For the longest time, I’ve had to deal with audio delaying at the beginning of every song/movie. I could never figure it out until this morning. Basically, when I would play something, VLC would freeze for 5 seconds before playing and I couldn’t figure out why.

Under ‘Preferences,’ click ‘All’ under ‘Show Settings,’ and open the ‘Audio’ category. From there, click on the ‘Output modules’ subcategory and make sure the correct audio output method is chosen; in my case, I chose ALSA. Save your settings, and the initial audio delay should be gone. I think the delay was due to VLC trying to find a suitable output method.

Now only if I could figure out why gnome-screenshot doesn’t include the title bar in gtk-window-decorator under compiz.

After hearing about Docky being separated from Gnome-Do, I went to try out the alpha version. I found that there are no Debian binaries – no worries, right? I can just build it from source…right? Wrong. I don’t know about other distros, but Docky refuses to build on Debian. The maintainers don’t even know why, or care. They don’t even know their asses from a hole in the ground and blamed the issue on Debian itself. Nice one, guys. I keep getting the error: No package ‘mono-options’ found and I have libmono-getoptions2.0-cil installed. No, my mono GAC is not broken. So, what have we learned from this? Don’t release a package “for Linux,” if it only builds on Ubuntu.

The Debian issue I’ve had since at least June has been resolved. I am now back on testing (squeeze). See this report for more information. The real reason why I’m happy is because I was able to get myself off of ATi’s fglrx driver. I have a Mobility Radeon X1300 and Linux support for it dropped some time ago, leaving me stuck with the 2.6.28.9 Linux kernel, since that’s the last kernel the last drivers support. I’ve been trying for years to get the open source radeon drivers to work and I got them finally this past weekend. I had to compile everything basically from the ground up and build it into the kernel and it worked. Now, I get fewer FPS than I did with the proprietary driver, but it works. Compiz works wonderfully and I can now resize video without X crashing. There’s also no tearing and I can play video in VLC once again. So, yeah, as a result of this I can use the newest 2.6.31 kernel – with ext4 and grub2. I’ve been using reiserfs since the days of Woody and it’s time to move on. I don’t see a future in reiser4 so I see no point in holding out for it.

Some bad news is that the primary drive in my server may be dying. It’s an 80GB Hitachi Deathstar Deskstar that I pulled from a dumpster in 2003. Since 2004, it’s been making bizarre noises that are a mix between beeping and clicking. I guess it’s its own African clicking language or something, being a computer and all. Starting last week, the clicking has become more slow and frequent. I ran a SMART check on it back in 2006 and got back no problems. I’m running an extended test as I type this so I’m hoping things are okay. Just to be safe, though, I have a scheduled cron script to back up all the important files on it to the secondary drive. I don’t really want to buy a new hard drive so I hope everything is okay. I actually depend on this one for a lot of things.

I wish I had a bigger tank for Mossby and Trigby. They’ve gotten so big, but I can’t afford a larger tank right now and I don’t have the time to maintain anything larger than what I already have. I’ve promised them that when I’m finished with school I will get them a bigger one – one with a filter so I don’t have to constantly change the water from their nastiness. I should really clean my room up a bit. There are wads of paper everywhere from where I’ve been ripping pages out of spiral notebooks. Oh, I watched Watchmen this evening. What a let down.

I do not look forward to writing this paper for my ethics class. The length requirement isn’t long, but it’s going to take a lot of rambling to fill it up. I’m finished being sick, finally. Luckily, it wasn’t anything serious. The only real odious task for this week was cleaning out Mossby and Trigby’s tank, which I did this morning. It was disgusting, to say the least. Their water was cloudy and smelled awful. Mossby has been proudly sitting on top of the rock this afternoon. I don’t know why. Watching Trigby eat three whole grasshoppers this past week was hilarious. Mossby was supposed to get two of them, but that didn’t work out…unsurprisingly. I watched The Girl Who Leapt Through Time yesterday.

It was pretty good and there weren’t any boring moments. The next one up on my list to watch is Perfect Blue. I have no idea what it’s about, but I hope it’s good. Also, it’s been a long time and the Debian installer is still broken. The root password and users set at installation are not actually saved and network manager is broken. The last time I used it (couple weeks ago), it didn’t detect any of my network hardware even though it was recognized by the kernel. Both of these problems have been reported, but nothing much is really being done about them. I’d like to switch back to Squeeze, but I can’t until this is fixed.

After hearing about Ubuntu’s new (well, not quite) notification system, notify-osd, I checked Google to see if someone had built a binary for Debian. Unfortunately, nobody had, but I was still able to build it successfully. The only dependency missing was libwnck-dev. Anyway, it’s just the standard ./configure, make, and make install protocol. I appended ./configure with –prefix=/usr in order to have it installed to /usr/share/ instead of /usr/local/share/. Upon running as a regular user (won’t run with root privs) I received the error “Another instance has already registered org.freedesktop.Notifications.” It took me a while to figure out that since notify-osd is a replacement of notification-daemon, notification-daemon would need to be closed first (killall notification-daemon). After this, it finally worked. My only gripe that caused me to uninstall it is the fact that it draws a dialogue box when a notification has an infinite expiration. Dialogue boxes are ugly. After uninstalling, I had to re-install notification-daemon for it to be recognized again as the notification system. I had plans to build a Debian package for notify-osd, but didn’t care enough for it to do so, but if anybody asks for it I will build one.

After having installed many updates this past week, something along the way broke, which caused Debian to have a coronary. This is the fifth time I’ve had trouble installing Debian testing from a USB flash drive. I don’t know if it’s me or if the boot.img.gz is just buggy or what. Some time ago I spoke with a responsible maintainer about it and even he said there were issues. Anyway, I was able to get everything installed through setting up a TFTP server (netboot) on ALICE. I had never done this before but it was easier than I thought it would be. It just took two steps: tweaking my dnsmasq configuration and installing tftp-hpa. Setting the debconf priority to medium allowed me to choose to install from testing and that was that. I’ll probably use this way from now on.
I’ve never had a problem installing Flash from Adobe, but this time was an exception. I’m not sure if it’s because Debian has switched to EGLIBC or what, but I was getting errors from the script installer saying that my version of GLIBC wasn’t up to snuff when it actually was. I fixed this by just manually copying libflashplayer.so into /usr/lib/iceweasel/plugins/. I hope this is worked out some time in the future.
I did finish up this past year with a 4.0 GPA, which was enough to get me finally accepted into UNC Charlotte as a transfer student, so I’ll be going there this Fall majoring in information systems and minoring in computer science. I think I’m more excited about leaving here than anything else.

…is strange. I assume it’s the same in other distributions, but under Debian in Iceweasel, print preview by default is lacking the option to scale content and view it in either landscape or portrait. From digging around in the configuration I found the print.whileInPrintPreview value to be set to ‘false’. Changing this to ‘true’ enabled scaling and landscape/portrait mode. I have no idea why this isn’t enabled by default, but I assume it will be at some point in a future version. The funny thing is, all of this is enabled by default in the Windows build and I’m not sure about OSX. I also found that using a custom scale produces a bug that splits the window into two panes, each with cut-off text. Whenever I close print preview and re-open it, everything looks fine.