Big Fat Ostrich

Hey, remember that big Amarok vs Songbird showdown that I wrote about last year? Well you know what? It was all bullshit! There I was, trying to find THE best goddamn music player, to just PLAY MUSIC. So what happened, you ask?

2 things happened:

a) Amarok turned into Amarok 2, which was a giant digital turd. End of story
b) Songbird turned into Songird for Windows with no more Linux support. That’s right: NO MO!
c) Songbird for Linux became Nightingale (which hasn’t really gone anywhere yet)

Fine, so that was 3 things.

Anyway, all this time something was right under my nose, and that something was Rhythmbox. And yes, Rhythmbox comes installed on Lucid Lynx by default. Also, you know what it goddamn does? It goddamn detects my iPod. And you know what else? It plays music right off my iPod! That means that I can take my iPod to any computer that has Rhythmbox installed and it will play my collection. Without me having to do any stupid synching or anything.

I know I know. Someone’s going to tell me that this existed in the 1620′s or something, but I don’t care! It’s news to me!

Also, in the last version of Songbird I couldn’t get the guitar tabs to work in 64-bit Lucid Lynx. If you want to use them in Rhythmbox, do this:

1. $ sudo apt-get install python-lxml
2. $ tar -xvzf tabsearch-0.1.tar.gz
3. $ cp -r tabsearch/ $HOME/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins/<—create the folder if it doesn’t exist!
4. Launch Rhythmbox and activate the plugin

OMFG and Double You Tee Eff, the people at Songbird announced that they’ll no longer be developing my favorite music playin’ application for Linux anymore. That’s right.

No mo.

Which kind of sucks since it’s so lightweight and basically does just what I need it to: play music. Yeah, go ahead and read about why I liked it so much over here in an earlier post.

But why? WHY INDEED. Let’s just say that the people over at Pioneers of the Inevitable have decided to focus on Songbird for Windows and Mac OS only. At least that’s what’s stated over in the Songbird Wikipedia entry. Songbird will actually still be available for Linux, just no longer supported.

But there’s a silver lining because some Songbird community members are going trying to continue developing an open source music player under the guise of Nightingale, which will basically be a branch of Songbird 1.8.

That’s all I really have to say about it. I mean, what else is there to say? I’ll still use Songbird on Ubuntu 10.04, and when Nightingale becomes available, I”ll test it out. I’m not desperate enough to go back to Amarok 2. I’m definitely never going there again. Never!

Yeah, I did it. I finally did it! I bought a laptop. A Dell Inspiron Core i3 64 bit 15 inch thing to be exact. It came preloaded with Windows 7 and the usual Dell crap and McAfee, which has a generous 10 day free trial. Wow guys. That was awesomely generous indeed!

So after about a week of clicking this thing, checking out that thing, and generally yawning over the whole Windows 7 experience, I took the next plunge: INSTALL UBUNTU 10.04 LTS!

It worked out stellarly.

I’m glad I waited the week. I was going to install Karmic on it, but then I read that Karmic doesn’t support i3 processors. Lucid Lynx does, and the install was smooooth. In fact, this release is all about change. No longer can we refer to Ubuntu as “Brownbuntu”. That’s right. They’ve removed that hideous brown theme and went with a purpley splash screen. It’s a little sleeker than the last release, and maybe even edging a little closer to Mac OS in style. Still, it feels like Linux and performs great.

Everything works. Video, audio, and the integrated wireless card. It’s kind of ridiculous for me to call it an integrated wireless card in this day and age, isn’t it? It’s a laptop! Everything is integrated!

So, after the install, I installed VirtualBox OSE and installed Windows 7 as a VM. That’s where Windows 7 will live. Forever. And with the VM running, you can really feel that you’re getting your value out of those 4 gigs of RAM. You don’t even feel it, even with Compiz running which is on by default. I may tweak Lynx to use less memory, but for now I’m enjoying the fact that there is no lag whatsoever, no matter what I do!

Now. About the D-Link 615 piece of shit router that I bought from  Dell with my order. I’m about to break the thing in half and go back to my wired router. Wireless is fine. Wired is fine. Browsing anywhere on the ‘ternets? Fine! How about ssh from my laptop back to my wired server? It doesn’t fucking work. I can reach my wired network from my wired machine. But the router seems to be blocking ssh and port 443 just from the wireless network.

And yeah, I forwarded ports 443 and 22. Don’t think I didn’t, cause I did.

I’ll let you know how it all works out!

Upgrading to 5.1 should do it.

It’s that simple.

After upgrading Google Earth (a fresh install works fine) on Ubuntu Karmic Koala, you may see this at the end of your install:

Installing desktop icon…
./googleearth-bin: ./libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.9′ not found (required by ./libgoogleearth_lib.so)
./googleearth-bin: ./libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.9′ not found (required by ./libbase.so)

Google Earth will not launch at all, but here’s how to fix it. You need to remove the 2 library files that Google Earth is complaining about. Here’s how:

Move out or copy the following 2 files from your Google Earth installation directory like so:

google-earth$ mv libstdc++.so.6 libstdc++.so.6.bak
google-earth$ mv libgcc_s.so.1 libgcc_s.so.1.bak

Google Earth should then launch.

So there you have it. Another half-assed tech note. Hopefully we’ll get some new gaming reviews when Dan finally takes a break from playing Demon’s Souls and drooling.

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.

Well it’s time to upgrade and say goodbye to Jaunty Jackalope. With the recent release of Ubuntu 9.10, aka Karmic Koala, it had to be done.

Karmic Koala was released on 29 October 2009, and while I am a little late on my review, I will say that I wanted to wait it out. After the initial release, I was hearing a lot of grumbling about slowness and issues with upgrading as opposed to a fresh install.

The last time I wrote a review of the Ubuntu upgrade process was way back in April of 2009.There were some issues with that tracker bug, but that was finally resolved. This time however, the upgrade went really smooth. Actually, let me back up a bit: The first time I tried to upgrade (2 months ago) to Karmic Koala, I used my old PIII 500Mhz laptop as a guinea pig. The exercise went horribly wrong, and to no fault of Ubuntu. Yes, my old Dell Latitude PIII finally bought the farm. That 20Gig hard drive has done it’s final spin.

So I had no choice but to bite the bullet and try the upgrade on my main machine.

I’m happy to say that the upgrade went perfectly smooth. I was a little worried that some packages might break considering the history of package installation that my machine has, but that didn’t happen.

The only issue I had was upgrading Virtual Box once Karmic was installed. If you use Virtual Box 2.0, you’ll need to first remove it (as root) with apt-get remove virtualbox-2.2.6.31-160, then download Virtual Box 3.12 from here and install it like so: dpkg -i virtualbox-3.0_3.0.12-54655_Ubuntu_jaunty_i386.deb

There was some initial slowness during the first boot, which is normal. Thunderbird and Firefox took forever to load. After the second boot, everything seems fine using the 2.6.31-16 kernel. Other than that, I have nothing bad to say about the Karmic Koala upgrade, so far. Time will tell.

I will say that the new splash screen is pretty slick. Click to enlarge:

Addendum I: After using Karmic Koala for about three hours, a nasty little bug was revealed. It turns out that a ton of useless messages will get logged to /var/log/messages, kern.log, and syslog. The logs fill up to the point where / or /var/log fills up. I’m really surprised that this made it out into the field, and it’s extremely annoying. The messages in question look like this:

Dec 1 08:02:42 compname kernel: [35031.545468] CPU0: Temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 13710)
Dec 1 08:02:42 compname kernel: [35031.545470] CPU0: Temperature/speed normal

Good thing though, is that there’s a simple temporary fix that you can use from the Ubuntu forums. Check out post #57 here. Once you apply the fix, backup or delete the huge log files and restart rsyslog.

Aside from that (I know, it’s a pretty major bug), Karmic Koala is running very fast and snappy. I’m inclined to say that the slowness I experienced with Jaunty was the fault of Firefox. Now, with Firefox 3.5.6 on Karmic, browsing is extremely fast. I’ve been testing browsing in Karmic using Chrome 4 as well, and page loading is very fast there too.

Addendum II: After a good 4 days of using Karmic, I’m really satisfied with performance.  Chrome 4 is good, but not there 100% yet. All apps seem to be loading fast, and my Windows XP Virtual Machine is smoother than before. Plus, Firefox is still surprising me with page loading,  especially when clicking through Adgitize blogs and ads.

m.

Months ago I did a couple of posts about Amarok 2 and Songbird and had come to this non-commital conclusion: Amarok 2 sucked, Songbird was excellent, but I was willing to give Amarok 2 a chance. Well, no more chances Amarok 2. You had your day in the sun, but you forgot the sunscreen (fine, worst metaphor/analogy ever). You get the point.

Songbird has been trouble free on my Ubuntu system. Updates, no updates, no problems. No crashing, a multitude of add-ons, no clutter, etc, etc, etc.

Amarok 2…such a disappointment. Clunky, non-intuitive, a complete redesign that tries to be something it’s not. Actually, it succeeded in that department: It went from being a music player/organizer, to a lumbering animal that no one had ever seen before. Amarok 2 is that thing that stumbled out of the woods, injured, waiting to be shot.

The final decision for me came with the beta release of Amarok 2.2 aka Crystal Clear. It doesn’t feel like an improvement at all. It just feels extremely overpackaged.

Thankfully, I found the all encompassing solution to all of Amarok 2′s woes in one simple command:

sudo apt-get remove amarok –purge

…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.