Having the Intel driver running instead of the fbdev driver means that OpenGL and visual effects (and Unity, if you’re in to that sort of thing) work, as does brightness adjustment, and I suspect it’s the reason that suspend and resume now work, too. Patching the kernel manually would be a pain, but the (updated) setup script from the Ubuntu forums now takes care of this for you, along with the keyboard and trackpad driver patches.

Ubuntu 11.04 on the Macbook Air, with all the important stuff working

I also had a chance to test the Ubuntu 11.10 beta. I haven’t tested it with the video fix above (though it is supposed to work), but I did notice that the my 5Ghz 802.11n network worked with it, so it seems like the 5Ghz issues I’m having with 11.04 have been fixed.

All of the important stuff is working, then, at least for my needs. There are some minor keyboard niggles — I haven’t been able to adjust the keyboard backlight brightness, and the volume keys are incorrectly mapped — but the biggest issue is with the trackpad. It works, including two-finger scrolling and two- and three-finger taps and clicks, but it doesn’t feel quite right, particularly when scrolling.

It seems like a minor thing, but the trackpad is central to the user experience, and when basics like button presses and scrolling rely to a degree on gesture recognition, it matters a lot that they’re detected reliably and respond appropriately. The multitouch driver is under active development, though, so I have no doubt it’ll improve.

I really enjoying benchmarking this thing, just to see how much power has been crammed in to it. Compiling Ardour 3 from SVN seemed like a good test of overall system performance: it managed it in 14 minutes and 50 seconds, just under two minutes faster than my 3Ghz Core 2 Duo desktop. It’s definitely no slouch!

With my old Dell laptop starting to suffer some physical wear and tear, I figured it was time for an upgrade. I couldn’t find a solid PC laptop that fit my needs, particularly in terms of portability and battery life, so I made a potentially controversial decision — I chose the brand-new 13″ Macbook Air. I won’t be using it for music-making, but after using it for work over the last week, I’m definitely happy with my choice.

I had sworn off Mac laptops for a few reasons: Apple’s power supplies and slot-loading DVD drives have always given me trouble, and my Macbook Pro ran very hot at times. Thankfully, the new power supply design seem less fragile, the Air has no DVD slot to worry about, and while it does howl a bit when working hard, that’s preferable to getting super-hot.

It’s also surprisingly quick — its 1.7Ghz i5 CPU outpaces even my 3Ghz Core 2 Duo desktop, and the SSD makes everything feel snappy. The Intel video isn’t brilliant, but it’s fast enough for most indie games, and even for a bit of Civilization IV or Left 4 Dead 2 on low-quality settings.

The Air’s fixed hardware is definitely a departure from my easily-serviceable old Dell, but it does help it to fit both a powerful system and a lot of battery in to a very light and slender frame. I wouldn’t want it to be my only computer, but it’s great as a portable extension of my desktop and home network. I’m sure I’ll have to give up the whole machine if it ever needs repairs, but with Time Machine backups configured (using my Ubuntu file server), I don’t really have to worry about losing data.

Mac OS X is, well… it’s Mac OS X. It has its advantages: it’s very well tuned to the hardware, making the most of the multi-touch trackpad, resuming from suspend in a second or so, and lasting a good seven hours on battery with a light load. It’s also great to have access to things like Steam. On the other hand, it’s still a bit annoying as a UNIX compared to Ubuntu, the Mac App Store is a shambles, and having to hack the OS just to stop it opening iTunes when I press my keyboard’s “play” key is completely asinine.

However, the reality is that I spend 99% of my working day using Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird, a text editor, and a bunch of terminals, and Mac OS X meets those needs just fine. (For the record, I’ve been using TextWrangler and iTerm2.)

Ubuntu running, in a fashion, on the 13" 2011 Macbook Air

The Air can run Linux, too, though it’s not terribly usable yet. The trackpad works in mutli-touch mode after some hacking, but there’s no power management, and the Intel driver doesn’t work with the built-in display, so you’re stuck with unaccelerated 1024×768 video. The wireless works, too, which makes it unique among current Mac laptops, though only in 2.4Ghz mode.

I generally think it’s a bad idea to buy a Mac to run Linux, since the hardware is odd enough to cause these kinds of problems, but it’s always nice to know that I can run it if I need to. There’s a thread on the Ubuntu forums with all the details, and one post in particular that has a script to install patched keyboard and trackpad drivers.

My dusty old WRT54GS, with one missing antenna, has been better days

My chosen replacement is the Netgear WNDR3700. With dual-band 802.11n and gigabit Ethernet it’s a major upgrade — I can easily get 60-70MB/s between my desktop PC and HTPC/file server (maxing out the disk), and about 12MB/s over the wireless from my laptop. There’s also a USB port, though I’m not sure if I’ll do anything with that, yet.

The stock firmware lacked some features that I’m used to having, such as DNS hosting for the local domain, so I soon switched to DD-WRT. Installing it was more of an ordeal than I expected, though; the version linked from, of all places, the DD-WRT wiki entry for the WNDR3700 caused the router to sit there rebooting in a loop. After much frustration some I found an older build that I had better luck with, and by working through the Atheros tuning guide I managed to get a little more speed from the wireless network.

DD-WRT is a far cry from the elegance and simplicity of Tomato, but it definitely has a wealth of features. It’ll take me some time to dig through it all, but for now, it’s doing everything I need.

Korg's nanoKONTROL is a brilliant, affordable MIDI controller

The nanoKONTROL is part of Korg’s nano series of tiny, laptop-friendly controllers which also includes the nanoPAD, with 12 drum pads and an X/Y touch controller, and the nanoKEY, a 25-key keyboard (of sorts). While I don’t think much of the nanoKEY — Akai’s LPK25 (Amazon link), while slightly larger, looks far more practical — the nanoPAD looks good, but I still think the nanoKONTROL is the pick of the bunch.

Its layout, with nine faders, nine knobs, and eighteen buttons, along with a set of transport controls, certainly lends itself to DAW mixer control, but it’s flexible enough to control just about anything. It did a fine job of handling synth parameters on PHASEX, for instance — using PHASEX’s MIDI learn features (just right-click on a control and move the appropriate MIDI controller) I was quickly able to set up the nanoKONTROL’s faders to configure the amp and filter envelopes, and the knobs to control filter cutoff, resonance, and envelope amount, among other things. It’s also brilliant as a SooperLooper controller, letting you pan, fade, and mute individual loops on-the-fly.

As a class-compliant USB MIDI device, it goes without saying that it works perfectly under Linux, but I’ll say it anyway — the nanoKONTROL works perfectly under Linux, with true plug-and-play simplicity. If you want to reconfigure the device, to change the MIDI messages that each controller sends, there’s a native app for that, called Nano-Basket, but Korg’s official app runs flawlessly under Wine, too.

Korg has announced updated versions of its nano controllers, but there’s no hard word on when they’ll be available yet. The nanoKONTROL2 adds a third set of buttons but loses one fader and knob, so I’m glad to have the original.

The Saffire PRO 40 has 8 inputs with preamps, 8 line outs, and ADAT expandability

The other new addition is somewhat bigger: it’s a Focusrite Saffire PRO 40 (Amazon link), a Firewire audio interface with eight channels of analogue I/O. Each input is a combo XLR/TRS jack with a preamp and phantom power, so it can handle up to eight condenser mics, but it’s just as happy handling line inputs from synths. In addition to the analogue I/O, there are S/PDIF and ADAT ports, which can add up to another 10 inputs and outputs.

As a sysadmin I’m quite familiar with how big standard 19″ rackmounted gear is, but for some reason, I was still surprised when I got it home — this thing is big! Now that I’ve made room for it, though, it’s fine, and beacuse it’s replacing not just my old PCI sound card, but also my Behringer mixer, it doesn’t actually take up much more space than my old setup did. Having to run just a single Firewire cable down to the PC is great — I certainly won’t miss running 3.5mm audio cables between my mixer and my PC’s back panel.

Like all supported Firewire audio devices, the PRO 40 uses drivers from the FFADO project, but support for the PRO 40 (as well as the smaller PRO 24, and some competing devices that use the same DICE chipset) is only available in the development FFADO code from Subversion. The current FFADO build in Ubuntu 10.10 is actually a Subversion build that’s recent enough to handle the PRO 40, but before I realised that I’d already installed the drivers manually. It wasn’t exactly plug-and-play, but once I switched to the old Firewire stack (playback doesn’t work on DICE devices with the new stack right now), and got the PRO 40 talking to my Firewire controller successfully (annoyingly, turning everything off and on again helped with this), getting it running with JACK was actually fairly straightforward.

So far, the performance has been fantastic. I haven’t given its preamps a good test with my mic yet, but recordings of my Blofeld via line-in were very clean and noise-free. Even my analogue delay pedal, which I know is a bit noisy, sounds much quieter than before, and with eight ins and outs on the one device, it’s very easy to hook up that delay pedal, send audio to it from Ardour, and then receive the output back in to Ardour. Even with Ubuntu 10.10′s stock generic kernel, I’m running pretty solidly at 8ms latency, which is low enough for my needs.

The open kit synths: MeeBlip and Shruthi-1

The MeeBlip and Shruthi-1 both answer the same question — just how much of a synth can you build on top of a low-cost Arduino-style platform? The MeeBlip squeezes an analogue-style two-oscillator monophonic synth on to it’s tiny 8-bit AVR CPU, and while the sounds may be digital, the interface is very old-school. It’s eight knobs and sixteen switches give you direct control over the sound, and it’s a good thing, too, since the MeeBlip lacks patch storage.

The Shruthi-1, with super-cool tranparent case. Image © Mutable Instruments

The more expensive Shruthi-1 has less direct control, but it does have patch storage, and quite a few more sound generation options. Like the MeeBlip, it’s a monosynth that runs virtual oscillators on a bargain CPU, but it augments those digital sounds with an analogue low-pass filter. Not only does that give you some genuine analogue feel, and the ability to filter sound from external sources, but it also leaves more CPU power for the virtual oscillators. That lets it cover more ground: while the MeeBlip has just saw and pulse waves, the Shruthi-1 adds super-saws, sweepable wavetables, vocal formants, and CZ-style phase distortion.

What both synths share is their design philosophy: both are completely open, with the hardware designs and the firmware source code available under open licences. If you have the means, you can source the parts, grab the firmware, and build your own synth from scratch; for the rest of us, both synths are available in kits with all of the bits you need. As more of these synths get in to the hands of developers, it’s going to be very interesting to see what new features find their way in to their firmwares.

The mass-produced dark horse: the Monotron

Korg surprised the hell out of everyone when it announced the Monotron — the last thing anyone expected from Korg was a 100% analogue synth for US$60. The Monotron is incredibly simple: there’s a single sawtooth oscillator, a low-pass filter (based on the filter from the venerable MS-10), an LFO for modulation, and a ribbon controller for input. There are no envelopes, and definitely no MIDI, but it’s still capable of some crazy sounds, and like the Shruthi-1, its filter can be used to process external audio.

The Monotron is capable of far more impressive things in the right hands, though, because its hardware is remarkably hackable. Korg recently released the synth’s circuit diagram, but it hardly needed to — the Monotron’s design is so clean and simple that it had been hacked by the community even before its official release. Still, Korg should be applauded for embracing, rather than discouraging, the modding community that that Monotron has inspired.

Many of the hacks involve adding external control systems — YouTube is awash with videos showing Monotrons under CV/Gate control from PCs using MIDI-to-CV/Gate converters, or under more direct control from custom Arduino-based boards. More intrepid hackers have gone beyond pitch and gate controls, adding external control of the filter, extra oscillators, and distortion circuits, among other things.

Affordable synths for the rest of us

While these new synths are bringing hardware down to software prices, the thought of assembling a synth from parts is, admittedly, a bit intimidating. Thankfully, mainstream instrument-makers are also delivering some remarkably affordable synths, even if they’re not quite as bargain-priced as the DIY options.

The Alesis Micron and Korg microKORG both give you small keyboards and virtual-analogue sound on a budget, the DSI Mopho squeezes an analogue monosynth in to a tiny box, and the DSI Evolver delivers unique hybrid analogue/digital crazyness. Even Moog is getting in to the game with the Slim Phatty — US$849 isn’t exactly cheap, but for an honest-to-goodness, 100% analogue Moog synth, it’s a bargain.

The Slim Phatty brings the classic Moog sound to a new low price

I still think that the Waldorf Blofeld — my synth of choice — is a great option, too, especially at its current second-hand prices. It covers a great range of sounds, from bread-and-butter analogue sounds through to distorted wavetable madness, and it has enough polyphony in multi-mode to run an entire track’s worth of sounds at once.

Linux soft-synths are certainly improving, but if you’re serious about making electronic music under Linux, you owe it to yourself to check out some of these affordable hardware options.

• Advanced pattern triggering techniques: queuing and snapshots
• Basic note editing: copying/pasting notes and changing velocities
• MIDI CC automation
• Background patterns
• MIDI note entry (step-sequencing) and MIDI recording

It’s a little longer than I’d have liked, but there’s a lot in there! If you’d prefer smaller, shorter tutorials in future, feel free to leave a comment and let me know.

For downloaders, there’s also a 720p WebM version available (107MB).

There’s an unspoken “step zero” here — get yourself a working copy of seq24. I’m not sure about other distributions, but on Ubuntu, especially 64-bit, the packaged version seems very unstable. The best thing to do is to grab the 0.9.1 version from the seq24 Launchpad and install that — this new release includes a bunch of bug-fixes, and a few new features, too.

The original plan was for a straight screencast, like my earlier synth tutorials, but I was so impressed by Kdenlive that I decided to have a bit of fun with it — hopefully the fun I had comes through in the finished product.

For downloaders, there’s also a 720p WebM version available.

http://wootangent.net/

Why the change? Well, the old URL made it seem like a blog attached to the old linuxgamers.net site, which it definitely wasn’t — the only reason I put it there to begin with was because I already had that domain set up. I thought about just ditching the “blag.”, but this blog has very little to do with Linux gaming, so running it at linuxgamers.net wouldn’t make sense.

It may take me a day or two to sort out all of the links, so if you find anything broken, or anything that still links back to the old domain, please let me know!

Testing new rockets is always risky — the history of rocketry is littered with spectacular failures — and with Obama’s moves to invest in commercial providers to replace the nearly-retired Shuttle in the near term, all eyes were on this flight. However, most of the components had already been tested on the Falcon 1, from the avionics and basic construction and design, through to the engines: as you can see in some of the launch photos, the Falcon 9′s first stage uses nine engines, which are identical to the single engine on the Falcon 1′s first stage.

The next flight for SpaceX will be the test launch of its Dragon spacecraft, which will be used to ferry cargo, and potentially crew, to the ISS. That flight should be just a few months away; the Falcon 9 for that launch is already built, and the Dragon capsule itself is nearly complete.

This test flight did bring out some real craziness, though — people across eastern Australia spotted a “UFO” early on Saturday morning. Based on the timing, and the behaviour, including a slow spinning motion that was also observed in the live webcast from the Falcon 9′s on-board cameras, it must’ve been the Falcon 9. That hasn’t stopped a tonne of idiots jumping online with wacky theories, stating that it “couldn’t possibly be a rocket” based on their ridiculously ill-informed ideas of what a rocket is meant to be. A lot of the media hasn’t even bothered researching its true nature, instead being quite happy to perpetuate the UFO story.

What exactly do you call an Unidentified Flying Object once it’s been identified?

I’ve still fiddling around with things, so don’t panic if you see any sudden changes. If anything’s broken, please let me know with a comment!