scratch team mailing list archive

[Derek O'Connell <doc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all and Happy New Year!

Sorry if I seemed to have gone AWOL recently, I have visitors over xmas
and I'm trying hard not to appear antisocial by spending all my time on
the computer :-) I have been reading emails if not replying and will
have more time next weekend to catch up on things including making a
start on a GStreamer plugin for sound playback and recording.

Re PulseAudio problems on 9.10, I last checked the situation two or
three weeks ago and saw no progress. I will check again this week but
I'm still more interested in a GStreamer solution not only for sound but
also for video and especially after discovering that GStreamer's plugins
may be hardware accelerated on certain platforms. My suspicion is that
much more effort is going into creating plugins for GStreamer than
maintaining stand-alone API's such as ALSA and consequently the code in
GSt plugs are of better quality.

@John: any thoughts about adopting the generic GStreamer plug-in from
OLPC Etoys? It would be Linux-specific of course. I have GStreamer
working on Windows too but I don't think it is officially supported and
is not easy to install/ configure.

@Kent...

thanks for the blog entry re Scratch on Kubuntu. I'm curious that even
playback works for you because it did not work for me. Up until recently
I had a pristine Kubuntu 9.10 installation but eventually resorted to
installing Gnome primarily to get suspend and hibernation working on my
notebook. I also have some catching up to do re VM developments but IIRC
there was recent mention of auto-selection of sound plugin (could be in
the start-up script or binary, I don't know). So what I am wondering is
do you also have Gnome installed and if you can also tell me which sound
plugin is actually being used? If the latest VM is now actually doing
auto-plugin selection then maybe there is a terminal message when
starting Scratch to indicate which plugin has been selected?

Re KDE and audio generally, I have to admit to being a bit of a KDE
newbie but IIRC KDE4 uses "Phonon" for audio, correct? It was not clear
to me what out-of-the-box options there are for none-KDE specific
programs to play/record sound. Do you know? Another topic that interests
me is supporting both KDE and Gnome in the same deb package but I failed
to find any clear info about detecting KDE/Gnome on install so that
post-inst scripts could set-up menu's/desktop icons, etc. Maybe it is as
simple as looking for key binaries to detect KDE/Gnome and performing
dual post-inst config if both are installed? Of course I then wonder
what the general solution would be if "A.N.Other" Window Manager is
installed. It would be great if you could help fill in the blanks in my
KDE knowledge :-)

Btw, IIUC, the "permission" error you get when trying to download the
deb from squeakvm.org is because Ian Piumarta deleted it after a request
from (I assume) Ubuntu/Debian package maintainers. I can only guess that
this is to support the package maintainers efforts to supply only
stable/signed releases and to avoid undermining them. If so then using
"alien" to get around the process might be viewed by some people as self
defeating. That said, I know very little about package building or the
process of maintaining one so take my advice with a pinch of salt ;-)

Hopefully ^ makes up for any lack of recent response. All the best for 2010!

-D



On 02/01/2010 05:32, Amos Blanton wrote:
> Hi Kent,
>
> Thanks!
> Sound playback works fine with the Scratch debian package because it's using
> the pulseaudio plugin (and an old version of the squeak-vm). Sound recording
> has the same problem you mention. Derek O'Connell is working on a fix, but
> we haven't heard from him in a while.
>
> -Amos
>
> On Fri, Jan 1, 2010 at 9:34 PM, Kent Tong <freemant2000@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>   
>> Hi John,
>>
>> Sound playback is working fine, but recording quality is poor (quite
>> some delay and some noise). But as people can always record outside
>> Scratch (eg, using gnome-sound-recorder), this is not a show stopper.
>>
>>
>> --
>> Author of books for learning CXF, Axis2, Wicket, JSF (
>> http://www.agileskills2.org)
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------
>> *From:* John Maloney <jmaloney@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>>
>> *To:* Kent Tong <freemant2000@xxxxxxxxx>
>> *Cc:* linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> *Sent:* Fri, January 1, 2010 9:46:19 PM
>>
>> *Subject:* Re: Installation instructions for MIT Scratch on Ubuntu 9.10
>>
>> Hi, Kent.
>>
>> Thank you. This *is* very useful, especially the instructions on what you
>> need to get to compile the UnicodePlugin.
>>
>> How is the sound working? Does recording work? We've been having trouble
>> with the switch from ALSA to Pulse Audio, but I believe the Squeak
>> maintainers were working on that so perhaps the latest Squeak fixes it...
>>
>> We are working on a package for Ubuntu 9.10.
>>
>>     -- John
>>
>> On Jan 1, 2010, at 1:58 AM, Kent Tong wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> As the .deb package isn't working for me (Kubuntu 9.10), I've
>>> got it installed manually:
>>> http://agileskills2.org/blog/2010/01/installing_mit_scratch_on_ubun.html
>>>
>>> Hope this info may be useful to some people out there.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Author of books for learning CXF, Axis2, Wicket, JSF (
>>>       
>> http://www.agileskills2.org)
>>     
>>>
>>>       
>>
>>     
>
>   
>
>
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