|
|
Subscribe / Log in / New account

Development

Getting Audacious

By Forrest Cook
November 7, 2007

It all started simply enough, your author has been playing with the recently released Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" release on several test machines. The plan is to migrate a number of machines that run older distributions, mainly Ubuntu 7.04 "Feisty Fawn", over to Gutsy Gibbon. This will allow access to the latest and greatest application releases. The migration process is not new, a list of essential applications has been kept for a number of years over numerous distributions and distribution versions.

For a long time, one of the essential applications was XMMS, the X Multimedia System. XMMS is a basic music player with a Graphical User Interface that has always been a good tool for manually playing tracks from an online audio collection. The majority of the collection consists of FLAC files, with a few .wav, .mp3 and .ogg files thrown in for variety. Unfortunately, the Gutsy Gibbon release just deprecated xmms-flac, the flac file plugin for XMMS. XMMS is largely regarded as nearing the end of its useful life, distributions seem to be deprecating it in succession. Despite this, XMMS development has not stopped completely. The XMMS2 project was created to be a replacement for XMMS, but development seems to be moving slowly. The current XMMS2 development version (0.2) dates back to May 20, 2007.

[audacious]

A bit of digging through the Ubuntu Forums showed that other people were also missing the xmms-flac package. One of the more popular replacements was Audacious, not to be confused with the Audacity audio editor. Your author decided to be lazy and try something new instead of of spending time building a deprecated package. Audacious version 1.3.2 was installed from the Ubuntu repositories with no trouble. This lags the current release, which is at version 1.4.0.

Those who are familiar with XMMS will notice that Audacious has an almost identical look and feel. In fact, the project FAQ starts off by stating that: "Audacious is a fork of beep-media-player 0.9.7.1.", AKA XMMS. The basic Audacious package (on Ubuntu) includes decoder plugins for the following media types: Apple (AAC), CD FLAC, MP4, MPEG (MPC), Ogg Vorbis, WAV and WMA. Some basic visualization effects and a graphic equalizer are also included. Installing the Ubuntu audacious-plugins-extra package adds a number of interesting visualization and effects plugins.

Unfortunately, one nice XMMS feature that seems to be missing in Audacious is the Play Directory file selector that shows up when right-clicking the mouse on the Sample Rate/Stereo part of the display. To achieve the same functionality, one has to select Play File then select all of the files using the shift-right mouse combination. This also has the unexpected effect of causing an Add To Bookmarks/Show Hidden Files popup to show up. Besides that one missing feature, Audacious seems to do everything one would expect from XMMS.

As noted in the Ubuntu Forums, Audacious does seem to be a bit of a memory hog compared to XMMS. The top utility showed the Audacious Memory footprint to be around 21MB resident/ 200 MB virtual versus 8MB resident/ 45 MB virtual for XMMS. Code bloat is nothing unique to Audacious, fortunately the average amount of system RAM is also growing.

Audacious should easily take the place of XMMS on Gutsy Gibbon and forthcoming Ubuntu releases, it now has a place on your author's list of essential packages.

Comments (16 posted)

System Applications

Clusters and Grids

Release of rsplib 2.3.1

Version 2.3.1 of rsplib is out. "rsplib is the Open Source implementation (GPLv3) of the IETF's upcoming standard for Reliable Server Pooling (RSerPool). It provides protocols and functionalities for the management of server pools and sessions between users and pools. In particular, RSerPool takes care for server selection and session failover support among servers of a pool. The rsplib package contains a library for the session communication (the rsplib), an implementation of the pool management component (registrar) as well as multiple example service implementations."

Full Story (comments: none)

Database Software

Postgres Weekly News

The November 4, 2007 edition of the Postgres Weekly News is online with the latest PostgreSQL DBMS articles and resources.

Full Story (comments: none)

SQLite version 3.5.2 released

Version 3.5.2 of SQLite, a light weight DBMS, is out. "This is an incremental release that fixes several minor problems, adds some obscure features, and provides some performance tweaks. Upgrading is optional. The experimental compile-time option SQLITE_OMIT_MEMORY_ALLOCATION is no longer supported. On the other hand, it is now possible to compile SQLite so that it uses a static array for all its dynamic memory allocation needs and never calls malloc. Expect to see additional radical changes to the memory allocation subsystem in future releases."

Comments (none posted)

Embedded Systems

BusyBox 1.8.0 released

Unstable version 1.8.0 of BusyBox , a collection of command line tools for embedded systems, is out. "Note: this is probably the very last release with lash. It will be dropped. Please migrate to hush." Many other changes have been made to the code.

Comments (none posted)

Filesystem Utilities

FOG - Free, Open-Source Ghost: Version 0.04 (SourceForge)

Version 0.04 of FOG has been announced. "FOG is Free, Open-source ghost, a computer imaging/rescue suite. A free alt. to Ghost, used to image Windows XP, Vista PCs using PXE, PartImage, and a Web Gui to tie it together. Soon to add memory test, disk test, disk wipe and av scan. We are proud to release Version 0.04 of FOG. This version adds some advanced boot options like disk wiping."

Comments (1 posted)

Mail Software

The Gmail Greasemonkey API

Google has put up a page for people writing Greasemonkey scripts to rearrange the Gmail interface. "Google acknowledges that some people are going to change their own experience of our web applications regardless of what we do. Resistance, as they say, is futile. It would also be somewhat hypocritical. After all, a Google employee wrote Greasemonkey in the first place, another wrote these scripts to add functionality to Gmail, and a third wrote two books on the subject (and these docs). Instead, we would like to provide a little help to make such scripts more robust."

Comments (10 posted)

sendmail 8.14.2 is available

Version 8.14.2 of the sendmail mail transfer agent is out. "Sendmail, Inc., and the Sendmail Consortium announce the availability of sendmail 8.14.2 which fixes some problems, e.g., - an important bug in the milter function smfi_chgfrom() which could cause the loss of a message body. - the handling of queued messages with 8 bit characters in From: or To: header which could be "mistaken" for internal control characters during a queue run and trigger various consistency checks. - the handling of lines longer than MAXLINE-1 characters in certain cases."

Full Story (comments: none)

Printing

Common UNIX Printing System 1.3.4

Version 1.3.4 of CUPS, the Common UNIX Printing System, has been announced. "CUPS 1.3.4 fixes a buffer overflow bug along with some localization, authentication, and printing bugs."

Comments (none posted)

Desktop Applications

Audio Applications

AlsaPlayer 0.99.80

Version 0.99.80 of AlsaPlayer has been announced. "I am proud to announce that AlsaPlayer-0.99.80 got stable, thanks to the hard work of every one that contributed to the GTK2 interface and other functions, as well that by submitting/fixing bugs. This release is a bug fixes release."

Full Story (comments: none)

SuperCollider 3.1 is out

Version 3.1 of SuperCollider, a real-time audio synthesis programming language, has been announced. "A lot of changes and improvements have been made over the last few weeks leading up to this release. If you haven't upgraded in a while, now would be a good time to do so!"

Full Story (comments: none)

Business Applications

Onepoint Project 7.1 Update 1 released (SourceForge)

Version 7.1 Update 1 of Onepoint Project has been announced. "We strongly recommend this update to everyone who is using Onepoint Project. Onepoint Project is the first open source project leadership software solution integrating project planning, progress tracking, controlling, monitoring and reporting into a single, easy-to-use Web 2.0 or desktop application. The solution focuses mainly on single and multi-project management, but provides also a number of practical portfolio management and resource management features."

Comments (none posted)

Desktop Environments

The GNOME 2.22 roadmap

The GNOME 2.22 roadmap has been posted; it contains a long list of items which are expected to find their way into the upcoming 2.22 release (and beyond). Among many other things, 2.22 looks to include Anjuta DevStudio, Empathy, and Cheese.

Comments (4 posted)

GNOME 2.21.1 released

Version 2.21.1 of the GNOME desktop has been released. "This is the first release of the GNOME 2.21.x series. This opens the development cycle for what will become the stable GNOME 2.22.x release."

Full Story (comments: none)

GARNOME 2.21.1 announced

Version 2.21.1 of GARNOME, the bleeding edge GNOME distribution, is out. "This release includes all of GNOME 2.21.1 plus a whole bunch of updates and fixes that were released after the GNOME freeze date. This is the first development release on our road towards GNOME 2.22.0, which will be released in March 2008."

Full Story (comments: none)

GNOME Software Announcements

The following new GNOME software has been announced this week: You can find more new GNOME software releases at gnomefiles.org.

Comments (none posted)

KDE Software Announcements

The following new KDE software has been announced this week: You can find more new KDE software releases at kde-apps.org.

Comments (none posted)

KDE Commit-Digest (KDE.News)

The November 4, 2007 edition of the KDE Commit-Digest has been announced. The content summary says: "Krushing day concludes with focused bug fixing for the KDE 4.0 release. Work on various "runners" in Plasma, with general work on applets and the addition of binary and fuzzy clocks. Consraints support in the Step physics simulation package. Work on icons across KDE Games applications. Support for the Scalix groupware server in KDE-PIM. Entry editing improvements in KOrganizer. Improved Blu-Ray format support in K3b. Solid gets support for Video(4Linux) devices. Kopete uses Solid for network detection and support of audio/video devices. Various progress across KOffice."

Comments (none posted)

Xorg Software Announcements

The following new Xorg software has been announced this week:
  • XCB 1.1 (new features, bug fixes and documentation work)
More information can be found on the X.Org Foundation wiki.

Comments (none posted)

Customizing X Window: An Introduction (O'Reilly)

Frank Pohlmann discusses configuration of the X window system on O'Reilly. "Many Linux and Unix desktops and window managers should actually be called X Desktops, since they use the X Window framework to provide users with a full, bitmapped system GUI. Still, most Linux and Unix users would not actually see X Window directly, except when they run X applications, like the xterm and rxvt terminals or some fairly basic games. On its own, X Window requires, but does not provide software to manage and display flexible GUI elements, e.g., windows. It provides the primitives to display them, however, including the ability to draw graphical elements and, of course, strings of characters."

Comments (none posted)

Electronics

GNU Radio release 3.1.1 is available

Version 3.1.1 of GNU Radio, a control system for a software defined radio transmitter/receiver, is out. "This is an important bug fix release that clears up some longstanding issues in the USRP FPGA code and some recent regressions in the GNU Radio examples. It is recommended that you upgrade to this version if you are tracking the stable releases."

Full Story (comments: none)

gSpiceUI 0.9.55 announced

Version 0.9.55 of gSpiceUI, a GUI for two freely available SPICE electronic circuit simulation engines, has been announced. "Things to note with the this release : - Makefiles have been modified. If anyone has problems let me know. - Can now tell the src/Makefile which version of wxWidgets to compile against. Good for package maintainers. - The sources are now in the SVN repository on SourceForge."

Comments (none posted)

Games

Cyphesis 0.5.14 released (WorldForge)

The WorldForge game project has announced version 0.5.14 of Cyphesis. "Cyphesis is a small to medium scale server for WorldForge games, with builtin AI. This version includes the demo game Mason which is currently in development. This release is intended for server administrators wishing to run a Mason server and World developers developing new worlds or game systems."

Comments (none posted)

PyChess Philidor 0.8 beta released (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop.org covers the release of PyChess version 0.8 beta. "The long development time covers a close to total rewrite, the most throughout testing for a PyChess release yet, and a massive new base of features. Many of which users have been screaming since the first alpha of PyChess."

Comments (none posted)

GUI Packages

Anjuta DevStudio 2.3.0 released (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop covers the release of Anjuta DevStudio 2.3.0, a GUI design tool. "This release is highly developmental and contains lot of new stuffs, including beefed up debugger support, new icons, new file manager plugin, friendly glade designer integration as documents, preferences reorganization, improved code assistance, improved plugin framework for language bindings and lot more."

Comments (1 posted)

SPTK 3.5.6 is out

Version 3.5.6 of SPTK, the Simply Powerful ToolKit, has been announced. "This release introduces general UTF-8 compatibility of the whole toolkit. It means that most of the components work with UTF-8 just fine. The GUI components, however, require FLTK-utf8 in order to work with UTF-8. SPTK automatically selects FLTK-utf8 if both FLTK versions are installed on the system. Also, for masked inputs, UTF-8 masks with non-ASCII chars wouldn't work correctly."

Comments (none posted)

Looking forward to wxWidgets 3 (wxBlog)

wxBlog previews the upcoming release of the wxWidgets 3 GUI toolkit. "The first alpha version of wxWidgets 2.0 was released 10 and a half years ago and we are still (only) at version 2.8.6 right now so the wxWidgets version numbers don't change very quickly as we, with the disdain proper to free software developers, don't really like inflating them for marketing purposes. However soon -- hopefully in the beginning of the next year -- we will release wxWidgets 3.0 which will be the first change of major version since a long time and only the second time it happens in wxWidgets history. So it may be interesting to look at what exactly has changed to warrant this and I'll try to briefly describe it in this post."

Comments (none posted)

Music Applications

Amuc version 1.5 released

Version 1.5 of Amuc has been announced. "Amuc is a light-weight tool for composing and playing music. 'Light-weight' in the sense of not needing graphical or other toolkits. It is very fast and offers useful features to help the inexperienced composer. Now it also incorporates a pitch extractor, translating a wave file to notes. Listen to a fast solo by John Coltrane on saxophone, followed by the extracted tune with a simple accompaniment, and then with a synthetic bass g[u]itar and sampled drums".

Full Story (comments: none)

Office Suites

Key KOffice Developers Talk About KOffice 2 and Open Standards (KDE.News)

KDE.news has an interview with KOffice developers with some information about KOffice 2 but lots more about ODF support and document standards. "'We're taking part in the OASIS because we truly believe in Open Standards. KOffice standardises on OpenDocument. Free Software and open standards are a perfect match and the way to move forward for a society to ensure vendor-independent access to its data. We're actively participating in the OASIS since it matches our value, and we believe that one strong standard is in the best interest of our users.'"

Comments (none posted)

Web Browsers

Mozilla's Prism now available for Linux too

The Mozilla Prism project, which seeks to more closely integrate desktop and web applications, made its first release on 24 October, but only for the Windows platform. The Linux community reacted as one would expect. Mozilla has now announced the availability of a Linux version. Mac OS X support has been added as well.

Comments (11 posted)

Languages and Tools

C

GCC 4.3.0 Status Report

The November 4, 2007 edition of the GCC 4.3.0 Status Report is online with the latest Gnu Compiler Collection development news. "We're still in Stage 3 for GCC 4.3. As discussed on the GCC mailing list, once we reach 100 open regressions, we'll enter regressions-only mode -- but we'll not actually create a branch until we're very close to making the GCC 4.3.0 release."

Full Story (comments: none)

Caml

Caml Weekly News

The November 6, 2007 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with new articles about the Caml language.

Full Story (comments: none)

JSP

ZK 3.0 released (SourceForge)

Version 3.0 of ZK has been announced. "ZK is Ajax framework enriching Web apps with little programming. With event-driven and markup languages, development is as simple as programming desktops and authoring HTML/XUL pages. ZK supports scripting lang including Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Groovy... Over 100 new features and 164 bug fixed, server push, ZK layout components, theme support for ZK components, and easier way to realize MVC approach."

Comments (none posted)

Perl

Test::Harness 3.00 released (use Perl)

Version 3.00 of Test::Harness has been announced. "It's a complete rewrite of Test::Harness with a more modular architecture that should make it easier to write custom testing tools."

Comments (none posted)

Perl 6 Design Meeting Minutes for 31 October 2007 (use Perl)

The minutes from the October 31, 2007 Perl 6 Design Meeting have been published. "The Perl 6 design team met on 31 October 2007. Larry, Allison, Jerry, Will, Jesse, and chromatic attended."

Comments (none posted)

PHP

New PHP documentation build system is ready for testing

A new PHP documentation build system has been announced. "The PHP documentation team is pleased to announce the initial release of the new build system that generates the PHP Manual. Written in PHP, PhD ([PH]P based [D]ocBook renderer) builds are now available for viewing at docs.php.net. Everyone is encouraged to test and use this system so that bugs will be found and squashed."

Comments (none posted)

Python

Python-URL! - weekly Python news and links

The November 5, 2007 edition of the Python-URL! is online with a new collection of Python article links.

Full Story (comments: none)

IDEs

The Open Komodo Project open-source dev tools

ActiveState has announced the launch of Open Komodo. "Open Komodo is now open! The open source platform for building development environments based on Komodo IDE and featuring the open-sourced code base from Komodo Edit is now available to developers at http://www.openkomodo.com."

Full Story (comments: none)

pydev for eclipse 1.3.10 released (SourceForge)

Version 1.3.10 of pydev for eclipse has been announced, it adds a number of new features. The project is a: "Python Development Environment (Python IDE plugin for Eclipse). Features editor, code completion, refactoring, outline view, debugger, and other goodies".

Comments (none posted)

Version Control

GIT 1.5.3.5 released

Version 1.5.3.5 of the GIT distributed version control system is out. "There are many fixes including a handful bugs that led to segfaults."

Full Story (comments: none)

Page editor: Forrest Cook
Next page: Linux in the news>>


Copyright © 2007, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds