fi support, USB, USB MIDI support, to name a few, are consistently better supported in ALSA. Due to sheer momentum, that maintenance pace does not hold for OSSv4. That said, no one is opposed to seeing OSSv4 improve to the point where it can be merged into mainline Linux. From the audio team's perspective, it simply makes support resources sense for Ubuntu and its supported remixes to carry support for ALSA and PulseAudio by default. I'd like to add that if someone wants to see OSSv4 support in Ubuntu, that someone just needs to step up and work in the Ubuntu audio team. I volunteer my spare cycles working on Ubuntu audio, so I see no reason why a motivated and resourceful person cannot do similarly. -Dan [0] http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~dtchen/UDS-Barcelona/ -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Replace PulseAudio with OSS v4?
On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 9:53 AM, Davyd McColldav...@gmail.com wrote: I've had an SB Live for ages. One of the most redeeming features of this card is hardware mixing. Meaning that I didn't care about OSS lockups or ALSA's dmix. Too bad that hardware multiopen support comes at a price: all streams are forcibly resampled, reducing audio fidelity. But I digress... I tried using PA's mixing and multiple output to use USB headphones and the onboard Realtek HDA audio. Worked for a while but often left PA locked up. I would have to kill and restart. My nett conclusion is that PA doesn't do well with multiple soundcards, despite the advertisements. That symptom is a combination of outdated ALSA (-kernel, -lib, -plugins) and PulseAudio. I've outlined[0] release schedule misalignments that exacerbate this symptom. So now I use the onboard sound exclusively. PA behaves (mostly) for me, but the sound is a little latent -- and I'm not a person who creates music or anything like that. I can deal with the minor latency because it doesn't really affect me. Someone who mixes digital music on the other hand (and I have a friend who does) can't use PA. PA is not the use case for people mixing digital music. The Linux audio community is finally coming to a consensus that desktop audio is the realm of PulseAudio, and professional audio is the realm of Jack Audio Connection Kit. Interaction between the two is being improved. I would welcome (and I'm sure other users would agree) any subsystem which: 1) Worked (all the time, without random lockup) Difficult to accomplish when the hardware is faulty, which is far more common on older Creative cards than one might think 2) Wasn't latent Different use cases here, see PulseAudio vice JACK 3) Wasn't a mission to set up 4) Just handled mixing 5) Could handle multiple soundcards easily Being improved for both the desktop and for professional audio OSSv4, from the posted article, looks like it handles the average user's requirements quite well. I guess it's up to whether it's worth patching into the Linux kernel for *buntu distros or if the kernel devs want to include it. Well, if you consider the average user not to care about her/his integrated laptop audio or USB headset, sure... dmix to work -- oddly enough, some distros actually have tools to make it work for you. I haven't seen something like that on *buntu Pre-Karmic shipped asoundconf(1). We've stripped it from alsa-utils, because it was becoming increasingly bearish to maintain, and because the magic alsa-lib runes necessary are really PulseAudio's realm. It would indeed be a great step forward to have sound work under Linux in the same manner that windows users are accustomed to: it just does A noble objective. Now who's with me? -Dan [0] http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~dtchen/UDS-Barcelona/ -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
