Dang’s Weblog

I've been playing with Fedora a bit recently, and it has that pulseaudio merged volume thing that I read about recently. Basically, the volume keys on your laptop move the "main" pulseaudio volume, which is a composite of Master and PCM. Half the "main" range is Master, half is PCM. This is a great idea, theoretically. It gives you twice the volume resolution range, since the volume of those two are additive.
However, in yet another case of pulseaudio fail on common hardware (intel-hda), if *either* Master or PCM goes to zero, the volume output is muted. Thus, if my main volume ever goes below half, there's no sound. Simple solution: never make either go to zero unless "main" goes to zero.
In other volume problem news, something about Fedora has caused my volume to not be properly saved on reboot. When it comes up, it's just below half, and therefore muted. When Is start rhythmbox, no sound. Changing the main volume has no effect (maybe it's the other one that's muted? beats me). If I open the volume slider in *rhythmbox* (which is most of the way down after boot) the volume suddenly jumps to maximum, and blows my ears out. Fortunately, I know that now, and I take off my earphones before doing this... I can then use the volume keys to lower it to just above half, which is a decent volume. Good think I don't want it quiet, tho, as that's not possible without opening the ALSA mixer directly...
So, partial fail to pulseaudio, partial fail to fedora, it seems. If all the fail goes to one, I apologize to the other.

Sound issues aside, Fedora has been fairly decent, on the whole. And, in all honesty, sound has never worked properly for me on anything but Gentoo...

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Today, about half a dozen times, I had someone tell me that I was an idiot, or that my code was crap, or that packages I maintained were useless, or that I was doing things wrong.  This, unfortunately, it typical for Gentoo (and FOSS, in general, I guess) development.  It sucks my energy to develop.

Today,  I had one person tell me I was awesome and helpful.  This was great, and made me feel good, and made me want to develop.

Unfortunately, this is not typical.  It's rare that this happens even once in a week; not often enough to make up for all the negative energy.  And that is even more depressing.

So, I'm getting discouraged.  The question then becomes, if I stop working on Gentoo, what do I do with my time?  Do I work on upstream Gnome?  Do I start a coding project of my own?  Maybe jump ship entirely to some other alternative OS?  Do I even continue to run Gentoo, once I can't contribute to it?  Or switch to something else?  If so, what?

Don't mind me,  I'm in a pissy mood.

UPDATE:   Thanks for all the kind words.  But honestly, I wasn't asking for pats on the back, just venting.  I know you won't believe me, but...

Tags: Gentoo // 13 Comments »

Well, I've now been through a California wild fire; that leave a mudslide and an earthquake to complete the trifecta.

I'm in Santa Barbara for business this week, and yesterday, someone looked out the window at the office and said "Hey! Smoke!"  We got to watch the fire move all afternoon, and yesterday evening the entire city was covered in smoke and even some drifting ash.  Quite the odd experience.

Fortunately, no significant damage seems to have occured.   My boss's house is close to the fire area, and he had to evacuate, but if the paper is right, it's fine.  I guess I'll find out soon.

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For quite a while now, Gentoo has used the plugdev group as a catch-all for Things-You-Need-Special-Permission-For-On-Desktops.  This includes automounting (what it was originally for), dbus policy, networkmanager policy, and so on.

As of today, modulo bug # 268223, I have what appears to be a full working desktop without being in the plugdev group.  This means, in my opinion, that policykit/consolekit is fully useful on Gentoo.

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Ladies and Gentlemen, PolicyKit has been unmasked.  I've tested it, and it seems to work well enough, and to not be too intrusive in it's current default setup.

If you have issues, please file bugs.  If there's missing policy, please file bugs.  If something is too annoying, please file bugs.  If something is horribly insecure, please file bugs.  We want to get this right.

In the meantime, I'm going to be going through the policy installed by other Distros to see how it differs from what we're shipping by default.  Probably packages that currently have policykit hard disabled will start adding USE flags to enable it.

It's unlikely at this point that PK will become required on Gentoo; we don't generally work that way, and the Gnome team, at least, has been patching the heck out of upstream packages to keep it optional.  I don't see that changing for 2.26 at least.

*EDIT* s/packagekit/policykit/, thanks to MiKeL

Tags: Gentoo // 7 Comments »

Supposedly, thanks to Steve, I should have WP no longer messing with my text!  Let's see:

find . --name "*.c" -exec grep -H "dang rules!" {} \;

Did it work?

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Created by Train Horns

In spite of the fact that I cannot hear quiet sounds well, I apparently can hear a good range.  Wonderful.  Only sounds most people can't hear bother me.

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This is really cool.   Android has some of these capabilities, and so I have some experience with them on my phone.  My weather bug, for example, shows me local weather.

There's a problem with it, tho, that I've experienced recently on my n810.  That problem is: how do you get the location into the desktop?

GPS is not really an option here.  If you are outside, so you can get a signal, you don't want to run GPS, because it's a *huge* battery drain.  Seriously.  I have to turn off the GPS on my n810 every time I unplug it from my car, because otherwise it won't last more than 2 hours.  It draws a lot more power than wifi does.  And, if you have power, you're probably inside, where GPS can't get an even approximate fix.  So, GPS is out.

My G1 gets around this by using cell  tower location for approximate location fixes.  This is quite sufficient for, say, weather, telling what city you're in, and so on.  It works great, but is not usesful for anything other than a phone.  Maybe, in the future, 3G/4G data cards will allow other devices to have this capability?  It would be nice, but I can't imagine the telcos not charging for it...

That leaves wifi location.  Some of this can be done for free.  I could program in to my computer the location of known wifi basestations (such as home and work).  Then, just checking which wifi I'm on would give me approximate (and even fairly precise) locations.  However, this is limited in number, and manually intensive.  Integration into some kind of map would help: I can pick the location where I am (or type in the address) and have my local wifi location database updated with knowledge of that location.

Then, there's wifi location services, that use the scan information to find your location from a huge database of known wifi basestations.  This is nice, but you have to pay for it.

So, the challenge to a geo-aware desktop is this:  How do you know where you are?  Are there options I've missed?

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Stuart:

Pretty please: explain to me what the alternative is?  Live without sound?  Because your average user (say, my wife with her nice shiny Ubuntu Dell laptop) cannot fix the sound any other way.  Even I had extreme trouble getting pulse to work at all, and I'm an experience developer, who can look at the code.  Is there some magical incantation that my wife can use to get this extremely important portion of her computer working?  Afterall, without sound, a laptop is fairly useless to most people.

And don't talk to me about minority failures.  This is the single most common sound chip, in a fully supported laptop that shipped with Ubuntu.  Please.  Explain how she can fix it, if she can't remove pulse.  Besides, say, switching back to Gentoo, which lets you remove it.

This has been a party broadcast on behalf of the "Don't break my computer with no way to fix it" party.

*Update*: I'm sorry for the rant, really.  But this whole "You should love pulse so much you shouldn't care you don't have any audio.  You can't make an omlette without breaking eggs, afterall." attitude has me seriously pissed off.

Tags: Gnome // 1 Comment »

Well, after ~1.5 months of work, testing, overlaying, etc., I've flipped the switch and moved my personal laptop (my main development machine) to 32bit-userland.  It was both easier than I thought, and harder: easier in that it's possible at all, and with very little work; harder in that there are 19 packages that need to be patched, and 3 (kernel, gcc, kvm) that I have not been able to fix yet.

One thing that surprised me was how many different packages have assembler and attempt to detect the arch and bitness.  Just about every media package, okay that kinda makes sense: they all optimize for media playback etc.; but bind-tools?  xulrunner?  WTF?  Anyway, for now, I've just patched them all in an overlay for now; many of them seem to use a similar detection method, so maybe I can do something in the profile to make most of them work.

On the plus side, Gnome has done a great job of hiding all the arch-specific code in glib.  None of the Gnome apps had any problems with 32bit-userland.

So far: less memory consumed.  This is a very good thing, as I was constantly running out before.

Oh, and what, you ask, do I do about those three unfixable packages?  I have a 64bit-userland chroot that I build them in, and binpkg them, and then just install the binpkgs.  Works fine.  Hopefully, I'll be able to fix those three in the future.  The kernel, in particular, has to work for sparc/mips, so it should be fixable for x86 as well.

Tags: Gentoo // 2 Comments »