banjo

adamw, Thanks for the hint. I will go take a look next time I get a minute to give it another try. Banjo (_)=='=~

When you are flying a real airplane there is lots of feedback on the controls and on your body. When flying a flight simulator, all of that is gone except for the visual. It is actually quite disorienting. A 3D vision system on the flight simulator would help a lot. Banjo (_)=='=~

I installed FlightGear on my Mandy 9.1 and it runs. The problem I had was that the controls, in particular the throttle, would not work. No matter what I did, it alway went back to idle. The throttle wheel on the joystick had very little effect, and the keyboard throttle controls did nothing. The documentation on the program is minimal, and I could not figure out how to make it work, so I gave up. I am former USAF from the early '70's. Flew C-130. I can't fly those !@#$% simulators worth a darn anyway. Banjo (_)=='=~

You mean, why the vertical format? I just got tired of having the wimpy forms on mailers like Yahoo etc. breaking my lines in ugly places....yuk. So, I go ahead and type a nice looking line and the mailer form breaks it at stupid places and makes it look like this paragraph. And then sometimes I go ahead and enter the text with no returns and the stupid mailers will not break the line at all and I have to read the line using the scrollbar at the bottom. So, I just got into the habit it typing teensy weensy little short lines that fit inside of the form. Maybe this form is a bit more friendly. call me crazy. Back on topic.... part of the reason that I am pursuing this is to figure out how all of this hangs together so that I understand why I fall so often into Dependency Hell and how to get out of it once there. I tried to build Audacity 1.2.2 last night and I didn't even get through ./config before it choked. Seems I need a wx_config or something that it could not find. Probably a development kit piece that I don't have. That is what precipitated my descent into source code and the wxWindows and GTK+ recursion. Banjo (_)=='=~

In an effort to understand what is going on with my Audacity, I downloaded the source code for 1.1.1-3 and took a look at it. It appears that the preferences are being written out by the write() method of a wxConfig class. So it is probably crashing in there somewhere... (null pointer?) Here is where it gets interesting. The program is using classes from wxWindows, which is a set of platform independent C++ classes used to build GUI apps........ which is built on top of GTK+, which is a set of platform independent classes used to build GUI apps........ which...... So, the application itself seems to be several portability layers removed from where the actual work is done, and finding where the problem actually occurs could be a bit dicey. Anyway, as a backup app. I downloaded GramoFile, which is based on curses (remember that? .... yee haw) and I compiled it and ran it and it runs. It's ugly, but it runs. I was able to record from my microphone directly into a .wav file. Where there is a will, there is a way. Is nobody else using Audacity? Pity. Seems like a nice app. if I can get it to stop crashing. I seem to be talking to myself on this topic so if anybody wants me to just shut up, let me know and I will take it offline. I'm just sitting here playing with my mental blocks. Linux rocks! Thanks Banjo (_)=='=~

I continue to slog along trying to make Audacity behave. I went back in tonight and blew away the .Audacity config file and then ran the program again. Audacity came up, and reinitialized itself and I could display the preferences dialog, set my preferences, and close it fine. I displayed the dialog box several times and it was working as expected. Then, I shut down the program and started it up again. Now, every time I display the preferences dialog and click on OK the program crashes. If I click on Cancel it keeps running, so something is going wrong trying to write to that file. I am very confused. I forge onward. Banjo (_)=='=~

Well, here I am answering my own question again. D'oh Since Audacity was crashing while setting its preferences, I found the .Audacity file and opened it in vi and made the changes manually. Then, when I ran Audacity again it came up with the settings I wanted. I managaged to record from line-in using stereo and life is good. The program works fine for that. I would still like to get properties working, but for now it is set up the way I need it. Maybe tomorrow I will go in and blow away the .Audacity file to see if it can fix itself and create a new one. But for tonight, my brain is fried. Linux rocks! Banjo (_)=='=~

Well, I almost got there with my recording project. I am trying to record from line-in into Audacity so that I can capture some recordings that I have made. I can record OK if I just run Audacity and then start recording, but the preferences default to monaural. When I set the preferences to stereo, and then click on OK, Audacity crashes with a Segmentation Fault. In fact, any time I display the Preferences dialog and then click on OK, without even touching anything in the dialog, Audacity crashes with a Segmentation Fault. I uninstalled Audacity and then reinstalled it with no effect. Anybody have a clue why this might be happening? Or, if not, is there a recording application out there that actually works? This is really getting frustrating. Thanks in advance Banjo (_)=='=~

The most common banjo tuning is an open G chord. DGbd with the little fifth string tuned to a g. This is the way a slide guitar is often tuned. Mandatory Avatar Content! I just thought that it would be neat if Tux played a banjo too, so I made that my avatar. I wish I were better with The GIMP, but I have very little time to use it. Banjo (_)=='=~

Um.............. because I play the banjo..............? Really. It's a chick magnet. Well......... maybe that's a bit of a stretch. It does get me my own bench when I sit in the park. Banjo (_)=='=~

<--- Tux plays the banjo too! This was done in The GIMP. I didn't start from totally original images, but the arrangement and editing are my work. Banjo (_)=='=~

Wow! Thanks! That is exactly the information I was looking for. I have placed it in my "linuxinfo" directory for future reference. Loading up urpmi with a bunch of web sources was not practical for me in the past because I was on dialup and I could retire before it got done doing what it wants to do. However, just recently I switched over to DSL, so now it might make more sense. So, I built LAME from source. When I built LAME it behaved very well and put itself into /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/lib as you suggest. My problem with Audacity 1.1.1 is that it crashes with a Segmentation Fault when I attempt to point it at the libmp3lame.so. From the CLI, lame works fine. It is most certainly not worth a huge amount of time to upgrade Audacity to fix this problem. I would probably burn my CD's from .wav files anyway and only translate to mp3 if I want to put something out on the web. CLI is fine for that. I am not one to chase the latest and greatest update, which is why I am still running my Mandy 9.1. My old Linux is a rock, and I like stability. I switched over to Linux from Win98 a year and a half ago when I saw WinXP coming like a runaway train full of SPAM. I do not regret the decision, since day in and day out I see my colleages being leveled by automatic Gatesian XP upgrades and general system trashing. Ick! I think that I might take on a source upgrade to Audacity just as a challenge. As long as it does not trash my installed Mandrake it would be interesting to try it. We shall see. Thanks again for the help. Banjo (_)=='=~

Ok, well color me stupid............ :blush: I could have sworn that I tried that and there was no place to edit the subject line. I must have clicked a different button or something. That is what I get for staying up too late doing this stuff. Thanks for pointing out the obvious to me. Sometimes my brain goes out to lunch without me. Banjo (_)=='=~

Thanks for the pointers. I built lame from source because I could not find a package anywhere. Obviously I am not looking in the right places. I have never had anything but bad luck with urpmi unless I was running it through the Control Center and the package is on the original CD's. I suppose that I am misusing that as well. But then, where is the document describing what this is all about? I have found lots of tutorials crammed with details, command line args etc., but nothing with an overview of how it is supposed to work or what it is supposed to do. What are, in fact, the rules of engagement? It seems to be fairly well impossible to upgrade apps in Linux because of the Dependency Hell issue. I have read nightmare stories about people trying to upgrade Mozilla and trashing their systems. I have been trying to upgrade my Audacity to 1.2.2 and finding myself in a labarynth of twisty passages with green snakes. It is very difficult to tell which required package name full of alphabet soup is going to be incompatible with something and render my system useless. So, I live with the old stuff. I hate to think of upgrading Mandy just to get a newer version of Audacity running. I do not know what ld.so.conf or ldconfig do, but I will go search for man pages to see if that will help. Thanks again for the overview information. It helps a lot. Banjo (_)=='=~

I feel better now. Thanks for the kind words. Just as an update, I have been fooling around with Audacity and figuring out how to use it. I have now recorded a few very brief tracks from the microphone and converted them into the following formats: ogg wav mp3 In order to do the mp3, I downloaded lame in a tarball and built it locally. That worked out fairly well. Unfortunately, when I pointed audacity at the local libmp3lame.so audacity simply crashed. Hmmmm. So, I used a CLI to do the deed, to wit: lame test.wav test.mp3 and that seemed to work. Whatever works! Being an old Unix hack for years, I ain't afraid of the CLI......... I just have to steer clear of that hardware stuff.... :woops: I am still using the Aucacity 1.1.1. I downloaded an rpm of 1.2.2 and tried to install it and it dropped me directly into Dependency Hell, so I backed off. Banjo (_)=='=~

Well, I fixed it. I don't know exactly what I did, but I got it to work. This is one of those cases where I don't know how it works, but by creating the project using different parameters, it works. Here is what I did. I created the project again with the New Project wizard. There is a crucial step in there that I passed over the first time I created this project. On one of the pages, a couple of menus are presented that allow you to specify the types of files that are to be created. The two items are: Default DTD: Create new files as: They both default to "WML 1.2" To make it work the way it used to, I changed both of them to "HTML 4.01 Transitional" Then, I went past the "Add files" page, preferring to do that manually later, and finished the creation of the project. Then, I went into Project=>Insert Files... and selected all the files I needed. Then I went into Project=>Insert Directory and inserted the image directory. Now, my project comes up just fine with my Standard toolbar, and the toolbar sticks around when I edit my files. I get the proper dialog box with my Img tag as well. Life is good. Sorry for the false alarm. I would still like to hear from anybody who knows how all this hangs together, but for now, I am back on track. Once again I love my Quanta :woops: and I love my Linux :woops: Linux rocks! Banjo (_)=='=~ P.S. How the heck do I edit the subject line so that I can append [sOLVED] to it?

I am using Quanta 3.1.1 on my Mandy 9.1 For the most part, this is a fine tool, but sometimes it goes nuts. In this instance, I have started a new project, added files to it, and loaded the Standard toolbar to get access to paragraph tags and image tags etc. When I invoke the Img tag editor from the Standard toolbar immediately after opening the project and showing only the default Untitled1.html file, I get a dialog box that will load an image and fetch the size of it etc. Kewl. This works fine. This is the dialog I have been using all along. It works great. However, as soon as I click on one of the other files to edit it, all my loaded toobars disappear. Quanta reverts to the set of default toolbars. So, I reload the Standard global toolbar. But from then on the Img tag editor pops up a different dialog box which does not seem to be able to fetch the image size. If I reload the project and start over, I get the same behavior......... once I edit a file, all the toolbars are gone and I am starting over again. Anybody out there ever use Quanta? Any clue as to what is causing this strange behavior? How do these toolbars really work? Without the toolbars the editor is fairly useless. I have been using Quanta for over a year now to do my web pages and I have not seen this particular pattern before. But this is driving me nuts, and I am about to give up on it and go back to vi. This random behavior is maddening. I have dug deep enough to go through most of their xml files where the dialogs and actions are defined, but I cannot figure out what the heck tells it which dialog to pop up or which toolbar to load or where it gets the toolbars from the project file or personal .rc file or whatever it does........ Thanks in advance Banjo (_)=='=~

Well, this is a hard one to write............... :blush: I finally got Audacity to record from the mic. :blush: Um............. how do I 'fess up to this? :blush: You know that microphone jack thingy............ that plugs into the sound card thingy...??? well it was in the hole ok............ :blush: and it was even in the right hole.... :blush: ... but you do have to push it all the way in until it clicks....... ... if you want it to work......... So, after I did that, and I almost blew out my speakers and my eardrums from the feedback..... it seems to work. It was late last night............ !! I think I love my Linux again :woops: Thanks to all of the very patient people who helped me out on this problem. I learned a lot about how the sound works on my Linux, so it wasn't wasted time. And I found loads of new tools to try out. Linux rocks! Banjo (_)=='=~ (I am sooooo embarrassed!)

That's why you get the big bucks! You are makin' music, and I'm still standing here with the mic in my hand saying "Test. Test. Can anybody hear me?" Banjo (_)=='=~

Kewl I will go grab it and see if I can get it to run on my old Mandy 9.1. Banjo (_)=='=~

I could not find an rpm of Audacity 1.2.2. The most recent I could find was 1.2.0 out on pbone. Did you build from source? Banjo (_)=='=~

You must have a later version of Audacity than I do. I have 1.1.1 from the Mandrake 9.1 CD's. When I tried to install 1.2.0 I ended up with a half dozen dependencies that I did not want to hunt down. It was late. The 1.1.1 version had a setup in preferences only for /dev/dsp and /dev/dsp1. Or maybe I was using it incorrectly. It was late. Maybe I will try again to install the newer version again this weekend. Banjo (_)=='=~

Thanks for the great info. I wish I were sitting at my Linux now so that I could try this stuff. To clarify the situation, my ultimate goal is to transfer music that I record myself using other equipment, probably a minidisc recorder, to the computer for burning onto CD's etcetera. I cannot record the music directly onto the computer because this will involve a grand piano, and moving it from the church to the house, and then moving it upstairs next to the computer would be a challenge that is probably more difficult than getting Audacity to work. Since I do not have the recording equipment yet, I thought that I would set up my tools to do the transfer and just speak into the microphone as a proof of concept. I am learning a lot about how the sound works, and I will report back whatever seems pertinent if anyone is interested. I have found out so far that /dev/dsp is, indeed, the device that is read for mic input and written for speaker output. The actual source and sink for the data are set up by the mixer controls. So I am on the right track there. /dev/dsp1 is a device that is used if a particular sound card has a second sampling device for simultaneous processing of multiple channels. I suspect that Audacity crashed because my sound card does not support /dev/dsp1. The search goes on. Linux rocks. Thanks again to all for the help. Banjo (_)=='=~

I believe that I am running ALSA, but I am not sitting at my Linux box right now so I cannot check it. Thanks for the pointer. If I can just get some visibility into what is going on in the system I should be able to trouble shoot this. I will give alsamixer a try next time I am on the Linux box. Do you know of any tutorials about how Linux handles sound? I think I would be better off if I understood how it is supposed to work. I am willing to do the studying if I can find a place to start. Thanks again Banjo (_)=='=~

OK, here is what I want to do: 1). Start Audacity or some other recording program 2). Record something from the mic This seems to me to be a rather simple task. It is not rocket science. I have done this dozens of times on my Dell running fnWindows. I have heard good things about Audacity so I decided to try that. I have installed Audacity 1.1.1 from the Mandrake 9.1 CD's and it seems to run OK. Audacity 1.2.0 from the net dropped me into Dependency Hell. So, I plugged my microphone into the mic input on my Sound Blaster Live! SB0220 card and tried to record something. Nada. I know this card works. Time for some trouble-shooting. I brought up KMix and unmuted the mic (I think.... does red mean "unmute"?) I cannot make head nor tails of how KMix works. What do all the little icons mean? What do the red buttons at the bottom mean and the green buttons at the top? How do I turn on the speakers? How do I make this tool actually do something? What are all the little pictures of phone jacks? They all look alike. Hunh? Anyway, I cannot make the mic speak through anything and I cannot figure out how KMix works. So, I killed KMix and brought up Aumix. At least there are some words on this one. So I unmute the mic (once again, does red mean "unmute"?) and crank up the volume. Then I crank up the volume for the speakers. There appears to be no way to mute, unmute the speakers. Nothing. Maybe the mic won't go straight to the speakers? So I fire up Audacity and select Preferences=>Audio I/O Recording Device. There are two selections: /dev/dsp /dev/dsp1 Nothing about a mic or a line-in. If I select /dev/dsp1, Audacity just disappears when I click OK. Must be a bug, or perhaps /dev/dsp1 is the wrong kind of device? So, I guess the only choice is /dev/dsp OK fine. So now I *think* that I have the mic unmuted, and I *think* that I have selected my sound card as input, so I try to record something. Flatline. Is there some place that I can go to find out how all of this sound stuff hangs together on Linux? What am I doing wrong? Why is this hard? Sorry for my little rant, but at this point I am so frustrated with this stuff that I am almost ready to go back to the dark side where you plug in the mic and select it and it works. I think that this is why people keep running back to fnWindows. If I can figure this out, I will gladly write up a tutorial on what-all pieces of software you must run and what-all magical clicking of icons and sliding of sliders and all that stuff that it takes to do this simple task... but until then, I am stuck. My ultimate goal is to record from line-in, but I don't have the equipment to hook up yet, so I am using the mic for initial testing. Bad choice? There must be somebody here that has managed to get a Linux app to record from a microphone.... it can't really be this hard, can it? Please? Thanx in advance Banjo (_)=='=~