Wayne D's Blog

When I saw that Adobe had not released a Linux version of Adobe AIR I thought some nasty things about Adobe. Adobe's FAQ from mid December said they were planning for Linux support but I got a bit cynical when March came and nothing had appeared, especially when I was trying to find a twitter client and many of them were designed for AIR. Well on March 30th, Adobe released their Alpha Linux AIR runtime. They are targeting and promising simultaneous Windows, Mac OS and Linux release for AIR 1.1. I loaded up AIR and tried Twirl, an AIR Twitter client. All was well until I changed workspaces and Twirl disappeared. It was still running as it would pop up notifications of new tweets but the main application window had disappeared. (updated June 16th) As of Twirl version 0.8.2 this problem has been resolved and Twirl works fine. Looks like it wasn't an Adobe issue after all. I don't know whether to blame AIR or Twirl but I'm sure it will get worked out before AIR gets released for real. Adobe is embracing Linux and has joined the Linux foundation because I think in part machines like the eeepc have demonstrated that big computing isn't necessarily the way to go. Ubiquitous wireless is enabling internet based applications. My eeepc has 512M of memory and can handle pretty much anything I want to do it. Microsoft's recent announcement that they are extending the life of Windows XP may in part be a result of their realization that they need a light version of Windows that can be run on less powerful portable hardware.

Here is a challenge for Adobe, give me Photoshop on Linux because I can't convince the people I work with to use Gimp. When you do release Photoshop for Windows offer me a free license transfer to Linux because I can't justify buying the same software twice.

I also recently tried out Twingly, a European based blog search tool. Though I have had issues with Google in the past, they seem to like me now. My article on adobe flash eeepc support was indexed by Google thirty-nine minutes after I posted it. Twingly is still in private beta, so my expectations weren't that high. First thing I tried was searching for the title of my latest blog post, nope, but that wasn't that surprising. The I tried searching for Dvorak,the man who plugs his blog relentlessly, nope on his blog too. Searching for Robert Scoble brings up TechCrunch but not Scoble's own blog. I realize that these guys are all American but the web is about finding information wherever it is. When I signed up I pinged my blog to see if they would index it, no new spider has appeared in my logs, I guess my blog isn't significant enough to be indexed. Google has a worldwide presence because even with all the link farms they have worked hard to stay relevant. Knocking them off their perch is not going to be easy.

(updated Dec. 27th) Finally thanks to My EeePC Blog there is a simple way to put Flash 10 on your old EEEPC. Some caveats, this method replaces some core libraries and may break other software you have installed. Packages it is known to break are build essentials, vlc, xchm, amule and some others. I used this method and it worked fine for me. The steps are fully explained at http://eeepc-albkwan.blogspot.com/2009/03/install-firefox-3-with-flashplayer-10.html so I won't repeat them here. If you decide that you don't want to take this radical a step you can still use the instructions shown below to get your camera working with the EEEPC default Flash installed. You should be aware that many websites only work with Flash 10 so upgrading as described above is probably your best option.

Though Flash 10 works most of the time you may have trouble getting it to recognize your camera. Getting things going on ustream.tv can be quite a chore. The good news is that the flashcam still works with Linux Flash 10 if you have trouble. You can also check out Flash camera support on the EEEPC 701 for my survey of flash based video websites and how to get them to work on the EEEPC 701.

The release of Flash 10 for Linux has rendered this method less necessary see EEEPC flash camera support without flashcam for details. Flash 10 has support for V4L2 which is what the EEEPC camera uses. Installing Flash 10 on your EEEPC brings with it a whole host of new issues.

I thought there must be a way to get the camera on the Asus EEEPC to work with Flash 9 which is the default the EEEPC shipped with. The sticking point was that the camera driver on the eeepc was v4l2 and linux flash plugin only supports v4l. Someone who was more energetic than I finally decided to do something about it. It's a bit of a convoluted installation but it seems to work You need this file flash-cam-eeepc-1.tgz The download file has been changed to add sudo chmod 666 /dev/video to the beginning of the vlback.sh file after some people reported problems with device permissions. This download file combines the original two downloads from http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?pid=203137, the original topic thread. This saves the irritating wait to download from the file sharing site where the files were hosted. I have also included the modified script that worked for me.

To use:

• download the file to your user directory
• extract the files by right clicking the file and choosing extract in the file manager, you should see a new vloopback folder created
• open a terminal window using CTRL-ALT-T and cd to the vloopback directory
• enter ./vlback.sh and press enter

You should see
ln: creating hard link `/dev/video' to `/dev/video0':
Input device: /dev/video

Size = 320 x 240
and the green camera light should come on. Don't close the terminal window unti you are done using the camera in flash. In your flash application be sure that you choose the vloopback device and not the uvc camera.

If I get some time over the weekend I will create a .deb package.

I neglected to give credit to The Flashcam project the guys who made all this possible.

After Firefox crashed on me last night I did some quick web research and found out that Firefox 2 runs on Centos without any fancy gyrations required. By then it was too late to late to rewrite my post on the demise of jPod.

I started watching jPod on the CBC website because I'm finding it more difficult to keep track of when shows are on since I stopped getting a weekly TV magazine. When watching online you sometimes don't notice when a show goes away. It turns out that jPod was cancelled at the beginning of March though I didn't hear about it until much later. It was a quirky show and I guess that it didn't appeal to enough of the CBC's audience. It's death knell was probably sounded when CBC moved it to Friday night which is usually a television black hole which also turned out to be the case here. jPod, you will be missed. You can still catch it on the CBC jPod website but don't delay, CBC tends to pull these things down pretty fast.

Thanks to a post by Don M. on the System rescue CD messages board I managed to get X windows to start on a Dell laptop with an ATI mobile chipset. I wanted to use the system rescue CD v0.4.2 to shrink the Windows partition so we could install Linux on the machine. The trick is to enter rescuecd doxdetect forcevesa at the boot prompt. That's not the end of the story though, neither Centos 5 or Fedora Core 8 would install. They could see but not use the nice 10GB free space we created at the end of the drive and gave a message about not being able to find enough free space to create the necessary partitions. Ubuntu 7.10 didn't have any problems though and now resides happily on the laptop. The wireless even worked right out of the box too.

After updating Firefox to 1.5.0.12 I have been experiencing occasional unexplained crashes. Firefox crashes when it tries to open a new window and it's starting to get on my nerves. For the record I am running Centos 5. I just lost my first blog post since I switched away from Yahoo 360 when I tried to add a link to a post that I will now have to rewrite. Maybe tomorrow. I should have used Seamonkey.