Harsh J

CCV (Community Core Vision) today almost made me wish I were on Ubuntu and not Linux.

Trying to build it on ArchLinux x86_64 took about 2 hours of searching solutions, building-installing and locating libraries, adding references, counting off one compile-error after another. Nothing has ever thrown errors harder at me. Makes me remember dependency hell.

Well, at least its not Windows and its lack of helper core programs.

Rant Mode Off

Being a KDE user has its ups and downs. The ups are that its beautiful, has a very wide and usable range of applications, updates often for bugfixes, and is generally very customizable. The downs are a few – with the Firefox+GTK integration being one of them. It makes your browser look UGLY! Of course, there are Qt-friendly browsers like Opera and Konqueror, even Arora, but these hardly work well with many sites, especially those of Google (Wave, for example). I’m not gonna delve into that subject, since this post is about using Firefox on KDE 4 (version 4.3.x).

You might have heard of the GTK engine that themes for Qt, known as gtk-engine-qt on most distributions (or with -kde4 suffix, if thats how they’ve integrated). This helps all GTK applications look great on KDE by providing *near* native look and feel. So I install that and smile, happy that my entire K Desktop is as I want it – dark, without gloss and perfectly usable with certain plasma widgets. That is until I notice my Firefox simply does not close itself when asked to, and hangs instead.

At first one would think its due to a plugin, or an extension, probably something added on that is causing it to hang when its supposed to terminate. Even the KB article at Mozillazine supports that fact. Perhaps its a popular reason, but I tried and it didn’t solve the issue for me. I jumped a few steps out of frustration and went on to move my .mozilla directory to a different name, just to see if it was a profile-related issue, and it still refused to close, driving me mad having to `killall firefox` it each time since it always hung at exit. So I switched to Opera and used it with horrible colors – Pages appeared normally as they would be rendered but the forms and other things just didn’t go well with my dark color scheme (Eclipse), making it appear like the image below, unreadable and thus untypable upon.

Unreadable, Unseeable - The form elements as they appear in my Opera (While using a dark color scheme in the DE)

The browser’s great otherwise, its fast and very customizable, but I couldn’t make any changes to these colors. I suppose one can achieve it by writing their own userstyle.css file but that is too much work. Used Opera until today, when I finally found this (pretty old) bug in the gtk-engine-qt project tracker. Uninstalled gtk-engine-qt and lo, all was normal again, closed fine and opened fine. Re-installed all plugins and extensions, and said bye-bye to Opera.

All I now miss is a native-looking dark theme with Oxygen icons, as my K Desktop contains. I’m making do with the Black Stratini theme as of now, it’s beautiful but I like the Oxygen icons better. 440 words for just the choice of browser on a dark theme, tch.

If your mplayer doesn’t seem to be zooming into, or expanding a video to fit the screen under fullscreen mode (Shows black bands all around the video, preserving its actual size), then it’s probably because of the video driver your mplayer is using. I had set mine to xv sometime back in order to play a few Real media files, and though it did zoom in on those files it confounded me when I tried other normal video files like AVI, etc on it.

The solution is to switch the video driver (Preferences – Video tab) to x11, which supports zoom.

You might think, like I did: Isn’t OSS dead? Didn’t ALSA replace it ages ago?

Open Sound System - Much better!

The answer, as I learnt, was both yes and no. It did die, only to be revived later by 4Front Technologies who developed it under a commercial license for quite sometime. It went GPL only recently, although with a paid premium-support and on certain platforms only. The improvements made in it are simply amazing. I’ll leave the rest of the mystery to be covered by 4Front’s own blog post. It’s a nice read

The following guide on how to shift to OSS from PulseAudio/ALSA is for Ubuntu (Jaunty Jackalope, 9.04*) users alone. A proper guide to ArchLinux’s solution might be found here.
Read the rest of this entry »

It just won’t work. You know that after messing around for over 2 hours.

Update: You can also get rid of PulseAudio completely and shift to OSSv4, a much better sound system with equivalent features, by following the guide at this link.

This guide (or something like it) is for you if your MPD’s errors.log (/var/log/mpd/errors.log) has these lines, and if you are an Ubuntu user (8.10, the Intrepid Ibex):

Jan 08 16:30 : Cannot connect to server in PulseAudio output "Pulse Device" (attempt 1): Connection refused

Officially, as per the MPD Wiki, the fix is pretty straightforward, to add the ‘mpd’ user to the pulse group. By doing the following:

sudo usermod -a -G pulse mpd
sudo usermod -a -G pulse-access mpd
sudo usermod -a -G pulse-rt mpd

Additionally change the related part of your /etc/mpd.conf to look like:

audio_output {
type "pulse"
name "My Pulse Device"
}

Also edit /etc/pulse/default.pa and add the following line at its end:

load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-anonymous=1

This should usually fix it, but if not there’s another way. Load up paprefs and select the options that say:

Enable network access to local sound devices
Don't require authentication

Still not fixed? Well, its time to give up and get back to ALSA. Yes, the good old ALSA that respects you. To do this, change your Sound configuration (Found at System > Preferences > Sound) to look like this:

Set all to ALSA.

Once done, reset your /etc/mpd.conf back to reflect the following:

audio_output {
type "alsa"
driver "esd"
name "My ALSA Device"
}

Restart MPD after each change to /etc/mpd.conf of course.

That _must_ work. But I have no idea what else it might render useless, which I hope does not happen.