Big Fat Ostrich

Maybe they’re not officially dead, but it’s starting to feel that way.

The guitar tab plugins that I’m talking about are the add ons that you would use in applications like Rhythmbox or Amarok (that piece of crap), Songbird, Banshee, or even Exaile (which is cool, but based on Amarok, so therefore it’s a piece of crap).

Or maybe it’s all Ubuntu 11.10′s fault.

I don’t know anymore. I once wrote about guitar tabs in Rhythmbox and how they no longer work in Ubuntu 11.10. Banshee doesn’t seem to have the extension, and Songbird is no longer maintained and is basically dead in the water. I tried Exaile which CLAIMED to have a guitar tablature plugin (in the search results), but when you go on their website, there’s absolutely no mention of it. Nada.

I think what this all points to is that developers are starting to care less and less about applications that you need to install. The focus is now leaning heavily on cloud based software, and music apps are no different with iCloud and Google Music. But what are your options if you want to play your music locally and display guitar tabs?

Maybe Canary has the answer. (Yes, another animal named software!) Canary.fm is so freaking new I don’t think anyone knows about them. And hell, they only have 4 Twitter followers. But, they’re doing something interesting which is cloud based guitar tabs. And the tabs look super slick. Now, if you can display guitar tabs WHILE I listen to my music (locally or in the cloud) I may be sold.

Here’s a vid:

It’s done.

I wrote about how I was going to remove Ubuntu 11.10 and install Arch Linux instead and I did it.

The experience was nowhere near as painful as installing Gentoo, and as I suspected, it would be a little bit closer to an older Debian installation. You really do have complete control over what to install. Yes, you have to specify that you want xorg, or else you’ll end up with a headless install.

The first time logging in was clumsy as hell.

I get the desire to have a minimal installation. Really, I get it. Logging in for the first time and seeing 3.9 Gigs of RAM free out of 4Gigs was a thing of beauty. But do I really have to install ‘ifconfig’ separately? It’s really not included in the base install?

Choosing which packages to install is fine, but having to install sshd and ifconfig separately? Now you’re just wasting my time. Seriously, I’m getting angry again just thinking about it!

And what about the stuff I DID choose? Like Libre Office, Rhythmbox and VirtualBox? Even though I specified those, they were never installed. No biggie, since I just installed them myself afterwards.

But what about important stuff, like fonts? Don’t get me started on the fonts or the complete absence of them. Yep. Have to install those too.

So, to figure out which fonts you need, you can do the following:

pacman -Ss font

Install those net-tools as well. You’ll need them:

pacman -S net-tools

Do you need ssh? Of course you do!

pacman -S sshd

And so on.

Getting my xorg nice and slick and spanning across two monitors using the proprietary Nvidia drivers took some work. I installed the drivers like this:

pacman -S nvidia nvidia-utils

Anyway, I’m not going to go into a huge how-to for Arch Linux here. It’s way too involved for that. Plus, they have a wealth of documentation which you can find on the Arch Linux Wiki. It’s long and involved, but all of the answers are there.

With all that said, if you don’t like documentation or reading/learning something new, Arch Linux is probably not for you. It’s definitely not for the impatient. I will say that now that I’ve got everything working, my system is faster than it’s ever been. I don’t have the fonts just right yet so it kind of looks like it’s been up all night drinking vermouth, but it sure runs fast. Everything is super snappy like and good.

I’ll be back with one more post about this, after a week of regular use. If things don’t work out with Arch-Linux, I’ll either be going back to an apt-get based system or Red Hat Fedora.

Yes, today was the day of the upgrade from Ubuntu 11.04 to Ubuntu 11.10, so let’s talk about that.

Ubuntu 11.10′s friendly alliterated animal name is Oneiric Ocelot. Oneiric is defined as dreamy, which brings me to the riddle I just made up:

Q. Why is Ubuntu 11.10 called ‘Oneiric Ocelot’?
A. Because they were asleep when they made it!

Stop laughing. I’m not joking.

The Upgrade
First of all, the upgrade took over 2 hours! Why? Because we all know that Ubuntu is not known for it’s slim girlish figure anymore. A few nicknames came to mind while watching some of the many packages get installed: Bloatbuntu, Ubun Too Goddamn Fat, and Moo-buntu. Yes, this is one fat OS.

The upgrade itself was smooth. After all, you can’t do anything but make dinner or watch T.V. while the packages are installed and downloaded. Why? Because networking is disabled throughout the whole process. Well done.

Ubuntu 11.10 boasts a hideous new login screen
I noticed two things once the upgrade was complete and I logged in for the first time: Oneiric Ocelot is incredibly sluggish when launching apps. 4 gigs of RAM should be more than enough on a linux system, but not here. Ubuntu has become the Windows of linux distros. Fat, bloated and with way too many processes eating up your cpu.

2nd thing: NO WIRELESS.

Well done Canonical/Ubuntu. Maybe I’m being harsh, but can you have everything work out of the box for once? Least of all the wireless. I’m pretty sure that in 2011, wireless technology is kinda a requirement. Jesus. I kind of expected to have to re-configure the desktop environment after upgrading, but the network settings? You’re kidding, right?

As I write this, I can connect to my wireless network so the driver seems to be fine, but I can’t ping anything. Yep. I get an ip address from DHCP, but no ping and no internet. Yes, it’s back to wired for now. Slow clap.

3.0 Kernel
Oneiric Ocelot uses kernel 3.0. In honor of the 20th anniversary of Linux. It was Linus Torvalds‘ idea or something like that. It’s kind of cool to see 3.0 after seeing 2.6 for so long, but it’s not making much of a difference, yet. We’ll get a better idea after some testing.

Desktop environments and Unity
Unity is “cute” but not something I’ll be adopting anytime soon. It’s clean but not necessarily optimal. It’s just sluggish. Gnome 3 is not much better, so I switched to Gnome with no effects. Decent, but not great. It should be faster once I tweak the performance. Again. Like after every upgrade. Probably should have forced it to leave my previous settings.

The Verdict: Oneiric Ocelot is a lazy cow. Arch Linux is starting to look more attractive. Or maybe a clean Debian install.

P.S. After using Ubuntu 11.10 for awhile I’ve come to really hate the Ubuntu Software Center. It’s ok and does the job eventually, but I feel that Synaptic Package Manager was cleaner, faster and more robust overall. It feels like aesthetics were the main reason that they replaced  the old Synaptic Package Manager with the Ubuntu Software Center.

Awhile back, I raved about MediaTomb and how great it was but there was one little issue that made me try Serviio: streaming subtitles support.

Being able to actually see the subtitles is sort of a big deal when you’re watching someone scream craziness in a Takashi Miike film, so I killed an evening learning how to install Serviio on my Debian LAMP server.

Here are a few preliminaries:

Download and install Serviio:

wget http://download.serviio.org/releases/serviio-0.5.2-linux.tar.gz

Unpack it. I did this from my home directory for the hell of it (but you can unpack it anywhere):

tar xvf serviio-0.5.2-linux.tar.gz

Install java and ffmpeg if you haven’t already

apt-get install default-jre
apt-get install ffmpeg

Now for the fun part and the major fail of Serviio. Serviio’s one major flaw is that it doesn’t have a web interface. This means that you have to configure it FROM the place that you installed it. Basically, if you’re serving movies or music with Serviio on your network, you have to configure it ON the machine where it’s installed. What is this, 1994? You can workaround this by using VNC or connecting a monitor to your server or whatever your setup is. Up to you.

First run Serviio from the bin directory (you should create an init script for this later)

/serviio-0.5.2/bin/serviio.sh

Now launch the serviio console:

/serviio-0.5.2/bin/serviio-console.sh

When the console launches, you can configure the paths to your media folders, i.e., video, music and photos. Pretty straightforward.

And that’s it! You don’t even need to configure Serviio’s profiles.xml, where you need to tweak mediaTomb’s config.xml to get it to work properly.

Now someone please tell me: How is it that mediaTomb hasn’t figured out how to stream subtitles AND have a kick ass web interface, yet, Serviio DOES support streaming subtitles but DOESN’T have a web interface? How is this possible? Please, someone introduce the mediaTomb people with the Serviio gang so that they can have sex and give birth to a fully functioning piece of software.

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"/>

Source

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.

Hey remember when VirtualBox came out and everyone thought that the VBoxGina module (for automated logons) name was so hilarious? Well me neither.

Still, it got me thinking about some of the weirdest linux packages out there. You know the ones. The ones that, if you’re Googling them while at work, you make damn sure to include the word Linux or Ubuntu in your search. Because surprising results can happen when you Google for ‘man beef’. Ok, it wasn’t surprising at all.

Anyway, here’s a short list of some of the weirdest linux/Ubuntu packages out there in repository land:

scrot – Which is a command line screen capture utility, i.e., SCReen shOT. That means if you have to look at the man page, you’ll be forced to type “man scrot”. Fine. You don’t think that’s so bad? How about:

scrotwm – This is a dynamic tiling window manager. And yes, this means that you’ll eventually be typing “man scrotwm”. I doesn’t get more obvious than that. Oh wait it does:

liboobs-1-4 – Which I was surprised was installed on my machine. No, there’s no man page for liboobs-1-4, but it does provide a GObject based interface for system-tools-backends. Yay.

beef – That’s right.Open up a shell and type ‘man beef’ and you’ll get the man page for ‘beef’ aka the flexible Brainfuck interpreter. Brainfuck has its own Wikipedia entry cause it has such an awesome name. Brainfuck is basically a programming language written in C that’s so minimalist that it’s basically unreadable. If your colleague is using it, you probably need to pie them in the face with a textbook. Still, beef is pretty damn efficient. Bastards.

And that’s all I got. I could go on about ‘tar‘ and the hilariousness of typing ‘man tar‘ 20 times a day, but that one’s been over done to death.Either way, let us know if you’ve come across some crazily named packages yourself. Do it.

* This isn’t related to that old Man Beef Hoax. Or maybe it is. I don’t care either way.

I’ve been wanting to write about my last upgrade for weeks and weeks, but we got all freaky with a bunch of Bobbipins posts instead!

So finally, after weeks of anticipation, here it is: My extensive review about upgrading to Ubuntu 10.10 aka Maverick Meerkat.

It went real smooth.

Seriously. That’s all I got. Each subsequent upgrade with Ubuntu becomes easier and easier, which really translates into boringer and boringer! I don’t know…it’s like the whole OS is so stable at this point, it just makes me want to yawn. Maybe I need to install Beryl or Compiz or something.

Anyway. Don’t you feel like punting that meerkat up there?