Journal - February 2008
29th February 2008
Amarok killed by non-free software bug.
Last night I updated and upgraded everything on my Desktop computer. It runs on gNewSense 1.1.
It brought through some changes that were made back in January when non-free binary blobs were found in the Mesa libraries in the Main repository directory. Yes, I know, that's rather a long time back, but this computer is not actually connected to the Internet at the moment so changes take a while to come through.
OK, if that just looks like I've written gibberish to you then here's a bit of an explanation. Anything that is not Free Software under the Free Software Foundation's definition is marked as a bug in gNewSense and then removed.
The vast, vast majority of the non-free stuff has been excised by the hard work of the gNewSense community. However, bits and bobs do still occasionally turn up, which is where the Mesa libraries come in. Non-free code was spotted and removed. Mesa deals with 3D and OpenGL, how exactly I don't really know, but I thought good job and it won't affect me since I'm not using any 3d software anyway.
Wrong. Rather bizarrely Amarok, the audio player and manager has a dependency for these libraries. Why? I can only guess, but I suspect it's to do with stupid "visualisations" that you can have running whilst listening to music. This is only a guess since I cannot imagine why else an audio player would depend on 3d graphics libraries.
What it meant was that Amarok would not start up and complained about a missing library called libGL.so.1. A crude hack proved that Amarok will start up without this library and another it subsequently reported as missing as well called libGLU.so.1. I won't say what the hack was since I'm at liberty to bork my own computer but reluctant to spell it out on the web for others to copy without realising the dangers.
Anyway, when I have time I may have a go at doing it properly by going to the Amarok source and trying to change and compile it without these dependencies.
23rd February 2008
What is the use of Helix player?
I've just been playing around with Real Networks' Helix Player. It is an audio and video player that runs on GNU/Linux and is Free Software.
When you look at Free Software platforms such as GNU/Linux the various BSDs or Solaris you'll find a variety of Free Software media players and frameworks that media players can be built on. Two popular examples of media "frameworks" are Xine and GStreamer. They both boast a variety of players that use them as a backend and GStreamer has capabilities that are used by audio and video editors.
Helix Player is a standalone programme whose only truly notable feature seems to be that it prompts users to download the proprietary programme Real Player whenever it comes across a Real Audio/Video or MP3 file.
Real Networks did not open up anything of real (sic) value when it freed some of it's code. It kept it's proprietary codecs to itself and the non-free Real Player.
Of course you could take the source code and change the way that Helix points at Real Player and that's at the heart of the free software philosophy. If somebody did that, though, it would no longer be "Helix Player" or distributed and promoted by Real Networks.
I think that nobody much appears to have engaged with Helix Player, quite bluntly, since it seems that Real Networks' motive is not to give something of value to the Free Software movement (which they have not actually done anyway), but to have a way of promoting it's proprietary (non-free) software inside GNU/Linux distributions. Helix Player is simply a Trojan horse for Real Player.
22nd February 2008
Here's wishing a long and happy retirement to Comrade Fidel Ruz Castro.
Actually, he's going to continue writing books and articles..... so, happy semi-retirement, Fidel.
Hasta la victoria siempre!!
