Controlling linphone

I am working on controlling linphone from the outside, via its command-line interface. To make this work perfectly, I had to modify the code of linphonec slightly to force it to flush after every line, otherwise, Linux is too smart and knows that the stdin/out are pipes and does some additional buffering. There are probably better ways to do this though.

ALSA Problems after Feisty Update

I started to get the following problems when running linphone on top of ALSA after my Feisty update.

ALSA lib confmisc.c:1105:(snd_func_refer) Unable to find definition 'defaults.pcm.dmix_format'
ALSA lib conf.c:3500:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_refer returned error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib conf.c:3957:(snd_config_expand) Args evaluate error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib pcm.c:2145:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM dmix:Intel

I thought linphone was the problem, but this had to do with old ALSA configuration files lying around. Removing (or moving) the .asoundrc and .asoundrc.asoundconf files in your home directory, as explained here will do the trick.

Fixing TV Card and WebCam culpirts.

A number of software packages, including OpenWengo or linphone, will usually insist on using /dev/video0 as the device from which they acquire pictures. This might turn into a problem if your hardware also has a PCI based TV card. Indeed, the TV card would then automatically turn into video0 while the webcam will be video1, a behaviour that you do not which to have.

The solution is a mixture of this tutorial and this blog entry. What I did was finding out the vendor/product of the webcam via lsusb and finding the vendor and device of the TV card via udevinfo -a -p /sys/class/video4linux/video0. I ended up with the following content for a (new) file called 35-perso.rules in /etc/udev/rules.d/:

KERNEL=="video[0-9]*", SYSFS{idVendor}=="046d", SYSFS{idProduct}=="08ad", BUS=="usb", NAME="v4l/video0", SYMLINK="video0"
KERNEL=="video[0-9]*", SYSFS{vendor}=="0x1131", SYSFS{device}=="0x7134", BUS=="pci", NAME="v4l/video1", SYMLINK="video1"

Note that the NAME directive is mandatory for this to work properly, otherwise you'll still have video1 and video0 crossed.

USB-UIRT on Ubuntu

Installing an USB-UIRT device on an Ubuntu system is as simple as explained on the community web site. Automating this would require to automate the dmesg lookup part (or to force the user to use a given USB port?).

However, even though it seems that simple on Ubuntu, it seems that the device is not properly recognised so far. I have been able to make it work on Windows using IRCommand2, but could probably have been using this solution, i.e. the lrnhelper and uutx applications.

However, it is possible to do this on Linux, misterhouse does it. Pay specific attention to the note about using "udev" to fix the name of the USB-UIRT device in the OS to avoid dynamic allocation and the problem described above.

Maxi Tweak

Automatix2 will help you maxi tweaking your Ubuntu installation, providing access to loads of "proprietary" software, codecs and fonts and other interesting applications that are not part of the official distribution.

Feisty Fawn

Yesterday, I started an update to the new Ubuntu release. The only problem so far is that my web cam has now been moved to another video device (/dev/video1) instead of /dev/video0 which is the default. It took some time to understand it, at first, I thought that it had stopped working. It is by trying out camorama -d /dev/video1 that I discovered the shift and I still wonder how to move it back to video0. One possible reason would be that Feisty is now recognising partly my TV card. This could be the start of an answer and solution.

Epson Stylus Scan 2000 on Ubuntu

I had an old Epson Stylus Scan 2000 that windows XP had rendered useless (the 2k drivers refused to work on XP). I decided to give it a go under Ubuntu. It worked like a breeze or almost. Printing was as simple as connecting and adding a new printer from the configuration panel. Scanning was just a bit harder, i.e. a matter of helping xsane with the product and device identifiers unearthed here and adding usb 0x04b8 0x0105 to epson.conf in the /etc/sane.d directory.

The Ultimate Calendar Syncing Solution

Here is the problem: How to keep all your calendars in sync, access them from your mobile devices, from your desktop and on the go, from remote terminals. The answer is partly simple, Google Calendar. But it is far from enough. Here is what I do:

• I have a Google calendar, which allows me to add events whenever I want and wherever I am, as long as I have an access to the Internet.
• I install GCALDaemon on every machine that I need to access the Google calendar from a desktop application.
• I setup sunbird on that machine, using the GCALDaemon URL (which is local).
• On my windows machine, I install My Phone Explorer and sync to the sunbird calendar. I tried syncing to the same local URL as the GCALDaemon but that did not work.
  

This way I keep all in sync, whichever device my newly added events are coming from.

Editing PDF

pdftk will do all sorts of batch operations on your PDF files, extracting pages, merging, etc. All the features are on the home page.

Installing Gnocl

Gnocl is a Tcl binding to Gtk which provides access to most of the Gnome components and is an alternative to the regular toolkit called Tk that most Tcl programmers use. I am interested in Gtk (and thus Gnocl) because there exist a DirectFB backend for Gtk applications. However, installing Gnocl means compiling it, which means the installation of the following packages in ubuntu. You will have to install the development versions of these packages (and their dependencies):

• libgtk2
  
• libgnomecanvas2
• libgconf2
• libgnome-vfs
• libgnome2
• libgnomeui
• libpanel-applet2