Re: [DNG] Quick start guide to uprading to Devuan and configuring minimalism

[dev1fanboy]

Some suggestions for minor updates to quick start translations.

There is a change in devuan that means it's no longer necessary to do "apt-get 
install sysvinit core" anymore, also "apt-get install basefiles" is not 
necessary. 

As mentioned before, adding the user to the disk group is not needed anymore. 
Feel free to change wordings to whatever you like, the CC license allows that 
anyway. 

A quick suggestion for working with markdown format.. where commands are done, 
or snippets of config files, it is necessary to use return carriages in mark 
down after each new line or they will display on the same line. This would 
basically mean I don't need to comment on changing the formatting for them, so 
content will look better. 

Anyway, will leave it up to translators if they feel this is worth doing, the 
newer version is what I'm working with now because it fixed some bigger issues 
with the guide 
(https://git.devuan.org/dev1fanboy/Upgrade-Install-Devuan/wikis/devuan-talk-version).
 
-- 
Take back your privacy. Switch to www.StartMail.com
___
Dng mailing list
Dng@lists.dyne.org
https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng

Re: [DNG] Slackware now uses PulseAudio...

[Steve Litt]

On Sun, 17 Jan 2016 12:25:53 +
Rainer Weikusat  wrote:

> Emiliano Marini  writes:
> > Word from Eric Hameleers, one of the main Slackware maintainers (AKA
> > alienbob):
> >  
> >> "...you have to have PA installed because applications are now
> >> linking against it. What you can still do is configure PA to be an
> >> input channel for ALSA and leave ALSA to control your hardware.
> >> But generally speaking I would not recommend that unless you have
> >> high audio quality standards (being a musician or an audiophile)
> >> in which case you should look at Jackd anyway instead of just ALSA
> >> or PA.  
> 
> [...]
> 
> This is actually really remarkable statement. I understand this
> basically as "If you don't really care about audio quality, pulseaudio
> is surely good enough for you", IOW, "despite pulseaudio is anything
> but good at doing the job it's supposed to be used for, it's surely
> sufficient for 'consumers'".

In all fairness, I've found few softwares as difficult to install and
get right as Jack. In fact, of the five times I've tried to install it
on various distros, I've succeeded zero times.

So I'd settle for Pulse (or ALSA or OSS) over Jack simply because I can
actually get those installed.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
January 2016 featured book: Twenty Eight Tales of Troubleshooting
http://www.troubleshooters.com/28


___
Dng mailing list
Dng@lists.dyne.org
https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng

[DNG] Jack or Pulse

[Simon Wise]

On 18/01/16 05:23, Steve Litt wrote:



In all fairness, I've found few softwares as difficult to install and
get right as Jack. In fact, of the five times I've tried to install it
on various distros, I've succeeded zero times.


Jack is extremely flexible, and essential if you want what it does. It is 
complex, it may seem overly so .. even arcane .. to someone not familiar with 
audio production and the systems and work-flows it emulates. But those 
complexities have a very real purpose and are essential in a Digital Audio 
Workstation and several other use cases.


It is certainly not the way to go for simply playing sounds from files or the 
web and hearing beeps and such from the DE and apps.


There are several audio and media production distributions with it all set up.

When Pulse was first introduced it (typically given its author) took over 
control of the audio hardware, excluding anything else and grabbing it back if 
anything else tried to connect directly ... and restarted itself if it was 
stopped ... this way anything it could offer 'just worked' and anything it did 
not offer became impossible. This completely messed up any system using Jack, or 
anything else that did not go through Pulse to access the hardware, which 'just 
failed'.


That may have been the period you tried to use Jack. Pulse had to be purged from 
the system to use audio in any other way. Over time that was fixed (eventually 
it added Jack as an alternative backend). Now it is normal to have Pulse as one 
of the inputs to Jack if an audio workstation wishes to have basic desktop apps 
just use their default Pulse methods, and installing Jack will generally set 
this up by default.


Pulse was (at first) a monumental stuff-up which imposed the 'one true way' on 
everyone ... but was eventually made more civilised (and less buggy).


The issue comes from the fact that alsa is easiest to use if only one app 
connects to and controls a piece of hardware exclusively, this led to obvious 
problems if that app was not some mixer that other audio apps could connect to. 
Hence Jack, later Pulse (there have been many others).




So I'd settle for Pulse (or ALSA or OSS) over Jack simply because I can
actually get those installed.


If you don't need to route audio flexibly, and don't use more complex audio 
hardware that Pulse cannot deal with, and don't want to fiddle with your system 
to get the lowest latency you can, and don't use audio apps that are Jack based, 
and don't want or need to use the other things Jack provides ... then you are 
definitely in the majority as far as audio use goes, and there is little point 
in installing it.



Simon
___
Dng mailing list
Dng@lists.dyne.org
https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng

Re: [DNG] Slackware now uses PulseAudio...

[Brad Campbell]

On 18/01/16 02:23, Steve Litt wrote:


In all fairness, I've found few softwares as difficult to install and
get right as Jack. In fact, of the five times I've tried to install it
on various distros, I've succeeded zero times.

So I'd settle for Pulse (or ALSA or OSS) over Jack simply because I can
actually get those installed.



Jack is one of those interesting cases. That you could not get it to 
work indicates you don't need it. If you needed it then you'd figure it 
out. If you need Jack it's because any of the other 'sound systems' are 
useless to you. Real time (ie multi-track studio work) is one of those 
instances (actually it's the only one I can think of).


Interestingly, installing Jack for me on Debian systems was a matter of 
download, compile, install and run. No frustration required. Probably 
because the hardware and drivers I was using was the sort of stuff Jack 
was written for.



___
Dng mailing list
Dng@lists.dyne.org
https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng

Re: [DNG] Slackware now uses PulseAudio...

[Daniel Reurich]

On 18/01/16 14:11, Brad Campbell wrote:
> On 18/01/16 02:23, Steve Litt wrote:
> 
>> In all fairness, I've found few softwares as difficult to install and
>> get right as Jack. In fact, of the five times I've tried to install it
>> on various distros, I've succeeded zero times.
>>
>> So I'd settle for Pulse (or ALSA or OSS) over Jack simply because I can
>> actually get those installed.
> 
> 
> Jack is one of those interesting cases. That you could not get it to
> work indicates you don't need it. If you needed it then you'd figure it
> out. If you need Jack it's because any of the other 'sound systems' are
> useless to you. Real time (ie multi-track studio work) is one of those
> instances (actually it's the only one I can think of).
> 
> Interestingly, installing Jack for me on Debian systems was a matter of
> download, compile, install and run. No frustration required. Probably
> because the hardware and drivers I was using was the sort of stuff Jack
> was written for.
> 
I've usually deployed it by `apt-get install jackd1` or `apt-get install
jackd2`

But Wheezy was the last one I' deployed it to...  But I've had no issues
apart from having to force alsa to set the card order and setting up
multi-card configurations is a bit painful.



-- 
Daniel Reurich
Centurion Computer Technology (2005) Ltd.
021 797 722



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
___
Dng mailing list
Dng@lists.dyne.org
https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng

Re: [DNG] Upgrading a MIPSel Jessie to Devuan

[David Kuehling]

> "David" == David Kuehling  writes:

> Hi, can I perform an "upgrade" from Debian Jessie to Devuan, as
> described on devuan.org, on a system running MIPSel architecture
> Debian?

Replying to myself, just for the mail archives: after some chatting on
#debian-fork it looks like currently Devuan does not build for MIPS
architectures, just for ARM and x86.  Also Devuan does not seem to have
any build machines currently for MIPS which would be a prerequisite to
start any work in that direction.

Anybody else here interested in Devuan on MIPS(el) machines?  I may
volunteer some time and (hw) resources, but one developer alone would
not be much.

Especially on Mips one may have to work with older or non-official
kernels, which used to be no problem with Debian, until Systemd came
around.  Here [1] it says systemd needs Linux > 3.7: I only have <= 3.5
on my Mips machines.  Now I'm afraid of ever running "apt-get update"
again.  Having Devuan will make working on Mips systems so much easier
(I currently use pinning to keep systemd off my system).

cheers,

David

[1] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/tree/README#n39
-- 
GnuPG public key: http://dvdkhlng.users.sourceforge.net/dk2.gpg
Fingerprint: B63B 6AF2 4EEB F033 46F7  7F1D 935E 6F08 E457 205F
___
Dng mailing list
Dng@lists.dyne.org
https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng

Re: [DNG] Slackware now uses PulseAudio...

[Simon Wise]

On 18/01/16 12:34, Daniel Reurich wrote:

On 18/01/16 14:11, Brad Campbell wrote:

On 18/01/16 02:23, Steve Litt wrote:


In all fairness, I've found few softwares as difficult to install and
get right as Jack. In fact, of the five times I've tried to install it
on various distros, I've succeeded zero times.

So I'd settle for Pulse (or ALSA or OSS) over Jack simply because I can
actually get those installed.



Jack is one of those interesting cases. That you could not get it to
work indicates you don't need it. If you needed it then you'd figure it
out. If you need Jack it's because any of the other 'sound systems' are
useless to you. Real time (ie multi-track studio work) is one of those
instances (actually it's the only one I can think of).

Interestingly, installing Jack for me on Debian systems was a matter of
download, compile, install and run. No frustration required. Probably
because the hardware and drivers I was using was the sort of stuff Jack
was written for.


I've usually deployed it by `apt-get install jackd1` or `apt-get install
jackd2`

But Wheezy was the last one I' deployed it to...  But I've had no issues
apart from having to force alsa to set the card order and setting up
multi-card configurations is a bit painful.


installing it is one step ... but you will not get sound from your desktop apps 
to your speakers without setting things up to achieve that. Normally using Jack 
you will have a number of other apps in the chain ... say processing some audio 
path, or a gui to set the mix, or a matrix of some sort that connects all the 
elements in your audio chain.


Many find the everything-in-one-app approach easier (and learn to match their 
ambitions to the workflows and plugins available) but jack offers the advantages 
of linking lots of small apps (each built along the unix line of making a 
program do one thing and do it well) and allowing the user to arrange the ones 
they prefer in the configuration they want. Which takes a little work on the 
part of the user to set it all up.


Simon
___
Dng mailing list
Dng@lists.dyne.org
https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng

Re: [DNG] Does dunst require dbus?

[Simon Wise]

On 17/01/16 08:08, Steve Litt wrote:

On Sat, 16 Jan 2016 15:32:11 -0500
Mitt Green  wrote:


Steve Litt wrote:


I'm not for a moment suggesting Devuan should remove Debian's libdbus
dependency. We have bigger fish to fry.


$ apt-cache rdepends libdbus-1-3
libdbus-1-3
Reverse Depends:
(...)
436 packages at all on my Unstable


[slitt@mydesk ~]$ xbps-query -RX dbus-libs | wc -l
139
[slitt@mydesk ~]$

Yeah, Devuan, Void or practically anywhere else, at this point trying
to remove dbus is like jousting windmills.

Of course, on good distros, you don't have to actually start dbus :-)


I've seen a lot of apps that will accept dbus if you want to use it, but do not 
require it ... this seems reasonable, dbus is just one of the options for 
communicating with it, and they might then require the lib.


But recently discovered that xfce4-terminal loses critical functionality without 
a session dbus running (it no longer connects to the cut buffer and clipboard 
... which really destroys its functionality). I dropped it in favour of 
roxterminal which is very similar, based on the same engine I believe, but it 
does the cut buffer and clipboard etc directly, as it should. It does connect to 
a session bus if it exists, and communicates appropriately ... just that the 
only thing it does if one does not exist is print a line to stderr then get on 
with everything else.


It seems the author may be abandoning it though, which is a pity.


Simon
___
Dng mailing list
Dng@lists.dyne.org
https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng

Re: [DNG] Upgrading a MIPSel Jessie to Devuan

[Adam Borowski]

On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 03:02:16AM +0100, David Kuehling wrote:
> Especially on Mips one may have to work with older or non-official
> kernels, which used to be no problem with Debian, until Systemd came
> around.  Here [1] it says systemd needs Linux > 3.7: I only have <= 3.5
> on my Mips machines.  Now I'm afraid of ever running "apt-get update"
> again.

Systemd crap aside, the minimal requirement for jessie is 2.6.something,
it has just been bumped to 3.2 for unstable.  As far as I know, forcing a
lower kernel is currently a matter of recompiling libc.

I do own an arm laptop that has a sourceless 3.0 kernel so in theory I
should give it a try, but currently I'm out of damns to give for that
machine...

-- 
A tit a day keeps the vet away.
___
Dng mailing list
Dng@lists.dyne.org
https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng

Re: [DNG] Slackware now uses PulseAudio...

[Rainer Weikusat]

Emiliano Marini  writes:
> Word from Eric Hameleers, one of the main Slackware maintainers (AKA
> alienbob):
>
>> "...you have to have PA installed because applications are now linking
>> against it. What you can still do is configure PA to be an input channel
>> for ALSA and leave ALSA to control your hardware.
>> But generally speaking I would not recommend that unless you have high
>> audio quality standards (being a musician or an audiophile) in which case
>> you should look at Jackd anyway instead of just ALSA or PA.

[...]

This is actually really remarkable statement. I understand this
basically as "If you don't really care about audio quality, pulseaudio
is surely good enough for you", IOW, "despite pulseaudio is anything but
good at doing the job it's supposed to be used for, it's surely
sufficient for 'consumers'".
___
Dng mailing list
Dng@lists.dyne.org
https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng

Re: [DNG] Slackware now uses PulseAudio...

[Arnt Gulbrandsen]

Pulse's long delays are a problem for musicians. If you want to 
coordinate two sound sources accurately, those delays are a nuisance. 
But that is something musicians do, not consumers. Consumers do not 
really care how many thousandths of a second the sound is delayed on 
its way to the speakers.


Arnt
___
Dng mailing list
Dng@lists.dyne.org
https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng

Re: [DNG] Slackware now uses PulseAudio...

[Rainer Weikusat]

Arnt Gulbrandsen  writes:
> Pulse's long delays are a problem for musicians. If you want to
> coordinate two sound sources accurately, those delays are a
> nuisance. But that is something musicians do, not consumers.
> Consumers do not really care how many thousandths of a second the
> sound is delayed on its way to the speakers.

A 'consumer' is - by definition - an entirely passive entity, somewhat
like a refuse bin, who is supposed to swallow whatever is to be
put into him by people who control 'production'.
___
Dng mailing list
Dng@lists.dyne.org
https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng

Re: [DNG] Slackware now uses PulseAudio...

[Nate Bargmann]

* On 2016 17 Jan 07:21 -0600, Rainer Weikusat wrote:

> A 'consumer' is - by definition - an entirely passive entity, somewhat
> like a refuse bin, who is supposed to swallow whatever is to be
> put into him by people who control 'production'.

I always had in mind one of those pedal operated trash cans that opened
on demand to whatever is being dumped in.

That said, I have no animus toward PulseAudio.  In fact, it is very
useful to me, a sound consumer.  I am certainly no music producer!

- Nate

-- 

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds.  The pessimist fears this is true."

Ham radio, Linux, bikes, and more: http://www.n0nb.us
___
Dng mailing list
Dng@lists.dyne.org
https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng