Tag Archive for 'linux'

Installing Amarok 1.4 in Ubuntu Jaunty

Published on May 1, 2009 in Tech. 7 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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Backup : Ubuntu Intrepid

Published on March 18, 2009 in Tech. 0 Comments

Well, when it comes to twidling around with Linux installation, I am a newbie. Usually my experiments end up with me not knowing how to reverse the side effects. I have no choice other than to live with the problems created. But periodically I have to do a complete reinstall of my system to keep it running well (also because after a certain point I cannot bear to see all the broken application, dead links and innumerable errors). Earlier it was a pain to do complete reinstall, because I would lose all my configuration files unless I explicitely saved them. Thus began my search to discover a backup tool for ubuntu.

I stumbled across this thread which says that all you need to do is to make a tar of all your files, thus saving the present state of ubuntu. If a restore is required, just expand the archive. This can be done on a running system too. Just restart after the exoansion is done, and the ubuntu gets restored to its state when the zarchive was created.

However, archiving all the files requires a lot of space. Also it takes time to everytime archive all the files. An alternative option I came across was to sync the files. I have used this method to create a backup of all my files. Sync is much faster than creating tar archive because sync only copies the files that have been modified since the last sync operation.

I have opted to backup only my /home/anu folder. This is what needs to be done.

rsync -av /home/anu /media/Downloads/syncUbuntu

rsync is the command used to sync the files. /home/anu is my user directory. I have an externally mounted USB drive. It shows up in /media with the label Downloads. I have created a new folder syncUbuntu within this drive to contain my sync files. Now all I have to do is run the above command and my files get sync with the files already present in the syncUbuntu folder.

The first time that you run the command takes time as all the files have to be copied. However the next time onwards the process requires hardly a few seconds. It is a great way to backup the system. And now I know I have all my files backed up to be called upon whenever needed.

To make the process easier, I created an alias in the bashrc file. I named it backup. This is the line that I added

alias backup=’rsync -av /home/anu /media/Downloads/syncUbuntu’

To backup my files, I now need to type backup in my terminal and I’m done.

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Set Proxy For Picasa In Ubuntu

Published on March 10, 2009 in Tech. 0 Comments
Ubuntu logo

Ubuntu logo

I am behind a proxy server and needed to set the proxy for picasa to work on my Ubuntu Intrepid. The instructions have been recorded below :

  • First you need to start the registry editor of picasa
    • /opt/picasa/bin/wrapper regedit
    • The above should do. However my picasa wrapper was located at a different place, namely
      • /opt/google/picasa/3.0/bin/wrapper regedit
    • Check yours and run the command appropriately
  • Navigate to the following user key
    • HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionInternet Settings
  • Now we need to add a few entries. They are
    • ProxyEnable
      • REG_BINARY
      • 01 00 00 00
    • ProxyOverride
      • String value
    • ProxyServer
      • String value
      • Server:Port
        • For example I had to set 144.16.192.247:8080
  • Thats it, done. The change should be immediate.
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Vagalume – Last.fm Radio On Ubuntu Intrepid

Published on March 2, 2009 in Miscel. 0 Comments
Last.fm

Last.fm

I love the last.fm radio. Recently I made a transition from the windows operating system to the ubuntu intrepid. I love amarok too, but sadly it wasn’t able to play the last.fm radio. Upon googling around, I found that apparently last.fm had decomissioned their old protocol on the 31st of January, 2009 and thus amarok 1.4 wasn’t able to stream music anymore. I was disheartened. I began searching for alternative appliations to play the radio.

Lastfm client was the obvious choice. I used it to play radio in the windows environment. However, I met with another problem. Installed, account entered, proxy set – but it wasn’t able to play too. I have no idea what the problem is. It skips through a lot of songs before giving a connection error. Again failed !

Next I came across this Vagalume last.fm client. It has support for gnome environment. It installed and was pretty easy to configure. It has all the features of the official last.fm client, namely play all the radio stations (neighbours, loved tracks and personal library included), ban/love a track, edit tags for a track and also scrobble. The last.fm page now shows

Listening now using Vagalume – Tuned to Megadeth Radio

Yeah, you can select a radio based on a global artist tag/genre tag and also select tracks from your own lobrary filtered by the tag. Additionally, Vagalume also changes pidgin status to reflect which song you are listening to at the moment – pretty much all that I was looking for.

Installing Vagalume is easy too. All you have to do is

sudo apt-get install vagalume

The application installs. You will find the aplication in your Applications->Sounds & Video. Configure the settings, namely your username, password and proxy if any and get tuned into your favourite station.

Happy listening. :)

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Am Lovin’ vi

Published on February 20, 2009 in Anu. 0 Comments

I have fallen in love with vi. I have started usign vi only recently. The concept was a bit difficult at first, but now I think I have got used to it. I still sometimes forget to enter the insert mode before typing, but that’ll come with practise. Also I have now learnt how to yank text, paste it and yeah also used the search and replace feature.

Below is a screen shot of my terminal using the vi. Each tab has a different file open. And the tab which contains the main file, I have divided it into two frames. It allows me to look at different parts of the same file without having to keep scrolling all the time.

vi terminal

vi terminal

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My .vimrc File

Published on February 16, 2009 in Tech. 3 Comments

Spurred on by my recent experiences with the vi editor, I havedecided to shift from gedit to vi. The insert, command and visual notion was a bit difficult to get hang of at the beginning, but with some practice I am getting the hang of it. There’s so many more features in it than I have used till now. It needs a bit of getting used to.

The first thing I did was to customize my .vimrc file to suit my programming style. I like my code to be syntaxically coloured, indented and prefer spaces over tabs. Also I keep the width of my tabs to 2. I must mention here that most of my programming habbits are because of Udit Sajjanhar – the one semester that he was our TA for the course of compilers.

So here is my vimrc file :

" do not keep a backup file
set nobackup

" wrap off
set nowrap

" tabs are only 2 characters
set tabstop=2

" auto indent uses 2 charaters
set shiftwidth=2

" spaces instead of tabs
set expandtab

" set auto-indentation on
set autoindent

" expand command line using tab
set wildchar=

" show line numbers
set number

" fold using markers
set foldmethod=marker

" powerful backspaces
set backspace=indent,eol,start

" highlight search terms
set hlsearch

" dont wrap words
set textwidth=0

" history
set history=50

" 1000 undo levels
set undolevels=1000

" show partial commands
set showcmd

" show matching braces
set showmatch

" auto-detect the file type
filetype plugin indent on

" on the syntax by default
if has("syntax")
syntax on
endif

" When editing a file, always jump to the last known cursor position.
" Don't do it when the position is invalid or when inside an event handler
" (happens when dropping a file on gvim).
autocmd BufReadPost *
\ if line("'\"") > 0 &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; line("'\"") <= line("$") |
\   exe "normal g`\"" |
\ endif

Here’s the file in case you want to download it : vimrc

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My Ubuntu Intrepid + LAMP

Published on February 9, 2009 in Tech. 0 Comments
Ubuntu logo

Ubuntu logo

Until quite recently I was working on Windows XP, when I had this urge to shift to Ubuntu once again. I got hold of wubi for Intrepid and my system was running the gnome in another 5 minutes.

Now while I was in windows, I had a wamp server installed. The first thing I set myself to do was to install the LAMP, and reconfigure the system to include the wamp www directory as the default directory instead of the /var/www. Here is what I did -

  • Installed SSH client (so that I could connect remotely to my Ubuntu) : sudo apt-get install ssh
  • Install the mysql-server : sudo apt-get install mysql-server
  • Install the apache2 webserver : sudo apt-get install apache2
  • Install php5 : sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5
  • Install php5-mysql support : sudo apt-get install php5-mysql
  • Restart the apache2 webserver : sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
  • Install phpmyadmin : sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

And it was done. The LAMP installed. Not to configure my dafault directory

  • I navigated to/etc/apache2/sites-available
  • Made a backup of the default file : sudo cp default default.bk
  • Edited the default file : sudo vi default
  • I changed the default document root to the www directory created by my wamp server

Yay, my site was up and running. When I navigate to http://localhost I could see the wamp index.html. I clicked on phpmyadmin and it worked. The phpmyadmin that I installed on Ubuntu was presented. It’s almost like having installed wamp server on Ubuntu.

But I would like to make a few ponts over here :

  • I do not yet know how to add more than one directory to the default directory list. Will do that.
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