Sound in GNU Octave on Debian Lenny

I was very disappointed by the poor sound capabilities of the GNU Ocatve project compared to MATLAB. The playaudio() function was inconvenient with nasty '/dev/dsp device or resource busy' messages. This was until I installed the octave-audio package in Debian and had the powerful sound() and soundsc() functions working.

The nasty thing is that those functions didn't work out of the box. They needed to call a play command from the shell. Finally, I discovered that this command is part of the sox package on Debian. I apt-get install sox and now, sound() and soundsc() are working perfectly!

Installing OpenOffice.org 3.0 on Debian Lenny (stable)

There is no OpenOffice.org 3.0 in lenny-backports till now and I need it! So, I grabbed it from sid (unstable). This discussion helped me a lot:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/openoffice-3-in-debian-lenny-679610/

In short, you need to

1. add to your repositories (/etc/apt/sources.list)
   

   deb http://www.backports.org/debian lenny-backports main contrib non-free

2. Also add to your repositories
   

   deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian sid main

3. To stay with the stable and not install packages from unstable by default, we need to add the following to /etc/apt/apt.conf APT::Default-Release "stable";
   
   
4. Then do aptitude install openoffice.org/unstable

Voila! Hope it does not break your system!

UPDATE: OpenOffice.org is now available in Lenny-backports. Now you do not need step 2. So, instead type aptitude install openoffice.org/lenny-backports

The long-waited Qt 4.5 Released :)

Qt 4.5 is now officially released.
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/133888
http://doc.trolltech.com/4.5/

With the LGPL v2.1 licensing option added, I expect the widespread adoption of Qt into commercial applications!

Qt 4.5 is even better suited for the medical field, combining reliability, performance, flexibility, nice look-and-feel, among other advantages.

Qt 4.5 now has -graphicssystem command-line option to switch the graphics engine of Qt applications to raster or even OpenGL without any change to the code. Yes, your application can draw itself using OpenGL without requiring you to change a single line of code, check:
http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/10/22/so-long-and-thanks-for-the-blit/

Moreover, you can have a custom widget plotting itself using OpenGL without requiring the rest of the application to use OpenGL, check:
http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/06/27/accelerate-your-widgets-with-opengl/

The LGPL v2.1 has one drawback regarding the use of templates in C++, check:
http://lab.obsethryl.eu/content/lgpl-21-qt-45-and-c-templates
However, it is stated on the Qt Labs Blogs that Nokia is working on an LGPL exception to overcome this problem. Let's wait and see :)

With a framework so powerful and flexible like Qt, one can ask: Are we watching the dawn of Qt and the sunset of Java and .Net??