Telling a Tale for Ten Years

Exactly ten years ago I started this ridiculous blog as a way to collaborate with other game developers. At the time I thought I would dig deep and push out at least one title. This eventually led to the "Desktop Distractions" studio concept, and the nascent title Deskblocks. I also worked within the CrystalSpace engine as an entrant to the PlaneShift team. I just couldn't give these projects traction however, so I gave it up and moved on to tinkering.

Even though the driving force behind the blog had faded away, and even though no one else reads this blog (aside from the State of .NET Integration Frameworks post), I kept updating it. Writing - even if it exists only for your own edification - really does help with communication and critical thinking regardless of what you write about. Even though my day job has nothing to do with garage door openers, my posts on my garage door security system helped me organize the build in a way that informed the Hack Clock project. Back in 2006 I began investigating vector processing, and the resulting frameworks have helped me think about and design microservice architectures. Of course, there was plenty of venting as well with my favorite software companies being dissolved or SuSE Linux winning and failing and winning and failing again. All of this writing helped me when performing comparative analysis at work, or designing parallel architectures, or watching trends in software development.

It is hard to believe a decade has slipped by. It doesn't even seem real. I don't think I've evolved much since that one cram session in a crystal chair, but I'm glad to have my collected ramblings to reflect back on.

Candyland Gets Paved. Again. Repeatedly.

I'm getting a bit tired of being so curmudgeonly. I can't help it tho. All my toys are being taken away.

First Novell acquires SuSE Linux, which I have been fairly skeptical of since the purchase was announced. Then Nokia ate Trolltech, the place where my favorite Qt was grown. And then Oracle ate Sun Microsystems, the ones who kept expanding the boundaries of software engineering and releasing such leaps to the public (usually (sometimes)). Now Oracle is smacking around robust and growing projects that have served the software engineering good for many years now.

And now Novell is bought by Attachmate, with 882 patents being absorbed by a Microsoft subsidiary. The openSUSE team says everything is "business as usual,", but there are very strong indications that this will not always be so.

Maybe this is just the ebb and flow that is technology capitalism... but all my power tools seem to be disappearing. If Apache and JBoss are bought by Philip Morris, I'm going to freakin' lose it.

OpenSUSE 11.0 - Desktop Linux Actually Done Right

I've been pretty unhappy with SuSE Linux as of late. I thought 10.1 was well done, but subsequent releases were of poor build quality and in places just sloppy. There were times it began to show promise, only to fall just short.

I've been living inside of openSUSE 11.0 for the past several days, and tried out RC1 as well. All in all it's a very impressive distribution, and I'm surprised they were able to put this level of polish on KDE 3.5, KDE 4 and Gnome at the same time.

Package management, the Achilles' heel of SuSE up to this point, is scores better. YaST2 actually loads its package management tool quickly, and metadata indexing doesn't take decades like it used to. Compiz is nicely integrated, and KDE 4 is actually quite well done. I'm installing the unstable 4.1 packages right now, and we'll see how that looks as well.

There are some speed issues, but then again I'm using KDE 4 with desktop effects cranked up. However, the fixes to package management alone make SuSE a fantastic winner for the desktop Linux space. Honestly, once KDE 4.1 comes out I wouldn't be surprised at all to see more corporate desktops and developer machines turning to SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.

SuSE Ten Point Ugh

It definitely seems like Novell's openSUSE distribution has taken a page from RedHat's Fedora Core. RedHat took their mainline distribution and split it into two - an Enterprise product, and a "community" product. Ultimately their community product had a lot of problems with communication and collaboration, although it seems they've leveled off since. The "Core" distro was really a way to publicly test and iron out bugs for their enterprise product.

10.3 definitely feels this way. Although they have an open Bugzilla, there are lots of bugs that should have been caught. Eclipse doesn't even start, Intel wireless cards have problems with NetworkManager and autoplug, and Xgl has crashes and other weird problems. Novell is even looking to awkwardly cram all of KDE into /usr, like RedHat infamously did. Mosfet blew a mosfet about this layout, and rightfully so.

I had a similar volume of really, really annoying bugs in 10.2, although most were eventually remedied after several weeks. And I even grew to like some of features that annoyed me at first. But the first few months of a release are choppy at best.

So I'll hold off on any big judgement. The problem with Linux desktop releases is that everything is really close to almost working... so close that it's maddening. I think that's why people fly off the handle when a new release comes out - you're so close to having a perfect setup, it's absolutely maddening when a few nagging bugs completely screw it up.

The Retelling of a Myth: Fin

My MythBox has been in service for nearly two weeks now - and I haven't had a single problem in nearly as long. It's quite remarkable that I was able to construct such an appliance for under $400 USD, and I owe most of those remarks to VIA and their lovely Mini-ITX EPIA C7 platform. They've crammed ten pounts of digital goodness into a five pound bag, and made it all passively cooled to boot. While it may not benchmark the fastest, it benchmarks as the most useful and power-efficient general purpose plaform I've ever used. The EPIA doesn't work faster - it works smarter by building in acceleration for what you actually need. Cryptography, MPEG2, audio and TV-out are all done intelligently by chipsets design for that specific purpose. That means you, yes you, get to reap the benefits of an extremely fast and jitter-free MythTV box without the cost, power consumption, size or complexity of a regular mobo/CPU combo. And VIA understands how Linux is crucial to their enterprise, and has worked towards providing support likewise. Open-sourcing their driver base is a smart step.. let's just hope they continue to document their chipsets and offer open-source implementation, as well as Linux driver support around every corner. If they do, I promise to keep buying. Deal? Deal.

Also, one should be greatly impressed by the Myth team's gusto. They've brought Linux together and have shown the world that this nimble little behemoth of an OS can really make a tremendous splash. Indeed, one almost gets a feeling as if this was Linux's endgame, and all the pieces of the puzzle are now being assembled; all that remains are the easy pieces inside the corners.

One also should give mad props to the community at large, which has taken it upon their anti-anti-social selves to document every living, breathing attempt to get a myriad of hardware configurations to run Myth. Indeed, these past five blog posts are my contribution back to the lukewarm saline pool that holds our collective brains. Without the dozens of blog, newsgroup and forum posts out in the wild I never would have been able to build this box. Thanks to this modern era of communications, n00bs everywhere are being schooled at the speed of light.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have 20 back episodes of The Daily Show to watch.

The Retelling of a Myth: The Myth Part

Installing MythTV is fairly easy once the OS & appropriate drivers are installed. Thanks to the all-knowing Packman repository for SuSE, I was able to easily use YaST2 and get the mythfrontend, mythbackend, myth-plugins and myth-themes with a minimum of fuss. Dependencies automagically installed and I was ready to go in a few minutes.

The SuSE packages show a good deal of polish. I installed the Gnome login manager (GDM), since it seemed to be the most lightweight login manager that allowed the mythtv user to auto-login. While I installed FvWM and expected I would need to use .xinitrc to launch mythfrontend upon startup, it turns out SuSE setup GDM to have MythTV as a session choice unto it's own. So instead of needing to specify Gnome, KDE or FvWM as the session to login to I could specify MythTV as a session of its own without a window manager. Very nice!

First, one needs to set a root password for MySQL and create an account for the zap2it Web service. After those accounts were created I followed the universal MythTV installation instructions for openSUSE, started the backend server and began populating the database.

Once the backend was ready to go, the frontend was ready to roll. First thing I did was ensure live TV was rendering correctly; since XvMC wasn't enabled, I had to find alternate ways of doing motion compensation. I ended up using the "standard" MPEG2 decoder library with kernel deinterlacing, which was the only deinterlacer that a) worked and b) reduced blur. Bear in mind the rational option should have been using the VIA XvMC decoder w/ bob 2x deinterlacing, but it just wasn't an option using VIA's X11 drivers. However, MPEG2 playback still only consumes 40% of the CPU. Go figure.

Sound, recording and playback all pretty much worked out of the box. Transcoding and archiving to DVD are still a work in progress for me... I haven't been able to get everything working correctly yet. I was able to transcode using default settings to RJPEG... but that turned a 1.1GB MPEG2 file into a 1.4GB RV file. Umm... wrong way.

I attempted to stream DVD-quality MPEG2 files from my home file server via 802.11b, but of course the latency just didn't agree with that kind of streaming. I replaced the Linksys 802.11b bridge I was using with an old (and I mean old) 10Mb Ethernet hub and the DVD-quality MPEG2 files were rendered via my MythTV box just fine.

While tweaks are still to be had the keyboard has been disconnected, cables tucked away and recordings are now being scheduled. Playback is smooth thanks to the via X11 driver and recording is transferring to ye olde Western Digital nicely thanks to the ATA patch. Lirc is reading remote commands nicely, and the 10M Ethernet line is feeding remote streams just fine.

Christmas Software Shenannigans

Is that how you spell "shenannigans?" Oh well.

Received a nifty lil iPod nano this Christmas. An obvious conundrum hit right away... my entire music library is formatted & encoded using Ogg Vorbis. iPods use AAC or MP3's.

Amarok - KDE's killer app - has great iPod support. Of course, the gold standard for iPod support on Linux remains gtkpod - an app that allows your little fingers to get into every facet of your iPod's filesystem layout. But Amarok makes me so tingly inside it's hard to express.

For example, Amarok can transcode your files on-the-fly. Are all your files in Speex but need them in MP3 format for your digital player? Just queue your files in Amarok's media device browser and it will automagically convert your files. Everything in Vorbis but you need AAC? TransKode will take care of it for you.

Not to mention Amarok now has an in-browser music store: Magnatune. I freakin' love Magnatune. The fact that it's now tightly integrated with Amarok makes me giddy.

But there are a few problems. I was up until 1:30 AM this morning trying to get transKode and Amarok to play nicely... there were so many uninstalled dependencies it wasn't even funny. And were there error messages? Nooooooooooooooooo.... I had to go and track down faac, vorbis-tools, gdkpixbuf, blah blah blah. After I made sure every possible package was installed, I was finally able to get Amarok to convert files automagically. I can't blame SuSE for not installing those dependencies... transKode is a plug-in to Amarok after all, and installing every possible dependency for Amarok would suddenly make it heftier than GnuCash.

Even with these limitations, Amarok is suiting my needs much, much better than iTunes. I don't think I'd be able to do jack nor squat with iTunes, considering it can't transcode my library. Next stop is trying to get contacts, calendar, to-do lists and notes to sync. But I've only filled up 10% of my 4GB so far. w00t!

Speaking of software, I'll stop my openSUSE 10.2 after this post. Several may have noticed Hubert Mantel is coming back to SuSE, which I hope is a good omen of things to come. The distribution has slipped since he left, so I'm hoping he can bring things back on course. I must say however - the bug reports I've filed so far have been resolved promptly. They're triaging bugs well. There are some pretty stale ones, like Evolution not running correctly in KDE. But by comparison Ubuntu has had an outstanding bug for what seems like an eternity that's stopping me from switching over: not mounting encrypted partitions at boot time.

openSUSE is going well now... dual-monitor support is working flawlessly now, SCPM is helping me effortlessly switch between home and office, and Amarok is allowing my expansive music collection to survive on my iPod. Hard to complain at this moment.

Sloppy SuSE

Have you seen Novell's "improvement" on the KDE menu? Have you seen the quotes around the word "improvement"? I have no idea what they were thinking. Reading the openSUSE site they claim the menu was the brainchild of hundreds of hours of usability study and research, examining every minute detail of user interaction. And yet they came up with a menu that takes 50 clicks to launch an application. Riiiiiight.

I just spent the past three days trying to get dual monitors working with the very insipid ATI card in my Latitude D600. Bear in mind, this isn't the first time I've tried to get a Xinerama-like "bigdesktop" setup working with this machine. Nope. I've had one since I've owned this machine, which is going on two and a half years. And yet, with every OS install on this machine, I've had to wrestle with getting the ATI drivers to obey. It's absolutely ridiculous.

The crazy thing is that we're not even talking about different driver versions. From XFree86 to XOrg, things have behaved weird or wacky in different ways. The only version of the driver I can run is 8.28.8, and even that would be unavailable if it wasn't for K's cluttered loft. 8.29.6 causes the LCD on my laptop to slowly - and I'm not kidding here - burn and bleed pixels. 8.32.5 won't even detect a screen. It's a pretty sorry state of affairs, especially considering 8.28.8 won't even work with XOrg 7.2, which is what SuSE 10.2 ships with. I have to backport to XOrg 7.1, install the 8.28.8 driver, then hack the config file.

Don't even get me started about the xorg.conf file. Even though my version of the driver stays the same, with each SuSE release the file has to change. Release before last I had to tell it my "DesktopSetup" was "0x00000000". Last release I had to ForceMonitors to be "auto,auto" for some unexplained reason (actually specifying the monitors wouldn't work). And in this release I had to specify ForceMonitors to be "lvds,tdms" and explicity specify the HSync2 and VRefresh2 of the monitor in the "Device" section. If I didn't, it would either never turn the monitor on, choose an incorrect frequency or choose a lower resolution.

If the above sounds like absolute rubbish, you're absolutely correct. And SuSE isn't the cause of the problem... it's ATI. Ubuntu, Fedora... they'd have the same problem. It's just that ATI doesn't feel like they need to adhere to "standards" of configuration at all, and their driver is simply unstable and, at times, unusable. The lesson: never, in your life, buy ATI hardware.

Send SuSE Back...

I upgraded my desktop and laptop to openSUSE 10.2 this week. Wow. Bad wow.

First off, ATI's support of Linux drivers is still abysmal. Not only are their configuration files whack, but they can't be composited, don't support Xinerama (on my laptop at least) and are a pain to install. SuSE ships with a release candidate XOrg 7.2 (because they are really into Xgl and composite extensions), and ATI wasn't ready to support it yet... probably since it hasn't been released. And yet, ATI quickly updated their driver. Still, with my laptop, neither the newer driver nor XOrg 7.2 run. I had to down-port to 7.1, then find an elder driver and use that. Hacked, ugly and it wasted a day and a half of hacking.

NVidia support still isn't much better. When the computer first starts post-install, you get nothing but a blank XWindow. Nice. You actually have to install the NVidia proprietary drivers first, then you can run your window manager. WTF?

As for sound, that was also borked. My laptop did fine with the install, but with my AMD64 desktop sound didn't work at all unless I was root. For some crazy-go-nuts reason, my users weren't in the "sound" group and didn't have permission to access /dev/dsp. So that was fun chasing down.

The Gnome people love messing with my head. Now they've created a keyring manager not unlike KWallet except, just like everything else for Gnome, it's far too convoluted. Evolution uses it to obtain passwords, however OpenSUSE doesn't open the keyring properly prior to launching Evolution. So I have to resort to an ugly, dirty hack for it to work.

So let's sum up here before I rant too long. My desktop wouldn't work immediately after install. Evolution didn't work. My laptop could run on the open-source drivers, but no luck on dual-monitor configs with the proprietary driver. Sound took hacking to work on the desktop. I think we need to let the original SuSE have their distro back - they always polished things to a nice sheen.

On the upside ODE 0.7 is automagically included it seems. So at least I have a standard ODE to develop on / release with. Also Novell has admitted to ZEN sucking - and they've offered alternatives. Although their really horrid ZEN update is still the default. Encrypted partitions work exactly as they should, and NetworkManager works as well.

Hopefully even though openSUSE 10.2 was off to a really rocky start, it will be smooth sailing from here.