Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Echolink on Linux

Over the last 5-6 years I've been in the habit of listening to the audio stream live Tuesday nights of the Houston AMSAT net. I actually have it setup on my Logitec Squeezebox to play automatically (which is a really nice feature BTW.) Tonight I finally noticed that for the past couple of weeks the net has been switched to just using Echolink. This was somewhat of an issue for me since I have just recently switched to Linux on my home computer. I was forced to look at what Linux options there were for Echolink. It seems like someone has done some back-end work, but there was nothing cohesive, definitely not polished or packaged. I decided to attempt to use WINE (Windows Emulation). I've attempted to use WINE in the past, but had mixed results. Seeing that this involved windows audio settings, I was thinking it would be the type of program that would fail miserably. I could not have been more wrong. I installed the Windows .exe using WINE without any bumps at all. The only minor tweak I needed to make was to change the default audio input device. I had to specify the USB mixer, since I was using a Plantronics USB headset.

It just worked!

As someone who has used Linux since Kernel version 0.98pl12 ish, I'm constantly amazed at how far it's come. This is going to make my project to exorcise my house from Microsoft operating systems a little easier.

Sunday, June 21, 2009

One for the archive

Ran into a little quirky problem today. I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on the home machine, finally giving Microsoft the boot. I also installed Gnome-do, and the docky app launcher. When Docky is up and running, I can't move any desktop icons to the lower third of my screen. It seems like Docky doesn't like sharing. This is Gnome-do 0.8.1.3. I'm using a dual-head system, I *can* move icons to the lower third on the second screen, just not on the screen where docky is running.