Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/pavucontrol.html

The result of a few hours of hacking:

pavucontrol cannot only control the volume of hardware devices of the Polypaudio sound server but also of all playback streams seperately, much like the new Windows Vista volume control application.

Get the Polypaudio Volume Control while it is hot.

On a side note I released updated versions of both the Polypaudio Volume Meter and the Polypaudio Manager which are compatible with Polypaudio 0.8.

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/polypaudio-0.8.html

The reports of Polypaudio’s death are greatly exaggerated.

We are proud to announce the release of Polypaudio
0.8, our networked sound daemon for Linux, other Unix-like operating
systems, and Microsoft Windows. Since the last official release, 0.7,
more than a year has passed. In the meantime Polypaudio experienced
major improvements. Major contributions have been made by both Pierre
Ossman and me. Pierre is being payed by Cendio AB to work on
Polypaudio. Cendio distributes Polypaudio along with their ThinLinc Terminal
Server.

Some of the major changes:

• New playback buffer model that allows applications to freely seek in
  the server side playback buffer (both with relative and absolute indexes) and to synchronize
  multiple streams together, in a way that the playback times are guaranteed to
  stay synchronized even in the case of a buffer underrun. (Lennart)
• Ported to Microsoft Windows and Sun Solaris (Pierre)
• Many inner loops (like sample type conversions) have been ported
  to liboil, which
  enables us to take advantage of modern SIMD instruction sets, like MMX or SSE/SSE2. (Lennart)
• Support for channel maps which allow applications to assign
  specific speaker positions to logical channels. This enables support
  for “surround sound”. In addition we now support seperate volumes for
  all channels. (Lennart)
• Support for hardware volume control for drivers that support
  it. (Lennart, Pierre)
• Local users may now be authenticated just by the membership in a
  UNIX group, without the need to exchange authentication cookies. (Lennart)
• A new driver module module-detect which detects
  automatically what local output devices are available and loads the
  needed drivers. Supports ALSA, OSS, Solaris and Win32 devices. (Lennart, Pierre)
• Two new modules implementing RTP/SDP/SAP based multicast audio
  streaming. Useful for streaming music to multiple PCs with speakers
  simultaneously. Or for implementing a simple “always-on” conferencing
  solution for the LAN. Or for sharing a single MIC/LINE-IN jack on the
  LAN. (Lennart)
• Two new modules for connecting Polypaudio to a JACK audio server
  (Lennart)
• A new Zeroconf (mDNS/DNS-SD) publisher module. (Lennart)
• A new module to control the volume of an output sink with a LIRC supported infrared remote
  control, and another one for doing so with a multimeda keyboard. (Lennart)
• Support for resolving remote host names asynchronously using libasyncns. (Lennart)
• A simple proof-of-concept HTTP module, which dumps the current daemon status to HTML. (Lennart)
• Add proper validity checking of passed parameter to every single
  API functions. (Lennart)
• Last but not least, the documentation has been beefed up a lot and
  is no longer just a simple doxygen-based API documentation (Pierre, Lennart)

Sounds good, doesn’t it? But that’s not all!

We’re really excited about this new Polypaudio release. However,
there are more very exciting, good news in the Polypaudio world. Pierre
implemented a Polypaudio plugin for alsa-libs. This means you
may now use any ALSA-aware application to access a Polypaudio sound
server! The patch has already merged upstream, and will probably
appear in the next official release of alsa-plugins.

Due to the massive internal changes we had to make a lot of modifications to
the public API. Hence applications which currently make use of the Polypaudio
0.7 API need to be updated. The patches or packages I maintain will be updated
in the next weeks one-by-one. (That is: xmms-polyp, the MPlayer patch, the
libao patch, the GStreamer patch and the PortAudio patch)

A side note: I wonder what this new release means for Polypaudio in
Debian. I’ve never been informed by the Debian maintainers of
Polypaudio that it has been uploaded to Debian, and never of the
removal either. In fact I never exchanged a single line with those who
were the Debian maintainers of Polypaudio. Is this the intended way
how the Debian project wants its developers to communicate with
upstream? I doubt that!

How does Polypaudio compare to ESOUND?

Polypaudio does everything what ESOUND does, and much more. It is a
fully compatible drop-in replacement. With a small script you can make
it command line compatible (including autospawning). ESOUND clients
may connect to our daemon just like they did to the original ESOUND
daemon, since we implemented a compatibility module for the ESOUND
protocol.

Support for other well known networked audio protocols (such as
NAS) should be easy to add – if there is a need.

For a full list of the features that Polypaudio has over ESOUND,
see Polypaudio’s
homepage.

How does Polypaudio compare to ALSA‘s dmix?

Some people might ask whether there still is a need for a sound
server in times where ALSA’s dmix plugin is available. The
answer is: yes!

Firstly, Polypaudio is networked, which dmix is
not. However, there are many reasons why Polypaudio is useful on
non-networked systems as well. Polypaudio is portable, it is available
not just for Linux but for FreeBSD, Solaris and even Microsoft
Windows. Polypaudio is extensible, there is broad range of additional
modules available which allow the user to use Polypaudio in many
exciting ways ALSA doesn’t offer. In Polypaudio streams, devices and
other server internals can be monitored and introspected freely. The
volume of the multiple streams may be manipulated independently of
each other, which allows new exciting applications like a work-alike
of the new per-application mixer tool featured in upcoming Windows
Vista. In multi-user systems, Polypaudio offers a secure and safe way
to allow multiple users to access the sound device
simultaneously. Polypaudio may be accessed through the ESOUND and the
ALSA APIs. In addition, ALSA dmix is still not supported properly by
many ALSA clients, and is difficult to setup.

A side node: dmix forks off its own simple sound daemon
anyway, hence there is no big difference to using Polypaudio with the
ALSA plugin in auto-spawning mode. (Though admittedly, those ALSA
clients that don’t work properly with dmix, won’t do so with our ALSA
plugin as well since they actually use the ALSA API incorrectly.)

How does Polypaudio compare to JACK?

Everytime people discuss sound servers on Unix/Linux and which way
is the right to go for desktops, JACK gets mentioned and suggested by some as a
replacement for ESOUND for the desktop. However, this is not
practical. JACK is not intended to be a desktop sound server, instead
it is designed for professional audio in mind. Its semantics are
different from other sound servers: e.g. it uses exclusively floating
point samples, doesn’t deal directly with interleaved channels and
maintains a server global time-line which may be stopped and seeked
around. All that translates badly to desktop usages. JACK is really
nice software, but just not designed for the normal desktop user,
who’s not working on professional audio production.

Since we think that JACK is really a nice piece of work, we added
two new modules to Polypaudio which can be used to hook it up to a
JACK server.

Get Polypaudio 0.8, while it is hot!

BTW: We’re looking for a logo for Polypaudio. Feel free to send us your suggestions!

Update: The Debian rant is unjust to Jeff Waugh. In fact, he had informed me that he prepared Debian packages of Polypaudio. I just never realized that he had actually uploaded them to Debian. What still stands, however, is that I’ve not been informed or asked about the removal.

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/s270ctrl.html

In response to mjg59‘s rant about
controlling the LCD brightness on laptops, I invested some time to
reverse engineer the Windows driver of my MSI S270 laptop
which implements changing LCD brightness. It requires some ugly
fiddling with registers of the “embedded controller” on ports 0x62 and
0x66. The result of my work is s270ctrl, a
small userspace utility. I’m planning to turn this into a proper
kernel module soon.

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/avahi-linuxmag.html

If you have access to the current issue (03/06) of the german
Linux Magazin make sure to read the two extensive articles about
Avahi (p.64 and p.90). Daniel S. Haischt wrote the second article, I
wrote the other. Both are a worthy read!

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/mod-dnssd-debian.html

Due to the great work of Sebastien Estienne there are now Debian
packages of mod_dnssd
and mod_mime_xattr
available from my little Debian
package repository. They’ve been uploaded to Ubuntu as well, but
we are still looking for some Debian developer who would be willing to
upload them to Debian proper. Feel free to contact me if you are interested!

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/mod-mime-xattr.html

I updated my little Apache module mod_mime_xattr to be compatible with Apache 2.0.

What is it useful for? Linux (2.4 with patch, 2.6 out-of-the-box) has been supporting extended attributes for files (EAs) for ages, but very few applications use them. To change that I wrote a small module for Apache which interpretes the EA user.mime_type and uses its value as MIME type for all files served by Apache. The EA has been standardized by the XDG MIME system, but apparently neither Gnome nor KDE support it right now.

Usage of mod_mime_xattr is simple. To enable interpretation of the EA on the entire tree use something like this in your Apache configuration file:

<Directory />
XAttrMimeType On
</Directory>

That’s all that is required to make use of user.mime_type on all files where it is set. To set the EA use a command like this one:

setfattr -n "user.mime_type" -v "text/html" foo.txt

And foo.txt will become a file with the MIME type of text/html, although its suffix is .txt!

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/mod_dnssd.html

The first release of mod_dnssd is now available. It adds DNS-SD based Zeroconf support to Apache 2.0 using Avahi.

This work has been inspired by Sander Temme’s and Sebastien Estienne’s mod_zeroconf module, but supersedes it in every way. MacOSX ships with mod_rendezvous/mod_bonjour, but mod_dnssd is much more powerful than this piece of software as well. In short: mod_dnssd is definitely the greatest way to add Zeroconf support to Apache available today.

A few examples just to show how great mod_dnssd is:

DNSSDEnable On

This is everything you need to enable DNS-SD support in Apache after loading the module. It will publish all virtual hosts and all existing mod_userdir directories (i.e. ~/public_html) as services of type _http._tcp.

In case you want to publish some subdirectory of the web server as service, just place DNSSDServiceName inside a <Location> section for that path:

<Location /foobar>
	DNSSDServiceName "A special service called foobar"
</Location>

You can even use it to publish WebDAV shares using Apache’s mod_dav module:

<Location /webdav>
	Dav On
	DNSSDServiceName "A WebDAV folder"
	DNSSDServiceTypes _webdav._tcp
</Location>

This especially cool since we now have a free software server counterpart for Gnome’s and KDE’s WebDAV client functionality.

Or to publish your blog as RSS service:

<Location /blog.cgi?rss>
	DNSSDServiceName "The blog"
	DNSSDServiceTypes _rss._tcp
</Location>

Get it while it is hot!

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/avahi-0.6.3.html

A few days ago we relased Avahi 0.6.3. This is an important bugfix release, everyone should update as soon as possible.

Avahi now has its own domain avahi.org and finally has a logo, thanks to the great work of Mathieu Drouet:

Avahi has moved from Debian
Experimental to Unstable. Ubuntu moved
it from Universe to Main since it successfully passed their security
auditing. The Fedora
Core development distribution contains it too, as does SuSE‘s
and Gentoo‘s. But
where’s Mandriva? Apparently they are considering
it, for whatever it is worth. FreeBSD Ports has it
too. I guess this means that Avahi has now been accepted by all major
distributions. Hurrah!

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/mandelbrot.html

It’s impressing how easy it is to draw fractals with Python. Using the ubercool Python Imaging Library and native complex number support in Python you can code an elaborate and easy to understand fractal generator in less than 50 lines of code:

#!/usr/bin/python
import Image, ImageDraw, math, colorsys

dimensions = (800, 800)
scale = 1.0/(dimensions[0]/3)
center = (2.2, 1.5)       # Use this for Mandelbrot set
#center = (1.5, 1.5)       # Use this for Julia set
iterate_max = 100
colors_max = 50

img = Image.new("RGB", dimensions)
d = ImageDraw.Draw(img)

# Calculate a tolerable palette
palette = [0] * colors_max
for i in xrange(colors_max):
    f = 1-abs((float(i)/colors_max-1)**15)
    r, g, b = colorsys.hsv_to_rgb(.66+f/3, 1-f/2, f)
    palette[i] = (int(r*255), int(g*255), int(b*255))

# Calculate the mandelbrot sequence for the point c with start value z
def iterate_mandelbrot(c, z = 0):
    for n in xrange(iterate_max + 1):
        z = z*z +c
        if abs(z) > 2:
            return n
    return None

# Draw our image
for y in xrange(dimensions[1]):
    for x in xrange(dimensions[0]):
        c = complex(x * scale - center[0], y * scale - center[1])

        n = iterate_mandelbrot(c)            # Use this for Mandelbrot set
        #n = iterate_mandelbrot(complex(0.3, 0.6), c)  # Use this for Julia set

        if n is None:
            v = 1
        else:
            v = n/100.0

        d.point((x, y), fill = palette[int(v * (colors_max-1))])

del d
img.save("result.png")

Some example pictures:

 .

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/nss-myhostname.html

I am doing a lot of embedded Linux work lately. The machines we use configure their hostname depending on some external configuration options. They boot from a CF card, which is mostly mounted read-only. Since the hostname changes often but we wanted to use sudo we had a problem: sudo requires the local host name to be resolvable using gethostbyname(). On Debian this is usually done by patching /etc/hosts correctly. Unfortunately that file resides on a read-only partition. Instead of hacking some ugly symlink based solution I decided to fix it the right way and wrote a tiny NSS module which does nothing more than mapping the hostname to the IP address 127.0.0.2 (and back). (That IP address is on the loopback device, but is not identical to localhost.)

Get nss-myhostname while it is hot!

BTW: This tool I wrote is pretty useful on embedded machines too, and certainly easier to use than setterm -dump 1 -file /dev/stdout | fold -w 80. And it does color too. And looping. And is much cooler anyway.

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/avahi-0.6.html

Avahi 0.6 is now officially released. Get it while it is hot!

Read the announcement.

In related news: I prepared a patch for distcc that adds Zeroconf support using Avahi.

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/avahi-0.6-pre.html

Unless we find any major bugs Avahi 0.6 will be released on friday. We ask everyone to do some testing for us:

• Current Avahi SVN snapshort
• Current libdaemon SVN snapshot

There have been a bunch of API changes. However, the API is now frozen, so feel free to start porting your application to the new API now.

A rough overview about the many improvements in Avahi 0.6.

• Support for (read-only) wide area support. (i.e. DNS-SD over unicast DNS)
• Ported to FreeBSD, NetBSD, Darwin/MacOSX and to some extent OpenBSD
• Compatibility layers for HOWL and Bonjour
• Support for registering/browsing abritrary records
• Proper support for DNS-SD service subtypes
• Native C implementations of the client utilities
• Now passes the Bonjour conformance test suite without any exceptions
• “Passive observation of failures”
• chroot() support
• Many traffic reduction improvements
• Bugfixes, cleanups

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/avahi-compat.html

A short while ago I checked in to SVN two API/ABI compatibility
modules which implement the HOWL and the Apple
Bonjour (dns_sd.h) DNS-SD/mDNS APIs on top of Avahi’s
native API. Effectively this means that you can run *all*
Zeroconf-enabled software that is available for free operating systems
seamlessly on top of Avahi. Or at least the software that uses the
limited subset of API functions we support. Missing functions will be
implemented on an on-demand basis. Gnome-VFS/Nautilus works
perfectly, as does Gobby, which are the only real-world applications
we tested until now.

The list of supported/unsupported functions is available from SVN for HOWL and for
dns-sd.h.

The compatibility layers are actually pretty interesting pieces of code: for
compatibility with the way HOWL/Bonjour integrates with event loops we had to
hook up the timeout and I/O watches D-BUS depends on to a single file
descriptor. This involves all kinds of ugly things like threading and
“creative” ways to use the event loop abstraction Avahi provides. Some might
call this “cracktastic”, but it actually works pretty well.

The compatibility layers are not intended to be long term solutions. For
every session object we create a background thread that polls for events and a
DBUS session object. This is an utter waste of resources, especially on
dns_sd.h where every basic operation uses a session object of its own.
In addition, our compatibility layers are incomplete. We do not offer the full
set of functions or the full semantics. Our compatibility is just good enough
to make most Zeroconf-aware programs work with Avahi right now.

We consider neither dns_sd.h nor the HOWL API a “well designed”
API and encourage people to port their programs to our more powerful native
API. To stress this the two modules will warn the user about their usage and
write a warning line to STDERR and syslog. Hopefully this will annoy
people sufficiently that Avahi adoption speeds up a little.

To our own surprise we actually support at least one API function more than each of the
reference implementations! From dns_sd.h we support
DNSServiceEnumerateDomains() which is actually unsupported by
Apple Bonjour on POSIX/Linux systems. The documented HOWL function
sw_ipv4_address_decompose() is actually a NOOP in the
reference implementation, but isn’t in our compatibility layer.

Since dns_sd.h is the only file licensed under a BSD license in the otherwise APSL-licensed
mDNSResponder distribution, we were able to copy it into our sources untouched.

Here’s a screenshot of
Nautilus and Gobby running on top of Avahi through the HOWL compatibility
layers.

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/avahi-wide-area.html

Yesterday in the late evening I commited “Wide Area” support to
Avahi SVN, i.e. “DNS-SD over Unicast DNS”. Only browsing, no
“Long-Lived Query” support and no publishing for now, but it is a
start.

To show off how cool this is, here is a “screenshot” of
avahi-browse showing all services defined in the domain
0pointer.de:

$ avahi-browse -a -d 0pointer.de
Browsing domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1 ...
Browsing for services of type '_http-rss091._tcp' (Web Syndication RSS 0.91) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1 ...
Browsing for services of type '_http-rss20._tcp' (Web Syndication RSS 2.0) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1 ...
Browsing for services of type '_http._tcp' (Web Site) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1 ...
Found service 'Lennart's Blog' of type '_http-rss091._tcp' (Web Syndication RSS 0.91) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1.
Found service 'Lennart's Blog' of type '_http-rss20._tcp' (Web Syndication RSS 2.0) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1.
Found service 'Lennart's Homepage' of type '_http._tcp' (Web Site) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1.
Found service 'Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD' of type '_http._tcp' (Web Site) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1.
Found service 'Lennart's Photos' of type '_http._tcp' (Web Site) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1.
Found service 'Lennart's Blog' of type '_http._tcp' (Web Site) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1.
Service data for service 'Lennart's Blog' of type '_http-rss091._tcp' (Web Syndication RSS 0.91) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1:
        Host 0pointer.de (217.160.223.3), port 80, TXT data: ['path=/blog/index.rss']
Service data for service 'Lennart's Blog' of type '_http-rss20._tcp' (Web Syndication RSS 2.0) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1:
        Host 0pointer.de (217.160.223.3), port 80, TXT data: ['path=/blog/index.rss2']
Service data for service 'Lennart's Homepage' of type '_http._tcp' (Web Site) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1:
        Host 0pointer.de (217.160.223.3), port 80, TXT data: ['path=/lennart/']
Service data for service 'Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD' of type '_http._tcp' (Web Site) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1:
        Host freedesktop.org (131.252.208.82), port 80, TXT data: ['path=/Software/Avahi']
Service data for service 'Lennart's Photos' of type '_http._tcp' (Web Site) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1:
        Host 0pointer.de (217.160.223.3), port 80, TXT data: ['path=/photos/']
Service data for service 'Lennart's Blog' of type '_http._tcp' (Web Site) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1:
        Host 0pointer.de (217.160.223.3), port 80, TXT data: ['path=/blog']