I have learnt a lot with Ubuntu, and I think they’re doing a great work for popularising Linux as an environment anyone can use. But I am also a very picky person, and I am getting weary of the bloat that comes with each new version. I don’t consider them incompetent (far from it), but they are trying to please too many people and therefore including lots of stuff I don’t use. Probably I have got past the Linux-newbie level and should move to something a bit more advanced where I could change every thing as I pleased.

So I was investigating what my options were for moving to the ‘intermediate’ level, and I reduced them to only three: Debian, because Ubuntu is based on it and the migration shouldn’t be too hard, and Gentoo and ArchLinux, because these allow people to configure systems to their exact needs… and have PowerPC versions/support.

The PowerPC requirement is because I aim to try things first on my laptop (a Powerbook that Apple’s Leopard is slowly killing with each system update), which I use occasionally, and once I get to grips with it there, I plan to move my desktop to that new, powerful distribution.

But before doing anything on real machines, I tried on VirtualBox, which is very handy for getting a general idea of how a distribution works, way better than reading about its statements and philosophy on its website.

I first tried to install Debian using the graphical installer. It failed. It got stuck in a loop like this:

(Computer) “Do you want to install GRUB?”
(Me) “Yes”
(C) “OK, here’s it, I’ve done it”
(M) “Next”
(C) “Do you want to install GRUB2? Warning, it’s unstable blablabla”
(M) “No, NEXT”
(C) “Right. Do you want to install GRUB?” (and back to the start)

Not promising! I tried again, with the text installer this time. It went better and I managed to get a working Gnome install etc. As happens with Debian, the packages are slightly (or quite) old and so it looked extremely outdated, compared with my main Ubuntu (which I had updated recently). Since it was a virtual machine and I hadn’t data to lose, I tried to move Debian to the “testing” branch but it didn’t quite work; it had an error and didn’t complete the updates. I got bored and closed this machine to try Arch.

Arch is quite different from Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora’s and the rest in that it doesn’t have big release cycles (say, every 6 months). Instead its packages are regularly updated and there are no big updates, but regular small granularised updates. They call it a rolling release system. This idea was appealing me but what really sold me Arch was that once you install it you just get a bare system. With no X, no Gnome, no KDE, no ALSA or no Pulse Audio. Nothing more than its package manager (pacman) and few utilities such as bash so that you can install whatever you need.

So I went to their page, downloaded the basic ISO and created another virtual machine for testing it. I followed their incredible, fantastic and excellent Beginners’ Guide and things went smoothly, and best of all, I understood what I was doing in every step. Everything seemed logical, well explained and well thought.

For example, while in Ubuntu the services are started via mysterious obscure /etc/init.d scripts, in Arch everything is specified in one file (/etc/rc.conf) with a nice syntax. Therefore you can know which services are launched at boot and in which order, with a quick glance at that file.

Once the main system had been installed (including ALSA, without that nasty thing called PulseAudio), I installed X and for a change, a new lightweight window manager called Awesome. I had been wanting to try one of these for a long time but I didn’t dare to do that in my main computer just in case I broke something in Gnome. It’s funny that it’s implemented with Lua, but the fun doesn’t stop there, because the developers use very amusing class names in their API, such as “awful”, “beautiful” and etc. The appearance and behaviour of the system can be modified by editing a lua script (although I haven’t done that yet), and the manager was very, very fast. Loading time was also ridiculous, maybe 1 or 2 seconds. Compare that to Gnome!

I will probably try to use this manager in the laptop, since I use it mostly for writing and I get distracted with most of the stuff which comes with “normal” distributions nowadays. Awesome is quite bare but I may even remove more stuff from it.

Once I stopped playing with Awesome, I installed Gnome, wondering how much useless stuff would the default gnome package bring with it. To my surprise, it wasn’t that much, and I could remove the stuff I didn’t want without any dependency warning. I noticed that it installs Epiphany, and some wallpapers, for example. Apart from that, it was pretty basic, which is exactly what I wanted, and it was the latest released version, which is also what I wanted! :-)

I tried installing several other packages I normally use, and compared them to the version I have in Ubuntu. All were the same or newer version, which was great. I also rebooted the system (which completed in approximately a minute, not bad), and noticed that since I had installed the gdm daemon I got the graphical login, but it also detected that there were two installed Window Managers, and allowed me to choose between Awesome or Gnome when logging in. Everything was very neat and well integrated, with no errors at all during the process. Pacman is very fast; at this point I had no fear of not using apt! So I thought about installing one of the programs that wasn’t available in binary form. It was also super easy, and I didn’t get any error at all. Dependencies were solved automatically (or should I say automagically? because it was almost magic!) and after a while I got the built package I was after. Elegant was the only word I could think of.

So I think I’m not even going to try gentoo (or at least, not yet): I’ll stay with Arch! I never thought I could say that about a Linux distribution, but ArchLinux is incredibly exciting. You really feel like you have the control of your computer!

I’m intrigued to see how well does it work with a real computer –i.e. not a virtualised one–. Specially how does it perform in terms of battery management, wireless, keyboard configuration, suspend options… which are critical for a laptop.

We’ll see. Meanwhile, if you’re tired of having to wait until each new Ubuntu release to get the latest versions of software, and don’t want to install tons of PPA’s, ArchLinux might be your thing.

I was also speculating and investigating about the capabilites of the v8 javascript engine, to use it instead of Lua, but after remembering that it doesn’t work on PPC’s (yet?), I decided against using it.

I also thought a bit more about the way the components are going to interact together, which is something that I hadn’t thought about in depth yet.

Apart from that, I haven’t written a single line of demo code today :P

The organizers have expressed publicly they don’t wish to organize yet another edition of nowadays biggest demoscene event, so it’s now or never! (At least until a new event this good takes off).

I already have had stuff of mine shown in their big screen. But that was before the true Big Screen, with capital letters. The 70 square meters one. I must release something, I said to myself.

Of course, this means that in a way, I’m going to break my own self-imposed rule (I will release things when they are done), but I’m working in a slightly pressurised scenario in order to finish the demo before setting off for the airport.

I have decided to keep a somewhat sporadic short demolog to keep people informed of what I’m doing, trace’s style. Hopefully it will help/force me to do things, daily, so that I don’t slack or procrastinate, and maybe you may help me too when/if I get stuck somewhere ;)

I’ll keep things short –this is probably going to be the longest post in the series– so that writing here doesn’t starve me of time to code.

This is the current status of the project:

• the theme is approximately set, but I won’t disclose it here
• I’m working on converting my on-its-own rudimentary OO-C synth (sorollet) to a bit less rudimentary C++ synth that can be embedded and interfaced, VSTi style, so that I can sequence everything from Renoise and play with parameters and settings in real time…
• … and convert Renoise’s Song.xml (inside the .xrns file) to my own data file — kind of means recreating a simple tracker which follows Renoise conventions (Lines Per Beat for example). I have taken a look at the Song.xml file, extracting and using the relevant data seems easy, specially since Sorollet was already using a tracker style format.
• So far I have managed to compile a VST plug-in in Linux. I had to solve several issues like having to compile for 32 bit while using a 64 bit OS, because Renoise is 32 bit too, gdb not willing to cooperate most of the times, the VST SDK docs being scarce and incomplete and not ready for Linux and etc, but I’m slowly progressing. Now I have a basic synth that can play sines or triangles, and transpose octaves. Awesomeness!
• This means I’m not using an mp3 this time. Could this fit into an intro? Maybe, but I don’t want to sacrifice code readability in order to make it fit into an intro… I’ll be more than content with making a demo!
• I need to find a way of producing a working Windows executable. Sadly, party organisers won’t allow a non-Windows .exe to enter the demo compo. Big BOOOOOOH for them. I have thought of different solutions, the easier is to install mingw in a VirtualBoxed Windows I’ve got, recompile my sources there and run the exe in my main machine, using wine. But I still have to try that, and I hope it works in Windows Vista :-S
• I still haven’t thought about the visual part, I fear I’ll have to script it as in ye olde times –no time for writing a visual timeline manager–, but I will probably use Lua to alleviate the pain.

Complimentary screenshot:

More later.

So here’s the last installment of my demoscene sources: escena.org dentro version 2. It was done for past year’s Inspire democompo and it won (incidentally, there weren’t any other entries in the compo but hey, it’s not my fault! :P).

This demo used a different approach; instead of building a whole scaffolding of C++ classes I just wrote some glue code with C++ in order to be able to draw something with OpenGL, and scripted everything else using Lua. It was also a bit of a benchmark. The result isn’t bad, given my lack of experience with Lua :)

Here’s the HD video (and here’s on vimeo, if you prefer it to youtube), and finally, here are the sources.

PS: The count down goes on to 1, and…

If you’re interested in VJ software, you may probably have heard about Neon v2, the VJ application that shine/xplsv.com developed a few years ago and which has been used not only for lots of VJ gigs but also for creating several real-time demos (including the euskal 2005 winner demo, Sound Pressure)

Unfortunately Shine is very busy right now. But instead of letting the software stagnate, he has made the full sources available under a GPL license, for whoever wants to pick up the development. This pretty much follows the story of Neon v1: when the author (mac/xplsv.com) got too busy, he released the sources for Neon V1 and Shine continued it, creating Neon v2 a while after.

You can check the sources from the SVN repository with your favourite SVN tool, or just be curious and browse them. It has lots of interesting stuff in it. Some examples that come to mind:

• a full real-time 3d engine, with support for pixel and vertex shaders for building really cool effects
• 3dsmax mesh export plug-in – if you want to know how to build a plug in for 3dsmax, here’s an example
• integration with Lua for scripting – allows you to use the engine features programmatically
• video play, using native windows video support and also ffmpeg for other formats
• custom skinnable gui

etc etc etc… there are more things but I’ll let you find out by yourself!

As Shine says in the news, if you make new features for it, contact him and we’ll include them on the repository. If the updating gets active we could then manage new users with write-access for the SVN.

I personally wish someone with better knowledge of OpenGL and GUI’s than me would port the software to Mac/Linux (fingers crossed). It would be awesome to have it working without depending on DirectX as it does now (hint hint hint!)