Category: computers

It’s A Sickness

So, my new win/lin laptop, the low end acer dealy… I have a six gig partition set aside whose only purpose is to allow me to try out alternative linux distros and whatnot while causing as little damage as possible to the parts of the machines I actually use for work. Here’s what I’ve done with it so far.

  • GoboLinux. Cool but gaudy and some things didn’t work right.
  • DeMuDi. Rockin cool for what it was designed for.
  • Breezy Badger (Ubuntu unstable) Didn’t work at all.
  • Debian Sarge. All I can say is that as of Sarge, Debian isn’t quite as horribly painful to deal with as it had grown under Woody. But I still wouldn’t really recommend it to anybody when Ubuntu is an option.

Lotta time wasted there.

UPDATE: I went back to Sarge and the more I use it the more I like it. It’s not as smooth an install as the big Ubuntu, but I get sick of “Ubuntu Brown” everything (computers and earth tones don’t go together for me), there are some really sweet fonts and color schemes in a default Debian desktop install… I think I might stay here in Debian for a while. I can always turn to the Ubuntu fora for hints on how to do things too.

GIMP 2.0 and XSane on OS X using Fink

It’s not that hard, but it was hard for me to figure it out how to do, so now that I know, I’m posting it so people who need to do it can find it.

Gimp 2.0 and XSane are both ‘unstable’. If you want to use them, read Q5.8 in the Fink FAQ thoroughly. You do *not* want to enable all of unstable. That way lies madness. You want to snag the .info and .patch files out of the unstable directory and put them in your local directory so you can build them with the least possible use of unstable, have-to-compile packages. I’m not going to go into detail on exactly which packages you need to do this for because I don’t remember all of them. Just do it as much as you need to. It won’t take forever.

Let’s take the Xsane problem first. You can install gimp 1.x from binary. If you want xsane to work as a plugin with your copy of the gimp, you need to install gimp and gimp-dev before you build xsane! If you do not have gimp-dev installed before you build xsane, xsane will happily build and then refuse to work with gimp, because it was compiled without gimp support. It will give you a “gimp support missing” error when you start up gimp. This is frustrating, and it’s hard to find documentation on how to deal with this, which is why I’m writing this blog post. Install xsane using “fink rebuild xsane; fink reinstall xsane” to make sure you get a nice fresh copy with gimp support.

That gets you xsane and gimp 1.x. If you want xsane and gimp 2.x, read on.

If you want gimp2 playing nice with xsane, you do the same thing, but uninstall all the gimp1 stuff, install all the gimp2 stuff (from unstable) (including gimp2-dev), and purge your install of xsane completely. Go edit the local copy of the xsane.info file you copied over from unstable (it should be at something like “/sw/fink/10.4-transitional/local/main/finkinfo/graphics/xsane.info”) and replace ‘gimp’ with ‘gimp2’ everywhere you see it in the file. Then “fink rebuild xsane; fink reinstall xsane” just to be sure.

You should get a working copy of gimp2 with an xsane plugin, and you’ll never have to worry about downloading scanner drivers from the manufacturer again.

(Actually I’m not sure you *have* to blow away your gimp1.x install to get it working with gimp2.x, but if you’ve got gimp2.x, why would you want to keep gimp1.x around? Gimp 2 crushes 1 like a ripe grape.)

Full of Stars

We’re on vacation, sort of. I forgot to ask for time off so I’m going in to work and hanging at the beach cottage in the evening. That’s why I have the laptop with me.

A few weeks ago I saw Stellarium on Freshmeat.net’s OS X section so I downloaded it to my ibook.

Night before last Mary and I stayed up late and watched the stars. There were zillions of ’em and some obvious planets. We figured the super bright and fairly bright planets must be Venus and Jupiter, but weren’t sure beyond that and the Big Dipper. I remembered Stellarium so I ran in and got it and clicked on our location and told it to plot the current time. It showed us a map of the sky as it was then and there, zing zing. We were right about Jupiter. The other really bright star in the sky was Arcturus. We also saw Spica near Jupiter, and Vega, and lots of other great stuff.

The next night we let the kids stay up that late and we showed them all the stars that we’d found out about the night before, bolstering our reputation for parental omniscience.

It was really cool. They’d never really looked at the stars before.

Kudos to Stellarium.

Smalltalk by The Seaside

“Great googly moogly” is not an expression I throw around lightly. I don’t want to frighten the children.

But Seaside makes me go, “Great googly moogly!”

It’s a web application development framework for Smalltalk (such as the open source Squeak project).

I’ve been walking through the tutorial and good gravy, it’s amazing.

You may be familiar with those spifftacular content management systems that let you go pointy clicky and go into “edit mode” and edit the content and formatting of the web page from the web page itself, all WYSIWYG? Seaside is like that, but with the whole application. You go pointy clicky and you get yourself a Smalltalk browser, and edit the code, or you get a Smalltalk inspector and edit the object representing the session you are currently in.

I’ve only barely scratched the surface of it but I got through enough of the tutorial to make my jaw drop.

Via Making It Stick and Steve Dekorte and at least one other blog I’ve forgotten.

DeMuDi

DeMuDi is the Debian Music Distribution, and you can get an installable ISO of it from the Agnula Project.

It installed well on my Acer laptop, and yes, the sound setup was great out of the box, including recording.

Jack is installed and runs automagically on startup and there’s a widget to configure how applications interact with each other — all easy to use and graphical.

Every Linux audio app I’ve ever heard of and a number I haven’t are available precompiled. Alas, two of my favorite, Ardour and Freewheeling, proved rather crashy. I fear I may need more memory on that beast before it’s really happy.

But I had hella fun playing around with ZynAddSubFx, the most gorgeous software synth EVAR. Serious, you’ve got to believe me, it comes installed (at least on DeMuDi) with many dozens of fascinating sound presets, and it’s so damn rich you feel like you’re Rick Freaking Wakeman on his $10,000 synthesizer or something.

Oh, I plugged in my PC-300 USB piano keyboard and it autodetected it right out of the box.

I threw together this piece of nonsense by plunking around on the keyboard with one of the cool sounds. OK, the pitch bend in there sounds pretty stupid. I just wanted to try it, give me a break. :)

Anyway, the few crashy apps make the Baby Linus cry, but overall it’s the *best* experience I’ve ever had with Linux sound, ever ever ever ever. I was blown away. So much goodness… free… on a CD.

I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to play with Linux sound and who knows their way around Linux at least a bit. You may have to teach yourself a little Jack-fu, but it’s pretty easy to grasp.