David A. Harding
Wednesday, 21 Mar 2007
Featured Presentation: Creating Music Samples with Open Source Software by Sakuramboo
The LUG/IP meeting format changed slightly. The new format follows:
President's Report
Ed Corrado
started the meeting at 19:10 by mentioning the new meeting format. He
continued by saying the officers are planning the annual baseball
outing;
William Bilancio
said the date is Saturday, July 14th, the tickets will be $8.50, and
there will be fireworks. Moving on, Ed said LUG/IP will be at this years
Trenton Computer Festival April 28-29. At the festival, LUG/IP will have
the LUG/IP Laptop donated by a friend of Ed's; the laptop will
be running
Ubuntu GNU+Linux.
The LUG/IP meeting after the festival will be a newbie night defined by
the slogan, you've installed Linux, now what?
Ed solicited presentations for newbie night, but he asked that any material be tested in Ubuntu because LUG/IP is officially recommending Ubuntu to new GNU+Linux users. Ed added that the officers are considering advertising for the newbie night at TCF and in local newspapers (I vote we rent a blimp).
In April, William said, the speaker will be Tom Limoncelli and he'll be speaking about his first year at Google. (After the meeting William said he's seen the talk previously, and it's really good.)
Chris Leyon said the Hardware Special Interest Group (SIG) installed Knoppix on the hard drive on an old IBM Thinkpad. "It Runs...," said Chris. "It walks," said Kim Goldenberg.
Beginner's Corner
Chris began by explaining the motivation for this new part of the
meeting: the Beginner's Corner is for the newbies the officers hope to
attract in the coming months. It partly replaces and builds upon the
discontinued Manpage-of-the-Month feature, will be a permanent part
of the meeting, and will last 10 to 15 minutes. "There will be no quiz at
the end," Chris said.
This month's topic is The Truth Will Set You Free or, more descriptively, using return values in shell conditionals. "In Linux, every process returns some status to its parent," Chris said, and when the process terminates, the returned status information "includes a return code."
Zero means success.
Non-zero means a failure of some sort.
For an example, Chris provided a listing of grep's return
values:
0 a match was found
1 a match was not found
>1 there was an error
Chris noted that the maximum possible return code is 127.*
He then provided several examples of if statements that
used the return value (as stored in the magic shell variable
$?) of a previously executed program. I enjoyed Chris's
explanation of the shell operators && and ||
as if statements:
command1 if [ $? -eq 0 ] then command2 fi
is the same as,
command1 && command2
Everyone applauded Chris's presentation.
Main Presentation
Sakuramboo used
LMMS
for his presentation. LMMS stands for Linux MutliMedia Studio
and is a graphical beat creator. Sakuramboo and an audience member
described it as similar to Apple's proprietary Garage Band software. I'm
impressed: Sakuramboo quickly and intuitively created interesting beats with a
few mouse clicks. I want to tell you what buttons he pressed
and how they affected the beat, but I was too caught up in what he did
to take notes. It was fun.
He began concluding his presentation by playing a track distributed by the LMMS project as a sample. His laptop (with a 900Mhz processor) began to dynamically render the sample—which sounded great—but after a few moments the complexity of the beat exceeded his CPU power; the beat became jarring and his desktop froze. After killing LMMS from a terminal, Sakuramboo played a beat he created titled, LUG Song. It was about 50 seconds long and I think a longer version will become immensely popular and propel GNU+Linux into the mainstream.
During the question and answer after the presentation, Sakuramboo showed LMMS exporting his beat track to the Ogg Vorbis audio format. He said LMMS also supports the Wav format and doesn't support MP3.
Sakuramboo played music loudly throughout his presentation, but our applause for him was louder.
Footnote