So please, have some patience, I’ll be right back soon

Laditools 1.0 «Lady “O”»

Apart from wladi and g15ladi, most of ladi* tools have been renamed:

• ladicontrol -> ladi-control-center
• ladilog -> ladi-system-log
• laditray -> ladi-system-tray

Moreover, a new component has joined the LADI Tools suite: ladi-player. LADI Player is a convenient, graphical VLC-style application providing an all-in-one control interface to start, stop and monitor JACK as well as the session handler. It also provides basic controls for managing studios.

Goodbye PyGTK!

All the code was ported to GTK+ 3 and the new GObject Introspection mechanism.

Code refactoring and cleanup

The code has been reorganized in order to allow the use of Python objects by 3rd party applications.

To start writing code using the classes provided by laditools, simply do the following:

from laditools import *

Two-in-one solution for LADI System Tray

Formerly laditray was an implementation of GtkStatusIcon to put a nice right-clickable icon into the system tray to allow users access JACK controls easy way. It’s been mostly rewritten and now it shows an AppIndicator icon (if the library is available), or fall back to the Freedesktop.org’s old-fashioned System Tray Protocol Spec-compliant icon.

Project’s new homepage

The project’s homepage is now hosted by Launchpad.net, the code is hosted by repo.or.cz and it’s available here for browsing.
Please use the following links to contact the development team:

• Bugs and patches
• Translations

New up-to-date packages will hit both Debian and Ubuntu soon!

(To be continued…)

Hi!

Since there has been a lot happening in the Debian Multimedia world during the Squeeze release, so we figured we should give you an update on that.

Who are we?

In the dark old ages, there were two teams involved in multimedia: the Debian Multimedia and Debian Multimedia Packages teams. Please note that neither of them is related to debian-multimedia.org (which is maintained by Christian Marillat, and is known to break current ffmpeg-based applications like mplayer and vlc in Debian Squeeze.). During late 2008, both teams were merged into one, the Debian Multimedia Maintainers team, to avoid effort fragmentation. Since then, there has been a lot of work done:

Consumer Multimedia in Debian

Consumer Multimedia is about playing and, well, consuming multimedia.

Squeeze will feature:

• FFmpeg 0.5.2, finally uncrippled thanks to zack! No mp3/h264 encoder, though. (still in NEW).
• mplayer 1.0rc3, finally with mencoder enabled.
• VLC 1.1.3
• VDPAU hardware acceleration in ffmpeg/mplayer (but feedback is welcome!)
• Guayadeque 0.2.5
• gmusicbrowser 1.0.2

Squeeze will not feature:

• FFmpeg 0.6 (But already available in experimental)
• Hardware acceleration with VA-API (packages also in experimental, for support on Intel hardware).

Producer Multimedia in Debian

Producer multimedia is software for producing multimedia. Squeeze will
feature:

End user applications:

• Ardour 2.8.11
• Audacity 1.3.12
• Composite 0.006
• Csound 5.12. The QuteCsound frontend is also available.
• FluidSynth 1.1.1
• Hydrogen 0.9.4.1
• Internet DJ Console 0.8.3
• Jokosher 0.11.5
• LiVES 1.3.4
• mhWaveEdit 1.4.20
• morituri 0.1.1
• QTractor 0.4.6
• Rosegarden 10.04.2
• SooperLooper 1.6.14
• Traverso 0.49.1
• X Jack Video Monitor 0.4.13
• Yoshimi 0.058.1

Platforms and technologies:

• JACK versions 0.118 and 1.9.6 (aka, jackd1 and jackd2). You can choose to install any of them (but only one at a time).
• LV2 plugins are supported. Ardour has support for them, and there are a bunch of them provided in Debian.
• LADSPA plugins are still supported.
• DSSI updated to 1.0.0, many plugins are available.
• FireWire sound devices are supported with libffado, and is supported by JACK.

Squeeze will not feature:

• JACK session support.
• Ardour 3 (it’s not out yet, so it did not make it in time for squeeze).
• SuperCollider. There is a package in the works, but did not make it to Squeeze.
• Toonloop: This live stop-motion animation editor has been packaged only recently.
• NASPRO: Convenient library to implement LV2 dynamic manifest plugins. It’s available in Sid.
• Mixxx: 1.7 series had RC bugs, and 1.8 was too late for squeeze.

Debian Multimedia Blend

There is also an effort to start a Debian Multimedia Blend to give a better overview about what multimedia applications are available in Debian. There is a short list for a quick overview as well as a long package list separated in sections to give a more detailed overview (including translations, screenshots, popularity of package etc). You are invited to help improving the tasks either directly in SVN or by sending patches to Andreas Tille <tille@debian.org> or debian-multimedia@lists.debian.org (see below). Note that not all of the packages listed in the tasks pages are maintained by the Debian Multimedia team, since they are aimed at producing useful package sets instead of showing only our own packages.

For those who want to squash some bugs in multimedia packages there is also the bugs page generated by the Blends tools, or our team bug page.

Other activity

The team has seen a lot of growth since the merger. Of the current 52 members of the Alioth team, 20 were added during 2009 and 18 in 2010, many of whom are involved in upstream development as well as the debian packaging. The number of packages has also grown, with 112 of the current 205 git repositories in our team area having its first commit during 2010.

Where to reach us

The Debian Multimedia Maintainers can be reached at pkg-multimedia-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org, should you have any questions. We have also decided to repurpose the old debian-multimedia@lists.debian.org address for user and more general discussion. We would like to invite everyone interested in multimedia to join us there. Interested developers/packagers can also join us at the first address. Some of the team members are also in the #debian-multimedia channel on OFTC.

Regards,

Alessio Treglia on behalf of the Debian Multimedia Maintainers

I’m talkin’ about Font Manager, a small application written in C and Python by Jerry Casiano, which allows users to easily install, remove and compare font files on own system.

Here are few nice screenshots:

To install the application, as usual type:

sudo apt-get install font-manager

Let me know what you think!

Links

• Project’s homepage
• Debian PTS page

1. Nautilus Pastebin has been entered Debian’s unstable archive (PTS page).
2. Yesterday morning I opened my mailbox and the first email began with the following:
   

   Hi,

   Congratulations! This e-mail confirms that Canonical would like to offer you sponsorship in the form of accommodation and travel to the Ubuntu Developers Summit in Dallas for the Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx release – http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UDS

I can’t describe what I feel, I just want to thank Canonical for giving me this opportunity.

“Why don’t find a not-CLI solution to make it in a more fast and comfortable way?”

So I decided to write nautilus-pastebin, an extension for the GNOME file manager, which allows users to send files just a right-click away.

How does it work?

Simply: right-click on a file, select «Pastebin» and, if the Internet connection is active, after few seconds you will see a bubble like that one in this screenshot:

The extension doesn’t only show that notification, it also retrieves the MIME type in order to try to adjust the syntax highlighting parameter according to the configuration of the selected pastebin and finally copies the paste URL to the clipboard, allowing you to paste it in a browser tab, IRC channel or wherever you want.

The global configuration file is located into /etc path, but if you want to select another pastebin to use you may do it by creating a file like the following one:

[generals]
pastebin = $GLOBAL_CONFIGFILE_SECTION

The file must be named as nautilus-pastebin.conf and saved under ~/.config/nautilus-pastebin/.

If problems occured during the past operation, you may see a message like the following:

Where can I download it? And how can install it?

You can find all the information that you need by opening the projects page, for the installation, after uncompressing the tarball, you can:

1. Use the setup.py script.
2. Copy:
   1. scripts/nautilus-pastebin.py to /usr/lib/nautilus/extensions-2.0/python/
   2. data/nautilus-pastebin.conf to /etc/ or in ~/.config/nautilus-pastebin/
   3. data/nautilus-pastebin.png to /usr/share/pixmaps/

After the installation, you may need to restart Nautilus:

killall nautilus

Some pastebins of the preconfigured ones don’t work well and I need some time to improve and extend the support for other websites.

If you wanted to contribute to the development by sending me patches, configurations or suggestions I would be very happy!

Links:

• nautilus-pastebin on Launchpad

I want to give a special thanks! to Luca Falavigna for all the support (and for the upload too).

For further informations, the ChangeLog is available here.

If you want to install it on Intrepid (or Hardy), follow the instructions available here.