Today I spent almost the whole day (after resurrecting Farragut from the downtime — gotta love the Italian default power company (ENEL); there are people who forgot when they got they last blackout, I forgot which was the last month I didn’t have a blackout of more than 45 minutes!) sleeping on my bed, or watching something on the TV through the laptop. I pulled an allnighter last night for a midsummer event, so I was mostly KO, then I also got a bad headache and was unable to actually do anything useful, add to that the temperature and you can pretty much understand how I feel now.
Anyway, before my power was cut out by ENEL, I was able to complete downloading the tarballs forming the official Solaris Developer Express (why does this remind me of Agatha Christie?) VMware datafiles. I supposed that if it’s official, it should be already well configured, and should not have the same problems I had after installing VMware tools.. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case: also this one gets a default screen size similar to my real screen size, counting both monitors, which makes it basically impossible to use for me.
This starts to be ridiculous, especially since Solaris is basically the only thing that is forcing me back from merging the xine audio conversion branch into 1.2 series (okay it will still be a bit rough, but it mostly works, and it just needs more people testing it to get good). This is quite interesting for xine users wanting to use JACK output, as the JACK plugin in 1.2 audio conversion branch is basically rewritten: the previous version was kinda crazy, and with audio conversion now in place I could rewrite it to just accept exclusively 32-bit floating point samples, which solves a lot of troubles for JACK output.
Anyway, tomorrow I hope to be able to do something more useful: there is still FusionSound to be ported, even if I have no idea where to start with that, and I suppose I could try to get NetBSD online and see if I can port the SunAudio code to the new interface with that, although i doubt basing on NetBSD exclusively will make sure I don’t break it for Solaris too. Maybe I should see to fix xine-lib for NetBSD and OpenBSD for now and schedule Solaris support for the future…
Another thing I’ll be working on is trying to find a new issue tracker for the xine project. The SourceForge.net tracker simply sucks, the interface is one of the worse out there, the search is clumsy, there are tons of duplicate bugs, it’s difficult to understand when an issue was reported, with which version, it’s difficult to do complex queries, the attachments are messy to handle and at the end it’s not uncommon that I fix a bug because I find it, and then find it reported on SourceForge.
Most likely, we’ll end up using Roundup like FFmpeg; it might become a standard for Multimedia software, who knows? It’s nice, flexible.. it might need a bit of work to get a good CSS, but that’s true for any other bug tracker out there, will be liked by Ubuntu people who will be able to push stuff upstream as Malone supports it…
Anyway, hopefully tomorrow it will be a productive day, I sincerely hope so. I also need to see if I should buy a new sound card, the VIA82xx with DXS is driving me crazy as it requires me to run JACK with 48kHz resolution to have HW mixing together with PulseAudio, and I don’t want to stop PulseAudio just to play the keyboard. Does anybody have an EchoAudio Mia or MiaMidi card and can tell me how it works under Linux? There is an ALSA driver that should be fine – most EchoAudio cards are – but I’m not sure whether the HW mixing support has the same constrain as VIA82xx’s (only 48kHz streams can be mixed together), if that was the case it would mean nothing to change the card for me.