Starting list of things I am trying to get working in lunux

• Directory and File compare
• dirdiff and meld. I want something more like beyond compare for linux with integration into konqueror.
  
• zinearama(spelling?) to work on my radeon 7000 with the open source radeon driver since the driver from ATI doesn't support radeon 7000 anymore.
• Time compress audio files to run on my MDA(pocket pc)
• audacity
  
• Get MDA to sync with linux
• Scanport 4400 Scanner to work with linux.
• dvd:rip to create with ac3 audio
• HaugePauge wintv-d to work as digital tuner.
• Get kids games to work
• wine working in low res without messing up monitors
• win98 vmware guest running in vmware player with emulated audio driver.
• bluetooth audio to work as default audio device.
• vpn working
• Webcam , intel, working
• gaim-vv(voice and video) working with yahoo and googletalk
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Things I have working:

• Bluetooth audio working with most audio applications including xine, gaim, amaroK, mplayer and gmplayer, xmms, skype, swift.
• the first part was getting the stuff configured to run as an audio device. All the instructions under Legacy Drivers are harder than it needs to be if you are using kde. or the kde bluetooth control panel applet. since it takes care of most of the pairing. Just build and do step 1 as root and then pair using the bluetooth applet. Then add step 5 to a script so you can run it when you want to.
• NOTE: one problem I had was that I needed to plug my dongle directly into the computer could not go thru a hub. Don't know why but it worked.
  
• after pairing i run a little script that just runs btsco for my device. The worst part is that I have to type my admin password to get it to work. But other than that it just works.
• Next is understanding how to change the device for all the apps. That knowledge came from a great wiki page i found , http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_ALSA_sound_mixer_aka_dmix
• The only difference for most of these is changing the device to -D plughw:Headset or insome cases \dev\dsp1 for example in skype.
• Good speech synthesis reading my clipboard.
• This was a little bit of a pain in Suse because of a bug in festival that won't let it find the audio device that it is looking for. I was not able to get around it but I did get Swift tts working great! So I created a script that reads the klipper clipboard using dcop and then writes pipes it to swift that then runs tts on it and saves it as a file. then i use aplay to read the file to my bluetooth headset and last i created a kde application link and set up a keyboard shortcut so that if I can just press Ctrl+Shift+s to get david to read the clipboard. The only problems with this are if things dont auto copy to the clipboard or if I want to stop in the middle of reading a really long entry. Still looking to solve those two.
• here is the script I use in its entirety:
• dcop klipper klipper getClipboardContents | fmt | swift -n David -p speech/rate=250 -f - -o /home/oatkinson/audiobuff.wav; aplay -B 1000000 -D plughw:Headset /home/oatkinson/short-pause.wav /home/oatkinson/audiobuff.wav
• The first part gets the clipboard contents. The fmt just cleans up any unreadabel stuff. The -f - in the swift command reads the input piped from the output of fmt, the -D plughw:Headset sends it to the bluetooth headset. And the short-pause is just a fraction of a second empty sound to handle a problem where the beggining of the audio was getting cutoff. Since the files are played in order the pause just before the text read seems to fix the problem.
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