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Bluetooth Fedora GNOME Guru Install POW Releases Tech Tools

POW: Bluetooth Improvements in Fedora 8

November 14, 2007 – 10:16 am

The POW is going to be the improvements made in the Bluetooth functionality in Fedora 8. I’m actually quite impressed with it as its been a bit of a challenge to keep my little mouse connected in the past.

Fedora 8 provides a new extended technology with its bluez-gnome package. In fact, the simplicity of it is that I only have to be able to click and approve a new device.

When I first turn on my bluetooth mouse and start to move it around, it doesn’t work, but up in the top right hand corner of my GNOME desktop is the bluetooth manager. It has a message for me:

bluetooth-authorize.png

The message indicates a click to authorize the device, namely the bluetooth mouse. (One note here, I was originally unable to use my touchpad, so I had to resort to other tactics [not pretty] to enable my mouse. Probably ought to have some other options available instead of clicking.)

Clicking on the notification window above brings me to an authorization window.

bluetooth3.png

At this point, authorization is quite simple. Click yes for a one time authorization of the mouse (Note the Bluetooth Travel Mouse indicated in the description), and to authorize it more permanently, choose Always Grant Access.

That’s it. My Bluetooth mouse is now enabled and working. I’d say this is much friendlier than what I used to have to do, including running hidd –connect <bluetooth id> after pressing the little connect button on the bottom of the mouse. This is sure nice now!

Its possible, that at some point, disconnecting the device might be necessary. To do this, right-click on the nice little Bluetooth logo at the top right of your screen.

bluetooth5.png

Choose Preferences. Up pops the Bluetooth Preferences window. From this window, three tabs are available. In the first (and also selected) tab, there is a section at the bottom of the window which lists the devices that are currently bonded and/or trusted. Choose the device from the list and then the appropriate action. The choices are Disconnect, Trust or Delete.

bluetooth4.png

In addition to just configuring your devices, it appears it might be possible to do things like Bluetooth DUN with a Treo, or enable data synchronization between laptops. One thing I’ve always wanted to try is to get my bluetooth headset working so I could do Skype or Asterisk phone calls through my headset, to my computer and out through the service.

Cheers,

Herlo

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Fedora Guru Install POW Tech Tools

POW: Codec Buddy

November 7, 2007 – 10:26 am

This week’s Program of the Week is a bit ahead of its release. The package is Codec Buddy, and is currently slated for release in Fedora 8 tomorrow.

Codec Buddy, with a little help from the Fedora and Fluendo development teams has grown into something that could be great. I see Codec Buddy really helping those who want to use and play non-free media sources from within Fedora. If you are currently running rawhide, you probably already know about this, but very soon, many other people will start to understand how Codec Buddy works as well.

One of the goals of the Fedora Project is to be free of any proprietary software. Though I don’t see that many people using Fedora without at least a few proprietary components, media codecs, drivers, etc. Maybe one day…we can always hope.

To that end, I am a big media buff. I regularly watch TV shows and movies that use proprietary codecs. As an example, most people don’t realize that using the reverse engineered DVD encoding provided by DVD Jon could be considered illegal. Fedora doesn’t want to be encumbered by these risks, and truthfully, I don’t blame them one bit. Considering that my backlog of mp3s and DVD rips will require an additional bit of software not normally included with Fedora, I think this is a great software solution. Give the user what they want without compromising the integrity of the project.

Codec Buddy is provided to help the average Joe understand the world of media formats. Its job was originally to provide a short description of why Fedora doesn’t include this in its distribution. Then point to where one might find more information about these formats. Codec Buddy has been altered a little, but attempts to accomplish the same thing using the Fluendo website.

Fluendo is the company that employs many of the individuals that work on the gstreamer project. Its quite a noble project, providing media codecs (installable formats) for many of the audio and video we like to use every day. Its great to have open source companies like Fluendo helping open source grow.

Codec Buddy works by launching a small application when someone tries to access a media codec not currently on the system. For instance, I’ve attempted to play a show I’ve downloaded.

Launch Totem

Opening Totem

Open the file

Opening a media file

Start the video

Start the video

As the video attempts to play, a prompt appears, indicating the media isn’t supported. Codec buddy then provides a few options to enable playback for this particular media format.

Choose your codec wisely, young padawan

The available items are MP3 Audio Decoder, MPEG Playback Bundle and MPEG4 Part 2 Video Decoder. By default only the MP3 Audio Decoder, which is also the only codec that will be installed without payment, is checked. The other two codecs are available for a small fee, which helps Fluendo to provide these codecs.

Clicking the “Get Selected” button will immediately start the download of the MP3 Audio Decoder (if it was selected).

Downloading the MP3 Codec

A license agreement then appears, make sure to read this and if you agree, click Accept.

Agreement

Once the agreement is complete, its time to purchase the remaining codecs. Choose Start Web Browser and in a few moments, the Fluendo website should appear. This should allow you to purchase the remaining codecs needed for the video I want to watch.

Open Web Browser

The Fluendo website has a good list of available codecs beyond the choices available in Codec Buddy.

Fluendo website

The purchase will seem similar to many others on the web, add things to the cart, and pay.

Fluendo is a good start. I’m sure there will be many people interested in purchasing these codecs here. However, I believe however, that the biggest problem is that most people can get these codecs for free on Windows, Mac and even other Linux distributions. So far, the thing I feel is missing here is the explanation for why charge for these codecs and who benefits.

Fluendo is a great resource and provides some kick-ass codecs. If there is no explanation as to why we need to pay for something that one can get for free. Potential customers who don’t understand the reasoning behind it might go elsewhere, or worse even, choose another distro or operating system.

I love fedora for the freedom it gives me to choose my path. I love fedora for its focus on making sure things are free and open, both monetarily and in liberty. I love fedora for trying things like Codec Buddy, I want it to succeed. I hope that with a few suggestions, both fedora and Fluendo can make Codec Buddy the informational tool that it was originally intended.

Cheers,

Herlo

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Fedora Install Releases Tech

Thoughts on the Fedora Upgrade – Part 1

November 6, 2007 – 12:43 pm

So its been a whole two days since I upgraded to Werewolf. I love it! Most everything works out of the box (OOTB), wireless, bluetooth, even suspend/resume seem to be possible for the first time!

But one of the oddities I encountered while upgrading was the names of the packages. Mind you, this is just my twisted mind being interested in some of the funny odd or strange package names I found while the yum upgrade was taking place.

So here’s the list anyway, with a short description of each. Enjoy:

  • gwenhywfar – A multi-platform helper library for networking and security applications and libraries.
  • meanwhile – Lotus Sametime session functionality.
  • neon – An HTTP and WebDAV client library.
  • coolkey – Linux Driver support for the CoolKey and CAC products.
  • rarian – Designed as a replacement for scrollkeeper; A documentation meta-data library.
  • openjade – An implementation of the ISO/IEC 10179:1996 standard DSSSL.
  • sox – (Sound eXchange) is a sound file format converter.
  • cadaver – A command-line WebDAV client.
  • booty – Small python library for use with bootloader configuration.
  • orca – A flexible, extensible, and powerful assistive technology.
  • zenity – Lets you display Gtk+ dialog boxes from the command line and through shell scripts.
  • eog – Eye of GNOME (EOG) is an image viewer.
  • gok – Enables users to control their computer without relying on a standard keyboard or mouse, leveraging GNOME’s accessibility framework
  • devilspie – A window-matching utility.*

This information was gathered using the command ‘rpm -qi <packagename>’.  This provided enough information to help understand at least the basics of each of these packages and whether to consider using them in the future.

The packages in italics above are packages that I consider interesting, and I plan to attempt to blog about each of them in turn as part of my POW series.

The devilspie package has a * which means that I’ve used this program before.  I quite enjoyed using the Devil’s Pie, and plan to take a look at it again in Fedora 8 as the previous package had some real limitations and lacked needed flexibility.

Please watch for the upcoming articles on these utilities.  Also, if there are packages that you found interesting during your upgrade, please comment and let me know what they are so I can learn and possibly use them as well.

Cheers,

Herlo

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Fedora Install News Tech

Upgraded! Fedora 8 (Werewolf) is installed!

November 4, 2007 – 10:00 pm

And so the saga continues!

Transaction Summary
=============================================================================
Install     98 Package(s)
Update    1092 Package(s)
Remove       2 Package(s)

Total download size: 1.3 G
Is this ok [y/N]: y

Resulted in:

$ cat /etc/*release
Fedora release 8 (Werewolf)
Fedora release 8 (Werewolf)
Fedora release 8 (Werewolf)

I did have a few problems, mostly things that were from non-fedora repositories. Once I cleared those up, all went well. Fedora 8 is beautiful.

A couple things to note. My ATI drivers seemed to stay in place and as horrible as ever for dual displays. I’m going to be trying xrandr as soon as I can find the open ATI drivers. Another is that I love to use vlc, but its in the livna repository and currently requires python 2.4, but Werewolf uses python 2.5. I guess I’ll have to get the src.rpm and rebuild it with python 2.5 as the requirement. I also noted that my mouse pad is currently not working, I’ll have to find out why the synaptics drivers stopped working.

Update: I’ve decided it might be useful to at least include a couple cool pictures of the new theme, so here you go.

fedora8-background.png fedora8-gimp.png fedora8-rsyslogviewer.png

Cheers,

Clint

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Fedora Install News Releases Tech

Upgrading to werewolf

November 4, 2007 – 5:32 am

Wish me luck. I’ve decided to take the plunge and upgrade to werewolf tonight. After reading Max Spevack’s post about how to upgrade to Fedora 8, this post from Will Woods stating that Rawhide is now ready to go and of course the current code freeze for this Thursday’s release, I think its time to upgrade.

In fact, I plan for Fedora 9 to do this much earlier so I can help test the release. I post here and now to make sure that commit to helping the Fedora Project squash bugs for Fedora 9. I’ll accomplish this by installing it at Test 1 and actually report bugs as I find them.

Wish me luck with this upgrade and my future endeavors. I think its a good cause and a great way to get further involved with the community.

Cheers,

Herlo

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