Tag Archive for 'jaunty'

Installing Amarok 1.4 in Ubuntu Jaunty

Published on May 1, 2009 in Tech. 6 Comments

Don’t like Amarok 2? Despair not, because there is a way to get back your Amarok 1.4 in Ubuntu Jaunty. Basically, you need to find a mirror of Amarok 1.4 and just install from there. One of those is mentioned below. This is all you have to do :

Add the repositories for Amarok 1.4 to your sources.list file:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bogdanb/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/bogdanb/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Add the key:

sudo apt-key adv –recv-keys –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com \
0×1d7e9dd033e89ba781e32a24b9f1c432ae74ae63

And then finally, update your sources, remove Amarok 2 and install 1.4

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get remove amarok
sudo apt-get install amarok14

That’s it. You are done. You have successfully installed Amarok 1.4 in Jaunty. Have fun.

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Amarok 2.1 : Managing Collections in Mounted Partition

Published on April 26, 2009 in Tech. 1 Comment

I have a huge collection of songs stored in my 500 GB USB drive. Now this partition is accessible from /media/Songs/audio [I mounted the partition with label Songs]. The problem I was facing was that Amarok 2.1 failed to remember the location of audio folder. As a result, whenever I would close and restart Amarok, I would lose all the collection information. And if I build the collection again, the information such as number of times played and etc., would not be remembered.

However, Amarok auto-detected ~/Music/ as containing all the media files. This is the default location where Amarok would look for the collection of songs. This gave me an idea to solve my problem.

I created a link for my audio folder in the Music folder. To create a link in ubuntu, grab the folder, press and hold CTRL+SHIFT, and drag the folder to the ~/Music/ location. And we are done.

Now all my songs are remembered and all the folders watched for collection.

So, as I understand from the bug report filed, Amarok fails to remember the collections if they are either not in $HOME or not on the same hard drive. Well, this should help. Thanks Mark Kretschmann.

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Amarok 2.1 … Now We Are Talking :)

Published on April 18, 2009 in Tech. 1 Comment

Amarok 2.0.2 lacked many a features of the earlier 1.4 edition, and was largely a disappointment.

For one the playlist was displayed differently, and it was not easy getting used to it. I used to have my playlist sorted in the order of rating or last played or play count, but that was missing here. Also the playlist was cramped to a side, hardly revealing anything.

More than a half of the sreen was covered up with applets or scripts. I found only two useful ones – Current Track and Lyrics. So this was basically a waste of space for me. The earlier Amarok made a much better use of space.

Then there was this nagging issue of scrobbling under proxy. Last.fm was being detected, I could see all my neighbours listed and all, but streaming would not work. Also the played tracks would not scrobble, even though I had manual proxy configured in the kioslaverc file.

All in all, I stayed away from Amarok. I installed Exile for the time being and used last.fm client to listen to radio. This was until I stumbled across Amarok 2.1 yesterday.

The Kubuntu has a download binary file, but to install for ubuntu you have to download the source file and compile it. And it wasn’t easy. There were quite a few dependencies that needed to be taken care of. Also it took me hours to get mysqld working. The funny thing is that I am not sure how I managed to do it. I remember having given up trying to install Amarok. Later on I thought of giving one last try and the installer detected mysqld ! Anyways, I got Amarok compiled and ready to go.

This edition is wonderful. I will soon fall in love with it. Though it looks just like the earlier one, it has quite a few newly added features. Firstly, here’s a screenshot of Amarok 2.1

Amarok 2.1

Amarok 2.1

One of the first things I noticed was the ability to modify the display of the playlist. It can now be configured to show informations as chosen by the user. It is very easy to make these changes. Towards the right hand bottom corner there is a icon labelled Playlist Layout. Clicking on it pops up an easy-to-use editor. Just drag and drop the required information tabs in desired order. Simple ain’t it. Now I can display the rating of each song with its name.

Also the last.fm is scrobbling now. Yay ! I have the proxy manually configured in kioslaverc. All my songs are getting scrobbled. I think that amarok scrobbles the songs a bit late, because sometimes a song is displayed as now playing, and after it is finished, it shows up as played only after a few minutes. Doesn’t matter. I’m happy as long as it scrobbles.

The radio service didn’t work for me. Sadly. But its not much of an issue as I have last.fm client to cater to my radio needs.

The now playing display has changed in look. It looks better now, when compared to the 2.0.2 version. The lyrics are fetched without any problem. Also I noticed that this time around the songs get an initial rating of 50 compared to 75 that they used to in 1.4. I have 120 gb songs in the collection and no problems.The On Screen Display looks cool. The cover manager was easy and intuitive to use. Also the sound can be configured from within Amarok itself.

Although this edition has everything I need, there are a few additions I shall like to see. For one, in this edition you can only select files and not folders, to import into the playlist. If you want to recursively inport a folder, you have to drap-and-drop. Earlier Amarok 1.4 allowed importing folder.

Its not easy moving up and down in the widgets pane. You have to click individual tabs to see them. I am used to my mouse tracker ball for moving up and down.

Most importantly I want to see the amarok 2.1 in the repositories of Ubuntu Jaunty.

All in all, this version has all that I need of Amarok.

But the most impressive fact that I stumbled across about Amarok was that this version is just the beginning of a new journey. There are a lot of features planned to be built into Amarok quite soon. The one that I read about was having a amarok:// url to be able to play amarok using custom urls. Now this is an exciting and something I am quite looking forward to. Till then, chillax and enjoy the cool Amarok 2.1.

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My First Impression Of Ubuntu Jaunty

Published on April 4, 2009 in Tech. 5 Comments

I just couldn’t wait for the 24th of April and decided to upgrade Intrepid to the present Alpha version of Jaunty yesterday. After downloading some 1300 mb’s and then taking up another hour to complete all the modifications, my computer restarted.

Apparently Jaunty is supposed to boot up faster. I did not notice any difference though. A possible reason could be that I had installed Intrepid using WUBI, so the disk access are going to be slow. Also I do not know if this speedup in boot time is for all the partitions or just ext4. Unfortunately, I still am running the older ext3. To make a change to etx4 probably I might have to format and do a clean install. I am only guessing. Not much funda here.

The ext4 filesystem is backward compatible with ext3, making it possible to mount an ext3 filesystem as ext4. Not only this, but also the ext4 filesystem is forward compatible with ext3, that is, it can be mounted as an ext3 partition. However, if the ext4 partition uses extents (one of the major new features of ext4), forward compatibility and therefore the ability to mount the filesystem as ext3 is lost. Extents are not used by default; the “extents” option is explicitly required. You might want to have a look at the following two articles: Converting ext3 partitions to ext4 on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) and Ext4: HowTo. Thanks to Gen2ly for pointing the way.

Music is what I love the most. So amarok was the first application I tested. Yay, Amarok 2 fired up. But my joy of having the new Amarok was quickly turned into dismay. The new look darker theme of Amarok looked disgusting. Earlier editions had a small left hand sidebar, and a wide informative playlist area. Amarok 2 features 3 bars. The leftmost one lists all the collection and last.fm service and all. The artist info and lyrics are all moved into the mddle bar while the playlist has been compressed into the smaller rightmost sidebar. Also very little information is shown in the playlist area. I liked the earlier Amarok’s feature of being able to sort the playlist by score or last played. It is lacking here. Or atleast, I did not find a way to do that. And the biggest disappointment was incompatibility of last.fm scrobbling. The application fails to scrobble if you are behind a proxy server. I tried everything, using manual proxy settings in kioslaverc, setting system-wide proxy, but with no luck. Apparently there is this bug in Amarok which prevents it from scrobbling from behind proxy. We’ll have to wait for a later release.

Next came on the messenger. Jaunty has implemented this notifications thing. The idea is that all the notifications could be sent to a single application which will display them to the user. Earlier it was a bit distracting. Any friend logs in and a black patch appears on the top right corner of my screen. However, after a few hours, I learned to filter it out. I am not distracted by it any longer. The notification doesn’t interfere with what one is doing though. If you move your mouse over the notification, say to close an application, the notificaion fades into the background. So far, I have only seen pidgin and rhythmbox notifications appear. But I am sure, very soon all the applications will use this feature and start deploying their notification in this manner. I feel options needs to be provided to the user making it possible for him to filter out few types of notifications. I certainly do not want to be notified when any of my friend comes online.

There is this Libnotify Popups plugin which dictates the notifications that is shown on the right hand corner top. You can check/uncheck the events you want to be notified about from pidgin itself.

New themes have been introduced in Jaunty. I love the New Wave theme. It is considerably darker than the customary orange human theme. Below is a screenshot of my Jaunty desktop.

Ubutu Jaunty Desktop Screenshot

Ubutu Jaunty Desktop Screenshot

I have had no problems so far yet, except a few applications crashing unexpectedly. But those instances were few and rare. One of the main goals of Jaunty was to improve user experience. So far it has been good. Only Amarok has disappointed me. But on the brighter side, my last.fm client is working once again. It wasn’t in Intrepid. Apart from these, I haven’t really tried much. Shall write again if anything comes up.

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