In the pool

In the pool
Originally uploaded by alexispz

Sound again

I upgraded recently to Kubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty", and I made the mistake of installing PulseAudio, the "new generation" audio system for linux. What a mistake. I then spent several hours trying to get sound working again - there is a thread in the Ubuntu forums with more than 125 pages of people complaining about PulseAudio, and this is not counting the whole collection of other threads on the same topic.

Of course, if you want to uninstall PulseAudio, you have to uninstall most of KDE because of dependencies - or so it seems. I had to install first the replacement for PulseAudio (ESound, which works fine, thank you), before being able to purge the pulseaudio related packages. Except one library, which has to stay there apparently.

And now sound works again. Hurrah!

Cloud of pictures

A fun way of displaying pictures.

Get this widget at roytanck.com

1.9 gigapixels

1.9 gigapixels: My largest panorama yet
Originally uploaded by Seb Przd

With the help of a new computer with 4GB of RAM I have been able to stitch very large images. My newest record is 1.9 Gigapixels, from 372 images shot over a 15 minutes span. The weather conditions were not good, and the exposures vary a bit over the image.

It took a bit more than 2 days to set up the control points (automatic and manually for some images), 1h30 to remap the images, and 23 hours to blend. I really should have bought a computer that could be upgraded to 8GB of RAM...

On the flickr page of the image I have additional details; if you want to view the full image you can do that on GigaPan.

Video + immersive panorama

Pano2VR has a new feature of interactive VR movies (or said another way, video immersive panoramas). Here is my first attempt (the video is over 3MB, please be patient if you want to enjoy it fully).

You will be travelling inside a torus made of Villarceau circles.

Click here to view the immersive video.

Cartoon Castle and Flowers

Cartoon Castle and Flowers
Originally uploaded by Seb Przd

Flash 9 version, made with the trial version of Pano2VR.

Building Hugin in Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn and Edgy Eft)

This is a work-in-progress as I figure out what are the necessary steps one has to take to go from a scratch installation of Ubuntu (or Kubuntu, or Xubuntu) to a building environment for source packages of hugin and its related tools (autopano-sift-c, libpano13, enblend). This has been tested in Kubuntu Edgy Eft and Feisty Fawn, but of course no installation is ever the same and I would welcome your comments as to what packages you had to install, or what error messages you are facing.

About hugin
Hugin is a very versatile software to merge different photos into panoramas. It is open source and its development is quite active so people might benefit from building from the sources. This post is part of a recent push to try to get frequent builds in most operating systems (Linux, Mac OSX and Windows).

Basic setup

Installation of needed components. This is the most difficult part, since once you have all the components you will be able to build hugin as often as you want.

1. Subversion
   

   sudo apt-get install subversion

2. Install cmake, other building tools and other libraries
   

   sudo apt-get install cmake checkinstall
   sudo apt-get install libvips10-dev libvips10c2a libgcj7-0 libgcj7-dev

   Here is the list as I could work it out from objdump -p /usr/local/bin hugin. Some sound strange, probably because I am building in 64bit linux.
   

   sudo apt-get install ia32-libs lib32gcc1 lib32stdc++6 lib32z1 \
    libc6 libc6-i386 libgcc1 \
    libjpeg62 libopenexr2c2a libpng12-0 libstdc++6 libtiff4 \
    libwxbase2.6-0 libwxgtk2.6-0 zlib1g \
    lib32gcc1 libstdc++6-dev lib32z1-dev \
    libc6-dev libc6-i386-dev  libgcc1-dev \
    libjpeg62-dev libopenexr2c2a-dev libpng12-0-dev libstdc++6-dev libtiff4-dev \
    libwxbase2.6-0-dev libwxgtk2.6-0-dev zlib1g-de     

Building libpano13

1. Download the source from SVN
   

   svn co https://panotools.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/panotools/trunk/libpano libpano13
   cd libpano13
   ./bootstrap

   Check if dependencies are missing; install and relaunch the configure process
   

   ./configure

2. Compile and install
   

   make
   sudo checkinstall

Building hugin

1. This is the trunk, which has been updated now from the Ippei branch:
   

   svn co https://hugin.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/hugin/hugin/trunk/ hugin

2. Building hugin: there is only one procedure right now with cmake
   

   cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local .
   make
   sudo checkinstall

   Sometimes when launching hugin it gives an error that a library is impossible to load. You have to run:
   

   sudo ldconfig