Big Fat Ostrich

Speaking of being on the bleeding edge of technology, a recent update/upgrade of my Debian server revealed a bug with man-db. Yes. man-db. Out of all places it could have happened, it happened here. It’s shameful!

After upgrading, you might see mandb taking up 100% of your cpu. And not only that, the upgrade is likely to hang on it.

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND

2653 811 man 20 0 21500 1256 488 R 100 0.1 154:39.62 mandb

This was found in man-db version 2.5.6-4 but it’s already been fixed. You’ll just have to do an apt-get update followed by an apt-get upgrade. After that you should have man-db version 2.5.6-5

You can also look at the bug report here:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=562503

Exciting times.

…goodbye Amarok 2!

So maybe I’m giving up too quickly on Amarok 2 or maybe Songbird instantly saw my whole collection and started playing music with no hassles. Maybe…just maybe that’s it.

Well Amarok, maybe we’ll meet again some day, but right now I’m hanging out with Songbird.

Songbird is built by Pioneers of the Inevitable using code by Mozilla, gstreamer and others. It’s simple, yet customizable with a ton of extras and add-ons. If you’re already familiar with iTunes and Firefox, then you’ll probably love it, or at least have no trouble figuring it out. Plus, the mascot is a fat bird wearing headphones. How can you resist? Anyway, that’s the least important of things here.

The default layout is a carbon copy of iTunes. Click in to have a closer look:

Yes, I like Frank Black. Moving on…

Just like Firefox gives you the ability to install add-ons with ease, so does Songbird. If you can think about it, someone has probably created one. I added iPod support (very important), as well as LyricMaster and BirdTabs. Yep, with BirdTabs you can have in-panel Guitar or Bass tablature while you listen to that song whose chord structure has been eluding you for so long. Songird also has a plugin that will tell you what concerts are coming to town based on your music collection. Pretty cool, no?

Initially, I was wondering why the active track playing was never highlighted in my playlist. I looked around and, you guessed it, there’s an add-on for that called FocusTrack. So far, Songbird looks very promising.

You can of course change the look if you’re not happy with the default. There are hundreds of ‘feathers’ (skins) available. Explore and enjoy.

Installation is simple on a Ubuntu system. This is how you do it:

First add the source:

echo “deb http://getdeb.masio.com.mx/ jaunty/” | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/getdeb.list && sudo apt-get update

then

sudo apt-get install songbird

You’re done. I’m in the process of seeing if Songbird can sync with my 3rd generation iPod. If it can, we’ll be saying goodbye to gtk pod as well.

Just a quick post to say that I have been trying out a shitload of linux distros lately and ended up installing Linux Mint, and I am in love. I had tried Mint a while ago, back when it was at version 3.0 (Cassandra), and although the intention was good, it didn’t quite cut it. There were many small frustrating problems, and the overall look was only “almost awesome”. Now, since I installed version 6 (Felicia), I have not been able to find a single aspect of the distro that I did not like. And my other computer is a mac, so the bar was raised quite high. Everything, from the theme to the functionality of the interface, the ease of use, the update system (aptitude), absolutely everything is tight. Linux desktops often feels like a patchwork of parts that don’t necessarily work well together, and the Mint guys seem to understand exactly what it takes to avoid that. So yeah, just wanted to say I’m very very impressed and I can’t wait to see what those guys have in store when Gloria is released in May.

–Dan