FYI: MyBooks Professional as Quicken replacement

If you wanna migrate to Linux or mixed enviroment and looking for some serious replacement of Quicken or another personal or SMB finance management package, then check out MyBooks. Got this link to it from Slashdot disscussion about IBM offering Linux workstation business package. Site looks a little bit odd (Coming from 2001 or so), but it's not always indicate quality and/or usefulness of application. There is trial version available, so check it out.

Evolution which sounds like revolution

There are several significant developments within Evolution community which interests me most:

1. First, Evolution team has promised to provide Windows binaries for each Evolution release. The last one they did is version 2.24.2 (which is quite recent). It is very important news, because so far Windows has been left in the cold, if we talk about quality of open source e-mail clients. Yes, there is Thunderbird, but it's still feels very immatured to me even after reaching 2.0. Sorry, but having to put signature in special .signature file doesn't cut the mustard1.

Anyway, availability of Evolution on Windows (and later on OS X, I hope) could change landscape of groupware offerings, because finally there would viable alternative to Outlook, which is still the king in Windows. My dream is to have CalDAV + Mail system (Postfix/Exim + Davecot) as easy replacement of Exchange system. Evolution have CalDAV support for Calendars for some time already, but there comes biggest news...

2. Thanks to Milan Crha, which was man who leaded my succesful attempts to provide first "official" patch to Evolution previously this year, have nailed and finally commited patches for supporting CalDAV VTODO (known as Tasks in Evo) and VNOTES (known as Memos) in Evolution. It gives me posibility to use DaviCAL server with Evolution and fully share my plans and tasks between work and home computers, and laptop too (I patched Evo in Hardy and Intrepid to do this). Yes, there are some rough edges, and stability sometimes suffers (without loss of information), but it is done - next stage is improvement of accounts (having one account to create in Evo and connect to all goodies of CalDAV). It's already improved my planning and scheduling so much that I really own Milan a bear (or whatever his favorite party trink is :)).

If we look back - when Novell went into some finansial troubles and formed strange partnership with Microsoft (which still bothers me time after time), I feared that it means end of Evolution as we know. Surprisingly, Novell not only countinue to provide superb support for Evolution, it also has worked with all contributors to change license to GPLv3 and also eased posibility for others to fix and improve Evo as they need (Milan works for Red Hat, for example). Yes, it has bugs, but I must say this - Evolution is a Firefox of open source groupwares. There are competition, but no one have came even close to deliver that much as it does.

Big thank you to you Evo guys, you really rock!

1 no hard feelings to Mozilla and Thunderbird teams. You still do your job and Thunderbird is still more popular than Evo. Keep improvements coming and maybe one day we will have nice competition between Thunderbird + Lighting and Evo.

How to fix broken gconf or how to deal with desktop which shows up borked

It is easy to screw up your Debian/Ubuntu install with self made debs. Well, I did myself and paid a price. Everything started with GnuCash, which, with 2.2 version, has also Windows port, which I suggest all Windows users as personal finansial manager - yes, they lack some features, but if you are in Europe, it fits perfectly.
However, when I wanted to use file in Ubuntu Feisty version of GnuCash, it gave error. I found out that 2.0 and 2.2 has problems with format compatibilities. So I went and built deb package for 2.2.1 version. Unfortunately, it included lot of non-GnuCash files in package, so when I installed it, it overwrote bunch of libraries, including gconf ones.
As long this GnuCash version was on my computer, there where no problems. However, uninstalling it (I got 2.2.1 "official" version of GnuCash trough Feisty Backports) caused my desktop to be b0rked, because gconf has problems with it's libraries and it can't read xml configuration files.
So I rebooted computer, went to console with ALT+CTRL+F1, loged in and issued such command:
sudo apt-get --reinstall install gconf2 libgcon2-4 gconf2-common
And then rebooted computer with command:
reboot
After restart of computer everything should be all right. If you still have problems, that it's not caused by lack of libgconf libraries.

Shame, shame, ohhh, what a shame...

It was very long time of no blogging, however it wasn't my intention, and if even no one reads this, it is just a little shame that I have almost no time for this journal, because when I created it I wanted it to matter.

Now, however, I am motivated to start from begining and so here we go....

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS aka Dapper is released almost two months and this crucial time have been spent without big worries. Only somehow important was xserver-xorg release screwup, but I beg to differ about it's impact - mostly impacted was those who update almost every day. Be sure, I am not one of them, and lot of common users either. :) Anyway, community leaders have learnt their lesson in this and they now investigate how to deal with such situations, t.i. mostly how to test updates for stable release before releasing them in wild.

Anyway, I use Dapper on work computer for now, and I'm very happy about it's perfromance and my "common user test" so far. Certainly there is lack of functionality here and there (most of them already aviable in Edgy updates), sometimes there is gripe about some problems with Microsoft Office documents, but in overall, I think Ubuntu is right on it's way to be Linux desktop king for common users.

I'm planning to post lot of posts from now and they will be about lot of different things around Ubuntu, Linux and free software. There will be also Peter Learns articles, about system tweakage or how to do something without breaking your stable Ubuntu. There will be also my multimedia hurdle, DVDs, Gstreamer, also Jokosher progress (Those guys continue to deliver what they promise, kudos to them), Jono also wrote good intro article about Gstreamer, Python and GTK combo or how make multimedia player in 100 lines of code.

There is lot of things to hype, to be sadden, to be happy, or to just have warm feeling inside about, so stay tuned.

And ohh, certainly Ubuntu Diaries will have Latvian version too.

ALSA worries countinues

And I thought to myself, that it was too easy...

Yesterday, playing again with Jokosher, I run again in two errors on both computers I use to test gstreamer-alsa/Jokosher stuff with. First of all, I got error while try to address 'hw:0' as device from which you can record from. It was bugging me for a while and I thought that it is Ubuntu or ALSA bug.

So after consulting with j^ in private on IRC, I got that these are two seperate issues. First was on my work computer and it was more like this - any ALSA recording, using 'device=hw:0' was failure.

pecisk@ubuntu:~$ gst-launch-0.10 alsasrc device=hw:0 ! flacenc ! filesink location=device.flacSetting pipeline to PAUSED ...

Pipeline is live and does not need PREROLL ...ERROR: from element /pipeline0/alsasrc0: Could not get/set settings from/on resource.

Additional debug info:
gstalsasrc.c(349): set_hwparams (): /pipeline0/alsasrc0:

Rate doesn't match (requested 44100Hz, get 0Hz)
ERROR: pipeline doesn't want to preroll.

Setting pipeline to PAUSED ...
Setting pipeline to READY ...

Setting pipeline to NULL ...
FREEING pipeline ...

pecisk@ubuntu:~$

However, j^ suggested to check out the same recording with arecord, which gave me more clues about what causes failure:

pecisk@ubuntu:~$ arecord -D hw:0 -f cd test.wav
Recording WAVE 'test.wav' : Signed 16 bit Little Endian, Rate 44100 Hz, Stereo
Warning: rate is not accurate (requested = 44100Hz, got = 48000Hz)
please, try the plug plugin (-Dplug:hw:0)

So issue appeared to consist of two problems - my sound card has recording locked on 48000Hz - quite unusual for built-in sound card (could be card problem or ALSA driver bug) and alsasrc (and as far is known, alsasink too) don't probe cards for rate instead of that requesting it. If cards set rate doesn't mach with requested from alsasrc/alsasink, it fails. Solutions can be several - first, probing for rate of PCM in alsasrc/alsasink would be very good, because it would benefit for various encodings/players/recorders to convert their media before playing it. This, however, would require bug gstreamer guys _or_ start to take it upon myself. Another solution would be simply probe sound card PCM directly for rate and use it within pipeline - but it feels more like workaround, not long-living solution to problem:

gst-launch alsasrc device=hw:0 ! "audio/x-raw-int,channels=2,rate=48000,depth=16" ! audioconvert ! flacenc ! filesink location="test.flac"

So this is for my first problem. Second one, however, appeared to be more difficult one. I have two sound cards on my home computer:

pecisk@blackcatstudio:~$ cat /proc/asound/pcm
00-00: VIA 8235 : VIA 8235 : playback 4 : capture 1
00-01: VIA 8235 : VIA 8235 : playback 1 : capture 1
02-00: ICE1712 multi : ICE1712 multi : playback 1 : capture 1
02-01: ICE1712 consumer : ICE1712 consumer : playback 1 : capture 1
02-02: ICE1712 consumer (DS) : ICE1712 consumer (DS) : playback 6

Using System > Preferences > Sound, you can choose which card would be used then for playing sounds/movies/etc (I usually switch to my EWS88MT, which sounds just perfect for music/movies with gst-0.10, thanks to ALSA/Gstreamer guys). It changes order of soundcards (defining which card is default one) and creates .asoundrc and .asoundrc.asoundconf files within your home directory. This, however, screws up 'hw' definitions and it was no more possible to record anything using 'hw:0' even from arecord.

So on my todo list is to:
* Fill bug about Ubuntu/GNOME screwing sound card definitions in ALSA - should be easy to fix;
* Fill bug for Gstreamer about probing rate from PCMs and using them for play/recording;
* Take a look on ALSA, Gstreamer and GNOME with various cards in computer - how such scenarios could be improved;

Death of the bug and other musings

Well, after little brainstorming, noise and brohaha, annoying gstreamer-alsa recording bug got fixed. Thanks to j^ and Sebastian of Ubuntu, bug fix was provided and new version rolled out yesterday. So now I can record with Jokosher and GNOME Sound Recorder on Ubuntu, using Gstreamer backend, without any problem.

Differently, nvidia binary driver got another bug fix release, which seems have to eliminate lot of lockups in my work computer. Will try Xgl later, which was unusable with such nvidia driver's behaviour, t.i. locked up after 5 mins.

Played with Jokosher - nice and easy for now, while not having any serious functionality (as it waits for it's 0.1 release). Slices and their split/join looks shiny and really gives promise of serious app. Ellio started to hack ALSA channel split (for multiple channel card owners like me :)) element for gstreamer, various bits and peaces gets added, visual bugs fixed. Ellio also works on using Gnonlin (Non-linear elements for Gstreamer, used in various video editors for now) for audio stuff.

Modern Ubuntu times

There are moments in the life when I miss all that Linux desktop begining stuff, when you had to tweak your Linux distribution at maximum to get, for example, divx playing. For now, I just have to enable universe and metaverse and install gstreamer-ffmpeg and gstreamer-plugins-bad and gstreamer-plugins-ugly (for AC3 sound) to get it work. Few clicks and I can play my divx just fine, also Quicktime movies. However, Totem plugin for Firefox still has lot of raw edges, so there is room for improvement. But I am very happy to see that Gstreamer idea proves it's worthy.

Saying that, Ubuntu Dapper beta still has bugs to squeeze, and there comes today's story about several important ones. Bunch of funny and talented guys have created project Jokosher, which aims to provide easy to use and easy to configure multitrack recorder/sequencer, using newest technologies like Gstreamer 0.10, GTK+ 2.8, Python, and Cairo (more in Cakewalk/Cubase direction. In meantime, I would like to point out, that profesionally aclaimed Ardour as Protools replacement will get gtk+2 interface very soon too). They have big fun coding and improving their baby and I say more power to them.
While testing their work, I run into problem that newest gstreamer-0.10 in Dapper won't record anything from alsasrc, which is very pitty. Seems like recording stuff using gstreamer is all broken. However, Ubuntu guys are informed about this problem, also Gstreamer mob, so I hope for fast fix.
And yeah, these days is when Dapper flies sixth time. Grab it for testing/bug reporting pleasure there. And register on Launchpad to register bugs and comment them with your expierence if there is already one.