Lubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail PowerPC Preview

I mentioned earlier I installed Lubuntu 13.04 and MintPPC on a second hard drive in my Sawtooth, so I thought I'd give you a quick look-see on the former to see what it's all about.

On first impression, it's highly polished. The theme is unified across all applications and the fonts are handsome. I'm not personally a fan of the Ubuntu font, but that just means 99% of the rest of the world looooooves it. The LXDE environment is easy to navigate around and very responsive, the same as LXDE on any other distro. It comes with a very minimal set of basic applications, which I appreciate. Just one music player (Audacious), one video player (Gnome Mplayer), one web browser (Firefox 19), etc. PCManFM automatically detected and mounted all partitions on both discs. Overall I was pleasantly surprised, though this being a development release there were some instances of bugginess.

First, I had to use the yaboot parameter "Linux video=radeonfb:1280x1024-32@60" entered at the second yaboot prompt. Otherwise I got distorted colors. Also, by using video=radeonfb:off, I could get 3D acceleration but only briefly. After a few minutes the system always froze, and it was due to radeon errors. I filed a bug report here and it's setting the world on fire as you can see.

Probably the biggest disappointment is with video. With 3D acceleration enabled, video playback is great, but like I said, 3D for me is unreliable. Back in a 2D desktop, videos show about 30% higher CPU usage and I get a slight horizontal shearing effect--slight but noticeable. I've never seen this problem on Debian/MintPPC. Also, when trying VLC it played sound but no video.

The only other bug I found was the Firefox blue tint bug, where some resized images are tinted blue. This is a PowerPC specific bug and has been patched at Mozilla's end, so it's only a matter of time before the fix migrates down to Ubuntu and Debian. In the meantime, Zen at PowerPC Liberation detailed a simple workaround here.

Here are a few screenshots, the third showing the Firefox bug:







Go ahead, give Raring a spin. I recommend installing from the alternate CD instead of the live CD, because it fits on an actual CD and you don't have to worry about messing with yaboot parameters and xorg settings to get the graphical one to work. Actually I've had highly prejudicial experiences with live CDs in the past, so take that for what it's worth.

Some more useful reading here: Lubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) daily build

Streaming Music on PowerPC

I have a confession to make. I'm a 120 Minutes orphan. Once upon a time there was a show every Sunday at midnight on MTV where you'd get two hours of videos of everything alternative and cutting edge. It was called 120 Minutes, and with this show you didn't need anything else to tell you what new music was out there. It was all packed into 120 minutes every week. And then it got cancelled.

Turns out I became dependent and was woefully unprepared to face the world without it. Finding new music was like suddenly being lost in an alien landscape of Myspace, Youtube, and low wattage college radio stations. I eventually turned to the humiliating method of typing in a CD I liked on Amazon and then going to the "Customers who purchased this also bought..." section. But even that's shown diminishing returns. Thankfully there's been a bevy of streaming music services to appear in recent years, not just internet radio stations, but services to read your tastes and serve up music you may have more than a 1% chance of not actively hating. So I thought I'd give a rundown of these for PowerPC Macs and see which are still compatible.

Spotify

First up is Spotify. It's client-based, meaning you download a client to login with and it serves up music with iTunes integration, its own playlists, as well as ads if you're on a free account. Version 0.6.6.10 is the last one to support Tiger and PowerPC and it still works, though there's no guarantee it will in the future. The charms of unsupported software. It can be found on this page.

Spotify also has a beta web client that is only accessible by signing in with your Facebook account. I'm not on Facebook so I didn't bother trying it, but you can here. Another option for paid members is Despotify, a cli-based client that can be installed on Linux, and on Macs with Homebrew.

Spotify has a beta Linux client, but the bastard sharks didn't compile it for PowerPC.

Last.fm

(UPDATE: Thanks to Mike W. for leaving a link in comments to the last PowerPC version of Last.fm's official OS X client. It's old but it still works. How did I miss this?)

Last.fm plays in your web browser and requires flash. This definitely sucks. I searched around for standalone clients on OS X, but they're all old and no longer work.

Thankfully the picture is brighter on Linux. There's a great open source client called lastfm available in the Debian repositories, and it has all the features of the web player without the flash. There's also the console-based shell-fm, and it may also be possible to compile this on OS X, though it looked...involved.

In addition to standalones, there are many applications that have Last.fm plugins to scrobble what you're playing back to the death star.

Pandora

Pandora is similar to Last.fm in that it basically gives you customized radio stations based on your likes and dislikes. Their web player recently changed to html5, but inexplicably still requires flash. This definitely sucks. They have an official desktop client that requires Adobe Air (scroll waaaaaay down for the last PowerPC version) and is for paid subscribers only.

This is another service where the much better experience is with Linux. Namely Pithos, a standalone GTK client that's tiny and slick. If for some reason you prefer a console-based client, there's Pianobar.

(UPDATE: If you see songs loading as 42 seconds long and playing silently, that's not a problem with your client. It's something Pandora triggers from the server side when you skip too many songs for their liking.)

Grooveshark

Last of the big players is Grooveshark. They appear to be exlusively web-based with no standalone clients. Their regular website requires flash, but they also have an html5 site that works in Safari/Webkit/TenFourKit. As of now it won't work in Firefox/TenFourFox because Grooveshark uses a proprietary codec that Mozilla is not supporting. Depending on your ideologies, blame Grooveshark or Mozilla.

In addition to those four services, there are a few others like Slacker Radio, Jango, and Rdio. They all require flash, though Rdio has made an old client for PowerPC Leopard users available here (direct download).

I also tried to get the flash sites working on Linux with Gnash and Lightspark, which was a hopeless exercise in futility. Of all these solutions, my favorite is the Linux Last.fm client, though it's a qt app. Here's a quick tip. If you have a qt app like SMPlayer or lastfm that has the ugly Windows 95 look and isn't conforming to your GTK theme, install qt4-qtconfig* and use that to get your qt apps to match. And its launch command is qtconfig or also qtconfig-qt4.

With all the above services, there's also an ethical consideration to make. They're fine as a musical discovery tool, but be aware they pay artists very little if anything in royalties, despite all the revenues they take in. So it's kind of a crap move to find something you like and then use the service to play it back on demand. If you like a song, support the artist and buy their stuff!

*You'll also need to install libgnome2-common, see this bug report for the why.

I Love Humanity

Global Equalizer for OS X

It's pretty late in the game to have discovered this, maybe I read somewhere before that it wasn't possible, but it turns out there's a way to have a global equalizer across all your applications in OS X. Not just in iTune$ or VLC or others with their own equalizers built in, but in everything else like Youtube videos in your browser or games and such.

One reason I want this is because all my CDs are ripped in Ogg Vorbis format, and iTune$'s (okay, I'll stop with the dollar sign) equalizer doesn't play with the Xiph plugin that enables both .ogg and .flac playback. Kind of a bummer since my desktop speakers are a bit small and could benefit from some tweaking. Luckily there's a global solution.

You need two pieces of software: AU Lab and Soundflower. AU Lab is part of the Xcode Developer Tools that came on your install discs. You can also download Developer Tools from Apple's developer website (free registration required). They've recently made AU Lab available as a standalone download so you don't have to install the full GB+ developer package, but I think it's only for Snow Leopard and up. I'm not sure about the licensing of obtaining a standalone AU Lab for Tiger and Leopard (it's free, after all), but you may find it with a bit of googling. Soundflower, more simply, is available here (1.4.3 for PowerPC).

At first I tried following Dctr Watson's directions here, but they were Snow Leopard-centric and I failed miserably. After some searching I finally came across this old post which had AU Lab/Soundflower instructions for Tiger. And they worked!

Now onto setting the right levels. The two pics below are two views of the same levels, the second one displaying the actual numbers.

These are what work best for my speakers. They're not overly aggressive with the bass, but they expand the soundscape and make my speakers sound less mono. Makes a much richer sound. If you try these and get distortion, just lower the levels or narrow the curve.

Once you're satisfied, you can save the preset and also save an Au Lab .trak document that you can use as a login item in your Accounts Preferences. That way it's running on startup. If you don't want that, you can just launch the .trak document to activate the equalizer anytime you want.

As far as equalizers go, the CPU hit is slight. AU Lab will use maybe 5% of your processor (and a slight amount of RAM) while running, but the key is to hide the application. There's visual feedback in the application window when audio plays, so if you keep it visible you're gonna take more of a hit.

Now Youtube videos actually sound good.

Multiple Linux Distros on One Hard Drive With Yaboot

So I had this old 13 GB hard drive packed away in a box that I completely forgot about until a few days ago when I thought, "Why aren't I using this?" Then I went back to playing with my balloon.

Several hours later, though, I decided to stick it in my Sawtooth as a second hard drive and use it to test out Linux distros on two partitions. So in an act of impressive daring-do and engineering elan, I opened its door. (My sarcasm is well-earned. I'm a veteran of the 7100 wars [don't ask].) A few screws unscrewed and screwed, a quick jumper setting change, and I had a second hard drive on top of my primary one and I was ready to go. From there, I closed the door and got some install CDs out.

The decision on which two distros to install was a no-brainer. Since I already have Debian on a laptop, I'd install Lubuntu and MintPPC. But how do you instal two Linux distros on the same hard drive? Never did that before. After a bit of googling, I came to one of two conclusions: either it was so complicated that speaking of it was a lot like the first rule of fight club, or it was so easy that nobody even bothered to write up a how-to. After going through it, I can now confirm the latter conclusion was the accurate one. Or was it the former? I always get those mixed up.

Apparently when you install any distro that uses deb-installer, it will automatically recognize any other Linux distros on the drive and append your yaboot configuration accordingly. It also recognizes OS X partions, but in my experience not OS 9 ones. Those I have to manually enter into yaboot.conf. So the procedure is easy.

First I started with MintPPC. In the deb-installer I set up the bootloader, swap, and root partitions and left the space I had planned for Lubuntu as "Free Space." Then I went ahead with the install just like any other. When that was all done, I booted with the Lubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) alternate CD (graphical installers are a PITA), and in the partitioner I set the remaining free space as Lubuntu's root partition. No need to set different bootloader and swap partitions as the existing ones will be shared. Then I proceeded with the install and rebooted.

Now at the yaboot prompt you enter "l" for Linux just like always, but at the second screen you press tab to display your choice of Linux installs. In my case, "Linux" for Lubuntu and "Debian-Linux" for MintPPC. You can edit those names in yaboot.conf to something shorter. Then type which one you want to boot and it boots!

The only problem I have is sometimes my display says "out of range" when the yaboot screen is supposed to display, so I have to type blind. I'll have to investigate that, but in the meantime I'll just ignore it and hope it goes away.

So now I have MintPPC and Lubuntu to try out. I'll probably write up something more about them later, but for now they haven't destroyed my computer yet so it's all good.

UPDATE: Just don't run ybin on a boot volume where your yaboot.conf only has one Linux install listed. In my case, the yaboot.conf on my Lubuntu install was the one with both Linux volumes since it was installed second, and the deb-installer ran ybin off of that. I made the mistake of running ybin while in MintPPC and temporarily making my Lubuntu volume invisible to yaboot. I got things sorted by running the Lubuntu install CD in rescue mode and re-installing the boot loader. Lesson learned.

Disappearing or Invisible Fonts on Debian/MintPPC

It seems a lot of people besides myself have had a slight problem lately when updating our Wheezy installs. All fonts in GTK apps render as a very light purple making them invisible. This only seems to affect people using the Radeon driver and the solution for me was ultimately a simple one. First generate a xorg.conf file if you don't already have one by switching to a console and entering:

sudo /etc/init.d/slim stop

Replace slim with gdm or lightdm or whatever your login manager is. At this point all the text in your console might be jumbled. That seems to be another bug. Just type the following commands blind:

sudo Xorg -configure

and then:

sudo cp /root/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Next, edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf in a text editor by adding the following line under the "Device" section where you see the "radeon" driver:

Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"

You also want to tab in the Option and make sure it lines up with the section. Then save and exit, type startx or restart the computer, and you should have your fonts back.

At first I tried to fix this with the xorg option "NoAccel" "True", but that turned off all acceleration and made my desktop unacceptably slow. But changing the "AccelMethod" from EXA (default) to XAA, it preserves 2D desktop acceleration and fixes the font issue. There's more information in these threads here and here.

Just thought I'd leave this here in case anybody googles, "WHERE THE HELL DID MY FREAKING FONTS GO LINUX WHEEZY HELP."

UPDATE: Peter S. reports he can get fonts back with EXA acceleration using the following xorg.conf edits:

Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
Option "RenderAcceleration" "false"

And you may also need:

Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"

He also says he can now use Compiz without it "lagging like crazy" on his G3 :)

UPDATE II: Here's a bug report, Bug #702480 xserver-xorg-video-radeon: GTK fonts are invisible on PowerPC

GarageBand Alternative for Linux

It's called LMMS (Linux MultiMedia Studio). Recently I decided to get more into learning about and making music. I'm always on the lookout for productive outlets for my OCDing and thought this could be the ticket. Also it has the added benefit of making me stop regretting that I couldn't play a note of music.

When looking for music production software on Linux, the first thing I became aware of is a lot of these programs require the JACK Audio server. So I installed it along with qjackctl (a settings GUI that also turns the daemon on and off) but got errors when I tried to start it. After a bit of googling, I found there are two separate JACKs, jackd1 and jackd2. jackd2 is not a sequel to jackd1. It's a different fork. So given I had jackd2 installed, I replaced it with jackd1 and...success! Got the server running, so now I can pass audio around between different applications if I ever need that function (moduler work environment is the applicable phrase). I don't know what the problem with jackd2 was. I got the same errors on an iBook and a Power Mac and the common advice about realtime settings didn't work. But for now I'm not gonna care.

Onto LMMS. This is probably your best bet as far as GarageBand alternatives go in that it's fairly easy to get started with but is also complex as hell just with the sheer number of options available to you. Here's the default setup with a triple oscillator synth selected:

It has a song editor for writing melodies and a beat/baseline editor for writing repetitious things like...beats and baselines. You bring up a piano roll for composing notes, and it's pretty flexible as far as copying/pasting and moving things around, etc. It also comes with plenty of instrument presets and samples for you to mess around with. And the GUI's pretty slick.

I've only found a couple of problems. If your computer's too slow, playing back songs with too many simultaneous elements may result in distorted sound, so you'd have to export to wav or ogg to hear the whole thing at once. Also, I thought at first that LMMS required JACK and I couldn't get it to start up with a JACK server running. When I stopped the server LMMS started fine, and I found in the preferences it's set to use ALSA by default. Cool, but just to see, I switched it to use JACK and got the same failure to start up even with the JACK server turned off. I had to trash the .lmmsrc.xml file just to get it to launch again. Maybe the JACK problem will be an inconvenience down the road, but as is the theme of this post, for now I'm not gonna care.

Be sure to check out LMMS's online manual beginning with the Getting Started section.

As for other programs, there's also Rosegarden. When I installed it it wanted to install Latex as a recommended package for typesetting music notation, but since I wasn't in the mood for a 1 GB download and I don't need to produce fancy musical sheets I installed Rosegarden with the --without-recommends argument. It basically does the same thing as LMMS, but in different way, so it's a matter of taste. Rosegarden requires JACK.

Also requiring JACK is Hydrogen, which is like an LMMS for drum machines. There's also Superlooper, which is about making loops presumably super. And QTractor is a newer program people are talking about.

I also tried Ardour, but I couldn't get it to launch. Maybe it's a RAM issue as the iBook I tried it on only has 256 MB (UPDATE: It was a RAM issue. I upgraded to 640 MB and it started up fine.). And Jokosher failed at the Create New Project prompt. It sounds like this PowerPC bug is still there. Oh well, Jokosher. Your screenshots looked good, but you'll have to remain a mannequin in the window.

So now I'm in the market for a midi keyboard and having to answer the existential question that has ruined larger men than me: 49 or 61 keys?

TenFourFox 19 Beta

A new TenFourFox beta is out for testing. This is an important update as it's the first build under a new compiler and there were previous warnings that it would push minimum memory requirements up to 1 GB. I can echo Cameron Kaiser's finding that those fears have not come to pass. In my testing, memory use is up slightly, maybe 30-40 MB on average, not enough for me to care about. He also says he's eager for Leopard and G3 users to test this as he doesn't have a G3 or a Leopard machine, so give it a download.

In my couple of days testing, it's been stable. In that respect, TenFourFox remains as boring as ever. Page rendering seems less jumpy and a tad quicker, but that could be a placebo effect. Altivec acceleration has been added for pages that shadow out the background. This will make me hate web developers a little less. Also, clicking scrollbars and tabs with the window in the background are now active, like with Safari/TenFourKit.

Check out Cameron's blog for the longer version. His posts are always packed with information without being overwhelming to the layperson. Glad to see TenFourFox still has a bright future.

UPDATE: And for Leopard users, SeaMonkey 2.16b1 has been released.

Some Cross-Platform Flash Alternatives

(UPDATE: A lot of this is outdated. Mplayer doesn't work with the https links Youtube now throws up, so for OS X I'd recommend PPC Media Center, and on Linux you can use Mpv with the following bash script:

#!/bin/bash
mpv --framedrop=vo --cache 8192 --cache-initial 820 $(youtube-dl -gf 18 $(xsel --clipboard))

Save it in a text editor as something.sh and make it executable with "chmod u+x /the/path/to/something.sh". The script requires Mpv, Youtube-dl, and xsel, and when you copy a video URL to the clipboard launching the script will stream the video. END UPDATE)

Put that in a #!/bin/bash script and you can just copy the video URL to clipboard and launch. This is assuming you have mpv, youtube-dl, and xsel all installed. END UPDATE)

By now you probably know about MacTubes for OS X, and I've written about quvi on Linux, but I think it's worthwhile to go through a few other Flash/Youtube alternatives given the way Google likes to break third party apps by changing its URL paths. Also, MacTubes hasn't been updated in quite awhile and has difficulty on videos with embedded ads, so who knows how long before it completely breaks? We need workarounds that have a history of rapid updates, and that's what this post is about.

Like the title says, the three alternatives I've found are cross-platform. One's a python script, and the other two are Greasemonkey scripts that work in Firefox/Iceweasel/TenFourFox.

We're also going to be using Mplayer from the shell to stream the video. You could just as easily use VLC or the new Mplayer fork, Mpv, but since I primarily use Mplayer I'll focus on that.

On Linux you can install Mplayer with your package manager, unless you're on a G3, in which case you have to compile it with the configuration option --disable-altivec (Mpv doesn't have this complication, but it's not yet available in Debian Stable). OS X users can use Macports or Tigerbrew to install Mplayer, or you can find an older pre-compiled binary inside the application package distributed at MPlayer for MacOS X.

Now to the best command line arguments for streaming Youtube, which are:

mplayer -framedrop -cache 8192 -cache-min 10

Those arguments will prevent the picture from lagging the audio, though if you have a slower computer and lagging is still a problem, you can add the argument -lavdopts skiploopfilter=all on h.264 files. Note that last argument will slightly degrade picture quality.

Next, OS X users will want to copy and paste B-G's Mplayer scripts. They're easy to edit if you need to change Mplayer's path or add arguments, and you can save them in your ~/Library/Scripts folder so you won't have to open a terminal to start a vid. As you can see from my scripts menu (enabled in AppleScript Utility), I've created way too many for every conceivable scenario:

On Linux we'll set up quick video launching with a bash script. First, install "xsel" with aptitude/apt-get. Then create a text file and paste the following (no carriage returns on the second line):

#!/bin/bash
mplayer -framedrop -cache 8192 -cache-min 10 -cookies -cookies-file ~/.cookie.txt $(youtube-dl -gf 18 --prefer-insecure --cookies ~/.cookie.txt $(xsel --clipboard))

Save it as toob.sh and make it executable with chmod +x path to toob.sh. Don't worry, that script will all make sense in a minute.

Now that Mplayer is set up, let's switch to the video downloader youtube-dl. It's a python script that requires Python 2.6, 2.7, or 3.3. Tiger and Leopard came with 2.3 and 2.5 respectively, so you'll have to update. Python 2.7 works great for me on Tiger. Next, Linux and OS X users can follow the instructions on youtube-dl's download page to install (if curl or wget mysteriously won't work on your OS X system, you can also paste the download URL in your address bar and save the file). Once it's in your /usr/local/bin and made executable, run youtube-dl -U to update to the newest version.

Ordinarily youtube-dl is used to download videos to disk, but for streaming we'll use it to retrieve the video link only. Not the page URL, but the long URL to the actual video. Before we get to the shortcuts, let's do this from the command line to see it all under the hood. In a terminal, enter (on one line):

youtube-dl -gf 18 --prefer-insecure "Youtube page URL inside quotes"

The -g option outputs the video link only, -f 18 specifies the format of the vid, in this case 360p mp4 (with no arguments it defaults to the highest resolution, and -F outputs all available formats). The --prefer-insecure is a new option to deal with Youtube throwing up https links, which Mplayer doesn't handle (Mpv, however, does). Now you'll notice the output is a really long link. That's the link to your video! So to get Mplayer to play it, you enter in a terminal (on one line):

mplayer -quiet -framedrop -cache 8192 -cache-min 10 "youtube-dl output link inside quotes"

and to retrieve the link and play, all in one command, enter (on one line):

mplayer -quiet -framedrop -cache 8192 -cache-min 10 -cookies -cookies-file ~/.cookie.txt $(youtube-dl -gf 18 --prefer-insecure --cookies ~/.cookie.txt "Youtube page URL inside quotes")

Some people say you need those cookies options on some rare videos, so that's why I'm including them. Otherwise, they're harmless.

Now to the shortcuts. In OS X, copying the long link from the youtube-dl output and choosing B-G's streaming script from your AppleScript menu will play the video. Alternately, you can "Save As..." in Terminal.app, and where it says "Execute this command (specify complete path)" enter:

mplayer -quiet -framedrop -cache 8192 -cache-min 10 -cookies -cookies-file ~/.cookie.txt $(youtube-dl -gf 18 --prefer-insecure --cookies ~/.cookie.txt $(pbpaste))

and check "Execute command in a shell". Now when you copy a Youtube page URL to clipboard, choose the command from the File | Library submenu in Terminal.app and the video will play.

On Linux it's even easier. Just copy the Youtube page URL to clipboard and launch that bash script I showed you above. Your video will now play.

So that's one Flash alternative, but I mentioned there were two others. These two are Greasemonkey scripts for Firefox/Iceweasel/TenFourFox, so first install Greasemonkey. Then install the user script Youtube EZ Download. Now when you go to a Youtube page you'll see a box on the lower right corner with a list of download links:

In OS X, copy a link to the clipboard, then choose B-G's streaming script from the AppleScript menu and watch the video. In Linux, use the Firefox add-on Open With to create a new menu item for Mplayer and its args. Then right-click a link in the Youtube EZ Download box and choose "Open Link with Mplayer".

The other Greasemonkey script has been around awhile and is called Viewtube (also in the screenshots). It replaces Youtube's video player with a picture preview and several buttons for playback and downloading. You can use the Play function to play back videos with the gecko-mediaplayer browser plugin and gnome-mplayer, but that's not cross-platform to OS X. OS X users will still find it useful as the Get button works for downloading, and it replaces Youtube's CPU eating no-flash warning with the aforementioned picture preview. It also works with Youtube's Feather Beta.

So there you have it. Streaming Youtube through Mplayer with just a couple of clicks. Also, youtube-dl and these two Greasemonkey scripts have a history of frequent updates so any of Google's periodic breakages shouldn't last long.

I found a couple of other Youtube browsers I didn't try. One was yt, a command line browser, but it didn't have thumbnails so it wasn't for me. Also, there's gtk-youtube-viewer (bottom of page), but I didn't see any documentation about compiling on Debian, and knowing my compiling skills...

Thanks to Peter S. for telling me about youtube-dl :)

UPDATE: There's some good stuff in the comments, too, about UnPlug and more AppleScripts. Read on!

UPDATE II: Peter S. reports playback on his G3 is way smoother with VLC than Mplayer. Here's his VLC + youtube-dl command:

/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC $(youtube-dl -gf 18 --prefer-insecure "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSwy412nttI")

So you can adjust all the above commands by pointing to the binary in the VLC app package.