Why can’t people just use ogg? Will respond to that another day.

I have been trying to get live streaming audio to work on Linux from http://hope1032.com.au (formerly FM103.2). They seem to being using wma2 inside asf.

The only successful application that I could find to accomplish this is VLC Media Player version 0.9.8a. The audio quality is great.

Thanks VLC developers for your hardwork.

Good bye Adam Williamson – Adams might have rocked the boat recently with his comments about Canonical. They were his own thoughts. As to the Mandriva Community he has been the PR and backbone of the Community and losing him will be a great loss to us all. Save Adam and the other remote devs and contractors.

Save Adam Williamson Petition

” On behalf of Wolfgang “wobo” Bornath
Sir,

With great surprise I read the announcement about the termination of Mr. Adam Williamson’s contract with Mandriva. As one of the longest standing users (since 1998), contributors and advocates of Mandrake/Mandriva Linux, as well as a former long term contractor of Mandriva, as well as the founder and maintainer of the German Mandriva user community project MandrivaUser.de I would like to share my opinion about this move.

Let me first state that I am well aware of the financial situation of Mandriva SA. I am also aware of the importance and essential role of cost reduction in the attempt to make Mandriva SA survive the current situation.

Every company in this situation has to look at its assets and decide which one can be sacrificed. The crucial question is: what does it cost the company if I give away this or that asset. In German we have a rule: “Never give away your family jewels!” which may translate into: you must not draw on your reserves.

I saw Dr. Denis Havlik come and go, also Mr. Gaël Duval and many other very important people, important for the future of the company Mandriva and the distribution likewise. With Mr. Williamson you give away one of the most precious assets Mandriva has.

Were it not for Mr. Williamson the community of Mandriva users would be much smaller. You may not know the Mandriva Forum, you may not know the importance of the community in the Linux universe in general nor for Mandriva itself. But you may know the repeatedly announced commitment of Mandriva to this community. Terminating Mr. Williamson’s contract is a dirct contradiction to that commitment. Most of the work which is necessary to distribute Mandriva Linux is done by just that community – for free! Do you know how much of this work will be left undone when you “fire” one of the most important persons in this community?

Certainly you know that each member of this community may be the person who talks to the CTO or CEO of your next potential corporate customer. Guess what this person will tell his superior about Mandriva.

Were it not for Mr. Williamson Mandriva’s output of news and information would have gone down to zero after Mr. Duval and Mr. N’Doua had left the company. It is not the press release on the Mandriva website which makes Mandriva visible in the market, it is the continuous flow of news and information, which was mainly in Adam’s hands during the last years.

Of course you can terminate each and every contract and hope that “the community” will fill the gap for free. This may work well for a certain time and to a certain degree. But it will not work in any case. And not in this case.

For myself, on behalf of the German user community and for the future of Mandriva I want to ask you to give the termination of Mr. Williamson’s contract a second thought.

Thank you very much for reading

Yours,

Wolfgang “wobo” Bornath”

Also KDE 4.1.2 is limited to what sort of hardware it can run on. Not as bad as Vista but looks like it will not support anything over five years old with little ram. I am unable to run on my old laptop. Dell Latitude C610. It is just freezes up the system. Takes forever to catch up with processes.

So ultimately I think the KDE 4 desktop will improve and will be great for current and future hardware. I am hoping the experience will get better and the desktop become a lot more stable.

I’m keeping an eye on Gnome 3 development and looking forward to where it heads.

So as I said in a previous post its Gnome for me for now. It is just more stable and can handle the tasks I have with ease and very few crashes.

Stability before innovation.

So phase one is now complete. She plans on spending the next couple of months getting use to the environment and is willing to put in the time to save her multiple hours she would have lost on Vista.

Phase two will be a complete removal of Vista. Running XP in a virtual machine for must have software.

So now over to Gnome 2.24, which since I last used it for a while has greatly improved and now has very similar features to what KDE 3.5.5 use to have. The gnome team have done an excellent job as well.

For browsers I still use Firefox 3.0.3, but Ephiphany seems to me more feature rich than Konqueror on KDE4. I can use Java and Flash plugins with much more ease. Ephiphany displays the online list on facebook which would not show on Konqueror.  Maybe I was missing a plugin for Konqueror. It just didn’t work for me.

Nautilus I have adapted to quite easily. I don’t find it much different to the old Konqueror on KDE 3.5.9 except opening network samba shares was slightly different as it didnt always open the domain or host to view the shares. I had to type the url in manually. But most features are almost identical. It didnt take me long to get used the interface and navigate through different settings and menu’s.

Instead of installing Amarok for KDE 3.5.10 I decided to go with Banshee 1.2.1 ( I decided this over Rhythmbox as I consider it to be quite lame). Banshee features are nice and not to different to that of Amarok. It also has an Itunes like feel to it. I was able to add my media and listen in no time. I didn’t miss Amarok at all.

For instant messenging I am now using pdigin over Kopete and for IRC, X chat over Konversation. My wife did miss Kopete though. But we all must adapt.

Now for the Desktop. It took a bit of getting use too.  The menues and windows in a seemed to spread more across the desktop in a flat 2 Dimensional way. I found this even if I removed one of the panels. I did miss a little how KDE used Kdesktop to set things up. It just felt more smoother to me. I also found the desktop look to me more flatter than on KDE 3.5.9. The Ia Ora theme did improve this over the default Gnome theme.  I suppose with a bit more playing around with themes I can get more bling.

So for now I will stick with my new Gnome 2.24 desktop. After 4 days I have adapted nicely. I can now do everything I did in KDE. I also opted to not even install any KDE 3.5.10 applications. Gnome will now be my desktop at least for the next six months.

TIme to celebrate.

It is a simple aggregator and feeds and easily added. The Icepodder team have removed a lot of the old dependencies; pyxmms, python, libxml2.python. It easily It now allows you to open downloads into Amarok or a media player of you choice.

So sharing my joy. I have posted my Mandriva 2008.1 build including source for you Mandriva users to use and abuse. Please give any feed back to the Icepodder developers as they love to hear how much you enjoy Icepodder.

RPM: Mandriva 2008. 1 Icepodder 5.4 personal build revision 64

SRPM: Mandriva 2008.1 Icepodder 5.4 personal build revision 64 source

To get the latest source:

svn co https://icepodder.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/icepodder icepodder

KDE on their blog did an April fools joke yesterday declaring that the OOXML is a standard and supported it after receiving a annoymous donation of $10,000 from a North American Company. The problem is the joke has turned into a nightmare, as the news, which was due to be released on Wednesday has been leaked.

OOXML is a standard and we now must show everyone that it is not a standard to even touch. Let alone let your Grandmother or pet dog look at. It will be interesting to see how it is modified and and how the standard improves and evolves into something remotely interoperable within Microsoft’s own product range formats, let alone other platforms.

Well I have made up my mind. As for me and my house will stick with ODF.

I see this as not a major issue for ODF (Open Document Format). From what I’ve read with OOXML out there currently, business and Government don’t seem to even be looking at any other format other than ODF. If this trend continues.,then OOXML with just be another on the shelf standard with Windows users having it shoved down their throats like Microsoft binary formats of the past. OOXML can join HD-DVD as the engine that couldn’t.

Personally I don’t support and will endeavour not to be brought under this permissive curse called OOXML. I will continue the migration all of my file format away from existing old binary formats to ODF. Dragging stuff out from when I was in High School. I want to be able to share with my kids when they say ‘what sort of stuff did you do when you were at school’. I can also recall old ideas I had and thesis’s I did. All of which are in binary formats and almost now inaccessible. The process is going to be long and tedious.

So what ever happens I hope that people will see that OOXML is not truly and Open Standard in the practical sense. Microsoft will still have pretty much full control of its direction. Its up to us to stop its implementation and promote true open Standards.

Today I received confirmation back that I was successfully registered in the beta program and decided so see if what was stated was true.

Below are picture of my results using Firefox 2.0.0.13 with the flash plug-in on Mandriva 2008.1 RC2 . I also have proprietary codecs installed.

The interface seems to be very Elisa Media Center like and also very Youtube like in the selection of the content. The streaming video quality is ok, but could be slightly better.

It will be interesting to see what actual content is displayed in the final release. At the moment it is pretty much ‘The Bill’ and a few documentaries.

Overall the implementation is quite nice and I will probably use it frequently as I tend to miss some shows I like.

Later in the evening I tried to retrieve my emails; still no luck. This time I contacted my ISP who put the problem back on the web host. So I contact them again and they said ‘we can access all of your services and account via ftp and other means’. So today I called my ISP back and this time I got someone with some decent access to the server. They said they flushed out the datastream (jargon) for my account an now I can access (I think this was code for we reset your account). I got my wife to check and everything was now working and emails retrieved.

Out of all this I can understand why the website and hosting went down but as to why the connection to any domain on the server I am hosted on has left me puzzled and guessing. I spoke to friends who are with the same ISP and state they have had what appears to be a block accessing their hotmail accounts.

Well I guess I will never know the true story and am glad to have access back to my emails.

Thanks to all those who helped troubleshoot this with me. You know who you are. Now back to living life again and solving other peoples problems instead of mine.