At first, it was mostly about the freedom to run what I want, where I want, how I want. Desktop Linux has always been exciting to me for that reason.

But then it grew beyond that and enabled me to contribute back. Open Source allowed me to teach myself new programming languages. It allowed me to make friends literally all over the world. It became the thing that I enjoyed doing most, technically, especially since my daytime jobs didn’t let me do the kind of programming and development that I wanted to do.

It helped me to get the best job of my life.

I’ve been working at VMware for more than 4 years now. I only have this job because I’ve taught myself everything I know about programming languages, and most of that has been through my work in the Open Source communities I’ve participated in over the last 15 years.

Most recently, I’ve had a blast as a KPilot/KDE PIM developer. I’ve met more people from all around the world and I have thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. But KPilot and Palm Pilots in general have long since lost relevance. And sadly, I was never able to find a new itch to scratch and a new area to start contributing to. It’s been years now since I’ve contributed any sizable amount of code to any Open Source community. I’ve waited, hoping that I’d find more time, or that I’d find a new itch to scratch, or that I’d get the urge to start hacking on Linux Desktop stuff again. But it hasn’t happened, and I have no reason to think it’s going to anytime soon.

Over the past several years, I’ve become increasingly irritated and frustrated by the ever-changing-and-not-always-in-good-ways Linux Desktop. I’ve blogged before about this and got quite a bit of feedback about it. That was two years ago, almost exactly. What has changed since then? In my mind, absolutely nothing. Now we have Ubuntu turning the desktop on its head again with Ubuntu Unity and destabilizing applications that have worked perfectly well for years and years. I know this because I’ve been working on VMware’s Workstation and Player products for the Linux Desktop for the last 4 years and I can’t tell you how much time and frustration and energy I’ve had to put into last minute bug fixes to work around new and broken in “exciting ways” behavior in Linux Desktop Environments. That’s the kind of thing that really sucks the life and soul out of you, especially when it’s something that you’ve cared so deeply about for so very long.

You have to understand… I have been one of the most outspoken and zealous of Linux Desktop proponents you’d ever want to meet. And I do believe that the Linux Desktop is awesome and a worthwhile thing to use, if only to keep down on the amount of ongoing upkeep you have to do to your PC thanks to viruses, malware, etc. But I have decided to move away from caring about Desktop Linux and I don’t know if I’ll be back, personally.

I’ve always looked at jwz’s “final straw” rant and thought that I could never get there. I’ve invested too much time and energy in Desktop Linux and cared too much about it to give up on it, right? Well, I was wrong, I guess. =:)

So, this isn’t meant to be a slam on Linux or a slam on KDE or a slam on Open Source or anything else. Just chalk it up to an old, cranky dude who became disillusioned with the Linux Desktop if you want. Or chalk it up to said old, cranky dude finally having enough money to buy a Mac and seeing how beautifully it runs and really enjoying it and not wanting to deal with for Linux Desktop on his personal daily equipment anymore.

But anyway, I just wanted to put this out there. I feel like I’m losing part of who I am by doing it officially and all. But I have been using and developing on Apple’s OS X lately and I’m thoroughly loving it. A couple of months ago, the opportunity presented itself at work and I made the switch from the VMware Linux Workstation/Player team to the VMware Fusion team, and I’m really loving it. I had been feeling like I’ve been stagnating lately and not learning or growing as a developer. I had been wanting to make a change and learn new technology and languages. And thus far, I’m really liking Objective-C and Mac development.

So at this point, I’m going to remove myself from planet KDE and take a break from Linux Desktop for a while. I’ve actually been not blogging for quite a while now because I know it’s not going to be relevant to planet KDE and that’s been another source of frustration, so I’m going to rectify that now too. I’ve been meaning to remove myself from the planet KDE feed for a while now, but 1) I felt like I should say some kind of goodbye and 2) I can’t seem to be able to log in to my svn+ssh account anymore to remove myself from the planet feed. =:/

Anyway, sorry to all my KDE friends. I feel like I’m letting you guys down. But truth be told, I haven’t been doing anything in the last couple of years anyway. =:/ I guess it’s just a normal part of life and different phases of it or something. We’ll see where this road goes. I’m hoping that at the very least, this will let me feel like I can start blogging again. =:)

I almost broke down and bought a new Kensington trackball mouse like the Kensington K72337US Orbit Trackball with Scroll Ring for PC or Mac, Kensington Expert Mouse Optical USB Trackball for PC or Mac (this one still really tempts me), or the Kensington Slimblade Trackball USB 2.0 for PC and Mac, (this one is sexy as hell!!!), but they each have their flaws. The Orbit is awesome and seems to work in Linux, but it only has 2 buttons. The Expert has 4 totally programmable buttons, and I think it has a physical scroll ring, but I’ve read that the new model is really bad on your wrist due to the elevated angle. And the Slimblade Trackball looks just amazing, but from what I read, the scrolling is done by twisting the trackball and that’s done completely in software, which of course Kensington hasn’t provided for Linux.

However, I did find one suggestion that got me to a 95% working solution by reading Google’s cached copy of the second page of this expired Logitech forum post. (UGH!) Specifically, Another_User says this:

I found one that works pretty good using a combination of Smart Scroll and ControllerMate.

In controllermate “trackball button 4″ box is connected directly to a “toggle” box which is connected to a “button output” box. Properties of the “button output” box are: “when turned on : button down”, “when turned off: button up:, “with mouse button: button #7″

Smartcontrol actived grabscroll with button#7, check wihtout moving cursors and reversed axis.

So I gave this a shot and got it working! Actually, you don’t need ControllerMate. I got this to work by using Logitech’s Control Center for OS X, configuring the two small buttons (button 5 and button 4) to report themselves as buttons 7 and 8 by using “Advanced Click”, and then I used SmartScroll to pick up on button 7 to do the grabscrolling.

This seems to work really well in OS X applications, like Chrome, etc., but the scrolling doesn’t translate well in X apps like NX Client or VNC even. But it’s better than it was before, so I’m definitely happier than I was previously.

I’d still love to get the Kensington SlimBlade Trackball working in Linux though. Anyone out there have success getting scrolling with the trackball to work?

1. The venerable FAT32 filesystem. Yes, it works. No, it doesn’t work like you’d want a UNIX filesystem to work. You can’t store files that are bigger than 4 GB on it, and the whole lack of permissions and filename length limitations thing just really sticks in my craw, so this isn’t a viable option for me.
2. The newer and even more proprietary NTFS filesystem. Come on, seriously? Why would anybody pick NTFS, which is native to only one proprietary operating system in the world (hint: not Linux and not OS X) and try to use it in Linux and OS X? Insanity, I say. Moving on.
3. ext2/ext3. Thanks to FUSE and fuse-ext2, the native-to-Linux ext2 and ext3 filesystem can be accessed in OS X. Of course, it works perfectly in Linux. However, in testing, it feels like trying to navigate through the ext2 partition in OS X’s finder is REALLY slow and choppy. I’m not sure what’s going on, and it doesn’t seem like the CPU is getting pegged or anything. But it felt slow enough that I don’t think I want to put all my data on it and hope it works right.
4. hfsplus. Now this one actually works (or seems to thus far) really well. Reading up on it a bit after having been using it makes me a smidge nervous, since it would seem that it’s extremely unloved from the Linux kernel devs and currently unmaintained. Yay! But if you set up an unjournaled hfsplus partition from OS X, Linux can very happily read/write it and it seems to be very stable and fast in both Linux and OS X.

Great. So why am I blogging about this? Well, like I said, hfsplus access in Linux is working almost perfectly. Except for VLC. Apparently, hfsplus has some nasty problems and isn’t actually POSIX compliant when it comes to opening directories. Due to how VLC handles “files” that it is asked to play (it accepts both directories and files as playlist arguments and VLC chooses to try to open the playlist element as a directory first, and this doesn’t fail with hfsplus the way it should in POSIX-compliant filesystems) VLC is unable to play anything that’s on an hfsplus partition. This is quite a bummer for me and others who use hfsplus as a filesystem and also like to use VLC.

Enter this bug report and Tobias’s awesome little patch for VLC. After using his patch and applying it over the top of my 1.0.3 VLC here in Kubuntu Karmic, I am now able to watch movies and listen to music stored on my hfsplus shared partition again from Linux, using VLC. Huzzah! Maybe this’ll help someone else out there struggling with this (or just generate a lot of “you suck, why would you use proprietary Apple hardware or OS X?!?!” comments).

Oh, and while this is a hfsplus filesystem problem at the root, because of how Kaffeine or KDE’s own Dragon Player open files, they are not affected by this bug. Only VLC is. So…. yeah.

I am curious, though… I know I’m not the only KDE hacker out there who’s using a MacBook or MBP, and who *gasp* also has OS X and Linux sharing the hard drive. What do you guys use for a shared partition between Linux and OS X?

1. Frustration with a particular admittedly proprietary application that didn’t use to have any problems in Ubuntu 8.10, and since then has been nothing but trouble for me and roughly 90,000 other people. You may say that it’s unfair to fly off the handle at one proprietary application having problems and condemn all of Desktop Linux, but I do not think this is limited to only one proprietary application.
2. A shiny new MacBook Pro in my possession and an epiphany of “this is what we’ve been working for, guys and we’ve been doing it for more than a decade and we’re still not there yet, why?”  And I’m not talking about the pretty UI or shiny buttons. You can argue all you want about OS X being the best in the UI/shiny/usability categories. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the increasingly growing market share of OS X and the (generally speaking) more polished and well-thought-out and 3rd-party-developed/supported applications. Being able to go to Flickr, for example, and download an actual client for OS X is pretty darned cool. Sure would be nice if Linux had the same mind/market share.

Now, having spent a week with my MacBook Pro in both Linux and OS X, I have a few more thoughts to add to the fire. Some of these have been results of discussions had as a result from my earlier post on this subject and others are more related to time spent with said shiny new laptop. But I think these are more constructive and less inflammatory. =:)

1. The MacBook Pro is truly a nice laptop and Linux, for the most part, runs really well on it. The Karmic wiki page got me 95% of the way there. Unfortunately, rEFIT doesn’t understand GRUB2 at all, it seems, so to just get Kubuntu Karmic to boot, I installed the old GRUB 0.97 instead (sudo apt-get install grub). Getting sound to work requires alsa-driver-snapshot, so that’s a little painful but not too bad. More painful was the hour I spent yesterday trying to figure out why sound stopped working (and this time it wasn’t pulseaudio’s fault, but rather something weird with the ALSA driver that plugging headphones in and removing them seemed to fix). Getting click+drag to work on the MacBook Pro 5,5 (since there’s no physical buttons anymore, but just one big touchpad (WHICH IS REALLY NICE!!)) requires a custom bcm5974-dkms driver. I’m using an unjournaled hfsplus partition to share data between OS X and Linux. And “setxkbmap -option altwin:swap_lalt_lwin” (or setting the same checkbox in KDE4′s System Settings) lets me use the command/apple/squiggly key next to the space bar as my Alt key (for alt+tabbing, etc.). All in all, I’m REALLY happy with Linux on this MacBook Pro. It seems to work every bit as nicely as Linux does on my work Thinkpad T61.
2. There is something core to my nature that must tweak and hack, and Linux is most conducive to that. Take something simple, like wanting to change the font and font size that OS X uses for window titles, system menus, etc. Apparently you just can’t do it? That kind of stuff bothers me (and this is just one example in OS X that comes to mind). I truly do love Desktop Linux, and especially KDE for this reason. I’m not saying I couldn’t survive in OS X, and I still enjoy it and its apps. And if I have problems with things I need to do (audio/video conferencing comes immediately to mind), I have no hesitation booting into OS X to just get things done. And no, sorry, I just can’t stomach the thought of using Windows because I have to get things done. OS X may not be free, but at least I don’t vomit from just the thought of using it. But if for nothing other than the challenge of trying to figure out how to get things working to my liking, I feel compelled to run Linux on this little wee beastie. And maybe after I get things working to my liking, I’ll even find a couple of itches to scratch again and start being productive again. =:)
3. We’re (Desktop Linux) not there (3rd party developer interest, compared to OS X and Windows) yet, but I think we’re getting closer, and even so, we may just never get there and that’s not our fault, I don’t think. My original line of thinking was that we’re not there yet because we keep changing core system components that prevent 3rd party developers, etc, from taking our platform seriously. And I think that as much as possible, we should really try to stop changing/breaking stuff so that this is not the reason we don’t get there. However, we have other core values and tendencies in Desktop Linux that are most definitely contributing to us not getting there and some of them we cannot change. Let’s take an important one: Freedom. Both parts of freedom matter: both gratis (for zero price) and libre (free to do whatever I want to it). The first part means that 3rd party developers can expect to sell nowhere near as much of their software in Linux as they can on OS X or Windows. The second part means that 3rd party developers can expect to meet resistance to their very existence. I personally side with the former more than the latter on this, since I’m cheap by nature and like to not spend money whenever possible. Also, being that I have to work for a living and support myself and my family, I do not, for a second, fault companies for existing and needing to have me pay for things so they can exist. But I think I’m in the minority on this point in Desktop Linux. Lastly, we’re not a money-making machine like Apple and Microsoft, and we never will be. And that’s both good and bad. It’s bad in that we do not have a big budget to spend on advertising and cute commercials, etc. It’s good in that we’re not going to go out of business just because we’re not “profitable” or growing as fast as OS X in market share. We have and can and will outlast other OS’s and desktop environments that must be profitable to exist (OS/2, Amiga, BeOS, etc., etc.). And maybe that’s why we’ll finally succeed in continuing to gain market share. Or maybe we’ll get there by being stable and good enough for most users and having applications which live on the  Internet being more important than applications that are written for Linux (Google OS, perhaps?). And maybe we’ll still not get there for another decade. Or longer. But that’s not the point, really, is it? I mean, it would be REALLY nice to never hear “oh, we’re just not even going to bother doing XXX on Linux, but that’s okay because Linux doesn’t matter… heck, it’s only .05% of our sales anyway!” again. But we’re here because we like what we have and we like where we’re going and we like controlling our destiny. I totally get that. And maybe that’s good enough.
4. OS X really does have some nice apps that Linux has no counterparts for, but for me, there are not that many (Tweetie comes to mind) and the good news is that we (Desktop Linux) can fix that ourselves (and we are). One of the big things that people point to in this whole OS discussion is that OS X has more polished apps than Linux. And I must agree with this. But I think the reason is less because of OS superiority and more the nature of apps on OS X. Developers actually make money selling software on OS X *shock*, so they have a vested interest in polish and user experience, and spend a lot more time on it than Linux projects typically do. Heck, they even pay people to help make their apps polished and highly usable. The good news is that we’re in control of our own destiny here and can do (and are doing) better.
5. We’ve come a long way (baybee), and I think we’re on the right track. It’s pretty amazing to think how far we’ve come in the last decade. It seems only yesterday that Blackbox and Bbkeys were the coolest thing in the world to me, and that the big Linux Desktop Environment projects just were nowhere as fun, exciting, or good-looking. We’ve come a long way since then. I’ve always preferred KDE to GNOME, but both DE’s have made HUGE improvements–both to the core Desktop Linux technologies that we share and to UI and polish and usability on top of those technologies. KDE4 has not even been out for 2 years already and the difference between what we have now compared to what we had 2 years ago is phenomenal. I absolutely agree with the sentiment that Desktop Linux is now, more than ever, ready for the world to use and ready for 3rd party developers to start writing for. I think this should drive us to be even that much more cautious as we push out new distributions and make sure we don’t break stuff just because we want something new and shiny.
6. I haven’t left, nor do I plan to, Desktop Linux (I know, who cares), but I think it’s important to think about what might be broken in our development model and figure out how to fix it, else we’re shooting ourselves in the collective foot and preventing all our hard work from reaching beyond our little geekly communities into more mainstream adoption, and that would be truly sad.
7. This MacBook Pro still has problems with Linux and that sucks, but also not our fault… sorta. And I’ll figure out how to work around all of them and so can you. As an example, as I’ve been typing this blog post, I have brushed the touchpad about 10 million times accidentally and ended up clicking somewhere entirely else, and in general disrupting my work by having to keep undoing the garbage that just happened. And yes, I’ve added a HAL fdi file to enable SHMConfig and tweaked syndaemon and synclient and yes, I know I need to still do more. But here’s the point: this does not happen in OS X. It just works. It would sure be swell if we could figure out how to make this work out of the box for Linux users. Similarly, suspend seems to work just fine, but I’ve had several issues with X/keyboard/mouse stability upon resuming. Not surprising, being that Apple hasn’t tried to make sure that its hardware works well with Linux. But annoying all the same.

Anyway, life is good, and I have a new puzzle to figure out (this MacBook Pro). =:)

So, I’ve realized that I need to buy a personal laptop for a while now but have been putting it off because it’s expensive and a big ordeal. I don’t do anything that involves money quickly or lightly, so kicking down a big wad o’ cash for a laptop is not something that I can just do whenever I feel like it. For the last few months, I’ve been agonizing over what I should get and researching and pricing and comparing. I knew that I wanted something that stood out and looked good and felt good and was well-built. I’ve been using ThinkPads as my main laptop for the last decade or so, since it’s what my employers have provided me, and while they’re sturdy as heck and are well built and last forever, they’re not really all that sexy. I wanted sexy.

I also knew that I wanted some nice features that Apple provides stock that most of the other guys do not. Such as a backlit laptop keyboard. I was playing around with the idea of getting a Dell E6500, but 1) not horribly sexy and 2) that requires me to get a 15″ screen. Which is another thing I wanted… to not feel like I’m lugging around an Encyclopedia every time I take my laptop with me somewhere. For the last couple of months, I’ve been using an Asus Eee PC 1005HA netbook for this reason and while I absolutely loved the battery life on the little guy and the portability, the absolutely diminutive screen size is what finally did me in. Well, that and the horribly slow CPU. And the horribly slow GPU. And the really small keyboard size. And the fact that it doesn’t have an optical drive. And the crappy ath9k wifi drivers that keep disconnecting.

So I bought a Mac. Spent a bunch of time before then reading up on whether the MacBook Pros can play nicely with Linux (model 5,5 is what I ended up getting), and felt pretty comfortable that a MBP could be a really nice Linux machine. After waffling and being generally unsure of which one I wanted to get, I finally decided on a 13″ 2.26 Ghz MBP. I knew I wanted a smaller screen size than my previous PowerBook of 15″ and my current work laptop which also has a 15″ screen. So 13″ fits the bill nicely. I was really unsure about the CPU and was really hesitant to get a 2.26 Ghz CPU in the MBP, thinking that it’d be not all that much faster than the T7500  @ 2.20GHz Core 2 Duo I have in my work Thinkpad, but as it turns out, the 2.26 Ghz CPU in the MBP is really nice and fast–feels faster than the Thinkpad. Also, upgraded the RAM from 2 GB to 4 GB and I left the 160 GB drive in, planning on replacing it with a 250 GB 7200 HDD that I already have or maybe even a SSD if they ever get cheap enough.

I spent probably 6 hours or so on Sunday night getting Linux installed onto my shiny new MBP. Installing Linux was the easy part. Getting rEFIT to recognize it and boot into it was something completely else. Turns out that rEFIT does not play nicely at ALL with Grub2 (which is what Ubuntu Karmic comes with), so one of the things I did at the end that got it to work nicely was to boot off the live CD, install Karmic, chroot into my newly installed Karmic partition, uninstall Grub2, install Grub 0.97, and that seemed to do the trick nicely. The other hiccups I had were around getting the MBP’s drive partitioned in a way that OS X and rEFIT could deal with. I ended up resizing the main OS X partition and creating MS-DOS partitions from inside OS X’s disk utility and then just formatted them from the Ubuntu Karmic install process. But now I have a really nicely working OS X and Ubuntu Karmic dual-boot MacBook Pro. I realize my details are pretty sketchy here, so if you’re interested in more details, let me know and I’ll provide more info.

Since my day job allows me to write code for Linux (and don’t get me wrong, this is the best job I have EVER had and have never been happier), I occasionally need to use Skype to teleconference into meetings. And at least five times over the last 2 days, right in the middle of a Skype meeting from my Ubuntu Jaunty Linux laptop, things totally stop working. Sometimes the audio stops working entirely and I can’t hear the people on the other end anymore. Sometimes the video freezes. Sometimes Skype totally locks up the USB webcam and I have to kill -9 it and unplug/replug the webcam. Sometimes I can’t even see video on it at all and all I can see is a black box. Sometimes, it even works as it should and I don’t have problems (but those times are rather few and far between).

So, here’s my rant. I’m sick and tired of this crap in Linux. I have been a VERY vocal proponent of Linux everywhere for more than a decade. I’ve pushed it in every company I’ve worked for. I’ve insisted on using it everywhere personally. I have been searching for a job that would let me actually program on and for Linux for a long time and I now have one (YAY!). But I am absolutely exhausted of things that work on other platforms being unreliable, crappy, non-performant, crash-prone, and in general totally second rate or worse in Linux. In this particular instance, I unplugged my USB webcam from my Linux Thinkpad, plugged it into my new MacBook Pro, installed Skype and was up and running in no time. Skype did not crash, hang, hiccup, freeze, mutilate, spindle, or in any other way be anything other than an awesome application in OS X. And, as an aside, just looking through the preferences section for Skype showed that it was obviously given more love and care than the Linux version. And ya know what? I’m tired of it. I’m tired of even having to think about it. I’m tired of having to apologize for stupid stuff like this, get to a shell and killall -9 it. Or try to figure out what stupidity is causing it to happen. Or try to find workarounds so that PulseAudio can not screw things up for me. Or have to check my xorg.conf to see if I might have enabled something that is causing the bizarre Xv errors Skype spews every once in a while. I’m just tired of it.

Now, the focus of my frustration in this case is Skype. And I know that without even a moment’s hesitation, 90% of you are going to say “oh well, see, that’s what you get when you used a closed-source application! just use Open Source and everything will be better!” And to that I say: bollocks. You’d be hard-pressed to find a bigger Open Source advocate than me. But that’s not the point here. And that’s not the true issue at hand here. Open Source is great. Open Source is cool. Open Source is a whole heck of a lot of fun. Open Source is the answer to a whole lot of problems! But of this I am absolutely certain: it is not the answer to this problem. In this particular instance, and in millions more like it, all across the world, every day, people are going to need to run software that IS NOT OPEN SOURCE. You can try all you want to create the best, most awesome Open Source project to meet a given need, but you will never 100% fill every closed-source software solution need. You might get close. You might even have something that is “good enough”. But the bottom line is that there’s always going to be some piece of software that you have to run that you don’t have the source for. At least, this is true in the world that I’ve lived in for the last decade+.

Now, I am very aware that the Linux Desktop is SO much better than it was even 5 years ago. We have eye candy up the wahzoo. We even have some better applications from commercial companies. Heck, we even had the awesome World of Goo game (which I actually paid money for and LOVE)! We have much more feature-rich FOSS applications and desktop environments than we’ve ever had before. But what we don’t have is a stable platform that companies can count on being able to invest into and reap monetary rewards from. Yeah, like it or not, this is the real world and companies have to make money to stay in business.

We are a bunch of hackers. We love to tinker, to fiddle, to break compatibility in a heartbeat just for the outside chance that it might be better, to change quickly, and to do whatever we feel like. And that’s all fantastic stuff. But at the end of the day, we’re our own worst enemies. What makes Desktop Linux so awesome and fun and cool and quickly evolving is the same thing that keeps companies from investing in us–and even when they do, we end up breaking their stuff and causing Linux Desktop users grief. And we show absolutely zero possibility that this is going to improve any time soon. PulseAudio? Really? I’m so glad it’s the new hotness and is technically awesome. Your new hotness just broke an app I absolutely have to rely on. Guess how much I give a crap about your new hotness now, hm?

Anyway, I don’t have a solution to this. All I know is that I’m really liking my MacBook Pro, and I’m really liking OS X. Is it free? No. Is it Open Source? No. But does it just stinking work? Yeah, it really does. And it is such a drastic and refreshing change from the world of Desktop Linux that I am seriously wondering if I’m going to ever end up using that Ubuntu Karmic install I just slapped on the other partitions of this drive. I don’t think I’m yet ready to send out a jwz-like dissertation and farewell address, but I totally get it now. OS X is beautiful, and it just works. And I don’t think I’ll ridicule anyone for getting an Apple computer and actually using OS X on it ever again. Windows is still another story, but even there I can see what the allure is. You know… you get a computer to do stuff, and you want it to work. You don’t care what it has to do so that it works. You just want it to stinking work. Wouldn’t it be nice if Desktop Linux was like that?

[ UPDATE - 2009-11-20 ] – I’ve received a lot of really great comments on this post, but my initial intent at 1) venting/ranting, 2) comparing Desktop Linux to OS X, and 3) raising issues that I think we need to take a hard look at as a worldwide community were taken in a very different slant than I intended. FWIW, after having spent a week with my shiny little MacBook Pro, I am happily running Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 on it and have blogged again in an attempt to clear up some of the muddiness around this first post. To this end, I’m going to change the title from “I think I’m tired of Desktop Linux” to something less vitriolic for future viewers. And hopefully this won’t cause aggregators/planets to re-publish this. =:/

For starters, I used qt-recordMyDesktop to capture the full-screen (1600×1200 resolution) video. I wanted to use it to also capture the audio portion of the screencast at the same time, but when I tried doing so, the audio was really choppy and out of sync. I mostly blame pulseaudio, but also the fact that I did this all on my puny little laptop, and I think that the system just wasn’t able to keep up with me, recording a nested Xephyr session with 4 fake Xinerama monitors (thanks again for that beauty, Lubos!), at 1600×1200 resolution. So I told qt-RecordMyDesktop to not capture audio and what I ended up with was a beautiful 1600×1200 Ogg/Theora .ogv file. We’ll call it demo-video.ogv.

Next, I recorded my voice, doing a monologue of what was happening in the screencast, using my laptop’s internal mic (not the greatest quality, but I don’t have a real microphone, *sigh*), and audacity (oh, and this is nice… audacity doesn’t work with pulseaudio whatsoever). This I saved in mp3 format. We’ll call it demo-audio.mp3.

The next magical trick, obviously, would be to combine the audio and video files into a single movie file, right? Well, all of the questions/answers that Google found me (even though I searched for “mencoder combine audio video”) were examples using ffmpeg. So I gave it a shot. And I’m sure there must be a way to do it, but for the life of me, I couldn’t get ffmpeg to combine my 80-meg demo-video.ogv file and my 10-meg demo-audio.mp3 file in a high quality and problem-free output file. The closest I think I got was this: “ffmpeg -sameq -i demo-video.ogv -i demo-audio.mp3 demo_full.mp4″, but that combined my 80-meg video and 10-meg audio file into a 350-meg mp4 file. Zoinks, Shaggie!! That’ll never do!

I finally stumbled upon the “-audiofile” parameter to mencoder and there was much rejoicing in Agrabah (not to mention Massachusetts). What I ended up with is this little mencoder incantation that seems to work beautifully. And, the resultant file is only 62 megs (80m + 10m == 62m !?!), so I’m sure there’s some loss of quality in there somewhere, but for the life of me, I can’t see it. Here’s what I used:

mencoder -sws 9 -vf pullup,softskip,scale=1600:1200,harddup,unsharp=l3x3:0.7 -oac faac -faacopts br=128:mpeg=4:object=2:raw -channels 2 -srate 48000 -ovc lavc -lavcopts aglobal=1:vglobal=1:vcodec=mpeg4:acodec=libfaac:abitrate=128:vbitrate=1000 -of lavf demo-video.ogv -audiofile demo-audio.mp3 -o demo_full.mp4

So, there you have it. Screencasting, done 100% in Linux. I wish I could show you the results, because I’m pretty darned please with them, but sadly, I cannot (nor do I have a spot to stick 62 megs of mp4 =;P).

I hope this helps some other poor soul, ’cause I couldn’t find much in the way of tutorials for doing this. I’d be very interested to hear what others think of this, as well as any other suggestions for doing screencasting in Linux. I know Aaron’s been doing something along these lines, and I’d be curious to see how this compares to his method. Also, any improvements to my mencoder line (yeah, I’m sure some stuff in there might be redundant or weird), or finding out what the ffmpeg equivalent of my mencoder line is would be greatly appreciated.

But I updated to the KDE 4.2 beta2 packages again today and am absolutely loving OpenSUSE 11.1. Things are blazingly fast and well-put-together, and best of all, my faith is totally restored in OpenSUSE after I reinstalled from scratch again. So what changed between my last post and now? A few things:

Yesterday when I installed the KDE 4.2 beta2 packages, I also pulled in the unstable Qt45 packages as well. Maybe that caused some harm? *shrug* All I know is today, I didn’t do that and I’m not seeing any problems.

I think I was using my old xorg.conf file (that worked perfectly well in OpenSUSE 11.0, mind you) yesterday, which still had a bunch of tweaks that I added over the last year to get nVidia to play nicely with KDE4. Today, I am just using the default xorg.conf, as written by sax2, and things are REALLY fast and stable. And based on a few comments I’ve seen (hi jospoortvliet!), it’s very likely that this is the true cause of my problems from yesterday. Here’s what my old Screen stanza looked like. Does anyone know exactly which one of these might be causing nVidia to hurl its little guts out in OpenSUSE 11.1 with xorg 7.4?

Section “Screen”
Identifier     “Screen0″
Device         “Device0″
Monitor        “Monitor0″
DefaultDepth    24
Option         “RenderAccel” “True”
Option         “UseEdidFreqs” “False”
Option         “TwinView” “1″
Option         “TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder” “DFP, CRT”
Option         “AddARGBGLXVisuals” “True”
Option         “DisableGLXRootClipping” “True”
Option         “DamageEvents” “True”
Option         “TripleBuffer” “True”
Option         “UseEvents” “True”
Option         “FlatPanelProperties” “DFP: Scaling = Centered; CRT: Scaling = Centered, Dithering = Enabled”
Option         “OnDemandVBlankInterrupts” “True”
Option         “PixmapCacheSize” “2000000″
Option         “AllowSHMPixmaps” “False”
Option         “BackingStore” “True”
Option         “metamodes” “CRT: 1680×1050 +0+0, DFP: 1680×1050 +0+0″
SubSection     “Display”
Depth       24
EndSubSection
EndSection

So, in addition to things being extremely awesome in general in OpenSUSE 11.1, I am totally thrilled to finally be able to use powerdevil (it is REALLY nice!!!), and really happy to finally have working hotplug/usb-drive mounting working in KDE 4.2!!!! (it failed hard in OpenSUSE 11.0 due to some hal permissions problems that I never figured out), and zypper (package management) seems to be even faster in OpenSUSE 11.1. And these are just a few of the things that I’ve noticed in the last couple of hours of X not crashing. =;)

And, of course, KDE 4.2 is continuing to to shape up and look, feel, and perform absolutely marvelously, and OpenSUSE 11.1′s beta2 packages are a great way of testing it out.

As for me, I’m just thankful to have a functional laptop again and I hope to get some good KPilot testing and bug squashing done during the next few days of Christmas vacation.

Merry <almost> Christmas, all, and to the OpenSUSE 11.1 guys, a huge thanks again for the awesome new distro. You guys just plain rock! =:)

First off, I have a laptop (meaning I cant change the video card) with an nVidia chipset (meaning I’d like to change the video card). So while OpenSUSE 11.1 works really nicely with the open source “nv” video driver, it can’t do any compositing, 3d, OpenGL, etc., etc. (meaning no wobbley windows or cube goodness or translucency or… you get the idea…).  So I followed these nice little 1-click instructions and installed the latest stable nVidia drivers, rebooted, and up came X with nVidia’s drivers quite nicely. So far so good. And then I clicked “logout”. And that’s where things started to fall apart. It looks like what’s happening is that nVidia’s X driver gets killed when logging out and trying to log back in again. I poked around a bit and saw in a log somewhere that kdm was timing out waiting for X and ended up giving up. So I bumped up some values in /usr/share/kde4/config/kdm/kdmrc in the “X-:*-Core” section (Core config for local displays). I changed ServerAttempts to 5 and ServerTimeout to 45, and it seems to help. Mind you, the underlying problem is still there, and X takes a LOOOOONG time to restart with the nVidia drivers, but at least this keeps kdm from failing altogether and me from getting stuck without an X session and an unusable console display (when this happens, and I’ve booted with the default vga= line, the console is totally unusable).

Secondly, one of the main reasons for my sticking with OpenSUSE is its exceptional support for KDE 4.2/trunk packages. So I installed a bunch of stuff from the KDE:KDE4:UNSTABLE:Desktop repository and discovered that X crashes far too randomly and regularly. This, combined with the above problem of X being unable to restart, using the nVidia drivers, made for a lot of ugliness. I reinstalled once already and am a little leery of bringing in the unstable 4.2/trunk packages. And yes, I’m aware that I’m trying to use something labelled quite clearly as “UNSTABLE”, but I’ve been using OpenSUSE’s excellent “UNSTABLE” KDE 4.2/trunk packages for 6+ months now without any problems whatsoever. And it’s been with the same version of the nVidia driver as I am now using. So… it must be something in the new versions of the kernel or xorg packages that’s causing problems? Is anyone else seeing this other than this guy (who never got his questions answered)?

Anyway, I’m going to spend another few days trying to iron things out. If anyone “out there” has any helpful hints or suggestions, I’d really appreciate them via comment. And, yeah, once I figure out what’s going wrong, I’ll look into filing bugs for this stuff…

Most relevant to the title is this: OpenSUSE 11.1 doesn’t come with blackbox or bbkeys, so I set about compiling them myself and hit some problems. Blackbox, of course, compiled and installed just fine from source. Bbkeys (which depends on Blackbox and its libbt.pc) did not fare so well. For starters, there are some includes missing that newer versions of gcc fail on. Luckily, Art Haas and Egon Braun both sent me in a patch (that I regretably have been sitting on for… a long time…) that addresses this. So I submitted it and a patch I found in OpenSUSE’s bbtools SRPM that fixes some string checking tonight and released bbkeys 0.9.1, woot. It felt really good… like old times again… putting a release together of bbkeys. ’twas a nice reminiscence, if nothing else.

The funny thing is… it’s been SO long since I’ve had to think about compiling bbkeys myself, much less coding on it, that there were quite a few cobwebs that I had to clear first before I could get things going. Pretty funny. And, thankfully, it’s been a REALLY long time since I last dealt with CVS that I fumbled around for a bit with some simple stuff (wha? “cvs update -C” instead of “cvs revert”??). And there is a small problem with blackbox’s libbt.pc that I submitted a patch for tonight, that kept me from compiling bbkeys, but after that things went smoothly.

But anyway, it felt good putting a release of my own code out there.

Nuts.

If I was made of money, I’d be sorely tempted now to go looking for a personal laptop to replace this frustrating hunk of Thinkpad with. New macbooks come out on Tuesday, no?