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Grandpa Gets a Dell with Ubuntu Linux Preinstalled (Groklaw)
Groklaw has a review of a reader's experience getting a Dell with Ubuntu installed. "First, sound. The sound card was automatically found by the operating system, and ready to go for basic things, like mpegs and pre-recorded CD's. I know it can do CD audio, because I put on 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' on Monday night, and it rained in the Valley of the Sun on Tuesday Night (for reference, see Walt Disney's 'Fantasia', the Mickey Mouse sequence). Midi (which is electronically produced sound, with no actual basis in reality) was a different story. There are a number of ways to get Midi to work, and some of them require a great deal of effort and knowledge. I cheated. I downloaded a program called Automatix which, in turn, downloaded the programs and codecs that I would need for a great deal of multi-media experience. "
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Grandpa Gets a Dell with Ubuntu Linux Preinstalled (Groklaw) Posted Jul 30, 2007 22:10 UTC (Mon) by bluefoxicy (guest, #25366) [Link] > I cheated. I downloaded a program called Automatix which, in turn, downloaded the programs and codecs that I would need for a great deal of multi-media experience.
Congratulations, your install is now hosed. (Automatix manually moves/removes/symlinks some stuff, and has no undo function; such things as, for example, the Totem firefox plug-in require the user to manually remove and rename files to get the package manager to control them again).
Grandpa Gets a Dell with Ubuntu Linux Preinstalled (Groklaw) Posted Jul 30, 2007 23:32 UTC (Mon) by jwb (subscriber, #15467) [Link] Yep. I wish ubuntu would officially warn people away from Automatix. It is written by people who, apparently, love the disaster that is Windows. It is capable of instantly destroying your system in such a manner that apt-get is incapable of fixing it. And, in my one experience, it did not even correctly install the thing it said it was going to install.
Grandpa Gets a Dell with Ubuntu Linux Preinstalled (Groklaw) Posted Jul 30, 2007 23:52 UTC (Mon) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link] So, just playing devil's advocate here, what do you recommend? telling people automatix is bad without giving them another way to solve their problem probably won't get very far.
Grandpa Gets a Dell with Ubuntu Linux Preinstalled (Groklaw) Posted Jul 30, 2007 23:56 UTC (Mon) by MattPerry (subscriber, #46341) [Link] Use the Applications -> Add/Remove menu item to install programs that you want. If you need codecs to play a file, Ubuntu will prompt you and ask if you'd like for it to search for the correct codecs.
Grandpa Gets a Dell with Ubuntu Linux Preinstalled (Groklaw) Posted Jul 31, 2007 0:07 UTC (Tue) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link] OK, good to know. I'm about to investigate switching from suse to ubuntu on the desktop, so I'll keep that in mind.
Grandpa Gets a Dell with Ubuntu Linux Preinstalled (Groklaw) Posted Jul 31, 2007 18:03 UTC (Tue) by jonasj (guest, #44344) [Link] Just install the package ubuntu-restricted extras and you will get all codecs and stuff, except for libdvdcss which you can install by runningsudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh
Grandpa Gets a Dell with Ubuntu Linux Preinstalled (Groklaw) Posted Jul 31, 2007 0:47 UTC (Tue) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link] I believe EasyUbuntu [1] is the prefered option, although last Ubuntu versions make much of it obsolete, because they let you install codecs yourself (it asks if you want to do it and let you choose).
The "Unofficial Ubuntu Starter Guide" [2] can also be of great help for those like me who just want to get things done without thinking much about it (I don't want to learn how to configure a desktop system, I use it for doing "Real Work", not for playing around).
One thing I believe Ubuntu fails horribly is with MIDI configuration. On the other hand I can understand it's not easy to setup on a global scale (lot's of different cards out there, and forcing software MIDI to everyone is not a solution, in my opinion).
[1] http://easyubuntu.freecontrib.org/
Grandpa Gets a Dell with Ubuntu Linux Preinstalled (Groklaw) Posted Jul 31, 2007 7:29 UTC (Tue) by hein.zelle (guest, #33324) [Link] The midi setup being hard is a pity, as it is really easy once you know how to. Assuming you don't have a midi-capable soundcard (which most are not, these days) it's just a matter of
aptitude install timidity
and editing /etc/default/timidity to turn on the daemon by default. Why they don't do this as a default action, beats me. It gives out-of-the-box midi music for all alsa programs, with a free patch set.
Getting midi on a soundblaster card to work is slightly more tricky (especially as all the howto's seem outdated or incomplete), but perhaps by that time you've passed the stage of a beginner trying to get audio set up.
Grandpa Gets a Dell with Ubuntu Linux Preinstalled (Groklaw) Posted Jul 31, 2007 7:54 UTC (Tue) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link] > aptitude install timidity
Alternatively, fluidsynth and/or qsynth to run user-level.
> Why they don't do this as a default action, beats me.
Me too...
> with a free patch set.
I'd strongly advice against using patches. There is simply no _free_ patch set with reasonable quality and good instrument coverage. I suggest using soundfonts (another mystery to me is why the fact that timidity works great with soundfonts is kept as a top secret). You'll easily find very good free soundfonts (some as large as ~100MB!). Or, you can use one of the standard Windows ct[2,4,8]mgm.sf2 files (ok, not free, but if you bought the soundcard these are likely to be on the installation CD so you can use them legally, I guess).
Grandpa Gets a Dell with Ubuntu Linux Preinstalled (Groklaw) Posted Jul 31, 2007 16:28 UTC (Tue) by hathawsh (subscriber, #11289) [Link] Thanks for the pointer. I just switched my timidity to the GeneralUser soundfont I found here:
http://www.sccmusic.250x.com/sfont/genuser/index.htm
I used Wine to unpack it. It is indeed of higher quality than the patches I've heard. Unfortunately, while it's free for individuals, its confusing licensing status makes it hard to include in any Linux distribution. Do you know of any soundfonts under a Free license?
Grandpa Gets a Dell with Ubuntu Linux Preinstalled (Groklaw) Posted Aug 2, 2007 7:55 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link] > Do you know of any soundfonts under a Free license?
Honestly, I haven't looked into this for a few last years, but back then no, I don't think I saw a truly FSF-compatible soundfont. I guess though it would be a negligible expense for Canonical to acquire the rights on one such a font (made by an individual)... Alternatively, as I wrote, an automatic dialog suggesting download/install one free for personal use would suffice (Ubuntu does it for many non-redistributable things anyway). Searching the Windows partition is another legal possibility which might work for a large percentage of the users...
Grandpa Gets a Dell with Ubuntu Linux Preinstalled (Groklaw) Posted Jul 31, 2007 8:06 UTC (Tue) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link] > On the other hand I can understand it's not easy to setup on a global scale (lot's of different cards out there,
I don't believe there are that many soundcards with hardware MIDI supported by Linux out there... Yet even for arguably most popular (Live!/Audigy) a single modprobe line is missing...
> and forcing software MIDI to everyone is not a solution, in my opinion).
With today's processors software MIDI is a good solution for most people (== playback), I believe. It's only a question of proper setup; see another my comment below.
Grandpa Gets a Dell with Ubuntu Linux Preinstalled (Groklaw) Posted Aug 1, 2007 0:36 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] probably software is better then hardware nowadays anyways.
I realy doubt that any remotely modern computer (say newer then Pentium 1 or so) will ever be remotely taxed by software midi playback. (that is to say have any noticable impact on your system)
Plus I expect the sound quality to be better with software once you got some decent sound fonts.
Grandpa Gets a Dell with Ubuntu Linux Preinstalled (Groklaw) Posted Aug 2, 2007 8:23 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link] > probably software is better then hardware nowadays anyways.
Unless you're doing in SW something which the HW card can't do, why?
> I realy doubt that any remotely modern computer (say newer then Pentium 1 or so) will ever be remotely taxed by software midi playback. (that is to say have any noticeable impact on your system)
Nope. You'll want at least a 1GHz CPU to listen to a reasonable subset of the classics. On an 800 MHz AMD box I had to severely degrade the quality of the Timidity synthesizer (run in the ALSA daemon mode) for a still somewhat jumpy playback of the 40th symphony... Fluidsynth is a bit better. Then, if you `aconnect' a software MIDI port to another MIDI port, ALSA will gladly hose ~50% CPU in the idle state ;-)
> Plus I expect the sound quality to be better with software once you got some decent sound fonts.
All consumer-grade "HW MIDI" cards use the same (loadable) soundfonts anyway. So if you happen to own a nice soundfont, you can use it with the sound card as well. At least, you won't be restricted by the ALSA bugs/deficiencies.
Grandpa Gets a Dell with Ubuntu Linux Preinstalled (Groklaw) Posted Aug 7, 2007 22:24 UTC (Tue) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link] This post seems to summarize all the steps needed on the last Ubuntu version (feisty):
http://mjg59.livejournal.com/77440.html?thread=523392#t52...
It just fails to say how to get the GPG signature for one of the repositories, which you can find on the unofficial guide.
Grandpa Gets a Dell with Ubuntu Linux Preinstalled (Groklaw) Posted Jul 30, 2007 23:56 UTC (Mon) by jsarets (guest, #39560) [Link] Couldn't the Automatix people just create a virtual package that dependson all of those warez with a little dpkg-reconfigure magic for people that don't want everything? There's got to be a reasonable way to do what Automatix does within the confines of dpkg/apt.
Grandpa Gets a Dell with Ubuntu Linux Preinstalled (Groklaw) Posted Aug 2, 2007 7:09 UTC (Thu) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link] Since when does non-technical grandpas like to play midi-files ?
Oh, I agree it's nice to have these things working out-of-box. I just somehow think that this particular snag would not be a show-stopper for 99% of the grandpas out there. (or younger people for that matter, midi ain't *that* popular unless you're in a particular part of the nerd and/or music-scene)
Grandpa Gets a Dell with Ubuntu Linux Preinstalled (Groklaw) Posted Aug 2, 2007 8:34 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link] > Since when does non-technical grandpas like to play midi-files ?
Don't know about grandpas, but my daughter was very upset when a couple of her favorite games didn't run/crashed on a computer I set up for her. (Before that, she played games on the papa's PC which had always had a HW MIDI card). That actually what had me investigate the MIDI synth status in ALSA. That was a few years ago, so probably the newer versions of the games no longer use MIDI; today it's not rare to see a game with 100kB of the actual code and 100MB of wav/mp3/... media. Sigh...
Grandpa Gets a Dell with Ubuntu Linux Preinstalled (Groklaw) Posted Aug 2, 2007 12:13 UTC (Thu) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link] MIDI is not used only by professionals.
It's used a lot by programs who only want to emit a set of notes, like music teaching programs, and before the quality of recent sound cards was used a lot for the ambient music in games (meaning many people would not notice MIDI in use because they would never hear it on their cheap sound cards).
It's true it's a standard that never took much out of the general *nix crowd, but was very important in the Mac and PC world.
Any program that wants to emit a single note at a certain tone will use MIDI for it (guitar tuners, note editing programs, music teaching, etc).
Anyway I find the "grandpa argument" stupid. It's not me who would make my grandpa look stupid in front of their friends by forcing Linux on him.
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