Linux Basement Presents: Chad’s Blog

So I’ve pretty
much made the switch over to Ubuntu on my home desktop flawlessly. I
have not run into an instance that it can’t do what I need it to do. I
really thought I would miss Dreamweaver a lot. I know I can mess with
crossover office or wine to get it working, but I’ve not missed it
enough yet. The truth is, most of the web work I’ve been doing has been
over SSH, which I have grown to love and rely on so much, that a lot of
times I’m just editing php right in SSH using nano. No, I’m not talking
about an ipod nano, though I do have one of those and love it. I’m
talking about the linux text editor, nano. Many true linux heads say
that vi is the bomb, but I have not had the time to break through the
learning curve in Vi, so for now, I’m happy with nano.
You can find out more about nano here.

This would probably not work for someone who was heavy into html
editing or CSS, though I seem to do all of that by hand now-a-days too.
I guess it just comes with the territory.

Interestingly enough I think I’m working more efficiently doing
things this way. It also makes me revisit the way I structure my
/var/www files and I keep them much more organized.

Random Thought: I can’t find all the fonts that i want on GIMP. What up with that??

I did run into an interesting predicament today, which interested me
about Ubuntu Studio. I do not see a good video editing suite. Not a
one. I need to do some investigation on how I can splice 3 small movies
onto one disk with a menu that will play in DVD players. I’m sure I’ll
find something, but we’ll see. If anyone has any suggestions for Linux
I welcome them.

I’ve been sick
for a full week now, and it sucks. I’ve got a sinus infection, and it
just wont go away. It might be because we recently got a kitten. I hope
not. I’ve spent some of my spare time getting Elder Scrolls Oblivion
working in Wine. I used the following tutorial, and followed it by
numbers. Worked.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Linux

Performance is almost exactly the same as natively under windows,
with the exception of some sound glitches. I am happy though. My next
task is going to try to import video via firewire, so we’ll see how
that goes.

A quick note. My favorite tutorial writer, Falko Timme
Just wrote a great tutorial on setting up the perfect desktop with
Ubuntu Studio. You can find it over at Howtoforge.com which is one of
the best linux tutorial sites.

Here is the link.

So, I’ve just
made the switch over to Ubuntu full time at home. I’m having fun
figuring out what works with what. One of my priorities, of course, is
to get my ipod nano to sync with Ubuntu. However one of my personal
caveats with this is to get podcasts to stay in the podcast folder on
the ipod, and work like they always have.

My first run was with Banshee. I’ve always been a fan of the Mono
project so I try to follow there software as much as I can. I had heard
about banshee and figured I’d give it a go. Great. I loaded her up, and
it has a really nice interface. Easy to use toolbars, and all around
looks and feels great. It synced with my music collection, and I was
rolling. Cool. Then I decided to go for the real test. I grabbed ye ole
ipod and plugged it in to my front usb. I got this.
So I proceeded to do the right thing and do some research, and finally
after loading and older version of firmware on the ipod, I got it to
sync. However, the podcasts were now set up differently. I didn’t like
it, and decided to see if there were other viable solutions.
Back in my KDE days (I switched to it for about 3 months a year ago to
try it out), I remembered a great program called Amarok. A quick search
on Google told me I was on the right track, so I went to my synaptic
package manager and found it. There are only two catches that I found
with Amarok. The first is that you have to load a lot of backend KDE
stuff for it to work in gnome. This is transparent to the user, but if
you are low on hard drive space, you might want to make a note of it.
A quick note I forgot to mention, even with Banshee, i had to load the package ipod up from synaptic as well. A quick

apt-get install ipod

will do the trick from command line. Also, if you want to know the apt-get for Amarok, you guessed it. It is

apt-get install amarok

Once in stalled, I went ahead and fired it up. Amarok went into a
one time setup asking me several intuitive questions, I gave it the
path to my music files and then I came to the part where it asks me
what type of database I want to use. Hmm, I didn’t see this one coming.
It states that the default is not quite as fast as the MySQL server, so
I decided to go ahead and load up a MySQL server and load the database
into that. Not only is it cool, but I love MySQL. For those following
along, and wanting to use MySQL, it takes a little setting up. If you
just want to use the default database, which is fine, jump ahead.
To set up a MySQL database, you will need to hop onto terminal or
Synaptic and grab mysql-server. Then you set it up using the commands
below. I will first set up the root user for MySQL and then I will
create a database called amarok, and a user called amarok, so that we
can have a less privileged user to connect only to the amarok database.
To do this, use the following commands.

apt-get install mysql-server

/etc/init.d/mysql start

mysqladmin -u root password yourrootmysqlpasswordhere

mysql -u root -p
enter your password

At the MySQL prompt do the following

create database amarok;

GRANT ALL ON amarok.* TO amarok@localhost IDENTIFIED BY “adifferentpasswordthenrootpassword”;

quit
In this instance, when creating the amarok user, make sure your password is in quotes “”.

That should do it, now you can enter that information into the Amarok setup.

The interface is nice. For those not used to a KDE interface, it
takes some getting used to. The tabs are actually on the left hand
window pane, so the words are stretched out. It is not as slick looking
as Banshee. However, its all about the functionality, and Amarok came
through. After it scanned my library successfully, I popped in my ipod
and it came right up, no sweat. I was even able to subscribe to the
podcasts that were already on my ipod, straight from the ipod to
Amarok, so I didn’t have to go out to the web and retrieve and enter
the rss feeds. Cool!
The second thing I want to warn the user about is the default view for
some of Amarok’s setup screens and tools was larger then the resolution
on my laptop. Beware! Works fine on my home resolution which is much
higher. I can’t think of my laptop resolution off the top of my head
but I’ll post back when I check it out.
Well, I am happily using Amarok now, and I really am starting to love
the bells and whistles. I encourage those who are on Linux and looking
for a viable solution for their ipod woes to go to amarok.kde.org and check it out.

Happy listening!

Submitted by Chad on Tue, 05/15/2007 - 8:20pm.

Ok,
so the digg module works in Drupal. Wow. I dugg my post on loading my
linux box up, and BAM! 10,000 reads in 24 hours. I’m going to toss it
up to posting about a hot subject at the right time. My server did
crash at first, but being that it is virtual, I upped the ram and added
a virtual processor and everything came back up smooth. I havn’t been
back down since, yet. So I survived my first diggfest, and I am
actually rather pleased with how Drupal performed. I am hoping that I
can do some tweaking with the throttle module and do some reasearch
over at drupal.org to
see if there are good suggestions about how to handle high traffic. I
will post soon on how I managed to throw this site together in about 2
hours using an existing drupal install and what modules I’m using.

In the meantime, digg on, I think.