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Why PulseAudio?

PulseAudio has been on the receiving end of quite a bit of flaming. Some deserved, a lot not. Most critics have been appeased as PulseAudio has matured and distros make setup smoother, but there are still a number of troll^Wusers who trash it at every opportunity.

Common objections to Pulseaudio includes:

“We don’t need another sound system!”

First of all, that’s what we said when ALSA was introduced. It played out exactly the same way. I have IRC logs from 2004 where the conversation goes “My sound is gone. God damn ALSA!”. “Yeah, I’m starting to think ALSA is like the emperors new clothes. It never works, but people say it’s because you’re a noob.” Then two people immediately chime in saying “works fine here”. Replace ALSA with PulseAudio, and you could have seen it in any forum today.

Second, we definitely do need another sound system. ALSA works ok as an output mechanism, but it’s not a sound layer worthy of a modern operating system. Even when it came out, it was way behind Windows (but far ahead of OSS). In terms of features, ALSA is to PulseAudio what SVGALib is to X11.

“I just want to play sound, I don’t need all these crap features”

Maybe. This is why OSS worked for so long. 90% of use cases are covered by allowing a single app to play audio at any one time. However, there is a lot more to a smooth audio experience. The following things are a non-exhaustive list of convenient features that a layer like PulseAudio can provide:

On-the-fly output device switching: In “the old days”, you could plug in a headset and the hardware would disconnect the speakers and play through the headset only. Today, the headset might be Bluetooth or USB, so no such hacks are possible. PulseAudio lets you handle this in software!
Per-application volume control: The ability to turn up the music without also turning up the IM notification sounds. If you use MPlayer with ALSA for example, 9/0 adjusts the system-wide volume, not just MPlayer’s.
Automatic muting of other audio on incoming phone calls, such as through Skype
Audio forwarding: Like X11 forwarding? Me too. With PulseAudio, you can also get application audio over the network. pax11publish lets you set PulseAudio settings like network forwarding per-display!

And here are some features that are less day-to-day useful, but very cool:

Networked audio: You can transmit audio from one (or more) apps to another box. Load Spotify on your laptop and play it via the media center’s speakers!
Combine two stereo cards into one 4 channel device. The cards don’t even have to be on the same computer!
Use the monitor device to record application audio, or connect it to a visualizer (demonstrated in a previous post)!

“PulseAudio uses a lot more CPU time than ALSA”

PulseAudio uses a high quality resampling algorithm by default. ALSA supports only one, a simple linear resampler. If, like most people, you can’t hear a difference anyways, you can configure PulseAudio to use a linear algorithm too by adding “resample-method = src-linear” in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf. CPU usage will drop from 10% to 1%!

“Thanks, I love PulseAudio now”

No problem

RAM-loadable Linux on a stick

I wanted to play some SNES games with a friend on one of a dozen public windows boxes, but I didn’t want to start downloading ROMs and installing zsnes on them. The simple solution was to just make a bootable USB memory stick with Ubuntu and boot from that on whichever box was available at the time.

The boxes turned out to have more horsepower than I assumed, and conveniently came with Linux-friendly Intel GPUs, so I wanted to try out OpenArena. Of course, then you need multiple windows boxes, and I just had one memory stick. Time to make it load and run entirely from memory, so the memory stick can be unplugged and used to boot other boxes.

Thanks to the fantastic initramfs mechanism, the best Linux feature since UUID partition selection (initrd wasn’t nearly as sweet), this is very easy to do, even when the distro doesn’t support it. Here are some hints on how to do it:

Install on a memory stick. These days, you can conveniently do this in a VM and still expect it to boot on a PC: kvm -hda /dev/sdb -cdrom somedistro.iso -boot d -m 2200 -net nic -net user -k en-us. A minimal install is preferable, loading GNOME from a slow memory stick just to cover it with OpenArena is a waste.

Ubuntu installs GRUB with UUID partitions, but Debian does not, so in that case you have to update menu.list: replace root=/dev/hda1 with root=UUID=<uuid from tune2fs -l here>

Debian has a fancy system for adding initramfs hooks (see /etc/initramfs-tools) that will survive kernel upgrades, but for generality (and not lazyness at all, no siree), we’ll do it the hacked up manual way: Make a new directory and unpack the initramfs: gzip -d < /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-2-686 | cpio -i

vim init. Find the place where the root fs has just been mounted, and add some code to mount --move it, mount a tmpfs big enough to hold all the files, copy all the files from the real root and then unmount it:

echo "Press a key to not load to RAM"
if ! read -t 3 -n 1 k
then
    realroot=/tmp/realroot

    mkdir "$realroot"
    mount --move "$rootmnt" "$realroot"
    mount -t tmpfs -o size=90% none "$rootmnt"
    echo
    echo "Copying files, wait..."
    cp -a "$realroot"/* "$rootmnt"
    umount "$realroot"
    echo "Done"
fi

Exercises for the reader: Add a progress meter to make the 1-2 minute load time more bearable.

Pack the initramfs back up: find . | cpio -o -H newc | gzip -9 > /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-2-686

Boot (still in the VM, if you want) and hit a key when prompted so you're running straight from the stick, install all the packages you want, and configure them the way you want them. In my case, I made the stick boot straight into X, running fluxbox and iDesk to make a big shiny Exit icon that would reboot the box (returning it to Windows), just in case any laymen wandered in on it.

Very important: apt-get clean. I had 500MB of cached packages the first time around, which is half a gig of lost memory and an additional minute of load time.

Try booting it from RAM. Make sure you remember if you're running in RAM or not when configuring, or all changes will be lost.

Debian required some kludges in the checkroot.sh init script to make it not die when the root fs wasn't on disk and thus failed to check, but Ubuntu was very smooth about it. Still, no big deal.

In the end, I had a 1000MB installation that could easily turn a dull park of windows web browsing boxes into a LAN party with no headaches for the administrator. Game on.

Pattern matching with Bash (not grep)

Pattern matching, either on file names or variable contents, is something Bash can do faster and more accurately by itself than with grep. This post tersely describes some cases where bash’s own pattern matching can help, by being faster, easier or better.

Simple substring search on variables

# Check if a variable contains 'foo'. Just to warm up.

# Works
if echo "$var" | grep -q foo
if [[ "$(echo $var | grep foo))" == "" ]]

# Easier and faster 
if [[ $var == *foo* ]]

The latter runs several hundred times faster by saving two forks (good to know when looping), and the code is cleaner and clearer.

Mixed pattern/fixed string search on variables

This is a less common but more interesting case.

#Check if /usr/bin overrides our install dir

# Mostly works (Can fail if $installdir contains 
# regex characters like . * [ ] etc)
if echo "$PATH" | grep -q "/usr/bin:.*:$installdir"

# Quoted strings will not be interpreted as globs
if [[ $PATH == */usr/bin:*:"$installdir" ]]

We want parts of our input to be interpreted as regex, and parts to be literal, so neither grep nor fgrep entirely fits. Manually trying to escape regex chars is icky at best. We end up chancing that people won’t use the script anywhere near weirdly named files (like, in their torrent directory). With globs, bash doesn’t have to reparse the variable contents as part of the pattern, and just knows to take quoted strings literally.

Of course, you see how both the above fails to account for cases like /usr/bin:$installdir. This is not something you can easily express in traditional globs, but bash does regex too, and the semantics of quotes remain the same (since 3.2 or so at least):

# Quoted strings will not be interpreted as regex either
if [[ $PATH =~ (^|.*:)/usr/bin(:|:.*:)"$dir"(:.*|$) ]]

Matching file names

I’ll skip the trivial examples for things like `ls | grep .avi$`. Here is a case where traditional globs don’t cut it:

# Copy non-BBC .avi files, and fail on half a dozen different cases
cp $(ls *.avi | grep -v BBC) /stuff

Bash has another form of regular expressions, extglobs (enable with shopt -s extglob). These are mathematically regular, but don’t follow the typical unix regex syntax:

 
# Copy non-BBC .avi files without making a mess 
# when files have spaces or other weird characters
cp !(*BBC*).avi /stuff

man bash contains enough on extglob, so I’d just like to point out one thing. grep -v foo can be replaced by !(foo), which strives to reject “foo” (unlike [^f][^o][^o] and similar attempts which strive to accept). egrep "foo|bar" can be replaced by @(foo|bar) to match one of the patterns. But how about grep foo | grep bar to match both?

That’s our old friend De Morgan: !(@(!(foo)|!(bar))). Don’t you just love that guy?

PS: If you don’t already use parameter expansion to do simple trimming and replacement on variables, now could be a good time to look up that and probably save yourself a lot of sed too.

What’s up with directory hard link counts?

Ever considered the hard link count from ls on directories?

 
vidar@kelvin ~/src $ ls -l
total 108
drwxr-xr-x  4 vidar vidar  4096 2009-11-22 12:52 aml-lsb
drwxr-xr-x 13 vidar vidar  4096 2009-12-13 16:00 delta3d_REL-2.4.0
drwxr-xr-x 23 vidar vidar  4096 2010-02-02 18:22 linux-2.6.32.7
...

For files, this is the number of hard links. You can use find / -samefile filename to find all files that point to the same file inode.

So what does this number mean for directories? Exactly the same thing.

Users, including root, are blocked from creating directory hard links out of the kernel’s mortal fear of cyclical directory trees (or should I say directory graphs?). The kernel still creates them though, specifically in the form of the “.” entry in the directory itself, and “..” in each subdirectory.

An empty directory /foo/bar will have two links, /foo/bar itself, and /foo/bar/.. When creating a subdirectory /foo/bar/baz, you will get the additional hard link /foo/bar/baz/... In other words, the hard link count is the number of subdirectories plus two.

Here’s a party trick for listing directory hard links in bash:

vidar@kelvin ~/src $ ls -ld aml-lsb/{,.,*/..}
drwxr-xr-x 4 vidar vidar 4096 2009-11-22 12:52 aml-lsb/
drwxr-xr-x 4 vidar vidar 4096 2009-11-22 12:52 aml-lsb/.
drwxr-xr-x 4 vidar vidar 4096 2009-11-22 12:52 aml-lsb/bin/..
drwxr-xr-x 4 vidar vidar 4096 2009-11-22 12:52 aml-lsb/lib/..
vidar@kelvin ~/src $

Clearly, each of them refers to the same thing, and the numbers add up (if they don’t, shopt -s dotglob)

As a side note, you can use mount --rbind to fake a directory hard link. This will remount a directory and all submounts on some other directory, but will prevent cycles.

You can also use mount --bind to remount without submounts. This can be useful for when you want to copy the contents of a directory that has another file system mounted over it. This is most commonly /dev, which is over-mounted with udev early in the boot process. Many people don’t realize that they have an entire /dev they’ve never seen!

Simple ad-hoc file sharing

There is a distinct lack of simple, ad-hoc file sharing mechanisms for one-off file transfers between platforms. Maintaining an ftp or http server securely and grant users access to files is cumbersome. An ssh guest account opens more than you’d like, and still requires you to somehow grant access to a certain file to a user and then close it. IRC requires that the file is on the box you run the client on (which is often not your local box), and MSN requires that you add people to your contact list, assuming you don’t use it through bitlbee anyways.

Here is a little script I have lying around, I call it wwwshare:

#!/bin/bash

die() { echo "$*" >&2; exit 1; }

[[ $# != 0 ]] || die "Usage: $0 filename"
[[ -f $1 ]]   || die "No such file: $1"

file="$1"
ip=$(curl -s 'http://checkip.dyndns.com/' | sed 's/.* \([0-9.]*\).*/\1/')
port=$((8000 + RANDOM%1000))

echo "http://$ip:$port/$file"

cat - "$file" << EOF | nc -l -p $port -q 0
HTTP/1.1 200 Ok
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
Content-Length: $(stat -c %s "$file")

EOF

Just run wwwshare filename, and it’ll print an URL and start a wannabe http server on a random port (8000-9000) for a single session. When the file is downloaded, it exits. No setup or cleanup required.

Default package selection

There has been some recent drama over Canonical’s decision to not include Gimp in the default Ubuntu installation. The importance of this decision has been blown way out of proportion, and relates to one of the most overrated issues in modern distro wars: default package selection.

Any distro will let you choose which packages to use, both before and after installation. If your dislike of the default set in any way affects your experience, it’s entirely self-inflicted and easily mended. Allow me to illustrate:

Rejecting Ubuntu because it uses Gnome is like rejecting OS X because it's purple

The default package set is like the serving suggestion on the cracker box. It’s there for inspiration – not to limit you.