Play sound in OSS applications, using ALSA

I just used GTick (metronome). But it supports only Pulseaudio and OSS. So, I configured it to OSS sound output and started with:

aoss gtick

It works well. And no more problems like "/dev/dsp: Device or resource busy".

From man aoss: «aoss - Wrapper script to facilitate use of the ALSA OSS compatibility library.»

Firefox crashes, while opening file downloading dialog

My Firefox crashed, when I pressed Ctrl+Shift+Y. This key combination open "Downloads" dialog. I found, that error message was:

firefox: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/gnome-vfs-2.0/modules/libfile.so: undefined symbol: gnome_vfs_unescape_string

So, I found solution that helped me and, hope, will help you. Just edit file /etc/gnome-vfs-2.0/modules/default-modules.conf and comment line (write "#" before it): "file:file".

Installing wine in Debian Wheezy (Testing)

I was surprised, when I didn't found wine in Debian Wheezy repositories. But I found some solution here.

So, try this:

ARCH=`uname -m | sed -e s/x86_64/amd64/ -e s/i.86/i386/`
wget -r -A "*_$ARCH.deb" http://dev.carbon-project.org/debian/wine-unstable/ 
sudo dpkg -i dev.carbon-project.org/debian/wine-unstable/*.deb 
sudo apt-get install -f 

After you need to delete folder with wine packages if you don't need them:

rm -rf dev.carbon-project.org/

Ha-ha. It works! Thanks for nicolaselie

MPD and Volume widget for Awesome

Here are two small and simple widgets for Awesome WM.

MPD State: Shows now playing artist and song. Works with "Pause" and "Stopped" states. Depends on mpc.

Volume State: Shows current volume status. Works with "Mute" status. Depends on amixer.

Sources and setup instructions are on: github.com.

May be, someone need them. Commentaries and proposals are welcome.

Wonderfull 200 lines patch for Linux Kernel

Soon, in Linux kernel 2.6.38 will be applied patch, that will improve Linux desktop responsiveness. It means, that you can watch video and roll pages in web-browser fluently.

Patch was written by Mike Galbraith. It adds only 223 lines of code into Linux Kernel.

Look like, Linus Torvalds liked it (and write about it in his e-mail):

Yeah. And I have to say that I'm (very happily) surprised by just how small that patch really ends up being, and how it's not intrusive or ugly either.

I'm also very happy with just what it does to interactive performance. Admittedly, my "testcase" is really trivial (reading email in a web-browser, scrolling around a bit, while doing a "make -j64" on the kernel at the same time), but it's a test-case that is very relevant for me. And it is a _huge_ improvement.

It's an improvement for things like smooth scrolling around, but what I found more interesting was how it seems to really make web pages load a lot faster. Maybe it shouldn't have been surprising, but I always associated that with network performance. But there's clearly enough of a CPU load when loading a new web page that if you have a load average of 50+ at the same time, you _will_ be starved for CPU in the loading process, and probably won't get all the http requests out quickly enough.

So I think this is firmly one of those "real improvement" patches. Good job. Group scheduling goes from "useful for some specific server loads" to "that's a killer feature".

Linus

Web-site phoronix.com created two videos: with sched_autogroup_enabled and without:

sched_autogroup_enabled=0

sched_autogroup_enabled=1

Play HQ video on slow CPU with mplayer

It is integerstion. If you have slov CPU, but would like to play HQ video on it, you, may be, had some problems with it. Like small FPS (Frames per second) or situation, when image is more slover than sound.
If your ansver is "No" - you are happy. :)

Others, try to start mplayer with this parameters:

$ mplayer -vfm ffmpeg -lavdopts lowres=1:fast:skiploopfilter=all Your_HQ_Video.mkv

It was helpfull for me. Wish same your's.