Alex Sleat » how to

AL lib: pulseaudio.c:331: PulseAudio returned minreq > tlength/2; expect break up – Ubuntu 11.10

Alex — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 23:49:56 +0000

./blender
connect failed: No such file or directory
ndof: spacenavd not found
AL lib: pulseaudio.c:331: PulseAudio returned minreq > tlength/2; expect break up
Floating point exception

Download and install the associated package to your processor from here : https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/oneiric/+package/python-openal

Restart your computer and the issue should now be resolved.

Updating The Kernel in Ubuntu

Alex — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:35:25 +0000

Download the latest from here:

http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/

The folders correspond to kernel versions and should also include the ubuntu version, for example I chose to update 11.10 (oneiric) from “3.0.0-14-generic” to “3.1.4″, this was in a directory called “v3.1.4-oneiric/“.

You’ll need 3 files (replace with the kernel version you’ve downloaded)*:

linux-headers-*_all.deb

For 64 bit systems (replace with the kernel version you’ve downloaded)*:

linux-headers-*_amd64.deb
linux-image-*_amd64.deb

For 32 bit systems (replace with the kernel version you’ve downloaded)*:

linux-headers-*_i386.deb
linux-image-*_i386.deb

Once you have the files, install them in the following order using these commands (of course, replacing the version number for the ones you’ve downloaded):

sudo dpkg -U linux-headers-3.1.4-030104_3.1.4-030104.201111281851_all.deb
sudo dpkg -U linux-headers-3.1.4-030104-generic_3.1.4-030104.201111281851_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -U linux-image-3.1.4-030104-generic_3.1.4-030104.201111281851_amd64.deb

Once that’s done, reboot. Once you’re back use the following command to check that the kernel you’re using is the one you’ve just downloaded and installed!

uname -r

Setting Up Surround Sound in Linux

Alex — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 13:21:41 +0000

It’s been a while since I bothered, the reason being it’s always seemed like an un-worthwhile struggle to get it working but either things changed or I was doing something to overcomplicate the process but it’s actually pretty simple to get surround sound up and running on your Linux machine. Now, I’m not going to go in to how to install the drivers for your specific sound card, because there are so many and I don’t have them all and most times on most popular distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, OpenSuse etc) you’re going to notice that the sound card is actually already supported. What I will be doing is showing you how easy it was to get my 5.1′s set up (and the same will be said for 7.1′s).

Step 1:

First off you’re going to want to edit the pulseaudio configuration file to add the number of speakers you’re using, it’s default is set to 2.

sudo gedit /etc/pulse/daemon.conf

Near the bottom of the file, there will be a line which looks like this:

;default-sample-channels = 2

The semi-colon is a comment, so this line isn’t actually doing anything unless you remove that. I would suggest leaving that line alone and adding a new line at the bottom:

default-sample-channels = 6

If you’re using 5.1′s the number of channels will be 6, 7.1′s will be 8 and I think you get where I’m going with this? So in this example, I’m using 5.1′s.

Now save and close that file. You’ll need to reboot your system now too, so that these changes will take effect.

Step 2:

So you’re back? Good..

Now you’re going to want to open up the Sound Preferences, usually you can do this by clicking on the little sound icon in your panel, or System > Preference > Sounds from the menu.

From here, you’ll want to click on the Hardware tab. Near the bottom it’ll say Profile: with a drop down box next to it. Here you can select the type of set up you have, as you can see in the screenshot I have an “Analogue Surround 5.1 Output”, yours might be different and that’s cool and if you don’t know feel free to try a few out. Next to that drop down box is a button which says “Test Speakers”, this didn’t work for me so I have to use an online test but give it a try as it might work!

That’s it, you should be done!

OpenNI – error CS0006: cannot find metadata file `System.Windows.Forms.dll’

Alex — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:41:37 +0000

During installing the OpenNi kinect drivers, found here: https://github.com/OpenNI/OpenNI, I came across this error:

make[1]: Entering directory `/home/alex/kinect/OpenNI/Platform/Linux-x86/Build/Samples/SimpleViewer.net’
gmcs -out:../../../Bin/Release/SimpleViewer.net.exe -target:winexe -unsafe -o+ -r:OpenNI.net.dll -r:System.Windows.Forms.dll -r:System.Drawing.dll -lib:../../../Bin/Release ../../../../../Samples/SimpleViewer.net/*.cs ../../Res/AssemblyInfo-OpenNI.cs
error CS0006: cannot find metadata file `System.Windows.Forms.dll’
Compilation failed: 1 error(s), 0 warnings
make[1]: *** [../../../Bin/Release/SimpleViewer.net.exe] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/alex/kinect/OpenNI/Platform/Linux-x86/Build/Samples/SimpleViewer.net’
make: *** [Samples/SimpleViewer.net] Error 2

To fix it, simply install the following package:

sudo apt-get install mono-complete

Once finished, re-make and make install and everything should be dandy!

Java – .jar Error 127 /bin/sh: javac: not found.

Alex — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:33:42 +0000

If you’re getting a similar error to this while trying to compile java files (.jar) then you’re probably missing the jdk, in ubuntu it’s called “sun-java6-jdk” so just go ahead and install that and all should be good!

make[1]: Entering directory `/home/alex/kinect/OpenNI/Platform/Linux-x86/Build/Wrappers/OpenNI.java’
javac -d Release ../../../../../Wrappers/OpenNI.java/src/org/OpenNI/*.java
/bin/sh: javac: not found
make[1]: *** [../../../Bin/Release/org.OpenNI.jar] Error 127
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/alex/kinect/OpenNI/Platform/Linux-x86/Build/Wrappers/OpenNI.java’
make: *** [Wrappers/OpenNI.java] Error 2

FIX:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

How To Take Screenshots in Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0.x)

Alex — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 13:23:32 +0000

Android 4.0 or Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) finally brings screenshots natively to the mobile platform, to a lot of users of custom ROMs such as CyanogenMod or Darkys ROM it may seem like this has been a feature for a while but that isn’t the case.

To take a screenshot:

Simply hold down the Volume Down button and Power button for about a second.

You’ll see a flash and the screen will be framed which shows the screenshot was taken (I’ve tried grabbing a screenshot of this screen, but it’s pretty tricky and no luck yet!). The screenshot will be saved in a folder /Pictures/Screenshots on your phones internal SD card.

You’ll also get a new notification in the notification bar saying “Saving Screenshot…” and once it’s done there’ll be a “Screenshot captured.” notification in the pull down menu which will take you directly the screenshot in the Gallery.

For more screenshots, check out my first look and impressions post about ICS!
HERE

Linux USB Errors with usb-creator-gtk “stdin: I/O error stdin: error 0 /init: line 1: can’t open /dev/sr0: No medium found”

Alex — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 14:29:01 +0000

After installing Ubuntu on a USB stick with the Ubuntu USB Startup Disk Creator (usb-creator-gtk) you might encounter an error such as the following:

stdin: I/O error
stdin: error 0
/init: line 1: can‘t open /dev/sr0: No medium found

This is actually a bug with the software and isn’t anything you’ve done wrong. It seems to be a bug that’s effecting users running Karmic, Lucid, Maverick and Natty so it’s a pretty wide spread issue.

The best way I have found to get around this issue is to install and run unetbootin to create live USBs. If you’re using linux it should be found in the usual place you can install things.

Installation:

Ubuntu/LinuxMint/Debian:

sudo apt-get install unetbootin

Fedora/OpenSuse:

sudo yum install unetbootin

Create a live USB:

To install a distro it’s pretty simple, either select it from the “Distribution” option and pick a distribution and version, UNetbootin will then actually download it and install it for you. Alternatively you can pick an Diskimage and browse for the ISO file you download (and would usually burn to a CD/DVD) and install from that. Select the USB Drive at the bottom and hit ok and it’ll install a bootloader, the system and you’ll be up and running in no time.

Persistence File:

If you wanted a persistence install which allows you to save files, settings and installed programs you’ll have to do a little manual work as it currently doesn’t support that option.

Go to http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/diskimg/ and download one of the files (128mb.zip, 256mb.zip, or 512mb.zip) corresponding to the amount of persistent space you want (make sure the size of the persistent disk image is smaller than the free space you have on your USB drive).

You’ll then need to edit the syslinux.cfg file that was created by UNetbootin in the root of the directory (just open it with a text editor) you should see something similar to the following:

label unetbootindefault
menu label Default
kernel /ubnkern
append initrd=/ubninit file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper quiet splash –

So on the line that starts “appen initrd=” you’ll want to add the option of “persistent”, it should then look like the following:

NOTE: WordPress changes my double dash at the end of the last line to a single long dash, this won’t work. It’s easiest just to add the final word before the double dash in the file, do not copy and paste this in to your file. If you do, you will get more errors.

label unetbootindefault
menu label Default
kernel /ubnkern
append initrd=/ubninit file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper quiet splash persistent –

I added this line to all that used the “file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed” option, since that’s the image that’s being opened and it should then change all options on the bootloader that will load the ubuntu install.

Python – Making Use of Google’s Text To Speech Translation Tool

Alex — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 00:46:22 +0000

Text to speech (tts) is a difficult task to get right and there are quite a few packages that show just how hard with their terrible tinny voices, these are also usually only limited to English, which for the larger part than most people would like to believe don’t find it very useful. Nevermind, Google to the rescue, their Translation tool has had the ability to also voice translations for a while now. So wouldn’t it be awesome if we could utilize this, stable, constantly developing and ultimately free utlilty? Yes? Well luckly for you it’s possible. It’s been done before with the use of JavaScript, like here but those more used to scripting and desktop programming don’t worry, you can use it too.

Basically it works by sending a request to the Google translate servers which then, pretty much instantly, reply with an MP3 file which contains the requested words in their most sexy of robot voices.

Check this URL for an example of said voice – http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?q=check+out+my+sexy+robot+voice (if it doesn’t load in your browser, open VLC, CTRL+N and paste the URL in)

First, we want to be able to get python to stream an MP3 file off the web:

More info on this can be found here, the following code was is a stripped down version of the code found at codeboje.de.

#!/usr/bin/python

import time		#for delay
import pygst		#for playing mp3 stream
import gst		# " "

#Play an .mp3 file from the internet
music_stream_uri = 'http://www.sample-url.com/file.mp3'
player = gst.element_factory_make("playbin", "player")
player.set_property('uri', music_stream_uri)
player.set_state(gst.STATE_PLAYING)

#requires a delay, if the py process closes before the mp3 has finished it will be cut off.
time.sleep(12)

            view raw
            playMP3stream.py
            This Gist brought to you by GitHub.
          

Now we want to make a string to send :

We’re going to use command line arguments as the string which wants to be read by the Google TTS engine, the following code will grab those arguments and concatenate them into a string. It also has to be in a format like a usual Google URL, these usually replace white space for the ‘+’ sign, that’s easy to do.

#!/usr/bin/python

import sys		#for cmd line argv

#take command line args as the input string
input_string = sys.argv
#remove the program name from the argv list
input_string.pop(0)

#convert to google friendly url (with + replacing spaces)
tts_string = '+'.join(input_string)

print tts_string

            view raw
            argvURLfriendly.py
            This Gist brought to you by GitHub.
          

Now let’s just pass this URL to the bit we wrote to stream an MP3 and watch it go:

Full Source Code:

(Uses command line arguments as it’s input, run like ‘python ttsString.py Hello World‘)

That’s pretty much how easy it is to use Google’s free online TTS engine, one main thing to watch out for is the 100 character limit to the use of this service in this way along with the API call limits which apply to each IP address. There are loads of cool things this can be used for and I’d love to see what anyone comes up with, keep me posted and have fun!

Python – Writing a ‘Fuzzy Clock’

Alex — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 13:57:47 +0000

If you want a clock that’s a little more human, there’s no better way than a ‘Fuzzy’ clock, essentially this converts the time in to a more brain friendly format such as “Twenty past Twelve” rather than 12:22.

Writing a simple fuzzy clock

Source Code:

#!/usr/bin/python

from time import gmtime, strftime

#Get minutes
time_min = strftime("%M", gmtime())
#Get hour, as int
time_hour = int(strftime("%H", gmtime()))

#round minutes to nearest 5, return as int
time_min = int(round(float(time_min)*2,-1)/2)

#Make it 12 hour, rather than 24
if time_hour >= 13:
	time_hour = time_hour - 12

#Get the O'clock for if it's around 0mins past
if time_min == 0:
	print "It's " + str(time_hour) + " o'clock"
elif time_min == 60:
	print "It's " + str(time_hour+1) + " o'clock"
#If it's less than half past, it'll be past
elif time_min <= 30:
	print "It's " + str(time_min) + " past " + str(time_hour)
#otherwise it'll be to, you need to invert the minutes and add on an hour
#	so 35 past 12 becomes: 25 to 1
else:
	print "It's " + str(60-time_min) + " to " + str(time_hour+1)

            view raw
            fuzzyTime_num.py
            This Gist brought to you by GitHub.
          

Output:

$ python fuzzytime.py
It’s 25 to 2

Writing a more readable fuzzy clock:

Now, this returns in a form of “It’s 20 past 1″ rather than “It’s twenty past one”, if you’re going to want this then it’s only a little more tricky. For this I used a lookup table which would essentially replace the numbers for the written numbers.

Source Code:

#!/usr/bin/python

from time import gmtime, strftime
import bisect

minLookup=[
	' ',
	'five', 
	'ten', 
	'quater', 
	'twenty', 
	'twenty-five'
]
hourLookup=[
	'midnight',
	'one',
	'two',
	'three',
	'four',
	'five',
	'six',
	'seven',
	'eight',
	'nine',
	'ten',
	'eleven',
	'noon'
]

#Get minutes
time_min = strftime("%M", gmtime())
#Get hour, as int
time_hour = int(strftime("%H", gmtime()))

#round minutes to nearest 5, return as int
time_min = int(round(float(time_min)*2,-1)/2)

#Make it 12 hour, rather than 24
if time_hour >= 13:
	time_hour = time_hour - 12

#Get the O'clock for if it's around 0mins past
if time_min == 0:
	print "It's " + hourLookup[time_hour] + " o'clock"
elif time_min == 60:
	print "It's " + hourLookup[time_hour+1] + " o'clock"
#If it's less than half past, it'll be past
elif time_min <= 30:
	print "It's " + minLookup[time_min/5] + " past " + hourLookup[time_hour]
#otherwise it'll be to, you need to invert the minutes and add on an hour
#	so 35 past 12 becomes: 25 to 1
else:
	print "It's " + minLookup[(60-time_min)/5] + " to " + hourLookup[time_hour+1]

            view raw
            fuzzyTime_word.py
            This Gist brought to you by GitHub.
          

Output:

$ python fuzzytime.py
It’s two o’clock

How to Install the ‘gnome-shell-extensions-mediaplayer’ Extension

Alex — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 19:38:58 +0000

The mediaplayer widget found on github, created by eonpatapon – (https://github.com/eonpatapon/gnome-shell-extensions-mediaplayer).

I’ve been searching for a while for a good, solid widget style thing that’ll sit in the top of the gnome-shell panel which can control the music that’s playing in banshee, rhythmbox or whatever else you want to use to play your tunes.

Installation:

1. First you’ll need to grab some dependencies:

sudo apt-get install git gnome-common gnome-tweak-tool

2. Next download the files from the git repository as below (this will download the folder to whatever directory you’re currently in, in terminal):

git clone https://github.com/eonpatapon/gnome-shell-extensions-mediaplayer.git

3. Once it’s finished download (it shouldn’t take too long it’s only about 2.30MB as of writing this guide), you’ll want to install using the following commands:

cd gnome-shell-extensions-mediaplayer
./autogen.sh –prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

4. That’s it, it’s installed. Next you’re going to want to enable it, run gnome-tweak-tool and under extensions slide the newly installed extension to ON and it should appear next to the “Universal Access Settings” in the top right.

Alex Sleat » how to

AL lib: pulseaudio.c:331: PulseAudio returned minreq > tlength/2; expect break up – Ubuntu 11.10

Updating The Kernel in Ubuntu

Download the latest from here:

You’ll need 3 files (replace * with the kernel version you’ve downloaded):

For 64 bit systems (replace * with the kernel version you’ve downloaded):

For 32 bit systems (replace * with the kernel version you’ve downloaded):

Once you have the files, install them in the following order using these commands (of course, replacing the version number for the ones you’ve downloaded):

Setting Up Surround Sound in Linux

Step 1:

Step 2:

OpenNI – error CS0006: cannot find metadata file `System.Windows.Forms.dll’

Java – .jar Error 127 /bin/sh: javac: not found.

How To Take Screenshots in Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0.x)

To take a screenshot:

For more screenshots, check out my first look and impressions post about ICS! HERE

Linux USB Errors with usb-creator-gtk “stdin: I/O error stdin: error 0 /init: line 1: can’t open /dev/sr0: No medium found”

Installation:

Create a live USB:

Persistence File:

Python – Making Use of Google’s Text To Speech Translation Tool

First, we want to be able to get python to stream an MP3 file off the web:

Now we want to make a string to send :

Full Source Code:

Python – Writing a ‘Fuzzy Clock’

Writing a simple fuzzy clock

Source Code:

Output:

Writing a more readable fuzzy clock:

Source Code:

Output:

How to Install the ‘gnome-shell-extensions-mediaplayer’ Extension

Installation:

1. First you’ll need to grab some dependencies:

2. Next download the files from the git repository as below (this will download the folder to whatever directory you’re currently in, in terminal):

3. Once it’s finished download (it shouldn’t take too long it’s only about 2.30MB as of writing this guide), you’ll want to install using the following commands:

4. That’s it, it’s installed. Next you’re going to want to enable it, run gnome-tweak-tool and under extensions slide the newly installed extension to ON and it should appear next to the “Universal Access Settings” in the top right.

You’ll need 3 files (replace with the kernel version you’ve downloaded)*:

For 64 bit systems (replace with the kernel version you’ve downloaded)*:

For 32 bit systems (replace with the kernel version you’ve downloaded)*:

For more screenshots, check out my first look and impressions post about ICS!
HERE