SDL_mixer is my least favourite piece of software today and is being very closely followed by SDL_image. A few updates that should have taken me about half an hour today ended up taking over three hours due to bugs in these packages.

I had a bunch of SDL related packages (sdl_gfx, sdl_image, sdl_mixer, sdl_perl) to update. These are usually fun, because they require extensive game playing for testing! My first point of testing is always Chromium B.S.U. Everything looked good there so I upload the updated sdl_gfx and sdl_image packages. Now for the second line of testing: Frozen Bubble. Interesting… SDL_mixer has an soname bump despite being an update from 1.2.9 to 1.2.10. Stranger things have happened (heimdal likes slipping soname bumps into minor version releases). So a rebuild of many other packages is in order. Rebuild frozen-bubble and try again…

FATAL: Couldn't load '/usr/share/frozen-bubble/gfx/loading.png' into a SDL::Surface.

Hmm… looks like an SDL_image issue. I can confirm this using some other games too. It turns out the SDL_image 1.2.9 release is very broken; just not broken enough to break Chromium B.S.U. So much for my extensive testing… It appears fixed in upstream SVN, but I am feeling lazy and just downgrade it while waiting for the new release that appears to be due in the next day.

Now, try Frozen Bubble again. Still no good…

[Graphics..........] [Sound Init] at /usr/games/bin/frozen-bubble line 312


Looks like the SDL_mixer update is causing issues. That may not be surprising given the soname bump. This is confirmed by starting the game with the --no-sound option. While searching for a fix, I discovered that the soname bump was an accident. Apparently, this has been fixed, but either the source was missed or something else was going on. The good news is, I do not have to do a big rebuild now (but the rebuilds I had already done were a waste). The bad new is, SDL_mixer is still broken… The change-log in SVN lists this:

Fixed bug loading multiple music files

Pull that patch and we can all play games again! Luckily, not all updates are that painful.

Edit: updates are now available for both SDL_mixer and SDL_image that fix these issues.

I thought I should take the Moblin v2 Beta release for a spin to see what all the excitement is about. While most distros would run fine on a netbook with little modification (e.g. The EEE repo for Arch essentially just contains a kernel), Moblin started from scratch and provides an interface specifically designed to get the most out of netbooks. Also, it is optimized for Intel’s Atom processor, so should provide a boost to multimedia applications on those less powerful processors that netbooks contain (in particular optimizations for the SSE2 and SSE3 instruction sets).

I was intending to test the Moblin Beta (20090529) in VirtualBox as I do not actually have a netbook, but that is not supported yet. While the live CD will boot, the screen resolution is too small for the upper menu to fit and the functionality is severely impaired. It did boot and run well on my laptop (any computer with recent Intel parts should be fine), but I was limited to testing from the live CD due to lack of spare partition to install it on.

My initial impressions are all positive. The interface makes it easy to do what I would want to do on a netbook (browse the internet and watch videos). Connecting to wireless internet was simple and sound worked out of the box. The web browser and media players did their job. The concept of “zones”, rather than multiple desktops, also works well. I would not be expecting to run too many applications at the same time on a reasonably underpowered machine anyway. I would need more time to assess how useful “the myzone” actually is, but my initial impress is that it could use improvement.

A couple of things did frustrate me:

• The inability to configure the top menu. I do not use Twitter or Last.fm so it would be good to get rid of the “status panel”.
• The “myzone” page can only have its background customized. This seems an area where more configuration options would be useful.
• I spent a lot of time looking for a shut-down button. It appears hitting the power button on the laptop does a shutdown (without a confirmation dialog…).
• The lack of a system tray. An instant messager is a bit useless without one.

I am sure some/all of these will be addressed as the distro heads towards an actual release. Only not being able to configure the top menu and the lack of system tray are critical as far as I am concerned.

Overall, I will definitely consider Moblin quite favorably if/when I get a netbook.

It does not take long to realize that posting from within WordPress is not the most efficient process. For me, two posts was enough… So, the hunt was on to find a desktop application to post with.

Gnome Blog is in the Arch repos, but is a bit basic. The main feature missing for my purposes was the ability to add a category to posts.

A search in the AUR found Drivel. It has several useful features, including the ability to add a category to posts (however, only one per post and not tags), being able to edit recent posts and integrated spell-checking. Even better, its development is now being continued after a several year break.