One of the best parts of Firefox were extensions. People expanded the functionality of Firefox in ways that were never imagined thanks to the ease of writing extensions for Firefox. Google learned that lesson well, and made Chrome easily extensible, too.

I’ve been looking through the wide range of extensions available for Chrome. There are already thousands, some good, some not so good. The extension that I most miss – Paste Email Plus – doesn’t have an equivalent for Chrome. But I have stumbled across some excellent ones. And some extensions that are surprisingly simple yet elegant. One such extension is great for those of us who use Facebook:

Facebook Photo Zoom is a simple, light-weight extension that integrates directly into Facebook so you can see the larger images of photo albums, profile photos and more whenever you hover over a zoomable image!

via Facebook Photo Zoom – Google Chrome extension gallery.

Some users are not happy with amarok 2 and they want to install amarok 1.4.This tutorial will help them to install amarok1.4 version.

Howto install amarok 1.4 in Ubuntu Jaunty | Ubuntu Geek

Many believe that Wine and other Windows emulation solutions may be their only recourse for high-quality gaming enjoyment. That, however, it not entirely true. There are plenty of smaller, independent gaming houses developing and releasing premium commercial games for Linux alongside Mac and Windows offerings. Search hard enough and you’ll find games ranging from low-resource puzzle solvers to 3D first-person shooters.

Stop Wine-ing: 15 Games for Linux | Linux Magazine

So, when you add things up,that means that I have to use iTunes for a lot of the functionality that I want from my iPhone. Which probably means I’ll end up using iTunes as my default media player from now on.

On further reflection – and after trying to use iTunes as a media player – I have gone running away from it. iTunes sucks ass (no offense to my friends and family who have to use iTunes). It’s a CPU and memory hog, it’s counter-intuitive, not user friendly, and seems to be written specifically so users cannot configure it to their liking. (Actually, since it is an Apple product, it almost definitely is.)

So now I gladly move back to my media player of choice: Amarok 1.4! (Screenshot above) There are very few things I dislike (really, it’s hard to think of anything I dislike), but plenty of things to love. Easy playlist generation, separate views of the Library from the playlist that one has running, very flexible sorting of the files shown in the library, logical groupings for playlists and podcasts.

Other features that I love:

• Amarok has one huge, huge feature that iTunes is lacking: dynamic library tracking. Delete a file on the disk, Amarok automatically removes it from its library. Rename the file, and Amarok updates its library with the new location (without losing ratings information!).
• More flexible ratings system. Amarok is one of the few media library packages that allows rating a track with half-stars. I use 3.5 stars as the baseline for most of my smart playlists. In iTunes (and most other media managers), you can only use half-stars. This is *huge* for me!

That leave the issue of iPod/iPhone syncing. As I mentioned in my previous entry, there just aren’t any Linux apps that can sync everything I want to sync on my iPhone (Apps, ringtones, video podcasts, playlists, etc.) Which means I have to keep a virtual Windows XP machine with iTunes at the ready. I create playlists in Amarok, then export them into an iTunes-compatible format, then use iTunes to transfer them to the iPhone. *voila*!

(As an aside, I put together a short bash script to make the playlist conversion. it is:

#!/bin/bash
sed 's/\/music/M\:/' "$1" | sed 's/\//\\/g' - > win_"$1"


Simple, but I loves me some sed.

iTunes thumbnail

In one of my most recent entries, I wrote about how I was able to get my iPhone 3g syncing in Ubuntu. That works very well, with a couple of issues that are quickly turning into show stoppers. My major issues are:

• Playlist support. I am not a random/shuffle guy, nor really an album guy. I like to make my own playlists, or create smart playlists.  Rhythmbox can’t do iPod/iPhone playlists, which pretty much rules it out. That leaves me with the too simplistic GTK Pod.
• Syncing ringtones: GTK Pod can’t do that.
• Backing up apps: I am fairly certain that GTK Pod can’t do that.
• Video podcasts: As silly as the idea is, I’ve gotten pretty hooked on watching video podcasts on my iPhone. GTK Pod can’t handle that.

So, when you add things up,that means that I have  to use iTunes for a lot of the functionality that I want from my iPhone. Which probably means I’ll end up using iTunes as my default media player from now on. Which annoys me to no end. And really does make me feel like a sell-out. But at the current time, there’s no open source alternative that does even half of what I need.

This makes two apps that I can’t find equivalents for. Good thing that VirtualBox is pretty damned good at what it does. And VirtualBox’s seamless mode makes the app look like they are running natively in XFCE.

So, like any good Linux user, I went bumping around Google to find a way to get the iPhone working in Ubuntu. I started out with a good article from FatButtLarry. I followed the HOWTO to the letter, but I could not get a successful sync. I could copy files to the iPhone, but the actual iPod software on the iPhone would not see it. So I went off on another search.

Fortunately, I stumbled on this excellent tutorial by StoneCut via WebUp8:

I am now quite happily using Rhythmbox to manage music and podcasts on my iPhone. I reckon eventually I’ll have to hook up to iTunes just to back up the apps I have, maybe to install some new ringtones… Or maybe not.

So I came up with my plan: copy the contents of each partition to a directory on the MyBook, then use gparted to combine all of the partitions on each disk. It would be a simple process: copy all data to the MyBook, unmount the current directory, create a symlink to the corresponding directory on the MyBook, then use gparted to nuke the corresponding partition. Simple and straight-forward.

My issue, hwoever, was that I didn’t stop to consider what the ramifications of unmounting part of a filesystem could have. I had no problem moving /home. And I actually had no problems copying /usr onto the MyBook. But then I made the mistake. And learned my lesson:

Never umount /usr if you are not logged in as root! Doing a “sudo umount /usr” worked perfect, of course. However, since sudo is in /usr/bin, and since I had just umounted /usr, there was no way to do a “sudo ln -s /media/mybook/usr /usr”. Or sudo. anything else, including mount. In short, I was hosed!

The easy fix, of course, would be to reboot and let the system re-mount /usr. Except that I had already removed the reference to that partition in /etc/fstab, and since sudo didn’t exist anymore, I couldn’t re-edit /etc/fstab.

With rebooting out, the next solution would be booting off of a recovery CD. The problem with that is I was not at home; I was making these changes remotely. Yeah, that was quite stupid of me; I won’t be doing that again!

I spent a couple hours last night trying to fix everything. I booted off a GPartEd Live CD, and then finished copying files from the various partitions to the MyBook. I then nuked all of the partitions off sda and created one nice, big partition. I’ll be mounting that as /data, and making symlinks where necessary. I also deleted all of the partitions off of sdb except for the root partition. I made this bigger (figured I won’t come close to 50gb anytime soon), then made the rest of the drive a big partition, too.

Of course, I am still running from the gparted CD. I need to copy everything back onto the new partitions. I am also decomissioning a file server, so I’ll be adding another 320gb drive to the system (all as one big partition). That’ll put my Linux Mint box at around 800gb of internal storage plus 1tb external. I think that might handle my needs for a while.

Assuming I don’t break anything else, of course.

Follow the steps in the link below to get sound back in Intrepid:

After upgraded to Intrepid RC, I once again fiddled with Ubuntu sound system to use ALSA instead of Pulseaudio in a non-destructive way (a.k.a no removable of Pulseaudio packages and configuration which in turn not remove ubuntu-desktop package which is needed for future distribution upgrade).

via ALSA instead of Pulseaudio for Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid – a Non-Destructive way. « Tux’s idyllic life..

Back to twhirl: everything was working fine except for one very nagging issue: it wouldn’t save my preferences.  (This was tested on Ubuntu 8.10) It wouldn’t save accounts, passwords nor application preferences. This was annoying, but not a show-stopper. I tried what I could think of to resolve the issue, but couldn’t figure it out. I was glad (as I always am when faced with a problem I can’t solve) to find out that this isn’t exactly an easy issue to resolve.

Fortunately, Amy on GetSatisfaction came up with a Linux-specific resolution for this issue. This has definitely resolved the issues saving accounts and preferences. I haven’t tried the password saving, but I get the feeling it isn’t going to work. But I can live with that. I don’t mind having to enter my password, as long as all of my prefs are remembered.

Tags: twhirl, twitter, adobe air, ubuntu