I was trying to use recordMyDesktopqt today. The video piece works just fine, but audio wasn’t as easy. I plugged in a usb mic. In the recordMyDesktop setting there is just a text box where one must type in the device name. I didn’t know what to put there. I tried a few things that failed, and then I had an idea. I opened up Audacity and went into the settings. It gave me a dropdown list and I found “ALSA: USB Device 0×46d:0×809: USB Audio (hw:1,0). Now, I’d already tried ‘0×46d:0×809′ and that didn’t work. I’d also tried it with USB on the front. Then I tried ‘hw:1,0′ and that did the trick. Looking at the recordMyDesktop documentation would have gotten me there sooner, or maybe not as they imply kmix could fix it, but I don’t think so.
I don’t know what I’m doing or this probably wouldn’t have taken as long as it did — but the one place I’d love to see a concerted effort to make things easier with Linux is sound. A lot of times things just work – but when they don’t it can be really tough to figure out where to go and what to do.
Browsing Posts tagged Linux
I installed the Windows 7 beta today. It is running as a virtual machine in VirtualBox on my Fedora 10 machine. I gave it half the ram recommended – and the underlying hardware is a few years old – so it isn’t screaming along or anything but it is decent – and interesting.
I’ve already seen this said in a few places, but the similarities to KDE are striking. This is especially true with the launcher thing. VirtualBox doesn’t support the aero or glass or whatever it is – so I’m not seeing it with all the bells and whistles. I don’t run KDE that way either. The machine just can’t really do it well. It can do it, but things get too sluggish.
Anyway – I’ve installed a couple apps. Anti-virus and a special application I need for work. This is a test bed to see if I can run Linux as the primary OS on my next work laptop while windows runs as a virtual machine under that.
I’ve been messing with KDE 4.1 on my Fedora box for some time now. This is an older machine – so I don’t normally have special effects turned on. They work o.k. but things do get just a touch laggy and I don’t like that. With them off, things are snappy – which I think is pretty impressive. I’ll just throw a few screen shots below the jump. continue reading…
I’ve been using twhirl as my twitter client on my windows machine. Today I thought – I must see if I can use it on my Fedora 9 box at work. So I went on over to adobe and downloaded the beta Adobe Air installer for Linux. According to the installation notes – this binary will install an rpm or deb package, so to use it, your distro needs to support one of those. I’m using Fedora, so no problems. Once it was installed – I went to the twhirl page and did a normal install of twhirl. The one thing I did need to do is use root privileges to install air and then the twhirl app. I imagine this would be a problem for some. I’m not sure if there isn’t a way around this- I haven’t tried to find one.
So twhirl is working fine and I’m sending out tweets from my linux box. Pretty Cool.
I’ve been meaning to give F9 a spin for some time, as I mentioned a bit back. Just haven’t had time to knock it out. But yesterday I picked up a new-to-me machine and that will become my new linux box. It’s an HP home entertainment type system. It had XP on it, my net install of Fedora 9 is almost half done.
Tropical Storm Fay is supposed to be blowing through some time today so they shut down schools and my office. So I’m working on my laptop over the VPN while the install chugs along. Kind of worked out nicely.
The new tower is an HP Media Center Photosmart PC m7170n. It was a work machine for a co-worker but he just upgraded to an new one. It’s got a 4 gHz processor, 3 gig of ram and 250 gig of storage. The machine it replaces had a 2gHz processor, 2 gig of ram and 25 gig or so of storage – so this is a nice step up on every front.
It has lots of media oriented extras that I will probably never use – this will be at my desk in the office. But it should run Fedora very nicely, give me all the dev tools I need and even let me host stuff I’m working on nicely.
Well – I am working too. Trying to get some Jesus Film databases all set for them, so I guess I’d better get back to that.
This is welcome news on the desktop front. KDE 4.0 was getting ripped pretty well, but I think people were premature to jump in that direction. I’m still running Fedora 7 at work – I’ll move that to 9 this week so I can update to KDE 4.1 and give it a spin.
At work I use a Microsoft keyboard that has a bunch of keys up at the top for special functions. There is one for firing up a web browser, back and forward buttons, mail, search and some media player buttons for play/pause, and volume stuff. I’ve never really used them – but I was looking at them today and thought, “I should use those.” Now when I say that – I mean I should use them for my main work machine which is running the Fedora distribution of Linux. Getting them to work wasn’t hard – and didn’t take too much searching.
The key was finding the right keyboard layout for KDE. Getting to the layout was interesting. I opened up the KDE Control Center and there is a Peripherals section – but the keyboard item there just has a couple options that deal with repeat rate and numlock settings for startup. The stuff I wanted is under the Regional & Accessibility section in Control Center.
The section that was a little trick to get right is the Keyboard Layout. I clicked on that section and then on the layout tab checked the “Enable keyboard layouts” box. Once I did that then the Keyboard model dropdown box became available. I have a Microsoft Comfort Curve Keyboard 2000, according to the sticker on the bottom. There was no corresponding description. I tried a few Microsoft models but things didn’t seem to be lining up just right. Certain buttons would work but others wouldn’t. I got tired of shooting in the dark pretty quickly. So rather than keep on, I did a quick google on keyboard layouts for Linux. That took me to this very nice article on using multimedia keyboards with linux.
Now that article just bypasses the desktop stuff and deals with X. I still wanted to use KDE if I could and what was helpful here was seeing that xbindkeys had a mode where it would show just what a keypress was sending. Installing xbindkeys took about 10 seconds (yum install xbindkeys) and then I fired it up. I switched between control center and that program – switching through the various keyboard models and looking at the output. It just took a minute or two to realize that the keyboard model I wanted was “Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro OEM”.
Once that was done, all my buttons on my keyboard were being sent. All that was left then was matching them up to what I wanted them to do. In some cases KDE already did this for me. The volume keys, the forward/back keys were set up automagically. Launching applications I needed to do, because it is up to me what apps will launch.
In the same part of the control center that handles the keyboard layout there is another section – Keyboard Shortcuts. That makes it easy to choose key strokes to fire off apps among other things. There is also a section, Input Actions, that can be used to set up mouse gestures and keyboard shortcuts. The gestures and shortcuts can be tied to launching apps or DCOP calls. Very nice stuff.
On a side note – and an appreciated bonus – once my model was right – synergy passed all keys correctly to my windows machine that I use at work. There was no setup needed for that. They just shoot right on over.
I’m not sure if I’ll use them much. I just like knowing I can if I want to.
Edit: I just redid this on a new Fedora 10 install – to get to the place to set the keyboard in KDE 4 it is now “System Settings” instead of Control Center. Everything else should be pretty much the same.
