XBMC and Natty
I also upgraded Ubuntu on our media PC. After the upgrade XBMC started to act strangely. When I tried to move up or down in the menu, it jumped two for each keypress. During the playback, sometimes the video froze for a fraction of the second, while the sound was continuing normally, then the video fast forwarded and caught up with the audio. The third issue was that the OSD wasn’t visible. It appeared for a quick moment, but then it disappeared. It was still there, but it wasn’t visible.
Read MoreFixing wireless after Ubuntu upgrade
Yesterday we upgraded the Eee PC 1000H from Ubuntu 10.10 to 11.04. Today it was unable to connect to the wireless network. After searching a little bit on the internet, I found the reason. There is a Ralink wireless card in the netbook:
01:00.0 Network controller: Ralink corp. RT2860
OpenStreetMap
Not long ago I was talking to a friend, and I mentioned OpenStreetMap. I was surprised to learn that he had never heard of it before.
OpenStreetMap is a freely available online map, similar to Bing maps or Google maps. The big difference is that OpenStreetMap is editable. Just like Wikipedia, it is edited by the online community. Everybody can upload GPS tracks, define roads, mark buildings, and so on. Even if you don’t have a GPS, you can help, for example by entering street names.
Read MoreThe story of the kangaroo
Read More
HTML5 video
There is a nice article about HTML5 video: http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html
Read MoreXMBC, Lucid and PulseAudio
After I have upgraded our media PC to Ubuntu 10.4 (Lucid Lynx) audio stopped working in XBMC. Upgrading to the latest XBMC ubuntu packages from PPA didn’t help. After some experimenting, I have figured out that pulseaudio had to be started. I have the XBMC session file (/usr/share/xsessions/XBMC.desktop), and it turned out that it simply starts xbmc-standalone, which in turn starts pulse-session. But only if it exists. On Lucid it does not.
Fortunately we can use pulseaudio –start instead. So I just modified the startup script and now it works fine.
For the records /usr/bin/xbmc-standalone before:
#!/bin/sh
if which pulse-session; then
pulse-session xbmc --standalone "$@"
else
xbmc --standalone "$@"
fi
And after:
if which pulseaudio; then
pulseaudio --start
fi
xbmc --standalone "$@"
IVAO
