apt-get install

Low recording volume in Skype and Ubuntu Hardy

Biffster — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:02:40 +0000

I decided to install Skype on my Dell 1521 laptop running Xubuntu Hardy. Installation of Skype went fine, and Skype’s audio playback worked fine. Skype was also able to use the laptop’s built-in webcam, which was pretty cool, too. However, it appeared that the laptop’s built-in microphone was not working. After some testing, though, I found that the mic was working, the volume was just amazingly low. Like ghostly whisper quiet. It took me a while to figure out how to fix this, but in the end, the following worked:

Set the input to Digital Mic
Go into alsamixer and to change to Capture mode
Set the slider for Capture and MUX up to the highest possible
Exit out of alsamixer
Go into Skype, and change the audio devices to one of the HW0 options
Save, then exit out of Skype
Go back into Skype, change the audio devices to Default Device
Save your config changes

Once I did the above, volume was at a very audible level for both input and output were perfect in Skype. And I can cross one more thing off my to-do list.

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Date and time zone reference

Biffster — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:07:59 +0000

I found an ultra-handy guide to displaying/setting the system clock in Linux (and, theoretically, most other UNIX-like operating systems. I always lose track somewhere when I am working with the system clock. Not via the Set Time/Date bit on the Gnome or KDE clocks, mind you, but from the CLI. So a guide like this is invaluable in helping me remember how to adjust the date and time, and then to save that as UTC time in the hardware clock.

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Biffster — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 02:58:27 +0000

All Your Base Are Belong To Us

A classic bears enjoying over and over…

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The shortest SHORTEST passwordless ssh tutorial

Biffster — Tue, 13 May 2008 22:26:34 +0000

So here is the shortest SHORTEST passwordless ssh tutorial you’ll find anywhere. It’s two simple steps:

Go to Translucent Code’s shortest passwordless ssh tutorial, ever
Follow Mick’s instructions there.

See, I told you this was short.

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Twitter clients for the Linux desktop

Biffster — Sun, 11 May 2008 04:28:58 +0000

I am just starting to get into Twitter. I’m still not 100% certain that I can get any use out of Twitter, but it is fun to play with. Theoretically, anyone who knows me can get updates from me if they Follow me. In reality, I don’t update Twitter very often, so no one can actually see what I am doing. But I am trying to change that. Which is why a Linux.com article about Twitter clients for the Linux desktop caught my eye. There are some interesting clients, most in very early stages of development. The most obvious one that I’ve tried is gTwitter, which integrates nicely with my XFCE desktop.

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Dilbert.com minus the suck

Biffster — Thu, 01 May 2008 05:47:43 +0000

There’s apparently been a raging discussion about whether/how much the new dilbert.com sucks. I am not really worried about that whole discussion. Flash-based sites tend to suck, but I only visit Dilbert.com once or twice a month, so it’s no skin off my nose. However, I was pleased to see that there’s an uber-minimalistic “hidden” page for those of us who would rather not have to deal with the beefed up website:
http://www.dilbert.com/fast

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Free PalmOS Games

Biffster — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 05:14:48 +0000

PDA Mill Game Studios is out of the PalmOS business. As a gift to Palm users everywhere, they decided to release their PalmOS games as official abandonware. The end result? Free games for all of us PalmOS users! You can find all of the games right here.

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Ubuntu Hardy Heron

Biffster — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 01:13:56 +0000

Yeah, I know that I should be writing something about Hardy Heron here. But after I made the switch from Ubuntu to Linux Mint, I just don’t have a reason to go all ga-ga over Hardy yet. Once Linux Mint - Elyssa is released, THEN I’ll be fawning over the best release of Ubuntu to date.

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Linux on Desktop: Cool Desktop Applications(Part 2) : 25 Small and Simple Games for your Linux/Ubuntu Desktop

Biffster — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 21:00:16 +0000

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 on Desktop: Cool Desktop Applications(Part 2) : 25 Small and Simple Games for your Linux/Ubuntu Desktop

Blogged with the Flock Browser

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Linux Mint

Biffster — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:36:00 +0000

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.

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