The Site With the Lamp

March 1, 2005

Sound is something that I have always had trouble with on linux. It seems Red Hat goes out of their way to make it difficult for you to make use of your speaker. Upgrading to to 2.6 kernels on Red Hat was an extremely painfull affair with the cross over from OSS to ALSA being plagued with numerous problems.

Fedora Core only seems to make things worse not better. Just as in previous versions, FC3 systems think that you should not listen to MP3s. (here's the solution) It makes you wonder if Red Hat Policy is set by stupid sri lankan government officials of the kind who banned the import of hi tech printers because they may be used by forgers.

Since upgrading to FC3, audacity, which I have used in the past to edit audio files stopped working. I had temporarily shelved it in the back burner until making it work stopped being an important task and became a urgent task. Installing audacity with YUM is quite painful even though it's supposed to take away the pain. Installing from source turned out to be a nightmare.

The version of wxWindows that I have on my system is 2.4 a version that is supposed to work with audacity quite well. Unfortunately there seems to be an incompatibility with the version of GTK that is installed with FC3 and as a result the audacity compilation comes to a grinding halt with the following error:

/usr/local/lib/libwx_gtk2-2.4.so: undefined reference to `_gtk_accel_group_detach'

/usr/local/lib/libwx_gtk2-2.4.so: undefined reference to `_gtk_accel_group_attach'

/usr/local/lib/libwx_gtk2-2.4.so: undefined reference to `_gtk_rc_context_get_default_font_name'

As usuall when I run into problems google is very reluctant to provide the answers.