Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2013 November 2

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November 2

Apple equivalent to XUmouse ?

This little program clicks the mouse or moves it periodically, in Windows. All I need is the "click the mouse" behaviour. Is there an equivalent program that runs on Mac OS X 10.7.5 ? StuRat (talk) 01:45, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Look at Automator. RudolfRed (talk) 03:48, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Installing Ubuntu on MacBook Pro: wireless connection

I have a MacBook Pro Early 2011 model (8,1) and I want to install Ubuntu on it. The wireless (Wi-Fi) drivers required do not come with Ubuntu, and I have to install `linux-firmware-nonfree`. However, I do not have an ethernet connection, and now I'm stuck with crApple Mac O'SuX and Microshaft Windoze. How to get Wi-Fi to work? I want to download the drivers on another OS and install them on Ubuntu. Czech is Cyrillized (talk) 04:48, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

I don't have the time to go in depth, but I would say you could download the .deb file to your OSX partition, install Ubuntu in a different partition, and then mount the OSX partition and sudo dpkg -i (if my memory serves) the .deb file to install it. →Σσς. (Sigma) 07:06, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Obviously, in the absence of a linux WiFi device driver, you must write your own, which should be no problem. WiFi is a very simple technology and its standardization consortium provides excellent documentation and engineering support at a low low price. If you're unhappy with the overall performance of the Apple implementation provided in OS X Mavericks, (which is available for no charge), then I'm sure you can find an alternate implementation of the device driver, written by a competitor, designed for Apple hardware products, available at no charge, and available for the operating system of your choice, and preferably released under a free software license. Ideally, you'll also want to get source-code so that you can re-compile the driver yourself whenever you like. Major engineering corporations spend lots of time finding smart people and paying them to do the sort of hard work involved in writing a device driver for competitors' products; and there is a vibrant community of elite hackers who work independently to implement such glamorous parts of the system as the WiFi driver international radio spectrum regulatory compliance, and the WiFi driver power management. So, there are boatloads of alternative options for you to peruse. Many variants are hosted on Canonical's servers, but without networking, your machine cannot reach those servers. No worries! I imagine, because you are a linux enthusiast, that you know how to operate a local package manager repository server - this is a uniqueness of Debian-flavored Linux distributions; so once you have linux-firmware-nonfree, you just need to install it from a local server. The fact that you are installing non-free software in binary form, just for the sake of "running Linux", should present no ethical quagmires whatsoever.

Alternately, you can run Ubuntu in a virtualized computer hosted on OS X. Virtual Box, VMWare Fusion, and several others are available; Virtual Box is free software, and works on OS X. In full-screen mode, your user experience will have the look and feel of a native Linux desktop interface, but the hardware is still operated by a system that you have chosen to denigrate as "crap," and yet it will work, which is more than can be said of your present situation. Nimur (talk) 15:59, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

For the enthusiast hackers in the audience: here is IONetworkingFamily for OS X 10.9, available from http://opensource.apple.com - the parent class for all networking device drivers on OS X. So, we are now comparing an operating system that is available at no cost, constituted largely by open-source software, against Ubuntu, an operating system that is available at no cost, and constituted largely by open-source software, except Ubuntu does not function. So, get cracking on the linux driver ports! Even Windows mustered a device driver that works on the Mac Book Pro! Nimur (talk) 16:12, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

That is a lot of anger towards someone asking how to manually download a .deb file on the non-target platform. (and then copy it to the target machine on a usb drive presumably.)

Perhaps the refdesk is not a place for going on tirades at people who don’t share your opinion about a certain brand of computer software. APL (talk) 20:46, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Link to all free apps for Apple iPad 2

Any link to all apps for Apple iPad 2 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.175.255.68 (talk) 13:33, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

You can select free apps only when you open the App Store. There are absolutely vast quantities of free applications - hundreds of thousands of them. By the time you read the list from start to end, dozens or hundreds of new free apps would need to be added. It makes a lot more sense to search for applications by category, or by name, or by developer; or by apps that are popular, or apps tha are common in your locale. You can do all of those app searches in the App Store. Nimur (talk) 17:17, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

volume

Hello, is there someone can turn up the volume of this clip please ? 198.105.121.83 (talk) 20:22, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Your computer has its own audio control. If it's actually turned up to maximum and it's still too quiet then you probably need to get some external speakers. On my computer when I turn up the volume of that clip I can make it extremely loud because I have excellent speakers. If I was on a macmini, for example, without external speakers plugged in, I couldn't because its internal speakers are pathetic. Do you know that your computer has a volume control and how to access it? If not, tell us what kind of computer you are on.--108.46.110.208 (talk) 00:26, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

You could adjust a sound file's volume pretty easily with a (free) program like Audacity (audio editor).

There's a limit to how far you can do that without ruining the quality of the sound, of course, but it's handy be able to do this if you have one or two files that are a lot softer than the rest of the files in the same playlist. APL (talk) 01:25, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

• It won't help. It's meaningless at any volume. Looie496 (talk) 17:20, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

• Hello, Fête, you've posted many such requests in the past, and I doubt there is someone here who is prepared to optimize all the sound files you need fixing. You really need to learn to do this yourself! Download Audacity, and try it out. There are tutorials on YouTube. In the present case, there is little to gain by normalization, because the file is almost fully normalized. You'll need to use compression and/or hard limiting, followed by normalization. That will achieve the effect you want. Also, the file is a stereo recording with one silent track. Copying the contents of the track with sound to the silent track, will also help. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 19:44, 3 November 2013 (UTC)