- main - earth.li

Ubuntu Sound Success
by Simon Royal 14 Jun '10

14 Jun '10

Hi I had Xubuntu 10.04 installed on my ThinkPad 600 and had audio problems. I finally got it working sort of and then decided to switch to Ubuntu. 10.04. Ubuntu runs a lot better by the way, but a fresh install meant fresh audio problems. After following some instructions for 7.10 I got it working. Now if I roll the mouse over an MP3 it plays fine and RhythmBox plays it but it is a bit jerky. Movie Player wont play it but it is more than I ever got out of Xubuntu. Considering Xubuntu is supposed to be aimed at lower hardware I was dissapointed by its performance and hardware support compared to Ubuntu. On the whole I am very pleased with Ubuntu 10.04 on my ancient 300mhz P2, better than Xubuntu. One thing I would like is some kind of frontend for mpg123 so I could play mp3 files with ease on low hardware, so it doesnt use too much processor/ram. Movie Player and RhythmBox are too heavy for my ThinkPad. Simon -- http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - http://www.tinyurl.com/macspectrum (sent using Sony Ericsson P990i)

3 2

Multi-Image formats, PDF and SimpleScan
by Steve Fosdick 14 Jun '10

14 Jun '10

Up until now scanning applications I have used have tended to work around the page or sheet as the fundamental concept to each page scanned gets written to its own file and, when a document has multiple pages, the link can be indicated by putting the page files into a directory or naming then in a consistent way. For the page files themselves I have always used PNG which I almost always use for single images that are not photographs. I've recently been trying a new Gnome application that came with Ubuntu 10.04 called SimpleScan. Unlike previous applications this is document based in so far as you can scan a number of pages (including the whole contents of the document feeder) and then save them together either as a single file or a set of related files (one per page). This has got me thinking again about files that can hold more than one image so the file then corresponds to a document and the application that views the file presents the various pages as needed. PDF is very fashionable for scanned documents and this is one of the options available for saving. I note from the Wikipedia article that PDF has now been standardised by ISO but is encumbered by patents which Adobe licenses royalty free. Any thoughts on how good a standard this is for long term storage and whether there are better alternatives?

2 1

wireless card conundrum
by Jenny Hopkins 14 Jun '10

14 Jun '10

Hi all, I bought a wireless network card RT2561/RT61 rev B 802.11g last week for my amd64 debian squeeze machine. I plugged the card in, installed firmware-ralink (via wired connection), modprobed for rt61pci, and sat back watching the shiny new connection and gloating at the easiest install of hardware I have ever had. I duly moved the pc to a room with no wired capability, and network manager (running under gnome) detected and connected me to the wap netgear with a not bad signal. A few hours later, the connection suddenly went down. All efforts to ifupdown wlan0 or stop and start network manager failed to connect again, with dmesg reporting "wlan0: deauthenticating from <blah> by local choice (reason=3)". Only a reboot seemed to sort it, and then only for a short while. Oh yes - I also got some ridiculous ping times for the gateway, even though the signal was fairly strong, which reduced to a sensible amount when I succeeded finally in quashing the wired interface eth0. I've come back after a week away, however, and it won't connect at all. syslog reports "rt61pci firmware: requesting rt2561.bin" , modinfo rt61pci shows a bunch of useful stuff that assures me it is all loaded. It can't be a firmware issue, surely, as it worked at first? I just keep being told "ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan0: link is not ready" Neither giving wlan0 a fixed IP in interfaces, or telling it to request an address from a dhcp server makes any difference. (The request for an address isn't even getting as far as the dhcp server). I'm stumped - any suggestions where to look for clues? I did read it could be a clash between udev and network manager, I also have no idea whether invoking iwconfig and iwlist scan makes any difference. I'm sure I've tried every combination possible by now. Thanks, sorry if this isn't very clear, I've been going in circles for so long I think I've forgotten where I began. Jenny

6 11

Missing sound from FlashVideo copy
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 13 Jun '10

13 Jun '10

If I play the following in my broswer: http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=vOhf3OvRXKg (well worth watching, by the way -- sand-art telling a family's story before, while and after Ukraine is bombed by German planes in WWII), I get the video and the sound fine, with the browser (iceweasel on Debian) using the Flash plugin. The sound effects are an essential part. While this is going on, a file in /tmp builds up, with a name like /tmp/FlashyfCGik When it reaches the end, the movie pauses with option to replay. At this point the /tmp file is fully downloaded. Now I copy it down to main storage, and rename it to have ".flv": e.g. ~/Downloads/FlashyfCGik.flv NOW: If I play this with totem, I get the video but no sound. So let's try getting the browser to open it: File -> Open File -> ~/Downloads/FlashyfCGik.flv and it recognises it as Flash Video and offers to "open it with movie player (default)". There is no other option for opening it. "Movie player" is an alias for totem ... so again it plays the video without the sound! Presumably if the browser used the Flash plugin for the local file I would get the sound as when viewing from the Web. But I can't see how to get that to happen. Any suggestions? Thank, Ted. PS: Warning -- you can get hooked on sand-art! -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 13-Jun-10 Time: 01:48:26 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

2 2

Re: [ALUG] Linux speech recognition software recommendations?
by Sam Tuke 12 Jun '10

12 Jun '10

Suffering from RSI, I have tried a few systems. I don't know of any sufficient FOSS option at present, but keep a close eye on simon listens, which promises to provide full speech recognition functionality in future with a great interface. Currently it can only control applications (such as firefox), and cannot handle dictation. See here for preset simon 'scenarios' for controlling different applications: http://kde-files.org/index.php?xcontentmode=692&PHPSESSID=c5b8ecb5c140ab6d6…. Also bear in mind that you have to install the HTK back-end for simon to use separately thanks to our Great British university of Cambridge licensing it under uncooperative terms. Personally I use Nuance Naturally speaking 10.1 preferred under wine. It works on my Kubuntu 9.10 installation, but not on my Ubuntu 10.04 install (to my intense annoyance). It works pretty well on my Kubuntu install - I can dictate text fine for the most part. It doesn't interact with any other apps however. You'll probably need to use Wine Tricks to install an extra DLL or two but this is a simple task. If you find any other solutions, please let me know! Simon listens is the great hope, and they desperately need resources, so if you can spare time/money/promotion then please hand it to their team. Sam.

1 0

Linux speech recognition software recommendations?
by Srdjan Todorovic 11 Jun '10

11 Jun '10

Hi all, Has anyone used any speech recognition software in Linux (FOSS/closed-source/freeware/commercial etc) that was of sufficient quality that it could be used to dictate a large document, or many small documents, with reasonable accuracy / least mistakes? If so, could you please let me know which software it is? This page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_recognition_in_Linux , lists some solutions. Is anyone able to offer their personal experiences and recommendations for any of those? Thanks, Srdjan

1 0

EeePC 701 with DebianEeePc - can't get WiFi working
by Chris G 09 Jun '10

09 Jun '10

I avoid WiFi like the plage if I possibly can but since I want to carry this eeePc around and use other people's network connections I really need to get WiFo working. I have gone through the steps outlined at the following:- http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/HowTo/Wifi I.e. I have used the Debian backports to upgrade the kernel to 2.6.30 and have installed the other bits and pieces suggested plus wicd. However when I run wicd (the wicd-client that is) it just says "No wireless networks detected". There definitely is a wireless network running here as my 'phone can detect it. So how can I progress this at all? I've done a few rather fruitless Google searches and haven't found much pitched at my level of knowledge apart from the link above. The wireless on the eeePc used to work with the original Linux installation (why did I replace that you may ask - I'm wondering too, though it was getting a very tight fit in the limited memory). Any ideas or pointers to useful web pages would be much appreciated. -- Chris Green

2 3

PHP question, any PHP gurus here?
by Chris G 09 Jun '10

09 Jun '10

Well maybe not PHP gurus, just web/apache/php knowledge required. I want to pass a value from one web page to another, or to be exact from one piece of PHP (on web page A) to another piece of PHP (on web page B). Having said that I can sort of understand the problem, there's nothing necessarily tying the two pages together, they *could* be running on different hosts under different web servers for all the web servers know about it. So, I have a Wiki where page A has a link to page B and I want to be able to pass some data from page A to page B. They *are* displayed by the same web server (which is apache2) and they *are* on the same host. I can't use cookies because by the time I can execute some PHP code the headers are long gone. So how can page A 'send' a value to page 'B'? Am I reduced to the nasty (but perfectly possible) expedient of page A writing something to a file somewhere and page B reading it? -- Chris Green

4 9

Kernel options for Intel 945GME graphics card?
by Dan 07 Jun '10

07 Jun '10

Dear All, Can anyone suggest what kernel options are best for driving the board that appears in lspci as 00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03) please? (I think I've got the wrong ones, sice DPMS is flaky and I'm getting quite frequent kernel panics related to intelfb.) -- Regards Dan

3 6

Rescuing SVN repository
by Richard Lewis 07 Jun '10

07 Jun '10

Hi ALUG, I have a Subversion repository which is trapped on a server to which I no longer have (reliable, at least) shell access. (ATM, in fact, I don't even have access to the WebDAV interface as Apache is down.) I want to move this repository to a different server and would be happy to convert to a different SCM if possible (quite fond of darcs, keep meaning to learn more about git). I still have the most recent working copy checked out. Is it possible to use this working copy to start a new SVN repository, retaining all the history? Or can I only dump from the current *repository* (on the server) to make a new repository? Best, Richard -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis ISMS, Computing Goldsmiths, University of London Tel: +44 (0)20 7078 5134 Skype: richardjlewis JID: ironchicken(a)jabber.earth.li http://www.richardlewis.me.uk/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- +----------------------------------------------+ | Support open access to scholarship | | http://freeculture.org/ http://www.doaj.org/ | +----------------------------------------------+

4 3