Not only that, but while we're a young distro we come with a rich history: Mandriva. While the corporate side of Mandriva is still somewhat struggling, the breadth of experience our contributors have is much greater than our age would normally indicate.

In terms of technology, I like to think we're a very forward facing distro. We're keen to adopt and contribute to the new "plumbing" layers being developed. Like pretty much every other distro out there, we've seen the value in this standardisation process and wholeheartedly adopted the new pid 1, systemd. Unlike some others, we've clearly stated that while Mageia 2 supports both systemd and sysvinit, Mageia 3 will focus solely on systemd. We do not see value in providing a half-hearted version of three different init systems and would much rather go "all in" and provide an excellent experience with the one that looks the strongest and offers the most compelling technical advantages. This will see us providing tools to help users administer their systems better and help with bug reports and fixes upstream too.

We also strongly support our packagers and developers contributing directly upstream. Just recently the xsettings-kde project was removed from Mageia subversion and migrated into KDE git upstream such that other distros can contribute more easily.

So for these reasons and many, many more, I feel we can continue to make the magic happen!

In terms of this release specifically, there are so many people to thank. In no particular order: Anne Nicolas, Thomas Backlund, Thierry Vignaud, Dexter Morgan, Pascal Terjan, Olivier Blin and many others on the development side, the many awesome folks in the QA team, those pesky bug reporters (some who were absolutely amazing and very understanding) and those who helped get the Artwork and Marketing side of things looking nice and slick. I'm sorry if I didn't mention you by name above, but there really are many, many lovely people involved and to thank everyone individually would just take too long! Rest assured, you are all awesome! Also thanks have to also go to the good folks involved in upstream projects. For me personally that's particularly Lennart Poettering, Kay Sievers, Michal Schmidt and Tom Gundersen (and others)  from systemd and Harald Hoyer from dracut (most of whole are Redhat employees with the exception of Tom who is an Arch contributor); Arun Raghavan, Tanu Kaskinen and David Henningsson from PulseAudio; to the KDE and GNOME projects and their many, many contributors and to everyone else supporting the use of Free software - don't be owned - own it!!!

We had previously used the FreeDesktop wiki for a couple, isolated pages (mainly because the pulseaudio.org wiki was just too frustrating to use), but the vast majority of content was still on the old servers.

So I finally got around to looking at migrating the content. Now a lot of it is out of date (again see the "too frustrating to use" comment above!), but there is still a lot of data and history there that we'd like to preserve.

Fortunately, FreeDesktop use MoinMoin which is very easy to manipulate, squeeze and mould into the right shape. No complicated databases, just a relatively isolated file system layout. This very much eased the migration process.

We used Trac over at pulseaudio.org and I've done a fair bit of hacking on Trac before so this was also quite convenient as the only two scripts I found for migrating wiki content from Trac to Moin were very basic and limited in their features.

So I set about writing a script to do the conversion. trac2moin supports full wiki conversion including history and attachments. It can rename pages (and fix up links) with a simple map file and also rename users with another map file. It can even fixup some of the syntax differences and even translate a few basic macros. All in all, the conversion process was pretty good.

There will, of course, still be a requirement for a big refresh of the data and content, but now that the bulk of the heavy lifting is done that task can be planned, organised and undertaken without any barriers!

Many thanks to Arun Raghavan and to Tollef Fog Heen for their help in this conversion process.

So get updating!

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

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.

UPDATE: This guide now also mentions Alexander Patrakov's (G+) DTS encoder dcaenc as an alternative to the alsa-plugins AC3 encoder.

ALSA Plugins: a52

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 and Mageia 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)

DCAENC

As an alternative to the above plugin, if your receiver supports DTS then you can also use Alexander Patrakov's DTS encoder dcaenc. This has the advantage of being stand alone and is very easy to compile and install. It also includes an appropriate alsa config snippet. I would recommend placing this snippet into /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf.d/ which (at least on recent alsa-lib versions) is automatically scanned for configuration files.

Using it!

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 Proper Passthrough?

At present Passthrough support isn't available in the latest released version of PA (it is supported in git master - UPDATE it's been available for a while now in released PA since v1.0). 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/DTS encoding system like the A52 or DCE plugins 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

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!