Entries Tagged 'Linux' ↓

One of my projects now that I have a hard drive for it is to scan my CD music collection.  I’ve made it through about 40 so far and have been using Amarok to manage that music collection.

I’ve used iTunes quite a bit over the last few years and one of the first things I noticed with Amarok is that it uses some funky made up score system to determine how popular it thought the songs were based on my listening habits.  I’m not ready to give all of my soul over to the borgs quite yet so that was not going to cut it.

Fortunately, a normal 5 start rating system is available but it just isn’t turned on by default and I’m going to show you how to do it.

First, let’s see what the window starts off looking like:

To turn off the score and turn on the ratings, go to Tools - Configure Amarok.  In the middle of the screen, in the Components section, uncheck Use scores (or keep it checked if you want) and check the Use ratings.  Once the window looks like this click apply:

Now the main Amarok window should look more like this:

If you do not see a Rating column yet, right click on one of the other column headers, select Show Column and then select Rating.  Then start rating your music.  Take control.  Don’t give in to the machines.

Another feature of Amarok is the ability to assign labels to songs.  For the life of me, I could not figure out what kind of labels I would need.  Then I was listening to the songs I had ripped and noticed some skipping.  Wouldn’t it be nice to assign a “skips” label to those songs and come back to fix them someday.

Here’s how you would do that.

Right click a song and select Edit Track Information, click the Labels tab on the new window.  Any labels you have already created show up in the blue area.  The labels you want to assign to this song need to be in the bottom, white section.  So type your label (or select it from the blue area if it already exists).  It should look something like this:

You can type more than one label if you like.  Just separate them with commas.  Click Save & Close and then go create a smart playlist.  Your playlist should look for labels containing your label.  So try something along these lines:

Then you can right click on that new playlist and tell it to load and your Amarok music manager should show you all songs with that label.  In my case, I have three songs so far that I need to try to re-rip so far.

One last parting note.  If you are using Amarok and dig a little bit of classical guitar, check out Radio Stream -> Shoutcast Streams -> Classical -> 181.fm - Classical Guitar

For those not using Amarok, you can try this URL in iTunes or something that plays these sorts of things.  I’m not sure it works outside of Amarok, so if you try it, please let me know what happens:

Great Classical Guitar Streaming Channel

Someday, I’ll get around to plugging in my iTune Shuffle and see how well it handles reading/writing music with that.

When I reinstalled Linux a couple of weeks back, I switched from Ubuntu to Kubuntu. No real firm reason, just a feel thing. Everything has been groovy since the switch, but everything was groovy before the switch, too.

I don’t print very often so it took me a while to find out that my install of Kubuntu did not have a driver for my Epson Stylus CX4800. When I set up the printer in Ubuntu, it was just a couple clicks on the next arrow and everything was set up.

Kubuntu knew that I was using the Epson Stylus CX4800. It kept telling me so on this screen:

When I click on Next however, the option to install a driver for the Epson Stylus CX4800 was not anywhere under the Epson list.

Rather then reinstall like I did when I had trouble with the NVIDIA graphics card, I decided to do some grasping at straws. I tried several things and it eventually worked. I can print again.

I’m not sure exactly which thing was needed, but here are some things that I know are currently happening on my computer.

These packages are installed:

• cupsys-driver-gutenprint
• foomatic-db-gutenprint
• ijsgutenprint
• libgutenprint2

I’m thinking the real magic was in this mess. I read a little about Gutenprint and Foomatic while trying to find an answer. So I gave them a shot. That didn’t magically fix it, but when I had to choose the driver, both options had Foomatic, Gutenprint, and ijs listed. If I remember correctly, installing one of them installs the others because of their intertwined dependencies.

Go get ‘em Adept Manager!

That didn’t quite seem to get us all the way working so I tried a trick that chejrw recommended in a comment on another one of my posts that (s)he said would have fixed my NVIDIA problem without a complete reinstall.

I edited the command to:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure cupsys

Then clicked through the options without changing anything. Lo and behold, the Epson Stylus CX4800 was an option when I tried adding the computer and is happily running on Kubuntu now.

Does anybody know what difference there could be between Ubuntu 7.04 and Kubuntu 7.04? I thought they were pretty closely related besides using Gnome versus KDE. So maybe the better question is what difference could there be between Gnome versus KDE that would result in printers working by default in one but not the other?

I’ll get around to testing the scanner part someday.

I’ve pretty much written off trying to use Wine. I have 3 programs that I need to be able to run in Linux or find an acceptable alternative and then my wife will be done with Windows, too. None of those 3 programs run in Wine. I think that two of them might have Linux alternatives that she would like at least as much as the Windows version.

Since I already have Windows XP, I’m trying to find the time to shrink down my ext3 Kubuntu installation to make run so I can have VMware Converter make a new image of the XP instance for me. Then, I’m planning on having VMware take a shot at running Windows XP inside Kubuntu.

This is my long term plan because it will put me well on the way to getting little virtual instances of different Linux flavors to experiment with. Plus I’d like to try FreeBSD and maybe even OpenDOS someday just to see what they do.

But, Wine 0.9.44 has been released.

I don’t see anything that really gives any indication that it will help those three programs run, but maybe I’ll have to take a night and see what happens.

My parents have a computer running Windows XP Home Edition with Service Pack 2. It has not been defragged or reinstalled during the 3 years they have been running it.

I was able to get them using Firefox and OpenOffice. They only make minimal use of any of the other software and could easily be switched to Linux versions of those programs.

I am going to be installing another 512MB of ram soon. During that time, I will also be backing up all of their data and reinstalling everything.

Now that I am the newest Linux self-appointed evangelist, I’m trying to decide if I should just convert them over. I can’t think of one reason they would need to stay on Windows and they would always be able to switch back if they didn’t like it.

Now, I should point out that my parents know absolutely nothing about computers besides how to run a few basic programs. They are absolutely the surf, word process, unload photos from the digital camera, and occasionally play a CD straight from the CD player.

The one stumbling block might be that my dad is starting his retirement career as a home inspector and is planning on buying some specialized software for the job. The software runs on Windows.

I’m pretty sure he is going to end up using a laptop for that, though, so he can take it onsite and print the reports before leaving the job.

I think if I put shortcuts to Firefox, OpenOffice, F-Spot Photo Manager, and any CD music player on the desktop, they probably would barely noticed that anything that had happened.

I’ll probably set them up with Kubuntu, my current Linux flavor of choice. I’ve noticed that my wife only logs out of Kubuntu to run a few specific Windows-only programs. I’m guessing that a lot of normal computer users could make the switch without even noticing as long as somebody did the installation for them.

I’m starting to think that my parents might be the next Linux converts. I’ll just tell them that they don’t need to pay to update Norton every year…or any year…and that I only support Linux now.

Do you know any Windows users that you think could convert without any real problems as long as somebody did the installation? What are you waiting for?

A couple days ago, I decided to brush up (relearn from scratch is more accurate) C++ and try to write a couple simple computer games. For the first time since making the switch to Ubuntu, I found myself with more than a couple windows open at a time. I was listening to music, ripping CDs, browsing for code samples, typing my code and compiling all at the same time.

I am madly in love with Linux’ multiple desktops. Right now, I am using 4 desktops. I even named a couple of them.

Now, this isn’t like the crappy multiple desktops in Windows XP Powertoys. That thing should be buried deep in some ocean before it gives birth to all kinds of new profanities.

Linux is magically able to keep track of which program is in which desktop and give you easy access to those programs in a variety of ways.

Right now, I’m using KDE for my desktop environment. I can access any program from my taskbar which I put on the top of the desktop. I can also click on any of the 4 desktops in the little mini-desktop graphic up in that same area. I can right click on the title bar of any application and assign it to any of the other virtual desktops. But, I am now writing epic poems of love and affection because when I click the middle button while hovering over the desktop, it shows me every program that is assigned to a desktop and organizes them by desktop.

I’m switching back and forth between applications at breakneck speed. I’m increasing my productivity. I’m not getting overwhelmed by the clutter of windows on my desktop.

And most importantly, I’m increasing my productivity output…at least until I compile my C++ code.

Despite my recent love fest with Linux, I still find myself in Windows quite a bit. I have to use it for work. It is a lot easier to use for games (which I just started dabbling with again). I prefer to use it for blogging because BlogDesk does not work at all for me in Linux (but I’m still working on that).

What I would really like is some way to run both at the same time. I just added memory to the computer so I technically have enough RAM to support both OSes at the same time as long as something could keep track of which memory locations belonged to which OS. I have both OSes on different hard drives so there shouldn’t be any disk read/write problems.

I need some kind of software or program that is launched when the computer is started and whose only purpose in life is to launch the OSes and to keep track of how the resources like memory are being used.

Then each OS can have it’s only little desktop and I could do some Ctrl + Alt + Tab type of command to switch which OS is being displayed on the monitor.

Does anything like that exist yet? Or more importantly, does anything like that exist that people with normal wallets can acquire?

A few months ago, I wandered into my computer room in search of something (I can’t remember what it was since I was not getting much sleep at the time due to my newborn daughter) and I heard the dreaded clicking noise emanating from my trusty P.C. which though a little long in the tooth, had lasted my since college (6 years, wow!) with only a RAM upgrade and a new hard drive. The previous time I had hard drive problems I was able to buy a new drive, use the old one as a secondary drive (slave), and still get at my data. This was my initial hope. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out.

As I was having these problems, I wrote about it on my other blog. That’s where Mike suggested I try booting Linux directly from a CD. Desperate to try anything, I started researching my options and came across Knoppix Linux.

My experience with Knoppix was a pretty good one. There really isn’t much to using it. First of all, you need to download the ISO Image file from one of the mirror sites. This is, of course, assuming you have access to a high speed Internet connection somewhere (at work, or in a public place somewhere?). Once the .iso file is downloaded, burn the image to a CD with your favorite burning software (the Knoppix Downloading FAQ has some information on how to do this, if you don’t know how).

Now that you have your disk, the next step is to put the disk in the computer with the messed up hard drive and turn it on. Enter your computer’s bios settings (varies from computer to computer) and set the computer to boot from the CD drive. Exit setup and you computer should start booting Knoppix.

The computer may take some time to boot from CD. Mine did (note my CD-ROM was over 6 years old). I doubt it would ever load as fast as it could from the hard drive. This isn’t a big deal, but is something to consider if you are in a hurry or not a patient person.

The moment of truth comes once Knoppix is loaded. Hopefully it was able to detect your hard drive and your hard drive wasn’t too damaged. Unfortunately, mine physically wasn’t able to run long enough for Knoppix to detect it. The disk would spin, the clicking would start, and then the disk would fail. If Knoppix is able to detect your drive I suggest you get your data off of it as fast as possible. You never know how much time you have left on the defective drive. Hopefully you have a nice sized USB drive handy you can copy data to.

My damaged drive sits on my desk in my computer room, waiting for the time when I have enough money to have someone professionally retrieve the data (probably never). I even tried the freezer method which did nothing but make the drive cold.

I am interested in success stories with Knoppix, so if you have been able to recover data using this method please let me know in the comments.

I bought a GeForce 6200 with 256MB of RAM for my computer. I installed the card, fired up Windows (since my wife’s side of the computer must ALWAYS be working) and installed the driver. Then I restarted, hopped into my BIOS and switched from the PCI integrated video to the AGP video. When I rebooted back into Windows, everything was great.

So, I rebooted and tried logging into Linux and it complained greatly about not being able to start up the X server and refused to let me do anything. I rebooted into safe mode and didn’t get much further even after downloading the Linux driver (while logged into Windows) and putting the driver installation file on the Linux drive (using the Ubuntu Live CD).

So, I did what anybody with a very recent installation of Linux and no saved files that I care about on the system would do…I reinstalled Ubuntu 7.0.4 on the drive. It repartitioned and completely reinstalled. I love that I have separated my Windows installation and Linux installation onto two different hard drives.

And just like magic everything worked. Once I was completely logged in I was able to use Synaptic to download the NVIDIA GLX package and get some of the eye candy to work.

While I had the case open, I also installed another 512MB of RAM to take the system up to 1GB. I detected the RAM and started running quicker and more confidently without any tweaking at all.

In retrospect, I think I learned an important lesson. Download and install the drivers before actually starting to use a video card or new piece of hardware. I’m not 100% sure, but I bet that would have made everything work right off the bat.

I installed Ubuntu on a new hard drive and set up my computer to dual boot both Ubuntu and Windows XP over the weekend.

The entire process is piece of cake easy and involved little more than these steps:

Download Ubuntu 7.0.4 iso image from Ubuntu’s site.

Burn iso image onto CD.

Install CD and reboot computer telling it to boot from the CD during the restart.

At this stage, I learned that the iso image is actually a Live CD. It launches an operational version of Ubuntu straight from the CD. I was able to browse the internet and play some games while I tested to make sure things worked.

One of the icons on the desktop was an install icon. Doubling clicking it launched the real installer.

It noticed I had two hard drives and asked which one I wanted to partition for Linux. I picked the new external USB hard drive and off it went with no other interaction the rest of the way including setting up the GRUB Loader to show the different OSes during boot up.

Only it wasn’t quite that easy. The hard drive that I installed on we a Western Digital 160 GB My Book. I used it briefly to back up some of the files from the Windows XP hard drive. When it configured itself for that, I named the hard drive “My Book.” The Ubuntu installer could not partition the drive because it did not like the space in the hard drive name.

It took me several hours to realize that this was the problem. I logged back into Windows, renamed the device, rebooted to the Ubuntu installation CD and went through the steps again, and this time everything worked.

I browsed, played Sudoku and went to bed. I will start testing and configuring the system to make sure the printer and scanner work and that I can play DVDs etc. as time permits.

I’ve installed Linux versions in the past, including some of the Ubuntu 6.x.x versions and was amazed at how easy the install went this time.