Archive for the 'Linux' Category

We have an opening for an experienced C# developer at DoubleTwist:

You will be tasked with working on both our client software as well as server backend code. Besides coding, you will be responsible for assisting with documentation, building test plans, debugging software, providing design input, and helping in every way to ensure the successful rollout of each phase of the project.

Location: San Francisco

If you are interested, send us your résumé. If you know of someone who might be interested, please forward this to them.

I am selling the following items. If you live in downtown San Francisco I will personally deliver the item(s) to you.

• Nokia 770: Used for 6 weeks. This unit is very special as it has been touched by the iCEO! (oh, and me, but I’m not quite at his level of fame). Runs Linux and is very hackable. $300.
• 3G iPod 40GB: Used for 2.5 years. Own a piece of DRM history! This is the iPod I used when I reverse engineered FairPlay in winter 2003/2004. Battery needs replacing as it doesn’t last very long anymore. $150.
• Firewire PCMCIA card: Nothing exotic here. Used only for a few days. $10 with purchase of any item above $50.
• AUDIOTRAK OPTOPlay: Used for a few months. $30 with purchase of any item above $50.

Update: The Nokia 770 and the iPod have been sold.

I’m 22 years old today and it’s story time: When I was 17 years old I bought my first portable MP3 player. I reverse engineered the Windows driver that came with it and wrote a Linux driver. After some time I was contacted by the Singaporean company that manufactured the player. They were quite happy with my work because they had “lost contact” with the Chinese company they had outsourced driver development to. Not only did they give me their support, they wanted to hire me to write a Linux driver for their next product. I was willing to start the work immediately, but they needed my CV first due to formalities. After I sent them my CV I never heard back from them. I doubt it was due to my lack of work experience, as I had already demonstrated that I had the necessary skills. So if you were wondering ‘Old enough for what?’ after reading the title of this post, the answer is ‘Old enough to write software for a company in Singapore.’

Having used various GNU/Linux distributions over the years, I find these pictures hilarious:
Caldera, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandrake, RedHat, Slackware, Ubuntu.

I hacked together a very simple C# command line audio player that uses libvlc.

It supports the following formats:

MP2, MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, Speex, FLAC, Apple Lossless, AC3, CDDA, WMA 1 and 2.
MOD formats: MOD, XM, IT, S3M, 669, MTM, STM.

Source Code: snd123-1.0.2.tar.bz2 (MD5: a315990e0ab58f30ca80589e251e2932)
Ubuntu Breezy package: snd123_1.0.2-1_i386.deb (MD5: f81e05b3bd9ed7cd8a0f5b458af78de6)

Syntax examples:

snd123 ~/Music/song.mp3
snd123 cdda:/dev/cdrom
snd123 http://a1864.phobos.apple.com/Music/y2005/m05/d25/h16/s05.yoplcihv.aac.p.m4p

I’ve released version 1.0 of SharpMusique. Ubuntu Breezy package is now available.

ChangeLog: Improved album support. Proper build system.

Instructions for compiling VLC with VC-1 (WMV9) support under Ubuntu Breezy

Install dependencies available from the Ubuntu repositories (main and universe)

$ sudo apt-get install libwxgtk2.6-dev libdvbpsi3-dev libmpeg2-4-dev libmad0-dev libasound2-dev libesd0-dev x11proto-video-dev libdvdnav-dev liba52-0.7.4-dev libflac-dev libfreetype6-dev libid3tag0-dev libogg-dev libpng12-dev libspeex-dev libtheora-dev libvorbis-dev libxml2-dev zlib1g-dev gcc g++ automake1.9 autoconf libtool subversion cvs libx11-dev

Install libdvdcss (DVD support)

$ mkdir ~/videolan ; cd ~/videolan
$ wget http://downloads.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/0.8.2/contrib/libdvdcss-1.2.8.tar.bz2
$ tar -jxvf libdvdcss-1.2.8.tar.bz2 ; cd libdvdcss-1.2.8
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr ; make ; sudo make install

Compile faad2 (AAC support)

$ cd ~/videolan ; wget http://downloads.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/0.8.2/contrib/faad2-20040923.tar.bz2
$ tar -jxvf faad2-20040923.tar.bz2 ; cd faad2-20040923
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr ; cd libfaad ; make

Compile ffmpeg (support for H264 and many other codecs)

$ cd ~/videolan ; cvs -z9 -d:pserver:anonymous@mplayerhq.hu:/cvsroot/ffmpeg co ffmpeg
$ cd ffmpeg ; ./configure --enable-pp --enable-gpl ; make

Compile libvc1 (WMV9 support)

$ cd ~/videolan ; wget http://nanocrew.net/sw/libvc1-1.0.tar.gz ; tar -zxvf libvc1-1.0.tar.gz
$ wget http://USERNAME:PWD@www.smpte-vc1.org/TrialPublication/Decoder/VC1_reference_decoder_release6.zip
$ unzip VC1_reference_decoder_release6.zip
$ cp VC1_reference_decoder_release6/decoder/*.[ch] libvc1-1.0/src/.
$ cp VC1_reference_decoder_release6/shared/*.[ch] libvc1-1.0/src/.
$ cd libvc1-1.0 ; ./bootstrap ; ./configure --prefix=/usr ; make

Install VLC

$ cd ~/videolan ; svn co svn://svn.videolan.org/vlc/trunk vlc-trunk
$ cd vlc-trunk ; wget -O – http://nanocrew.net/sw/vlc-libvc1.diff | patch -p0
$ ./bootstrap ; ./configure --with-ffmpeg-tree=../ffmpeg --enable-faad --with-faad-tree=../faad2-20040923 --enable-esd --enable-flac --enable-theora --enable-libvc1 --with-libvc1-tree=../libvc1-1.0 --disable-hal
$ make ; sudo make install

ATI has released a new version of the fglrx driver. What has changed since the previous one?

• DVI output works
• XVideo playback of 720p content works

Suspend doesn’t work at all (system locks up and screen is garbled).

I was looking through boxes of old stuff and came across the first computer programming book I read and the first Linux distro I tried.

Issues with the ATI fglrx driver on my IBM ThinkPad T42p:

• DVI output does not work (no signal).
• Unable to play 720p video because XVideo can’t allocate enough video memory: “BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)”. Disabling DRI frees up enough video memory to enable successful playback.
• After waking up from suspend, 2D performance is very bad (scrolling in gnome-terminal and firefox stutters).

None of these problems occur with the open source xorg radeon driver.