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).

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.

I was fortunate enough to be invited by Scott Reeves to speak about PulseAudio and specifically the KDE Integration work recently undertook. Scott works mostly on the SLED side of things (Enterprise Desktop) and PulseAudio falls within his remit. I'm pleased to say that the next version of OpenSuse's KDE flavour will follow the lead of Mandriva, Fedora and, most recently Kubuntu, and default to use PulseAudio under KDE. This is IMO a great step forward and will help continue the acceptance and appreciation of PulseAudio and I'm very happy to have played a part in making that possible.

Our talk itself went very well and seemed to be well received. It was also a pleasant surprise to finally meet both Takashi Iwai and Lennart Poettering who attended my talk and generally milled around. I've managed to miss meeting Lennart at various events over the years and while we've worked quite closely on PulseAudio in the past (to the extent he trusts me enough with managing the PA project while he works on the systemd project), it was nice to actually "talk" about PulseAudio! The subsequent BoF (Birds of a Feather) session on systemd was also very interesting (even if there was a little bit of a sticking point on defining preload vs. readahead which IMO was really labouring semantics to a degree and prevented getting to the more interesting stuff!). Takashi is another one of the few people who work on Linux Audio and it was nice to chat to him after exchanging several emails over the years on the ALSA mailing list.

The rest of the conference was also interesting. As someone who sits rather on the fence between KDE and Gnome it was interesting to see the developments in Gnome 3 demonstrated. There were various other titbits of interesting things too, but I wont bore the world with the details!

On the Saturday, I took the tram to the south of Nürmberg and visited their New Museum of Art and Design. It was very enjoyable. Almost deserted, which made it a rather nice experience, but also sad to see such a place under appreciated. Still it was quite early when I went, so maybe it hots up in the afternoon! My favourite photographs were by Gabriele Basilico and depicted a series of chairs with interesting seats: lattice, round holes, metal bars etc. and then accompanying photographs of a bottom that had clearly been sitting in said chair for a while. That quite tickled me An installation peace by Jeppe Hein was also very smart. Using light, mirrors and sensors to create interactive "rooms", including and empty one that just set off an alarm when you stepped into it (no doubt just to make people jump!). I then walked up through the centre checking out the churches (which would be a lot more interesting if they didn't have all that religious stuff inside them!) and the castle. A thoroughly pleasant day out!

When it was time to return home, my only regret was that I didn't get a chance to say goodbye to Scott, so as luck would have it I bumped into him at the airport in the queue going through security. It turned out he was on my flight to Amsterdam anyway so we were able to have a little blether on the way there.

What came as even more of a coincidence was the fact that I bumped into my mate Dom who happened to sit in front of me on the connecting flight to Edinburgh! He'd just been off climbing Kilimanjaro, which is arguably slightly more interesting than my week but he got his phone stolen at the "security" check in the airport (and the subsequent delay that it caused actually meant he was on my flight rather than an earlier one) so that evened things up!

But all in all, thanks to Novell, OpenSuse and Scott for inviting me along!

So apologies for that. I know some distro maintainers look at the Mandriva packages subversion for patches etc. so I'm sure some folks will have these fixes already, but it was a mistake not to push them upstream sooner.

Anyway, fixes are pushed to upstream master and stable-queue and will be part of the (hopefully) upcoming bugfix release.

Those of us involved in the community surrounding Mandriva have obviously been worried that the future of our favourite distro is in doubt, so it is with great pleasure that I pass on news of the upcoming fork of Mandriva Linux: Mageia

Obviously the obligatory slashdot story only really draws comments on the choice of name. Personally, I quite like it (more so than the name "Mandriva" (which itself was a contraction of Mandrake and Conectiva - partly due to the use of the name Mandrake drawing some legal issues)). And choosing a name is no easy business: there are trademark issues to consider and domain names to secure: this can seriously limit your choice. Regardless of the practicalities, "that which we call a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet". In other words, the name doesn't matter, what really matters is the work done and the contributions to be made to the wider Linux ecosystem.

Mandriva has long been regarded as a good participant in upstream projects, contributing to the Kernel, Graphic and Audio subsystems as well as being a very active contributor to higher level desktop environments such as KDE (and GNOME and XFCE and others too). With so many of the key contributors following this fork and contributing to Mageia, I feel this tradition will continue and grow with time.

So, as I said in one of the many "goodbye" emails I've had to write following the lay offs: The future is unwritten. Let's write it!

As well as taking part in various discussions, I was able to spend some time cooking up a UI to control the configuration of PulseAudio and the various cards attached.When adding PulseAudio support to the various parts of KDE that need it (Phonon, KMix), there was an important part of the puzzle missing: a card profile selector, and a sink/source port selector. I had always intended to include this functionality somewhere, but the KMix framework didn't really allow for it neatly (I could have created a separate dialog of course but it didn't quite feel right).

The eagle eyed readers may have seen a sneak preview of this feature when looking at the KDE-specific help page I wrote up on the PulseAudio website. So I give you this: the Speaker Setup tab in System Settings.

Speaker Setup GUI

The little icon in the middle is your user icon, so you'll see this differently unless your a weird stalker type and have set your icon to mine :s

The various drop downs allow fully control over all cards that are attached to the system. The buttons on the main pane allow you to test each speaker separately. In order to test the speakers, libcanberra is used. libcanberra is an implementation of the Free Desktop Sound Theme specification. It allows this test to be implemented with minimum hassle and I'm not personally interested in reinventing the wheel, hence the use of this library and the additional dependency.  Some people dislike using libcanberra in KDE (as was apparent from some discussions at the Multimedia Sprint), but I believe the reasons were often personal ones and not related to the usefulness of the code. If someone really wants to factor this out, they can but I have no interest in doing so and will prefer to use the existing implementation whenever possible (and this would include any future implementation I may or may not do with regards to support the Sound Theme Specification in KDE (or maybe Qt) directly)

When a 5.1 surround system is presented, the GUI is obviously a bit more advanced:

Speaker Setup GUI (5.1)

For those naysayers, I've tried my best to ensure that the compile will work fine without PulseAudio installed. It should also degrade gracefully when it is compiled with PA support, but PA is not configured to be used at runtime. The whole tab will simply not be available.

There is still one small problem left in that I don't handle disconnection/reconnection yet. This causes the GUI to crash if the PA server is stopped and restarted. This is not typically something that happens, but it's still something I will fix shortly all the same.

This code is now in trunk (r1154776) so feel free to try it out and report other bugs etc. This GUI is also included in Mandriva Cooker (I did want to include it prior to 2010.1 release, but the timing didn't work out - tho' it probably would have been OK considering the delays that cropped up in the release process). I expect this functionality to be included in any updated/backported versions of KDE for 2010.1.

For reference, in case you didn't spot it yourself, this GUI was heavily inspired by the gnome-speaker-setup utility.