Gold Linker working in Ubuntu
Yeah, the Ubuntu Guys fixed the Gold Linker Package. Speed difference is incredible, now we need LLVM. Some problems are still there: GNU ld respects folders in /etc/ld.so.conf.d/, gold does not (e.g. it doesn't find libs in /usr/local/lib).
Controlling OpenOffice Impress Presentations with Apple IR Remote Control
.. isn't that complex, but requires some installation on Ubuntu.
Here a quick and dirty going-through.
(More after the click)
Ableton Live in Wine
At first glance it looks like Ableton Live (Demo) works very well in Wine, but you cannot record live instruments because Wine has a Bug which blocks Ableton to save anything (Bug 15695). Too bad, Ableton Live seems like the perfect toy for rainy Sunday Afternoons and the price for the Home Version (called Ableton Live Intro) goes Ok with around 80€.
And you can do funny things:
Own CalDAV Server
Today I wanted to get rid of Kontact/Kmail and one part of it was the calendar synchronization. Ubunto doesn't have it in it's Ubuntu One; for security reasons I do not want to save it on Google, so I tried to still use my plain old WebDAVs-Calendar on GMX MediaCenter. But oops, Kontact seems the only program natively supporting it; Thunderbird Lightning talks about it as poor mans CalDAV, but Lightning doesn't work in Lucid (there are packages here). But poor man; thats nothing for me, I need a real CalDAV server.
Isn't that easy, nobody implemented a small versatlie one. The only I found in Debian Lenny is very old and seems not to work anymore.
Then I found Davical, but it needed PostgreSQL. Without having an alternative, I got through the complicated install script (thats why people want small installable servers, they don't care how others want Apache and PHP and SQL server to talk to each other). But hey, it works, even on the iPhone.
So, if you know someone who wants to hack a small CalDAV server, let me know, I would support it, just for getting calendar sharing done on your own private cloud server.
SPDIF out on Asus Mainboard
After the purchase of a desktop speaker (Behringer calls them Near Field Monitor but I wouldn't go so far) with digital in I was searching for some digital audio outputs on my ~1 year old computer. There aren't any. Apparently inside, on the mainboard itself there is a 4pin connector where you can plugin some kind of Asus specific SPDIF output bracket. Hey, this board is 1 year old. What shall I do with some useless 6channel analog output (which tends to distort with >50% volume) but no SPDIF? Even my laptop has it combined in its stereo out, at least Toslink.
So well, you can buy the blend in two different revisions, one with coax in/out (6pins), the other with Coax/Toslink out (4pins). Both are not produced any more, so you have to have some luck on ebay or so. At the moment, only 6pin-variants appear. Original price for these brackets is around 10€, now it tends between 1€ and 20€, dependent whether you are only one who needs it or not.
Mono for GUI?
From time to time I think about switching the language for GUI development, as C++ sucks hard when you want to do that. In the moment I would favor Mono/C#. The core of the program would still be in C++, so I would have to write a Binding for it. Flameeyes wrote a nice text about the problems that can raise up. Maybe in this direction, there can be done a lot by automation (like GAPI for gobject) as I have direct access to the core library and could simplify it for wrapped usage. Let's see.
But much more, I would favor some kind of declarative GUI programming technique, because computers are quite good in interpreting it.
Open Source ATI on it’s way
I just had the chance to checkout the fairly new Ubuntu Lucid Lynx Alpha3 for testing it with ATI/AMD r700 (in my case Ati Radeon 4830) compatibility. With FGLRX there was and is a lot of stress. Fedora 12 already brought some light but you had to install some experimental sources. (all citations from private blog).
The result is impressive. Yes it's an alpha version, but the Ati Driver runs out the box. With Kernel Mode Switching (KMS) and Compiz with moderate memory consumption (in contrast to FGLRX). Also window minimizing/maximizing/resizing and Ctrl+Alt+F1-Text-Console switching is fast and seems stable. Phoronix has some benchmark about the poor 3D performance in contrast to FGLRX but I think this will be a matter of time. A bit more annoying is the absence of modern OpenGL2.0+ features, so it is not really possible to do GLSL hacking with these driver yet. I don't know whether we can get Powerball running on it, but anyway no one has time doing something on it in the moment. The X11 driver git-trunk has some GLSL2.0 features already, it's just unclear whether the Ubuntu Team will put it into Lucid Lynx as it will be a Long Term Release (LTS).
For fans, there is also a new theme:
(Image from Ubuntus gallery)
Boot loader mess
One thing I really dislike on Ubuntu/Desktop Linux. Each time I reinstall something, e.g. Windows7 (because Vista/32 was to buggy and cannot really work with 8gb of RAM and I need something to start C&C Generals you know). Anyway each time, the boot loader gets shot. Ok; thats Windows fault. But how do I easyly repair that? The web is full of easy-to-hardrange installation tutorials; but why not a simple button "repair my fuxxing boot loader" on the CD?. Now, when you use the wrong disc (a Ubuntu 9.10 disc instead of 9.04 - wrong labeled) it installs - without any message or something - grub2. Naturally incompatible with grub1 installed by all Ubuntu all the versions before. The first sign that something went wrong is a Grub minimal bash like shell telling you something.
So, for fast remembering; how to reinstall grub:
# boot from any recent OS CD, start terminal, get root # exchange /dev/sdb1 through the partition you installed you root ubuntu system # /dev/sda should be standard as target partition for grub mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/bla mount -o bind /dev /mnt/bla/dev mount -o bind /proc /mnt/bla/proc cd /mnt/bla chroot ./ grub-install /dev/sda
Useful things StackOverflow
Useful discussions on StackOverflow found in the last time:
- Recursive Locks vs. Non-Recursive Locks
- How do I recover a semaphore when the process that decremented it to zero crashes?. The solution with file locks seems to be good. Maybe file mapping / file locks should replace SharedMemory/Semaphore Combinations anyway.
2nd Amarok 1.4 Fork
Now therea re two Amarok 1.4 Clones. Let's see when they will outstrip Amarok2 
Nummer 1: Pana
Nummer 2: Clementine Player
P.S. About KDE4: When you install 'kile' on a previous Gnone-only-Ubuntu; you have to fetch 700MB(!) of data. And you won't get any spellchecker. That's fixed with KDE 4.4 through backports. (Hey, they did not had a spellchecker in a text editor for ALL these time??)