A Ventrilo Compatible Client for Linux
News
First 1.1 Developer Snapshot Available
Dec 2nd
Along with our 1.0.0 release yesterday, we also posted the first 1.1 developer snapshot which contains some new features. This weekend, we hope to go through unscheduled trac tickets to assign features for the 1.1 milestone. If you have feature requests, now is the time to make them.
New features in the 1.1 snapshot are:
- Global Chat
- Phantom Support
- Interface changes to use less screen space (ability to hide the buttons and server information panel)
- Window size is remembered across restarts
- Per-server character set setting
- Remember channel passwords (only during current connection at present)
As always, developer snapshots can be found on the download page.
Mangler 1.0 officially released!
Dec 1st
Today marks the end of an interesting period full of research and development. On October the 4th, we promised to have a fully functional native Ventrilo client for Linux on the 1st of December. Now that the day has come, our users can finally decide if we have lived up to those expectations.
As always, our latest release can be downloaded from our download page. There is also an (incomplete) list of fixes and enhancements to be found on trac.
For the people that are wondering what is next:
- We will be working hard on our next version of Mangler which will bring several more enhancements and bugfixes. A release date for Mangler v1.1 will be announced in the near future.
- We have been experimenting with the Android platform and are successfully able to run our libventrilo3 library on top of an Android phone. Your feedback on this idea is always appreciated!
You may also be interested to know that we have (mostly) documented the libventrilo3 library. This should make it a lot easier for developers to build their custom software for the Ventrilo 3 protocol.
Last but not least, we would like to give credits to:
- All the people that reported bugs and made suggestions for improvements.
- Idlers in our IRC channels that gave us great company, feedback and debugging assistance.
- People involved in earlier research to the Ventrilo protocol, namely; the Spux Project and Luigi Auriemma. Mangler would not exist today if it wasn’t for these previous efforts.
- Package maintainers, designers, wiki editors, patch submitters, and anyone else that in any way contributed to Mangler!
Last RC before release — 1.0rc4 — is ready for testing
Nov 25th
With any luck, this is our last RC before release date. RC4 adds a couple of bug fixes and by popular request, a new feature.
Changes in RC4:
- Ability to copy comment and url to clipboard
- Hopefully fixed all temp bans on transmit. Please tell us if you’re still seeing these. We have only had a few reports of this problem, but I imagine this must have been widespread. If you’re getting banned from your server, we need to know about it.
- Do not attempt connections if we know required data is missing
Mangler makes its way into Portage!
Nov 22nd
Gentoo users can rejoice: it is no longer required to build Mangler from source manually.
Thanks to the efforts of Ben de Groot (yngwin), Mangler’s latest release candidate (1.0rc3) can now be found on portage. This makes Gentoo the first distribution to include Mangler in its official repositories!
If you’re feeling adventurous, there is also an ebuild available to automatically build from subversion trunk.
Instructions can, as always, be found on our download page.
1.0rc3 Is Available
Nov 21st
As I mentioned in the 1.0rc2 notes, RC3 will have a fix for users using Speex at 8kHz and 16kHz getting temporarily banned when they try to transmit. This is the only change in this version.
We finally identified an unknown value that we’ve been searching for a couple months now. This behavior would not have affected anyone connecting to a personal server. It seems that the bug Luigi reported in the official Ventrilo client was fixed for the hosting companies’ version of the server.
Problems With 1.0rc2
Nov 21st
A number of users reported problems with 1.0rc2 crashing whenever someone tried to talk. 1.0rc2.2 is now available for download which should correct this problem. My apologies for not catching this.
There have also been some reports about Mangler hanging when starting up. This is caused by errors reading the configuration file, but we cannot reproduce. If this is happening to you, you can remove your ~/.manglerrc file (save your server list information!) and start Mangler again. This will recreate the file.
Snapshot and Packages for 1.0rc2 Available
Nov 21st
Mangler 1.0rc2 is available today with some major bug fixes. Thanks to everyone that reported bugs from the 1.0rc1 release. The major bugs fixed are:
- Fixed a few pretty major memory leaks
- Properly implement password protected channel hierarchy (sub-channels are protected by parent channel passwords)
- Support servers that do not allow you to view the channel list
- Added PTT support for mouse buttons 8/9
- Added Gnome desktop information files and icons
- Increased the maximum amplification for per-user volume
- Fix for speex channel specific codec format changes
- Fixed a bug/crash in outbound speex codec processing
- Fixed the last transmit timestamp resetting on comment change or channel change
There is still a major issue on some Speex codec combinations that are causing issues. It is possible that — depending on your server codec — you can get temporarily banned by attempting a transmit. Unfortunately, the only way to get yourself unbanned is to restart the server. This issue is currently our highest priority. This only affects specific Speex codec formats and specific servers. For example, Speex @32khz Quality 10 is known to function normally. Speex @16khz Quality 5 is known to cause problems. Other formats may or may not work. When this problem is resolved, we will release rc3 immediately.
Mangler 1.0 Screencast Preview
Nov 11th
It’s almost time for Mangler 1.0rc1 to be released and we haven’t had a screencast in a while. So for those of you that have been waiting for a stable release, this is pretty much what 1.0 is going to look like.
New Features in SVN Since Halloween
Nov 7th
For those not following the Trac timeline, we’ve added a bunch of new features since the 10/31/2009 snapshot. Per-user volume control is done. We’ve fixed all ticking sounds in audio, and there’s notification sounds for various events now. There’s a number of bug fixes as well. We haven’t completed the server list window yet, but that should definitely be completed soon.
On November 13th, we’ll be releasing the next snapshot, which will be the first 1.0 release candidate with all of the new features.
Two Major Fixes Today
Oct 31st
The instant disconnects have been fixed thanks to Luigi. You should no longer get randomly disconnected when you connect to a server.
The next big bug fix is that users of newer versions of PulseAudio (including Ubuntu 9.10 users) should have stable audio now. The PulseAudio default latency changed a bit from the previous version to the new version, so now we set a specific latency on PulseAudio connections.
