PulseAudio, calibration (end of story), Ogg support on Maemo

PulseAudio

I guess most people already know about it but after two weeks of tests, we (Mandriva engineering team) have decided to switch next Mandriva Linux release (2008 Spring, scheduled in April 2008) to PulseAudio. We are hoping it will help to fill the gap and fixes the issues our users have sometime, some may be caused by the cross desktop nature of our distribution (we don't want to favor one desktop environment over another). Switch has started on cooker, we will still need to fix some issues, but things are progressing nicely, thanks to Colin Guthrie hard work.

Display calibration

Thanks to everybody who commented on my post about choosing a display calibration device. Unfortunately, nobody reported test for Huey Pantone calibrator. So I decided to go ahead and buy one (in a shop where I could return it for any reason, I'm not completely crazy).

First, a funny fact : there was a sticker translating in french product description and you could read "For Windows 2000 and XP, Mac OS X 10.3 or OS more efficient (in English, real text is "or higher operating system". I guess we can say Linux is more efficient ;)

Second, I tried to build lprof from CVS but I could get it to recognize the device (since Lprof maintainers commented on my previous post, it would be nice to do a new development snapshot, guys ;) but I didn't spend too much time on it (I'll investigate later this week). So, I switched to Argyllcms 0.70 beta 7 (no Mandriva package yet, I'll create one soon). It recognized the device (nice) but couldn't talk with it.. After a little debugging, Huey device is a "false" HID device so kernel decided to handle it with usbhid module. Unloading usbhid module fixed this issue and Argyllcms was able to communicate with calibrator and I was able to tune my monitor !!

I'll have to ask Pascal to add Huey to HID ignore list, just like the fix he did two weeks ago to fix Wacom tablets (this fix was originally done by Frederic Lepied, XFree86 wacom initial driver author and who used to be Mandriva CTO sometime ago) years ago in kernel 2.4 and it was forgotten in Linux usb 2.6 stack and nobody noticed until today :(

So, if you are looking for a cheap display calibration device which doesn't require any additional firmware, I suggest Pantone Huey.

Ogg on Maemo

Hub, check Tuomas work, he has reported good progress on Ogg support in built-in media player on IT2008. Still some issues but it is really encouraging.