Amarok Blog

The four computers in our household are named: Hyperion, Endymion, Serenity, and Shrike. Can you tell that we are big SciFi nerds?

What you're seeing above is a photo of my work place (home-office, which rocks in so many ways!). Hyperion and Serenity are compiling Amarok with 12 compile jobs, using Icecream.

What I really wanted to write about is Serenity, my new ThinkPad X201 lappy, because some of you have asked me for a little review. Before I start I would like to say one thing about the keyboard, which is really dear to me: This is actually a vintage IBM Model M, from 1985. The Model M is often referred to as "the best keyboard in the world". Simply put, that's no lie. If you get the chance to lay your hands on one, never (ever!) give it away. Typing was yesterday, Model M is flying.


ThinkPad X201

This is the configuration I got:

Intel Core i7-620M Processor (2.66GHz, 4MB L3, 1066MHz FSB)

360GB HDD, which I exchanged for a Intel X25-M G2 SSD, 160GB (more on that later)

One 6 cell Li-Ion Battery, and one 9-cell (up to 11 hours running time)

Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 WiFi

UltraBase docking station

Price was about 2,000 USD for the ThinkPad, and an extra 350 USD for the SSD. Was it worth it? Totally. It's a sweet machine. What I like about it:

It's fast, extremely quiet (even under full load you hardly hear fan noise), and very small. In fact I like to think, the X201 manages to pack the power of a "real" laptop into almost Netbook format - quite impressive. The SSD was something of a personal dream of mine. It's the first I got, and I must say it's totally worth it. Boot times of about 2 seconds, instant application start times, and especially no more freaking harddisk noise. You often hear the argument "Yeah that's cool, but HDDs are still bigger!" That might be so, but think about the real use of an SSD: 160GB is more than enough for putting your whole system data on it, plus some personal data and such. This is what needs frequent access, so it really matters to have the speed. All the rest, the rarely accessed data like movies you watch once in a blue moon, you simply put that on a dirt cheap external USB HDD. Problem solved.

So, yeah, overall the X201 is really fancy. There are a few things I dislike about it. One of them is the rather poor performance of the Intel GMA HD graphics (which is actually integrated in the CPU). Desktop usage with up to two displays is fine, but forget about anything fancy like gaming. I'm suspecting that the Linux drivers play a rather huge part in this issue. Something else that annoys me is the bad quality of the docking station's audio jack, which produces a lot of hissing noises due to bad shielding. However, the audio jack on the lappy itself is just fine.


Verdict: Buy. (and get a Model M - the most beautiful model there is)

A new Free Software event is born: FrOSCamp. The location is nothing less than the renowned ETH Zurich university, in the beautiful city of Zurich, Switzerland

KDE of course could not miss out on the chance of partaking in the first out of a (probably) long series of successful FrOSCamp events. Thomas Thym, Myriam Schweingruber, and myself (Mark Kretschmann) organized a joint KDE / Amarok booth. On the second day, Amarok hacker Edward "Hades" Toroshchin joined us at the booth as well.

Thomas Thym gave a great talk about "The 7 principles of successful open source communities". Check it out, it's seriously interesting (and I don't say that lightly).

Check out more photos of the event here. And don't miss out on joining us next year! You can talk to the organizers in #froscamp on irc.freenode.net. Also, the wiki page contains heaps of useful information.

The image you're seeing above is showing the Wurlitzer Lyra, an innovative digital jukebox by the Wurlitzer company (a subsidiary of Gibson Guitar Corporation), which has a long history of building famous jukeboxes. The Lyra however is their first all-digital product, marking the advent of a new era.

I wouldn't have blogged about this product if I didn't have a special relationship with it. As it happens, members of the Amarok team were in fact part of the original team of engineers that designed the Lyra. Originally the jukebox was supposed to run a modified version of Amarok, which some of us worked on for several months, including a meeting with the CEO of Gibson Guitar himself, which I had written about earlier.

Although the final product did not end up using Amarok, I'm still happy about the fact that it did not get shelved, but that it was turned into a real device that can actually be bought. Also I'm pretty sure that the Lyra will generate a rather decent sound, which I could witness as I had been partaking in some of the hardware tests. Gibson stands for quality, and they wouldn't have used crappy speakers in their gear.


PS:
As for why the Lyra does not use Amarok now, there are several reasons: For one, the timing was simply bad, as Amarok back then was at version 2.0.1, and it simply did not have the maturity we required for such a use case. Additionally, and for this I blame Gibson, they tried to get away with development on the cheap, and they did not allocate sufficient resources for our development team. Software development is expensive. There is no way around this, if you want quality.

After a summer hiatus with lots of... well, not Amarok hacking... we are back with a fresh release. I won't list all of the changes here in my blog, as you might as well head over to the official release notes.

I will however say that our team now seems to be beaming with a newly found spirit of excitement. We all had to reload our batteries a bit, I guess. If you have ever toyed with the idea of contributing to Amarok, now is the perfect time to do so! We are now starting to work on the "next big version" (likely to become 2.4), and we have an influx of new developers, promoters, handbook writers, and all that makes up a team of this size.

We are also happy to welcome again two teams of students working on Amarok as university projects, one team from France, and one from Germany. Now is the time to introduce new features, and test out all of the wild ideas that you might have for Amarok. Git makes it possible to develop your very own branch of Amarok, and when you feel it's done, you can request a merge into the main development line. Dive in now!