i love the hud very quick and handy rather than trying to click the menu

Regards

Bevan

In a world without fences and walls, who needs Gates and Windows?



On 27 April 2012 10:39, Derek Smithies <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi,
>  Well - the latest is now out. I thought I would do something different,
> and comment on the older version.
>
> My comments - well - take them as you will..
>
> Some have decried ubuntu for the lack of configuration tools - to change
> things the way they want. Hmm.
> This is "important" to some, but I see a computer as a work tool -
> something to pick up and use and get the job done.
> In my experience, "tweaking" the look almost invariably leads to zero
> productivity improvement, and much wasted time.
> Some teaks do work::decreasing the size of tool bar, adding a cpu
> performance meter. To me - I am happy with the "look".
>
> The update manager seriously annoys me. Some packages hang in the install
> process, doing nothing. You have to open the extra
> details, click q in the "less" process that is running and trying to
> explain something, and move on. If linux is truly ready for the
> masses, there should be no need for this.
>
> Pulse annoys me. Pulse is designed around one sound device - which means
> that on a laptop with an inbuilt sound card, and
> usb headset, only one is operational. True - one can go into the
> preferences and move the sound to the headset from the
> sound card. But it is clunky. Would it not be better to make the ring tone
> playable on the speaker, and the conversation on the headset.
> Well - some say - you can edit asound.conf with this wonderful short
> script to get sound that way with alsa. The moment you say,
> "edit a system sound file", you are proving linux is not ready for the
> masses.
>
> Alsa annoys me - applications that are labelled "alsa compliant" do not
> always work.. A customer asked me to write a linux app
> that has 20 concurrent sound channels on it. On pulse - it runs fine. On
> Alsa - well - it depends. There is now a document that
> says some alsa calls are safe for application developers to use - and
> others that are not safe. Going further, they say that the application
> should write the sound data to the library in sizes appropriate to the
> device - so some want it in 16 or 32 or 200 bytes at a time. All
> applications for alsa have to do this - which means there is a whole lot
> of duplicated code out there. Surely, such bundling of bytes into
> the right size is best done in the library? (That is the purpose of a
> library - to put common code in the one place, accessible to all).
>
> The transition of Alsa to Pulse is the right transition - the process is
> just painful. Usually hindered by the mountains of legacy alsa scripts
> we have written to get sound somewhat right. Remember that the only thing
> which is advanced in alsa is found in the name.
>
> But what really bites, and really annoys, is the handling of USB devices.
> This problem is also found on Fedora, so don't get excited.
> I have a USB device which encodes/decodes audio (320 bytes of 8khz audio
> can be turned into 49 bits).  If this device is in the box, the box
> is then powered on, the usb device does not respond to programming
> requests. It shows up at /dev/ttyUSBx - the codec connects to linux
> via a FTDI chip. To get the device to work, it has to be unplugged, and
> plugged in after power up.
> --turns out there are a host of other devices (usb mouse etc) out there
> with a similar problem. Always - they need to be unplugged after boot, and
> then plugged back in, before they will work.
> Turns out that there is a thing called a modem-manager, which actively
> probes all FTDI devices at startup. Yes, I wrote a program to do a
> FTDI reset in an endeavour to bring it back, and copied/tried the programs
> out there to reset the usb bus. None of those brought my USB
> device back to life. So why don't I want to just remove the modem-manager
> (responsible for mobile broadband wireless)?
> Well, I could. It would be problem solved (for me). But for others who use
> my program - they too would have to do the same. And some of
> them are mobile people, and want the modem-manager. Instead, they all have
> to remember to unplug/plug the USB device in, and then start my program,
> and then start work. A process they have to go through every time they boot
> their box.
>
> Partly the problems results from multiple people using the same
> vendor_id:product_id on different different devices.
>
> Enough ranting. Maybe this can spark some activity on this list. Who knows
> - I might get lucky and someone tells me how to disable the modem-manager
> for a particular usb vendor/product pair.
>
> Cheers,
>  Derek.
>
> --
> Derek J Smithies Ph.D.
> Christchurch,
> New Zealand
>
>     -- "How did you make it work??"  "the usual, got everything right"
>
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>
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