video playback with compiz
Sun, 29 Nov 2009 12:16 - Daniel - Other - Comments (0)
Video playback with compiz running is pretty slow and sometimes there are some nasty glitches, like not being able to go to full screen mode, black video etc. Some of this is because of how compiz handles the video. But the good news is there is a way to get good video playback with compiz running.
There is a patch for mplayer 1.0rc2 that lets mplayer use some compiz functions to draw the video. You need to have the video plugin enabled in compiz for this to work.
First we need to get the mplayer sources.
apt-get build-dep mplayerapt-get install build-essentialapt-get source mplayer
Navigate to mplayer-1.0~rc2/libvo, download the patch and apply it.
patch -p0 vo_xv.c mplayrepatch.patch
Now you should update debain/changelog to create a new version of the package and build and install the package with
fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage -b -uc -usdpkg -i mplayer_1.0-rc2-0ubuntu17_i386.deb
I tried this with ubuntu 8.10 intrepid. If newer versions of ubuntu ship with a version of mplayer that is incompatible with the patch you have to get the mplayer1.0rc2 source code from the mplayer site.
Video playback should work now without problems. There are some other goodies apart from decent video playback speed and working full screen mode, but these two were the most important for me.
Tags: video ubuntu mplayer linux
Debian for eee PC
Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:53 - Daniel - Other - Comments (2)
I used fluxflux for quite some time on my eee Pc, but I didn't really like the PCLinuxOS it was based on. It worked quite well for some time, but the last release is kinda aged and after upgrading the OS I had some serious problems. Since I prefer Debian based systems anyway I took a quick look at Debian Lenny and Ubuntu.
Ubuntu has a special version for netbooks called Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It's not as heavy as a full Ubuntu install, but it's still quite big. Also I has a few problems with the eee 701.
Debian on the other hand can be installed with only a minimum system that uses very little space (I know, ubuntu can do that too with it's alternate installer CDs) and supports pretty much everything on the eee 701 thanks to the work of the DebianEeePC Project.
Installing it is very simple. Just follow the steps of the HowTo. I installed just the standard system and later added the x.org, gnome-core, gdm, network-manager and iceweasel by hand. After that the OS install is just about 1 GB and some stuff even is optional. For example you can skip gdm and network-manager tofree a few MB if you don't need a fancy graphical login and manage your connections manually.
The only thing that doesn't work at the moment is changing the volume with the function keys, but I don't really need that anyway.
To sum it up, Debian on the eee PC is very nice. Boot time is lightning fast and the hardware works "out of the box". If you think about installing another OS on your eee PC, Debian would be a good choise.
Tags: linux ubuntu fluxflux debian asus eee
Songbird 1.0.0 deb
Wed, 03 Dec 2008 18:54 - Daniel - Other - Comments (1)
I found a deb file that works on my ubuntu 8.04 box. Unter Hund provides debs for songbird 1.0rc1 through 1.0 final.
Unfortunately he hosts the deb for Songbird 1.0 on a one-click-hosting site. If some one want to grab this deb too, you can get it now from my mirror too.
Most noticeable change from songbird 0.7.0 to 1.0.0 is the improved startup speed. Very nice.
Tags: linux songbird music player ubuntu
Songbird 1.0.0
Tue, 02 Dec 2008 22:08 - Daniel - Other - Comments (0)
Today songbird 1.0.0 has benn released. This is the first final version of songbird. Songbird is a music player based on xulrunner (from mozilla, also powers firefox), gstreamer for playback and sqlite as database backend for the music library. It's free as in freedom and runs on windows, linux, mac os x and even opensolaris.
I've been using it for a while now (since version 0.6.0), and it is a really good music player. Unfortunately it the tarball release won't run on my ubuntu pc. Maybe building it from source will help, but I havn't tried that yet.
Tags: linux songbird music player ubuntu
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