Arun will be giving a PulseAudio talk and Lennart will be rambling on about init systems as is customary these days. Very much looking forward to both.

We've also had an IRC meeting about bluetooth support and policy stuff for in-car usage with some big car manufacturers which we'll follow up next week in person and there are also a lot of other audio folk in town so we'll hopefully kickstart the UCM discussions again with a view to merging into PA 2.0. Looking forward to catch up with Mark and Liam again on that front.

So with pretty much all the people invloved in the Linux audio field, this is a really good opportunity to make some good progress!

Here's to a successful trip!

Many thanks to Collabora who have helped me organise funding and also to Yocto Project (via Texas Instruments) who have very kindly sponsored my attendance of the LinuxCon/ELC-E part of the event. I look forward to finding out more about their project when I help out at their booth!

This release fixes a couple issues people had with our two-point version number change and several other bits and bobs.

On it's way to Mageia Cauldron now and I should get around to backporting this sometime very soon for mga1 now that backports are open

It's been a long time coming and I'm very glad this is finally out of the door and I look forward to a much more streamlined release process in the future.

There are too many people to thank but in particular I'd like to thank Arun Raghavan, Tanu Kaskinen, David Henningsson, Maarten Bosmans, Daniel Mack, Jason Newton, Jyri Sarha, Lu Guanqun, Luiz Augusto von Dentz, Marc-André Lureau, Pierre-Louis Bossart, Siarhei Siamashka and of course Lennart Poettering.

There is more info over on the announce mail, so give it a read and also see our release notes.

Obviously there is still a huge amount to be done, both in the daemon itself, improving documentation and improving integration into the desktop environment itself. Any help is gratefully received!

So stay tuned for future improvements! And speaking of staying tuned, I'd also like to announce Planet PulseAudio. This is an aggregated feed of posts about PulseAudio. If you have a blog and write about PA, please get in touch and we can add your feed. The design is heavily borrowed from Planet GNOME so it should be familiar for some readers.

Packages are already available for Mageia Cauldron and backports for Mageia 1 will be available sometime soon. Hopefully someone will update the packages in Mandriva as I'm not actively doing stuff over there these days.

Happy listening!

PS I'm sure there will be a brown bag moment to come with a 1.0 release, but fingers crossed.... :p

Sadly one things that has always bugged me: the fact I cannot rename the newsgroups to suit my taste. I already use the Extra Folder Columns addon that lets me see additional columns in the folder listings so I had a little go at tweaking it to allow me to assign nicer names for the numerous newsgroups (well mailing lists) I follow. It turned out not to be too hard (tho' it took me a while due to not knowing anything about modding Mozilla apps!).

The result:

Thunderbird Newsgroups Renamed!

My patch can be found here. I'll be submitting it upstream to the guys who developed the addon and they'll hopefully incorporate it (even if it does not fit in perfectly with the name of the addon, it wouldn't really be possible to do this separately without tweaking the existing addon in some capacity).

Well as I'm now mostly running Mageia, I decided it was worth posting a follow up article. Read on if you're interested in the nitty gritty of how such a system works.

So most of the details in that previous article still stand true, although thankfully it's now much simpler and requires very little in the way of patching of system files etc.

The Mandriva and Mageia rc.sysinit files both support the "early local" script (like rc.local, but executed much earlier in the boot process) which allows us to inject the necessary tweaks.

What are those necessary tweaks? Well primarily it's for setting up some tmpfs files and some unionfs or aufs2 mounts. The standard system init does actually do quite a lot towards getting this working automatically, but I've never had much success with that and there are a still a few things missing (related to dbus) so I prefer to keep things simple!

When I first upgraded my chroot to Mageia, the first hurdle was that mkinitrd-net was not available for Mageia. Thankfully I already had this installed from Mandriva days and the package still works fine. I'll make sure we import this package into Mageia so this won't be a problem ongoing. The second problem was that when booting with the latest kernel, the kernel panicked quite quickly relating to unionfs. It seems unionfs+nfs don't really agree that much. So I reverted back to the old Mandriva kernel which worked fine. So with a little research, I found out that aufs2 is basically replacing unionfs these days. With a couple of checks I was able to add aufs2 support to my rc.early.local script easily enough. This allowed the boot to work without any issues.

In actual fact, even with unionfs and the old kernel, things didn't work perfectly and relied on various tmpfs mounts done by the standard rc.sysinit. Without these, I found various issues relating to kernel panics and general slow performance. With aufs2 these problems don't seem to exist anymore and I can bypass these mounts for a simpler mount setup which is all rather nice.

So once things booted the second problem turned out to be related to keyboard support... I can't quite remember what this was, but I suspect it just related to me not having evdev installed... my memory is sketchy tho'. It certainly wasn't a big problem. What was a big problem was that my user had no rights to various hardware devices. I quickly realised that this related to console kit not marking my login (which was via the autologin package) as "active". This took a little more sleuthing but I finally realised this was down to not bringing the autologin package up to date with the recent(ish) changes in console kit, namely the pam ck connector. With a little bit of patching of the /etc/pam.d/autologin file, I was up and running again! I've reported this to the Mageia devel list. Hopefully someone who knows this stuff better than me can comment and we can push an update soon now the updates and QA processes are in place.

So without further ado, here is the contents of my rc.early.local. The comments should mean the file kinda speaks for itself.

#!/bin/bash

# Fake an eth0 configuration
cat >/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 < DEVICE=eth0
ONBOOT=yes
NOZEROCONF=yes
EOF


If anyone has any suggestions for improvements or wants to discuss any of the bits in detail, just leave a comment!

While last year it felt like I was the lone voice singing the praises of PulseAudio (although there were a few supporters!), but this year it feels like everything has gone 180° with pretty much everyone on board! This is a great result for me personally as I've been pretty much the only person working on KDE+PulseAudio integration, so I was very pleased to get this feedback. It's good to know that the hard work and effort you put in is appreciated. It's all too often that the people who appreciate your work are the silent majority (if you do a really good job, they don't know you've done anything as things Just Work™), while the vocal minority are quick to shout and judge and generally flame.

So I was off to an lovely start and I got down to hacking. What did I do this year? Well I continued some work on the interface I made last year called "Speaker Setup". I realised just a short while ago that there was no interface in KDE to be able to change the Source Ports (i.e. pick Mic vs. Line In on your laptop) so I set about extending speaker setup to cope with this. I added a Mic VU meter for good measure (mainly to use up the space with something vaguely useful!). I would ultimately like to do more with this UI but this would need more changes in PulseAudio itself (come listen to my talk in Berlin at the Desktop Summit if you want to know more about this!).

As well as this, I did some tweaks in Phonon to tidy some things up. Various bits and bobs within Phonon and the KCM had bit rotted a little, so minor tweaking saw that all brought up to speed.

I also spent some time hacking on PulseAudio itself, improving some earlier work related to adding Source Output volume controls to PA to take on peer review comments (for those of you unaware, this is capture stream volume control - PA has long supported "per-application" volume control but this only actually applied to outputs. It's not really very common for users to record multiple streams at the same time so support for per-capture stream volumes was never introduced. Now that PA supports Flat Volumes (a feature that always tries to use the hardware volume whenever possible to get the most efficient volume adjustment path), it makes sense to use this for inputs too. It also establishes a degree of symmetry to the API which has always felt a little weird in the past - especially if you are developing a VoIP app (the guys from Skype were a little confused about this disparity for example)). I also spent some time making some minor improvements to pavucontol (shh, don't tell the KDE guys but this is a GTK app!) as this is still my main debug tool when hacking on PA (I mainly improved it to deal more gracefully with errors - like when PA itself crashes and leaves behind the X11 root window's PULSE_SERVER property which results in an invalid argument error from the context with the result that the automatic reconnect mode doesn't work! - but also added some simple keyboard shortcuts that I generally miss when switching windows quickly). I also added support for Source Output volumes to KMix, but this will stay in my private branch until I've committed the PA code as the version check will currently match git master code even if it doesn't yet have the support needed!

I also started to look at Arun and Pierre's awesome work to support passthrough. As there is no reliable way to query receivers for the encodings they support (AC3, DTS etc.) we have to provide a way for users to specify this manually. I worked to rejig how PA stores various bits of information in internal databases to allow for arbitrary lengths of data to be stored rather than the fixed size blobs supported currently. This will pave the way to adding a protocol extension to set the formats for which support will have to be added to the Speaker Setup GUI somehow...

In addition, I also looked at VLC's PulseAudio output layer. I've known for a while that it's kind of lacking and Rémi from upstream VLC has become rather exasperated about the lack of good documentation we provide. I fully appreciate our docs are lacking (some mails on our mailing list today highlight that internal docs for module development are also severely lacking), but I was able to use what was out there to add what I think is quite robust support to VLC. As VLC is used as a Phonon backend by some distros, I felt this was an important task to work on during this KDE sprint.

All in all it was a pleasure to stay here again and meet some now familiar as well as some new people (especially Bart and Trever who are big PA fans!) I look forward to seeing several of them again in Berlin and hopefully next year here in Randa too!

I've not had nearly as much time to contribute as much as I would have liked to this release, due to various personal, work and upstream project commitments, but I know my good friends and colleagues have done a stellar job (and I've helped out when I can).

I should say that this shouldn't be expected as a ground breaking release. We're not using Gnome 3 or Systemd yet (both will most likely come in Mageia 2) as this release more signifies the establishing of all the various infrastructure needed to create a distro (build cluster, community management, mirror management etc.) especially the proper cleaning and rebuilding of all of the Mandriva packages thought to be essential or vaguely useful. This was a momentous task and one that I think has been achieved in good time.

Onwards and upwards! (to 2!)

I've included my abstract below just in case you are interested.

PulseAudio integration has come a long way. The times when detractors derided it for crashing or simply not working are mostly in the past (there are always exceptions!) and the various distributions now have solid integration and configuration options available. ALSA has also come a long way to support the timer-based scheduling that PulseAudio uses by default.

Today, a major hurdle is UI and Desktop Environment integration. In this talk I intend to look at the current UIs in both GNOME and KDE and the kind of interfaces that are missing and are still needed and what options still need to be exposed from the underlying ALSA level. I'll look at the routing logic chosen under the (more exposed) KDE and the (more minimal) GNOME interfaces and how we support that at the PA level. I'll also look at how we should be configuring some of the more advanced features of PA in a way that can fit in neatly to the DE with their own, native UI.

[colin@jimmy ~]$ uname -a
Linux jimmy 2.6.37-desktop-3.mga #1 SMP Tue Jan 25 14:16:42 UTC 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[colin@jimmy ~]$ cat /etc/mageia-release
Mageia release 1 (Cauldron) for x86_64

Yay! Now I should be able to step up the pace of my contributions as I find it much easier and more natural to work and test as I go on my own computer rather than in a virtualised environment.

Personally I upgraded my computer from Cooker which I had frozen in a pre-rpm5 state, diligently not doing any updates despite wanting several newer packages (esp the latest Firefox 4 beta). The upgrade itself went fairly smoothly, but had some hiccups. These were mostly solved when I realised I still had a bunch of stuff in my urpmi skip.list and cleaned it out (I had various rpm things in there to prevent rpm5 being accidentally installed - I'm sure it'll be good eventually, but I'll hold off for a little while ).

So now I can update my computer again, the magic can return! Mageia has arrived!!!

While the "a52" plugin is part of the official ALSA plugins source, some distros do not compile it by default. It's available in Mandriva out of the box, but on Ubuntu for example you'll need to compile it yourself or find someone who provides a custom build for you (feel free to suggest a PPA in the comments below). Someone did tell me about pretty good instructions about building the plugin yourself.

So after building the plugin all you need to do is add a snippet of ALSA configuration to setup the a52 plugin with a named PCM that PulseAudio checks for and then everything should work automatically.

Here is the snippet. I'd recommend adding it to your ~/.asoundrc file (just create it if it doesn't exist; ~/ is just a shortcut to your home directory).

pcm.a52 {
  @args [CARD]
  @args.CARD {
    type string
  }
  type rate
  slave {
    pcm {
      type a52
      bitrate 448
      channels 6
      card $CARD
    }
    rate 48000 #required somehow, otherwise nothing happens in PulseAudio
  }
}

(just as a note, the previously linked article has an error when is suggests using echo to add this to your ~/.asoundrc as it doesn't double escape the $CARD)

Once this is in place, then PulseAudio will automatically probe it and provide you the option of selecting a 5.1 Digitial Output profile. You can use pavucontrol's Configuration tab to pick your profile (or gnome-volume-control or the Speaker Setup tab in KDE).

One other thing you may have to do to get this working properly is change the default sample rate used by PA to be 48kHz. To do this, just edit daemon.conf in either /etc/pulse or ~/.pulse and include the line:

default-sample-rate = 48000

What about Passthrough?

At present Passthrough support isn't available in the latest released version of PA (it is supported in git master). Even when this is available it will be exclusive (as will any other codec support such as MP3 for Bluetooth and RAOP etc.) and as such mixing will not be available which leads to a whole set of UI and configuration problems, so in many ways using a software AC3 encoding system like the A52 plugin here has many advantages over using passthrough. Obviously there is processing and mixing overhead but for many people (myself included) this is perfectly acceptable.

One odd thing about the setup is that some applications will consider this an "Analog[ue]" output (e.g. in XBMC I have to select Analog Output and choose 5.1 speakers to get everything working correctly, but at least it works

PS, yes the title is a Wu-Tang reference