Archive for category Install
Howto install amarok 1.4 in Ubuntu Jaunty | Ubuntu Geek
Posted by Biffster in Debian/Linux, Digital music, Install, Open Source on April 24th, 2010
I keep meaning to blog about this post, and keep forgetting. I personally can’t stand Amarok 2.x but loved Amarok 1.4. The link below gives an easy step-by-step procedure to install Amarok 1.4 in newer versions of Ubuntu/LinuxMint. Note: in the list of steps, replace “jaunty” with whatever Ubuntu distro you are using.
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
Ubuntu: network manager and vpnc
Posted by Biffster in Debian/Linux, Google, Install on November 22nd, 2008
I have another issue in Ubuntu that has been driving me batty: updated DNS servers. When I set up a vpn connection using Network Manager, I can connect to the vpn tunnel, but the DNS settings are not updated. This means that pretty much nothing can be done. I don’t go around remembering IP addresses anymore. That’s so twentieth century quaint!
After searching on Google for a solution to this for a while. What this seems to be is an interaction between resolve-conf and Network Manager. Network Manager isn’t updating the DNS because of resolv-conf. Resolve-conf isn’t updating the DNS for the vpn connection. So the solution?
apt-get remove resolvconf
Ayup, that’ll get the job done. Network Manager will still automatically update /etc/resolv.conf. No manual connection will be needed. And Network Manager will correctly set up nameserver settings for VPN connections.
Amazing that this was such a simple solution for such a vexing issue.
Linux on Desktop: Cool Desktop Applications(Part 2) : 25 Small and Simple Games for your Linux/Ubuntu Desktop
Posted by Biffster in Debian/Linux, Games, Install on March 29th, 2008
I tend to be a little cynical about list articles. Most are just trolling for links to try to drive ad clicks. And I am pretty certain that this article at Linux on Desktop is doing just that. However, the list given is actually pretty cool. There’s a lot of games in the list that I hadn’t heard of before. I can’t wait to give them a spin, especially Open Invaders (I was a huge Space Invaders fan back in the day) and Abe’s Amazing Adventure.
really cool games and emulators thatyou can install on your Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon Desktop (Am giving installation instruction to Ubuntu since it is one the most popular Desktop distribution right now but if you want to install these games in other distribution you can do so with little modification to the installation command/instructions ). Most of the games discussed in the article are simple and small so they should run flawlessly on computers with pretty modest configuration .
Linux Mint
Posted by Biffster in Debian/Linux, Install on March 12th, 2008
I finally found some time to play with a few different Linux distros. I had mentioned here that I tried Sabayon Linux, which looks absolutely beautiful, and was kinda fun. But Gentoo is so far out of my comfort zone that I decided Sabayon wasn’t worth the time that it would take to re-learn things.
I’m not a Red Hat/Fedora, so I didn’t even consider any distro derived from it. That left me with Debian-based distros. I’ve been using Xubuntu for a long, long time, so I figured I would try something with Gnome as the main desktop. I was listening to LUGRadio, and they had an interview with the Linux Mint guy, so I figured I would try that out.
Linux Mint is actually very cool. There are mostly subtle differences from Ubuntu (codecs installed by default, compiz active, different/nice theme). But a couple of the huge ones are the Mint Menu (modified version of the Slab) and Mint’s control panel. The Menu is very cool. I normally launch apps either from a terminal or via ALT+F2, but I’ve found myself using Mint’s Menu pretty frequently.
Mint’s control panel is pretty handy, too. It’s well laid out, and seems to give more options than the standard Gnome control center. But I am not a standard Gnome user, so that could be totally wrong.
Mint also comes with some pretty good default applications. OpenOffice is the office app, of course. Firefox is the web browser. Interestingly, Thunderbird is the email client. As much as I want to like Thunderbird, it just isn’t flexible enough for me. So I switched back to my standard mix of mutt (remote) and kmail (local). Mint uses Amarok as its music player (a most awesome choice, and an obviously sign that Mint is not Gnome app specific), Totem for video playback, Pidgin for IM. And it is packaged with a few really good games (OpenArena, Singularity, a Worms Armegeddon clone, and more).
The first thing I did was to test-drive the standard Mint install. And Linux Mint makes a surprisingly good desktop OS. For someone who just wants to sit at their computer, surf the web, watch videos on YouTube, send and receive email, play games and use a word processor, Linux Mint is perfect. And it has a good amount of eye candy, with compiz-fusion turned on.
Of course, I am not the type who uses an out-of-the-box Linux install. So I did an aptitude safe-upgrade to make sure I had the latest version of Mint. (Mint includes a custom application named Mint Update, but I’m an aptitude kinda guy.) Then I installed my “can’t live without” suite of applications:
- openssh-server
- gnu screen
- links2
- mutt
- slrn
- slrn-face
- centerim
- kontact
- liferea
- logjam
- (And a couple of others which I use all of the time but cannot remember now.)
I was able to take a shortcut by copying over config files and my bin directory from my Ubuntu install, so I was able to test as soon as the apps installed. And I have to say, I was extremely impressed!
Linux Mint actually performed better than Ubuntu (gutsy) on the same machine. This is almost definitely because of cruft on my Ubuntu install, though. I’ve gone through a couple of major upgrades on my Ubuntu install without trying to weed out applications that I no longer use. I had a couple of different XFCE installations, and numerous other applications that I compiled myself. And I had done a surprisingly poor job of separating apps that I compiled from distro-provided stuff (I really need to remember the –prefix=/usr/local switch for configure).
But no matter, the fact is that Linux Mint is extremely fast on my machine. I notice that in day-to-day work, and I especially notice it in 3d accelerated games (e.g. OpenArena). I really didn’t expect this kind of performance gain! I am quite happy about it.
There were a couple of downsides to Mint. The first was difficulties with my soundcard (Soundblaster Live! 5.1 Gamer). The card was detected, but the mixer settings were all wacked out. It was trivial to use alsamixer to correct this, but a n00b would’ve been lost. I don’t like the choice of Thunderbird for the default email client, though I would prefer that over Evolution.
Those are mere quibbles, however. I am actually quite happy and very impressed with Linux Mint. Enough so that I moved Mint over to be my main OS.
Album art on iPod via Amarok!
Posted by Biffster in Debian/Linux, Digital music, Install, Podcast on June 22nd, 2007
It took friggin’ forever, but Amarok is finally able to transfer album artwork to my beloved iPod Nano! Supposedly, album art support has been in Amarok for a while, but it didn’t work because Amarok couldn’t correctly set the iPod model string.
Well, fortunately, Amarok 1.4.6 has been released. And even more fortunately, it is already in the Ubuntu repositories, at least for Feisty Fawn. One:
aptitude install amarok
..and Amarok 1.4.6 was running on my system. Then, from the Devices tab, clicking iPod -> Update Artwork. A few seconds later, and Amarok said it was done. I said, “Yeah, right,” but disconnected the Nano and pulled it off the dock anyway. I figured, ah, why not give it a quick try. And Huzzah! Artwork! Albums and podcasts.
Huzzah!
Play TiVoToGo files in Linux!
Posted by Biffster in Debian/Linux, Install, Open Source, TiVo on March 18th, 2007
I don’t know how I didn’t run across the tivodecode project on SourceForge before now. Somehow it completely slipped by me. But I finally tracked it down this week, and have been playing with it since. And it all boils down to this: tivodecode is good stuff.
tivodecode’s install was surprisingly simple. I nabbed the latest source code from the download page, extracted it out to a temp folder, ran “make” in that folder, then copied the resulting tivodecode executable into a directory in my path. Per the README, I then created ~/.tivodecode_mak and copied our TiVo’s Media Access Key into that file.
For a test, I tried converting an episode of Countdown With Keith Olbermann, using the following command:
tivodecode -o olberman_20070315.mpg /media/tivo/Countdown\ With\ Keith\ Olbermann\ \(Recorded\ Thu\ Mar\ 15\ 2007\ 05\ 00PM\ MSNBC\).TiVo
This is fairly straight-forward: this command decodes the TiVo file to outfile olberman_20070315.mpg. Give this a bit of time to run (I started it in the background and then moved on to other stuff, so I can’t say for certain how long it takes), and then do as you wish with the resulting mpg file.
tivodecode defaults its output to stdout. This seemed kinda silly to me for a second, but then I realized just how awesome it is. Instead of writing out to a file, one can go straight to a media player. For example:
tivodecode /media/tivo/Countdown\ With\ Keith\
Olbermann\ \(Recorded\ Thu\ Mar\ 15\ 2007\ 05\ 00PM\ MSNBC\).TiVo | mplayer -
Assuming that one has mplayer installed and has a codec that can handle MPEG2 video, the end result of this command is instant playback of the .TiVo file. Talk about sweetness! There is one downside to the above method: one can’t skip through commercials. If that’s important to you, then save the output to a file first.
All in all, tivodecode is a critical application for anyone who has a TiVo and Linux installed as their main desktop OS.
Normalizing mp3s with mp3gain and Amarok
Posted by Biffster in Debian/Linux, Digital music, Install on March 8th, 2007
I’ve mentioned here before that my digital music collection is massive. We’re at 15,000 songs with more being added every month. I’ve built this collection from a number of sources, including ripping from CDs, purchasing from iTunes, and downloading from eMusic. This has left me with a gigantic music library, and a music library that has some drastic volume variation!
While I will often listen to whole albums, I am much more likely to have Amarok throw up a random playlist. But that can be a sometimes-painful experience, as one song plays at such a low volume that I have to crank up the speakers, but then the next song plays so loud that it rattles my monitor.
I’ve known that I needed to normalize the volume on my collection for quite a while. But that’s a daunting task when faced with 15,000 songs. Fortunately, I stumbled across a few articles about replaygain, and found a link to mp3gain. Once that was installed, I then modified instructions from porg.es as follows:
find . -iname '*.mp3' -execdir mp3gain -a -k "{}" + &Run this in the root of your music directory (for me, that is /music), wait a few hours (overnight). And then, voila!
Oh, just to explain the command above: “find . -iname ‘*.mp3′” searches for all mp3 files. -execdir executes the command on a directory basis. The -a switch to mp3gain tells mp3gain to use Album gain instead of Track gain (very important!), and the -k tells mp3gain not to increase the volume so much that there’s distortion in playback.
It is also important to point out that mp3gain doesn’t make any changes to the actual music data in the MP3 file. It simply adds a tag with the replay gain adjustment value. For example, a very quiet song might get a replay gain value of +4. That means that the player needs to crank the volume up when it plays the song to keep things at a fairly-normalized volume. Which directly implies that you need to use a music player which can read and use the replay gain tags.
Amarok doesn’t seem to do this out of the box. But fortunately there’s a ReplayGain Amarok script which does. Download and install the ReplayGain script, and then launch it from Amarok’s Script Manager. As Amarok plays a track, the script checks for a replaygain tag. If there’s one, then ReplayGain adjusts the volume accordingly. If there isn’t a tag, ReplayGain politely informs you that there’s no replaygain info in the track. This is actually amazingly useful, because it reminds one to run mp3gain on that track.
I know I am rambling: blogging while stoned on cold medicine is always risky. But trust me, mp3gain + Amarok + ReplayGain = sonic nirvana.
