My Home Studio

The title of this post may not make a lot of sense at first but hopefully it will once you’ve seen the video below. Regular readers will know I try to keep the blog on topic most of the time, in as much as I don’t ramble on about things outside of technology and open source much. However, one area which does get me going is politics and every so often a subject comes along that compels me to write something. Copyright and more specifically the misuse of it by certain parties is one such subject. The accompanying video is a speech given to the European Parliament by Becky Hogge on behalf of the Open Rights Group. You may have noticed the little ORG badge here on my blog, it’s just to the right there see? No, scroll down a bit… yeah that’s it. The reason for this is because I support the Open Rights Group and their political work in the UK. At the moment there’s a proposal to extend the copyright term on sound recordings from 50 to 95 years inside the EU. This is promoted by industry lobbyists as helping the poor little artists and nobody wants to hurt the artists do they? Look at the them they’re so cuddly, aw.

The simple fact is that this story is complete bullshit, I’m sorry to swear but it is. I’m an artist myself and I find it repulsive, the RIAA and the rest of their cronies do not speak for me and they certainly don’t give a damn about artists or culture. They never have and they never will. Artists and art itself are treated with contempt by the 4 major record labels who manipulate the global music industry. They seem to see artists merely as battery chickens with tattoos and funny hair cuts, only there to be exploited and discarded. They are antiquated and unwilling to adapt to the world we now live in, a world where the Internet and high speed data sharing exist. I’m sure they’d like to get in a time machine and take us all back to the golden days of the pre-war era where they controlled the production (and more importantly reproduction) of all music via vinyl discs. In this world the only way for an artist to get their music to an audience was to be completely subservient in exchange for the chance to access rare and expensive recording equipment, all this just to commit their masterpieces to record. That world doesn’t exist any more and no matter how much the recording industry pines for it, it’s not coming back. These days the proliferation of affordable recording equipment and computer technology have taken the power out of their hands and given it back to the people. I can now pick up my guitar and stream a performance to the entire world via the web in the same time it takes me to brush my teeth or heat up a microwave dinner. We don’t need the middle man anymore and they know this, that’s why they’re scared.

Creative Commons is the only way to go

This may sound like the words of a man who’s just bitter at not being an Internationally known artist with a big recording contract but I honestly don’t care about any of that. I think the days of sending off demo tapes in the hope that some recording industry executive will offer you the chance to sign your life away are gone. Young artists should be engaging directly with their audiences and embracing tools like the Internet not fighting them. The opportunities have never been so great. I’ve seen this myself through podcasting, nobody would have given me a radio show, certainly non of these traditional media guardians. Yet still I have been able to communicate with people all over the world with just a computer and a microphone. How amazing is that? Think about the power this gives us, I have to pinch myself each day. The only barrier now is talent and whether someone out there really wants to listen to what you produce. This is the ultimate in free speech and democracy. Does it mean all the music on the Internet will be good? No of course it doesn’t but I would argue that not all of the music on the shelves of your local record shop is good either. Why let some guy in a suit choose what you should get to hear?

I believe that artists should be fairly paid for their work, their creativity and be able to make a living out of it but I also believe this is possible in the new connected world. Copyright has a place and it’s one possible tool but nothing more than that. I believe in Creative Commons licensing. The sad truth is that most bands only make real money out of live shows anyway, they don’t see much of that £10 you hand over at HMV. A few pence if they’re lucky. We all want to support artists but I’m much happier to buy a CD off a band’s own website and give them the money directly than give £9.50 to a record company and 50p to the band. The recording industry is misrepresenting the current situation and how this copyright extension would affect artists. They are misleading our politicians and trying to make fools out of us all. Don’t let them do that, please! I’m glad good folk like of the Open Rights Group are out there trying to bring some balance to a story we usually only see one side of in the mainstream media outlets. Many of whom are owned by the same corporations as the 4 recording giants. I’ve rambled on enough and I will leave you to watch the video in peace now. Becky puts these arguments a lot better than I ever could. All I ask is that you think about the issue. Please visit http://www.soundcopyright.eu/ Thank you for reading this

Becky Hogge: Speech at Sound Copyright conference in the EU Parliament 27.01.09 from Open Rights Group on Vimeo

Edit: – Thanks to Becky for her comment on this post, if you’d like to write to your MEPs and tell them how you feel about this issue I urge you to do so. Please check this site for details, it’s really easy – http://www.writetothem.com/

Booting Sabayon 4

It may have been a while but I decided I should really get distro hopping again seriously. I like to try out new software, it’s almost a geeky form of OCD and besides, it makes for great review fodder I hope. Today’s candidate is the latest release of a distro I first looked at some time ago, Sabayon. I’ve had mixed feelings about it in the past, I found 2.2 Professional to be very bloated, capable of interesting innovations but overall slightly disappointing. It’s a Gentoo based distro from Italy and it seems there’s no love lost between the Gentoo and Sabayon camps so I’ve been told. I wanted to see how it had developed now they’d reached version 4.0, so here goes nothing…

Vital Stats:
Distro base – Gentoo
Packaging – .tbz2 (Binaries managed by Entropy) Source installations also available with Portage
Linux Kernel – 2.6.27-sabayon
Default Desktop – KDE 3.5 (edited after a comment, I thought it was KDE4, my bad), Gnome 2.24, XFCE, Openbox, Fluxbox and almost everything under the sun it seems

Installation:

The Boot Menu

I downloaded the main DVD installer image and burned off a copy. My test laptop is a Dell m1330n which a lot of you will already know, I’ve talked about it before so won’t go into the details now, you can read more here. Upon booting the DVD the first thing I noticed were some rather exotic options on the boot menu. The usual install options you get with all distributions were there of course but so were more interesting things such as: Boot without music, Play Sauerbraten, Anonymous Web Browsing and eeePC boot (640×480). Despite this bewildering array of choices I stuck with the default and just booted Sabayon into a live session, I could install from there. The drivers for my freedom hating nVidia graphics card were automatically enabled and I was asked whether I wanted the 3D Compiz Desktop or not, so I switched it on. This was all very painless and similar in experience to Mandriva or some other distros I’ve tried. It was around this time the “boot without music” option began to make some sense to me. I noticed some strange sounds faintly coming from the speakers at a low volume so turned it up and instantly recognized it as Pornophonique, a band we’ve played on Linux Outlaws before. Their work is Creative Commons licensed and published on Jamendo so well worth checking out. I like the band but I’m not sure the wisdom of putting music in the background of your installer, it reminds me a little of those awful rave tracks you used to get on Warez installers years ago. Not that I would know about that of course *ahem*. I let the boot continue and was greeted before long by a KDE desktop.

KDE

The earlier versions of Sabayon I tried had a slightly garish red theme which felt about a subtle as a slap in the face with a wet trout, and while aesthetics are not usually my primary concern, I do have to say this new theme is a great improvement. It looks slick and much more toned down with grey and pastel colours. I shall move on from that before I begin to sound too much like Brian Sewell but rest assured it looks good, you can judge for yourself from the screenshots. I clicked the install icon on the desktop to get things under way. The installer itself is pretty straightforward and includes an interesting option to update from the Internet before starting. I’ve never seen this on a distro before and it’s a cool idea. I added my wireless settings to the little KDE widget and got online quickly enough but still had to close and reopen the installer to actually get past the offline error message. I got the installer updated and proceeded to manually partitioning my drive as I always do, a 12gb root partition, a 140gb (ish) /home partition and the remaining space left as swap. I stuck to  the default install options most of the way through to get a feel for what most people can expect with Sabayon. The black background of the windows made it hard to read some the text and use the interface effectively at times, worth mentioning I thought. I timed the install from this point onwards and it took well over 35mins, hardly speedy by Linux standards but then I’ve been told both Vista and OS X are slower to install, I’ve never used either so can’t really say.

In the end I had to actually perform the install twice when the it crashed and failed the first time. The installer window kept greying out and freezing for periods during the process which usually indicates processor strain in Compiz or at least an operation stalling. Then a message popped up  which read “Exception occurred – check crash report”. I had to reboot the system and decided to try booting from the hard disk to see if the install had taken. Sadly it hadn’t and I was left to go through the whole process again of booting from the DVD. It took just as long the second time around but at least it did complete. I ejected the disc, rebooted and I logged into the KDE desktop. The reason for the slow install would soon become apparent. Read on fellow travellers.

You can see a full slide show of the process here

The Kitchen Sink and More:

Not A Slim Install

This distro seems to contain almost every piece of software you could possibly think of, all installed by default! It’s nice in some ways but bad in others. Having the likes of Picasa, Google Earth and Skype installed will please a lot of users but it takes up a lot of space. My 12gb system partition was already feeling the strain with 10gb of data. People call Ubuntu bloated but even after running it for over a year and installing a hell of a lot of addition software I’d only used about 3gb on my system disk. I quickly noticed that not only had KDE been installed but also Gnome, XFCE, Openbox and Fluxbox. This is the default behaviour it seems, when in doubt install everything. I’d wrongly assumed choosing KDE from the wizard would only install this desktop.  Another reason for the large footprint and slow install could be the source-based nature of the distribution. I’m not 100% sure of this as I don’t have a lot of experience with source-based distros but it seems possible.

Spritz in action

If you want a big selection of software by default then this is the distro for you I’d say, right down to things like Ardour. I found almost everything I could want was already installed and there’s something to be said for that I suppose. There’s also a package manager called Spritz which allows you to install binary packages rather than compiling everything, it’s a lot faster but some would say not very efficient. It was very buggy for me and probably needs a bit more work. I found Spritz froze a lot and the range of packages seems paltry when you’re used to something like Debian. I installed a few things such as Rhythmbox but couldn’t find Tasque, gPodder or Gwibber. This is a minor complaint as most things are already installed or available but I did have to resort to using Portato for compiling the extra things I wanted. Portato is a front end to well known Portage package manager from Gentoo, it uses what are called ebuilds (triggers of a sort) to compile the software you want from source trees. I’ve been told by a few more knowledgeable Gentoo fans this is not a good idea on Sabayon and you should only install new software using tools like Emerge and Portage, updating your system with an “emerge world” command can break things pretty badly apparently. If you’re not an experienced Linux user of even a Gentoo user it’s probably best to be wary of this. I found Gwibber 0.7 and Tasque in Portato and installed them both. This took well over an hour to complete and it’s not a speedy process. The virtue of compiling your software is the performance benefit of having it tailored to your system proponents of the art say but I find it a bit too time consuming personally. I left the machine while I retreated to get some dinner but when I returned over an hour later it was still compiling some of the dependencies for Gwibber. Tasque worked well enough once installed but Gwibber wouldn’t display messages and after a near 2 hour wait this can be very frustrating. I’ve been advised since that this was probably down to a Web Kit library problem, either the wrong version or a fault but I didn’t manage to get it fixed. I’m sure these things could be fixed with time and expertise but it’s not an ideal situation. I should point out that there really were only a couple of things I wanted but couldn’t find in Spritz, most of the things I needed were already installed and a whole lot else besides.

Disaster Strikes:

Over 3gb of updates

I used Sabayon for about a week and at one point I was prompted by Entropy (the back end to Spritz) to install updates to 277 packages. 277?! This seemed a lot to me but without thinking I foolhardily let it start it’s business of installing 3gb of updates, only realising about half way through this was a stupid thing to do as my 12gb root partition was already over 10gb full. Unfortunately by this time it was too late to stop it and my whole drive had been filled. The system became unstable pretty quickly, just changing work spaces was taking a long time so I shut it down. On reboot I wasn’t able to log in at all and it seemed the only course of action was to reinstall the whole thing from scratch. Another 40mins of my life I’ll never get back, yay!

This time I was a little smarter during the install, I chose the Gnome desktop and went through the list of packages removing all the KDE and XFCE stuff. I figured this would slim down the install but it still took up 8.5gb of space. Not a light distro in any sense but then to be fair it doesn’t claim to be.

Interesting Innovations:
I don’t want to sound like I’m being negative about Sabayon, there are some really interesting things in it. Original little touches like the option to update your installer, prompts to accept licenses for restricted software like Google Earth and Picasa in the update wizard, the amount of different ways to use the live CD, the binary packaging system with Entropy, it all has potential. I was able to do all the things I needed to reasonably well and spent about a week testing it day to day, so it’s a usable distro it just has it’s quirks. All the multimedia codecs and tools I needed were installed out of the box so I didn’t have to set up any of that which saves time. Flash, Java and all the other things you could need are there right away.

Conclusions:
Ease Of Installation & Use: 3/5
Speed & Stability: 3/5
Community Support & Documentation: 4/5
Features: 4/5
Overall: 3/5

Running Sabayon

Overall I think Sabayon has the potential to be a really good distro but for me it’s incredibly bloated and though some of the ideas are ambitious, they lack a little finesse in the execution so far. It was pretty fast to run, the boot was quick and applications seemed snappy enough despite the bloat. There’s a hell of a lot of software in there but if by some chance you need something extra, installing from source is time consuming and can be risky. I’d say it’s probably not a distribution for users who are very new to Linux, it’s not scary or particularly hard to use, I don’t want to give that impression but if you run into problems it’s easy to get lost. There are a lot of good resources on the Sabayon website it has to be said, an active forum, IRC channel and pretty well stocked wiki are all at your disposal. So there is help out there, I just found it wasn’t quite for me. I’d be interested to try Gentoo some time to compare and contrast, see what I could learn from it. I expect it would be quite a project though and probably take a week to set the system up with my lack of knowledge. I like to test on my main everyday laptop to give an authentic feel for what people can expect, so it’s all on the line and I’m not sure I could get Gentoo installed quickly enough while going about my daily work on the same machine. When I get a spare test box I think Gentoo will make a nice side project.

Firefox 3

If you want to try something different then you could do a lot worse than take a look at Sabayon but for me it’s still not quite there yet. I admire the ambition and the goals of the project, I think you have to take risks sometimes and while everyone else is racing to make the smallest distribution they can these guys have gone the other way, I like individuality. It has potential but still needs some development I feel. Take a look for yourself and see what you think, then you can let me know in the comments.

You can download Sabayon 4.0 here

Moving on…
So next up for me it’s the recently released Debian Lenny, I’m actually typing this in OpenOffice on Lenny right now. I’m an unashamed Debian fan and also a Gnome fan so I’m expecting to like it but I’ll try to be fair and honest about any shortcomings I find, it won’t be getting an easy ride. You’re all welcome to join me of course, expect that review in the next week. From there I’m not sure where I’ll go. I’ve threatened a BSD for some time, still need to do that. I’d also like to take a look at Sidux and perhaps Foresight. I know all you Arch fans out there have been asking me to try that for a while and I will but I fear it’s the same situation as Gentoo, not sure I could install it and go about my daily work quickly enough on this machine. It would require a lot of reading and learning which are both good things to do, just not when you have someone on the phone asking you why their website doesn’t work. If you have any suggestions for me please feel free to post them and I’ll take a look. Till then, see you over the hill, I’ll race you…

My Hastily Made Logo

Hey folks, it’s pretty late on Sunday night but I just realised I’d almost forgotten about my new series. I’m calling it the Weekly Rewind, it’s just a round up of my week really which hopefully contains some interesting and funny bits and pieces for you. I tried it for the first time last week (all be it a day late) and asked for title suggestions when someone said I should call it the Weekly Rewind and I like the sound of that, I can also use an old cassette tape as a logo, retro mmm So here goes…

Early in the week I finished off testing Sabayon 4 and doing research on that. I had hoped to have the article finished and published by now but as usual that didn’t go to plan. I’m about 800 words through at the moment. I expect to have it out tomorrow or Tuesday but if you want to hear a sneak preview of my thoughts check out Linux Outlaws 78. I talked about the distro for about 15mins. It’s after the Microwatch section, about 40mins in if you want to skip through. I won’t be upset but of course you should try out the rest of the show as well if you’ve never heard it before, you never know you might even enjoy it, shock horror.

I’d downloaded Debian Lenny on the release day last weekend and decided it would be my next stop so installed that on Wednesday. I’ll be writing a full report on it which you’ll be able to read in the next week or so but here’s some quick initial thoughts. Getting the wi-fi working was easier than I expected and even installing the freedom hating nVidia drivers I needed on this laptop wasn’t too hard. Overall it’s a very stable release as you would expect but I have experienced a few weird issues now and then. You’ll have to wait for the actual review to get all those juicy details though. Not long I promise.

Thursday night we recorded Linux Outlaws 78 and for the first time actually streamed it live as well. It all came together at the last minute in true Outlaws style but Fab set up his eeePC to broadcast through Ustream. We had some trouble with the web cam freezing but the audio stream stayed up I’m told and about 35 people listened in live, not bad considering we never really announced it. It was something of a trial but the feedback has been good and we’ll try to improve on it next time. The listeners could hear me over Skype but I didn’t have a web cam set up at the time. People have asked me but I’m not so sure I wanna be filmed all the time. I’ve always known I have a face for radio but perhaps in future I’ll get something set up. For now we’ve hit on the solution of just sticking a picture of me in the corner. Fab can change it every 10mins to one with a different expression and we’ll just pretend it’s a live feed but the lag is really bad, nobody will know, unless they read this hehehe Some people on the Linux Outlaws blog have helpfully suggested I wear a mask but I have no desire to become the Phantom of the Podcast thanks very much. We’ve had requests to stream the recording process live for a while. It’s a weird experience getting instant feedback from people in the chat room as you talk but kinda cool too I have to say, a nice buzz. Unfortunately we’re not set up to do the full radio thing at the moment and mix in all the music and sound effects as we talk, most of that is done in post. I’ve been playing around with my mixer tonight though and experimenting, so stay tuned there may be developments on that front. I’ve toyed with the idea of streaming a live music show for quite a while using something like Icecast but as with most of my plans I’m too busy plotting new things to ever actually finish them all. I edited the show over the weekend (on Lenny actually) and it was released tonight if you want to hear the results.

Next week I’m off to Geek Up in Liverpool on Tuesday night which is something I’ve been told I should attend for ages by my friend Adrian from LivLUG. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of crowd turn up, I’ve been to many LUG meetings but this is open to all tech types not just freedom crusaders and might be a different experience, I’ll let you know how it went next week. Thursday night is Chester LUG which will be at the University for the first time with technical talks, slide shows and even perhaps refreshments, which are the main topic of discussion on the mailing list at the moment it seems, don’t get between a geek and their snacks. If you’re in range of Chester in the UK then come along by all means. It would be nice to see you there, I’ve included a map below.

View Larger Map

Right that’s it. Over 750 words in the end, not bad for an impromptu post, hope some of them were worth reading. Take care everyone and I’ll see you soon, remember to stay tuned for those Sabayon and Lenny reviews.

See ya

Dan

I’m following one jokey picture post directly with another here which seems like a slight blogging faux par. I like to mix things up normally but then you get sent an image like this and all plans go out of the window…

Me In Rabbit Form?

It’s from a game called Rayman Raving Rabbits TV Party and was sent to me by Moggers87 on Identi.ca with the words “is this you?”. At first I thought “how preposterous??!!” but the more I look at it the more I have to admit it does look quite like me, right down to the pot belly but I’m not sure the ears are big enough. I don’t remember posing for this photo but then that doesn’t mean anything, I don’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning, where I left my car or what you just said to me either. Here’s an image of me for comparison…

A big mug ...with an Ubuntu mug

So what do you reckon, do I look like the rabbit??? I’ll hop off and eat some lettace while you ponder that, laters

A friend bought me this Family Guy calendar for Christmas and when I saw today’s entry it seemed oddly appropriate. It’s Brian saying “I like the sauce”, ok so it’s spelt differently but I thought to myself… I like the source too!!!!

Brian Likes The Sauce

Click to enlarge the pic. It’s a tenuous link I know but I had to post it anyway

We need a title

Hey folks, just wanted to round up the events of the last week. I noticed I did this last Sunday and it’s becoming a bit of habit, so perhaps I should make it a regular series. A set day would probably be a good idea and Sunday seems a good choice, I’m already late with the first one but start as you mean to go on I say It needs a name though and I’m not sure of a good one, The Week That Was? Nah, too long. Weekly Roundup? Mmm… that’s not really working for me either. If you have any suggestions for a title then please drop me a comment, all sensible suggestions will be considered and probably some stupid ones as well. For now I’ve just called it The Week, sounds kind of imposing and possibly a tad pretentious but it’s short and I can spell it so it’s a winner. Right then lets get going with issue 1.

Edit: I’ve actually changed the title to The Weekly Rewind which I really love, thanks to Rob for his comment suggesting this

Last Wednesday we recorded Linux Outlaws 77 which still isn’t out at the time of writing but hopefully will be very soon (crosses fingers). We had a really full show with loads of news, reviews of both Crunchee and Crunchbang 8.10.02, an interesting chat with Steve McIntyre (Debian Project Leader) and a killer closing song from Smashing Pumpkins that we could legally play, good stuff.

6ix Toys at Liverpool Twestival

Thursday night I went to Liverpool Twestival and had a great time. Sadly I didn’t win anything in the raffle, despite buying quite a few strips of tickets but as the money was all for good causes who cares. The auction seemed to go pretty well too and some of the items were a bit eclectic to say the least, a couple of pairs of Stephen Fry’s worn socks for example. I couldn’t afford to keep up with the bidding and I wasn’t sure I really wanted some used socks but it later occurred to me they could be used to clone Fry and make the ultimate pub quiz team. An opportunity missed there then, never mind. The music was great and I loved watching 6ix Toys particularly, I’ve been hammering their album for about 3 weeks now and I really recommend them as a good contemporary funk band. (6ix Toys picture taken by Jennifer Welch, you can see more here). I didn’t get a chance to meet and talk to everyone on the night sadly but that always leaves more for next time I suppose. We raised £507 in the end and a good time was had by all. Big thanks to everyone who worked so hard to pull the event off at short notice. You can read more about it on organsier Mandy Phillips’ blog.

Late on Saturday night Debian Lenny was finally released. I sat reloading the Debian website all day waiting and it seems the actual release came pretty late on. They said it would be out on Feb 14th which was Valentines Day but I think they must have been referring to Hawaiian time or something. I have my net install CD downloaded and ready to go. At the moment though I’m still testing Sabayon 4 with mixed results and I’ll report back on that later in the week. The next distro hop will be to Lenny I think, I’m eager to try it out. One thing worth noting, I’ve been using Evolution to manage my email on Sabayon and shock horror, I think I like it. Haven’t used a proper mail client like this since I was on Windows all those years ago with Outlook. Not sure I’ll stick with it full time after more distro hops but we’ll see.

As for upcoming events this week, I’m not sure what I have planned right now but no doubt some things will happen, they invariably do. So let’s see what the week brings. Take care everyone, speak to you soon

Dan