Abort, Rephrase, Ignore?

Looking around for information on getting the VMware Server 2.0 beta running on Ubuntu Server 8.04 — I find it best to look online to see if people are having trouble before I waste time trying to make something work — I saw a fair few complaints about performance not being very good.

Well, I’m not quite sure what those people were talking about. I’ve set it up with a Windows XP VM on a machine that had previously been running Windows XP and as a test I hit it with my usual DVD-to-AppleTV process: rip to disk with DVD Decrypter, convert to XviD with AutoGK, convert subtitles using SubRip.

It’s been a little bit slower than the same stuff running natively, but not significantly so. I don’t have numbers — I forgot to collect stats before nuking the native XP install — but it’s doing the DVD->XviD at ~real-time, which isn’t a whole lot slower than when there was no VMware in the middle.

I’m happy enough with this, particularly given that this is batch processing — fire off a whole heap and forget about it — and that this is a beta with debug code.

Incidentally, I did try using dvd::rip from the Ubuntu packages, but the cluster support is failing — the final “put all the bits together” step barfs claiming there’s no video stream — and while I can indeed do transcodes one-at-a-time without using the cluster stuff, there’s no batch support without it. So while that would probably be faster, life is too short.

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Tags: Tech, Ubuntu, Video, appletv by matt
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Found the source of my sound problem: some changes I’d made to /etc/asound.conf trying to make mpd play nice. Removed the file, rebooted to make sure everything was completely clear, and now it’s working properly.

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Tags: Linux, Ubuntu by matt
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Been using KDE as per kubuntu-desktop as my primary desktop for about a week now. Mostly happy, but there are some unresolved issues. In no particular order:

• Amarok still doesn’t cope with the tags in my music collection. Even a small subset of the collection has stuff in it Amarok’s tag-scanner doesn’t like. This is irritating, but it works Just Fine as a DAAP client or browsing the filesystem. This means I don’t get the fancy-pants “Context” pane. I’ll live;
• More seriously, sound-mixing isn’t working. With my previous Gnome setup on Gutsy (and Feisty, for that matter) everything worked properly via ALSA. RIght now, if a Flash player has grabbed the sound then Amarok can’t play, and of course Warcrack doesn’t do sound if Amarok or Flash have grabbed the device. I have to wonder how much of this is due to the way I got here: Gutsy beta, updated to release, installed kubuntu-desktop
• No Compiz. I’m sure it’s doable, I just haven’t had time/inclination to fight with it. If I wanted to fight my computer I’d install Red Hat.

Otherwise, pretty happy. Still using a few Gtk+ apps beyond the obvious Firefox/OOo — Drivel and Logjam in particular — but unlike Qt running on Gnome, Gtk+ integrates tolerably with KDE. Suspect this is down to Qt/KDE work rather than the other way around.

Looking forward to KDE4 but not going to install an early pre-release, thanks.

Popularity: 45% [?]

Tags: Ubuntu by matt
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Further to this.

The Compiz bug where titlebars go AWOL still seems to be present, but I’ve narrowed it down some. It only happens with maximised windows. The reason I only noticed it with Firefox for a while is that Firefox is the one thing I typically maximise.

Otherwise, things continue to work well. I’ve finally got my T|X syncing to Evolution in a reasonable manner, which is something I was never able to get working on Feisty. Not that I particularly like Evolution as a PIM.

My one criticism of Palm support on Ubuntu right now would be that there’s no easy way to install things to a Palm via the GUI. The only way I can find to do it is by running gpilot-install-file -l file.pdb to queue the install and then do a sync. It’d be lovely if the GPilot kit included a simple GUI that can be associated with PDB/PRC files.

In other news I’m about to start trialling Ubuntu LTS as a replacement for FreeBSD at work. We use FreeBSD for network-infrastructure type jobs, like firewalls and SOCKS gateways. Ubuntu is a whole lot easier to keep updated so I’m going to fool around with ucarp on it under VMware and see how that goes.

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Tags: Ubuntu by matt
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Or, more specifically, the sorry state of Linux music player software.

I think I’ve tried most of the available options now. Here are my impressions:

Rhythmbox

I’m used to iTunes on Mac and Windows, so Rhythmbox is an obvious choice. It has a similar three-pane browse interface and that basically works pretty well. What stinks is stability. I do not want my music player falling over randomly. The version shipping with Gutsy is less-prone to keeling over than earlier revisions, but it’s still far too often.

Banshee

Come back when you get a browse mode.

Exaile

This is what I was using on Feisty. Not the version that ships with Feisty, of course, because I wanted DAAP support, but the backport version. That worked pretty well and I was happy giving it to my partner to use. Unfortunately the version in Gutsy has gone a bit senile and now “forgets” track numbers. Which makes it unusable if you’re the sort of person who still likes albums.

Amarok

If Exaile’s UI is OK, then why not try Amarok? Well, mostly because the versions in both Feisty and Gutsy are incapable of parsing more than the first 10% of my music collection before they go catatonic. Yeah, OK, I can accept that maybe there’s some weird shit in my music tags, but I cannot accept that “sit still and do nothing” is the right response. Throw an error and move on to the next file, damn it. I believe this is a problem with the KDE tag library it relies on, but I really don’t care whose fault it is.

Totem

OK, so the fancy-pants library-based players are all failing to work. Surely the bare-bones “movie player” can handle the job? Sadly not. In Gutsy at least it has the random crashes down pretty well, just like Rhythmbox did on Feisty. It’s fine for playing a single track or a single movie, but gets all upset with a playlist.

VLC

Getting really spartan now, aren’t we? This worked OK the first few times, though I don’t know that I like the playlist editor much. But then it started deciding to play only one track at a time: it’ll play a song, then stop. I can tell it to play the next one, but I have to do so by hand. Gah.

Audacious

A “modern” rewrite of XMMS? Yeah, OK, why not give it a try. Feeling a bit like it’s 1999 all over again, but it seems to work. Except for the bit where I start finding Warcrack hiccuping — screen and sound updates pause for a second or two — pretty regularly where it hadn’t done before. This with Audacious idle. Quit Audacious, suddenly the problems go away. Clever.

XMMS

So now it really is 1999. And guess what? It actually works. So far, anyway.

What is so difficult about writing a reliable music player, anyway? Genuine question, I really don’t know the answer. I can understand that the more bells and whistles you add the more likely you are to run into trouble, but this is one area where I think there needs to be a really serious push to get behind one application and make it really rock-solid. You aren’t going to get granny to stick with Ubuntu when it turns out she can’t play her Nirvana albums on it.

Popularity: 57% [?]

Tags: Linux, Music, Tech, Ubuntu by matt
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Further to my last post, after some more mucking about with Gutsy on the home machine.

The audio problem with Rhythmbox seems to go away if I turn the volume down a little from the default. This is using the application’s volume control, not the system one, which is what I’d been using previously. Presumably it’s doing its own processing and at 100% it is distorting.

Warcrack runs pretty well even with Compiz enabled. Framerates are about what I was getting with Fiesty, possibly a little higher, and it works nicely with Expo mode as you can see in this screenshot. The one flaw so far is that very occasionally — and I’m not sure what triggers this — the Gnome panels will insist on sitting over the top of the Warcrack display and the only way to stop it is to quit the game and restart.

The other small Warcrack annoyance is that the freeze-on-exit bug found in the last few months’ of Wine builds is back. It’s fixed in the current Wine, but Gutsy is using something slightly older. Not a huge problem, and I expect that once Gutsy goes release the WineHQ people will start providing binary packages for it.

One final exciting bug: the title-bar on Firefox (so far) is sometimes corrupted. You can see what I mean here. If it’s forced to refresh (e.g., switch windows) it is redrawn correctly. Most often happens when I’ve switched back to Firefox via Expo mode.

In any event, I am broadly happy using the Gutsy beta both at home and at work, and we will probably install it on my partner’s new machine when that arrives this week. She’s seen what Compiz can do and really likes the look of Expo, Scale, and Enhanced Zoom.

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Tags: Linux, Tech, Ubuntu by matt
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Have been running the Gutsy beta at work for about a week now. So far so good. From an end-user perspective the main change really is just the default use of Compiz, and while that is disabled on my machine — it has an Intel X3000 GPU which is blacklisted — it does mostly work if you remove it from the blacklist. Just don’t use any of the 3D screensavers or the water effects.

And I now find myself missing Compiz when I do stuff at home, specifically the Expo and Scale modes. Having set those to trigger on the bottom corners of the screen, I find myself using them constantly for window and desktop switching. As I typically have a lot more windows open at home I can see it being very very useful.

I’ve tried the Gutsy beta at home but something somewhere is making sound from Rhythmbox distort on bass. Have done a little poking, Totem and Exaile both play the same material just fine, so it’s clearly something specific to Rhythmbox and this machine, as it works fine at work. At least I have a very simple test case: play “Electronic Performers” by Air and the distortion comes through pretty much right away.

This is a pity as I quite like where they’re going with Rhythmbox.

The other question will be how full-screen Wine stuff (i.e., Warcrack) copes. The machine at work is behind the sort of corporate firewalls that mean there is absolutely no point even trying so I haven’t checked this out recently, but last time I tried there was that whole annoying business where the Gnome panels would sit over the top of the Wine window.

The timing of the Gutsy beta is unfortunate in terms of my personal ability to properly test and debug — life has been a bit hectic and draining of late — but I’m sure it’ll be a fairly solid release.

Popularity: 45% [?]

Tags: Linux, Tech, Ubuntu by matt
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