Paul Swanson’s Technobabble
And so does Paul. So I set about sexifying my desktop yesterday and I’m quite pleased with the results. I used a really nice Ubuntu GNOME theme called Dust, a GDM Login Window the called Woobuntu 2.0, changed the default font to FreeSans and turned on Subpixel Smoothing. And it was good.
Some time ago I purchased an M-Audio Transit USB sound card, and it’s actually pretty cool but it has caused me some angst. At first I was using it solely under Mac OS X 10.4, and without incident, but then I was forced to buy a regular laptop and the love ended there, somewhat.
I run both Windows Vista Business and Ubuntu 8.10 on my laptop, Ubuntu for day-to-day and Vista for games and audio production (Ableton Live). I thought as though Vista has been around for a while, like my Tranist, it should be a good fit, unfortunately I was wrong. Firstly, a little magic is required when installing the Transit Vista driver and making it function. Secondly, the Vista driver for Transit itself is still just the first release beta and has not been updated since it’s release in July 2007. As a result there are some problems with it and led me to question whether or not Transit Vista driver is abandonware. Mercifully an M-Audio support technician was at least able to confirm that Vista users have not yet been completely ignored by M-Audio, but there are no guarantees that we’ll see something more substantial before Windows 7 arrives.
I also bit the bullet and had a go at getting my Transit USB to work under Ubuntu 8.10. The initial instructions I read just about put the fear of God in me, but thankfully it’s not that miserable for Ubuntu users. One can easily install the Linux Transit drivers by using Synaptic is selecting the “madfu” package. This beats the pants off compiling it yourself and is almost easier than the Vista approach - except for one small hitch: there’s a bug. Oh why, why? Once again, as with the Vista driver, it’s to do with the driver being out of touch with a newer release of the Operating System. I was able to fix it with some Googling and just a few small tweaks. Now my Transit driver loads immediately on connection under Ubuntu, unless I plug it into a USB port different to the previous (yes, this steams from the bug) but I have not the inclination to go further with it at this time. Nor is there any control panel available under Linux and this the fault of M-Audio as they refuse to even simply devulge device specifications, let alone write a driver themselves. Come guys, use the power of the Open Source community to your advantage!
My next adventure will probably be to see how well the Transit and Ableton Live run on a virtualized instance of Windows XP in VirtualBox under Ubuntu. This could hopefully be a nice compromise. On the bright side, at least I can use it, somewhat, under any OS I like and it is a wonderful little sound card.
It’s no secret that media playback is more convoluted on Linux than it should be. The Ubuntu distribution has made a number of efforts to the reduce the pain felt in this area, most of which I applaud, although it’s no where near as good as it should be. It all comes down to an ideological clash between some open source developers and secretive proprietary software vendors. Not surprisingly, on switching to Ubuntu as a primary platform for my laptop I have encountered some problems with media playback.
In theory Ubuntu should come with everything that I need, but the reality is that there are incompatibilities and bugs that mean I can’t have my cake and eat it too. Ubuntu 8.10 comes with a media framework called GStreamer that is supposed to glue everything together and make life easier. In some ways it succeeds and in others not so. The problem is that when it comes to GStreamer and playing a host of media formats reliably it just doesn’t. This is because some of the media codecs it provides are pretty rubbish in the real world. The default media application in Ubuntu is Totem. Totem uses GStreamer by default, but this just makes things worse as Totem is just not that great at much and seems to multiple your woes when mixed with GStreamer. Of course you can switch to the Xine version of Totem (which uses a different framework / back-end) but this in turn fixes some woes and creates new ones (eg. web browser embedded Quicktime playback becomes problematic). Thankfully there is VLC media player.
VLC Media Player is a popular program for playing just about any kind of media on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. It works quite well under in Ubuntu 8.10 and so I have set it to be the default player for most video types. It does have one annoying glitch in that it doesn’t play well with Compiz (the 3d desktop effects) and video hardware acceleration. VLC Media PLayer also has a Mozilla Plugin which lets you use VLC for all embedded media playback while browsing the web; it does a reasonable job of this. Of course there were always going to be compromises made.
For the moment I’ve settled on VLC Media Player as my default video player and I’ve turned off Compiz so that my video playback will be 100%. I’m currently undecided as to whether Totem GStreamer or Totem Xine is the better option. Totem GStreamer seems to do the best job of embedded playback, Totem Xine not so much. But Totem Xine is almost as good as VLC Media Player and makes everything look integrated and Ubuntu-ish. Right now I’m running Totem Xine as the default media player, VLC Media Player as the default video player for MP4 and XVID plus my choice for DVD playback, and am yet to decide between Totem Xine and VLC for my Mozilla plugin.
Update (31st December 2008): I’ve since discovered that the MPlayer Mozilla Plugin does, in my experience, a better job than the Totem or VLC plugins. Just remember that you need to uninstall (through Synaptic Package Manager) any other Mozilla plugins (such as Totem or VLC) for it to work properly. Also, Compiz (3D desktop effects) and video playback has started working for some unknown reason. So the long and the short of it is:
I recently bought a new laptop, a HP Pavilion dv5, mostly out of desperation as I was not able to acquire the new Macbook I really desired. Nonetheless, I’m quite happy with my purchase and have proceeded to play around with both Vista and Ubuntu 8.10 on it. Surprisingly, Ubuntu was significantly easier to install and configure from scratch; the Broadcom Wireless card and the NVIDIA 8600M GT were both detected and drivers installed after my first login. Vista was a different story, it did come with Vista Home but it was the Russian version (as I’m living in Ukraine) so I pulled out the propoganda version that I received at QUT and spent a couple of nights trying to find all the drivers for those pesky unrecognised devices.
So far I’ve been quite happy with Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) with the exception of one big party-pooper: resume from suspend is broken on my dv5. Hopefully the very active user community will be able to get this resolved. But Vista doesn’t get off cleanly either. I’m really not impressed with how Vista deals with updates, it seems every second or third time I boot up I’m asked to reboot. In fact, at one point I was rudely rebooted whilst playing Call of Duty 4 on account of an update, needless to say I’ve since clipped the wings of Windows Update.