I use Skype on my Win desktop and MacBook as a matter of course now, I rather like to use the video feed via the MacBook when co-working with my team on our screencasts.

Since the desktop box usually runs Ubuntu 9.04, I wanted to try my new QuickCam Pro 9000.  The short story is – it works.  I had to faff for 15 minutes figuring out the right config for Skype, the winning combo with my old Audigy 2 ZS sound-card was:

• Sound In: QuickCam Pro 9000 (hw:Q9000,0)
• Sound Out: Audigy 2 ZS [SB0350] (hw:Audigy2,0)
• Ringing: Audigy 2 ZS [SB0350] (hw:Audigy2,0)

To test that the Quickcam was running first I used ‘lsusb’ to list the recognised USB devices:

ian@NewMESH:~$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 011: ID 046d:0990 Logitech, Inc. QuickCam Pro 9000

and then I ran cheese and had to choose 640×480 to 960×720 to test the video.

My version of the QuickCam 9000 has USB BCD 0×0008 which makes it one of the buggy versions (buggy only for Linux <sigh>), instructions of figuring out if you have one of the fingered models is here.  Thankfully I’ve not seen any bugs yet in an hour’s use of audio and video Skype calls.  The quick command to get the required ‘bcd’ info is:

ian@NewMESH:~$ lsusb -d 046d:0990 -v | grep bcd
  bcdUSB               2.00
  bcdDevice            0.08

I found some notes for Ubuntu Skype along with the Linux Changelog.

Update – on a subsequent boot Skype had forgotten my audio settings and couldn’t find the webcam.  I reset the audio settings (as per above notes), then ran cheese and verified that my webcam was on /dev/video0 (I had to change the resolution before cheese picked up an image though), then I reconfigured Skype and all was well.

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence for companies (Mor Consulting), programs Python, produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

In my recent upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 to the latest 9.04 I lost the scroll wheel on my Marble Mouse.  The solutions is in this Logitech Marblemouse USB help page at Ubuntu via this forum entry.

I’m also annoyed by PulseAudio (again).  Once again it takes over from ALSA but doesn’t output any sound, currently I have to kill pulseaudio in the task manager and then set the volume to 100% (it gets set to 0% by pulseaudio).  So, now I’ll uninstall pulseaudio like I did before.

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence for companies (Mor Consulting), programs Python, produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

We’ve just installed Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 onto Emily’s Dell 9400 laptop.  As ever there are some wrinkles, I’ll note them here.

First – installation was fine and easy.  I used a 10Gb root partition and the rest (about 100Gb) as /home.  Sound worked straight away.

Video is, as ever, a bit more interesting.  This machine has an ATI Mobility x1400 card.  Ubuntu uses the open-source ‘ati’ driver by default.  This works but video tears which is distracting.  TV Out works (we run at 1024×768 to the LCD TV).

I’d assumed we could use the closed-source ‘fglrx’ driver (I’ve used it in the past) but ATI doesn’t support the r500 chipset (as used in the x1400) from the current release of the X display system, as used in the latest Ubuntu. So – we can’t use ‘fglrx’ and we can only use the ‘ati’ driver.

The only improvement I’ve found so far is to use the EXA (notes) switch in xorg.conf, EXA is an improvement to the XAA graphics subsystem.  By using it we can use the ‘og’ (open-gl) graphics system in mplayer along with ‘xv’.  Previously if I tried ‘og’ it wouldn’t go fullsize, only ‘xv’ would go fullsize.  Both still tear though.  Hmm, further reading suggests that Jaunty was released with EXA enabled by default as it fixed many problems.

I’ve also tried: AGPMode to 8 – no change. AccelDFS – no change.  EXAVsync to True on the radeon man page – no change.  These bits – no change.

To try – ‘man exa’, man page for radeon.  Look for other xorg.conf options.  Also  ideas.  The log in /var/log/Xorg.0.log seems to be fine although AIGLX reports that DRI2 isn’t supported.  More notes and more.

Anyone else have any suggestions? Drat – it looks like it is dual-head support that isn’t quite fixed!  The current 2D support is tear-free for this card but I think only for the primary screen, not the LCD output (which is what I’ve been viewing all along).  Looking at the laptop’s screen I don’t see any tears.  Back to searching.

For the following message see this fix: “The application ‘NetworkManager Applet’ (/usr/bin/nm-applet) wants access to the default keyring, but it is locked.”

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence for companies (Mor Consulting), programs Python, produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

I’m pleased to say that my earlier post on Installing IE6 on Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10) needs only a minor modification to work with Jaunty 9.04.

For Jaunty you just need to replace any references to ‘edgy’ with ‘jaunty’ on the ies4linux Ubuntu install page.

The ./ies4linux installer took 15 minutes to complete under VirtualBox (I was running Jaunty Release Candidate for a preview) – slow but…it worked.  Given that IE6 is over 10 years old, this is rather impressive.

Too see wine in action running Internet Explorer 6 on the Jaunty RC, watch this screencast of ie6update that I recorded last night in ProCasts:

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence for companies (Mor Consulting), programs Python, produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.