Pages

Tuesday 14 July 2009

Random thought on the Google Chrome OS

I just had a random thought on Google's Chrome OS announcement, in particular the paragraph on the simple architecture which they are planning on using:
"The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel"

Now if that is the case, where the hell is the Linux Chrome browser launch! I mean they are planning on releasing a full blown Linux based OS running the Chrome browser and we have yet to see an easy to install version of the browser for Linux based distros?

If I am wrong and there is a way to get Chrome working on a Linux distro (preferreably a 64bit version, as this is the way of the future right?) then please let me know where I can get my hands on it.

UPDATE:

Might have to take some of that back... I have just found and installed Chromium for Linux via this Fedora repo - http://spot.fedorapeople.org/chromium/
Also thanks to @jdub for the link to the Ubuntu PPA launchpad site for the Ubuntu nightly builds - https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa
So now I am running Chromium on Linux under Fedora at the moment and will be installing it later tonight/tomorrow under Jaunty too :-)

Saturday 4 July 2009

Fast playback in Kino on a Pulseaudio system

I have only just found out that the default Fedora 11 install of Kino (when I say "default", it comes from the RPM Fusion repo) has a big problem with audo and hence the playback speed of DV files.

Everything is fine until you hit the platy button. There is no sound and the video plays back at around 10x. I found that the problem is, if Kino has an issue with the audio output device and cannot connect properly then it will try and auto determine the audio sample rate and up the speed of playback to match.

The solution is simple (although not obvious until you find it), you just run Kino through the "padsp" command. This emulates the old /dev/dsp sound device used in ALSA sound systems for the application which it invokes. So running Kino from the command line like this:

padsp kino &

works a treat. Under preferences you can leave the audio device enabled and listed as /dev/dsp and the problem is solved.

As usual with Linux there are a miriade of ways to automated this for launching in the future. You could add this as an alias to your ~/.bashrc file or create a script which launches the command and place it in your ~/bin/ directory. You can come up with your own ways, but I thought the simple way was to just add an alias to my ~/.bashrc file.

alias kino=`padsp kino`

You will have to log out and back in again for this to take effect before you run it.

I hope this helps anyone else out there who is banging their head trying to solve this problem.