That’s right boys and girls. We’ve got video features coming so we thought “hey, let’s create a youtube channel!” And we did.
This first video is just a test. BUT WHAT AN ADORABLE TEST!!! JUST LOOK AT THOSE BIG BLUE EYES!!!!
[Dan out.]
Continuing with the joy that is Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot and how it completely messed up my previously working wireless, here’s a solution. Note that I’m currently using a Dell Core i3 Inspiron using the following Broadcom network adapter:
Broadcom Corporation BCM43224 802.11a/b/g/n [14e4:4353]
You can run lspci -nvn | grep -i net from a shell console if you want to find out which card your machine uses.
Anyway, long story short, you may need to remove the wrong drivers and install the correct ones. This solution worked but may not work for everyone depending on your hardware:
Remove and uninstall the drivers:
sudo apt-get purge broadcom-sta-common broadcom-sta-source bcmwl-kernel-source
Install the correct one:
sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter firmware-b43-installer
Enjoy and let us know if this solution worked for you. Found a different solution? Tell us about it!
Ubuntu 11.04 has changed some of its default applications one being the move from Open Office to Libre Office and the other being a move from Rhythmbox music player to Banshee. I don’t really care which Office application Ubuntu uses, but to play music, the application actually needs to perform properly. Let me list some of the issues I have with using Banshee to play and manage your mp3 collection:
1. Banshee 2.0 crashes often: If you have a large music collection (over 10000 songs) expect Banshee to freeze. I’ve never had this problem with Rhythmbox. I’d rather use a stable Rhythmbox than wait for Banshee to figure this out.
2. Guitar Tabs: This is one of THE most important plugins for me. The Banshee music player doesn’t seem to have a guitar tab add on. Rhythmbox uses the tab-rhythmbox-plugin to query the guitar tab archive and displays them right alongside your music library, in the same window. No brainer for me.
3. iPod Support: Banshee seems to detect my old 3rd generation iPod without a problem, but so does Rhythmbox. Not enough reason for me to switch.
4. Naming your software Banshee: Have you tried using Google to search for “Banshee music player”. Yep, you’re going to get a a lot of results for “siouxsie and the banshees“, which I don’t mind all that much since they were kind of a cool band anyway. With Rhythmbox, your search results will be more precise and therefore, easier to find support. I’ll admit that this was a bit of a stretch.
In the end, all I want is a music player that just plays music. I don’t care what it looks like as long as it indexes my collection fast and efficiently.
Honorable mention goes to Clementine which would give Rhythmbox a run for its money if it also had…you guessed it…a Guitar Tab plugin. It doesn’t from what I’ve seen, but Clementine 0.7 does pretty much everything else. They’re at version 0.7, so they’re obviously very new. If you can prove me wrong and they do have a guitar tab plugin, let me know! Overall, I find using a combination of rhythmbox and mplayer works out just fine. Or you could use VLC if that’s your thing.
Well it took a day, but I fixed the monitor problems on Ubuntu 11.04!
After experiencing THE most unstable Ubuntu upgrade yet, my external display resolution was basically a sea of Technicolor vomit. The display on my Dell 1564 i3 was fine, but attaching an external VGA monitor resulted in an unusable display of flickering madness. I also figured out why they called the distro Natty Narwhal: because it acts like a beached whale with a spike in its brain! Fucking Natty.
Anyway, this is how I fixed the garbled external display problem:
1) The Easy Way
a – Open System > Administration > System Testing
b – After entering your admin password, click next. You’ll have a list of many items to test.
c – Chose Monitor Tests and Video Tests
Run the tests with your external monitor detached.
When the tests are complete, run them again with the external monitor attached. You may have to position your mouse on the ‘Test” button before you attach the monitor, since the display resolution will still be garbled once the monitor is attached. When you’re ready, click “Test”. When the tests complete, you should have your external display back. If all looks good, you’ll just have to configure your display settings. And that’s it!
2) The Hard Way
a – Open a terminal and type xrandr
b – You’ll see something similar to this:
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1680 x 1050, maximum 8192 x 8192
LVDS1 connected 640×480+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 344mm x 194mm
1366×768 59.6 +
1360×768 59.8 60.0
1024×768 60.0
800×600 60.3 56.2
640×480 59.9*
VGA1 connected 1680×1050+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 434mm x 270mm
1680×1050 59.9*+ 60.0
1280×1024 75.0 60.0
1440×900 75.0 59.9
1280×960 60.0
1152×864 75.0
1024×768 75.1 60.0
832×624 74.6
800×600 75.0 60.3 56.2
640×480 75.0 60.0
720×400 70.1
HDMI1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
Choose which display you want to be your primary and form your command like so: xrandr –output VGA1 –primary
Honestly, this isn’t the best method if you want to fix it visually. Running the Monitor Tests from the System Testing menu uses xrandr anyway and should get your second external monitor up and running. Hopefully things will run better in 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot which will be out in October 2011.
Next up: How to Uninstal Unity
Hey Natty! Less time drinking tea, more time fixing bugs!
Did you upgrade to Ubuntu 11.04 aka Natty Narwhal? I did, and for the first time since using Ubuntu (I’ve been loyal since 6.10), I’m very disappointed. There are some major issues with this upgrade. What we’ve come to expect from Canonical is a solid operating system, and most importantly, smooth upgrades. In fact, the last few times I wrote about upgrading Ubuntu, I almost had nothing to say because the upgrades were so smooth, they could have been unattended upgrades.
So let’s get down to it.
1. Crashing at first boot (external monitor support): This is open to interpretation. I’m using an external monitor with my Dell Inspiron 1564 and Ubuntu 11.04 didn’t exactly crash. The problem is that there’s a major bug when using an external monitor with Ubuntu 11.04 on various laptop makes and models. So after first boot, both monitors went black. After I unplugged the external monitor, I saw the Unity interface (more on Unity later). I logged out of Unity and into Gnome. When I attached the external (analog) monitor, the image resolution was completely corrupted and unusable. This is a problem with the VGA driver. Read about the bug here.
Note: My display was fine when I connected it to my Samsung via the HDMI port.
2. Unity: Fine, using Unity instead of Gnome 3 might take some getting used to, but could the menu bar have some options? It would be really nice to have some control over its orientation, and at the moment, there doesn’t seem to be any. Isn’t Linux about having control? Freedom? Remember that word?
Unity looks like it’s trying to be an iPhone. Or an iPad. Or like it has a hard-on for Apple. It refers to “Apps”, which are just its regular programs and this just makes it sound like it’s trying to be something it’s not. Basically, Unity makes me feel the way I felt about Amarok when Amarok 2.0 was released, and it wasn’t a positive experience,
3. Flash: After logging into Gnome, I tried browsing and watching videos. You Tube was a mess with videos playing, but with the control buttons flashing and intermittent flickering. Very nice. I ended up fixing that issue by installing Flash Aid which is a Firefox plugin that figures out which version of Flash you need. My question: Why couldn’t the people behind Ubuntu do that?
4. Firefox 4: I haven’t tested Firefox 4 on any other system besides my unstable Natty Narwhal, so you can call me biased, but Firefox 4 has been crashing like Firefox 2 did awhile back. Are we back to the memory leaks from 4 years ago? I’ve been blaming Ubuntu 11.04 and its 2.6.38-8 kernel. Flash is also very choppy on Firefox 4, where flash is fine on Chrome. The test: try playing some Facebook game like Mafia Wars (check the property pages) on Firefox 4 and then try playing it on Chrome.
5. Everything Else: Ok, not everything is bad. When things work, they’re snappy and quick. Even Firefox seems to be as fast as Chrome normally is. I do think that there’s potential here, just that Natty appears to have been rushed for release, and that’s never a good thing. They compromised stability in favor of bling that’s less than impressive. Just give us an OS that works. Remember what happened with KDE 4.0? DO YOU?
1 Amazing thing that actually DOES work: ssh freezing problem: Yep. ssh no longer freezes when authenticating via wireless to my LAN or any external network. The freezing ssh session issue was an annoying bug last year (which I thought was the fault of my crap D-Link DIR-615), but it now works and my wireless ssh sessions are stable. Bonus.
Pro Tip: Touchpad Control: Did you install Natty narwhal on a laptop and found that you lost control of your touchpad? Yeah, me too. Fix it like this:
gconftool-2 –set –type boolean /desktop/gnome/peripherals/touchpad/touchpad_enabled true
By the way, what’s the deal with Byobu? Is it necessary? I’ll be trying out this enhanced terminal soon.
I picked up a 40″ Samsung 550 Series LCD the other day. Initially, my plan was to stream digital video from USB storage through a media streamer like Apple TV, Boxee, or the Seagate Free agent GoFlex. Turns out this TV is pretty well equipped to just play video streamed from my Debian server, so it pretty much cuts out the middle man.
Samsung has an application called Allshare which you can install on Windows. Mediatomb is an alternative to Allshare if you’re running Linux.
It depends what you want, so if you want a real media center like Boxee or XBMC, use your PS3 or Xbox or something like that. I didn’t feel like buying yet another box/appliance so I installed Mediatomb on my Debian machine and was watching my shows in about an hour. It’s programmed in C++ and has a simple xml control file. It’s really easy to install, so here’s how.
Step1: Install Mediatomb:
sudo apt-get install mediatomb
Step 2: Configure Mediatomb:
Add the following to the server section of config.xml. The following DLNA code is the key:
<custom-http-headers>
<add header=”transferMode.dlna.org: Streaming” />
<add header=”contentFeatures.dlna.org: DLNA.ORG_OP=01;DLNA.ORG_CI=0;DLNA.ORG_FLAGS=01700000000000000000000000000000″ />
</custom-http-headers>
You’ll probably also want to configure your mime types like this in import/mappings/extension-mimetype
<map from=”avi” to=”video/x-msvideo”/>
<map from=”ts” to=”video/mpeg”/>
<map from=”divx” to=”video/mpeg”/>
<map from=”mp4″ to=”video/MP4V-ES”/>
<map from=”mkv” to=”video/x-msvideo”/>
Lastly, under section <server> change the following to ‘yes’:
<protocolInfo extend="yes"/>
And that’s pretty much it. You’ll probably want to turn on the GUI initially and you can do that in /etc/mediatomb/config.xml under section <server>:
<ui enabled=”yes”
Now you can configure which folders you’ll want to share to your Samsung 550 series LCD TV by going to the following address. If you have usernames set to ‘on’, the default username/password is mediatomb/mediatomb.
http://localhost:49152/
Enjoy. I’ll be back with some cool mediatomb hacks.
You’re probably wondering: why transfer your domain from Godaddy when they’re the biggest and still relatively cheapest? One good reason is their convoluted and confusing interface. Once you’ve got your domain, you don’t have to look at their site very often, but every time I do, it feels like such a chore. Wading through options upon options along with all of the extra services they’re constantly trying to sell you. It always feels like they want you to click on something by mistake just so they can make a few extra bucks off of you.
So I transferred one of our domains to Namecheap.com, which was not hard to do, but not intuitive. Godaddy’s cluttered website doesn’t make it very easy for you.
Here’s how to transfer your domain.
Preliminaries
Before you initiate the transfer, prepare your domain on the Godaddy side:
1. Make sure you do this at LEAST 2 weeks before your domain is set to expire.
2. If your domain is set to Private with Godaddy, change it to Public.
3. If your domain is Locked, Unlock it.
If you don’t do this, Godaddy will deny the transfer.
Transferring Your Domain
1. Head on over to Namecheap and initiate the Transfer Request and follow the instructions. Don’t worry if you don’t have an account with them. You’ll be asked to create an account during the process.
2. Namecheap will ask you for your EPP (Extensible Provisioning Protocol). You need to log into your Godaddy account to get it.
a. In your Godaddy account, click on Domain Management and look for Authorization Code. Then click on Send By Email. This will send the code to the technical contact registered for your site.
b. Once you’ve received your Authorization code (it took a couple of minutes), you can enter it in at Namecheap under EPP.
3. After you submit the EPP/ Authorization code to Namecheap, you should get an email asking you to click a link to confirm the transfer. It took about an hour before I got that email.
a. You should then be getting an email from Godaddy after you confirm the transfer to Namecheap.
And that should be it!
Also, I don’t know if this is a coincidence or not, but the day after I went through this process, Godaddy totally redesigned their web site, and it’s worse than ever. It’s extra confusing and not only have the previous options been moved around, the entire site looks like a clown party, or a gaudy jacket. Sounds like this is the right time to bail from Godaddy. Hopefully, Namecheap maintains their interface the way it is.
Well, it finally happened. My 3rd generation 20Gig iPod has gone to iPod purgatory. I say purgatory because it’s not quite dead, but it doesn’t work for shit either. The hard drive (yes, the hard drive) spins up and whirs before making this awesome *clunk* sound. Yeah, putting a spinning disk in a device that Apple urged you to use while jogging and dancing was a ridiculous idea, but they managed to sell a fuckload of them. It’s brilliant really. Make a device that’ll break (hopefully) in 1 year.
I’m not angry though.
6 years, man! I had the thing for 6 years, which may have been a record if I hadn’t replaced the hard disk once already. Oh the times we had. On the bus, in the bathroom, in jail. It was awesome.
20Gig Paperweight
