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Can you hear me now?

The Fedora 11 preview release announcement went out on April 28. Around the world, Fedora users responded by downloading, testing, pondering the ext4 filesystem, and generally feeling a little "jaunty" themselves. One Fedora developer, though, had a moderately strange response which might be a little hard to understand out of its full context:

Anybody who has been sufficiently distant from the disturbance on the fedora-devel mailing list can be forgiven for wondering what is going on here. In short: changes to the PulseAudio volume control widget shipped in Fedora 11 have made it hard for some users to get sound out of their systems in the manner to which they have become accustomed, and they're not happy about it.

The longer version goes something like this. The low-level ALSA sound system provides a great deal of control over the underlying hardware, exposing all of the knobs supported there. Volume-control applications have typically made all of those knobs available to the user. That sounds like the proper way to give users full control over their hardware, but, as anybody who has pulled up the mixer on moderately-complicated hardware knows, the result can be an unbelievable mess of confusing sliders. See this image for an example. There is a clear usability problem here.

The solution, as found in Fedora 11 (and, ultimately, GNOME 2.26), is to reduce the number of sliders slightly. OK, more than slightly: there is now a single "output volume" slider and a single "input volume" slider. The user has a single knob to play with, and PulseAudio somehow makes everything else work right in some magic, behind-the-scenes manner that need not be worried about. And, in fact, on a reasonably normal system, the "just works" factor is pretty high. If one is trying to get normal audio output from a number of applications, the single volume control does the right thing. Many users will, your editor suspects, never miss all those other sliders.

But the Fedora user base goes beyond "many users." And some of Fedora's testing users are finding that they can no longer make things work. Sometimes the behind-the-scenes magic doesn't get things right for specific hardware, and sometimes these users are just doing something strange that PulseAudio developer Lennart Poettering didn't envision. These users have, at times, filed bugs noting a regression in Fedora 11; they have been dismayed to see those bugs closed with a "not a bug" or "won't fix" status. To these users, the behavior of Fedora 11 is, indeed, a regression, and they are not happy about it.

It must be said that Lennart has, by virtue of a strong "not my problem" attitude, made the problem worse. His responses tend to look like this:

What he generally tells users who are unable to get the behavior they need is that they should drop down to alsamixer and fix things there. But users, strangely, dislike the idea of moving to a curses-based tool to gain access to functionality that was once part of their desktop. And, of course, just running "alsamixer" yields a beautiful, 24x80 rendering of, yes, the single PulseAudio output control; one must first figure out the proper command line options to get alsamixer to talk to the system at the right level. It just doesn't seem like much of a solution.

In the middle of this, the Fedora engineering steering committee (FESCo) held one of its regular meetings. The terse meeting summary includes the following:

This is a solution which has pleased nobody. Lennart thinks it's a big mistake, of course. Others don't like last-minute changes to the Fedora 11 feature set. And the people who are unhappy with the current state of affairs really would rather not have to go digging through the menus to find an emergency backup volume control which does what they really need. Many Fedora users, it is feared, will just see that functionality has disappeared and won't know where to go to find it again.

So what is the right solution? It seems pretty clear that the "one slider fits all" approach will never work for everybody. David Woodhouse expresses it well:

On the other hand, a general return to the "ALSA mixer of doom" (David's term) is clearly not in the cards. Presenting users with hundreds of sliders is, in most cases, not going to leave them feeling more empowered. The simplification work which has been done in the volume control application is clearly needed.

One suggestion which has come out of this is that the volume control should have an "expert mode" which makes more sliders available. That would allow those sliders to remain hidden for the (presumed) majority which will never want to adjust them, but it also makes them available in the obvious place for users who do need to go deeper. This solution, too, fails to please everybody, but it may please enough of the people involved to, eventually, cause the noise of this debate to subside a bit. Because, alas, there is no slider to turn that particular noise down, even in expert mode.

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New Releases

Ubuntu 9.04 released

The Ubuntu 9.04 ("Jaunty Jackalope") release is out. There is, of course, no end of new stuff in this release; see the graphical overview for an introduction.

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Announcing Ubuntu 9.04 for ARM

The Ubuntu team has announced Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop edition for ARM processors. "This first, community-supported ARM release of Ubuntu supports the imx51, ixp4xx, and versatile subarchitectures, allowing use on a wide variety of hardware and virtual environments. Desktop installation images are available for the i.MX 51 Babbage development board, and netboot installation images for other subarchitectures."

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Ubuntu Studio 9.04

The Ubuntu Studio team has announced its fifth release: Ubuntu Studio 9.04. "With this release, which you can download in a 1.2GB DVD, Ubuntu Studio offers a pre-made selection of packages, targeted at audio, video and graphics users. Ubuntu Studio greatly simplifies the creation of Linux-based multimedia workstations."

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openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 1 Released

The first testing release of openSUSE 11.2, Milestone 1, is out. It contains a number of very recent software releases such as: Linux kernel 2.6.29, KDE 4.2.2, GNOME 2.26, OpenOffice.org 3.1 beta 4, Mono 2.4, and more. "This is a milestone release. It's for openSUSE contributors who want to use the release for testing and development (or want a sneak preview of the 11.2 release), but it is not for production use." Click below for the full announcement.

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The Fedora 11 preview release is available

The Fedora 11 preview release is out. "This is the Fedora 11 Preview release, we're just a short time from releasing the full shebang. Therefore we need the most testing we can possibly get on this one." There's a reasonably advanced set of release notes available for Fedora 11; the final release is due on May 26.

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Distribution News

Debian GNU/Linux

Linux-libre for Debian Lenny

The Debian project now has Linux-libre packages available for Lenny (Debian GNU/Linux 5.0). Linux-libre packages remove the binary-only firmware which are non-free according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG).

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Fedora

Reminder: Fedora Board IRC public meeting

The Fedora Advisory Board is holding its monthly public meeting on Tuesday, May 5, 2009, at 1800 UTC on IRC Freenode. Join #fedora-board-questions to discuss topics and post questions. Join #fedora-board-meeting to see the Board's conversation. "The moderator will voice people from the queue, one at a time, in the #fedora-board-meeting channel. We'll limit time per voice as needed to give everyone in the queue a chance to be heard."

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Fedora Board Recap 2009-04-22

Click below for a brief recap of the April 22, 2009 meeting of the Fedora Advisory Board. Topics include Future Security Response Plans, What is Fedora?, and Status of Trademark Followup.

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SUSE Linux and openSUSE

openSUSE Board Meeting Minutes, April 8, 2009

Click below for the minutes of the April 8, 2009 meeting of the openSUSE board. Topics include Trademark guide lines, openSUSE Foundation, openSUSE conference, Membership Advantages, and more.

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Ubuntu family

Karmic Koala open for development

Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10) is open for general development. "Please remember to wear your seat-belt, and remember that bugs in the rear-view mirror may be closer than they appear. Automatic syncs from Debian will begin shortly."

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New Distributions

wattOS

wattOS is designed to be a lightweight but fully featured distribution using less energy. The OS will run on low power computers and recycled systems. wattOS Beta 2 combines OpenBox with a Ubuntu mini install. "We are actively looking for developers and supporters in our efforts to create a low power operating system that can be used personally and commercially. contact us and watch for updates to get involved."

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Distribution Newsletters

Debian Misc developer news (#15)

In this issue of Misc developer news you'll find Updates of major desktop environments, Alioth updated to lenny and FusionForge 4.7, wiki.debian.org migrated to MoinMoin 1.7, Tidbits from the wanna-build team, RFH: Removing spam from the listarchive and Groupware discussion list.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 300

The DistroWatch Weekly for April 27, 2009 is out. "Naturally, the biggest news event of the week was the release of Ubuntu's latest version - 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. Reviews have started pouring in and users are busy upgrading. How well will the latest version be received? And does the success of Ubuntu mean, as some are beginning to wonder, that Debian GNU/Linux is no longer relevant? This week's feature article provides some answers in an interesting comparison between Xubuntu 9.04 and Debian 5.0.1 with Xfce to see how well each performs. We also post links to an interview with Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth, while Tux Radar takes a look at the last ten releases of the world's most popular desktop Linux distro. Of course that's not the only thing that happened this past week - Debian has announced the availability of Lenny kernels with no closed-source firmware, the Fedora community has received up-to-date images of version 10, and the openSUSE online build service looks set to receive support for a Git version control backend, thanks to a Google Summer of Code project. Happy reading!"

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Fedora Weekly News #173

The Fedora Weekly News for the week ending April 26, 2009 is out. "This week's issue starts with a welcome double dose of FedoraPlanet coverage, providing news and views from around the Fedora community. Our Ambassadors beat shares the LinuxFest Northwest experience. Developments covers the controversy over "PulseAudio: A Hearty and Robust Exchange of Ideas" and in Translation word comes of Fedora 11 Release Notes proofreading readiness. Configuration conflagration of Wacom graphics tablets is revealed in the Art beat. The Fedora Weekly Webcomic divines an unbreakable future. We're brought up to date with SecurityAdvisories for Fedora 9 and 10, and the Virtualization beat completes the issue with updates on virtualization status in Fedora, with specifics on a new libvirt 0.6.3 release, a new libguestfs 1.0.10 release, and KVM migration support in Fedora 11, to name but a few!"

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The Mint Newsletter - issue 82

The Mint Newsletter for April 29, 2009 covers the Mint 7 roadmap and more.

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Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #139

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for the week ending April 25, 2009 is out. "In this issue we cover: Ubuntu 9.04 Released, Announcing Ubuntu 9.04 for ARM, Ubuntu Open Week Schedule, MOTU Council News, German LoCo team launches new portal, Ubuntu Live in Aalborg, Chicago Style Release Party, Rocked in Finger Lakes, Ubuntu-CL: FLiSoL, New Ubuntu US Teams Website, Limited edition Jaunty Jackalope T-shirts, Announcing Ubuntu Gaming Team, Spread Ubuntu to go live soon, Shuttleworth: Oracle's Sun buy validates open source, Ubuntu Podcast #25: Dustin Kirkland Interview, Full Circle Magazine #24, and much, much more!"

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Newsletters and articles of interest

Tux Radar looks at Ubuntu's Jaunty release

Tux Radar has published three articles on Ubuntu and the recent release of 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). First some history with The road to Jaunty: a look back at Ubuntu's history. Next Shuttleworth on Jaunty, netbooks and more, an interview with Mark Shuttleworth. Finally there is Ubuntu 9.04 frankenreview for a test drive of Ubuntu 9.04.

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The Perfect Desktop - Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) (HowtoForge)

HowtoForge sets up a desktop system with the latest Ubuntu release. "This tutorial shows how you can set up an Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge."

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Distribution reviews

Novell's SLES 11 is packed to the gills and keeps moving at a decent clip (Network World)

Network World has a fairly extensive review of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, which was released last month. The review looks at new features added, as well as doing a bit of benchmarking to compare SLES 11 with 10.2. "And, finally, Novell has produced a YaST Security module, which consolidates a raft of formerly separate settings (file permissions, and login restrictions parameters, as a few examples) into a single and comprehensive (and finally usable) user interface. For instance, during testing we were able to make policy settings changes, and form user folder permissions without having to leap back and forth between formerly disparate user interfaces."

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Ubuntu Users Looking a Bit Jaunty Today (Linux Journal)

Justin Ryan takes a look at the newly release Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. "Prime among the features being touted by the Ubuntu camp are improvements in speed, perhaps rather fitting for a release named for the jackalope. Boot speed is reportedly greatly improved, as low as twenty-five seconds in some cases. Hibernation and suspend/resume have been enhanced, including immediate availability post-hibernation. Those we spoke to noted an impressive improvement in boot speed, significant even for virtual machines, as well as dramatic speed improvements in finding and connecting to wireless networks."

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