Was very happy to read today that the air has gone out of the SCO balloon. Since 2003 SCO has been a thorn in the side for free software developers with the ongoing lawsuits and claims about Unix and Linux. With Judge Kimball not essentially gutting their case I think we have mostly seen the last of McBride and company. I think the outcome of this lawsuit will play a major role also in defining the rules of the game in terms of open source, in some sense showing that if a sleazy corporation want to try to get ahead of the game by bogus lawsuits the community now has enough resources and friends to shut them down.

In combination with the recent US supreme court ruling on software patents I think we will see a lot of changes in the coming years as the lock in model of software fail. I think the next big battleground might very well be media codecs where the US supreme courts ruling can level the playingfield and cause a lot of media codecs to become open source compatible as their patent protections fall away.

Asus Pro31s and Linux

As a followup to my blog post about the problems I had running Linux on my Asus laptop I thought I should mention that with the latest kernels for Fedora it works pretty well. The Wireless and DVD player for instance both run fine, and I am able to switch to console mode easily now without the screen going black. Suspend do not work 100% yet, but that is a common problem with a lot of laptops.

So after spending 8 days sick after returning from the UK I managed to get myself to a doctor yesterday. Got set up with a package of antibiotics which seems to be working pretty well. Still not 100% well, but at least I don’t feel like a bulldogs chew toy anymore either.

In terms of the new company things are moving forward at a brisk pace and I hope to be speaking with a local graphics designer I know this week, in order to have a nice logo and profile created for the company before we announce it.

Things are also moving rapidly forward on the moving front. Alia has been checking out various moving companies as she and Zaheer will share a moving truck with me, and I contacted a couple of storage companies today to start getting some information on pricing and availability. Know that my energy is starting to return thanks to the antibiotic I also hope to get moving on the UK room soon.

So I recently purchased an Asus PRO31S laptop and I figured I should report on how it plays with Linux in case other people out there are looking at the machine also. The specs are really nice using the new Intel Santa Rosa chipset, nvidia graphics, lightscribe capable DVD writer, Wireless card supporting up to 802.11n. It also sports a built in camera above the screen, built-in bluetooth and DVI out.

I am writing this entry on the laptop so obviously it do work, but I have to admit getting it set up was a much bigger challenge than I expected. The first problem was that no Linux distribution was able to properly detect and access the DVD drive. As you might guess this is slightly painful when trying to install linux as the DVD based installs fail as soon as the install for the first time tries to access the DVD drive. Managed to get latest Fedora installed in the end by using Network install. Once I had the core system installed I realized I needed the very latest proprietary nvidia driver to get X working at all, version 100.14.11. Problem is that the system seems unable to have the X display reset, so if I start the system with the graphical boot loader or try to go into a console I just get a black screen. So ctrl+alt+f1 etc., is not currently available and if I have the graphical boot enabled I will only get a black screen instead of the gdm login screen.

The Intel wireless cards works, well sorta. It seems to consider the signal strength very weak even if I am sitting next to the wireless router. With the original Fedora 7 kernel I needed to manually install the updated kernel driver from Intel, but with current kernel updates it seems to work fine out of the box apart from the signal strength issue. While I am not 100% sure at this point I also think the signal strength issue is what is making Skype etc., useless on the laptop.

The Asus also comes with its own annoying startup sound, you can turn it of in the bios, but it seems doing that causes the sound card to not initialize properly or something under linux, giving you zero volume sound.

Things which seems to work perfectly however for me on the laptop is the smartcard reader and the bluetooth support. The camera also seems to work fine with latest kernel updates.

Suspend partially works in the sense that I do seem able to suspend and then resume the system, but things like the wireless networking did not seem to want to resume again.

So the current status is that I have a useable laptop for my day to day needs, but there are still a lot of things that aren’t working fully. Hopefully the driver issues will sort themselves out over the next Months, but at this point in time it is not a laptop I would recommend for a great out-of-the-box linux experience.

After my last blog entry where I let it be known that a group of us left Fluendo I realized that I had forgotten to put up my new (old) contact information. So people who need to reach me/us can contact me on uraeus*at*gnome*org.

I also want to say thank you to all those who sent us emails and messages of support and best wishes, much appreciated.

So as of today Wim Taymans, Edward Hervey and myself are no longer working for Fluendo. The same goes for Tim Muller who has been working as a contractor for Fluendo for a long time now. The reasons for us deciding to leave are many, but essentially I guess the time had come when we felt our prospects outside Fluendo were better than the ones offered inside. Our exact plans are not set in stone yet, but one likely outcome is that we set up our own company doing various kind of software and services around GStreamer, more on that in the coming weeks.

We updated all the plugins in the webshop over the last few days with newer, faster, better versions. So if you have purchased our plugins just log into your account on shop.fluendo.com and ‘view’ your order. You will see a download link inside which will let you download the updated package. Especially the Windows Media packages contains a lot of improvements.

Big new release of Schrödinger

Just cut the 0.6.0 release of Schrodinger, our implementation of the Dirac video codec. This is a major milestone release as it should be fully bitstream compliant. This means that if you use Schrodinger to encode a Dirac file today you should be able to decode it with any compliant decoder in the future.
Of course you should wait for the 0.7.0 release at least before doing a major migration of your media collection as we might still have bugs causing us to not be 100% compliant. Anyway getting this release out is a big step forward for the project, and while there are still many improvements we want to see happen, it at least brings Schrodinger into the realm of being useful outside pure testing scenarios. Tim has also promised a new release of Thoggen soon with experimental Dirac support using Schrodinger.

Update: These days working at Collabora Multimedia the world leaders in GStreamer consulting.

I noticed on the semi official Playstation 3 blog that the upcoming 1.80 firmware will have DLNA support. This is great news as it means you will be able to share and exchange media between your Elisa system and your PS3. Supporting Intel ViiV and DLNA was something I pushed for in Elisa since day one. Thanks to the great work that has been going into Coherence ,the Python uPnP framework we are using, Elisa has very good support for these technologies already and we will of course make sure it will become even better as time goes by.

In regards to Elisa I am also very happy for the
just announced collaboration with the Ubuntu community to create a Ubuntu Media center edition based on Elisa. As I build my own mediacenter solution at home over the next few weeks I will probably try to get involved in that effort myself actually.

For those who missed it there is a nice review of Elisa over at linux.com today. Especially if you are not very familiar with Elisa it gives a nice overview of the current situation. Also in regard to the much asked question about DVB and PVR support, Elisa superhacker Philippe Normand made the critical mistake of promising me to add support for it as soon as he had a DVB card for his home machine. Well…all I can say is that the card is on the way :)

Jokosher

Michael Sheldon posted a nice screenshot in his latest blog entry about having started on his Google SoC project to add VoIP support to Jokosher. The screenshot
is showing a very good example of how our powerful multimedia architecture is starting to let us easily tie different kinds of applications together in order to provide some really nifty combinations.

Fluendo webshop

I put the Windows Media encoder plugins into the beta program yesterday and expect to put the AAC decoder in today. Hopefully they will be ready for the shop soon along with some updates to the other existing codecs. Also need to check in with Tim the current status of Codeina once he returns from UDS in Seville. Would be great to be able to use Codeina for this set of updates as the webshop software doesn’t exactly make it easy, to put it mildly.

Codeina Screenshot

Planet GStreamer

Last but not least I added Robert McQueen’s blog to Planet GStreamer today. So this means you will be able to follow the latest Collabora, Farsight and Telepathy news also on Planet GStreamer, or at least follow such news when Robert does his once per millenia blog posts :)

Succumbed to latest trend

So after having shunned this social network sites after having had a short run in with Orkut a few years ago I just caved in and signed up for Facebook. I try to defend it to myself by saying its part of what being an early adopter type of persona is all about. Who knows, maybe I get crazy enough soon to install Mugshot even :)

So our Elisa team is growing fast and we are looking to hire one more person. We are primarily looking for someone with good linux and python experience, but knowledge of
OpenGL, DirectFB and GObject is also of interest. We are looking for someone with a European work permit who are interested in re-locating to Barcelona, Spain. As someone who have been living here for a while I can say that it is a wonderful city to live in, with good food and drink, beautiful architecture, great beaches and a fun gang of crazy hackers to work with.

If you are interested in joining our wild and wacky team please send an email with your resume to Lionel Martin, who you can reach at lionel[at]fluendo_dot_com. Non-french speakers are especially encouraged to apply :)