Notes on conventional desktop tools

[Martin Langhoff]

Some quick notes after an exploration of various tools & packages
outside of our Sugar world. Some may be old news. os353 (of the 10.1.3
series) used...

 - `umount /var/cache/yum` is a prerequisite for any serious yummage

 - Gmixer is a useful extra to our Gnome env.

 - Java (via open-jvm) works. JClick is an excellent example.
Strangely, applets work but not very well -- the Java runtime seems to
not exit, and often a java process stays behind, eating 99% of CPU.

 - OpenOffice works well, gstreamer, mplayer, vlc work a charm. If you
shamelessly use the rpmfusion repos, you can play any content out
there on the intarwebs.

 - Flash pays a hefty price for its refusal to use Xv. Don't install pulseaudio.

 - Skype 2.0.0.72 works reasonably well once you set the right
microphone input. Latest Skype (2.1.0.81) doesn't play well with our
ALSA implementation. We aren't alone in this, various chipsets/drivers
are affected similarly -- your voice is distorted into a growling
mess, see https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCL-638 -- someone with
serious alsa trickery and magic may be able to massage .asoundrc to
work around the issue, I could not. This is recent - previous release
2.1.0.47 has good audio but video is corrupt.

 - Ekiga is *not* happy. Not sure if it's interaction with alsa or
with our video driver -- but it freezes the Gnome UI (apparently when
it's probing devices); calling the echo service echoes back horrible
audio.

Help diagnosing / reporting these upstream is welcome. Fedora folks
are probably more insterested in F14 reports, so exploring whether
these things work better on F14 is a start.

cheers,



m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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