Six Distro Categories

August 13th, 2006 • Linux

There are the daring Minis and LiveCDs (Knoppix), the specialized ones (Linux-on-a-toilet), the “techdemo” distros (Kororaa), the “Mighty Underdog” distros (Frugalware; Zenwalk), the retard OSes. (Linspire; Mepis), and finally the uber-1337 Gnu/Linux distros (Debian; Slackware; Gentoo.)

I like the way TechNews put it.

Fixing Skype Sound Problems on Linux

May 9th, 2006 • 5 comments Asides, Linux

Skype’s backend is based on OSS. This causes Skype to have many problems with full-duplexing. OSS is fairly old, I think it already served it’s purpose and served it well, but that’s about enough, move on to ALSA already.

On Linux, Skype’s not a very good citizen, so if you’re getting “Problem with sound device” errors and “/dev/dsp-1: Device or resource busy” errors, here’s what to do:

• Install alsa-oss package, wraps around software that uses OSS and makes it ALSA-compatible. Most distributions (at least Fedora, Ubuntu and Arch) call this package the same.
• Run aoss /usr/bin/skype
• (Optional) Rename /usr/bin/skype and put a bash script in its place to run aoss
• Enjoy free calls!

Update: You don’t need to this anymore because Skype have already released an ALSA-compatible version for Linux. Let’s go nuts.

Configuring nVidia Drivers on Ubuntu

November 27th, 2005 • 2 comments Linux

I’ve been fiddling around with Ubuntu Breezy lately, it seems like a solid system, more or less. I’m going to get to that later on, but now I’m going to document how to properly install nVidia drivers on Ubuntu.

Ubuntu’s Wiki has many out-dated documents on how to do that, and they all say that it’s as easy as running:

apt-get install nvidia-glx
nvidia-glx-config enable

After rebooting, nVidia drivers should be installed. If you want to check, run:

glxgears -printfps

On my GeForce 6800 Ultra I’m getting around 14,000 FPS, I’m sure I can speed it up with more tweaking, but I don’t really have the time for it.

The thing is, enabling nVidia GLX drivers isn’t enough to get the performance these drivers are capable of. So here’s what you need to do:

First, check whether you’re using AGPGART or NVIDIA AGP drivers:

$ cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status
Status:          Enabled
Driver:          NVIDIA
AGP Rate:        8x
Fast Writes:     Disabled
SBA:             Enabled

If it says AGPGART instead of NVIDIA then you should add nvidia-agp to your /etc/modules just before the line that says nvidia (assuming you already run nvidia-glx-config enable).

This tells the system to load nVidia AGP drivers on start-up, but that’s not it, you need to also disable loading AGPGART, nvidia-agp doesn’t work with AGPGART loaded, so add it to hotplug’s blacklist:

$ tail /etc/hotplug/blacklist

# snd_intel8x0m can interfere with snd_intel8x0, doesn't seem to support much
# hardware on its own (Ubuntu bug #2011, #6810)
snd_intel8x0m

# causes failure to suspend on HP compaq nc6000 (Ubuntu: #10306)
i2c_i801

amd64_agp
agpgart

I had to blacklist amd64_agp too because it depeneds on agpgart. Note that this doesn’t prevent AGPGART from loading again, but this makes sure that NVIDIA AGP is loaded before it.

Next, you should add a few performance-enhancing options to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Just above the line that says Driver   "nvidia" add these:

    Option "NoLogo" "true"  # Disables nVidia's logo on start-up
    Option "NvAGP" "1"  # Tries internal nVidia AGP drivers first
    Option "RenderAccel" "true"  # Duh :)
    Option "CursorShadow" "true"  # Adds an alpha-shadow to your cursor
    Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"  # Mostly used for cool effects

Note that using AllowGLXWithComposite can cause the system to act a little flaky when you enable Composite extension. This is used for cute Vista-like effects, like transparent windows, drop-shadows, etc. Use with caution.

Well, I hope that’s it. I didn’t have to recompile my kernel or nVidia drivers, most went out smoothly, except for the fact that I had to search a lot for this information.

One last tip, try to install an optimized kernel as soon as possible. Ubuntu comes with linux-386 package, try to upgrade it to linux-686 or linux-k7, depeneding on your hardware, you’ll notice a performance increase.

Best of luck.

P.S. Turns out most of my performance gripes with Ubuntu was because of nVidia’s “inproper” installation. Like I said nvidia-glx-config enable didn’t quite do the trick.

Is Ubuntu Really Breezy?!

November 21st, 2005 • Linux

I don’t know what got into me, but Debian’s apt-get really does something to me, so as soon as Breezy was released I decided to give Ubuntu a second chance.

Boy was I wrong…

In all honesty, I simply don’t get it. I tried and tried to fix whatever’s wrong with its Gnome defaults to no avail. It’s too damn slow! Yes, really. I’ve heard about a Firefox issue eating up all the CPU on Breezy and that it should be fixed with a simple install of the latest binary from Mozilla.org, but it’s not just the browser, everything in the system feels sluggish as hell.

I thought maybe I did something wrong, maybe I installed a package I shouldn’t have, maybe I unleashed the wrath of “humanity”, I’m really not sure, so I reinstalled. Then, I reinstalled again. One more time, reinstalled. I still kept coming back to the same issues over and over again. Even Hoary wasn’t this slow.

I even downloaded and installed OpenSuSE (I’m sorry about the caps, I’m still not sure hOw tO sPEll SuSe :), Slackware with Dropline, did a Stage3 Gentoo installation, even FreeBSD delivered great performance. I’m astonished. How could a distribution this cool release a version this crappy?!

They say Droopy Drapper is going to be the be-all-end-all distribution, and I have to give Ubuntu guys their credit, they’ve done some really hard work until now, after which I can’t explain this sudden decline in quality. They’ve already released their first nightly of Dapper. Now guys, why on earth would you be working on a newer release when you still haven’t fixed the old one?

Remember how Ubuntu used to toot their own horn about a periodic 6-month release? Come to think about it now, I believe it’s a bad idea. Maybe Ubuntu devs felt some pressure to release and they just had to go for it. Well, I’d be much happier if you do a 6-year release period but do it right, I mean really right.

I’m not sure what to think right now about Ubuntu. They’ve impressed me once, but they can’t seem to do it again.

Wish you best of luck Ubuntu team. Hopefully, you won’t need it.

Kool Krashing

July 26th, 2005 • 5 comments Linux

The first thing that I do when I install Windows is disable its error reporting. To me, it’s absolutely useless, I’m not going to dig into a core dump, it takes way too much time, I’m not going to send any information to Microsoft because for some reason, I just can’t bring myself to trusting them with my privacy.

Yesterday, while emerge sync && emerge -uDN world, amaroK crashed. I’m not sure why it did, probably because of some library incompatibilities since the update wasn’t finished yet. But anyhow, when amaroK crashed, Kmail popped up with a new message reading:

amaroK has crashed! We’re terribly sorry about this :(

But all is not lost! You could potentially help us fix the crash. amaroK has attached a backtrace that describes the crash, so just click send, or if you have time, write a brief description of how the crash happened first.

Many thanks.

That’s got to be the cutest crash I’ve come across, it makes me actually want to send crash reports. All I had to do is click on send and get back to work, no hassles, no interruptions, just a little smile.

By the way, in case I haven’t mentioned this before, amaroK is the only media player that got me to switch from Winamp! I absolutely adored Winamp and had it running under Wine, amaroK changed that; but that’s a whole different story.