Category: Linux

Pd midi on Fedora

A few days ago, my girlfriend asked me to set up PureData on her Fedora 11 box. Installing Pd was easy thanks to CCRMA. Making it work – not so much…

After countless failed attempts I came up with a simple yet working setup which can be implemented in about two minutes:

  1. install pd-extended, jack-audio-connection-kit and fluidsynth
  2. start JACK: jackd –realtime –silent -d alsa –midi-driver seq &
  3. start FluidSynth:
    fluidsynth -l -i -s -a jack -o synth.sample-rate=48000 /usr/share/soundfonts/default.sf2 &
  4. connect FluidSynth to ALSA:
    jack_connect fluidsynth:left alsa_pcm:playback_1
    jack_connect fluidsynth:right alsa_pcm:playback_2
  5. pd -rt -jack -alsamidi -midioutdev 1

I first tried to not use JACK because I thought it would clash with PulseAudio. Problem with this approach: Pd does not support PulseAudio natively and neither does FluidSynth in F11 (upstream supports it, but that is another sad story). So it’s either PCM sound or midi, but not both at the same time 🙁

Fortunately, JACK turned out to work great – but for normal desktop usage, I am still very happy to have PulseAudio 🙂

2009

It’s 2009 already, which means: time for another blog entry 🙂

During the last months I have mostly been busy with university. Unfortunately things tend to take a bit longer than expected… But now, having only only one exam left, I took the chance to get up to speed with the latest GNOME, Linux and FOSS development.

The general “theme” for GNOME 2.26 seems to be getting rid of legacy dependencies like libgnome(ui) everywhere, which is very nice. Also, there’s a lot of small-but-welcome improvements here and there. Finally PulseAudio will be properly integrated into the desktop (if the remaining bugs can be fixed before the final release, it will rock). Brasero is a 1st class GNOME app now: the team has done some impressive work, just look at the level of integration they accomplished during the last development cycle!

While WebKit/GTK again didn’t make it into GNOME 2.26, the progress still seems to be huge and it should really “be there” for release+1. Even without it, Epiphany got some really nice improvements (woohoo bar!).

In other news, the coming Thunderbird will follow Firefox and provide a nice native look. I really hope the motivation to draw all the needed icons will be high in the weeks to come… 😉

I’m also pleased to hear that OpenOffice is finally starting a GUI revamp, even if this effort will take quite some time: every journey starts with a first step.

openSUSE 11.0

Today I received a free boxed version of openSUSE 11.0: thanks a lot, openSUSE and Novell! I’m running and experimenting with the system inside a VM for some days now actually and it really has some amazing features and polish. I will definately put this on the laptop really soon, maybe it will replace Ubuntu as the main OS…

Update: I had to modify a lot of .menu, .directory and .desktop files to get a nicer (upstream-like) menu. Can we please have this out-of-the-box in 11.1?

Modified menu in oS11

Update 2: The Build Service is just incredible. I used it to create some updated bluetooth-related packages (bluez-gnome, obex-data-server, nautilus-sendto). You can find them here. Still not 100% satisfied with bluetooth on 11.0 though.