Fixing Festival in Lucid Lynx…

I have come across a common issue with my Lucid computers.  After installing festival, the command echo "Hello world" | festival --tts gives me an error, “can’t open /dev/dsp”.  I found the fix, although I do not remember where.

Anyway, edit the following file:

sudo vi /usr/share/festival/festival.scm

and append the following lines at the end:

(Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "aplay -q -c 1 -t raw -f s16 -r $SR $FILE")

This seems to take care of that issue, and the command now works.

Got a Netbook…

I am going to a conference soon, and my wife cannot part with her laptop now, so I bought a $300 Asus Eee-PC netbook (1005HAB), with a 9-cell battery that gives me close to 9 hrs of battery time.  I bought it online through Best Buy (I know, I know), and picked it up at the store a few days later.  I had Windows7 Starter Edition on it.  I prepped a USB drive using a the KDE Startup Disk Creator program and the Kubuntu 10.04 Netbook Edition ISO.  I had to find the BIOS first (F2), and tell the netbook to boot from USB, but after that, Kubuntu Netbook installed without a hitch.  I chose to wipe everything, since the netbook came with the OS media (if I ever want to install Windows, yuck – but hey, I paid for it).  I set it up with separate partitions (including /boot) and formatted everything with EXT4 (for later conversion to btrfs when the 2.6.36 kernel comes out).

Everything worked right out of the box.  Including wireless and suspend-resume.  Sweet.  It is a little slow, but who cares?  This thing is so neat.  I am a little addicted to being able to go anywhere around the house now and surf, blog, email, and administer the other machines from this thing.  When I am done, I can close the lid, and later open it back up, wait a bit, and then be prompted to unlock the screen and get back online, no sweat.

In addition to updating the kernel to 2.6.35-17 and updating KDE to version 4.4.5, I also installed the MediBuntu repositories, set up the USB smartcard with Acrobat Reader, Firefox, and Thunderbird, and got the camera working with the new gmail video chat software.  One more thing – to get the function keys to work, I had to edit my /etc/default/grub file and change the line

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

to

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_osi=Linux"

I also installed “eee-control-tray” from the repositories for better control over the camera, touchpad, etc.  The only thing I do not like is the touchpad, in fact.  When scrolling on a web page, it likes to keep scrolling whenever I move it into the page to click on a a link.  I use a USB wireless mouse now.  We are taking this thing everywhere we go now.

Now Using Kubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx…

Well, I finally upgraded my work machine from Jaunty to Lucid about a month ago, and really liked what I saw.  I was using 64-bit, and got sick and tired of all the little issues with flash, Java, and Acrobat Reader., so I switched to 32-bit instead.  KDE4 seems much more stable and polished now, and I can sign PDFs with my smartcard now in Acrobat Reader.  Since it worked so well at work, I went ahead and upgraded at home after a couple weeks.  This involved swapping my media computer with my main computer (the old RAID SATA setup I have is getting a little squirrelly), and rebuilding both.  The RAID computer was built using the Alternate Install ISO, which worked well.  In both cases, I lost no data unless I chose to, so the 300 GB of movies I had copied from our DVDs was wiped from the old media server.  I figure I can always recopy them in a smaller format later.  Yesterday, I updated my wife’s laptop, completely rebuilding it (wiped everything after backing up the user data).  I restored her data later and nothing was lost.

Some common things I am doing to customize my Lucid installs of Kubuntu are:

1. sudo wget --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list && sudo apt-get --quiet update && sudo apt-get --yes --quiet --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get --quiet update (from https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu)
2. sudo apt-get --yes install app-install-data-medibuntu apport-hooks-medibuntu
3. sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2 w32codecs
4. Update to a later kernel (currently 2.6.35-17) – sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kernel-ppa/ppa && sudo apt-get update
5. sudo apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.35-17 linux-headers-2.6.35-17-generic linux-image-2.6.35-17-generic linux-maverick-source-2.6.35
6. Update to a later version of KDE4 (currently KDE 4.4.5) – sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/ppa && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

So far, things work very well.  The computer with squid, squidGuard, and dansguardian is not going to be upgraded, however.  Another thing – no more XFS.  I now use EXT4 with everything, and have a separate /boot partition.  This is so I can more easily convert to btrfs when 2.6.26 comes out.  I read that btrfs suffered a large performance regression in the 2.6.35 kernel, so I will hold out for the 2.6.36 kernel instead.