Tech Thoughts

Powerbook G4 Audio Problems

2012-01-25T20:33:00.000-08:00

Well I've just been having a frustrating time with my 1ghz Powerbook G4, which I've only had for a short time. My cheapo iPod dock broke and I've started using the Powerbook instead with the iPod connected via USB. This worked fine for a couple of nights but now audio keeps stuttering and stopping, no matter which music player I've tried. I thought it might be because the iPod is attached to slow USB 1.1 but ruled that out after copying the music to the hard drive. It's not the audio leads or headphones, there must be something wrong with the 'books socket or it's onboard soundcard. Highly annoying, I think I'm going to try Xubuntu PowerPC on it to rule out OSX problems (Download PowerPC 'buntu versions of 10.0.4 here). I have at least rediscovered which players I can still use on OSX. I tried the stable version of Vox, the new version does not work on PowerPC), VLC, and my new favourite, Cog. Cog is very lightweight, probably the lightest of them all and has better music management than Vox. I'm now using my older 667Mhz Powerbook for music for the time being.

Tech Thoughts Now Has a Google+ Page!

2012-01-09T09:23:00.000-08:00

Now you can follow Tech Thoughts on Google+ and you'll be kept posted of new blogposts and tech news.

My HTC Hero Feels Like New Again!

2012-01-08T20:52:00.000-08:00

I have recently reinstalled CyanogenMod 7 on my HTC Hero, since it was so bogged down with background apps that the battery life was about 4 hours! It now feels like a new phone again and I've held back on the amount of apps that run in the background, and I have not installed Facebook or Twitter as I can kill two birds with one app by using Seesmic, which is less resource hungry than either of them. I'm also using the lightest launcher I could find, Zeam, which does what I need it to do. I like the way the dock works on it, having six visible items plus more that are hidden.

Apps wise I've switched from Cubed to PowerAmp, which runs much more smoothly on my Hero and has some nice features, it always pauses when I remove the headphones and to skip tracks you swipe back or forth on the album art.

QuickPic is now my preferred photo viewer, as it is nice and quick, and works well. I've also added a few more interesting apps like TransDroid torrent client which I use to access Deluge on my server. You can add, delete, pause and search for torrents and can also access Transmission amongst many other clients. I've also found some great remote access app like AirDroid that allows you to control your phone via web browser on your PC and Droid VNC Server for VNCing into your phone! Also another great app for managing apps and settings is Elixir 2.

HTC Hero - My First Android Phone

2011-11-05T17:00:00.000-07:00

Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me....yes it's my birthday and this HTC Hero is my main present, it's also my first proper smartphone (my previous phone being a Samsung Monte S5620) and it's my first Android phone. Don't worry, I've scheduled this post and I'm really out having fun and hopefully I'm fairly merry right about now! Oh and sorry about the quality of the photo, took it in low light on my Monte.

I've actually had it for a week or so now and I love it! When I first got it, I played with the stock HTC version of Android for a bit, but found it a bit limiting settings-wise and me being a tinkerer and Linux user, I wanted to have a good rummage and tweak! I tried a few different alternative firmwares starting with Cyanogenmod and finally settled on VillainROM. It's based on Cyan but has the Google apps included by default and has some extra tweaks, including LauncherPro installed by default. The only thing I miss from the original firmware is part of HTC Sense, that nice weather widget that shows drops of rain and a wiper when it rains!

Here's what I love about my Android phone so far:

Being able to customise almost everything! Almost every little thing about the OS is tweakable! (though I do forget how I've done things sometimes!)

Ability to disable mobile data and just use WIFI, this is important for me as I'm on Pay As You Go, and as far as I know, this isn't possible on the iPhone. (Update: Is possible on iPhone 3GS, 4, and 4S) On my previous phone some apps would turn on the 3G without asking, sapping my credit.

Install apps from Android Market using the browser on my computer, as well as on the phone itself, so it's very convenient and easy to keep track of what's installed. AppBrain is another useful site to discover new and interesting apps to install through their app that connects to Market and gives more info and stats for apps I also like being able to install single apps from other places. It's also quite handy to upload the odd app to Dropbox for install on the phone via the Dropbox app.

Store Apps on MicroSD card. This is a great feature of Android. It saves on onboard memory enabling me to have over 70 apps!

Gmail app - It's such a good app that I pretty much only check my emails on my phone now, I haven't opened Thunderbird in days!

Uploading photos as soon as they are taken. The Hero has a reasonable 5MP camera and I like the convenience of not having to connect via USB to upload my photos. They automatically upload to Google, but I also use the UbuntuOne app that also uploads automatically as soon as I get a connection, very handy!

Enable Quiet Hours. I don't know whether this is available on iOS, Blackberry etc, but this is a great feature, it means that no one can wake me up in the middle of the night by calling me but I'll hear it ring when it gets to a reasonable time

Favourite apps:

Tomdroid: Android version of Tomboy that I use on Ubuntu. Although you cannot edit the notes on the phone, it is still handy to have access to them.

Dropbox, UbuntuOne, and Wuala: 3 very useful apps for accesssing online storage.

TaskOS: Shopping list type app that syncs with Google Tasks. This along with the Google Calendar app have replaced my Palm Tungsten for keeping appointments, shopping list etc.

Quickmark: The nicest free bar code scanner that I've tried so far.

Cubed: Music player that has a great coverflow-style view option for flicking through albums, scrobbling to Last.fm (via either Scrobble Droid or Simple Last.fm Scrobbler) and good album art support. It can use local or embedded art or download it. And of course, like a lot of Android players it supports Ogg and FLAC aswell as the usual Mp3 and AAC. I prefer not to use AAC as it seems it's tags are not supported on Android. I also quite like the Songbird Android app but it doesn't have any way to manually add or change album art.

And many more!
Google+, Reddit Mobile, Overlook Fing (awesome network info tool), ConnectBot and sshdroid ssh client and server, Wifi Analyzer, Maverick (another wifi tool for wardriving), Android VNC, SCDB (warns of speed cameras), ElectroDroid (gives pin outs for electrical cables, conversion tools etc). These are just some of the apps I have installed, you can see all of them on AppBrain.

All the apps I've listed here are all free on the Android Market. If you have any suggestions of interesting and useful apps please feel free to mention them in the comments.

Update 01/12/11
I've replaced LauncherPro, which comes with Villainrom, and handles the desktop, with GoLauncher as it has nicer options and seems more responsive and less inclined to crash. I've also just installed Beautiful Widgets (which can be had from GetJar for free) as it has clock and weather widgets much like HTC Sense has.

Ubuntu 11.10: The Good, The Bad and The Unity (Revisited)

2011-10-14T17:41:00.000-07:00

Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) is now out, and since I needed to change the hard drive on my Dell latitude D505 (the previous one having serious errors) I thought I'd try a fresh install of Oneiric. The LiveCD installer feels more polished than ever before, so the install started on a positive note.

One neat feature is a new screen that gives you the choice of a fresh install, install alongside and now also offered an upgrade from 10.0.4 to 11.10 which used to be not possible unless you installed the inbetween releases too. You used to be only able to skip versions by upgrading from LTS to LTS. The install was speedy as usual, even on this Pentium M 1.6ghz laptop with a Gig of RAM and slow 4200rpm 30GB hard drive.

Once the install completed, I rebooted, or rather i tried to, for some reason it hung on the shutdown. I had to force to power off and start it up again. Some blank screen and a nice Ubuntu logo and then a swish new login screen greeted me. Looks great but it's yet another login screen i have to get used to, after going from GDM to GDM2 then this, LightDM. This probably won't bother new users, however who may appreciate the eye candy but it's annoying to keep having to relearn how to edit and tweak it each time! For instance I prefer to not have the users names on the login screen, it's more secure, one more thing for a thief to guess.
Update: How to hide user list in LightDM

This release comes with the latest Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird is now default mail client in 11.10, instead of Evolution, and I actually really like it now! It actually works very well, much better than it used to, so much that I may not even install my previously favourite, Evolution. It looks great and it helps that Thunderbird is also my default mail client on my Powerbook G4.

Also on the good side of things, Software Centre looks better, more polished, and works just fine. On the bad side of things, UbuntuOne sync is refusing to sync my Tomboy Notes. File syncing works fine but I really rely on Tomboy Notes being synced, it's ideal for planning my blogposts. This is especially annoying as Tomboy syncing was working fine in previous releases! Another bug I notice for some reason Dropbox doesn't seem to be integrated into nautilus anymore, whether this is an incompatibility with Oneiric or something else I'm not sure.
Update: Oddly this only occurred on a fresh install, worked fine on upgrade from 11.0.4 to 11.10 after deleting the dropbox-dist folders.

Sadly the most annoying change in this release is the lack of a "Gnome Classic" login by default. It is possible to install it, as in this post, but it's more like Gnome3 Fallback which, as I've mentioned in a previous blogpost, I'm also not keen on this either! It just isn't quite like Gnome2 enough.

As I've said in a previous post, I'm not keen on Unity, it really stifles my productivity! I like being able to see and use more than one app at the same time and if i wanted a big-buttoned tablet-optimized interface I'd use a tablet OS like Android!

Thankfully, there is another option.....

Xubuntu To The Rescue!

After putting up with Unity for around 30mins, I could take no more, I installed the Xubuntu desktop (sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop). I have not used XFCE in awhile and was quite surprised how much smoother and slicker it is. It feels like a much more traditional, saner desktop that Unity/Gnome Shell. Some things are still a little confusing at first like adding items to panels. You have to right click, add items, add a launcher, then right click the launcher, add item, search for the app(s) you want and add them. Xubuntu by default uses two panels, the top one has the XFCE menu, open apps, and Indicator tray, MeMenu, clock and session menu. The lower panel is set up like a dock that auto-hides and is set translucent. it's really quite attractive and there are plenty of nice themes. XFCE's System info in Settings looks and works much better than it used to, such as the Background settings allows a different wallpaper each time you log on. I used to use (now defunct) wallpaper-tray app for this on Gnome2.

Update: Although XFCE's default file manager, Thunar, isn't bad, I've switched to nautilus which you can change in the Settings Manager. I've also switched from the painfully slow Ristretto, XFCE's default image viewer, to Gthumb.

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Conclusion

To me, this release is more of a polished version of 11.0.4, but with the disadvantage of not having the Gnome2 login option, and being stuck with Unity. So those who like Unity in 11.0.4 will probably love this release but for those who don't, like me, this release is merely another reason to switch to Xubuntu or another distro. I'm quite happy with Xubuntu for now, as Linus Torvalds said, "it's a step down from Gnome2 but a step up from Gnome3" and it's certainly a step up from the Unity interface!

Using an Apple Powerbook G4 in 2011

2011-09-27T21:15:00.000-07:00

Having recently acquired a 667Mhz "TiBook" Powerbook G4, I set about bringing it up to date, software-wise. The previous owner has already maxed out the RAM to 1GB and installed a faster, 60GB, hard drive. Most Tibook's have a DVD ROM or combo drive, but mine has the optional CD writer. It arrived with OSX Panther installed, so using a Firewire DVD writer, I did a fresh install of Leopard using Leopard Assist to get around it's 867Mhz minimum requirement. It tricks the Open Firmware into reporting 933Mhz to the OS. Once complete, this can be reset by resetting the PRAM and NVRAM.

It's surprising how usable how this 9 year Powerbook is for every day use. I mainly use it for general web browsing and with MIDI music software. Native Instruments B4 (Hammond organ emulator) works perfectly with no lag using a USB (1.0!) MIDI keyboard with the onboard audio (on a PC, with Windows, I had to install a Creative Soundblaster Audigy2). The only problem these days is finding apps that still work with PowerPC Macs, thankfully there are quite a few free and/or open source apps around, here's the main free apps I use:

Web Browser: TenFourFox
For web browsing, Firefox and Opera no longer support PowerPC Macs. Luckily, there's TenFourFox, an upto date version of Firefox for older G3 and G4 Macs, of course there's still Safari, however although it's quick, I don't find it as useful and my favourite add-ons are not available for it.

E-mail: Thunderbird
I'm not that keen on Apple Mail, I prefer Mozilla Thunderbird. Since the latest version does not support PPC, I'm using version 3.1.15. I've also tried Eudora but I find Thunderbird easier to use.

Instant Messenger: Adium
Adium uses the libpurple core of Pidgin to support multiple IM networks. I also use Skype which still currently supports PowerPC Macs.

Twitter Client (Updated): YoruFukurou (NightOwl)
This was the hardest thing to find. Since the last Authocalypse, there are very few Twitter clients left standing that still run on PowerPC Macs, particularly native clients. I had settled on Syrinx donation-ware, and i found it thanks to this blogpost. However due to lack of RT or Retweet in the app, I've been looking for alternatives and I've now found YoruFukurou which is a much nicer, more usable app. Unlike Syrinx, NightOwl has real time updates, multiple accounts, it's what you'd call fully featured!

YouTube: MacTubes
Probably one of the best YouTube viewing/downloading apps I've used, MacTubes is a very useful app (especially if/when Flash on PPC becomes unavailable in the browser).

Video Player: VLC
Quicktime stutters with downloaded YouTube videos, that play perfectly in VLC Media Player which also happens to pretty much play anything!

iTunes Alternative: Vox
iTunes is OK on OSX, but for when I need a quick, lightweight music player there's Vox which can play much more than iTunes, including FLAC, Musepack, Monkey's Audio, OGG Vorbis, and many others. It can even export to AAC, AIFF, Apple Lossless, NeXT/Sun and WAV.

VNC Client: Chicken Of VNC
Chicken Of VNC is a fast, lightweight VNC client for OSX.

Music Player Daemon Client: Theremin
For accessing music on a server, Music Player Daemon or MPD is very useful and has plenty of clients. My favourite client for OSX is Theremin (named after the groovy hand-waiving instrument).

CD Ripper: Max
For me there's only one real choice of decent CD ripper on OSX, and that's Max.

Mp3 tag Editor: MusicBrainz Picard
Picard is one of the only tag editors I could find that still supports PowerPC with a Universal Binary.

Office Suite: LibreOffice
LibreOffice is the free open source cross-platform office suite based on OpenOffice, I also considered NeoOffice although their latest PowerPC version is not as upto date as their Intel Mac version.

Audio Editor: Audacity
Audacity is possibly the best free audio editor available for all Mac, Windows or Linux and there is a Universal binary available for OSX.

Overall, I'm rather pleased with my Powerbook, it's just about quick enough for most basic stuff and I've been using it as my main laptop since I got it. It's lighter, thinner, more comfortable and has a nicer screen than my other main workhorse laptop, my 1.6ghz Dell latitude D505. I also like the way the Powerbook suspends and resumes perfectly. Don't get me wrong, I still love Linux and I love my Ubuntu desktop machine! I'd almost consider dual booting with Linux on the Powerbook if it wasn't the lack of flash browser plugins for PPC Linux. Also I still miss Hotot which is only available natively in Linux or as a Chrome/Chromium app (which won't run on PPC OSX).

A HP dc7800 And A Stubborn Card Reader

2011-09-12T17:08:00.001-07:00

Since my home-built PC's cheapo Asrock Alive VSTA AM2 motherboard seemed to be dieing a slow death (one of it's 2 RAM slots having already failed) I needed a replacement. Not having enough money to replace the motherboard and/or CPU, I chanced upon a bargain, an ultra low priced HP dc7800. Although it's not brand new, this machine is still a beast, built solidly and is powerful enough for my liking. It has an E6750 Core 2 Duo CPU (2.66 GHz, 4 MB L2 cache, 1333 MHz FSB) and can take up to 8GB of RAM in it's 4 slots. Since my old boards one remaining slot supported only 4GB and I only had 2GB DDR2 sticks, this was a nice upgrade. So I installed all the DDR2 I had, 2x 2GB and 2x 1GB, for an awesome 6GB of RAM, this machine runs Ubuntu much smoother and gives me enough oomph for some VirtualBox virtual machines. Also, unlike my old board, this has plenty of PCI/PCI-Express slots.

I installed my Nvidia 8400GS graphics card (connected to 19" 16:10 Acer and 19" 4:3 HP monitors), along with the 1TB SATA and 200GB IDE hard disks from my old rig. I also added an 80GB SATA too for extra space. I had to use adapters in the optical drive slots, since I only have one set of "isolation mounting" screws for the two quick change hard drive bays. I also needed to enable VTx and VTd in BIOS. This can be found hidden away in Security, System Security, enable VTx and VTD. Press F10 to save and we're done.

Naturally, once I set the right boot devices in the bios, Ubuntu 10.0.4 (64 bit) booted straight away without any real problems, I just had to do 'sudo sensors-detect' to get lm-sensors to find the new temperature monitors onboard this new rig.

I've been using an external USB card reader for awhile and wanted a tidier, internal reader instead. Having had one lying about in spares for awhile I thought I'd fit it into my 'new' HP dc7800. This turned out to be easier said than done! The floppy bay on the dc7800 only locks a drive in place if the screw holes are in the right place, and the ones on the card reader are nowhere near the right place. After a lot of swearing and sliced fingers, and having accidentally got the reader stuck too far back several times and having a nightmare removing it again, I had a MacGyver moment! I had to put something between the first locating screw and one of the metal guides and found this weird metal ring that was just the job, using the spare screws nearby to lock it in place.

Then I connected the reader to internal USB connectors. After I put everything back together and licked my sharp-PC-case-related wounds, I tried it out with my 4GB SD card from my camera. Nothing. Turns out this card reader was made before the introduction of SDHC cards! Typical! I think I learnt a vital lesson here, fully test a component before MacGyvering it into ones PC's case! I'm still very pleased with this machine and it should serve me well for awhile. One day I'd like to max out the RAM to 8GB and install a decent card reader!

5 Great Linux Music Player Daemon Clients

2011-08-18T19:39:00.000-07:00

Music Player Daemon is a server-side music playing application which means it can be controlled over a network or locally using desktop apps. I've covered MPD before and I thought I'd expand on it since I have recently rediscovered how useful it really is. I like how you can control it from anywhere, the desktop, web, phone etc, and it has gapless playback and light resource usage. There's a massive amount of clients to control MPD, these are my favourites: (although some of these are essentially platform independent, I've focused on those that work on/with Linux)

Ario

My favourite desktop client is Ario, which runs on various UNIX/Linux desktops, and also Mac (using Fink) and Windows. It can find covers in the directory, amazon or Last.fm and can also 'scrobble' tracks to Last.fm too, though I usually use a server-based scrobbler such as mpdscrobble. It has a nice tray icon for controls and I find it the most usable of the desktop clients.

Client 175

Client 175 is a browser based client that looks and acts like a desktop one. Make sure you have python-json installed and then download the latest Client175, then extract it (I used ~/home/carl/apps/client175) then you can run it from the command line with "python ~/apps/client175/server.py" (without the qoutes, obviously). To make it run as soon as my computer logs in, I added that command to Gnome's Startup Applications (System, Preferences), though there is a more complicated, proper way to do that here.

PhpMpReloaded

PhpMpReloaded is essentially a collection of basic web clients in one package and can be especially useful for browsing on basic low resource web browsers.

Maemo Music Player Client

MMPC is a version of the Gnome Music Player Client, with a focus on maximising screen usage and touchscreen usability. I have it running on my Nokia N800:

BitMPC

BitMPC is the only client that I cannot try myself at the moment since I don't have an Android device to try it on (donations welcome!) but I thought I'd include it anyway since I know many Android users who would find it useful. Also worth a try is PMix.

Classic Computers In Only Fools And Horses Episodes

2011-08-08T17:57:00.000-07:00

I've recently started watching the entire Only Fools And Horses box set from beginning to end. Not only is it a brilliant sitcom but it also often captures the time it was made very well, such as in the Yuppy era of the late 80s. I've watched them many times but have only now started spotting all the old computers and tech.

In the 1987 Christmas special, "A Frog's Legacy", Del Boy has a consignment of hooky computers, badged Raja 2000 but actually ~~BBC Model B's~~ a BBC Master in a 3rd party Viglen case, (thanks to Andy Taylor for the info) Del flogs one to a vicar.

In 'Yuppy Love' (1989), Rodney goes on a computer Diploma course and here he's using an Amstrad cpc 6128, with green screen, the "best 8 bit computer ever!" according to Andy Taylor of Retro Computers, who kindly identified it for me.

Rodney eventually gets a job working for Cassandra's dad, Alan, in an office. In "The Jolly Boys Outing", Rodney's having a bit of trouble with his ~~Apple SE/30~~, Apple Macintosh SE (thanks David), he keeps wiping out his spreadsheets! Both he and his colleague (played by Alan Hunter, who is now Max Branning in Eastenders) both have SE/30's on their desks.

I will keep updating this post when I spot more old computers in later episodes.

Wuala - A Dropbox Alternative

2011-07-13T20:42:00.000-07:00

Since my Dropbox is pretty full (I'm using nearly all of my 4.4GB of storage) I'm always on the look-out for alternative file syncing apps, so I was intrigued when a fellow Google+ member mentioned Wuala by hardware storage makers Lacie. Just like Dropbox, it's cross-platform, it runs on Linux, OSX, Windows, iPhone and Android. Wuala is available for most distros and installation on Ubuntu went without a hitch with the Deb package. After installing you'll find the it in the 'Internet' menu. I found I had to manually add it to the Startup Applications by making a panel shortcut then dragging and dropping that into it. Also, thanks to the Wuala team on Twitter, I've now found out that to make the app minimise on startup, on Linux, edit the item so the command reads: 'wuala -silent'. On OSX, add a line with ' silent ' to wuala.cfg found in ~/Library/Application Support/Wuala/.

The app itself is Java based and feels a bit bulky (at least on my Dell Latitude D505), but is functional enough, though for adding files I found it quicker to drag and drop with nautilus. By default the files are in /home/user/WualaDrive/wualausername but you can change this in the app's Preferences. There is also web access through an in browser Java app, which I didn't have much luck with on Firefox (it crashed) or Chrome/Chromium (it either didn't work or was very sluggish. Dropbox has the advantage here, with their much slicker web interface.

The Initial 1GB free storage is stingy considering Dropbox, UbuntuOne and others offer 2GB free from the start, although you can start with 2GB if you follow a referral link. Perhaps my connection was a bit busy, but it seemed to take a long time to upload a small number of photos. You can tweak the upload/download limits if needed, but one thing I like in Dropbox is LAN syncing, where by it will sync between PCs on the LAN, reducing internet upload/download usage, good for those with monthly limits. Edit 05/01/12 You now get 2GB, 3GB with referrals with Wuala, bringing it into line with Dropbox and UbuntuOne.

Just like Dropbox, you can get more free storage by inviting others (up to 3GB, compared with upto 10GB with invites on Dropbox). You can also temporarily boost your Wuala storage with promo codes, which unfortunately only last for a year. I wonder how things go when they run out. Unlike Dropbox there is also a third option of trading some of your local disk space to gain more online storage, this I have yet to try since your computer has to be running for at least 17% (4hrs) of the day. Security wise, "All files get encrypted and are stored redundantly. No one unauthorized - not even Wuala as the provider - can access the files." "Every file is encrypted with a different key. The list of these keys is encrypted with your password and stored on our server. Your own password is very important here: it never leaves your computer, so we do not know it. Hence, not even we can access your data." Hopefully, this means not even the FBI can access your files...

Conclusion
Wuala is pretty good, considering it is still in beta, but I really would like LAN syncing and a larger initial storage would be nice and they need to make the app start and minimize on login. Oh and at the moment if you change a file it uploads the entire file again, unlike Dropbox, though apparently this will be implemented soon. Overall, this is one sync solution I'll be keeping an eye on. Thanks to Shaun Mallette on Google+ for telling me about the program.

Foresight Linux (Review - Updated)

2011-06-06T06:27:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to try installing Foresight Linux for awhile. Their focus for the distro is to be an "intuitive user interface and a showcase of the latest desktop software". Several install DVDs are available for download with KDE, XFCE or Gnome desktops. I chose the Gnome version. After a successful test in Virtualbox, I installed it on my Toshiba 6100 (1.6Ghz, 512MB RAM, 20GB HDD) laptop.

Installation

Even on this modest hardware, the install was pretty fast for a non-live DVD install, taking only around 15 mins using a modified version of Anaconda, the installer used by Red Hat/Fedora. The partitioning and user setup is all fairly user-friendly. Foresight uses sudo for admin duties and no logging in as root, just like Ubuntu. Unlike other distros, there's a choice of EXTLINUX or GRUB as a bootloader. I chose GRUB since I am more familiar with it and I know to fix it.

First Impressions

After install and a fairly quick boot that looks like a green version of the Fedora Plymouth boot screen, there's the usual GDM login screen following by a fairly standard Gnome 2 desktop, the default green theme reminds me a little of Gnox, a long defunct Slackware live CD I used to like awhile back. I'm not sure about the combination of all the green but with blue icons but there are plenty of icons are already installed, including all the Faenza ones so plenty of theme choices.

Software

Foresight seems to be fairly light on resources, similar speed to Debian or Slackware. There's a user guide in the System menu and an interesting choice of default applications. Skype, Pidgin, F-Spot, Banshee, Totem, Mplayer and Gnome Mplayer, OpenOffice, Gnome Do, Evolution, Ekiga, Firefox (4.0.1 after updates), Tomboy Notes, Dia, Inkscape, and GIMP amongst others. Wireless networking works out-the-box as Foresight already has madwifi, intel wireless drivers, and ndiswrapper installed which should be useful for those with tricky wireless hardware. Adobe Flash is already installed too.

Unfortunately there is no graphical package manager installed by default, and is the only real criticism I have of this distro. Foresight use a package manager called Conary, which is similar to apt-get. To install applications do 'sudo conary update appname' and to remove apps do 'sudo conary erase packagename' and for updates do 'sudo conary updateall'. It is slightly odd using 'update' to install programs, you would of thought it would use 'install' instead of 'update'.
According to the documentation, "updates are faster as Conary only downloads the updates to the file, and doesn't require a full binary for download."

Update (07-06-11) As has been pointed out in the comments, one unique feature of Conary is the ability to rollback or undo any update to any point between first and last update. To rollback one update do "sudo conary rollback 1" and to see what can be rolled back do "sudo conary rblist" Conary also has a 'repair' function along with quite a few others which you can read about in the Conary manual.

Desktop Effects

One of the most useful parts of Foresight is the custom config tool for desktop effects: System, Preferences, Desktop Effects. Then for fine tuning there's also Simple CompizConfig Settings Manager and the usual Compiz Config Settings Manager. Emerald Theme Manager is also installed.

Conclusion

Overall I quite like Foresight Linux, it's fairly quick and easy to install and has some useful features like the afore mentioned Desktop Effects tool and the unique Conary option to rollback and repair packages. If it had a graphical package manager already installed I'd recommend this distro to the average user, but as it is I'd say if you are fairly confident on the commandline this is a fairly good distro.

My Nokia N800

2011-05-31T18:45:00.000-07:00

I've recently purchased a Nokia N800 Wi-Fi-only internet tablet. I've wanted one for quite some time since I read an article in Linux Magazine on it when it was originally released back in 2007.

This one has been very well looked after, boxed, has a spare stylus, original paperwork and original 128MB memory card. Of course the first thing I did was replace that with a couple of 2GB SD cards (it takes one internally and one externally, up to 32Gb each). I haven't fully tested the battery life on it yet but it seems pretty good.

The N800 runs Maemo, a Debian based OS that Nokia used to use all the time on it's phones. It has the 2008 OS and third party repositories installed. It's built in Application Manager reminds me of that of a 'proper' Linux distro and of course it already had an X terminal installed. Since it's based on open source software there is still a thriving community for apps and mods for Maemo devices.

My favourite app for it by far is Pidgin (instant messenger), it's great to having it on all my Linux PCs (along with Adium on my Macs) and my N800. There are also various useful plugins for it in the package manager. You can also install apps using apt and dpkg just like a Linux distro.

I also love the built-in email app, it was easy to setup Gmail with IMAP and I like the way it notifies of new messages in the left panel and by flashing the 4-way pad blue, although I couldn't quite get GMX to work with it. The N800's web browser is based on Mozilla and works pretty well, and I've had no problems browsing my usual sites. It's perfectly happy browsing quite a few full sites too, like Facebook, rather than the mobile version . It also came with Skype for it's built in VGA camera which pops out the left-hand side of the unit and swivels 180 degrees. For video playback though, Mplayer is far better than the old media player it comes with, as it plays higher quality videos and newer codecs with ease. Other useful apps (along with many others) I have installed are VNC Viewer, ssh, gFTP, x11VNC, mCalendar, MediaBox and Canola (two very swish media suites) most of which can be installed either from maemo.org or from the App Manager on the device.

I'm very pleased with it to say the least, it's what I've always wanted and it suits me nicely since I don't use 3G and always wanted a portable Linux device for Pidgin, VNC and ssh, the only thing that's missing is a usable Twitter client since most of the ones that are around have fallen because of the oAuth-apocalypse.

Attempting To Make Gnome 3 Fallback More Usable In Fedora 15 (updated)

2011-05-29T15:11:00.000-07:00

I recently upgraded the hard drive on my Dell Latitude D505 from 30Gb to 60GB, so I thought i'd try Fedora 15. I had F14 on the 30GB and it worked OK but certain things were annoying me like not being able to get Hotot to work properly (I basically had to run it without installing it, which was awkward). Anyway, I installed Fedora 15 using the full DVD version, since it offers more options. After setting up user accounts, and first login I was expecting to login to a beautiful Gnome 3 desktop, however I'm now stuck with Gnome Fallback, as apparently my system isn't good enough for it. This I find strange since I should have hardware acceleration, and for playing video I do. I've found a number of things I miss from Gnome 2.

Here's what I miss from Gnome 2 and any fixes and workarounds I'm using.

1. Startup Applications missing from the Gnome menu.

Workaround: Ctrl + F2 and run 'gnome-session-properties' (I found this here) Edit: You can re-enable it using alacarte (yum install alacarte) and navigate to System, Preferences, and tick in the relevant box. Why this was disabled in the first place baffles me.

2. Unable to add applications or applets to the Gnome panels.

Workaround: Since I needed quick access to my favourite apps, I installed Cairo Dock with these instructions.

Although you have to add apps from within Cairo Dock by right clicking an item then 'Add' then 'Custom Launcher' since you can no longer drag and drop apps from the Gnome menu.

3. Poor quality fonts and there seems to be no appearance settings in the main menus.

There doesn't seem to be any way of changing the fonts in Googsystray, it looked so much better in Gnome2. Edit: I've found Gnome Tweak Tool (yum install gnome-tweak-tool) to change fonts, it can also change other things like icons, titlebars etc .

3. Seemingly no customisation options for the Login screen. I want to remove the user lists but can't even with gconf-editor.

4. Dialogue boxes open way too large and don't fit-to-screen which makes apply buttons and options off screen on my 1024x786 resolution desktop. Also some dialigue boxes keep popping up under the window I am using when they should appear on top.

Here is how my Gnome 3 desktop looks at the moment:

Some things I like about Fedora 15

1. Fast booting and shutting down - it shuts down in only a few seconds and boots pretty quick (although sometimes I think it does a fsck without notifying me).

2. Yum package manager seems to be slightly faster with less messing up, although it's still not as fast or as tidy as apt in Debian/Ubuntu.

3. Despite the usability problems, it does look good, it just needs plenty of bugfixes and smoothing of the rough edges. As usual, every Fedora release seems to be an alpha or beta for RHEL at the expense of the average home user's experience with the distro.

4. Some of the apps that didn't work in F14 now do work in F15 such as Hotot.

If you have any fixes or workarounds for the problems I have been having here then please do mention them in the comments below.

Update 05/06/11
I have wiped Fedora 15 out having tried that for awhile and thought I'd try out the iQunix re-mix of Ubuntu 11.0.4 (with Medibuntu repos already installed and a bare minimal Gnome desktop) and surprisingly it actually works without any modifications to GRUB. The most annoying thing about Gnome3, that was the final straw, was the wallpaper kept changing to 'scale' every time I switched desktops, every time I tried to change it, it would change back on the next switch or next login - highly frustrating! Oh and also it's impossible to disable the screensaver, you have to uninstall it!

Update 27/10/11
I've now done a clean install on a 'new' hard drive with Ubuntu 11.10, see my review here.

My brief flirtation with the Kubuntu 11.0.4 KDE4 desktop

2011-05-18T19:00:00.000-07:00

I used to love KDE, back when I first used Linux, in the KDE 3.5 days. After a brief flirtation with Red Hat 9, I used many distos with the KDE desktop such as Mepis and Vectorlinux (a Slackware derivative) and last of all Kubuntu, until KDE 4.0 was released. I got tired of KDE since the KDE 3.x on Kubuntu at the time was getting buggy so I switched to Gnome and have used it ever since. Just recently with all the Unity stuff going on quite a few users have been trying out KDE4 again. So, just on a whim, maybe just out of boredom, I thought I'd try the KDE4 desktop.

Installing KDE4 on the Ubuntu desktop only took about an 80MB download and not long to install using sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop. I selected GDM when prompted since that's what I prefer, rather than KDM. After a short time I logged out of 'Ubuntu Classic' and into the Kubuntu desktop. Login took what seemed like a long time and with many errors, such as the the desktop effects were 'too slow' and so were disabled, strange since compiz works perfectly fine on Gnome 'Classic'. I had to wait awhile for the messages to subside and I noticed when I ran Kopete, I had no net access. I did not see an error message for this and couldn't see a tray applet. The tray looks pretty cluttered and messy. I had to scour the menu and search for 'network' and after several goes I found the KDE network config tool that I needed, which is a sizeable thing just to configure my network. It worked though. I also had to deal with the "KDE Wallet" which I've always hated since the KDE3.x days!

I managed to get my wobbly windows back by enabling effects with "ALT+Shift+F12" and they were OK, also it did not seem obvious how to change the default KDE4 theme, since the grey looks a bit tacky. Talking of shortcuts, my laptops Fn keys didn't work, as i wanted to lower the screen brightness, they work just fine in Gnome. I also found the widgets and 'new activity' thing a bit confusing at first. I added a few widgets and liked the Facebook widget. A lot of widgets look a bit big, at least in their default size on my small screen. I do like the way you download widgets without having to go to a web page in the browser. I don't like the default browser, Rekonq, it's a bit too minimalist for my liking even more so than Chromium which is OK for a quick browse but I'm mainly a Firefox 4 user.

My overall impression of KDE4 is that it's a bit messy and cluttered, at last on a 12 inch screen. Settings and buttons seem to be all over the place. I'm also not keen on that main menu, not helped by it's resemblance to the menu that Suse introduced. Perhaps a fresh install might have avoided the numerous errors I was getting but in the end I removed the Kubuntu desktop and went back to Gnome after about 30 minutes of KDE4. To remove KDE4 completely I followed the instructions at the bottom of this page.

Synchronize Tomboy Notes With UbuntuOne on Fedora and other Linux Distros

2011-05-14T16:23:00.000-07:00

Having installed Fedora 14 on my Dell Latitude (after finding Ubuntu had issues with the i915 graphics, causing freeze-ups and random reboots) I was only missing a couple of little things I liked from Ubuntu. Firstly I really like the Hotot Twitter client but I cannot get it to run properly in Fedora, and have resorted to using the Chrome/Chromium App version for now. Secondly I missed having my Tomboy notes synced with UbuntuOne. Now this I was able to resolve with the following steps. The steps to set-up Tomboy Notes on Ubuntu can be found here. These steps are similar but with some slight modifications.

1. First install Tomboy as root if it is not already installed with "yum install tomboy" or selecting it in System, Add/Remove Software and clicking Apply.

2. Run Tomboy Notes either from the menu or a run dialogue with tomboy.

3. In Tomboy, go to Edit, Preferences, Synchronisation

4. In the Service drop-down box, select Tomboy Web

5. In Server, type: https://one.ubuntu.com/notes/

6. Select Connect and it will open a browser for it to authenticate in UbuntuOne, you may need to login and you'll need to give it name.

7. If all is well you should be able to click Synchronise and we're done :)

Unity, The Future Of Ubuntu And The Alternatives

2011-05-03T18:37:00.000-07:00

I've used Linux since around 2003, starting with Red Hat 9 and early Fedora Core, followed by Mepis and various other distros until I finally settled on Ubuntu (7.10 at the time). It was the first distro that I found to be easy to install and use. Codecs, graphics card drivers and the browser flash plugin all installed smoothly and automatically and it worked so well on my computers. With only minor hiccups along the way, Ubuntu kept getting better and better. I felt that nearly every release had something interesting and was stable. I generally stuck with 8.0.4 LTS for a long time on my main desktop and servers, but experimented a bit more on my laptops. For me 10.0.4 LTS was a landmark release, and still my current favourite distro. 10.10 added extra features but was still just as stable as 10.0.4, which is why I was so disappointed with 11.0.4.

Ubuntu 11.0.4 and Unity

I was already a little worried even before 11.0.4 was released, having watched from a distance as Unity was being developed and then what The Register described as "the worst beta Ubuntu ever" I was really hoping Canonical could get it sorted for release day. As you may have read in my review, I found only a little I could really praise about 11.0.4, such as Firefox 4 and LibreOffice installed by default (both of which I was already running both on 10.0.4 and 10.10 via PPAs). The installer seemed a little more polished perhaps, but overall not much better. The biggest downer though of course is Unity and generally how flaky 11.0.4 seems to be. Various people have mentioned on Twitter or on various sites that it either runs fine or it won't run at all, depending on hardware etc. I think I was lucky with when I upgraded my HP nc4400 (Intel graphics) that it runs OK, as long as I don't run Unity! However, on my Toshiba Portege M200 (which ran fine with 10.0.4 and 10.10) it ran like an Alpha release. It installed fine but, either with or without proprietary Nvidia graphics drivers, I was getting all sorts of graphical glitches, I couldn't even CTRL+F into another screen to kill processes as all I got was a colourful mess and it kept crashing!

The Interface

I don't quite get this obsession with ever newer snazzy interfaces, as most people, I think, particularly those who aren't power users, use their chosen OS because of the apps, often not caring what the rest looks like. They don't need the interface to get in the way of quickly launching those apps which is what Unity feels like. They want a web browser, Photoshop (or something as good as it), music player, office suite and games or whatever and a way to search for documents like Spotlight on OSX. And if you going to make a snazzy interface at least make it customisable! If I want the dock on the right then that's where I want it! "Easy to use" does not mean nailing everything in one place so you can't move anything! At least on OSX you can have it on the left/right or at the bottom of the screen! Also I've heard that to get the best out of Unity you need to know all the keyboard shortcuts which is hardly suitable for new users (which is who Canonical targeted it at), particularly if they are new to computers and mostly use a mouse. And the global menu system isn't really suitable for dual monitors, as it means too much mouse mileage - just because OSX has it, does not make it good! The only place I think Unity could possibly work well is on a tablet or small screened netbook and that's where it should stay, on a netbook version of Ubuntu, not the default login for the main release!

Only a few power users are all 'look at my shiny desktop effects', many just want things to work and be reliable, never crash. I like the Compiz effects (mainly the cube and window previews) multiple desktops and dual monitors not just because it looks good but because it actually helps me be more productive. All I need other than that is a decent dock (I prefer Cairo Dock) to launch my most used apps. What Linux really lacks for me is smooth MIDI / JACK setup, and the sound system sorting out so it's less of a mess, oh and proper gapless mp3 playback with Gstreamer.

my current dual monitor setup with Ubuntu 10.0.4 with Cairo Dock on the right

The Future Of Ubuntu and The Alternatives

For now I'm suggesting, to those who I recommend Linux to and new users in general, to stick to the Ubuntu LTS releases. Hopefully the next LTS will be back to being as stable as 10.0.4, and maybe they'll have abandoned Unity by then or at least made it into a separate Netbook release, which is what it should have been in the first place. I really do hope they change their plan to have no 'Classic Gnome' login by 11.10. Perhaps Gnome 3 will be mature enough to take over being the main desktop. If not, then many, may switch to Debian (or an Debian or Ubuntu based distro), being familiar territory, as I will once 10.0.4 is no longer supported. On some laptops I've already switched to Fedora and Debian. In fact many have already starting to abandon Ubuntu 11.0.4 already, and moved back to 10.0.4/10.10 or switched to another distro.

As for Ubuntu itself, I doubt it would die completely (unless they run out of both support and money) but it could quite easily be pushed aside by other distros, just like when Ubuntu itself climbed to the top of the list of the most user-friendly distros such as Fedora, (which will use Gnome 3 in Fedora 15) and the Ubuntu and Debian versions of Mint which will be sticking with Gnome 2, and will not use Unity. Debian, from which Ubuntu is based on is also an option, it's rock solid but isn't quite as user-friendly to new users, particularly with installing drivers and codecs (you have to add the Debian Multimedia repo and install what you need). The good thing about Linux is it's all about choice, there are plenty of distros to choose from.

Ubuntu 11.0.4 (Natty Narwhal) The Good, The Bad and The Unity

2011-04-29T06:39:00.000-07:00

So, Ubuntu 11.0.4 is out, so I decided to upgrade one of my laptops that was running 10.10. The laptop in question is an HP nc4400, Core2Duo 2Ghz, 2.5GB RAM, and a 120GB hard drive. Ubuntu 10.10 notified me of the new release and asked me whether I'd like to upgrade. However I thought I'd check if there was any updates for 10.10 which is advisable before upgrading. lo and behold for there was a large batch of updates ready, surprising really since I only did updates a few days ago. Clicking on Upgrade now then starts the usual upgrade process. It would be nice if they made that prettier since it uses the Root user's theme which is quite ugly. Since I was upgrading over wifi, the downloads took awhile. Ideally I would have used ethernet but then I couldn't sit in a comfortable sofa!

upgrading to Natty:

Eventually it finished upgrading and I rebooted to the login screen. I thought I'd give the now default Unity desktop a chance so I logged straight in and was greeted with what looks OK at first glance but doesn't seem to work as smoothly as it should.

Unity:

All the application icons that I previously had on my desktop's lower panel have been crammed into the Unity dock, along with quite a few that I don't use that often so I had to remove a lot. One by one. Next I opened my usual set of apps, Pidgin and Hotot, Firefox and a single nautilus window. Nautilus goes full screen, blocking everything else out of view. If feels like a phone or a tablet, how am i supposed to multi-task with every window trying to go fullscreen? I dread to think how I'd use it on a dual monitor setup. And with window previews enabled the Unity dock reminds me of the Windows 7 taskbar, but even more confusing. None of this is helped by various graphical glitches that kept occurring (top left):

Unity graphical glitches:

After around 30 minutes or so with Unity, I'd just about had enough, so I thought I'd try 'Gnome Classic'. Only one problem though, presumably due to bugs, I could not find the logout button or any other way to log out and I did not want to force a shutdown, so i had to kill Xorg. Not good. So I logged into Gnome Classic (which you can select at the GDM login screen) and that's what I using now. It's more familiar and usable and I think they should make it the default rather than Unity, which as far as I'm concerned should be reserved for tablets, and isn't ready for prime time. Not sure on the 'good' side of things with this release, other than unity it's pretty much like 10.10, at least in the time I've used it so far. it does have Firefox 4 and LibreOffice by default and which is a good thing, though I already had both installed. Also the Software Center has been tweaked a little with app reviews. Disappointingly, Canonical have done a KDE4 with this release, change for change sake. If they drop Gnome2 in the coming releases, I think I'll install the Xubuntu desktop (sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop) and if that runs OK I'll use that, if not I'll go back to 10.0.4 LTS on this laptop and recommend that for new users too. Perhaps by the time the LTS stops being supported they'll be other options or Unity will get more stable or be abandoned. I may also try Gnome 3 and the latest KDE4 and see how well they work.

Gnome Classic:

Update 29/04/11 Fresh install on a Toshiba M200

Since there were some graphical glitches with Unity I thought I'd try a fresh install on a different laptop, my Toshiba M200. Everything went fine during install, took around 10 minutes, all was well until i rebooted. Firstly it seems to have a weird bug. When i reboot all I get is pretty colours and no proper boot screen and cannot see the login, just weird patterns. If I shutdown then do a fresh boot it boots an reaches the login just fine. However even after I installed the proprietary Nvidia drivers, it still won't login to Unity desktop, it just hangs. Also if i try to CTRL+ALT+F key into another screen it goes white or just weird colours. That just will not do. Unity-2D works (sudo apt-get install unity-2d) but it's not exactly much consolation.

gggg

How To Setup Music Player Daemon With PulseAudio On Ubuntu 10.0.4

2011-04-05T11:45:00.000-07:00

I've been wanting to get Music Player Daemon aka MPD working in Linux for a long time but never got round to it, but today I got it working properly with PulseAudio! The main reason I like MPD is it's actually gapless unlike most other Linux media players (I'm looking at you Rhythmbox, Banshee, and other Gstreamer based players). Also you can fully control MPD from over a LAN via other MPD clients, even from a mobile phone.

Setting Up MPD

With a lot of Googling, I've found a lot of different tutorials on getting MPD to work in Ubuntu. It seems on a desktop PC it's easier to setup MPD as a user service rather than a system service. i could not get it working at all as a system service. I based my setup mainly on this tutorial and updated it for 10.0.4 / Lucid and modified it to fix problems with PulseAudio. This should also work in 10.10 and higher too. Although you can do some things with graphical installers, apps etc, it is far easier to write down commands to copy and paste into a terminal.

First install MPD:

sudo apt-get install mpd

Disable MPD from starting as a system service:

sudo /etc/init.d/mpd stop

sudo update-rc.d mpd disable

Extract and copy the default config file:

gunzip -c /usr/share/doc/mpd/examples/mpd.conf.gz > ~/.mpdconf

Edit the config file:

gedit ~/.mpdconf

Change all paths to point to: ~/.mpd. You need to change the following entries:

music_directory

playlist_directory

db_file

log_file

error_file

pid_file

state_file

Audio setup

At this point I needed to adjust the audio config and modify it slightly from that tutorial to make it work with PulseAudio, (I found the right config for Pulse output here). Find the audio_output section and comment out the alsa section (which is first up in that section) then add:

audio_output {

type "pulse"

name "My Pulse Output"

#server "localhost" # optional

#sink "alsa_output" # optional

}

Make MPD start at login:

In a terminal do:

sudo nano ~/.config/autostart/mpd.desktop

and paste this into it:

[Desktop Entry]

Encoding=UTF-8

Version=0.9.4

Type=Application

Name=Music Player Daemon

Comment=

Exec=mpd

StartupNotify=false

Terminal=false

Hidden=false

Then Ctrl+O to save it and Ctrl+X to exit. Now it should start upon login

Modifications:

I also changed 'user' to my Ubuntu username and I've also enabled (uncomment the relevant lines) zeroconf, replaygain and volume normalization. And also it wouldn't bind to localhost so I changed bind_to_address "any".

And here is my resultant MPD config file (gzipped for convenience). now run MPD by typing 'mpd' into a terminal. If it shows no errors and then disappears (it runs in the background) then all is well.

Finding and playing music:

Next you need to add your music directory, I found it was best to create a link (right click your music folder, select 'create link') and move the link into /home/username/.mpd/music

Now we need an MPD client, Ario and Gnome Music Player Client both run fine in Gnome but there are plenty of choices. Next we need to update the database, in Ario do File, Update Database and we're done. Most of the players I've found so far use an Artist / Album / Title setup which is handy for playing single albums, but I am searching for an easy way of just dumping the entire collection into one playlist and whacking it on random. I've tried using the file system browser in Ario but when I try to dump all the tracks into the playlist it only seems to find less than half my collection. Update: I've discovered that MPD is quite picky about tags so it's apparently best to use EasyTag on your collection which automatically corrects broken tags. Since I have quite a it of music, this may take awhile! Next thing I want to get working is streaming music over the network!

NOTE

Confusingly the MPD wiki states:

"mpd.conf is the configuration file for mpd(1). If not specified on the command line, MPD first searches for it at ~/.mpdconf then at ~/.mpd/mpd.conf and then in /etc/mpd.conf."

Update: you may need to do "chmod g+X /path-to-music" on your music collection to give it the right permissions.

Installing Ubuntu On a Dell Latitude D505 Laptop (Updated)

2011-03-18T18:19:00.000-07:00

Updates at the foot of the page

I've just aquired a Dell Latitude D505 laptop for a very good price. It's got a 1.6Ghz Pentium M CPU, 512MB of RAM, a DVD/CD combo drive, and a 30GB hard drive which had Windows XP Home installed. Naturally I wanted to put Linux on it straight away! I chose Ubuntu 10.0.4 as I mainly use the LTS releases. I plan on upgrading directly to the next LTS when released. I'm not keen on Unity or Gnome 3 so I may switch to XFCE when the time comes. It's also missing the battery at the moment and I intend to get one very soon.

Installing Ubuntu

First I tried the Ubuntu live CD and it seemed to boot but never got to the desktop, only a black screen, so I did a bit of Googling and found various solutions including this on the Ubuntu Wiki. To fix the graphics problem, just follow these instructions in "Workaround A."

In some cases, this bug causes i8xx users to boot into a blank screen on both the LiveCD/USB and a clean install or upgrade. To enable the above workaround in these situations, add "i915.modeset=1" to your kernel boot parameters.

From the LiveCD:

1) At the purple screen with a keyboard and stickfigure, press Enter to get to the menu.

2) Hit Enter to select your language, and then press F6 and then Esc.

3) Add "i915.modeset=1" after "quiet splash".

4) Press Enter to boot the LiveCD.

Now the live CD boots like normal into the desktop. The install only takes around 20 minutes but after rebooting you need to follow the second set of instructions:

1) Hold down Shift while booting to enter the GRUB menu.

2) Press 'e' to edit.

3) Add "i915.modeset=1" after "quiet splash".

4) Ctrl+x to boot.

Now we just need to permanently add these to the GRUB menu so we get working graphics every time! ina terminal enter:

sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

and edit line 10 so it reads:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="i915.modeset=1"
then save and quit gedit, then do:

sudo update-grub

..and now we have working graphics on every boot!

Ubuntu boots in a only around 30 seconds and is quite snappy though I think I need to upgrade the RAM to 1GB as it swaps quite a bit after a long Firefox session. Ubuntu also suspends properly unlike my HP nc6120 which used to until I upgraded it to 10.0.4. When i get a new battery I'll update this post to include battery life.

Update 26/03/11
Got my new battery, a little disappointed I'm only getting around an hour and a half out of it when mainly browsing the web. Apparently laptop batteries need to be fully charged and discharged a few times before they reach their full capacity.

Update 29/03/11
The only other thing that doesn't seem to work is lm-sensors does not detect any temperature sensors, though this is only a minor inconvenience since it doesn't seem to get that hot most of the time. it's certainly running cooler than my HP nc6120. The latitude is currently my favourite of my laptops. I'm also thinking of getting a secondary battery which replaces the DVD drive and gives it an extra 4 hours of battery time!

Update 30/03/11
Unfortunately I've discovered video problems when trying to play videos with Totem, VLC etc but YouTube videos work fine, I'm working through these workarounds found on the Ubuntu Wiki

Update 30/03/11 (2) Graphics Fixed!
Well I fixed the graphics problem by upgrading the kernel to one from the Mavericks Backports repository. Add the repo with:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kernel-ppa/ppa

then install the Maverick kernel with:

sudo aptitude install linux-image-2.6.35-25-generic

I've also upgraded the RAM to 1GB so it feels a bit snappier now and swaps memory less. Video playing is still a bit glitchy in Totem but fine now if I use Gnome Mplayer and VLC.

Update 02/05/11
Having had some weird random reboots recently I decided to see if it's hardware or software related i decided to try Fedora 14 on it. I have just installed using the Fedora LiveCD install on a spare HDD and it went very smoothly. I didn't have to mess about with GRUB to get the graphics working, however the first thing I did was disable SELinux, as it's fine for corporate desktops but too much hassle for the average user. Whether I will keep Fedora on there is another thing, i'll see how it goes, as I tend to miss little things of Ubuntu like UbuntuOne and Tomboy Notes

Update 05/06/11
I have wiped Fedora 15 out having tried that for awhile and thought I'd try out the iQunix re-mix of Ubuntu 11.0.4 and surprisingly it actually works without any modifications to GRUB.

Hotot Love!

2011-02-13T15:58:00.000-08:00

I have blogged about Hotot before but I thought I'd say a bit more since it is now one of the first apps I install on Linux and my favourite Twitter app. Having become tired of Gwibber's slowness and bugs, and consuming all my available RAM, it took me awhile to find another decent Twitter app. I used Pino for awhile but needed something better. It also seems there are too many Adobe AIR Twitter apps which are too slow for slower PCs. I also tried Tweetdeck in Chrome/Chromium but I find it far too messy and confusing. Luckily Hotot came along. I now use it on Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian, and it's available as a deb or an rpm from their Google Code page. It is also available on for Windows. Bizarrely their main site just says "coming soon" for PPAs and doesn't actually have any download links! Installation instructions are also here on their Google Code page. I'm also surprised that Hotot don't seem to have a presence actually on Twitter!

Hotot uses tabs for main feeds, replys, DMs, retweeted, and search. I really like the way conversations are shown:

What I'd like Improving:

I often find I keep losing my place as new tweets arrive, as they push the old ones down. I'd like it similar to web Twitter, where they arrive queued up. A similar thing happens on Gwibber.

Keep the input box open (Hotot autocloses it after a short time) as when it auto closes I end up losing my place again as Hotot jumps about in the timeline with it's unwanted shortcuts like 'T' which makes Hotot jump back to the top!

Conclusion

Hotot has great features, is light on resources and easy to use. I've tried dozens of other Twitter clients for Linux but I can't find one better than Hotot, but feel free to suggest any I might have missed in the comments!

Install Hotot Twitter client in Debian Squeeze / Mint Debian Edition

2011-01-22T08:50:00.000-08:00

I've recently installed Mint Debian Edition on my Toshiba 6100 laptop which comes with Gwibber as it's Twitter/Facebook app. I prefer Hotot since it's lighter and I'm not bothered about Facebook usage.

Hotot isn't in the MDE or Debian Squeeze repositories it uses but you can use the Ubuntu PPA instead.

Edit /etc/apt/sources.list as root with your favourite text editor and add these lines:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/hotot-team/ppa/ubuntu maverick main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/hotot-team/ppa/ubuntu maverick main

Then save and exit then enter this command as root (you can use sudo on Mint Debian Edition):

apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 41011AE2

Then do:

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install hotot

And enjoy :)

Mint Debian Edition

2011-01-21T18:12:00.000-08:00

The root partition became corrupted yesterday on my Toshiba 6100 laptop, possibly due to a faulty hard drive, so I had to do a fresh install on a fresh drive. It was running Lubuntu 10.0.4, the lightweight desktop derivative of Ubuntu. It started out as Ubuntu but was too slow for this old beast. It has a 1.6Ghz Pentium 4 CPU (yes, it runs way too hot!), 512MB RAM and a 20GB hard drive. I then installed the Xubuntu (XFCE) desktop then settling on the Lubuntu (LXDE) desktop, but it still seemed sluggish, so I considered my options. Slackware would be very light but a lot of effort and I prefer Debian or Debian based distros as that's what I'm used to and know best. I like Debian but I find it's packages to be a little old, at least in Lenny and it's not quite as user friendly as Ubuntu. After a brief but failed install attempt with Saline OS (another Debian-based distro) I thought I'd try Mint Debian Edition which is a rolling release distro based on Debian Testing. The main advantage of being a rolling release means it never needs to be reinstalled but it means things may break occasionally.

Mint Debian Edition installs in a similar way to Ubuntu, using a live CD but with a different installer. It didn't take too long to install even on this old thing. It asks the usual questions, users, root password, partitioning etc. One interesting thing I noticed was it automatically chose a hostname based on the model of my laptop - "satallite6100-laptop" which was a nice touch. After the install finished, it prompted a reboot into the new OS. Boot time was nice and sprightly, taking around 35 seconds. A Notify message popped up informing me of wireless networks available, this uses onboard Intel wireless so it's probably why it works just fine 'out-the-box'. I then found I had 708MB / 646 packages to upgrade!

The default desktop uses a single panel along the bottom, like Windows, with it's Mint Menu. I'm not too keen on it as although the search feature is nice it still takes far too much of my 1024x768 pixels for my liking!

I've changed the layout to a more traditional Gnome arrangement by removing the Mint Menu and adding the Gnome 'Main Menu' from the 'add to panel' dialogue, to my new top panel. I also added the User Switcher to the top right of the top panel, it's not quite Ubuntu's MeMenu but it will do. Also for the chop is the colour scheme - black and green is just not my scene! I'm using Human-Blue icons (taken from the Ubuntu version of Mint) , Murrina-Blue controls and Bluman window border and some tasteful wallpaper.

Just like Debian, you can only install Deb packages via the commandline until you install the Gdebi installer. I'm not sure why the Mint devs didn't include it. It is nice to see the nautilus-terminal extension already installed so that you can right click and select 'open terminal' in a folder. To manually install a downloaded Deb package on the CLI, do something like "sudo dpkg -i package-name.deb". The main user is in the sudoers list so you can use sudo to temporarily become root, just like in Ubuntu. Of course the best place to start with packages is by seeing if it's available in the repositories using either Synaptic or with it's 'Software Manager' which looks a bit like Ubuntu's Software Centre. MDE uses Debian Testing so packages are more upto date than in a standard Debian install. MDE includes the latest Firefox (once I installed updates) as well as Debian's Iceweasel.

Standard packages include MPlayer, Gnome MPlayer and VLC, which is nice since I always install VLC anyway. MDE plays encrypted DVD movies straight off since libdvdcss is installed by default, as are all the useful codecs and Adobe flash player. It's also nice to see GIMP already installed too, since Ubuntu has removed it recently to save space. Two packages I immediately removed were F-Spot and Gwibber since I prefer Gthumb or Picasa (which is in the repositories) and Hotot, which is a much lighter Twitter client than Gwibber. By default Thunderbird and Evolution are installed.

Conclusion

Overall Mint Debian Edition offers a good compromise - it has the speed and lightness of Debian and some of the ease of use of Ubuntu and I'd recommend it for older desktops and laptops. It has up-to-date packages, has all the codecs for music and DVD playing so it's fairly easy to use out-the-box. According to their website "LMDE requires a deeper knowledge and experience with Linux, dpkg and APT" due to it being a rolling release and to "expect rough edges". The main thing I miss from Ubuntu is UbuntuOne for syncing my Tomboy notes.

Update 19/03/11

I've kind of gone off the various versions of Mint mainly due to it's use of a difficult to remove custom search for Firefox, I prefer to use Debian itself rather than LMDE. I have now installed Fedora 14 on the Toshiba 6100 to try out and I've kept it as it's pretty good distro, much more stable than when i tried Fedora 11. The only thing I don't like about Fedora is I can't seem to ssh or VNC into it on my network, I even tried disabling its firewall and SELinux to no avail.

Snackr: An RSS Ticker

2011-01-13T17:27:00.000-08:00

I've been looking for an RSS feed 'ticker' for Ubuntu for a long time without much luck, until I found Snackr, which is also the first Adobe Air app i've found that I haven't immediately uninstalled! Being an Air app of course means it is cross-platform too. Amongst other features, you can set scroll speed, position, opacity, and set it to sync with Google Reader.

Screenshot on my main (dual monitor) desktop:

Screenshot of Snackr's horizontal arrangement my laptop:

Dropbox has Reached Version 1.0!

2010-12-17T15:08:00.000-08:00

The excellent cross-platform folder syncing app Dropbox has just reached version 1.0 and has some great new features, chief among them being Selective Sync. This means that you can select which folders you want to sync on each machine, handy for devices that are limited on space or for folders you don't want to sync to your work or home computer. On Ubuntu I found out, thanks to Dropbox Support on Twitter, that Dropbox version is different to the nautilus-dropbox version. To get it to upgrade on Ubuntu, I needed to download a replacement files to replace the ".dropbox-dist" hidden folder (download the 32 bit or 64 bit version). I had to extract the package in a temporary folder then move it to /home/username/ replacing the files already there. According to Webupd8 You could also delete or move that folder and Dropbox should download the upgrade itself.

Rockbox On My Sansa Fuze

2010-11-06T19:30:00.000-07:00

Recently I tested my Sansa Fuze to see if it is gapless using Dark Side of The Moon by Pink Floyd. It's not only a great album but also almost all the tracks follow on from each other without any gaps. I was disappointed to hear a small but noticeable gap between tracks, so I decided to install Rockbox on it. Rockbox is an alternative firmware for many different digital audio players.

To install it you download and install the rockbox utility for Linux, OSX or Windows. Then plug in your player, fire it up and it should auto-detect which player you have as long as it's supported. Then click 'Complete Installation' or 'Minimal Installation' if you're short on space or don't want to install everything. I chose the complete option. Rockbox comes with lots of plugins and themes, I went for the Cabbie theme.

For the Sansa Fuze you need the bin file from the original firmware for it to modify as it dual boots the original firmware and Rockbox. Once installed it should now boot up in Rockbox. I noticed though that you need to shut the player down before plugging into the computer, for when you need to add tracks, so that it boots into the original firmware. The computer doesn't 'see' the player while it's booted into Rockbox. Once you safely remove the player (right click and select 'safely remove' in Ubuntu) shut it down then start it up again and it should boot back into Rockbox. So my Sansa Fuze is now gapless and has extra apps and themes, and can play even more codecs. I'm rather pleased.

Update
I've also found one useful feature of Rockbox is I can now log all my played tracks with Last.fm using a choice of different scrobblers, at the moment I'm using dap-scrob.

Update 2 - Hidden tracks

I noticed every now and then some tracks I didn't recognise and discovered Sansa had already put some tracks preinstalled on the player. These have been added using MTP mode and you can see them in Rockbox in Files --> ##MUSIC#. I found the only way to delete them is to set the original firmware into MTP mode then open up Rhythmbox or similar player that can use MTP and order the tracks by date added. The tracks I dragged 'n' dropped had no time but the pre-installed ones do, hence easier to track down and delete.

Rhythmbox Annoyances

2010-10-24T10:34:00.000-07:00

I've seen a lot of swish looking mock-ups and modified versions of Rhythmbox such as Rhythm-e and others but they all seem to concentrate on it's looks and layout. What I'd like to see is the annoying little bugs and improvements in performance and features which have been in Rhythmbox for years but still haven't been fixed. I only use Rhythmbox for adding music to my mp3 players and mainly use Gmusicbrowser for playing music. Here's a not-exhaustive list of Rhythmbox annoyances and feature requests:

Rhythmbox can only have one music folder.

I've recently discovered this since my 250GB hard drive I store music is nearly full so I have some music on another hard drive but there's no option to add another folder, unlike my preferred player, Gmusicbrowser. This means if I want to add music to my Mp3 player I have to find another option. I could use sym-links but that's inelegant and a new user shouldn't have to do that either. (Apologies for the blurryness of the images, click for a better view, having trouble with Bloggers uploader)

Compare that with Gmusicbrowser with multiple folders:

Erroneous import errors

When scanning or rescanning the music folder, rhythmbox shows "Import Errors" with a red 'no entry' symbol, which makes it hard to ignore, but when you look at them they are mostly album covers. Gmusicbrowser has an option in preferences: "Do not add songs that can't be played" as you can see in the above screenshot.

Visible Columns has no option to change the order they appear.

Pretty much every opther player has the option to move the columns either by dragging them or in preferences. I want Artist, Title, Album, Time, Quality in that order!

There are some things Rhythmbox does do well like handling devices, it works better with mp3 players than Gmusicbrowser (which seems to have no support) and Banshee which has trouble with the SD card in my Sansa Fuze. Also I have recently found out Rhythmbox actually transcodes FLAC and ogg on-the-fly to iPods and accessing DAAP shares works well. But Rhythmbox's school report would read: "Has been essentially coasting for several years, has improved in some areas but needs to buckle up and get this sorted! Must do better."

Unboxing My Newly Arrived (and early) Birthday Present - a 4GB Sansa Fuze

2010-10-20T10:33:00.000-07:00

My main birthday present this year arrived early, it's a 4GB Sansa Fuze mp3 player. I requested a Fuze rather than the new Fuze+ for two reasons. For one you can pick up the 4GB version for around £35 through Amazon and I think it's a backward step removing the scroll-wheel for the Fuze+. My Fuze was nicely packaged in a plastic bubble-pack that arrived in a Jiffy bag that actually fitted through the letterbox, for once. I would have liked to have preserved the packaging a bit but I had to hack it about with scissors to free the little beauty. The back of the pack has the player's specs on and I noticed they don't even mention that it can play FLAC for some reason. It does actually play the usual mp3 and WMA, plus ogg and FLAC, which is another thing it has over an iPod. It's also a lot cheaper than a similar sized Nano and has a microSD card slot for expansion. I'm using my 8GB card that I had in my Sansa Clip+.

Package Contents:

4GB Sansa Fuze Player
Proprietary USB lead
Earphones
8cm driver disc
Pretty little flip booklet for quick usage instructions
Instruction booklet

The player feels nice to hold, it's rubberised backside preventing it from slipping out of my hand and the 'piano black' finish to the upper surface looks nice but as usual attracts finger prints very easily. The iPod-like click-wheel is also rubberised. There is a slight rough plastic edge at the base of the player but that's not much to grumble about and it does feel more durable than the Clip+ The power-on slider is on the right-hand side of the player and you slide it down for the Hold function to prevent the buttons being pressed while it sits in your pocket. This is a 'physical' hold function that's much preferable to the smaller Sansa Clip+'s software hold function. I'm not quite sure why the headphone socket is on the bottom edge of the player but it's not much bother, I'll just have it upside down in my jacket pocket.

On turning on the player, I was greeted with a nice little graphic and it booted fast. I checked the firmware version in System -> Settings -> info and no surprises that it isn't the latest version. Upgrading firmware was easy, and much easier and quicker using the manual method rather than using the Windows only update tool. I followed the instructions on Sansa forum, just extract the two files into the root directory of the player, safely remove the player and wait while it updates, which took only a few seconds. The new firmware restricts the volume of the player (to comply with EU regulations) if you set it to English/EU region, so it's best to set the language to English but then set location to "rest of the world" so you can actually hear it properly in noisy areas!

The user interface is rather nice looking, though it takes a little getting used to if you are switching from using an iPod as there are slight differences in navigation. Like the iPod, the Now Playing section shows the album cover and info and click the middle button to show just the album cover or info plus graphic etc. Another thing I like about the Fuze (and other Sansa players) is that you can delete tracks from the player interface and it can show you the info about the track - bitrate, filesize, format etc - which the iPod cannot. As with other Sansa players, the Fuze works best in MSC (mass storage device, like a USB stick) mode when using it with Linux, working well with Rhythmbox on Ubuntu. I find it's best to set the player to only use MSC mode rather than setting it to auto or MTP.

The sound quality is excellent, certainly as good as my iPod Mini, but like the iPod, you're best of ditching the little earbuds you get with it, to take advantage of it. It would be nice if it used a normal micro-USB connector rather than the proprietary connector, much like the iPods, but unlike my iPod's connector, this one stays in better thanks to release clips either side. Also I've seen them on Ebay for about £3 so it's handy to get a spare/replacement cable.

Conclusion

So far I'm very impressed with the Fuze, it's good value for money, particularly compared with an iPod Nano. I like it's interface, great sound quality, codec support, look and feel. As long as it's reliable and the battery life is usable (24hr while playing audio, according to the manual) I'll be happy.

Update

I've installed alternative firmware - Rockbox - on my Fuze to achieve perfect gapless playback - and I've detailed that in a new blogpost.

Ubuntu 10.10 - First Impressions

2010-10-11T22:46:00.000-07:00

Ubuntu 10.10 (codename: Maverick Meercat) was recently released at 10:10am on 10/10/10. I upgraded from 10.0.4 on my HP nc4400 notebook (2.0ghz Core 2 Duo, 2.5GB RAM, 120GB HDD) and the upgrade went very smoothly. After upgrading all I had to do was re-enable or re-add my PPAs/ software repositories, including adding the new Medibuntu repo. The main things I noticed immediately are slight changes like tweaked login screen, "Ubuntu One - Syncronize this folder" in the Documents folder and the nice new font, so I decided to install Maverick in Virtualbox to experience a fresh install.

After the the live CD has finished booting you are greeted with the new installer. It is even simpler to use than it was previously. As usual you can try the live desktop or start installing straight away.

Next up Ubuntu now has a check list to ensure a smooth install. Also tick "Third Party Software" and you get mp3 playing 'out-the-box'! Also very useful is being able to download updates while installing which saves a bit of time.

Then choose your partitioning - going for fresh install and letting Ubuntu choose automatically here.

..and next a confirmation page, last chance to check your settings before your hard drives are formatted...

User Settings: Here is where I noticed that Ubuntu starts installing whilst you fill in your details, which saves time yet again. After choosing keyboard settings, username password, the installer moves on to....

..the new installer slideshow, which you can now move backwords and forwards in, with a nice little effect. It highlights the new version of Software Centre, Shotwell photo manager (which replaces F-Spot, which I never liked), Ubuntu One's new mobile syncing abilities and Rhythmbox integration, it's new sound applet, Firefox, OpenOffice, and Ubuntu's built-in social networking (Gwibber, Evolution, Empathy, MeMenu).

And soon after (install on a fast machine can be as quick as 10-15 minutes) it's time to reboot into the install.

After a sprightly boot-up this is the fresh Ubuntu desktop. Not sure about that wallpaper but it's much better than the one seen previously during the beta.

The window controls are still in the 'wrong' place!

This is fairly easily sorted though. Do CTRL + F2, type "gconf-editor" and press enter. Navigate to Metacity -> general and then double click on the entry beside "button_layout" and change it so it looks like the screenshot below. Alternatively you can also switch to an older theme like Clearlooks that uses the normal button arrangement.

Conclusion

I have to say on trying a fresh install, this is the smoothest Ubuntu install I've experienced and possibly one of the smoothest OS installs out there. I'm starting to notice new little things like the waste basket/ trash is now the Rubbish Bin (in UK language settings) and I love the new font. The new sound applet is better than I expected, much improved over early versions, I might actually find it useful now with Rhythmbox. Hopefully it will eventually work with my favourite player Gmusicbrowser at some point. Also I notice deb files now open with the Software Centre by default.

My only niggle is that since I upgraded my laptop, it has upgraded Deluge to version 1.3.0, which isn't in the Deluge PPA, which means it won't connect to my Deluge daemon on my server, since they have to be the same version. I'm keeping my server on the LTS release so I'll see if I can downgrade my laptops Deluge client. At the moment I can make do with using the web interface instead. Update 14/10/10: version 1.3.0 has now arrived in the Deluge PPA.

Many of 10.10's new features are under the surface and on an upgrade from 10.0.4 it's harder to spot them at first. On a fresh install though you can see that a lot of work has gone into making it as easy and smooth as possible. I'm going to explore 10.10's features as I go along on this laptop but I'm keeping my desktop on 10.0.4 and servers which will only be upgraded when the next LTS arrives.

Download Ubuntu here

How to setup Firefly Media Server on Ubuntu 10.0.4

2010-09-04T19:21:00.000-07:00

Firefly, formerly known as the incongruously titled mt-daapd is a server based streaming app that streams to DAAP clients like iTunes, Banshee and Rhythmbox (see screenshot above) or hardware players like the Roku Soundbridge. Unfortunately iTunes 10 cannot access Firefly at the moment, hopefully this will be sorted soon. Since I'm installing this on a headless Ubuntu 10.0.4 server I'm using commandline configuration, accessing it from my laptop via ssh. Either enter these commands sitting at the server in a terminal, or ssh into it from another PC that has a terminal or ssh client. Enable ssh access to your server with sudo apt-get install ssh and login to your server with ssh ip-address - for example: ssh 192.168.16.14

Install Firefly

sudo apt-get install libid3tag0 (I think this ensures Firefly can read mp3 tags, it's usually installed already in Ubuntu)

then:

sudo apt-get install mt-daapd

Configure Firefly

Next you need to edit Firefly's config file:

sudo nano /etc/mt-daapd.conf

Use Ctrl + W to find the parts of the config file you want to edit. First you need to edit Firefly's admin password (replace password with something you'll remember that's secure):

admin_pw = password

Next add your music folder - mine is:

mp3_dir = /storage1/music

You can also have a password for playing music (the one you enter in the player e.g. iTunes) - remove the '#' and replace mp3 with a suitable password, but this is entirely optional.

#password = mp3

Then you might want to change the Firefly server name, I've named mine "server2-Firefly".

servername = Server2-Firefly %v on %h

Next start Firefly with:

sudo /etc/init.d/mt-daapd start

Now you should be able to log in to Firefly's admin page from your web browser on your network.

http://servers-ip-address:3689

for instance mine is http://192.168.16.14:3689

or if you are configuring it on your server:

http://localhost:3689

Here you can rescan the collection, set scanning preferences and various other options. And that's pretty much the whole setup. You may have to set your music folders permissions so they they can be read by everyone, so Firefly can see all your music. Now you should be able to play your Firefly server's music from Rhythmbox, Banshee, Amarok, iTunes or whichever DAAP client you use. Rock on!

Apple iPad Review

2010-08-13T16:44:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had my first go on an iPad, several iPads actually since they had one in Comet and several in Currys, both shops being in the same area of Triton Road, Lincoln. Apologies for the poor photo, I had to be discreet and use my phone. Having heard people going on about the device for ages, with all the hype, I was expecting to be blown away, or at least a bit impressed. But it was not a very 'magical' experience for me, not helped by the fact my fingers still hurt from typing on the on-screen keyboard. I managed some Tweets, browsed the net and checked out the various apps installed. It was annoying trying to select part of a URL to delete it and it was harsh to type on without feedback. I could have attached it to the keyboard accessory, but that seems like defeating the object of a tablet.

I played with it for awhile in Currys, I must have been there for about 20 minutes without being hassled by staff, plus the time I spent on the one in Comet, so I had plenty of time to explore it. The iPad is most at home playing music and videos, and viewing photos, which was the only thing that impressed me, a bit. The way you can flick back and forth with your finger, and zoom in and out by moving your fingers together and apart was nice. Also doing this with web pages was useful too, though I couldn't seem to get the page to stay zoomed in like that. Auto-switching between landscape and portrait when it is turned round was nice too. Browsing through iTunes was OK apart from I kept accidentally selecting things. I suppose at least it could play music and browse the web at the same time, which is something...

I then tried the "Magic Piano" app that, having seen many videos of it, I expected better. The lag was atrocious! It was difficult to play a proper tune or chord sequence when the sound took a few seconds to play after hitting the keys, no matter what instrument I chose. I suppose the only realistic instrument to emulate would be a Mellotron, perhaps that's why there's a Mellotron app, even then the lag is longer than most Mellotron's I've seen in videos. And it was hard to actually play a chord without my fingers touching other notes by mistake.

Overall I wasn't blown away by it and I was not comfortable browsing the web on it for more than a few minutes. For viewing photos, music and videos it's fine, but it seems a very expensive toy just for those features, I was more impressed by an £79 Eken tablet from Amazon than this, which has the greater freedom provided by the Android OS, though i think I might save my fingers for something with a keyboard or a stylus. I certainly wouldn't recommend a tablet like the iPad for those who have even the slightest RSI!

Integrating GMX Storage as a network drive via Nautilus in Linux

2010-08-12T16:08:00.000-07:00

This is quite a simple way to access your GMX online storage in nautilus, I found this trick on this forum post, so I'm posting it here in case it disappears.

1) In nautilus' location bar, type this in and press enter:
davs://storage-file-eu.gmx.com/ (or davs://storage-file-us.gmx.com if you live in the US).

2) Enter your GMX e-mail address and password when prompted:

3) And now your GMX storage appears in nautilus:

PC vs Mac: Here's what you (really) need to know

2010-08-10T19:46:00.001-07:00

Microsoft really must be getting desperate when they resort to simple mud-slinging to get people to buy there products. MS has a new page on their website on why you should get a PC rather than a Mac. Here's just some of their points and my response:

"Macs can’t connect to an Xbox 360" Why? because MS made it that way! Also you could use open source software to stream media to your 360 on any OS.

"Macs take time to learn" ALL operating systems take time to learn. As soon as you start to use a computer, you have to learn how to use it. It just depends where you start from! If you started off from Mac or Linux you would take time to get used to Windows.

"Apple’s productivity suite file formats won’t open in Microsoft Office on PCs." Er... MS Office available on the Mac. Also if MS file formats were truely open there wouldn't be any problem on any OS.

"It’s easy with a PC." It's easy on the Mac too. It depends what you want to do, some things are easier on Windows, some easier on the Mac, some easier on Linux.

"If there’s a Mac version of a program you need, you’ll have to buy it again and relearn how to use it on a Mac." Again, that works both ways, same argument as previous point. Plus there's plenty of free equivalent software on the Mac.

"Macs don’t work as well at work or at school." Increasing numbers of schools and university students use Macs.

"With PCs running Windows 7, you can play the videos and music stored on your home PC while you’re on the go, for free." Try Subsonic which is cross-platform, and also has iPhone and Android apps.

Microsoft should just concentrate on making a good product (or trying to) and not mud-slinging.

Make Root's Apps Fit into Your Gnome Desktop

2010-07-24T18:15:00.000-07:00

Having found a nice combination of icons and themes for Gnome that I like, it's mildly annoying when apps that run as root (such as Synaptic) look ugly because they use a very plain theme. I've been looking for this for awhile and stumbled across this solution by the user "FuturePilot" in an old thread in the Ubuntu forums:

sudo ln -s /home/.themes /root/.themes
sudo ln -s /home/.icons /root/.icons

This is a nice simple solution to the problem, so now Synaptic fits in with my desktop. My theme consists of Bluman-Clearlooks controls, Clearlooks window borders, and Reblumanity icons.

5 Useful Audio Apps For Ubuntu Linux

2010-07-18T17:29:00.000-07:00

For a long while Linux seemed a bit lacking in good audio apps, but it's improved so much in a short space of time and it's getting better all the time. Here I've gathered the necessary apps to get your music ripped, tagged, edited and played.

Audex CD Ripper

I've trawled the net for a good CD ripper on Linux and they all seem to be not quite what I want. Basically, I'd like a CDex for Linux. CDex sort of works under Wine but has trouble with the DVD drive sometimes locking it for other apps once I've closed it. I've found Audex to be the closest to it, plus it has album art downloading which CDex hasn't got. It is a KDE app so theres some KDE dependancies, but it looks and works fine on the Gnome desktop.

Audex is available from the Ubuntu repositories or from their site as source code.

Also consider: Sound Juicer, Rubyripper, Rhythmbox (a player that and rips)

Puddletag Mp3 Tag Editor

This is a relatively new app but it's quite well featured. It's loosely based on the Mp3tag available on Windows it is a good Linux alternative to it. I really like the Filename --> Tag and Tag --> Filename conversion it shares with Mp3tag, which other Linux apps generally lack. Another good conversion is it's case conversion which Mp3tag doesn't have. It's almost there, I only occasionally find my self going back to Mp3tag in Wine.

Download and installation instructions

Also consider EasyTag, Audio Tag Tool, Picard all available from the Ubuntu repos and Mp3tag under Wine.

Update 29/08/10: I have since found EasyTag to be more reliable and stable than Puddletag. EasyTag is very good, once you get used to the way it works.

Audacity Audio Editor

This really needs no introduction, it's probably the best free audio editor on any OS! It does look a bit different here due to my Ubuntu theme.

It's available from the Ubuntu repositories and from the Audacity site

Also consider: Traverso, LMMS, amongst others.

EasyMp3Gain

This is great GUI (Graphical User Interface) to the commandline mp3gain, vorbisgain and aacgain volume normalisation tools. Again, I used to use the Windows version of Mp3gain in Wine but having found EasyMP3Gain in the Ubuntu repos, I've switched and found it a lot quicker!

Also consider: Mp3gain under Wine.

Gmusicbrowser

For a long time I kept switching between various music players on Linux trying to find one that worked best for me. I used to be an Amarok fan before Amarok 2 came along, even by then it didn't really fit in with the Gnome desktop I'd switched to. I switched to Gnome having had so much trouble with Kubuntu, it always felt like Ubuntu's neglected brother. Having been recommended by a fellow Blogger user, Apocrypha, I tried Gmusicbrowser, and have found it to be lighter but feature-rich. It has good tagging support like Foobar on Windows and I like it's tray pop-up that gives you easy access to the controls. Unlike Rhythmbox, you can just hover over the icon. And the full controls are there, rather than just play/pause in Rhythmbox. The only thing Gmusicbrowser could do with is better USB device support.

Gmusicbrowser is available to install from the Ubuntu repos.

Also consider: Rhythmbox, Banshee, Foobar under Wine, and various others, just try them out, it costs you nothing but time!

And there we go, from ripped to playing, I think we have it covered!

8 Useful Google Chrome/Chromium Extensions (for Firefox fans)

2010-05-24T18:35:00.000-07:00

When Google Chrome first came out, I found it much too basic, too lacking in features, however it has since grown much more useful since lots of extensions have been available. I'm using Chromium (the source code of which filters down to Chrome) on my old Compaq N400C (850Mhz/256MB RAM) laptop. I've recently upgraded the hard drive (from a 4200RPM 30GB to a faster 5400RPM 40GB drive) and did a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.0.4 LTS. Having found the Gnome desktop to be a little sluggish, I've installed the Lubuntu (LXDE) desktop, which comes with Chromium. Lubuntu looks great and works at a reasonable speed. I still use Firefox sometimes, but Chromium is lighter on resources and not as basic as Midori. I've been searching for extensions similar to my Firefox add-ons and have found these so far:

Adblock

An essential extension! Though not quite as good as AdblockPlus in Firefox, this is the next best thing for wacker-moling those pesky ads.

Flashblock

Again, it's not quite as good as the Firefox equivalent, but good enough to prevent my old laptop from grinding to a halt under flash web elements.

Chromed Bird

On my desktop I love using Gwibber for keeping up with my Twitter (and Facebook) feed. However it's a little too resource hungry for my ageing laptop, so this is a good substitute. For Firefox, the equivalent add-on is Echofon.

Xmarks

I've been using this in Firefox for awhile, so I'm glad to have it in Chrome/Chromium, the only feature it lacks compared with the Firefox version is it lacks password sync. Syncing open tabs is a fairly new and useful feature.

Chromisious (aka Delicious Bookmarks)

Another useful bookmarking addon. I've been using in Firefox addon equivalent for a while.

Tampermonkey

For those who need their Greasemonkey scripts this extension gives "a little bit more Greasemonkey compatibility"

Addthis

This extension/add-on is for sharing URLs to social networking sites, automatically creating a short URL, and is available for Chrome/Chromium and Firefox.

StumbleUpon

One of my favourite ways to while the hours away when bored!

Update: Google Chrome has just reached the landmark stable version

Linux on a Panasonic Toughbook CF-27

2010-05-09T11:25:00.001-07:00

Having been given a Toughbook CF-27, I decided to see if I could run Linux on it. As you can see from the specs below, it's quite low powered but it's very solidly built and also splash proof. It's also completely silent due to the lack of any fans and has a very nice, bright, screen. I was hoping it would be the touchscreen version, but alas it isn't.

Specifications

Panasonic Toughbook CF-27 (Mark 2)
Model no. CF-27 EJ6K3EE
CPU: 300Mhz Mobile Pentium II
RAM: 128MB 100Mhz SODIMM
Hard drive: Toshiba MK8113MAT 6.4GB (now 30GB)
Floppy (Interchangable)
Screen: 12.1 inches (None-touchscreen version)
Connectivity: Connexant 56k modem,
2x PCMCIA slots
1x USB port.
Sound: Yamaha YMF-744B
Graphics: Neomagic MagicGraph 256AV

OS Installation and Customisation

As the Bios has a password on it, it won't boot from anything but the hard drive, so I had to take the hard drive out and use another PC to install the OS. I chose Debian Lenny as it's well supported and a little more lightweight than the latest versions of the *buntu family. But first I had to take the hard drive out of it's metal caddy, which was easier than I thought. An access plate on the bottom of the laptop is only held in with two latches, and the caddy comes out quite easily. Removing the drive was easier than other Toughbook models.

Notice the sim-card slot, it also has an extendible flexible antenna. (click for larger images)

I then attached the hard drive to a mini-IDE to IDE adaptor and installed it temporarily in my test box (AMD socket A/Via board, 1.6Ghz). I installed the XFCE and Gnome desktops (type desktop=xfce at the boot prompt for an XFCE-only system), build-essential, lm-sensors, fusesmb and a few other bits. Once finished, I shutdown, removed the drive and reinstalled it back in the Toughbook. I'm pretty sure Windows would have had a fit at this point but Debian booted quite happily, despite the big difference in hardware. I downloaded Google Chrome to replace Epiphany and Iceweasel (aka Firefox 3.0.6). I haven't always got along with Chrome but it's quite handy for low spec PCs since it's fairly lightweight and I like the built-in browser sync for bookmarks and themes using your Google account. Of course there's always the other option of Midori. Due to the lack of an ethernet port or wireless (which was an option), I'm using an Edimax PCMCIA wireless card, which worked once I downloaded the Ralink firmware. I installed the deb package with 'dpkg -i firmware-ralink_0.14+lenny2_all.deb' as root, as the Gdebi tool isn't installed by default.

As I don't plan on storing much on this laptop, I decided to keep the original 6.4GB hard drive but I've seen some with 30GB or 40GB drives. I may upgrade it later. My next job is getting the onboard sound working. I've had trouble before with Yamaha sound cards on Toshiba laptops. I'll update this post once i get it sorted!

Update:

Fixed the sound problem thanks to this bug report, that includes the solution. Debian doesn't include the alsa-firmware package anymore so I had to download it from here and compile it ("./configure" and "make" in the alsa-firmware directory once you've extracted it) and copy the firmware files (.fw) to /lib/firmware/yamaha (need to create it). Rebooted and now it works!

Update 2

Added the Debian backports repository and installed the later version of Pidgin so I can now chat on MSN on it.

Update 3
I've now upgraded the RAM to 192MB and using the Gnome desktop as i had problems with disappearing panels in XFCE, plus I generally prefer it.

Update 4
I've just upgraded the hard drive to a 30GB Toshiba drive (often cited as the maximum this can take which is wrong, the maximum is 120GB, limited by the age of the controller) that came from an old defunct laptop and also served in my Compaq N400C at one time. It already had Debian installed, booted straight away and bizarrely has no problems with the onboard sound.

Update 5
I have recently upgraded to Debian Squeeze without any problems, although it did take awhile!

Ubuntu 10.0.4 LTS: First impressions

2010-05-02T09:28:00.000-07:00

10.0.4 LTS (codename: Lucid Lynx) is the latest version of Ubuntu, released just a few days ago. I did a fresh install on a HP D530 desktop (Pentium 4 2.8ghz, 2GB RAM, 40GB hard drive) and also upgraded my home-built desktop (AMD Athlon 64 2.4ghz skt 939, 3GB RAM). Here's my thoughts so far:

Sometimes it's the little things that impress me about a new OS release. For instance, during a fresh install, Ubuntu detected my time-zone so I didn't have to carefully pinpoint it on the map. There's now an installer slideshow while you wait the usually short (around 15 mins on an average PC) time until it completes. Once it finished and rebooted I was amazed at the boot time, booting in seconds, I barely had time to admire the new boot-splash screen!

The default desktop now looks pretty slick, feeling similar to OSX, especially with the default wallpaper and title-bar button layout. However, if like me you prefer it how it used to be, it's fairly easy to change. (click the screenshot for a better view).

1. Press ALT + F2 to get a run box
2. type gconf-editor and press return
3. Navigate to Apps --> metacity --> general
4 Find the entry "button_layout"
5. Double click "close,minimize,maximise" on the right-hand side.
6. Edit the entry so it reads: "menu:minimize,maximize,close"
7. hit enter and you're done :)

One of the main features of this release is the new MeMenu. Once you have setup your chat accounts in Empathy (now the default messenger client) or Pidgin (which i still prefer), you can now update your Facebook and/or Twitter status from the text box in the MeMenu. Ideal for a quick tweet! By default it updates both FB and Twitter, but if you want, you can set just one in Gwibber, Ubuntu's default social media tool. I've been using it since 9.10/Karmic, and it has become even better in Lucid. Tweets now show up in speech bubbles and it's easier to differentiate between others and your own tweets. My only niggles are the buttons to select just Facebook or Twitter are too similar in shade. It is also still impossible to retweet a full, 140 character tweet, as it counts the 'RT @username' bit as part of this tweet.

MeMenu:

Gwibber:

Overall, 10.0.4 feels like a slicker, improved OS over the previous 9.10 (Karmic) release, a worthy upgrade, especially considering it is an LTS (Long Term Support) which means you won't have to upgrade for a long time if you don't want to. The only other niggle I had to attend to the volume control applet to the main panel was missing from startup items (add gnome-volume-control-applet to startup items), but easily fixed. This is the first time I haven't immediately changed the theme on a fresh install. The slick new theme is a refreshing change from the previous yucky brown releases, unless you were the minority who really were into brown. I should also mention the Ubuntu Software Centre has improved since last time, it feels a lot easier to find and install packages now. There's also the new Ubuntu One Music Store integrated into Rhythmbox, that I have yet to fully play with but seems to be a good alternative to the iTunes store. Ubuntu One is more integrated this time and actually connected at login every time, unlike in Karmic.

Download Ubuntu here.

Choosing hardware and software for your next Linux computer.

2010-02-01T20:33:00.000-08:00

Software

When choosing to buy or build a computer, I would first off think about what you want it for, and then choose the software then the right hardware. If you going to be doing professional graphics/audio/video work, I'd consider a Mac, as there are some good second hand deals out there. My Powermac G4 (dual 1Ghz MDD, with 2GB ram, room for 4 IDE hard drives) is still a good usable machine, even for light multimedia usage. The only real reason to use Windows is really for games, although there are quite a few, mostly non-commercial, games for Linux and Mac. Even then you can still dual-boot a PC or a Mac. I only boot into Windows for the occasional game of GTA SA and Need For Speed games. You can also play a certain amount of Windows games using WINE. For native Linux games, DJL is a great Steam-like game manager that makes it easy to find what you want.

If you need a machine for an everyday desktop work, web browsing, playing music, media server, and everything else, you can't go wrong with Linux. For me, Ubuntu is the most user-friendly distro. It's the one I have had the best experience with and I feel like it keeps getting better. Feel free to play the distro feild, as it costs nothing but a little download usage. In fact you can get an Ubuntu disc sent to your door for free! Distrowatch is a good place to find the right distro for you. These days there's no reason not to go 64 bit, unless your hardware doesn't support it, as it supports more than 4GB of ram and can give a performance increase.

Hardware

When building or buying hardware for use with Linux, do a bit of Googling to see if anyone has had problems with your chosen hardware. At the moment Nvidia is the best choice for a smooth Linux experience. You'll be rewarded with good performance and lovely compiz goodness! I would avoid onboard graphics as the performance is not so good and it usually borrows from your RAM. Motherboard-wise you can't go wrong generally, except with specific makers e.g. Foxconn. For wireless cards, I have had the best luck with those cards with ralink chipsets. I've had several Edimax and Belkin cards (USB, PCMCIA and USB) that work well with Linux. I have to say I don't like USB dongle-type devices anymore as i have had them overheat and die on me. Most soundcards seem to work OK with Linux, some better than others. Despite problems in the past most Creative cards work fine, though you might need to research a little with X-Fi cards. For printers, HP and Epson work well, avoid Lexmark/Dell. Similarly as HP/Compaq support Linux a lot of there hardware works well with it. There's a good list of hardware makers that support Linux here. Also have a look at the Linux Hardware Compatibility database. After choosing the main hardware, choose a suitable case to house it in, with a decent power supply.

Create a new XFS+ partition in empty space on OSX, without spending any money!

2010-01-19T16:11:00.000-08:00

Having recently cloned my Power-Mac G4's failing 80GB drive to a larger 120GB drive (maximum size allowed for it's onboard IDE), I needed to make use of the empty 38GB or so of space. Unfortunately Apple's drive utility doesn't have the ability to make a new partition in this space, it's pretty basic really. Having Googled around for a freeware OSX partition tool, it seems there isn't any, all I could find were paid for partition software and some complicated command-line tutorials.

So here's how to get your HDD space back:

1. Attach the drive via a USB/IDE adapter or drive caddy. Make sure it is set to Master.

2. Plug it in to a PC running Linux (I use Ubuntu), the Gparted live CD, or any other live CD with gparted.

3. Open gparted and select the correct drive (your XFS+ OSX boot drive should be visible and your free space). Right click and select unmount.

4. Right click in the free space and select create a new primary partition and select FAT32 as the filesystem, then click apply.

5. Safely remove or just shutdown your PC, then remove the drive from it's adapter or caddy.

6. Re-attach it your Mac, (making sure the drive's jumper is set to the correct position) and power it on.

7. Open Disk Utility and select your new FAT32 partition, it will be named something unfriendly.

8. Select Erase, and set the filesystem to XFS+ (Journaled), then it will format and it will auto-mount on your desktop.

9. Re-name the new volume as something useful. I named mine 'storage' as it's handy for downloads, software etc.

Job Done!

A Beginners Guide To Ushare (Using Ubuntu)

2010-01-02T11:53:00.000-08:00

This is a brief guide to getting UPNP sharing with Ushare working on Ubuntu, though should work on Debian and Debian-based distros.

Installing:

In a terminal, type:

sudo aptitude install ushare
(then enter your password when prompted)

(you could also open synaptic and search for and double-click ushare)

Quick configuration:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure ushare

Go through the dialogues, you can keep the default name 'ushare', then tell it where it will find your videos or audio, with a space between directories, something like:

/home/carl/music /home/carl/video

..and that's the basic configuration done.

Advanced Configuration

To get ushare streaming to your Xbox 360 you need to edit the config file:

sudo gedit /etc/ushare.conf

and find and edit this line so it reads

ENABLE_XBOX=yes

Also enable the web interface:

# Enable Web interface (yes/no)
ENABLE_WEB=yes

..and then restart ushare with:

sudo invoke-rc.d ushare restart

You can now access the web interface by pointing your browser to
http://ip-address-of-server:49152/web/ushare.html

You will also need to invoke that command when you add more music/videos (or reboot) to make them appear in ushare, or refresh from the web interface.

You may need to do a little more fiddling, I don't have an Xbox to try it with, there's a more advanced guide for ushare and Xbox 360 here. and also here

For accessing your ushare server from another Linux desktop, I found a tutorial using djmount.

Update: Djmount is now available in the Ubuntu repositories, so there is no need to compile it, just 'sudo apt-get install djmount'

Here's how to start djmount on startup, reposted here just in case the source disappears:

The following steps do work for autostarting djmount under ubuntu:
cd /etc/network/if-up.d
gksudo gedit ./djmount

contents of script:
#!/bin/sh

# Not for loopback!
[ "$IFACE" != "lo" ] || exit 0

modprobe fuse
fusermount -u /media/upnp
djmount -o allow_other /media/upnp

sudo chmod 755 ./djmount
sudo chown root ./djmount
sudo chgrp root ./djmount

Accessing a Sandisk Sansa Clip+ with Banshee on Ubuntu 9.10

2009-11-17T18:38:00.000-08:00

I've been given a Sandisk Sansa Clip+ 4GB mp3 player for my birthday. I requested the Clip+ as it has a microSD card slot (that supports up to 16GB SDHC cards) and I have an 8Gb card to use with it. I am amazed by the clarity of it's sound for the price. The player supports Mp3, WMA, FLAC and Ogg (no AAC), and arrived in a large box compared to the tiny player itself:

It supports replaygain and is gapless, is much cheaper than an Ipod shuffle and has a nice bright little screen. As you can see it looks like an ipod that's shrunk in the wash!

I set the player to use MSC (Mass Storage Class) in it's settings (you can also use MTP - Media Transfer Protocol) and plugged it in to my desktop machine that has Ubuntu 9.10 64bit. With MSC, the player and it's microSD card show up as drives, however it took a little searching on the net to get the Clip+ to show up as a device in Banshee. I'm using the newest version from the Banshee Team Repos (named 'banshee-1'). Eventually i found a solution here, and here. You need to create a text file in the root of the player and it's card called ".is_audio_player" (without the qoutes). The period is essential to make it a hidden system file, press CTRL+H in Nautilus, to show hidden files. Copy and paste this text into each file, then save:

audio_folders=Music/
folder_depth=2
output_formats=audio/mp3

This makes sure the files go in the right folders and with the right format, mp3 in this case. Then safely remove the player, unplug and plug back in, and now it will show up in Banshee in it's side pane like so:

Additional Links:

Read CNET's review of the Clip+

Finding An Alternative to Winamp, Foobar or iTunes for Ubuntu 9.10

2009-11-03T14:03:00.000-08:00

Whenever i am on Windows I prefer Winamp for general use. It has reasonable tagging, good album art and info support, the media library is excellent and it's gapless. For transcoding music files i use Foobar. As a player it is good and has great tagging support but lacks decent visualisations and is tricky to setup. On my Mac i use iTunes mainly as i can access my Firefly (mt-daapd) servers. However, on Windows iTunes is a different, more hideously bloated, beast. I used to really like Amarok 1.4 for awhile before i switched to Exaile, and I'm not keen on Amarok 2. I find it lacks the features I liked in 1.4 and does not fit in well with Gnome, it being a KDE program. There are not many gapless audio player for Linux other than Aqualung, which is a little bit too bare-bones for me, and struggles with large music collections and also Rhythmbox is now gapless. There is also Music Player Daemon but it can be difficult to setup.

What I require in a Linux music player:

Gapless playback
Last.FM support
Album cover support (from embedded and/or folder image, and ability to download covers)
Good Mp3 tag support and tag editor
A context view with information from the internet (lyrics etc)
Reasonable Gnome integration.
To just play music, i have VLC or Totem for video files.
Shuffle mode and custom playlists - especially Recently Added)
Decent visualisations.
Firefly (mt-daapd) support

The Linux alternatives:

Exaile

Exaile was my choice of media player for the Linux desktop, until now. I have just upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 and sadly it has version 3.0.1 of Exaile. In this version there is a very annoying bug. Exaile refuses to close, even when I attempt to close the player's tray icon it just sits there. if i have the icon disabled and close the player, the music will just keep going without the GUI. When this bug will be fixed is uncertain. It's a shame as if it was not for that bug it would be great player. Consequently I am now looking for a replacement media player, at least until Exaile is fixed.

Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox is many users' choice as it's the default Gnome music player, however it has it's problems. it takes a long time to scan my music as i have a very large collection but that's not the biggest problem. Unfortunately the main problem with Rhythmbox is it keeps scanning non-audio files and giving error messages, and trying to download codecs for them. It does this on startup whether it has already found them before or not. This is made worse by the lack of a manual rescan library function.

Banshee

Banshee seemed to take the longest (more than an hour!) of all the players I've tried to scan my music collection as it found my 31299 tracks (i actually have around 27500) then re-scanned them for some reason. Visually, the interface is a bit messy at first but once i had it configured to how i like it, it's fine. It is similar to Rhythmbox really, except with a better interface. the only problem I have at the moment is it is not submitting songs to Last.Fm. I should also say I tested using the Beta from the Banshee Team Repository.

Listen Media Player

This is the first time I have use Listen Media Player for a long time, and it looks a lot better than it used to. Once I set my music folder in it's preferences, Listen scanned my music collection. it was quicker than Banshee but not as quick as Exaile, and gave good feedback along it's progress bar, although it used quite a bit a lot resources doing it. Upon trying to play however it became unresponsive and my CPU peaked out at 100% and memory usage skyrocketed, then Listen crashed with a python error. When I restarted the player, it had to rescan the media library again *sigh*. I managed to get it to play again but with such high resource usage that I had to close it down. So no joy there, which is a shame as it does have a gapless setting.

Conclusion

Well for now it seems I'm going to stick with Rhythmbox but only because Last.Fm scrobbling actually works otherwise I would choose Banshee. I have disabled automatic scanning of tracks though to avoid it trying to find codecs for non-audio files everytime it starts up! If the bugs in Exaile are worked out then I'll switch to it instead. For editing tags in mp3s I use Mp3tag in Wine, and for normalising volume i use Mp3gain in Wine. I long for a decent substitute for Winamp/Foobar on Linux.

Update: I managed to get last.fm plugin to submit tracks on Banshee - it's now vieing to be my choice of player on Linux! My only annoyances: lack of a visible Skip button on the interface - where is it? EDIT: When you disable Shuffle the Skip forward button appears. I use the Cairo Dock Audio Player applet or the media buttons on my keyboard to control the player. the best thing about Banshee is the cover fetcher, it is a lot better than Rhythmbox's.

Resource Usage:

This is the output of 'top' on the command-line, when each player is playing an mp3 (separately):

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND

16998 carl 20 0 779m 141m 22m S 11.9 7.1 64:39.88 banshee-1

21623 carl 20 0 817m 120m 26m S 5.9 6.0 0:19.64 rhythmbox

10958 carl 20 0 565m 27m 15m S 4.6 1.4 0:25.57 aqualung

12041 carl 20 0 1212m 355m 17m R 89.7 17.7 23:00.49 listen

4579 carl 20 0 743m 219m 20m R 94.7 10.9 0:27.39 exaile

Notice the astronomically high resource usage of Listen!

Update 2 - 3/11/09: For some reason, possibly because it uses Mono, I've recently found Banshee (1.6 beta) to be using more and more ram the longer it is left usually around 900mb and peaking the CPU quite a bit, I hope this is fixed soon. Until then I'll keep looking for alternatives.

Update 3 - 29/01/10: I've settled on Gmusicbrowser for now as it does just about everything I want, although transfering to USB drives is a bit cludgy.

Re-Enable CTRL + ALT + Backspace to Restart X in Ubuntu karmic

2009-11-02T11:52:00.000-08:00

As with Ubuntu 9.0.4, the shortcut to disable restarting of X has been disabled in Ubuntu karmic, and the previous method does not work now. Instead go to System --> Preferences --> keyboard --> Layouts --> Layout Options and tick the option as shown in the screenshots. So next time on that hopefully rare occasion X locks up you can now restart X, instead of resorting to holding the power button in.

Ubuntu 9.10: First Impressions - The Good, The Bad and the Ugly?

2009-10-29T21:54:00.000-07:00

Ubuntu 9.10 (codenamed Karmic Koala) is now available to download, and I've installed it on a fresh hard drive in my HP6120 laptop. So, what's it like?

The Good

The new boot screens that use Xsplash instead of Usplash make the boot process quick (helped by the now default ext4 filesystem) and looks great, with a lot less messy text, it's very smooth. It also now uses Grub2 on fresh installations. The new Humanity theme on Gnome 2.28, is the most obvious improvement on previous releases. This time round I didn't immediately switch to Clearlooks or any of the other themes as the default theme actually looks much better. It has a lot less ugly brownness! The Disk Utility is neat new little feature, which shows hard drive info including SMART status which is rather handy. It's also good to have the (almost) latest version (3.5.3) of Firefox as default browser, hopefully it will be upgraded to 3.5.4 soon. Update: the latest Firefox has now been added to the Ubuntu repos.

The Bad

I think the new Ubuntu Software Centre which replaces Add and Remove Software is an interesting idea, especially for beginners but I felt it seemed more difficult to quickly find programs, or maybe it's because I much prefer Synaptic which is thankfully still in the Administration menu. The new GDM for 9.10 is now very limited, you cannot change it's theme without resorting to hacks, and although it has made boot-up seem faster, it seems to take longer to get from login to desktop than it used to.

Empathy is now the default messenger client, which I think needs more work. My main annoyance was I was unable to get the Facebook plugin to work properly, and there were lots of connection errors. I still prefer pidgin which i am glad you can still install from the repositories.

Another piece of software that is 'almost but not quite there' is Ubuntu one which is similar to other file sync services such as Dropbox, and is now installed by default. Unfortunately it is still unable to connect with the server at the moment, only coming up with an error message. Incidentally I do really like the new libnotify notifications, they look even better now, and are slightly lower on the screen than before. Another disappointment is I'm stuck with the latest feature-lacking version of Exaile. Update : Just received an Ubuntu-One client update and it is now connecting fine. (07:52 GMT) Update 2:

The Ugly?

Well there isn't much ugly in this version of Ubuntu, as it features a much more appealing look. The default theme is more orange than brown, and nautilus looks cleaner this time too. I'm not too keen on the new login theme either, it is dark yucky brown and you cannot easily change it's theme, plus it is more insecure to have your username shhow up at the login screen as it is one less thing for someone to guess.You should be able to change that behaviour by using gconf-editor and go through /apps/gdm/simple-greeter/ and select disable_user_list but I have not got it to work yet.

Conclusion

Well this release sees some interesting changes, and overall it feels like an improvement over 9.0.4. It boots quick and looks great, Ubuntu just keeps getting better and better. The next release, 10.04, will be a Long Term Service release. It will be interesting to see, as i will probably upgrade my servers then, which still run the last LTS - 8.0.4. You can upgrade from LTS to LTS but you can't upgrade from 8.0.4 straight to 9.10, you have to upgrade to 8.10 and 9.0.4 then 9.10.

*The Release notes to Karmic show that you can now more easily re-enable the CTRL ALT Backspace for restarting X action, also other bugs and solutions. I would also suggest using ext4 only for the root filesystem for the time being due to large-filesize bugs.

Ubuntu 9.0.4 Reinstallation On HP 6120

2009-10-09T18:01:00.000-07:00

I've just had to reinstall Ubuntu on my HP 6120 Laptop, due to the graphics messing up - I was using Intel beta graphics drivers, so I guess the latest ones don't like my 915 chipset much. Consequently I was left with unusable graphics. Thankfully, it doesn't take too long to get a fresh Ubuntu installation back to how I want it.

Preperation

Firstly I logged in, in safe-graphics mode and backed up my photos, some downloads, documents and my settings, over ftp to my desktop. I backed up the hidden folders for Firefox, and Pidgin which are ".mozilla" and ".purple". After reinstallation I simply copied these back into the new home directory. I used Evolution's own backup/restore function to get my email sorted. I should also say that you could also use a seperate /home partition but this time I wanted as little detritus from the previous install as possible. Also If you upgrade to a new version of Ubuntu, you may get config problems. If you can't boot into the old install you can copy everything over using the Ubuntu livecd.

Fresh Desktop

After the reinstall i was welcomed by a clean, very brown, Ubuntu desktop. This I just have to change! I reinstalled Clear-Blue theme and Human-Azul icons. I also installed wallpaper-tray, a utility that switches wallpapers at preset times, from Synaptic. I then installed Dropbox and pointed wallpaper-tray to my wallpaper folder in the Dropbox folder. For extra eye-candy I installed the Compiz advanced settings tool, I need my wobbly windows and spinning cube!

Essential Programs and Multimedia

For playing all the usual codecs and for some other stuff not included in the default repositories, the easiest solution is Medibuntu. I added the repository (link is to the howto) and installed 'non-free-codecs', 'libdvdcss2' (for encrypted DVD playing), Skype and Google Earth. Make sure to agree to the Google license agreement, otherwise installation will fail.

I installed Avidemux For video editing and to transcode downloaded youtube FLV videos, and Deluge for torrents (Linux distros mostly). I prefer Deluge to Transmission, the default client in Ubuntu as I find it easier to use. For playing videos and streaming video/audio I use VLC media player, it is one of the best players around. All three are cross-platform, running on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Hardware Monitoring

For keeping an eye on my laptops temperature and performance I always install smartmontools, lm-sensors, xsensors, and xsysinfo and they're corresponding applets which can all be found in the Ubuntu repos. For extra configuration I install Webmin, which is good for remote admin too. Do 'sudo sensors-detect' in a terminal (and press return a few times to answer the questions) to configure lm-sensors then reboot to get it working. Another good admin tool is phpsysinfo which gives a nice run down of your hardware in a webpage, a good alternative to Belarc Advisor on Windows. Of course, not for the command-line-phobic, ssh is the daddy of remote access - 'sudo aptitude install ssh'. I also installed the old Gnome network manager, 'gnome-network-admin' as i prefer it to the new one, especially for static connections.

Also of course, I installed the Facebook Pidgin plugin and Swiftfox, both of which I've blogged about before. And that's about it for the moment, last thing I installed was the Sun java plugin 'sun-java-jre', everything else I'll probably install as I need them.

Update 19/03/11

I have since replaced this laptop with another HP6120, (this time a slight upgrade 1.8Ghz, from 1.6Ghz) and I have been running Ubuntu 10.0.4 for quite awhile and is my favourite of my laptops due to it's nice 15 inch screen and keyboard.

Powered by Ubuntu

2009-10-06T10:15:00.000-07:00

My "Powered by Ubuntu" stickers arrived today!

A few weeks back, I sent off for them from the System76 website. You can download them from the Free Software Stickers book and print them yourself, but of course you need the right self-adhesive paper and reasonable printer, so it's easier to get these guys to do it for you for free! They are ideal for replacing those Designed for Windows stickers most PCs/laptops come with. I have put the first sticker on my home-built desktop machine.

Photos:

How Dropbox Works (video)

2009-10-02T18:59:00.000-07:00

I find Dropbox very useful for syncing config files, wallpapers and sharing files with friends. You get 2GB of free storage and can get more through referals. I've found I don't use my memory sticks as much for smaller files. I like that it's cross-platform (Linux/Mac/Windows). There are other similar programs like Syncplicity (Windows only) and Foldershare (Windows/Mac, now owned by Microsoft) that aren't completely cross-platform. For Linux, there's also Ubuntu One which I have yet to try, but it is limited to Ubuntu 9.0.4 and above at the moment only. Anyway this video explains how Dropbox works in a nice simple way, ideal for encouraging friends to join up. :D

Update: Having tried Ubuntu One, it's similar to Dropbox, though it would be nice if it had similar icons to show what files are updating etc, and a distinctive Ubuntu One folder icon. Although you can of course add your own emblems (Edit --> Backgrounds and Emblems in Nautilus) I'll let you know how I get on with it, when I've tested it thoroughly. Also of course it would be great if it was not restricted to Ubuntu, though you can upload/download files through the web interface, but it is not as intuitive as Dropbox's.

Update 2: I've been tryomg out Ubuntu One a bit more, it's ok when it works but at the moment all i get is an icon with an ominous 'X' on it, sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't, maybe it will improve for upcoming Karmic koala, which is not long now.

Debian Lenny on a Compaq N400C

2009-09-19T11:16:00.000-07:00

Distro Problems and Decisions

I've been using my Compaq N400C for a while with Ubuntu 8.0.4 and it ran OK, up until just recently. Ever since a recent update, it kept running ok for a while then freezing up, two LEDs would flash and that would be it. I'd have to hold the power button down to force shutdown. I even tried to reinstall with Ubuntu 8.0.4 and 9.0.4, but got a kernel panic during install. I checked RAM and replaced the hard drive (swapped the original 20GB for a 30GB), but still received the same problem. To install anything on this laptop really requires the docking station that has the CD drive (and two extra HDD bays too) that I don't have. I use the minimal install discs with a USB DVD writer, as I never had any luck with a full OS disc, i'd always get errors. So then I thought about a different distro. I didn't fancy having to get used to an RPM based distro again, like Mandriva or Fedora (which I have had bad experiences with) or even Suse which I'd never consider now they are sleeping with Microsoft, besides I'm not keen on YAST. Nope, it'd have to be Debian based or indeed be Debian - so, onto the install:

Installation and Configuration

I used the smallest of the minimal install discs, the business card ISO, and installed it from my Plextor USB/Firewire DVD writer using USB. I chose to just install the commandline only install at first so I could check it booted ok afterwards. All was fine so far, so I rebooted. removed the DVD drive, then installed the Gnome desktop with "aptitude install gnome" as root. I also installed ssh and deluge-torrent, then I rebooted again to be greated by the nice Debian GDM screen. I did notice all the sound mixer faders were all muted for some reason, and discovered the ESS Allegro/Maestro3 soundcard wasn't found. I Googled around and found this post on the the Debian User Forum. What solved it for me I think was installing the firmware (untar then compile it with "./configure", "make" then "make install") then running, as root in the terminal: "rmmod snd_maestro3" and then "modprobe snd_maestro3" and after a reboot it was fine upon unmuting the mixers. Now the volume buttons on the front of the laptop do actually work the master volume.

Making Debian More Palatable For The Desktop

The first thing I needed to do was get my Edimax EW-7108PCg PCMCIA wireless card working, as I used Ethernet during install. For the wireless I needed the Ralink firmware which you can download here or directly from here. Annoyingly, double-clicking a Deb package opens it with 'Archive Manager' and even when I open it with GDebi Package Manager it doesn't work, just crapping out after opening. So to install Deb packages I have to resort to "dpk -i nameofpackage.deb" in a terminal. Upon reboot, my wireless worked, and I connected to my WPA encrypted network.

Next up I just had to replace Iceweasel, which has to be the worse software name ever, with a proper version of Firefox. I did consider installing Firefox manually using the tar.gz package but it's not exactly conveniant, so I installed Swiftfox instead. Swiftfox is an optimised version of Firefox, with versions for Intel and AMD 32bit and 64bit. At the moment it is based on Firefox 3.5.2.1 which is almost the latest version. I then installed Pidgin messenger from the Debian repository and the Facebook plugin.

For playing all the required codecs I added the Debian Multimedia repository by adding "deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org stable main" to the software sources. I've installed w32codecs, flash-player-mozilla and libdvdcss for now. I also transfered my Swiftfox settings from my other laptop by copying the .mozilla folder (in /home/username/). Since I use Dropbox for syncing files I installed that too. This required adding the Dropbox Ubuntu Gutsy repository, as a Debian one isn't provided.

This was a slightly unorthodox install compared to a standard install due to the hardware involved, and is a little bit more fuss than an Ubuntu install, but I'm fairly happy with it, it's a solid stable distro, and feels a bit lighter than Ubuntu which is handy on an 850Mhz laptop with 256MB of RAM!

Update: Swiftfox has now been updated to the latest version, 3.5.3.

Update 2: Found a nice short tutorial on installing the latest Adobe Flash plugin in Debian.
Update 3 14/02/10: I have since gone back to Ubuntu 8.0.4, since various updates seem to have solved the problems I was having.

Update 4 (02/06/10): The hard drive out of this is now in my Toughbook CF-27 and this now has a 40GB drive with Lubuntu 10.0.4 LTS which is running fine, using Chrome for browsing and it also boots extremely quickly.

Sometimes you do get what you wish for...

2009-09-15T19:38:00.000-07:00

I used to be a KDE man through and through, until i had some serious stability issues in Kubuntu, and then of course there is KDE 4.x but I'll leave that for now. One of the main reasons I stuck with KDE for a long time was Konqueror. It's such a versatile file manager (and web browser) with it's little Kioslaves and it's split pane file mode. When I switched to Gnome on Ubuntu (Hardy/8.0.4 at the time) I still occasionally used konqueror for that very feature, until now.

Anyway, I have just discovered you can now get dual-pane mode in nautilus! It's essentially a beta version of Nautilus which you install via a PPA (software repository), it is only available for Ubuntu 9.0.4 at the moment. There is an article on how to install it here. I havn't encountered any problems with it so far, and i like the way it removes the background of the pane you are not using, you press F3 to go dual-pane, it works really well.

This really does sum up the RIAA so well

2009-09-07T21:51:00.000-07:00

From http://cosmo7.com - click for original image

Firefox Spotted On Electronic Billboard

2009-08-26T18:26:00.000-07:00

On a recent trip to Stamford, I spotted this electronic billboard in the entrance of Newark (Nottinghamshire) station. On closer inspection I noticed it was actually using Firefox (instead of IE, for once) unable to find the URL for it's advert. I reckon they used Firefox because of it's fullscreen mode is better than IE's, in that it actually auto-hides the main toolbars at the top, so all you see is the page itself, plus maybe because it's also more secure and standards compliant. You can tell by the 'Try Again' button that it is running on Windows, which always seems to be a bit of a waste of resources to me, using a full blown desktop OS for an application more suited to a slim Linux installation.

Facebook Chat for Pidgin

2009-07-29T18:11:00.000-07:00

Update:

Facebook have added Jabber/XMPP support to their Facebook Chat protocol so now we don't need any plugins for Facebook in Pidgin/Adium/Empathy! Find out how to add a Fb account here. This renders the following tutorial obsolete!

I like Facebook quite a bit, it means I can keep in touch with my brother in Japan and see what all my friends have been upto, wherever they might be. The one thing that annoys me though is Facebook Chat. It hardly seems to work most of the time and you have to have the web browser open, meaning you need to keep flicking between tabs to hold a conversation and do whatever you are doing in other tabs. You can put Chat in it's own window, but that doesn't solve the other problems. I kept wondering why they didn't just make it available in other messaging programs.

Thankfully, when reading an article on messaging programs I discovered a Pidgin plugin for Facebook. And it's great! It allows you to add Facebook as just like another messaging protocol like MSN or Yahoo! It features options to show Facebook updates as email alerts, edit Friends from within Pidgin and set your Facebook status with your Pidgin status (I'm not sure you would want 'I'm not here right now' as your Facebook status, but there you go).

Of course Pidgin is cross-platform, running on Windows and Linux, and theres a portabl e Windows version for USB stick. If you have a Mac, you can use Adium, which is based on Pidgin and has the Facebook plugin already installed.

On Ubuntu 8.0.4 you need to install libjson-glib - download it here - before you install the Deb package. On Ubuntu 9.0.4 libjson-glib is in the it's repositories so no need to manually download/install it. If Pidgin is already open restart it, then got to Accounts --> Manage --> Add and it lists facebook alongside the other protocols. So I'm pleased I now no longer have to have Firefox open on the Facebook page to chat to friends on Facebook :)

Penumbra

2009-07-17T17:31:00.000-07:00

I've followed the blog of Helios for some time, using RSS feed, and it's always well worth visiting! Today more so, as he's blogged about a new game available for Linux. It would be great if more publishers made games available for Linux. It is actually three games created by Thomas Grip and Jens Nilsson called Penumbra.

Firefox 3.5 on Ubuntu 9.0.4 64 Bit

2009-07-12T10:00:00.000-07:00

Having looked forward to Firefox 3.5 for awhile I looked forward to it popping up in the Ubuntu repositories, yet it still hasn't appeared in them. Fear not though a quick Google search reveals its easy when you know how, to install the latest version. Great, so I installed it, but then found Flash wasn't working any more. As I'm using the 64 bit version of Ubuntu, I'm used to slight incompatibilities occasionally. Again a quick search on my favourite search engine and I found a solution here. I was also worried my favourite extensions wouldn't work, yet i had no trouble after a few updates. The only plugin that I found to be incompatible was Novell Moonlight, which I hardly use, and will most likely be updated soon. I've found Firefox 3.5 to be impressively fast, even running at a reasonable speed on my old 400Mhz PowerMac G4. I've not explored everything yet, but I am impressed by the new restore feature that allows you to choose which tabs to restore in case one of them crashed the browser, which is a nifty feature and one that I've always wanted.

My Favourite Firefox Extensions:

Adblock Plus - absolutely essential!
Caught Up - allows you to play ITV Play in Firefox on Linux!
Delicious bookmarks - bookmark sharing plugin
Downloadhelper - for easy download of YouTube videos
Download Statusbar - shows downloads on Firefox's status bar
External IP - shows your IP address for your net connection
Fierr - replaces the default error page with a more stylish alternative.
Flashblock - Replaces flash objects with a button so you can selectively play them, ideal on Flash-heavy pages, like the hideous Myspace!
PDF Download - Allows you to choose whether you want to view or download PDF files.
ReloadEvery - reloads web pages every so many secons or minuites.
StumbleUpon - browse through random pages for when you're bored
TabScope - preview and navigate tab contents
VideoSurf - shows stills of videos of sites like youtube, and choose where you want to view the video from.
Xmarks - sync bookmarks between browsers on all your PCs and Macs - usually the second plugin i install after Adblockplus!

Update
It seems my Java plugin is broken :( ah well probably just use Opera for java stuff.

Update 2
I can attest to Firefox 3.5's stability, I've had 30 or more tabs in Firefox on Ubuntu with no problems and no noticable slowdown.

Update 3
I have now switched to Swiftfox 3.5.2 which has optimised builds for different CPUs and also has a PPA for Deb packages. It's setup to be faster than a normal build of Firefox.

Update 4!
Found an even better tutorial on getting 3.5.3 on Ubuntu here

Fedora 11: Why i wish i hadn't downloaded it..

2009-06-26T00:35:00.000-07:00

I sometimes think i might be really unlucky with some Linux Distros but I know at least one other person who has had some issues with Fedora 11. Firstly I tried the live CD, as always i try it first in Virtualbox, just to check it downloaded OK and have a quick spin. It booted OK but i was unable to get it to install, crashing out on me. OK I thought maybe it is just a VB issue, so I tried it on a spare PC, a socket-A Athlon, (2GHZ/512MB ram, 40GB x2 HDD). I tried the default partition layout: no dice. I then downloaded the DVD (32 bit version) thinking this might be better. I still had trouble installing either in Virtualbox or on my test machine. I searched some forums and tried several different partition layouts but still no luck. This is the buggiest distro I've tried in a long long time! A friend of mine tried the 64 bit version but had similar problems but did manage to get it installed. His major gripe was apparently PulseAudio sets all applications' volume stupidly loud by default, not helped by Gnomes default Pulseaudio mixer which has really been dumbed down so much. On Ubuntu 9.0.4 I have actually installed the old mixer as it allows greater control, especially on line-in and Mic-in. Somehow all of the reviews of Fedora 11 I've read online have been positive, and I can't figure out why!

Anyway, I always like to try out various distros every now and then just to reinforce why i chose my favourite - Ubuntu :) I've also I've just been trying out a nice lightweight, easy to use distro called Nonux. It's a Dutch Slackware based live CD with the Gnome desktop which makes a great combination. It has an installer and gparted (partition editor) is installed so it's good for rescuing PCs and for installing on old PCs.

Imitation is not always the sincerest form of flattery

2009-06-04T10:16:00.000-07:00

Monstrosity: Windows 7 Theme for Linux

I've occasionally seen a red Fiat Coupé with Ferrari badges all over it. It looks pretty tacky and unconvincing, yet on various desktop customisation pages such as Gnome-Look, Stardock and others, I've seen countless themes that emulate the complete look of another operating system.
Why would you want Linux to look or work like a hideous bloated and buggy closed-source operating system? I've also seen Ubuntu brown themes for Windows, whilst it's nicer to look at than Windows XP and Vista default themes, why not just use Ubuntu, at least in dual boot? I also find the lack of themes on OSX to be a little irritating, what if i don't like brushed metal? The only feature of Mac I emulate in Windows (on the rare occasions I boot into it) and Linux is the dock. For Linux I use Cairo Dock and for Windows I use Object Dock. This is only because I like the way it works and keeps all my favourite programs close to hand. I just don't want my whole desktop to look like or work like OSX, the Starbucks of OS's, or the Mcdonalds of OS's, Windows.

Ubuntu 9.0.4 The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

2009-05-16T12:58:00.000-07:00

Following on from my previous article on 8.10, I thought I'd repeat the process with the latest Ubuntu release - 9.04 codenamed Jaunty Jackalope.

The Good...

The Integrated Brasero for CD/DVD burning is nicely implemented and everything generally feels more speedy, and the boot-time is quicker and neater, I like the new splash screen. Dual desktops worked straight away after I installed the Nvidia drivers, unlike in 8.04, which took a little jiggery-bodgery. I also like the new Remote Desktop applet that shows available remote desktops with one click of the icon.

The Bad...

Kubuntu has abandoned Amarok 1.4 before version 2 is ready and fully featured, although you can still install 1.4.10 using this repository. Last.fm still didn't work for me in Amarok 2 and the gui feels cluttered. As with 8.10, I still don't like the default network manager although I have now found out than you can still install the old one. More annoyingly to please newbies, Ctrl Alt Backspace is disabled. This is an Xorg change rather than Ubuntu specific, and it is fairly easily changed.

...and the Ugly
The default brown theme looks a little better and though I'm still not keen on it, it is easily changed (and is the first thing i change!) Also in the latest Gnome, it is missing two of my favourite themes - Glossy and Clearlooks classic.

overall I am pleased with 9.04, much more than 8.10, and I'm running the 64bit version (I've not noticed any 64bit specific bugs as of now) on my main desktop machine.

Ubuntu 8.10 - the good the bad and the ugly: first impressions

2008-11-06T18:04:00.000-08:00

The latest Ubuntu release, Intrepid Ibex is out now, but is it any good? Well, my first impressions are a mixed bag.

The Good...

Hardy Heron's Samba problems seem to have been sorted I think and Ibex ships with the latest edition of Firefox. The new Guest user is a great new feature that i've been wanting for ages, and encrypted folders are a good thing. Nautilus now has tabbed browsing at last, now it just needs split pane like konqueror...

The Bad

A friend of mines Lexmark Z1380 printer still doesnt work, even the PDF print feature doesn't work either, this seems to be a CUPS problem. I don't like the new network manager, I accidentally left a test machine without a network connection because it was so tricky to set up (although i could edit /etc/interfaces manually...), maybe I'll get use to it in time...

..and the Ugly

The new brown theme is not much of an improvement over the old one so it's still the first thing I'd change on a new install, unless you like brown.

The Second-Hand Mac Keyboard Experiment

2008-09-23T16:59:00.000-07:00

For a week I thought I'd try an Apple keyboard on my PC with Ubuntu Linux and Windows XP, as I have just acquired one for free, it's not a new silver one though, but an old white one from 2005.

On Ubuntu 8.0.4 (and other Gnome using distros), it's easy to set up with the gnome keyboard tools (System → Preferences → Keyboard). Choose Apple under Models and add 'Apple United Kingdom' (or whatever your locale is) to the layouts. Also it is useful to select 'Press right control for third level chooser' under Layout Options, so you can access unusual keys like copyright symbols and double inverted commas etc. I set up F14, F15 and F16 as Previous, Play/Pause and Next track, but you can choose whatever you want them for in System → Preferences → Keyboard Shortcuts. I also set up F13 as Print Screen but I kept hitting it accidentally whilst aiming for backspace, so I set it to Alt + F13. Apple's help key is Insert, and the equals key is unassigned, and I gave up trying to assign it.

On Windows XP I had problems with the Apple keyboard. The volume keys worked straight away, perhaps because I had the Microsoft keyboard tools installed. I could set up F14, F15 and F16 for
Previous, Play/Pause and Next track but only with Winamp (with the RMX plugin which can also use joysticks and remotes) The eject key did not work straight away. To actually reassign keys its tricky, although possible with third party freeware. I tried Sharpkeys and Autohotkey but I almost messed up my Windows install using them. It was much more difficult to set up in Windows than in Linux.

On using it for awhile I liked using it with Ubuntu, the volume controls and eject shortcuts I like and the look of it, but I'm switching back to my Microsoft Comfort Curve 2000 as its much less strain on my fingers. Perhaps because it's old, the Apple keyboard needs more force to press the keys, and the key travel is too long. I hope the new Apple keyboard is better for the sake of Apple users, I now realise why a lot of Mac users use non-apple keyboards.

Update: Since then I've aquired a Powermac G4 which has the old Mac G3/4 keyboard with built in power button, I actually prefer this keyboard to the later one as it feels more comfortable!

Another Reason Why I Love Linux!

2008-09-08T12:06:00.000-07:00

Recently I built a 'new' PC from various bits and pieces: a Foxconn socket 939 board i had lying about, with 2.4ghz single core CPU; 2GB of ram (made up of four 512MB modules running in dual channel mode) and I put in an 80GB drive for Windows. Of course, I had to do a fresh install on it as it has a different chipset than my old machine (Nvidia as opposed to SIS on the old Asus board) though both machines use Athlon 64 bit CPUs (2800+ socket 754 and 3800+ X2). So once I had afresh install it came to thinking about how to transfer all my settings and things for Ubuntu. Instead of the tedious approach of reinstall then re-downloading all my programs, I decided to risk just moving the hard drive straight into it, and just repairing Grub with Super Grub Disk Imagine my surprise when it worked perfectly without any problems! I'm writing this on it now. Now you can't do that with Windows without a whole lot of messing about, I didn't even have to uninstall anything!

Having successfully transferred the Ubuntu system between desktops, I wondered whether it would work with other mixed systems. the opportunity came when I repaired a HP nc6000 laptop, and on having a faulty DVD drive, and not having a spare I used an unorthodox method of getting a working system on it. I installed the Ubuntu 8.0.4 live CD on the hard drive connected to a USB/mini IDE converter to my pentium 3 750mhz test-bed machine, then put the drive back in the machine when the install had completed but before the reboot to the new system. On booting up in the laptop it worked fine, with no problems! I wonder what would flummox a Linux install! After installing the ATI drivers and adding another 256MB of ram, Compiz works great on it.

Steve Ballmer and The Grim Reaper - the likeness is uncanny!

2008-08-02T08:42:00.000-07:00

Steve Ballmer and The Grim reaper (as portrayed in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey)

Hooray! Vmware now works on Ubuntu 8.0.4!

2008-06-21T10:08:00.000-07:00

As you can see, the latest 6.0.4 version of VMware Workstation now works perfectly in Ubuntu Hardy Heron without any kernel patching. Also you may notice I'm running Mac OSX Tiger in VMware! I downloaded an already setup VMware image, but there is a how-to here.

Update: It works not quite perfectly, at the moment it needs configuring everytime I reboot, which is annoying!

Update 2: Sorted! it seems an ubuntu kernel update has fixed this issue, its work fine now.

2008-05-19T17:59:00.000-07:00

I've just recently tried Ulteo's Virtual Desktop which is a nice integrated way of running Linux applications on Windows. it is based on Colinux (co-operative Linux, but I've found out it was a bit fiddly and not as smooth as Ulteo. The only problem with UVD is it needs a good internet connection all the time, I just wish Colinux was as smooth as Ulteo.

Ubuntu + Firefly + Amarok = bliss

2008-05-14T09:18:00.000-07:00

For awhile now I've had an Itunes compatible music server in the form of open-source Firefly (previously called mt-daap) on Ubuntu (Gutsy and Hardy). It takes a little setting up, but you can grab firefly from Ubuntu's repositories make sure you have Apache running for web configuration. There's a nice tutorial here, and plenty of others with a little Googling. Update 05/11/81: the link is dead, try this tutorial (which is based on Ubuntu)

On either the host machine or another Linux PC on the network, you can use Amarok (daap shares should be available under 'Devices' along the left hand side, enter password if you set one up.) or you could use Rhythmbox or Banshee if you prefer.

On Windows you could use Itunes of course if you don't mind the bloat, but there are some alternatives. I just discovered Get It Together (GIT) , an open-source Itunes client for Windows, Mac or Linux. It uses a java based mp3 player internally, but can also use Quicktime, which I would only use for playing AAC files. It can also download tracks from the server. I also look forward to Amarok being available on Windows , which should be the ultimate Itunes replacement!

Virtualbox and Hardy's Naughty Nautilus

2008-05-13T07:24:00.000-07:00

Well i got virtualisation working with Virtualbox, although it is not completely stable. It is fine as long as i do not change any of Virtualbox's settings. The other glitch is that when I try to resume virtual machines' saved state, it just errors and I have to discard the saved state. I've been trying out Slackware 12.1 which finally uses the 2.6 kernel and uses HAL and modular X.org by default. My other virtual machines are Kubuntu 8.0.4, KDE4.0 version, for testing the latest nightly builds of Amarok 2 and also Windows XP, for testing and for when I need a specific Windows only program.

Also, I am annoyed with Ubuntu 8.0.4 for having a bug in Nautilus - it won't mount USB storage at the moment, there's bit of a buzz on forums about it. My workaround is to point Konqueror at media:/ and mount and unmount it there, which works fine. Obviously it 's fine for people who have KDE libraries installed but not for those who like a simple Ubuntu install.

Update: Ubuntu has frozen up completely today, twice. Both of these involving USB. I connected my kodak digital camera earlier and it froze, then just now it froze scanning for a printer, I am really getting annoyed with it now!

Update 2: I have found the common denominator for both crashes - Amarok, my favourite player was running both times, and searching for a printer works whilst Amarok is closed as does connecting my camera.

Update 3: I have solved the above problem, by disabling PulseAudio completely by selecting alsa for all options in /system/preferences/sound. It's a shame, as I quite like some of it's features, like network audio and individual volume controls for programs, hopefully it'll be improved in updates. Like Firefox 3 beta, it should not appear in an LTS release.

Ubuntu 8.0.4 - pitfalls of early adoption :(

2008-05-06T08:26:00.000-07:00

Well i looked forward to version 8.0.4, and promptly downloaded and did a fresh install. It's great for normal use and seems much faster than 7.10. I like the improved multi-monitor setup tool and Vinagre - the new remote desktop program and wireless support is even better than in 7.10. However, as it is still very new, some of my favourite programs have yet to catch up with it. Annoyingly, it is all the virtualisation tools that I can't get working! VMWare has problems configuring networking, it works until after you reboot, and becomes un-configured again. I've just tried a trial version of Parallels Workstation which does not support the new kernel yet, and Virtualbox has random crashes, where it freezes up the entire system, although I've read reports of this on various distros and versions of Virtualbox. I need my Virtualisation, as i like to test software and new distros in a sandbox environment, or for when I need to quickly use a Windows program occasionally.

The 30 Quid Laptop

2008-04-26T12:32:00.000-07:00

Bargain Budget Hardware.

About a year ago, I was in need of a laptop, and with a meagre budget, I bought two ancient Toshiba Tecra 8000 laptops for £30. Both have 233MHz Pentium 2 CPUs and one came with 64MB of ram, the other had 32MB. I decided to use one and keep the other for spares as they had only one 4GB hard drive, battery and cdrom between them. I transferred the ram, battery, HDD and cdrom into the best one, as one had broken lid-catch. Despite not working, I had to keep the battery as it forms part of the underside and front of the machine, so it's just dead-weight really!

A Suitable OS.

The hard drive had Windows 98 installed which I used, until I was fed up with it's poor USB support and buggy nature. It did boot quickly, but was also let down by lack of security - pressing escape at the login bypassed it! Perhaps this was rectified at some point but I wanted something better. I then dabbled with Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux and other small distros, but I could not get the Yamaha on-board sound or wireless working with my Ralink USB adapter. So I installed Windows 2000, which was an improvement over 98 but took up a lot of space without additional programs, and i really wanted Linux on it.

'Linux for human beings'

Ubuntu 7.10 arrived in late 2007 with is much improved over previous versions great wireless support. I installed Kubuntu on my desktop machine on November 5th (my birthday!) and I am writing this on it now, having since been a Gnome convert, 8.04 has just come out and I will update it soon. Anyway, I installed Xubuntu on my laptop in dual boot with Windows, sharing half the hard drive. XFCE is a great desktop environment, just enough Gnome features without being so heavy on resources. I've been adding programs, being careful to choose lightweight programs. For a media player I have chosen Audacious which is like an updated XMMS (like a linux version of Winamp), it has a nice on-screen display plugin and plays so smoothly on such a low spec machine. I use Firefox with Flashblock installed as Flash tends to cripple old machines. I recently deleted Windows off the hard drive using Gparted and moved /home onto the fresh partition using a tutorial I found here. After all, i can do everything i want/need with Linux now so I hardly need Windows at all!

Home Sweet Home? Ubuntu Home Permission Shananigans

2008-04-07T20:20:00.000-07:00

I recently had a permissions problem on Ubuntu, caused by an aborted attempt at using Remastersys backup software which I don't think I will ever use again judging by the mess it created. Ha! to think I was using it to protect my sacred install!

It all meant I had to create a new user account and copy everything across. I did this once logged into the new user account. Annoyingly my other storage partitions (under /media) had to have their permissions changed aswell, I did this by loading konqueror as root (rather than using sudo konqueror as I've found that it wouldn't always change permissions underlying directories for some reason and was slow. It was still slow changing permissions on gigs of files.

Anyway, there was a silver lining to this story too. As i only copied important files and directories such as .evolution for my emails and .bash_history so i don't have to keep trying to remember obscure commands in terminals. Secondly I decided to start Firefox from fresh, well almost fresh, as it had become slow and bloated from many extensions and cache detritus etc. I used the FEBE extension to restore passwords and selected extensions from my old firefox. It runs a lot quicker now :)

My Favourite Firefox Extensions:

FEBE
Foxmarks (for synchronising bookmarks between browsers)
Delicious Bookmarks (similar but more accessible)
Download Embedded (for vids)
Download Statusbar (better than downloads in a separate window)
Flashblock (essential for slow connections)
Stumbleupon (staves off boredom)
Titlesave (save page as the pages title)
Video Download
Youtube IT
Adblock plus

More Reasons NOT to use Windows Media Player

2008-03-24T09:44:00.000-07:00

* Lack of codecs 'out the box' leading to a hunt around the net for third party codecs, such as Ogg, FLAC, Mpeg4, H.264 and AAC (which is supported by Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Zune Mp3 player).

* No gapless playback, essential for albums like Dark Side of the Moon and live albums.

* WMP's mp3 decoder's overly strict adherence to ISO Mp3 standard (unusual for MS) forcing LAME 3.98 to encode at 100% compatibility without using the bit reservoir on 320kbit frames

5 Reasons for not using Windows Media Player

2008-02-29T13:53:00.000-08:00

I have compiled a brief set of reasons not to use Windows Media Player 9 - 11. Winamp and Foobar are good alternatives. I've not mentioned DRM here, but that is more than just a WMP problem. Anyway, here we go:

1. Inadequate CD ripping facilities.

By default, WMP rips into WMA at a poor bit-rate, so you have to remember to change this in it's settings. Also, by default, error-checking is disabled. Even with it enabled, WMP may be fast but it hasn't got the best encoder out there.

2. Album Covers

If you put your own high quality album covers as folder.jpg in an album's folder, it replaces it with its own poor quality image. It also hides folder.jpg files (marks them as system and hidden files). To prevent this you have to disable it from retrieving album covers and managing your music library.

3. WMP messes with tags and filenames

Firstly when you rip an album with WMP, you have to individually edit the album/artist tags for each song and editing the playlist is a pain. There's also no overall playlist time. There's also little annoyances like it uses 'And' and 'Of' instead of 'and' and 'of' in tags, although these are down to personal taste.

4. Overall 'Bloatedness'

Media Player 11 uses around a 100mb of memory just to play a track! (Itunes also uses similar amounts of memory too) It just tries to do too much being a video and audio player and doing both poorly. Also, I don't like to allocate the huge amount of disc space it requires, just for a media player.

5. VBR

WMP has poor support for playing variable bitrate mp3s, displaying the wrong average bitrate and seek time. Some other software and hardware players have the same problems.

Reasons why I cannot erase Windows from my PCs

2008-02-20T09:35:00.000-08:00

Even though I love Linux, there are still certain things that still prevent me from switching completely:

Midi

I've tried to get Midi working in Linux countless times. I've recently installed the Midiman firmware loader to no avail. Theres no fanfare when I plug it in. inputting lsusb in a terminal shows it's there, but I cannot seem to get the thing working in any of the programs. jackd runs, but nothing much happens.

TV-Out / Multihead

I have an old Compaq AP550 that sits connected to a portable TV through its Nvidia MX400 and single phono-type video lead, without a monitor. When Windows boots it automatically displays on the TV. Unfortunately on Linux, even with the proper drivers, once X is started it does not appear. It's an absolute pain to experiment in hacking xorg.conf. Things should be much easier than this! Also, on my main desktop, i cannot get multi-head working without stretching my desktop accross two monitors - I want two seperate desktops at 1280x1024!

Apart from this, I do use Linux 90% of the time. There is another problem I have too which stops my aging Toshiba Tecra 8000 laptop from being totally Linux, but I'll save that for another time.

Update (17/05/10)
Both these problems have now been circumvented. Ubuntu has had good dual head support with Nvidia drivers for a while now. The old Compaq has been retired and replaced with several times, due to hardware failure. The current machine is a HP D530 with an ATI card with HDMI-out, into the rear of a flat-screen TV. It works just like a monitor. I'm also slowly starting use a dual CPU Powermac G4 for music creation, so hopefully Windows will be used even less.

My five must have Linux apps.

2008-02-17T20:15:00.000-08:00

Having seen this blog post on Techtonic - Five must have apps for a new linux install, i thought I would share my five essential Linux apps list. these are just off the top of my head, there are so many other great programs out there, only an 'apt-get install' away!

Wi-fi Radar

Essential for connecting to wireless networks with my Ralink rt61 PCI card, which only seems to work with KDE's network manager on the first boot.

Amarok

Although I prefer the Gnome desktop over KDE these days, I can't do without my favourite media player! I've tried others but always return to Amarok. Rhythmbox is improving but is slow with my large (13000+) mp3 collection. Helix Banshee is hideous and XMMS lacks a collection manager. I love Amarok's cover manager, it's ease of use and extensibility with scripts, and it looks great too. OK it can be a little heavy on resources, though I think the developers are working on that for version 2.0 which I look forward to as it'll be ported to Windows and Mac OSX too!

K3B

It is the best burning program for Linux in my humble opinion! It has more features than any of the other Linux burners I've tried - especially volume normalisation with the Normalize package installed. I also like it's integration with Amarok, so I can easily send albums and playlists to K3B.

Kaffeine

I like totem the default video player on Gnome, it's clean and easy, but I've found that kaffeine has better support for FLV, and has greater control over playing (fast forward etc).

Kaudiocreator

My favourite CD ripping program on Linux, because I found it easy to setup, and is close to what I was use to with CDex on windows.

All the programs I've mentioned are available through the Ubuntu's repositories. I try to avoid a reinstall at all, as it would take a long time to download everything, on my slow connection, and to get everything setup just right. Like most i want as little downtime as possible, which is a distinct advantage of Linux over windows.

E-mail accounts

2008-02-16T19:44:00.000-08:00

I love Gmail, it gives you huge amounts of space for free and it now has SMTP support, so now works perfectly with my favourite Linux email program, Evolution. It's nicely integrated into the Gnome desktop, looks great, and is easy to set up. I have set it up to use my Yahoo, my first webmail account, which has now been relegated to a spam-box. there is a Windows version but it's a bit buggy and bloated. Thunderbird on Windows is OK because it has a Gmail wizard but It's not as good on Linux. I still have a Lycos account, which I can't delete, and still have to use as i'm signed up to various things with it. The annoying thing is you have to pay for a premium account to get POP access, the website is a cluttered mess of adverts and rubbish and they only give you 300mb of space. Come on Lycos, even yahoo and Windows Live mail has more space than that for free!! Then new users can't sign up for lycos anyway, they get diverted to sign up to an even more flashy, bloated site called jubii.co.uk. Again the free account, which is in beta, is no better than lycos and definately not recommended for old 233mhz laptops like mine!

PCWorld

2008-02-13T07:35:00.000-08:00

One of my occasional hobbies, when i'm wondering about town, bored, is visiting PCWorld. Not to actually buy anything, that would be ridiculous at their prices! No, i like to rescue as many of their poor newbie customers as possible. Yesterday I got chatting to a guy who was from the old school of programming, more used to the BBC Micro, Archimedes etc His old Medion PC apparently has some problems recognising CDs and generally running poorly, mainly because it runs Windows ME I think! Of course the member of staff he was talking to talked a lot of bullsh*t, clearly showing only a basic knowledge of computers, and naturally trying to sell him a new PC or expensive components. Soon after I joined the conversation, he realised he was out of his depth! Not that I'm an expert or anything, nobody is, but he clearly hadn't had much training. Anyway he soon made his excuses and retreated to his cave, or wherever they disappear to! One day I might just go there armed with copies of Ubuntu and the Open CD and hand them out to their customers :D

Windows Vista

2008-02-09T04:09:00.000-08:00

Whilst there maybe a few good features and improved security in Vista, which are hardly noticeable in every day usage, these are far out-weighed by the serious performance issues on hardware that XP performed well on.

Good things about Vista

- Speech recognition software (though it's still not perfect)

- independant Volume controls (yup I cannot think of anything else!)

-Improved task manager (although Dtaskmanager, is a better alternative!)

Bad things about Vista

- The new Windows Explorer. It's horrible, i thought the old file manager was bad enough but now they've managed to make it worse! File copying is incredibly slow - especially over a network - and the integrated Zip function is even slower than before.

- General bloatedness. Unless you have a PC with 4GB of ram (and dual core CPU) it's as slow as a slug wading through treacle. I first tried Vista on a friends Acer SFF machine with 1GB of ram, Core 2 Duo CPU, and 320GB hard drive. it does mostly use laptop components, and is let down by onboard Intel HD ready graphics. It also features dual analog/digital TV tuner and onboard 7.1 HD audio. If it was running Ubuntu 7.10 or XP it would be rather good. Unfortunately, it runs Vista Home Premium, and therefore takes almost 3 minutes to boot and still felt rather sluggish after reverting to Windows classic theme. Running VMware with another OS such as XP or Linux was impossible, it slowed to a standstill. My old homebuilt machine with Ubuntu or XP would piss all over Vista on this PC.

- Poor hardware support for any device older than 2 years old. I wonder how many old perfectly working scanners and printers and other devices will be frown away just because they're no longer supported. Even if they worked fine in XP or Linux. They're seems to be abundence of them in local charity shops already. Even with its environmentally friendly standby modes, this is not exactly an environmentally-friendly OS.

- Audio A poor sound system crippled with DRM.

- Horrid Security messages. If you have administrative privileges, you should not be hassled by pop up "are you sure?" messages every time you move through the control panel, or change any settings. Yes you can turn it off, but its not exactly friendly for newbies.

- Choice - Microsoft are trying they're damned hardest to get rid of XP as fast as possible in order to force people to upgrade / buy a new PC with Vista. High street stores no longer stock XP, except for businesses (who still demand XP, as its what they know, it works (to a degree) so why upgrade?

At the moment, there are only a small number of people who are buying copies of Vista: Gamers who 'need' DirectX 10, even though most DX10 games at the moment barely use any of it's features; gadget freaks who want the latest fad; and system builders, who supply for demand. The rest of Vista's sales are down to people who have bought a new PC which has Vista on it, as they don't realise there's other options.

Early days part 2

2008-02-05T05:15:00.000-08:00

It was late 1998, I enrolled at Lincoln College (UK) to do several A-levels. At the time i thought the PCs must be upto date, by I later realised they were far from state of the art! The "Learning Resources Centre" had about 20 or 30 Dan or Research Machines 386's linked with parallel cables on dial up internet with Windows 3.11 for workgroups! They were slow even for the time, around the rest of the college was not much better, Mostly Windows 95, 98 500mhz P2/3s. All of these were eventually replaced with Dell P4 / 2.4ghz machines in 2001/2.

After 3 years of college I went to Lincoln University in 2001, for a couple of years. This is when I really got into computers, after my student loans had dried up a bit, after all that drinking, and I had to get some work done. As I did not have a PC at first, I spent a lot of time in the library writing essays and researching. However, it closed at midnight so I decided to had to get a PC, and being my first PC i got ripped off by buying a friends IBM 486 for 40 quid!! It was a right state, software wise. It had Windows 95 on about a 500mb hard drive. I spent most of my time trying to work out what was wrong with it and how to get it to work properly. I later discovered (about a couple of years ago) that someone had compressed their documents into a hidden H:/ Drive, so much so it could not be decompressed to format with fdisk. My mind was not really on my studies, though I spent a lot of time enjoying myself! I dropped out of University and have been unemployed for a good while, trying to get a foot in the door of the IT industry.

I discovered Linux fairly recently (about 4 years ago), after picking up some old magazines in a charity shop (10p each!) whilst on a web design college course. I downloaded my first distro - Red Hat 9 - on the college internet (much improved by then) though the discs became corrupt I never gave up. I tried Mepis which I was impressed with, installing it on a Pentium 3, 733mhz, machine i picked up for 20 quid. Then there was Suse 9.2 / 9.3 which was great on DVD as I didn't have an internet connection, they had plenty of software. I must've tried hundreds of distros since then, but I have finally settled on Ubuntu 7.10. It's been dual booting with XP on my current PC (ASUS K8-UX, 1.25Gb ram / 200 + 160 + 20 GB hard drives) as it recognises my Ralink wireless card first boot, everything just works, so easy to use. I used to be a KDE fan but have switched to Gnome because Compiz Fusion works with it straight away. I do still use some KDE apps like my favourite media player Amarok.