After a few initial teething problems with my submission to freshmeat.net I’ve managed to get my little blogmail script listed.

All that remains now is to wait for complete world domination

For all the goods see:

• freshmeat.net listing
• blogmail “home page”

I’ve been playing with amarok recently. It is a really nice audio player for KDE-3.2

Simple clean interface, nice drag and drop playlist creation, on screen display of song titles and some cool analyzers.

But, best of all, it plays streams from internet radio stations like somafm.com (and for those connected with Internode you can get SomaFM streams unmetered and unprioritised).

Yippee, KDE 3.2 was released the other day (release notes). I’ve been running KDE built from CVS for the last couple of months and this release has many improvements over the 3.1.x release. The biggest being speed, KDE 3.2 feels much faster than the previous release.

Had a play with hotplug in Gentoo today.

I just can’t seem to get it to do what I want.

Specifically, I want synce-setup and synce-start to be launched automagically when I drop my iPAQ in it’s cradle.

I can get a script to fire when the iPAQ is dropped in the cradle, but something else is not working and as a result synce-{setup,start} fail to work. I think it could be a timing issue, might need to introduce a delay before the synce scripts are run.

Yippee!! After a little bit of fiddling around I have finally managed to get 5.1 surround sound working in Linux.

I’ve got a SoundBlaster Live! soundcard and I’m using the emu10k1 ALSA drivers in kernel 2.6.

To get all speakers working I suggest that you use alsamixer from the alsa-utils package to adjust your volumes.

Once you have everything how you like it, use alsactl to save your volumes to a file, a bit of rc-script hacking and you can have your volumes restored on boot and saved on shutdown.

To get 5.1 for your movies requires a player that can support it, MPlayer is one and getting it working is dead simple. Pass -channels 6 on the command line to mplayer and you’ll have lovely 5.1 surround sound.

BTW, all these applications can be installed easily in Gentoo, simply do:

emerge alsa-utils mplayer

and you should be good to go. Gentoo also has a nice rc-script to handle the volume:

rc-update add alsasound boot