Kaeru's Online Journal
Online journal entries sorted by date
Creativity Exercise
A lively conversation yesterday, brought up an interesting exercise from my high school days. It's why I think Malaysian system of streaming Science and Arts is limiting our students. This exercise also highlights why having as much knowledge and observing all the things around you is important for ideas.
The exercise, is to have a large piece of paper with about 25-50 empty boxes, with some sort of constraint. In this case a horizontal line. You then have to fill it up with illustrations. Here is a few.. try it.. trust me, it gets harder to be unique as you go along. Unique as in not doing variations, eg. road and beach are variations of the line as a horizon.
If I didn't do music, I wouldn't know about music notation. Bah, I still can't draw a treble clef after all these years, but I digress. Players of racquet sports, know that net line perspective all too well. The narrower your experiences, the harder it gets to draw inspirations from.
A wave is a curve to an artist, a sin function for a mathematician, a tone for a musician and a cool experience for attendees of the upcoming world cup.
If you get shoehorned into just doing one thing, you lose all the different enriching experiences and perspectives.
What makes http://planet.foss.org.my a fun read is getting all the different insights for me, not just frameworks and shell scripts, but stuff like paint ball tactics.
Hey, one of those obstacles could work as another picture now for me.
Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid
Installed this cleanly on new drives, due to both my drives on my workstation deciding to die at the same time recently. Luckily I was still able to recover most of my configurations and could get back up rather quickly. Only covering my caveats here, you can get dozens of in depth reviews on the web soon.
General observations, is that it's fast in all areas, such as bootup, resume from suspend (instantaneous almost) as well as applications. Back to Firefox now with 3.6 bundled as default.
The new theme and icons make Ubuntu desktop look very polished. If you don't care for the purple/pink default background, that's fine. The new themes have gone for the neutral look of greys and a dark theme. Switch to your favourite background or one of the nice defaults and it will look just as good. Neutral greys makes your applications stand out more and look good without any issues of clashing colours. The mono icon theme also looks nice and functional. Instead of blinking icons, or graphical hints, I find that subtle colour changes work much better. For example, the message notification icon, changes from grey to green. This provides notifications, without forcing me to deal with immediately due to annoying blinking icons or bright red warnings.
Software RAID Install
I used alternative install CD for this for as I decided to go for a Linux software RAID setup this time instead of motherboard fakeRAID. Install kept on failing because /boot was not installed properly, if you choose degraded boot setup which allows the system to boot of remaining drive. If you don't pick this option, it actually installs correctly and installs GRUB on both drives.
Open Source 3D Support for AMD Onboard Graphics
AMD 780G/790G (built in video) chipsets are great budget motherboards. They run your older AMD CPUs, and they run newer CPUs like the Phenoms. There was only 2D support in 9.10, as there was no proprietary driver available (fglrx) and no support by the open source one. Thanks to AMD's open specs and Xorg developers, those using on-board graphics such as HD2400 (RV610,630) will get good support for basic desktop usage. The following is my checklist:
- Compiz 3D desktop
- No tearing for Video and 3D applications when used together
- Fast enough 3D to play Spring Engine games.
The second issue was a pet peeve of mine with the proprietary drivers. It's now a thing of the past. The open source drivers work well for all three current requirements for me. Looking forward to it improving this year.
Input Devices - Wacom and TrackPoint
The next thing on my checklist during install. Both work out of the box, and tweaking now involves familiar Xorg.conf device files in /usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d instead of weird hald settings.
TrackPoint, you probably want your scrolling. In /usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf create 20-thinkpad.conf and add the following,
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "Trackpoint Wheel Emulation"
MatchProduct "TrackPoint"
MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
Driver "evdev"
Option "EmulateWheel" "true"
Option "EmulateWheelButton" "2"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "false"
Option "XAxisMapping" "6 7"
Option "YAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection
Source: http://psung.blogspot.com/2010/04/thinkpad-trackpoint-scrolling-in-ubuntu.html
For my Wacom, there is still a bug with Windowed mode in GTK. This means your cursor is way off from where the drawing happens. Grr.. Not good for dual monitor setups. To get proper aspect ratio, you're going to need to modify 10-wacom.conf file by adding the option "KeepShape". This is going to cut off a bit of your tablet at the bottom if you have 16:10 aspect ratio monitor and a wide Intuos 3, but a least the circles you draw aren't flattened ovals:
Section "InputClass" Identifier "Wacom class" MatchProduct "Wacom|WACOM" MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*" Driver "wacom" Option "KeepShape" "on" EndSection
Xonar Essence STX and Audio
Works out of the box, and includes the fix for the bug I reported in not having an option to switch between Speakers and Headphone outputs. If you want better control over the headphone amplifier and DAC oversampling, you'll have to compile and install snapshot alsa-driver for now (not as hard as it sounds, and tutorials and ready to use scripts are a Google search away).
The wierd SDL glitches with pulseaudio are now gone.
Another good bonus which will be very useful for me soon (and for UbuntuStudio) users is that pulseaudio-jack is now in mainstream build, which means pulseaudio will now be able to work with a JACK sink. This means you can do things like record Skype calls via JACK and also be able to do MIDI and JACK audio recording while still having normal desktop application sounds via pulseaudio.
Other hardware
Works out of the box, including network scanning for the common HP All in One printers.
Python 2.4
Is no longer supported, so if you have legacy applications such as Plone 3, you're going to have to use the application build of Python rather than the system one.
Hopefully everybody else has a good experience as me with the new release. Great work by the Ubuntu team (as well as the developers of the rest of the FOSS stack).
Running Playlist
Portable Audio Players rock
