Monthly Archives: October 2008

howto linux

Webcam, Cheese, GStreamer and UVCVideo problems in Intrepid

2008/10/25 – 8:08 am

I bought a new webcam, a Logitech E 3500 and it works great on Skype. Unfortunately, on my Ubuntu Intrepid box, Cheese and other GStreamer based programs are not able to make the webcam work.

At the beginning, since it was working with Skype and not working with GStreamer, it seemed a GStreamer bug. It is not. It is a bug with the uvcvideo module loaded in the kernel. As soon as you compile the SVN version of uvcvideo the webcam start working with all the programs which can interface with Video4Linux2.

Here a few steps to make it working.
First of all: you need to install some build tools and the kernel headers:
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential subversion

Create a folder on which you will work (let’s say it’s in your home, but you can change it):
mkdir ~/uvcvideo
cd ~/uvcvideo

Now download the latest source from the SVN server:
svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk
cd trunk

and build it:
make

Now you are ready to load the brand-new module, but first unload the old one:
sudo rmmod uvcvideo
sudo insmod ./uvcvideo.ko

Now start Cheese and smile! In my case the resolution selection is still not working, but that’s a minor problem.

Please note that now you are using a module that is hand-loaded. If you want your kernel to load the new uvcvideo module automatically instead of the old one, enter the following commands:
sudo cp ./uvcvideo.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/media/video/uvc/uvcvideo.ko
sudo rmmod uvcvideo
sudo modprobe uvcvideo

This will overwrite the old module. The classic make install won’t work, since it will install the module in a different folder from the default tree of the kernel in Ubuntu Intrepid.

Personally I hope Ubuntu will soon provide a correct patch: even this worked for me, I don’t really like quick&dirty ways

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linux software

Evolution 2.24: The buggiest version ever

2008/10/18 – 10:50 pm

Almost two weeks earlier than the official release (I’m so brave!), I upgraded my Ubuntu Box from Hardy to Intrepid. Everything shines and it is great, except for one: Evolution 2.24.

The new version of famous Gnome PIM Client by Novell (ex Ximian) is absolutely a pain in the ass, buggy and very easy to crash (it seems a software by Microsoft!). Let’s start.

Google Calendar

At the very first beginning it seems this new version eventually works well with Google Calendar. If you add an event on your Evolution, you will see it magically appears online. But at the very second try you will understand it is not working so well. Events in some of the calendar are read only and any time you try to move them or to modify you have two possibilities:

  1. The event doesn’t move: it’s well protected and the cut and copy commands in the context menu are gray.
  2. The event moves, you start singing “hurrah!”, but it actually makes a duplicate creating a new event just beside the previous one.

Of course forget any chance of deleting any event: any changes must be done through the web interface of Google Calendar.

After that you could have the great idea of changing some settings for the calendar which gives you problems. The default settings are “sync every 30 minutes” and “use SSL”. Well, let’s try to make the sync happens every 5 minutes and do you really need SSL for the calendar about your dog poo time?

After changing those settings somethings seems changed, but it’s just an impression: give Evolution a couple of minutes and it will disappoint you again. So you open the settings again and you see that they are back to 30 minutes and SSL is activated again.

Mail

I have to admit: there are not so many problems about the email. Only two.

1. Email notification

I was used to run the Email Notification applet to make an envelop icon appear on my panel any time I have an unread email. I just don’t like the Evolution native notification: it doesn’t behave as I want, and until differently proven this computer belongs to me.

Of course, since you are reading this, the Mail Notification 5.4 doesn’t work well with Evolution 2.24. You could think this is just a matter of configuration. So I tried to configure the Mail Notification but as I try to change any settings inside the Mail Notification Preferences I see Evolution crashing. The big giant defeated by the small dwarf who, by the way, didn’t want to hurt the big giant.

2. Virtual Folders and email count

Evolution 2.24 has some serious problem with calculation. I have some VFolder: one of this is the “Unread Messages” that will collect all the messages tagged as unread. This folder says I have two unread messages but it’s actually empty.

-1 unread, 6 total

-1 unread, 6 total

But there is another VFolder which behaves much funnier. This folder collects all the messages received in the last two days plus all the email tagged as “Important”. This folder says that I have 6 messages total (they are actually 27) and -1 unread messages (yes: minus one). Maybe Evolution thinks I have to write one message to get even.

Evolution 2.24 has been released along with Gnome 2.24. Both are great projects and I’m using them since several years ago (I suppose I started using Gnome in 2000), but they cannot pretend they are good and stable only because they shouted out so. It’s some kind of arrogance that puts out a quality much lower than the one I got used to.

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howto linux software

When Evolution freezes

2008/10/10 – 4:16 pm

As many of you could easily understand, I’m not talking about the human evolution, but about the PIM software Evolution.

It’s generally a good software, although I thing there is much space to improve, much more than what Evolution has done in the last few years.

Today a classic case has happened again. I started Evolution, and immediately clicked the Calendar button. Unfortunately I was too quick, and I pressed the holy button before Evolution had finished loading the mail component, which is the default component loaded at start.

What happened next? Evolution has frozen and trying to close its window made my computer ask whether I want to forcedly terminate the program. I had no choice and I killed it.

The problem is that Evolution doesn’t want to start again, unless I go and find the evolution-data-server process to kill it as well. If not, Evolution will actually launch (you can see the correspondent process in the system monitor, or in “top”) but will never appear, waiting for some God-only-knows event.

Actually it’s quite probable that the standard users don’t know about that: the only choice for them is to restart the computer, or at least end the session and login again. This is absolutely unacceptable: if you like to restart when things go wrong, you could just use Windows.

I hope this problem (along many others) have been solved in the 2.24 version (I’m using 2.22 which is included in Ubuntu Hardy). However, I don’t count on it. Let’s see a few weeks later, after upgrading to Intrepid.

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web

Eyespot is closing down

2008/10/09 – 11:00 pm

Eyespot, the website dedicated to mixing video clips, is closing down. I just received a mail from them suggesting me to migrate to some of their competitor. Here is the mail they sent.

We deeply regret to inform you that Eyespot Corporation will no longer be able to continue serving you.

For our users at eyespot.com, we’re no longer allowing you to upload new videos. You can retrieve your uploaded video and mixes by going to your mymedia gallery and clicking the download link below the video thumbnail.

For our business customers in the eyespot video network, your site will continue operate unaffected for a limited period of time. We encourage you to migrate your video solution to one of our competing providers in the video mixing (e.g. http://corp.kaltura.com/) and video publishing space (e.g. http://www.fliqz.com/) immediately. We’ll soon be providing you with the means of downloading your community videos from within your dashboard at http://eyespot.com/partnerDashboard].

We have spent three years providing over a hundred thousand of you with a unique video experience. We believed that by putting creative tools and rights-cleared media into the hands of influencers and connectors, Eyespot would enable social media and participation culture like no other company.

After playing over two hundred million of your video creations, we have to stop. After assembling possibly the most potent team in digital media ever, we’re now moving on.

Thank you all for being apart of our community over the past three years.

Jim Kaskade
President & CEO

I used Eyespot in the past, I mixed a few video (just some titles on my own videos, so nothing special) and I’m not supposed to be a great fan of this service. Just, it’s always quite sad when a site or a company closes down.

Good bye Eyespot!

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linux software

Epiphany-webkit on Ubuntu updates

2008/10/09 – 8:29 am

Very little left to do.

About Hardy. The webkit-team PPA has Epiphany 2.22.3 with webkit enabled.

Instead Intrepid has webkit enabled Epiphany in universe, so my work is not necessary. You can still use the webkit-team PPA if you want to use a more recent version of the webkit engine. I will probably upload a more updated version of Epiphany as well if neighter intrepid-proposed nor intrepid-backports will be able to provide it.

So long and thanks for all the fish!

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