Nathan’s Blog

trog has written about the lack of open standards in video. To be honest I would be happy enough if everyone switched to h264 and browsers had native support for that format.

The Ogg suite is a nice idea, but unfortunately I think is dead in the water – this field is so encumbered by patents its very hard to make a competitive product. Funnily enough with essentially all pirated HD material distributed in h264, the standard is starting to take hold in many hardware players too.

The only tricky bit for h264 is mobile devices; iPhone will play such video (though only at very specific encoding settings) and most other phones can’t decode it at all. Still, if we can’t solve this issue on the desktop what hope do we have of an industry wide standard?

Ted Tso has written an in-depth blog entry about the recent “ext4″ defect which he (and many other people) see as defects in the user software, not the kernel.

The core of the issue is applications that have been coded to an implementation, not to the API. This is an issue that hs been discussed a few times on Raymond Chen’s Windows blog, and has no easy solution. The kernel developers are wont to completely ignore backwards compatibility though, so I suspect the most popular “broken” software will be fixed pretty quickly.

Ubuntu 8.04 was released at the end of April. For past releases I have usually upgrade during the beta cycle at least a month before release, but I’m in no rush to upgrade this time as 7.10 has served me well.

I started off the process last night by upgrading my old laptop, a Dell Inspiron 5100. I really only use this laptop when something else is busted and so was able to do a fresh installation to see what the new process is like.

The actual installer is a fully graphical mouse-driven 7 step process; choose your language, choose your timezone, choose your keyboard type, select a username and password, etc. Having made my choices I left the installer run overnight.

Sound works fine, 3D acceleration is OK (based on glxinfo | grep direct). Unfortunately my PCMCIA wireless NIC is still not supported OOTB. I noticed immediately before X started there was a log entry on the text console:

May 7 16:56:39 nathan-laptop kernel: [ 528.426318] b43legacy-phy0 ERROR: You must go to http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware and download the correct firmware (version 3).

Indeed, following those instructions will result in a working system. As Ubuntu gets better I cant help holding it to a higher standard, and I think we can certainly do better here:

• This message only appears for 2 seconds; there’s no chance to fully process what it says. At a minimum, the GUI needs to be smart enough to provide these kind of issues in a tooltip after you login.
• It seems like the kind of thing that could be easily automated; if I’m just pasting a bunch of commands into a terminal it cant be too hard to provide a simple GUI wrapper to do the whole thing for me.

The msttcorefonts package is a good example of the latter; it respects the license of the 3rd-party fonts while still providing an automated way to install them.

Of course I’ve glossed over how to actually get access to the internet when your network card is not working – using the ethernet port is the usual answer.

With that solved, I just had to get connected to my WAP. NetworkManager is becoming a very polished piece of software in this regard and seems to fall into the “just works” category.

Next I tried out Gnome’s Windows file-share browsing functionality, which I’ve found a bit flakey in the past. This time it could see all my Windows PCs immediately and I was able to quickly locate a .mkv file on another computer.

Final thing I’ve checked out was actually playing the .mkv with Ubuntu’s default video player (Totem). It did not have a codec to play the file and so popped up a “Do you want to search for a codec?” dialog like you see on Windows. That Windows dialog is infamous I think for never doing anything useful, but that wasn’t the case for Ubuntu. It offered a list of codecs I might wish to install (I chose them all), downloaded and then started the video.

I guess you could argue it could be even simpler (why not just offer to download all codecs when the video player started) but the experience compared to Windows is certainly much better.

Trog mentions that Ubuntu 8.04 has been released, with demand for it on Bigpond being higher than expected. I’ve been using Ubuntu as my primary desktop since its first release in late 2004 and it has been getting better and better with each release. While still very much a niche, I’m glad to see that the hard work going into making a usable linux desktop is apparently having some reward.

Trog also commented that he believed you could upgrade directly from the Ubuntu repository rather than having to download a new installation CD. This is true and in fact is very easy. To do so, you need to start the “Update Manager”:

Enter your administration password at the prompt. The Update Manager will detect a new release is available, at which point you just need to click the “Upgrade” button to install 8.04 LTS:

Rockbox is an open-source alternate firmware for a variety of digital audio players, including a variety of iPods. In other words, its a complete replacement for the software that runs on the audio player that can provide a variety of features that Apple either can not or will not provide.

I had seen Rockbox mentioned on Slashdot a few times, but was not a big enough iPod user to investigate the software or what was involved in installing it. Recently however I’ve grown a bit tired of burning CD’s for my car and so have taken to utilising my iPod for this purpose.

Perhaps the biggest annoyance of using an iPod for more technical users is the requirement that all music be added via iTunes (or compatible software). I find this annoying for two reasons:

• I have my music files stored on a NAS. It would be far more convenient if I could just synchronize those files directly onto the iPod instead of having to run a GUI application.
• I dont use iTunes to play music on PCs. I’ve already organised my music into a hierarchical structure which I find is best suited to my needs; an ID3 databse (not just iTunes, but K3B’s too) just does not work as well for me.

Rockbox has many more features than Apple’s firmware, but easily the most desirable for me is the ability to just copy files directly to the iPod disk. When using Rockbox, I can then browse the folders I’ve uploaded and play them.

A feature I’ve found useful for utilising the iPod in the car is the configurable start-up action. Apple’s firmware has a feature that when plugged into a car adapter, the iPod pauses playback when the car is turned off. This is certainly useful, but unfortunately there does not appear to be a corresponding resume playback when power is turned on.

Rock maintains the pause functionality while also adding the ability to choose what to do when the iPod is powered on. You can choose to start in a specific area (like “Files”) or to “Resume Playback”. This suits me perfectly since I can just leave the iPod in my glovebox and not have to touch the thing unless I want to change albums.

Installation of Rockbox was surprisingly easy (extract a .zip onto the iPod hard drive, run a program, finished) and the PDF manual is thorough – at 100+ pages, I didnt get too far past the installation section. Beyond learning a few more keystrokes (”Prev” is go up directory / back in the settings tree) general usage is just as easy as Apple’s firmware. I would definitely recommend a look for power users; the “play files off the drive” feature is worth the price of admission alone.