Linus Torvalds flips Nvidia

Linux creator Linus Torvalds isn’t happy with Nvidia. And he wants you to know it.
Late last fortnight, at a hacker meetup in Finland, Torvalds laid into Nvidia, calling it “the single worst company” the Linux developer community has ever dealt with, complaining that the chip maker doesn’t do as much as it could to ensure that its hardware plays nicely with his open source operating system. He even turned to the camera filming the event, flipped the company the proverbial bird, and dropped the proverbial F bomb.
“Nvidia, fuck you,” he said, as the room erupted with applause and laughter.

See the you-tube video below.

Linus Torvalds flips Nvidia

Using JACK for GStreamer

Gstreamer includes a jackaudiosink in the gstreamer-plugins-bad package. To get started install this package. You would also need some more stuff to get the whole thing working so just follow the below apt-get command,
shell$ sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad jackd jack-rack jack-tools patchage
Now to route the gstreamer audio data via JACK you need to do some tweaking to the gstreamer properties in gconf-editor.
shell$ gconf-editor

Now navigate to /system/gstreamer/0.10/default. In the ‘audiosink’, musicaudiosink’ enter the following:

jackaudiosink connect=none

If you leave off the 'connect=none', the sink will automatically connect to the outputs of your soundcard in Jack. You may want this for default audio and chat (just remove 'connect=none'), but not for music if you want EQ, dynamics, etc. processing on it. You may want to change the description of the sinks as well...otherwise it just shows up as 'ALSA custom' in gnome-sound-properties.

Next, we make a rule for jack.plumbing. In the version of jackaudiosink that ships with Feisty, the outputs are by default named 'GStreamer:out_x'; In Gutsy, they are named by the program, so for Banshee, they would be 'Banshee:out_x'.

Save this in your home directory as '~/.jack.plumbing':

(connect "GStreamer:out_1" "jack_rack:in_1")
(connect "GStreamer:out_2" "jack_rack:in_2")
(connect "jack_rack:out_1" "alsa_pcm:playback_1")
(connect "jack_rack:out_2" "alsa_pcm:playback_2")

Now you need a script to automate it. Put this in a script (again, you may need to modify the jackd command to suit your set up, depending on what your primary soundcard is labeled as in ALSA, and if you have -RT kernel, running jack with '-R' will give you better performance), save it in your home folder, 'chmod +x' it:

jackd -dalsa -dhw:0 &
sleep 2
jack.plumbing &
sleep 1
jack-rack -n &

Now you're set. Try running that script, and if everything works, jack-rack should pop up. If it doesn't, jackd didn't start correctly. If you save a jack-rack file, you can tell jack-rack to load it in the script above by just adding the path to the file after the '-n'. If jack-rack popping up on every boot annoys you, get alltray (sudo apt-get install alltray) and run jack-rack like so: "alltray jack-rack -n &", and it will dock in your system tray.
Alternatively you could omit the jackd server start in the script and start it with the qjackctl and then run the above script for JACK plumbing.
Now run your favorite gstreamer audio application (exaile, banshee, rythymbox, etc.) and see if you have any sound when you hit play. If not, open patchage and manually connect the output pins from your sound application to the input pins of jack-rack (just drag and drop). Jack rack's output should already be connected to the outputs of your soundcard.

OR just to test with Gstreamer alone follow these steps:

Run the above script that pops up the JACK rack.

Now start your favourite gstreamer pipeline (example gst-launch0.10 audiotestsrc ! audiocovert ! jackaudiosink) and check if the audio data (sine in the example case) is routed via JACK.

Installing Ubuntu using USB Flash Drive

Create a Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive

You would first need to download the UNetbootin software. This is not a installer, rather just double click on it to run it.Select your options as shown in the image below and press OK button.

The process will extract the files from the ISO image, copy them to the flash drive and then install the bootloader. Depending on what you are installing, this really doesn’t take very long. Once the process is completed, you’ll be prompted to reboot… which you don’t necessarily have to do unless you want to test booting the flash drive on the same machine you are using. Otherwise you can hit the Exit button.
Booting from Flash Drive
Now that you are all finished, you can try and boot from the flash drive. Every BIOS is different, but most of them will have a message like “Press F12 for the Boot Menu”, which is highly suggested. The boot menu will allow you to select the USB drive as the boot device. Instead of the regular Ubuntu boot menu that you might be used to seeing, you will see the UNetbootin menu, which has essentially the same options.