Quite a pleasant sight for Do lovers!

Well, today’s finally the day;  After weeks of alpha testing and months hard work, GNOME Do 0.8.0 is released!  This is another monumental release for an amazingly useful application.  GNOME Do has increasingly become the cornerstone of my linux desktop experience.  From time to time I even catch myself stopping to think about how I would have done that if Do wasn’t just a “super-space” away.  Sufficed to say, “Longer than I care to think about”, is the answer I usually come to with regards to that question.

First of all, before I go any further, I’d just like to personally thank everyone involved with the project.  Everyone that’s helped in some minute way to make Do what it is today deserves thanks.  Some of these people include: David Siegel, who started Do as a college project, Jason Smith, who is largely responsible for “Docky”, Alex Launi, for some great work on the new plugin API and some of the most useful Do plugins around, Peng, for some more great plugins, and for helping me with some c# code I was writing for a plugin, and Cimi and Kalle for translations and much new insight.  There’s so many more people associated with this great application, it’s hard to thank everyone!

Much more information can be read here, the release notes on the Do website.

Now, it’d be wrong to talk about such a great application, and not show off any pretty pictures, so I’ll show some screenshots of Do here.  Some screenshots include things that I’m working on currently, and aren’t yet released.  Enjoy!

First let’s take a look at how you can add things to the dock.  Adding items to the dock is pretty easy actually.  You can drag launchers onto the dock.  You can also manually add items to the dock by

Stick items to the dock!

summoning Do, finding the item you want, and clicking on the little “+” sign to the left of it, as is shown in the image to the right.  And, if all of that is just too much for you, you can even sit back and let Do “do” the work for you!  The dock automatically gets populated with your most used items!

What if you don’t like the items on your dock anymore?  Well this could not get any easier.  You have two options, either right click on the item and select “Remove from Dock”, or just grab that item, and literally throw it off the dock!

Throw it off your Dock!

Finally, there’s one more picture I’d like to show.  I mostly do work with plugins, and I’ve been working on making some plugins more friendly on the Dock.  One of those that I’ve been working on is the Rhythmbox plugin.  The banshee plugin that Alex has been working on has pretty actions that show up when you right-click on banshee when it’s on the dock.  When the changes I’m making to the rhythmbox plugin get merged, Rhythmbox users will be able to enjoy this cool feature too!

Playback options for Rhythmbox

Once again, thanks everyone who made Do possible.  Even though I’m not a big-time contributer, I hope my plugins (virtualbox & translate) will be helpful to some people.  I’d also like to thank David, Jason and Alex in particular for helping me to write these plugins for such a great application.  Much of my background lies in programming for embedded systems, so I’m not exactly “profficient” at programming at such a high level.  Nonetheless, I feel as though I’ve received a lifetime’s worth of experience and learning just from hanigng around you guys!  Thanks again!

It seemed pretty relevant, so I started hunting for anything I could find that seemed to explain just what these error messages meant.  After a shot search, I found this.  This seemed to be exactly the problem I was experiencing.  Sure enough, all of my computers have a ‘-’ in their hostnames.   It was a little strange to me that it was marked fixed, but I figured it was worth it to find out whether or not this was what was causing pulse to die on the network.

Much to my surprise, after chaing the hostnames of my computers, pulse now works wonderfully!  I can seamlessly move streams between devices over the network, and the RTP sink now plays music on all computers (and even correctly loops back audio on the current computer)!

What I did to fix this was change the hostname of every computer that currently had a ‘-’ in the hostname.  To do this, it was quite simple actually.  Debin/Ubuntu sets the computer’s hostname to whatever is in /etc/hostname on bootup.  To change the computer’s hostname, simply change the contents of this file.

[code]
sudo nano /etc/hostname
[/code]

Then save changes and exit. To change the computer’s hostname instantly, use this script:

[code]
sudo /etc/init.d/hostname.sh start
[/code]

You’ll also have to change another file as well.  Failure to change both of these could lock you out of your account and prevent you from using sudo!  On this next file, you’ll have to check the two lines at the top. The first two lines should currently look like this:

[code]
127.0.0.1    HOSTNAME
127.0.1.1    OLD_HOSTNAME
[/code]

All you need to do is change OLD_HOSTNAME to HOSTNAME.

More than likely, you’ll have to restart the pulseaudio server to register these changes. Either logout or reboot, and hopefully, pulse will play nice with your network now!

More info on how to change hostnames in linux.
Another important note here as well.

After spending some time reinstalling some programs, I discovered that PulseAudio finally worked on my laptop.  Even though Pulse was included in 8.04, it didn’t work on my laptop and I had to switch everything back to ALSA.  I played around with Pulse for a couple of minutes, setting everything up and then I started to notice something strange.  Even though my system volume was turned up to 100%, everything still seemed too quiet.  I tried changing the device in System > Preferences > Sound, but nothing seemed to help.

Running alsamixer in terminal only showed one mixer track — as it should if PulseAudio was enabled, and this read 100%.  After quite a bit of searching I found out what was wrong.  It turned out that one of the tracks (front) on the alsa hardware mixer was turned down to about 50%.  There’s no way to see this through the gui.  The only way to fix this is to run alsamixer in a terminal like this:

$ alsamixer -D hw:0

This will bring up a bunch of bars representing all of the mixer tracks available on the hardware device.  After turning all of these up to 100% and exiting alsamixer (press ESC), everything was working perfectly again.

Hopefully this will save someone stuck in a similar situation from a few hours of headbanging.

I’ve been using VirtualBox a lot recently, mostly for programming and testing applications on different platforms, without actually having to restart my laptop.  After I saw that there was no VirtualBox plugin, I thought that this would be the perfect plugin to write.

After a couple weeks I have built a nice, stable GNOME Do plugin for managing VirtualBox virtual machines.  The plugin allows GNOME Do to perform actions on your saved virtual machines.  The plugin will index the current state of your VM and only allow you to perform relevant actions as well.  For example, if you have a VM that’s currently powered off, the only actions Do will show you are to either turn on the VM or revert to a saved state (if there is one).  For VM’s that are currently running, you can pause, turn off, save state, or take a snapshot.  Dynamic modifier items also allow you to start a VM in either headless mode, or GUI mode.

I’ve made a small YouTube video showing the various actions that are exposed to GNOME Do through this plugin.

My plugin was finally accepted into the Community branch of GNOME Do’s plugins.  I’m still attempting to get it into the official branch, as I’ve agreed to maintain it, and have gone through multiple code reviews to make sure the plugin meets coding and performance standards.  Look out for this plugin to be available with the next release of GNOME Do.

After getting a chance to poke around and see what’s new, I’m pretty impressed.  Usability and stability is great.  All of my hardware worked right out of the box.  Installing Nvidia’s display drivers was so simple, just a couple clicks and a reboot, and now my multiple monitors work properly.  I was also surprised to see that my printer was installed without any interaction.  All I had to do was plug in the printer during install and the drivers were installed by default!

By far though, the one thing I’m the most impressed with is PulseAudio.  I currently have Hardy (8.04) on my laptop, and PulseAudio there is…. well for lack of a better word, complete and utter shit.  The only way I could get sound to work on my laptop at all was to completely remove anything remotely related to Pulse and set all applications to output directly to ALSA.  (Since doing that though, Hardy has been great for me.)

PulseAudio in 8.10 is quite a different story however.  It actually works!  By default, Ubuntu 8.10 does not ship with the auxilary PulseAudio controls and programs.  These include padevchooser, pavucontrol and pavumeter.  After installing these I was able to play around with the various features of PulseAudio.  I must say, I’m pretty excited about the future of GNOME and PulseAudio.  The ability to transfer streams to separate audio sinks and ‘per application’ volume control are pretty cool.

I’ve also read that now that much of the ground-work for implementing PulseAudio into GNOME is done we will start to actually see some of these cool features.  Now that most applications are using PulseAudio directly, it’s possible to get the actual metadata from the audio stream.  This allows for things like transfering all VOIP calls to your headset instead of desktop speakers, and also muting all other audio sources when a VOIP call comes through.

One thing I would like to see more though is a more PulseAudio integrated gnome volume control applet.  Currently, the gnome volume control applet only controls the overall system volume.  I was searching through Ubuntu’s brainstorm website and I stumbled upon this idea.  It would be great if something like that was planned.  Some of the mockups show what the future could hold as well.  This particular one is my favorite.

I haven’t found anything specific in the Gnome universe about what plans there are to further integrate PulseAudio, but hopefully something like the above can become a reality soon!