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?

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.

This is a screenshot from within the Xephyr session, showing the 1600×1200 Xephyr display. The cool thing is that using ksnapshot from within the Xephyr session will actually capture the entire display, not just what fits on your host display. This is important for me because my laptop LCD display is only 1680×1050, so I can’t actually fit the entire Xephyr display inside my real physical display. Nice to know, definitely, since this means that I can create a monstrous Xephyr display that doesn’t fit inside my actual host display and still get full-display snapshots out of it. So what you see here is a KDE3 session spanning all 4 Xinerama heads. Kicker correctly only spans head 1. VMware Workstation is on head 2, in full-screen mode, but only full-screened on the second head. It can span more than 1 head as I’ll show further down.

To achieve this, I downloaded seli’s fakexinerama library, compiled it in ~/build/ like this:

gcc -O2 -Wall Xinerama.c -fPIC -o libXinerama.so.1.0 -shared
ln -s libXinerama.so.1.0 libXinerama.so.1
ln -s libXinerama.so.1 libXinerama.so

I then copied the real /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1.0.0 to /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1.0.0.real (make sure you backup your library!) and set up an alias in my ~/.profile so that I can easily switch on and off this fake xinerama library. When I start up my real host session, I don’t want to be using fakexinerama, but when I launch my Xephyr session for multimon development, I do need it to be there.

xin () {
if [ "$1" = "real" ]
then
sudo cp /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1.0.0.real /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1.0.0
elif [ "$1" = "fake" ]
then
sudo cp ~/builds/libXinerama.so.1.0 /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1.0.0
else
echo “real or fake?”
fi
}

Here’s the contents of my ~/.fakexinerama config file:

#Configuration file ~/.fakexinerama
#
# The format of the file is rather strict. Lines beginning with # are comments. First line is one
# number, specifying number of screens. This line must be followed by this number of lines, each
# containing four numbers: X Y W H, i.e. screen’s X and Y origin, width and height.
4
0 0 800 600
800 0 800 600
0 600 800 600
800 600 800 600

This establishes a 2×2 4-head xinerama configuration. Next up is creating the Xephyr display. From within your regular host session:

Xephyr :2.0 -ac -br +xinerama -screen 1600×1200 &
xterm -display :2&

You should now have a single Xephyr screen that’s 1600×1200 pixels with an xterm running inside of it. Now switch focus to the new xterm window and turn on the fakexinerama library and start up a KDE3 session:

xin fake
startkde
# (and when you’re done with this little environment, make sure you return your system to sanity by running “xin real”)

That’s about it. Really cool stuff. One last little screenshot… This one shows VMware Workstation spanning multiple heads. This obviously works with real external monitors as well. The way it works is by clicking the little monitor button to the right of the “View” menu. This tells Workstation to cycle through the available display topologies. So, on first press, Workstation spread across all 4 heads (fullscreen multimonitor, largest topology). Second press took on this configuration that I screengrabbed (vertical span). Third press spread Workstation horizontally across the first 2 heads. And then 4th press returned Workstation to just fullscreen on head 2 (where I started it from).

One last thought on the subject… One of the things I’m hopefully going to be able to work on in the next couple of months is implementing the new EWMH _NET_WM_FULLSCREEN_MONITORS hint in various X window managers. Currently, Workstation does some internal gyrations to convince window managers to allow our undecorated fullscreen window to maximize over multiple monitors/heads. _NET_WM_FULLSCREEN_MONITORS was the hint that was recently added to the EWMH spec to correctly accomplish this, but as far as I know, it hasn’t been added to any window managers yet. I’m excited about getting the chance to get up to speed on some window manager internals again! It’s been a while since I’ve last had the chance to do that (bbkeys/blackbox days of yore!).

Anyway, hope this helps someone else set up a multi-head dev/test environment, should the need arise. =:)

First, Xinerama. I’m going to be doing multiple monitor stuff for work, which should be really interesting if I can keep my self-imposed stress level down. I have never had more than a single monitor to use on any given desktop or laptop until I started working at VMware, and as such I am currently less than clueful with how all of this stuff works in X. (As an aside, if anyone can refer me to some really good documentation or multi-head/multi-screen/multi-monitor/multi-display Linux/X resources, I’d greatly appreciate it!) So today I was looking into a bug report that had to do with a Twinview side-by-side display configuration, and I discovered that “xdpyinfo -ext XINERAMA” will tell you what the screen topology looks like currently. For example, my normal Twinview cloned 1680×1050 setup looks like this:

XINERAMA version 1.1 opcode: 158
head #0: 1680×1050 @ 0,0

… whereas if I change it to a side-by-side 1680×1050 configuration, I believe it will show this:

XINERAMA version 1.1 opcode: 158
head #0: 1680×1050 @ 0,0
head #1: 1680×1050 @ 1600,0

(I can’t be certain since apparently in all of my fiddling, I disabled Xinerama in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and currently, it shows me this: XINERAMA version 1.1 opcode: 158 head #0: 3360×1050 @ 0,0 *sigh*) This is coolness that I’m sure I’ll be needing to use frequently in the coming months.

Secondly, Modelines. Now, honestly, it’s been years since I’ve had to worry about manually putting Modelines into my XF86Config/xorg.conf files. X has gotten much better since those bad old days and things have pretty much Just Worked (TM). Although I still do fondly remember the days of working with some hard-core X hackers in trying to get my laptop display drivers working (like 10 years ago??) But somewhere between my Ubuntu 8.04 installation and my current OpenSUSE 11 installation, X no longer thinks that it should allow me to output a 1680×1050 resolution to my external monitor (a Dell 2007FPb). I disagree strongly. =;D Unfortunately, my Lenovo T61 laptop looks like crap unless it displays in its native resolution of 1680×1050, so in Ubuntu Hardy, I became accustomed to doing the cloned twinview 1680×1050 thing. Like I said, something broke this when I went to OpenSUSE 11. I’m guessing it’s a newer X version. But anyway, after a whole lotta Google action, I came across a post that suggested another dude use the “gtf” command to find a good X11 Modeline. Wow, cool!! Here’s what it does:

$ gtf 1680 1050 60

# 1680×1050 @ 60.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 65.22 kHz; pclk: 147.14 MHz
Modeline “1680x1050_60.00″   147.14   1680 1784 1968 2256    1050 1051 1054 1087   -HSync +Vsync

Awesome!!! I don’t know if this little tool didn’t exist back in the bad old days when X required you to enter this or if I just didn’t know about it, but this would have saved me lots of agony over the years had I known about it. =:) I copied/pasted that into my /etc/X11/xorg.conf inside the Monitor section for my Dell 2007FP, restarted X, and now nvidia-settings will kindly let me use 1680×1050 resolution again. YAY!

Looking for the best distro...

I got bored with my Ubuntu Hardy install last week and decided to have a look at what some of the other guys are up to these days. Mind you, there wasn’t anything horribly wrong with my Ubuntu host. I still ♥ apt; IMHO, there’s still nothing faster (although the new package management in OpenSUSE 11 comes darned close!). But anyway, it was an interesting trek across the newest distros and while I was looking to end up with something other than SUSE (again, nothing wrong with it at all–I just like change), I am totally impressed with OpenSUSE 11 and am going to feel satisfied sticking with it for a decently long while, knowing that I’ve shopped around as it were. And I think that that’s really the main point, now that I think of it. It’s why I got involved with Linux originally: I hated Windows 3.1 and didn’t like the fact that there was no way to shop around and make it better. Oh–one other thing I was looking for in a new host: nightly/weekly KDE trunk (4.2) snapshots–and from what I found, only OpenSUSE offers that. Anyway… some random thoughts about the voyage…

OpenSUSE 10.3… I ran this when I worked at CVS. Awesome, solid, stable. Really, really good. I installed this on my work laptop when I started at VMware and was pretty happy with it. What ended up pushing me off of it and onto Kubuntu Hardy was the fact that debugging with gdb on OpenSUSE 10.3 was really, really painful. Just about everything that I tried to “p” or “pt” on ended up making gdb itself segfault. Frustrating and work-inhibiting. Time to switch.

Kubuntu Hardy… Also very stable and well-done. Apt just plain rules the package management scene, I’m convinced. I believe there are architecture issues or something that make other distros not like it, but it is danged fast. Nothing really to complain about with Kubuntu. It worked, worked well, and I don’t think I really had any problems with it. It was awesome to not have gdb segfault on me too. =:/ I started looking for nightly/weekly KDE 4.2/trunk builds and couldn’t find them. Feeling frustrated and stagnant (through no fault of Kubuntu), I decided to switch distros and see what else is out there. A Fedora 9 DVD came in one of the Linux magazines I bought at B&N lately (plus a friend of mine from work runs F9 on his work laptop), and it has been staring me in the face for a month now. I couldn’t resist any longer. Oh! Also, Ubuntu’s graphical boot stuff, while nice, manages to screw up my video card on my laptop if I stop kdm/xdm/gdm from running (which I need to do frequently lately to try out the nVidia beta drops). It stops the display manager and then goes back to the bootsplash screen and when it returns me to my VT, it’s totally messed up and unusable. Impetus enough.

Fedora 9… Words cannot express…. I’m trying to block out the painful memories…. Okay, it wasn’t completely horrible, but they’ve done so many things with Fedora since I last used it that I feel totally uncomfortable in it. I think wireless networking worked decently well. I set SELinux to disabled and kept getting popups warning me that such and such a thing would have been denied if SELinux wasn’t disabled and how that was bad… Couldn’t figure out how to turn that off. Getting my existing LUKS-encrypted home partition working was a pain. I LOVE the RHGB graphical boot magic. That was honestly (shallow, I know) one of the reasons I was looking forward to Fedora 9. Well lo and behold… when the boot sequence has to stop and prompt me for my LUKS passphrase, it drops completely out of RHGB mode (reasonable enough) but then fails to go back into it. Sexiness– and still no KDE 4.2/trunk nightly/weekly builds. On we go.

UPDATE: I had forgotten the biggest reason I ran away screaming from Fedora 9: they’re using newer Xorg packages than nVidia has drivers for. Aiyeeee!!!!

One of the coolest KDE dudes I know (/me waves to Helio) works for Mandriva, so I’ve been meaning to try out the latest Mandriva for a while. I used to use Mandriva on my work laptop when I worked at Rite Aid and was always impressed with it. The package management used to suck a lot, though, which is one of the reasons that I stopped using it. You used to have to go into one application to add packages and another application to remove packages. =:/ I’m happy to say that Mandriva 2008.1 (or maybe an earlier release) fixed the package management stuff and now adding and removing packages happen in the same interface. Yay! =:) Mandriva has always impressed me with its eye candy and extremely solid and well-crafted UI, and Mandriva 2008.1 is no exception to that. Very nice, very pretty, very solid. I’ve hit a couple hiccups with package management, but nothing that a retry (1..n times) didn’t fix. And I like the grouped package management idea, where instead of a single run of 200 package installs, it will group them into logical/related packages and do X at a time… so you have “A of B packages in this group installed; Y of Z total”. And Mandriva is really fast–it always has been. I ended up replacing the OpenSUSE 10.3 install that I had on the kids’ desktop downstairs with Mandriva and we’re all extremely impressed with it. And I really, really, really wanted to keep using it on my work laptop. Until I started trying to get wireless networking to work, and that’s where the wheels fell off. Mandriva uses its own wireless networking configuration and management, instead of using NetworkManager, and when it fails, it fails hard–especially with WPA, it seems. Switching between wireless networks just started to fail miserably and I could not grok what was going wrong enough to fix it. And then I just stopped caring and burned an OpenSUSE 11 DVD… Mandriva: you should really use NetworkManager. It really does Just Work (TM). Oh–and you can install networkmanager in Mandriva, but it doesn’t actually work, from my experience. =:(

And then there was OpenSUSE 11. WOW is a good word for this. They’ve done a really awesome job on the installation process. It has never looked better or been more functional. And there is some serious go-fast juice in the package management now. I don’t know if it’s as fast as Apt yet, but it is so fast that I no longer dread using it in SUSE. And the 1-click install YMP stuff is pure sugary sweetness that is Good For You Too. And wireless networking works perfectly. I’ve not yet seen it fail. And the knetworkmanager changes (Will, I think??) are AWESOME! And the eye candy is delicious. And everything works. And it is really fast. And I like it. Here I’ll surely stay for a good long while, now content that I’ve shopped around and that I’m not just settling for the same thing I used before–that what I’m using really is the best… for me at least.

One last note to squelch any potential “yeah, but you can fix XXX by doing YYYY, you stupid person” comments…. This was a whirlwind tour that happened over the last week or so. I still have to work for a living, so when I switched distros, I did it at night and then actually had to spend the next day working on it for my job. So you could say that this was a trial by fire for these distros and probably more representative of what a new Linux user would deal with and expect than a patient hacker, hell-bent on spending whatever time is necessary to get things working. I’m finding myself sort of between the OS X “I just want it to work and not have to think about it” camp and the hard-core Linux hacker who will stay up all night to figure out why thingey XXX is not working and beat it into submission. I still love the latter, but being that I have to work and be productive on my laptop, I can’t afford too much of it.

Anyway, there’s one brain dump for the week. I have several more I need to do (preview: THE NOKIA N810 JUST PLAIN ROCKS (but DANG we need to get some good PIM apps on there)!!!!!!, and spending all day Saturday to change interior lights SUCKS!, and Opera is still awesome again and getting better!!), but those will have to wait. =:)