Catalyst 8.5 on Linux aka fglrx

Well I just upgraded to the Catalyst 8.5 drivers on Linux and they say that 2d should be fast. I ran a gtkperf test and the change was negligible.

So if you are expecting a big speed bump, I would lower your expectations.

Sprint Unlimited Plans

Well I read a rumor today that Sprint was eliminating the Unlimited part of its broadband access cards Terms of Service. I REALLY hope this is not true since we don't have a lot of choice for internet. And the Sprint broadband card is the best way to get on the net.

Application idea

I have an idea for some software that would be cool eye candy I think, but I don't have time to learn how to do it. But I think it would be something cool to implement.

Anyway, the idea is to take the Mac dock and the Nautilus desktop and merge the eye candy. As you mouse over the icons on the desktop, they get bigger and the other icons move out of the way, like the icons on the Mac dock.

I think that clutter could be used to complete this pretty easily.

Any takers?

Gnome MPlayer - Next

I added a feature to the DVD w/ menus playback yesterday that adds a menu button to the panel buttons that if you click this it takes you back to the main DVD Menu.

I also found that the latest svn of libdvdnav and mplayer don't get along. I've found that libdvdnav r1031 is the last one that works properly with mplayer if there is an error in the dvd audio decoding.

I think I'm getting close to wrapping up this next version of Gnome MPlayer.

Picked a camera

Since my Kodak camera broke I did some research on cameras out there. I liked the Canon SD890 (as seen on the web) but nobody at the big box stores had one. So we looked at a few and found the Olympus Stylus 1010. The price was ok, the zoom lens was huge at 7x and 10mp was right where I wanted it. The size of the camera is great as well, with it being about the size of my cell phone. So far the few pictures I have taken with it have come out well. I'll take it out to the house later today and take some outdoor pictures with it.

Sticking with the Asus EAH3650 Silent Magic

So after a few days of working with the card and the drivers I think I got a good solution here. Driver installation was painless and the quiet of the card is great. The heat from the card raised the temp of the box about 10 degrees F, but I was able to mitigate that by installing a small case fan that came with the case (Antec NSK1380). I still would like to avoid putting in the case fan. The machine with the fan runs at 49C/120F and 55C/130C without the fan. The fan is quiet enough that I can ignore it especially with a radio playing. I hear the Thermaltake Slot Fan only runs at 21db, so maybe next time I order something from NewEgg, I'll get it.

gtkperf -c 500 -a on the 3650

gtkperf -c 500 -a
GtkPerf 0.40 - Starting testing: Tue Apr 29 10:56:16 2008

GtkEntry - time: 0.09
GtkComboBox - time: 4.44
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 3.42
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.86
GtkProgressBar - time: 1.01
GtkToggleButton - time: 1.44
GtkCheckButton - time: 1.21
GtkRadioButton - time: 1.43
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 5.38
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 3.75
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 1.45
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 318.11
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 45.02
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 4.13
---
Total time: 391.73

Other than the Circles and Text results, this is one of the fastest results I've seen on my machine.

Test machine: 2.4 Ghz Q6600, 4GB RAM, Asus P5e-VM motherboard, Asus 3650 Silent Magic, fglrx 8.476, Fedora 8

Video Cards and Fedora 8

So as you know I've been having some issues with the Intel G35 video chip and Linux. So after thinking about it, I figured I should just get a real video card anyway. So I first ordered a Sapphire 2600xt card from NewEgg. Got the fglrx drivers from Livna and things were going well. Card is fast and responds well and the drivers even work ok. One problem however, the fan on the card is super loud. I have a small and quiet machine and the fan on the video card could be heard in the next room. Totally unacceptable for the goal of a quiet PC. So I did something I hardly ever do and I returned the card.

Next, I decided to stick with an ATI chip since I got burned on my last nVidia card (GeForce 3 Ti200). nVidia dropped support for that chip and basically turned a decent video card into junk. So I decided on the Asus 3650 Silent Magic card. Now specwise this card is a little slower, however in my testing with Extreme TuxRacer the card actually gives a better FPS than the 2600xt. SecondLife, the other big 3d app I test with still gives a great picture. The added benefit of the card... 0 noise, sure it takes up a second slot in my machine, but the board I have has just about everything I need on it and there are only 4 slots anyway. The card takes the PCIx16 and PCIx1 slots. I have a PCIx1 and a PCI slot free on the machine. About the only thing I could think of using the slots for would be a video capture card. And I think an external USB one, might be a better choice. My only concern at this point is the extra heat in the card from the video board. I might be able to move around some cables inside to help the airflow. I'm hoping that ATI will enable powerplay in the drivers for the board.

glxgears: ~6600fps
quake3: 90fps (it never goes above or below and I'm running 1280x1024 with triliniar filtering)
etracer: ~150fps
secondlife: recommended settings (bar is on level 3 of 4)

I am disappointed in the Intel video support since the motherboard I picked up, I specifically got for the G35 chip on it. So I could have saved a couple of bucks and got a motherboard with fewer features. I will admit that I am pleased with the Asus product's I've gotten. The motherboard is an Asus P5E-VM HDMI.

So I'll do some more testing with this video card and let you know how it goes.

Frustrations with the Intel G35 chip

Well, I think I've had about enough with the Intel G35 chip under Linux. I've installed drivers from git and used the prepackaged drivers with Fedora are full of problems as well. So I've ordered a ATI 2600XT card and am gonna try it with the fglrx driver. I'm currently running fglrx on my Thinkpad and the 3d experience is pretty good. So hopefully the free drivers will get there. But after 2 months of problems with video issues, I've had enough and gonna try another chipset.

Intel G35 chipset on Linux

Holy cow I've been having some issues with the Intel G35 on linux. Especially with 3d code and screen corruption and crashing. After a lot of git pulls I finally have a setup that actually works to my expectations.

As of today I did the following

pulled drm from git, compiled and installed and thing compiled and installed the linux-core subdirectory as well

pulled mesa from git master compiled and installed

pulled xserver from git master and compiled and installed with these options
./configure --prefix=/usr --with-mesa-source=/home/kdekorte/cvs/mesa/ --with-dri -driver-path=/usr/lib/dri --enable-builtin-fonts

pulled xf86-drv-intel from the 'origin/intel-batchbuffer' branch and then compiled and installed with these options

./configure --prefix=/usr --with-xserver-source=/home/kdekorte/cvs/xserver

After all that googleearth, etracer and quake3 all work as expected. And reasonably fast. Quake gives me 90fps and for some reason I think it could give more. etracer is in the 20-25 fps range.

history meme

Not that anyone cares...

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
187 cd
90 src/gnome-mplayer
87 ls
84 sudo
57 make
40 rpm
34 vi
34 exit
27 more
26 git

Gnome MPlayer Subtitles

I've been working alot on the Gnome Mplayer issues with subtitles. Now I have to admit that most of what I know about subtitles and mplayer, I've learned in the last couple of weeks. I do know that a current version of mplayer is needed for proper subtitle support. So if subtitles are not working right, then get a newer version of mplayer. I've been testing with mplayer SVN (Mar 25,2008) and everything is working pretty good. You can even switch subtitles while the video is playing back.

Now code locations

Due to internet connectivity issues I had to move the SVN repos for gnome-mplayer and gecko-mediaplayer to new sites.

Gnome MPlayer: http://code.google.com/p/gnome-mplayer/

Gecko MediaPlayer: http://code.google.com/p/gecko-mediaplayer/

This completes the move of these project off of my website. RPMs are now part of Livna, so you can get them there.

Firefox 3 beta 3 on Linux

I just installed Firefox 3 beta 3 for Linix on my machine and I am very impressed. Memory usage is down, performance is up and the native GTK theme looks great. I can hardly wait for the final version to come out.

gnome-mplayer and gecko-mediaplayer 0.6.0 released

The latest versions of gnome-mplayer and gecko-mediaplayer were released today. gnome-mplayer had the bulk of the changes. The playlist and GUI have been greatly enhanced.

When just playing audio files the video window disappears. The option to hide the playlist is still available, making the player use a minimal amount of screenspace.

How Unix people make children

who && gawk && uname && talk && date && wine && touch && unzip && strip && touch && finger && mount && fsck && more && yes; yes; more; yes; umount && make clean && sleep

New Development Machine

I finally got a new machine for personal use and this one should last me awhile.

Intel Q6600 (quad core) @ 2.4Ghz
4GB RAM
250GB HD
Antek NSK1380 case (small formfactor, about the size of a large 4 slice toaster)
Asus P5E-VM motherboard
Fedora 8 x86_64 as the OS

Some initial testing shows that I can compile mplayer from a make clean in about 2 mins when I use the -j 4 option to make. On my loaner laptop it was about 10-15 mins.

Hopefully now, I can get back to coding.

2008

Well a new year is a upon us once again. Amazing how many things got accomplished this year and all the things that are still on the table to complete... Someday I'll get the Star Destroyer Lego done...

I can be thankful that I have a caring family and a good job and I am in good health. After that what more can you ask for. I hope everyone has a great 2008 and I know personally I'm looking forward to the upcoming events... now if I can only sell my house... ;)

Thanks Comcast....

Well Comcast decided to block port 25 incoming into my server at my house, they think I am a spammer. I can understand blocking port 25 going out (which they did as well), but incoming? I guess they say I can't run a server and since a mail server falls into that, they can do that unless I get a commercial account or use a mail reflector both cost extra so I'm not going to do that. So now I can't receive any email coming into the mailing list that I was using for gnome-mplayer and gecko-mediaplayer. So I had to reconfigure all my email stuff yesterday. So now the mailing lists have moved to Google Groups

The group for gnome-mplayer is here: http://groups.google.com/group/gnome-mplayer

and the one for gecko-mediaplayer is here: http://groups.google.com/group/gecko-mediaplayer


You have to join the group to post, but I don't think that is a bad thing at all. The CVS mailing lists are all internal to the server and so posting to them is not blocked by Comcast, so those will remain where they are for now.

Anyway, thanks Comcast for killing several hours.

Disney World

Jody had a conference in Orlando and so we got to take a couple of days at Disney World. We got to visit Epcot, Animal Kingdom and Magic Kingdom. Disney really knows how to move people around. The infrastructure is amazing that they have put together.

Pictures are in the usual spots... (Vacations/2007/DisneyWorld)