Patch to enable stardict to play mp3 audio

It goes without saying the most popular and free extensible multilingual dictionary on Linux is stardict so far. However, failing to play back mp3 or other compressed audio recordings is a serious drawback which leads up to falling behind Lingoes on Windows. After looking inside the source code, it's a piece of cake to achieve such a requirement.

Why stardict doesn't support mp3 or other compressed audio playback? Two key restraints are hard-coded:

1. filename suffixes such as mp3 and ogg are filtered out.
2. gnome_sound_play() accepting only wav formats is called to play audio recordings.

A web post had exposed valid modifications to remove the above restrictions. After performing some verifications on the ubuntu Linux platform, the modifications are rewritten into a distributable form. To apply the changes step by step, all you need to do are:

1. download the source code stardict-3.0.1.tar.bz2
2. download stardict-3.0.1-mp3.patch and configure.ubuntu
3. tar jxf stardict-3.0.1.tar.bz2
4. cd stardict-3.0.1
5. patch -p1 < ../stardict-3.0.1-mp3.patch
6. chmod +x ../configure.ubuntu
7. ln -s ../configure.ubuntu
8. ./configure.ubuntu
9. make
10. sudo make install

That's all. But be careful:

• espeak should be installed before configuring stardict.
• stardict has been configured to play audio by an external command, e.g. mplayer which has to be installed beforehand.
• custom audio recordings need to be installed in the same form and location(i.e. /usr/share) specified by stardict.

FreedomHEC 2009 in Taiwan

It was a wonderful day in Taiwan since FreedomHEC 2009 did a great job! Many famous people including jserv, CIH, authors of Linux Device Drivers, etc. came together to share their inside thoughts about the latest open source development, the Linux kernel as well as the GPL-license issues.

This seminar ended with a remarkable panel discussion where what's wrong with the managers' head towards OSS licenses was questioned. Let me quote the viewpoints from my previous manager as references:

The most important thing for us small companies is how to survive today rather than to carefully clarify the license issues. We never take OSS licence issues into consideration until we become large companies such as Linksys one day at length.

Sad! But I think it is generally true that the number of license issues, especially GPL-violations, caused by millions of small companies over and over again is far more than those so-called large companies while what the the gpl-violations.org can focuses on are only those companies with names known by people.

Finally, I raised a question which aroused completely different opinions among the leading kernel developers:

Android is Hot in recent years. What are your opinions about the modifications on the Android platform by Google? Can it be viewed as a progress for a compromise between open sources and commercial markets?

For most people, the answer may depends on whether or not the Android platform will achieve great success. Just wait and see.