Logitech H555 headset.UPDATE Aug. 15, 2011: There have been a few changes to the new model, which you can read in this additional post. Continuing with another “gear I like” post… Yesterday my Logitech H555 headset finally gave up the ghost. I’ve had this USB headset for about three and a half years, which may be a record for me. I’m very tough on wired things where I have a propensity for yanking on the cord. I’ll routinely do clumsy things like try and walk away with it still attached to both my laptop and my head, or drop the headset on the floor, or get it tangled up with other things on my desk. So it’s a wonder it survived this long, and a testament to how good the product is. I greatly prefer using a headset to relying on a laptop’s internal mic and speakers. Those internal sound devices can make conference calls and even point-to-point contacts painful because the person on the other end can get a lot of echoes, typing clatter, and environmental noise. A headset may make you look like a Time/Life operator (“Can I take your order?”) but it really makes business dealings more professional and your personal chats more pleasant. The sound is fantastic, and I find it to be very comfortable to wear for extended periods since it has dual adjustable earpieces with thick pads. It’s not as comfortable as a great set of over the ear studio monitor headphones, but those aren’t really as portable. This headset can fold up into a convenient carrying case (sized just right for a nice Fedora logo sticker!) which makes it highly portable and unlikely to be damaged in transit. The connection from the headset is actually via two 1/8-inch TRS plugs — one for the stereo headphones, and one for the microphone. You could plug that into a large number of laptops that have separate headphone and mic connectors. Why TRS for the mic then? Ah, that’s where the magic comes in. There’s a USB dongle into which you can plug the leads and that allows the mic to become a noise canceling, low-powered condenser. The resulting sound from the mic is very clear, which makes my VoIP calls comprehensible to folks on the other end of the conversation. You can also use it for screencasts and podcasts, although of course the sound won’t be as good as a professional large condenser type microphone. But how does it work with Linux? Spectacularly. It’s automatically recognized on every Fedora I’ve used it with, starting with Fedora 9, as a USB audio device. I can use PulseAudio to easily control the volume on the mic and headset — and if that’s inconvenient for some reason the headset cord has a mini control which allows me to vary the headset volume with a rotary dial, and mute the mic with a slider switch. The control is at a perfect location, not too close to my neck and not too far away to find when I’m in the middle of a conversation. By the way, I don’t shill for Logitech or anyone else. This is just a gadget that has made my life easier. I use the H555 daily, usually for several hours, on voice-over-IP softphone calls. Now that Google+ has a neat Hangout feature for multi-party video conferencing, I sometimes use the headset with that app as well. Hopefully this post will help someone have an easier time choosing a device to suit their needs. |
Catching breath, no. 75.5.Upgrade went smoothly, although I did run into this common bug at the very end of the process. Not only was the bug known about, it’s already been fixed, so no one should see it in the next test release. Nice work Anaconda guys! The bug’s been written up on our “Common F13 bugs” page as well. That page is where we record issues that we’ve seen in the test release, to lower the surprise factor even for people who are gearing up to test our pre-release software. As we go through the release cycle and these bugs are stomped out, we edit this page as needed. Because it’s a wiki we invite our community to help us document problems there and track them throughout the release cycle — a great way to collaborate that can help innumerable other people helping to test Fedora. Other than that issue — which itself required no mitigation on my part anyway — the update was extremely boring (just the way it should be). I’ve already noticed a few things worth calling out:
That’s just what I saw in the first few minutes. I’m really looking forward to seeing all the other excellent new features coming in Fedora 13. Our first pre-release, Fedora 13 Alpha, is due next Tuesday, March 9. If you’re a savvy Linux user who wants to see the latest and greatest new technologies, you can pick up a copy and help advance the future of free software by testing the pre-release and reporting bugs. The more we squash in the pre-release, the better the final Fedora 13 will be. With 0ur recent move to a special pre-release branch, I’m expecting a very solid release — but nevertheless I am very much looking forward to exploring the nooks and crannies of Fedora 13 Alpha, especially if what I’m using now is any hint of what’s to come! |
Constantine unites!The big day is here — Fedora 12 is released, uniting freedom, technology, and community. You can download the all-natural goodness at http://get.fedoraproject.org and read some of the highlights of the release. The official announcement text is here, and on the wiki as well. I’m a big fan of the new Abrt tool which can produce and file detailed information for developers in a Bugzilla bug with just a few clicks, and also the improvements to the SELinux Troubleshooter, which do essentially the same thing. Thanks to Fedora’s strong stance on freedom, this release features some of the best free video drivers yet. On all three of my home machines that use NVidia and ATI cards, kernel mode setting, the enhanced graphical boot display, and on-the-fly display setting work like gangbusters — no more proprietary drivers causing problems we can’t debug or fix. (Thanks Nouveau and Radeon guys.) The latest GNOME and KDE sparkle, Bluetooth tethering and audio are no-brainers, mobile broadband is dead-simple, PulseAudio happily converses and integrates with everything including your PlayStation3 and probably even your kitchen sink, PackageKit can install missing commands at the shell… Oh, and did I mention the virtualization features? It’s sheer heaven for sysadmins and techie types who love to try different distros; just install them in Fedora’s built-in KVM and go to town! And of course there’s plenty for developers, including the latest Eclipse and NetBeans IDEs, and an updated SystemTap that helps trace and locate opportunities to optimize code. And of course you can get compilers and tools galore, and all the frameworks, libraries, and modules you need to build powerful applications in any language you prefer, including cross-compiler support for building Windows executables on Fedora. Fedora 12 also features a nice helping of fit and finish on the Desktop, with fresh theming, easier to navigate panels and menus, tooltips that give you useful information while intelligently staying out of your way, and more useful notifications that are also reduced in frequency to keep the most important information in front of you at all times. In short, it’s our best release ever, and you should download it and give it a try today! |
Hamster on the move.Very cool — the Hamster applet, which I use to track my time, is featured in the GNOME 2.28 release notes. I really enjoy using this application to keep count of my hours and the way I spend my time during the work day. Thanks to its flexibility for noting details about my major tasks, I can also use it to send summaries to my managers. Interestingly, it stores info in an SQLite database, so it’s easy to use Hamster’s data elsewhere if desired; and of course it exports to a variety of formats as well. I posted earlier about Hamster, and I’m glad to see it getting some attention in GNOME 2.28. Of course you’ll see it available in Fedora 12 as well, so I hope some of you readers find it useful; if so, let the developers know! |
Pushing ahead.The days of summer may be hot, but they’re anything but lazy in Fedora. The Fedora 12 release, as many community members already know, is a somewhat tighter schedule overall. We had so many features in the Fedora 11 release, some of them particularly extensive and complex, that we drove a slightly longer release cycle. To make up for that longer cycle, the Fedora 12 cycle is somewhat shorter. That truncation returns us to release dates close to the May Day/Halloween calendar we originally set up back around the Fedora 7 time frame. As a result, the feature freeze for Fedora 12 is occurring on July 28, or approximately three weeks from now. That’s the date by which new features and major changes in existing packages have to be entered. Probably a good date to inscribe on your calendar (and maybe tattoo on your forearm)! You’ll see that the release after that freeze is called “Alpha” in this release, because we really have only two test phase releases before our release candidate in Fedora 12. For Fedora 11 and previous releases, there were three. So there’s limited time left to get your features in gear for the F12 release, if you want the practical upshot. To me, Fedora 12 is going to be very much a tightening of a lot of screws and bolts, ensuring this release is even more solid than Fedora 11, which itself premiered many new technologies but yet is racking up overwhelmingly solid reviews and praise. Our hope is to release Fedora 12 on November 3, 2009, as listed in the F12 release schedule on the wiki. The Feature List page on the wiki shows a number of line items that need to be updated by their maintainers to be retained for the current release. If you own one of these, please visit the page and update your status so your feature can be managed correctly. If you are hoping to get a new feature into the process, then now is the time to build your page and get it entered into the appropriate category on the wiki. This process will help people elsewhere in the project work on targeted testing, publicity, and other noteworthy bits that go into each release. Thanks for being a part of it! |
Fedora video bonanza.The great thing about the Fedora community is that when there’s work to be done, people roll up their sleeves and pitch in. That’s exactly what happened at our most recent Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon) in Boston a couple weeks ago, where volunteers banded together to provide audio streaming and video recording of some of the proceedings. Matt Domsch, Chris Tyler, and Clint Savage headed up the A/V support for this event and I’m very thankful to them. You can find all the proceedings linked here in the schedule, in the totally free Ogg format. The Linux Foundation has kindly made Flash versions available of some talks as well. But if you thought that was all the video goodness available these days, think again! It was a couple years ago, I think, when I first met Colby Hoke, a member of Red Hat’s Creative team who specialized in videography and video production. Colby and I share a deep love of film, although I’m convinced he’d beat the tar out of me when it comes to technical trivia about cinematography or film treatment. Plus, he has a bitchin Creative Commons tattoo. That’s dedication. Colby has a wonderfully loose and natural shooting style that informs the many videos he’s shot about Fedora over the years. His style helps emphasize the Fedora themes of fraternity and freedom. By getting naturally up close with the people who contribute to Fedora, he shows that Fedora is built by regular people who care deeply about software freedom, and about your rights as a participant in the global information society. And of course the subject matter is often the cool code on which those people are working, code that builds features you’ll see not just in Fedora but in many other Linux distributions, thanks to our upstream-friendly practices. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, hop over to our wiki and check out the list of systems and features Fedora contributors at Red Hat work on every day, and from which you and I benefit. So much of what just works in Fedora and Linux is due to the hard work and brilliance of contributors like the ones building the free software on that list. I’m amazed at the progress we’ve made and what’s still ahead for Fedora 11 and beyond, and the features we’re building now are going to be part of the pieces Colby and his teammates are creating right now. The Creative team calls these videos a “Spotlight On” series, because they help shine a light on the great work being done in Fedora by a group of dedicated, talented engineers. These folks work directly with upstream communities so that the features produced in Fedora don’t just stay in Fedora. That wouldn’t be much of a collaboration, now, would it? Instead, we work with GNOME, KDE, freedesktop.org, the kernel, the information security community, and many others — to lead the way on features and make sure the future of open source is one of sustainability, steady growth, and participation. If you travel over to this page, you’ll see where Red Hat has kindly built a one-stop shop where you can find all the great Fedora media Colby and the rest of the Creative team have helped us create. But that’s not the only way to check out these video feeds! There’s also a YouTube channel where you can find “Spotlight On” videos as well as a lot of other exciting media. There’s also a playlist available if you want to drink from the firehose. You can also see the latest videos by grabbing the RSS feed from Red Hat Magazine. We have plenty more exciting content like this on the way, so stay tuned. |
Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, no. 38.True to form, Fedora marches on! As I look at the proposed Fedora 10 features this morning, I see a lot of changes since yesterday. The number of feature proposals has dropped significantly, meaning these features have been simply moved to a more general pool while their owners update them with a bit more data. That extra data allows for better discussion of the feature and how to measure its progress or completion. I would expect that many or all of these features, and hopefully more, will find their way back to the proposed list very shortly. There is still plenty of time to propose features for Fedora 10 — and whether you are proposing one as a developer or as a wish, the feature process can accommodate you. Update: stupid process grokkage mistake, duly fixed. |
