Tuesday, 7 July 2009

Re-Programming MusicPal

I have not made any progress with the MusicPal since Christmas, but someone else has been busy and made a good start on some alternative software to run on it, which he has published here http://musicpal.v3v.de/.
Well done Marco - you have got much further than I have!
Giles also made progress with sound output and left his code in a comment to one of my earlier posts here.
Maybe it would be worth starting a project on Google Code or somewhere so other people can help develop it?

Re-Programming MusicPal

I have not made any progress with the MusicPal since Christmas, but someone else has been busy and made a good start on some alternative software to run on it, which he has published here http://musicpal.v3v.de/.
Well done Marco - you have got much further than I have!
Giles also made progress with sound output and left his code in a comment to one of my earlier posts here.
Maybe it would be worth starting a project on Google Code or somewhere so other people can help develop it?

Sunday, 28 June 2009

A General Purpose Network Solver?

I often get frustrated if I want to solve a simple fluid flow or thermal problem that is in the form of a network with branches, parallel paths etc. These tend to be a bit to difficult for a "back of the envelope" solution, which is always my preferred approach, so you end up writing code to iterate to find solution.

The easy way would be to use a commercial package like Aspen Hysis, SINDA or ESATAN, but these are very expensive for the once a year or thereabouts that I need to solve something like this. It would be nice to have a simple, low cost solver available.

I thought there would be plenty of open source ones available, but I have not been able to find a simple network solver, so I am going to resort to writing it myself. I did do one once before, but I seem to have lost the source code....It never got finished properly anyway.

I have started the project at http://code.google.com/p/openproc. There is no code worth talking of there yet, but the Wiki describes the sort of design I am thinking of. Any offers of help greatly appreciated!

A General Purpose Network Solver?

I often get frustrated if I want to solve a simple fluid flow or thermal problem that is in the form of a network with branches, parallel paths etc. These tend to be a bit to difficult for a "back of the envelope" solution, which is always my preferred approach, so you end up writing code to iterate to find solution.

The easy way would be to use a commercial package like Aspen Hysis, SINDA or ESATAN, but these are very expensive for the once a year or thereabouts that I need to solve something like this. It would be nice to have a simple, low cost solver available.

I thought there would be plenty of open source ones available, but I have not been able to find a simple network solver, so I am going to resort to writing it myself. I did do one once before, but I seem to have lost the source code....It never got finished properly anyway.

I have started the project at http://code.google.com/p/openproc. There is no code worth talking of there yet, but the Wiki describes the sort of design I am thinking of. Any offers of help greatly appreciated!

Tuesday, 9 June 2009

More Ubuntu 9.04 Sound Problems

I 'accidentally' wrecked my gnome desktop (no menus, toolabrs etc.) - I had been doing a bit of tidying up and must have uninstalled something important. I could not decide what, so re-installed the whole ubuntu-desktop package.
This came with pulseaudio again, so sound stopped working like last time.
Decided to invest an hour in sorting it. No real success searching on the web, but I did find this article - http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=962695. The author provided a little script to update the ALSA drivers automatically, and quite a few people reported that this cured the sound for them.

I am always wary about running unknown programs as root, but the script looked safe enough - just an automated way of downloading the ALSA source packages and running 'make install' etc. so I trusted it.
It ran and it installed ALSA 1.0.20, compared to version 1.0.18 in the Ubuntu package.
To my surprise, when I re-booted the computer, sound is back!

More Ubuntu 9.04 Sound Problems

I 'accidentally' wrecked my gnome desktop (no menus, toolabrs etc.) - I had been doing a bit of tidying up and must have uninstalled something important. I could not decide what, so re-installed the whole ubuntu-desktop package.
This came with pulseaudio again, so sound stopped working like last time.
Decided to invest an hour in sorting it. No real success searching on the web, but I did find this article - http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=962695. The author provided a little script to update the ALSA drivers automatically, and quite a few people reported that this cured the sound for them.

I am always wary about running unknown programs as root, but the script looked safe enough - just an automated way of downloading the ALSA source packages and running 'make install' etc. so I trusted it.
It ran and it installed ALSA 1.0.20, compared to version 1.0.18 in the Ubuntu package.
To my surprise, when I re-booted the computer, sound is back!

Monday, 11 May 2009

Ubuntu 9.04 Sound Problems

I upgraded my Fujitsu-Siemens laptop to Ubuntu 9.04 from 8.10 a few days ago.
Everything worked fine except for sound. Sound went from working perfectly in 8.10 to being quiet, and awfully crackly in 9.04.
If I updated the gnome settings to use OSS rather than ALSA it worked ok, except flash movies still made crackly noises (I don't think flash can use OSS).
I messed about with the gnome mixer without luck, except I did notice that changing the PCM volume did nothing (which is wrong), but changing the 'beep' volume did alter the sound volume (Along with crackles).
I don't know why the beep and PCM are the wrong way around, and don't have time to work out how sound works properly, so I went for brute force and ignorance - I had heard a suggestion that Pulseaudio might be the problem, so I replaced pulseaudio with esound, and it all seems to work now...
Therefore, I don't know what the problem was, but it was cured by getting rid of pulseaudio...