Boring Ubuntu reminder post

A reminder for me to check out this page for some hints on improving Ubuntu performance...

How to tune your Ubuntu PC for faster performance

EDIT: Well, turns out the page is an exact duplicate of a page I found elsewhere. Not sure who's ripping off whom. Anyhow, the adjustment to "swappiness" from 60 to 10 seems to have helped (edit /etc/sysctl.conf and change swappiness setting), as has the setting to allow faster booting and enable some multithreadedness (edit /etc/init.d/rc and make "CONCURRENCY=shell"), but the most impressive one was freeing up some RAM. The method has changed, though: this thread in Ubuntu forums describes what you do to turn off tty2-6. It reduced my RAM usage from 40% to 20%! (You basically edit /etc/default/console-setup file and change a line to "/dev/tty[1-2]", then go to /etc/event.d/ and edit the tty files that you DO NOT want by commenting out lines starting with "start on runlevel").

Compiz Fusion is incredible

I'd heard a while back that the Linux "eye candy" known as Beryl was going to merge back with its predecessor Compiz. A few days ago I saw they'd agreed on a name: Compiz Fusion. While not exactly the best name in the world, it got me interested in seeing what new things they might have added to arguably the coolest computer interface out there today.

Well, amazingly, they've made it even cooler.

I followed instructions similar to these, updated all the appropriate packages and then ran the new Compiz manually. Oh my stars and garters, how awesome. The rotating cube rotates much smoother (although not as fast), and the Desktop Wall option is what Apple's Spaces should have been--way cool to look at and functional to boot. I can do without "fire writing" but hey, that's fine, I just turn that off.

Although it's often dismissed as just "eye candy" I really like how it allows me to make a desktop for different functions. And the new Grouping option lets you link windows together for even more functionality. The fact that they've wrapped this functionality in a pretty package (that takes up hardly any CPU time thanks to graphic card acceleration, by the way) helps to make it fun to use, which isn't a bad thing.

I should try to make a screen recording of some of my Compiz Fusion stuff, but in the meantime, here's a YouTube video showing it off. Try to ignore the dumb scrolling titles in the beginning.

Rosegarden is successfully pruned

Yahoo, I got me a working Rosegarden (see previous post)!

First of all, the problems with the Yamaha P-70 and MIDI were all cured with (suspiciously) the use of a Yamaha USB to MIDI adapter. Guess my M-Audio is hitting eBay soon. Then, although I got Timidity working as a software synth in Rosegarden, the latency was really noticeable... big delay from hitting the keys to hearing the sound. Qsynth seemed to work better but was horribly out of tune. Following a hint, I changed the sample rate for both Qsynth and JACK to 48K, and whammo! No latency, all in tune, much better sounding due to a little reverb action in Qsynth. Works great!

Big Trouble in Little MythTV

I think it's possible that MythTV, my digital video recorder of choice, may be coming to a screeching end very soon. Yesterday Zap2It Labs, the group that was providing all of us MythTV users with program guide data, announced they were going to stop the service in September of this year. It'd been free up to this point (you were asked to take a survey every three months or so), but apparently some groups were somehow using the data to generate income, which was against the agreement.

Anyhow, the likelihood that they would accept cash from end-users is slim, and the alternative--"web scraping" sites to come up with listings--is a poor one.

No word yet from the lead developer of MythTV, Isaac Richards, but in mailing list postings he comes off as such a big PITA that it wouldn't surprise me if he said he was taking his ball and going home and stopping development of MythTV.

If so, hello SageTV...

America's Got Talent

Brief notes on this show:

* I haven't been blown away by any of the people going on to the next round.
* Why are there two Brit judges?
* Sharon Osbourne is oddly attractive.

An overgrown MIDI Rosegarden

Since the kids still seem to be enjoying piano lessons, I took some slush fund money and bought a digital piano with 88 weighted keys, rather than having them practice any more on an electronic keyboard with no piano action. I got a Yamaha P-70, very nice sound, not too unreasonable a price.

Since I was getting a nice keyboard, I thought it would be nice to get back into the MIDI world. I'd played with MIDI since waaaay back in the days of the original Macintoshes. I had one of Mark of the Unicorn's first MIDI interfaces, and at one point had a MIDI setup that included an E-Mu Proteus and a Korg Wavestation. I sold all that when I moved down here, so it's been 10 years since I've played with anything MIDI.

Since my Ubuntu machine is closest to the keyboard, I thought I'd see what the world of open source software offered MIDI-wise. So I installed Ubuntu Studio, an AV-oriented package of tools that even comes along with a low-latency kernel. The USB to MIDI interface (an M-Audio MidiSport Uno) was recognized right away. The only problem is sorting out all the software. There's a program aptly named JACK that handles all the connections, both MIDI and audio, from any music-based program that's running. The main sequencer is Rosegarden, and there's a software synth that uses soundfonts called QSynth.

Theoretically, all this stuff should work together. Well, I can get Rosegarden to play a MIDI file out to my P-70, but I can't seem to figure out how to send program change info to the P-70, or to get QSynth to play along. Plus, the sound font I downloaded is way out of tune with the P-70. Oh, and something is totally screwed up with either the P-70's MIDI output, or how it interacts with the M-Audio MIDI interface, as it won't record or work as a controller for sound playback unless I do this weird voodoo-like setup on it (set doubled voices and make sure both are tuned to +0 octaves).

On the Mac, GarageBand is certainly a much easier program to set up (plug in the interface, do the P-70 voodoo setup thing, play!), but it's not a MIDI sequencer and so doesn't play MIDI data back out to the P-70.

So, regardless of where I do it, it's yet another rat's nest. Oh well, at least the piano has some nice built-in demo songs.

Ubuntu car

Since I got all multi-media-ey with that Kevin Smith post, and since I want to set a record for the most number of labels for a single post to my blog, I'm posting a picture of my virtual Honda CRX that I'm driving around in the Xbox 360 game Forza Motorsport 2.

One of the many cool things about the game is that you can design your own graphics. There are lots of people who have done some amazing bits of artwork for their cars, particularly considering that they're not bitmaps, they're hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of layers of simple objects, layered and colored to look right. I soooo don't have that kind of time on my hands, so instead I went for something simple: the Ubuntu logo. It turned out OK. When I have more time on my hands, I might try to spell out "ubuntu" in that rounded font of theirs... which means tediously resizing multiple rectangles, circles, and arcs.

Oh, and the driving part of Forza 2 is pretty fun too. :)

Superman Returns and Kevin Smith

I've started watching this on the treadmill and frankly, the main thing I'm thinking about is Kevin Smith's story about meeting Jon Peters back when he was writing a version of the script.

Hey, thanks to the miracle of YouTube, I'll link to the clip! It's long, about 19 minutes, but it's subtitled in Spanish (you can learn how to say lots of dirty words in Spanish), and at least so far, it's way more entertaining than Superman Returns.