cat >/dev/null

While the headline speaks for itself (here are the relevant release notes), it’s no big deal for me, since I make very little use of Skype.

There are times when I can’t avoid using it, though. Most people don’t value their freedom enough to take the most basic action or turn around the slightest annoyance, and I can’t afford not to care about all of them (though heaven knows I’m tempted).

That’s how I discovered that Skype had this very annoying habit of fiddling with the sound hardware on my notebook, randomly toggling the “capture” status and actually muting my mic during a call. After several experiments, a lot of repetitions and a whole lot of cursewords (only some of which have been heard by my counterparts, good for me), I’d come to the conclusion that it had something to do with the sound level, but couldn’t completely avoid this behaviour, no matter how low I kept my mic level or the tone of my voice.

Well, maybe the problem has been solved. This new release has a promising option switch, Allow Skype to automatically adjust my mixer levels:

to which I reply: hell no!!!

After literally months of whispering, I can’t wait to shout into someone else’s ears! Not quite enough punishment for using a closed-source, closed-protocol VoIP application, but still better than none.

Oh, almost slipped my mind: still no SMS.

Enter Moblin, Yet Another Mobile Linux effort, directly from Intel.

Looks interesting as others did before. But will it turn out to be something more than words, words, words, and Photosh… I mean, Gimp-ed mock-ups?

Time will tell. In the meantime, I’m betting €5,00 on NO.

Today is a great day.

After literally years as a GNU/Linux desktop user, I was finally able to reach a satisfying sound configuration.

Frankly, it baffles me to think that it was as easy as putting this into my /etc/asound.conf:


pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm “dmix:1″
}


There’s got to be a lesson in all this, too bad I can’t make it out!

I’m now running several instances of xmms, vlc, playing a Flash movie (newborn version 9 of the Linux plugin supports ALSA) and hearing sound notifications from gaim (via esd), all together. Of course it’s a total mess, but I’m as happy as a child.

You know I HATE to be forced using proprietary protocols and formats. Nobody should ever support a protocol for which a legal Free Software reference implementation is not available. All violations should be punished with Death by iPod Stoning.

In spite of their so-called community efforts, Real never convinced me (or rms, but that’s understood). Too bad the need to play the occasional flipping .rm file on Linux comes whenever you least expect it. So yes, there’s a RealPlayer 10 Gold for Linux, but what the…? No ALSA support? Are you joking or what?

So I did some research, and (not nearly as easily as you may think) I found out that there are nightly builds for RealPlayer.

And guess what: ALSA support!

Sweet. Well… almost.

How many times did you have to change the IP address of your workstation to match the IP subnet of that new network device you needed to configure, maybe just to change its address from the default?

How many times did you need to check something on the Internet during the process, and you had to switch addresses back and forth, maybe many times? Worse still, did you like all your TCP connections such as your umpteen IM logins, ssh sessions, VPN tunnels and the like, to be shut down on the occasion?

If you do my job, it happens a lot of times. But never before this morning had occurred to me that there is a smarter way to do that, if you’re under some sort of un*x operating system like GNU/Linux(*).

Suppose you have a device on 192.168.1.1/24 (if you don’t know about CIDR, this may be a good time to learn something about it) and your workstation’s interface, let’s say eth0, is on a different IP subnet (but of course plugged into the same Ethernet network). You can do like this (as the root user):

# ifconfig eth0:0 192.168.1.100 netmask 255.255.255.0

As you may have guessed, this command adds an alias interface for eth0 called eth0:0, and assigns it the specified IP address. You can use this interface in the same ways you would use eth0, e.g. using your web browser to reach the new device’s web-based configuration interface at http://192.168.1.1 or whatever else.

The good thing is that this does not affect your main interface and the associated routing, so your existing connections don’t get killed.

Once you’re done, you can remove the alias interface:

# ifconfig eth0:0 down

and you’re back to your routine.

A couple of notes to the tech-savvy:

• (*) You can add multiple IP addresses on Windows also (from Windows 98 on, I believe). Just add a new IP address to the interface. I don’t know (nor care about) the details, though.
• Adding the alias interface automagically adds a route for the new interface’s IP subnet, but of course does not change your default route. If your new device is a router and you want to reach networks behind it, you’ll need to add specific routes to your system.
• You may unwillingly expose services running on your workstation which are listening on all interfaces (TCP *:port)

Trolltech, maker of Qt, the framework upon which KDE is based, and its lightweight counterpart Qtopia, after entering the smartphone software business with its QTopia Phone Edition, is now aiming at hardware with this Qtopia Greenphone.

Do you mean I’d finally be able to sync my Kontact data with my phone, and be officially welcomed to the 1990s?

The feature set is by no means impressive, and at US$700 you can’t say it’s cheap, though the price is for a development device, to be bundled with SDK licenses, and may or may not reflect actual street prices. There’s no indication that the device will eventually be marketed.

But the worst news is there is no WiFi.

I sincerely hope this is just a development device. Otherwise, see you next time.

I was reading John Siracusa’s comments on the recent speculations about a possible kernel change in Apple OS X’s next upgrade release, codenamed Leopard.

John specifically rules out the possibility of adopting Linux as a kernel, primarily for license reasons. I am very aware of these objections, as I was before these rumours: after all, that’s why BSD was chosen in the first place. Moreover, even if it was possible, I’m not that convinced that it would be a good move for Apple.

Anyway, I can’t help asking myself what if.

What would it take technically to wrap around the GPL (without breaking its terms, that’s understood), how could it possibly work? Would it be good for users, for Apple in the long run? And ultimately, would it be good for me?

I’m afraid I don’t have an answer to these questions, except to the last one.

Links:

• A kernel of truth
• A kernel of truth: the plot thickens

Let me point you to an interesting article by Jono Bacon about the importance of communities behind pieces of free software.

I think I made this point myself here before.

I’d just stress the difference between real communities and corporate manoeuvres (hints: mambo, joomla). It’s obvious that the whole free software community needs more of the former and less and less of the latter.

Though I am definitely not a very loyal fan of Skype (or the next closed-protocol app, for that purpose), I must admit that it does its job cleverly, and can occasionally save your day. So it’s loaded on my PC almost full-time.

I use Skype on Linux most of the time. Despite the fact that, as we all know, the Linux experience with sound (and multimedia in general) leaves so much to be desired, I’ve more or less found my blues. Being a KDE user, I came to prefer getting a cheerful fanfare of sound notifications stacked together as soon as I hang up a phone call (the artsd daemon stacks them while the sound device is not available, and plays them when skype gives it back) rather than wrapping Skype with artsdsp and get bad sound quality and horrible lag.

It seems that pretty soon Skype will support ALSA and KDE will support gstreamer or something else, better still. Pretty soon Linux will be a wonderful platform for multimedia, and AIDS, cancer and artsd will be things of the past. Anyway, I know I learned not to hold my breath. And I like it that way. I am thankful to the F/OSS gods and I won’t sell my soul to Steve Jobs for want of a bell chime. (audience laughs)

All this said, I never, ever had the pleasure of hearing that chime when a Skype chat message comes in. My Skype does not even ring to an incoming phone call. This is very annoying and I keep missing important events.

After so many months of wondering I decided to follow my long-time resolution and go have a look at the forum. There was my answer, actually not as evident as one could expect, given the relevance of this issue, but definitely within my reach.

I’m posting the link on my blog along with a brief summary, so that the millions of Skype users under Linux reading it may finally find a solution to this frustrating problem.

The Skype installation includes a sound dir. That’s where the WAVs for the notifications are kept. I install Skype from the tar package into /home/skype. Your mileage may vary.

Copy or link this directory to your home dir:

andrew@bambino:~$ ln -s /home/skype/sound ~/

If you want a system-wide setting, use /sound instead:

root@bambino:~# ln -s /home/skype/sound /

and you’re set.

Now leave a comment using one of these two templates:

A) At last!! No more lost calls. I’ll be your slave for the rest of my life. Please accept
[ ] these €500
[ ] this 12″ iBook
[ ] my sister
on account.

B) Wake up, pal. It’s been on the front page of the forum for ages.

UPDATE 20060905: recent Skype for GNU/Linux betas natively support ALSA and seem to pick up sound files just fine. Still a hog, though. Nothing’s perfect, I guess.