Want spotify?

Don’t know what it is? Read about it. Want a free invite, and live in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France, Spain or the Netherlands? Comment, and the first 15 will get one.

EDIT:

This is now in native for Linux in preview (using QT though), but only for subscribers

Wine or Crossover?

I am an avid gamer, and a while back my PS3 died on me, and I was desperate! How could I possibly live for X months (repair time, due to the retarded support partner for Sony in Scandinavia; Nordisk Film), I decided to give Steam a go. And I must give credit to Valve for that brilliant web solution. It absolutely rocks, and is a great leap forward in digital distribution. Anyway, using Steam, I saw that this Linux gaming with Wine would require allot of configuration, and Crossover had the Lame Duck promo running.

Dear expert

It have been a week since I submitted my, paid for, incident at Mandriva Expert and you have still not replied. Please get your finger out of your posterior and answer me! Seriously, I don’t know how long I can live with out my audio controls since I killed pulseaudio, getting annoying having to run alsamixer just to reduce the volume…

Sound issues

Had sound issues using RPM distributions this time around (OpenSuSE and Mandriva). My sound card is a nVidia Corporation MCP61 High Definition Audio (from lspci), which use an Intel chipset. The problem was that when one application played sound, no other could, even after the first process was killed. Not really sure what the underlying problem is, but the cause was Pulseaudio. Disabling this solved it completely, apparently. If you are using Mandriva, you can quite easily fix it by opening Mandriva Control Panel, Hardware tab and select Configure sound. From there, just uncheck “Enable pulseaudio”.

EDIT:

This was solved installing libalsa-plugins-pulseaudio, but seriously, this version of Mandriva, Powerpack none the less, was so crappy that if you want Mandriva, I think it will be worth waiting for Mageia!

drakx11 pains

Anyone familiar with Mandriva knows the drak tools (various GUI’s to configure your desktop, and most of them are quite excellent), and most likely love them. However, I noticed one flaw with the drakx11 tool, which is used to set up your graphic card. I have a troublesome screen and graphic card combo, where my graphic card are unable to read the EDID the screen sends to it (or properly identify the screen).

This means I use an custom EDID file, which I need to enable in my xorg.conf. However, before this is setup, the resolution is set ridicilously low, something like 640×480 (which is a pain to use, nothing fits on the screen). So I have to add the following line to my xorg.conf:

Option “CustomEDID” “DFP-1:/path/to/custom_edid.bin”

Where DFP-1 is the screen identifier assigned by the nVidia driver (you will find this in nvidia-settings). The file is not the problem, I created that using a very good tutorial over at nvnews and my onboard graphic card. However, on reboot, Mandriva sets my resolution to 1366×768, which is pretty reasnoable considering the size of my screen (26 inches). But I still prefer 1920×1080 and compiz fusion with enhanced desktop zoom, which is where the problems with drakx11 comes. Where nvidia-settings will keep your custom options in your xorg.conf, drakx11 will not. This means that after I had changed my resolution in drakx11, Mandriva reverted to the 640×480 resolution, and I reverted to a backup xorg.conf file each and every time until I figured out what was happening.

Still, was an easy fix, just me being stupid about it and expecting drakx11 to behave like nvidia settings…

Themes and theme engines

There is allot of nice things to say about Mandriva, but very little about their default theme, called la Ora. Even though it comes with several colour variations I find it inherently ugly, and it is always one of the first things I change. This jump was no different and I looked long and hard for a decent theme. In Ubuntu, I always change to Dust, which is a visually pleasing and pretty neutral and darkish theme.  As I have been using that theme for the past few years, I thought this was a good time to start looking for a new one using GNOME-look.org.

Desktop of choice

One of the powers of Linux and the open source movement is the freedom of choice. If the software you need exists in one flavour, it most likely have more flavours out there somewhere. This also comes to desktop environments in Linux. If you are wondering what a desktop environment is, look at your own desktop, and note the file manager, panel with menus, quick launch icons etc. That is your desktop environment.

For a Windows user this concept is quite confusing, as it Windows only comes with one desktop environment, not counting projects like Cairo Desktop Shell. In the Linux world, this is a common term, and everyone have their favorite, from GNOME to XFCE, and even LXDE etc.