There can be no hiding it - audio frameworks on Linux are far from perfect. To start with, we have several different sound servers - including OSS and ALSA, which complicates things for application developers, but also, these frameworks aren’t nearly as advanced in terms of feature sets as the sound systems in other operating systems like Core Audio in Mac OS X and Windows Vista’s sound architecture.

PulseAudio is a project designed to change that. Actually, it’s not Linux or even POSIX specific, but it is a much more advanced system which is designed to bring better stability, compatibility and features to Linux audio.

The Fedora Project have an interview up with Lennart Poettering, one of the developers on PulseAudio. The news is that Fedora 8 will be one of the first Linux distributions to ship with the new audio framework (and if it turns out to be successful, many other distros could follow suit).

I won’t paste the whole interview here, but I do want to raise some points that I thought were interesting in it and that arose from it:

• As well as modernising the Linux sound architecture, PulseAudio is designed to be a “Compiz for sound”. This is a novel and interesting concept. While all major operating systems now have some form of visual eye candy, whether it’s Vista’s Aero interface or Compiz in Linux, there hasn’t really been any ideas around enhancing the sound experience in a similar way. Poettering terms it ‘ear candy’ (although for some reason I don’t like the sound of that).
• Lots of backwards compatibility is built into it. That’s sort of inevitable, as no new sound system for Linux would ever be adopted if it didn’t work with any existing code. It does seem a shame however, that we have to reinvent the wheel to a certain extent and it’s quite difficult to drop everything.
• A negative point - it is yet another framework. Things are complicated enough with having multiple sound systems and some applications that work with one and some that work with another. Again, it’s inevitable to a certain extent, but it does make things yet more complicated.

Overall though, I think this does sound like a very neat idea and it’s something I will personally be watching keenly when Fedora 8 is released next month and as it develops.

This is the first ever FOSSwire post with video! Be sure to click Watch Video in the metabar above, or click here to view the video accompanying this post.

VLEs are all the rage in education right now. A VLE is supposedly a ‘virtual learning environment’, a software system designed to take teaching online and offer services like being able to download assignments, track progress and so forth.

Most VLE systems are web-based, and one such open source web-based VLE is Moodle. It is written in PHP and supports many different database types (although the most popular are MySQL and PostgreSQL). This means it’s perfect for running on your LAMP server, or of course it should run fine anywhere where PHP and a supported database solution do.

After installation (which you can see in the accompanying video for this post) and briefly setting up your Moodle installation, you can begin setting up courses and using the main features of Moodle.

While I haven’t delved very deeply into all of the features of this open source VLE system, it seems very comprehensive and easy to use and is a formidable competitor to rivalling VLE systems.

Well, FOSSwire, we’ve had some ups and downs, but overall it’s been a good year. We now have quite a reader base compared to when we started.

But now isn’t the time for reminiscing. (really, never is the time.)

You may have noticed some changes around here. Did FOSSwire get a haircut? You’ll have to figure that out for yourself. But we did add several new features:

• Tabs: Now, instead of a bajillion categories, we now only have five, and they are shown as tabs at the top of the page. Who doesn’t like tabs?
• Tags: This is where the mass amounts of categories were thrown. We didn’t really know what to do with this new feature in WordPress 2.3, so we’re just using it as our new category home.
• The Metabar: Chris calls this the Überbar. To each their own. The important thing is this is home to many more features, including:
  • GNOME vs KDE vs XFCE wars
  • FOSSwire Video: Yep, we finally support video. Expect many more posts to have this feature.
  • PkgBase Automatic Installers: This is what we were suggesting with this post. You can now enjoy a one-click style install feature for systems that support it. And for those that don’t, instructions are given.
  • Expertise Level: Know before you read a post how difficult it will be to do. Most commonly used in the Tips & Tutorials section.
• Post Ratings: For anything that can be reviewed, such as a software or game release, we can now assign a rating out of 10 to it.
• Caching: You won’t notice anything (other than comments being delayed) except for the site running a lot faster. We’re using a custom-built caching system that is by far faster than WP-Cache.

Those are most of the features, but we’ve made some cosmetic changes here and there. We think you’ll like it.

Special thanks to Peter, who kept posting away while I was coding away, and to Chris, who did the design and kept me focused on getting this done.

Welcome to Year Two.