cloudsoup

linux linux everywhere, originally uploaded by colinj.

At Orlando the crew reboots the inflight entertainment system. Linux everywhere.

Today – at this moment actually – I’m installing KDEvelop and various support add-ons . An IDE for KDE with support for C/C++, Ruby, scripting and so on.

It’s a few years since I’ve done any serious low-level programming. In fact, I think the last such project I worked on was the development of a COM object to suck in foreign exchange information in real time, C++ on an MS platform. My development experience on Linux is limited although I used to support a job scheduling system written on a Unix platform and used by BT but from today I’m rolling up my sleeves and getting down with KDEvelop.

Don’t know if I should report on my progress, it might be so painfully slow.

Ok, so I know I should update Ubuntu and I’ve read that Breezy isn’t the best for sound but I’ve finally – after an afternoon of messing about – managed to coax Audacity to use my Logitech USB microphone.

First of all, I downloaded the (beta) source for Audacity 1.3.2 and following the helpful advice on mics in Ubuntu here, compiled the source with:

./configure --with-portaudio=v19 --without-portmixer

– which didn’t do the job. Not quite. The problem is that Audacity’s recording preferences appear not to let you change the device from /dev/dsp to /dev/dsp1. According to reports, Audacity won’t find /dev/dsp1 unless there’s a /dev/dsp0. And this is the final fix that worked for me; change to root and type:

ln -s /dev/dsp /dev/dsp0

which creates /dev/dsp0 as a symbolic link (like a shortcut to you Windows folk) to /dev/dsp

then Audacity picks up the USB mic and everything works. Check out this forum entry too.

Might do another podcast now that’s sorted. Still got a problem with my Olympus Digital Voice Recorder on Ubuntu, though.