Cocoa Geek

The new version of Ubuntu is out now - so a great time for everybody to try linux. It really is a top-notch distro and increadably easy to configure. Go fo it.

The new version of Ubuntu is coming in a couple of weeks, and since it has now entered beta phase i decided i would upgrade my installation of Hardy Heron. The installation is very easy just requiring the command:

sudo update-manager -d

The installation is remarkably quick, installing all the updated packages. The only problem i had with the installation was my GRUB config file was overwritten meaning i had to re-write some entries. As with previous upgrades config file diffs can be displayed and merged as required.

After a quick restart and reconfiguring my display drivers (very easy - just a matter of picking the correct driver) i was in 8.10. Changing my theme and background to the new artwork i was very pleased to see the removal of that awful orange that has been used in previous versions, its now quite a nice dark and moody brown which reminds me somewhat of Ubuntu Studio.

On the whole it has been remarkably stable, since the feature freeze is coming in now then future updates are going to be entirely focused on fixing bugs. I am currently running the update commands about twice a day and getting at least 15 packages updated each time.

I can’t wait until it is fully stable and released at the end of this month, Ubuntu is getting stronger and stronger as a desktop OS and with the current 6 monthly release cycle its also moving very quickly. I think a huge amount of credit should go to the community for working so hard on bug fixing and packaging. Making this OS the easiest linux distro to get started with.

Yesterday i picked up Spore, all i can say is: what a game. I’m not a big gamer anymore - don’t suppose being a mac guy i can be really, but this is superb. It is such a well thought out and fun game. I hadn’t been playing for more than 10mins before it managed to get my girlfriend’s interest. As I write this post she has been playing for the last half an hour and loving it. It is great fun a game for all the family… ok thats it now… i’m going to get my game back…

Well on monday night a regular band practice managed to turn into an electronic jam session, which we took some live recordings of. These are avalible for listening pleasure on music.cocoageek.com. These are performances by myself and richhoo.

I have finally gotten around to releasing a binary of Eskimo my to-do manager for OS X. This is deffinitly still in development and the feature set is far from complete. Download it here.

Just a quick update on the circular recording technique i described yesterday, i have uploaded the compleated recording to Cocoa Geek Music for anyone who is interested.

This is a blog post that is deffinitly here for my future reference

What i wanted to do was record the drum Ultrabeat drum machine in logic as an audio track as opposed to midi so i could have a more dynamic drum track. As far as i know there is no out of th box feature for this in logic (if anyone knows differently please correct me) however all you need is Jack.

Jack is a little server that sits in the background and pipes audio around so you can direct audio inputs and outputs more efficiently across your software. So download and install the latest binary and launch the program that gets installed in you Applications directory. It is essential that you start the server before launching logic.

When logic is lauched change your device to output to the new jackrouter device and go onto the ‘routing’ table in the jack gui. here you can set the output of logic to also become the input for logic so if you create a new audio track in logic you can record your output from one track to the input of anouter track. Make sure that your output from the track you are recording is not being fed back into itself otherwise you will get alot of feedback very quickly.

Obviously by using jack you can if you prefer pipe your audio into another application alltogether such as audacity or something like that.

There are loads of different Linux distributions around these days, and this number seems to get bigger every week. Loads of them are great and some are really great but how can you actually use one to learn Linux, and what techniques do you use?

One of the problems with learning about a Linux system and its structure is that its just so massive. Particularly for someone not familiar with Unix or another similar system, and although there these days it is easy to get up and running – especially with the advent of really good package managers and lots on online tutorials. But what about the real nuts and bolts of Linux hacking? Where do you start?

This is where Linux From Scratch comes in this is a really interesting book that details hot to build your own Linux distribution. The writers have written this because they find the current distribution not customizable enough and as much as I agree that there could be things done I think for most uses a standard distribution is absolutely great. The real benefit from trying this is that you get a really good insight into the inner working of Linux as well as several major problems with installing like this (How do you compile a compiler without a compiler?). On the whole its very interesting however definitely not something I would put on a production machine, it takes a lot of work to build this and set it up – setting it up for a production environment would be even more difficult!

I shall be playing with this over the next couple of weeks, so I will keep you all informed.

Another WWDC, another shed load of blog posts about what’s going to be announced. Is it just me that thinks a developer conference shouldn’t be used as a tool to announce new products? As much as i agree its exciting and interesting to see what apple have been working on recently i still think its not the place to be launching the next iPhone.

I have seen loads of blog posts today about the next major release of OS X being announced next week, as well as the next iPhone, other media devices, new hardware and everything else. Basically no one knows, all i am saying is lets at least wait until next tuesday before we get excited about things that haven’t been announced yet, lets also hope that next year the keynote can be for the developers who have traveled there as opposed to the media in the hall.