Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Category: Me (Page 1 of 27)

Your input requested for DAW Live

December 15, 2024 / / 7 Comments

It has been a long time since I had a serious look at my audio software set, and the Slackware DAW Live ISO image which is meant to showcase all of that software.

Life interfered and priorities shifted.

Now I am looking at 2025 and the Christmas holiday week which precedes it, and am pondering where to put my energy and time. Considering the lack of clarity about the next stable Slackware release (something which really annoyed me in the few years leading up to Slackware 15.0) and the relative certainty that KDE Plasma 6 is not going to be included in that next release, I am not looking forward to kickstarting my obsolete ktown repository for Plasma 6. It would eat up a lot of my time and I am a happy Plasma 5 user.
So, I decided it would be more productive and rewarding to revive the DAW and audio software project.

I will not focus on a refresher of my Slackware 15 based DAW Live Edition. I want to switch to Slackware -current, realizing full well that this may cause new frustrations along the way when stuff breaks as a result of a Slackware update, but I really want to experiment with Pipewire – for sure as a replacement for Pulseaudio but perhaps also as a replacement for the Jack Audio Toolkit. Who knows.

However, I have not been playing/experimenting with Slackware’s sound system since 2022, the whole Pipewire adventure has passed me by. If I want to rebuild & refresh that large set of software, I need to start with the basics and that is to get a low-latency ‘pro’ sound subsystem off the ground that I can understand and adapt to the needs of a Live Edition.

HELP!

Therefore a request to you, blog regulars, to help me understand how to get rid of Pulseaudo in Slackware and replace it with Pipewire. How does Jack still fit in this configuration? Should it remain the main sound server? Should Pipewire replace it, providing the binary API to Jack-enabled applications? Should the choice to have Pipewire or Jack as the main sound server be something you would want to make after login?

Anything you have already mastered and all the bugs and nasties that you have already eradicated, will save me some precious time and give me more motivation to restart the project during my Christmas break.  Use the comments section below to describe your challenges, your solutions and your resulting setup; or link to pages / pastebins that contain Slackware-specific information.

And somewhat related, since I am not a musician or audio technician: I want to understand better how to connect the audio software to audio hardware: how do you link up a DAW like Ardour to an external USB sound card, a MIDI controller keyboard, hardware synths, microphones etc.
Some synths present themselves as another external USB sound card as well – how do you deal with that when you already route your audio through your FocusRite Scarlett? It boggles the mind when you have to try and make sense of it when you do not have music-making friends in physical proximity.

Eventually I want to have a working studio in my attic and be able to create music, not just create a music production enviroment like Slackware DAW Live.

I would love to read all your feedback and hopefully it will be enough already next weekend to help me startup when my off-week starts 🙂

Cheers, Eric

Mastodon FollowPacks and more

November 24, 2024 / / 26 Comments

I recently quit using Twitter altogether. Its owner has been abusing the platform for political gain and profit. It made no sense to keep supporting that. I am more active on Mastodon anyway, the friendly federated social platform that all of you should prefer over Twitter, BlueSky or Threads 😉
I wrote an article about switching to Mastodon a while ago, check out Migrating from Twitter to Mastodon. But after the recent mass-exodus from Twitter after the US elections, I thought it would be a good idea to write an update for those people who recently found their new home on a Mastodon instance.
When you are new to Mastodon, it can be a bit of a daunting task to get the information to flow. Unlike the other aforementioned platforms where the ‘algorithms’ ensure that your feed is constantly populated, you actually need to subscribe to one or more topics and/or start following actual people, to kickstart your federated timeline and see stuff worth reading.

Coming up with topics is not hard – just type something that comes into your mind in the search field of your client, and you will be able to look for hashtags, posts or people matching or containing that text string. Start following a hashtag is enough to start the flow of posts to read.
But finding people may be harder. Not everyone posts on Mastodon using their own name or with a recognizable nickname. How to find interesting people to follow? Here are some options.

Also called a ‘Starter Pack‘, the FollowPacks are a concept that was actually born on the BlueSky platform. Now they are also created for Mastodon and boosted by the MastodonMigration account. FollowPacks are a convenient way for new users of Mastodon to quickly populate their list of people to follow in the Fediverse.
In essence, a FollowPack is a CSV file containing the listname and Mastodon addresses of up to 35 people who have a relevance to a certain topic area. An example line in such a CSV file for an “OpenSource” list could be a reference to myself:

OpenSource,@alien@fosstodon.org

The MastodonMigration blog has a instructional article about FollowPacks and how to use/import them into your Mastodon account: the Mastodon Follow Pack FAQ, as well as a page with a directory of these packs that they themselves maintain – on topics of ‘Astronomy and Space‘, ‘Climate‘, ‘US Politics‘ and ‘Miscellany‘ and hopefully more to come: the Mastodon Follow Pack Directory.

Instructions for obtaining and importing the packs are simple: download the pack’s .csv file and import into Mastodon to follow all accounts contained in there. As the list content grows, you will be able to merge new names into existing lists. In more detail:

  • Click on a FollowPack’s .csv file link to download it
  • Click on the ‘Preferences‘ (gear) icon at the bottom right of your Mastodon homepage
  • On a mobile or narrow desktop click the  “hamburger” button located at the top right of the page
  • Click ‘Import and Export‘ > ‘Import‘
  • As the ‘Import type‘ in the dropdown: Select ‘Lists’ (NOT ‘Following list’)
  • Verify that ‘Merge’ is selected (IMPORTANT)
  • Click the ‘Browse…’ button and select your previously downloaded “[file name] – list.csv”
  • Press ‘Upload‘ > ‘Confirm‘

You can create such a FollowPack yourselves too of course, and share it with your friends.

What else is there? If you are in need of expansion of your personal ‘following‘ list, you could look at the accounts that someone else is following. For instance, here is the list of people I am following: https://fosstodon.org/@alien/following . In general, add “/following” to the Mastodon homepage of any person.

To broaden your search, look for people who are actively posting. The Mastodon server instance where I have my home, Fosstodon, is a place whose users have an affinity with Open Source. That may lead to the discovery of some interesting people. If you want to know who posted most recently on Fosstodon, check out the server’s directory like this: https://fosstodon.org/directory?order=active&local=true .
Mind you, Fosstodon is just one of many servers in the Fediverse, so everything that gets posted there will find its way to your own Mastodon home if you or other people on your server instance are following the topics mentioned in their posts. You will find more people to follow, if you visit other instances’ directories. Lists of Mastodon servers can be found here or here, or find them via a convenient search form here.

Yet another way to quickly find people that fall in certain categories is to use fediverse.info. For instance, this search string leads to a directory of accounts that are tagged with “OpenSource”: https://fediverse.info/explore/people?t=OpenSource .

Found anything else to boost your ‘following‘ list? Let us know in the comments section below!

Have fun! Eric

 

Down with COVID

February 2, 2024 / / 61 Comments

I somehow avoided getting infected with COVID for all these past four years, but this week unexpectedly it hit me after all – and that while being inoculated multiple times. Oh well, they say that the inoculations keep the more severe symptoms at bay.
Still, this feels like a very bad flu, I have been in bed for two days, feeling delirious in the beginning but just nauseous and dizzy now, accompanied by the father of all headaches.
I have no energy left in me,  meaning package updates may be delayed. Pay supplied me with the sources for the to-be updated glibc package in Slackware, so that the computer can do all the compiling when I return to bed. That will be about all.

Stay healthy! Eric

I switched the blog’s theme

December 28, 2023 / / 16 Comments

A blog  is something personal, and theming it just right is a challenge. You’ll surely have noticed that the theme of Alien Pastures has been changed overnight.

This blog started out with a theme by Andreas Viklund (wp-andreas01) but that did not scale well on mobile devices, also it did weird stuff with user comments. I liked its visual quality a lot but the usability challenges were not fixable even by rummaging around in its code.
Eventually I replaced that with a new theme by Rajeeb Banstola (techism) but during my recent WordPress blog-code update I realized that this techism theme had not been updated for years, the author’s website has disappeared and the Freemius SDK from which that theme is created has a XSS vulnerability. Real shame because I thought it was beautiful, light, responsive and it fixed the user comment issues I mentioned previously.

So I have used my December holiday to look for another theme, experimenting with several, but I wanted to end with one that at a minimum allows me to have two columns: one for the articles and one as a sidebar with widgets showing all kinds of permanent info. Three columns was what I had with wp-andreas01 and techism, but I could live without one of the two sidebars.

I finally found a theme collection created by Anders Norén. On his page teman he showcases several that I find appealing, but after some experimenting I chose his Lovecraft and Hemingway themes over Baskerville. I kept the visual style of the new theme as close as possible to the old one (header image, top menu, sidebar widgets etc).
A note about the header image – that one has changed a few times over the years. I always use a picture I have taken myself and I rotate them on occasion.

At the bottom I was able to add three widgets that otherwise would have gone into a left sidebar. I think it’s cleaner now. Plus, one of these bottom widgets shows posts that have been most popular during recent weeks. That’s always interesting information to you (visitors), previously I would be the only one with that overview – it shows in the blog’s admin dashboard.

I am still undecided whether Hemingway or Lovecraft will make it as my final choice. Hemingway theme shows the number of comments to each article and it’s visually somewhat more condensed. Lovecraft on the other hand is aesthetically more pleasing to my eye.

I hope you like and appreciate the change and the new interface does not pose any difficulty writing and posting your comments. Feel free to comment below of course!

Cheers, Eric

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