Matt Van Stone

Ubuntu and Kubuntu don’t come with MP3 support right out of the box because they are not opensource. You have to install these restricted packages on your own.

Amarok has a nifty feature where you can right click on an album and choose Burn This Album. It will give you the option to burn it as an audio CD or a data CD and then will launch K3b to burn it.

However, if you dont have the right packages installed K3b wont be able to convert the MP3s to PCM so that it can burn them directly as audio.

Type the following command in the console window to install MP3 conversion support:
sudo apt-get install libk3b2-mp3 libmad0

libmad0 might be installed already. It was for me, but it is required so I added it to the above command. After this try burning the CD again. Worked for me, hope it does for you too.

Compiz has been around for a long time. There was a forked version called Beryl that I used for a long time that was very popular. The two projects have merged again and this is what they have produced:

For those of you who don’t know, Compiz Fusion is a composition window manager for Linux. It will run on basically any GUI (Gnome, KDE, etc). The purpose of Compiz Fusion is to make the graphical user interface more fun to use at the same time as making it more productive.

This project is still in an alpha stage, which means it is not stable or ready for the general public. You can still download and install it on your Linux though, just don’t complain if you have stability issues. Hopefully they can work on getting this to a stable state now. I’d really like to see that.

• OpenCompositing
• Installing Compiz Fusion on Ubuntu/Kubuntu

I have officially morphed into a level 60 geek. I know I had to compile Linux kernels in college, but this is the first time I have done it for my own enjoyment.

The linux kernel has the potential to include a lot of support for hardware without the need for “drivers” or kernel modules. There are a lot of things that are compiled in by default that the average user may not use anymore. There is a lot of support for hardware that is included to make Linux run on a vast range of systems. So if you compile your own kernel and leave out all that stuff that you don’t use or need you could get a quicker kernel. Also, you can force modules to be compiled into the kernel that you know you always use. Having them precompiled in the kernel can make for a faster boot time.

I used the instructions in the Master Kernel Thread at the Ubuntu forums. I’m not going to reiterate those instructions here because they are constantly updating them. The post is over 6 months old, but the instructions were updated just 4 days ago.

I was able to upgrade my kernel from 2.6.20.16 to 2.6.21.5. I don’t know what the benefit of this newer kernel is really, but it’s newer. I optimized the kernel for my Athlon64 processor and removed support for other processors that this build will never run on. I also ran through these kernel performance tweaks from Own3d in another Ubuntu forums thread.

Following Own3d’s instructions I removed a whole crapload of stuff that I dont use like PPP, SLIP, touchscreen support, ISDN subsystem, video capture support, extra languages, Amateur radio, IrDA, and Bluetooth support. Removing all these things might not be for you, but I don’t use them.

For most modules you have 3 options, to not compile it, to compile it, or to compile it as a module. I didnt think to look the things that were being complied as modules to see if they could be hard-compiled right into the kernel. So it looks like I might be compiling it once more.

Depending on the speed of your computer it can take more than an hour to compile the kernel. On mine it was between 30 minutes and an hour.

One last thing, if you have an Nvidia video card you will have to reinstall the driver after you boot into your new kernel. When you boot you will end up with a black screen. Switch to tty2 by hitting CTRL+ALT+F2 and run the Nvidia installer from there. Also, you will want to read this thread on a bug that exists with the Nvidia driver at the 2.6.21 kernel. Basically when you compile your kernel you want to turn off Paravirtualization Support. If you don’t turn it off you will have problems compiling the Nvidia driver on the new kernel.

Well, 2 nights ago I whacked my SUSE 10.2 install and tried installing OS x86 10.4.8. It looked like it was working, but stalled when trying to extract the files. I was able to format my SATA drive and everything. Since I do have an AMD CPU and an Nforce4 chipset it looks like there might be some problems getting it to install on a SATA drive out of the box. I’m downloading a different ISO to give it a try, but in the meantime I had to get something up and running. So last night I installed Kubuntu 7.10. I have had it downloaded since it was released but I didn’t want to take the time to install it.

First off I had the same two problems I always have with Linux. I had to install the nvidia-glx drivers and I had to remove the bluez packages so that my keyboard and mouse would work without having to reconnect the dongle every time I start up. This only took me about 10 minutes to do as opposed to the first time when it took me hours of research to figure out. Oh yeah, and usplash still doesnt work. By adding a better resolution to /etc/usplash.conf I was able to get the shutdown splash to display, but the boot splash is all distorted.

I must say, I am happy with how responsive it is. It does seem a little quicker than SUSE was. However, there is a lot of software that SUSE came with preinstalled that Kubuntu doesn’t. Firefox for example. It also seems to boot faster. From GRUB to KDM it’s about 24 seconds on my AMD 3700+. I was able to add my windows shares on my fileserver to the fstab file and they mount automatically when I boot. On SUSE I had to do sudo mount -a every time I booted up to get the shares to mount. That was a pain in the ass because if I started Amarok before running the mount command Amarok wouldnt be able to find my music on the server and would delete it all from the database. I would have to reindex my entire music folder again.

There is this issue with kdesu where sometimes it can’t find the current screen session for starting elevated applications. There is a bug report on this but it wasn’t fixed before Feisty was released. In that bug report kko has posted a fix that worked for me. It’s more of a workaround though because you have to do it every time it gets messed up.

I also had to install rdesktop for krdp to work. It’s strange that they had krdp installed, but not the required rdesktop package. Of course I also had to install MP3 support and all that jazz.

Those are the only things I can think of now that I had issues with. I think I am going to hold off on installing Beryl, or whatever it’s called now. I like how stable this stock install has been. Eventually I’d like to have a tri-boot system OS X, XP, and some KDE based linux, but I need to get an IDE drive that I can try OS X on before I attempt that.

I have been riding the train a lot lately and I am really growing sick of sitting there in silence. Since I had to give up the iPod that was never really mine when I left my last job I have been MP3 playerless. I purchased a RAZR V3i for it’s music capability, but the DAP on the phone really sucks. It is very picky about bitrates of MP3s and it has failed reading most of the songs I have put on it. Plus the sound quality really blows.

I have recently become addicted to reading Engadget and Gizmodo. These sites fuel some kind of sick addiction that people have with you guessed it, gadgets. The sites give the world up to the minute news on all sorts of fresh gadgets as well as specs, rumors, and reviews.

The Sansa Connect player has been on the headlines a lot over the past few weeks. It is a new wifi player that allows you to stream internet radio from Yahoo Launch right to the player from wherever there is an open wifi signal. Although I wasn’t interested in paying the premium for wifi, the regular Sansa e280 (8GB) looked pretty good to me. It’s the same price roughly as a 4GB Nano (if you find the Sansa on sale) and it supports FM Radio, voice and FM recording, and even does video playback. Plus the screen is bigger. This player looks nice, but then I found the iRiver Clix2.

Here’s a video of the Clix2 functioning.

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Ubuntu 7.07 has been released today. I was looking forward to upgrading from 6.10, but since I installed openSUSE the other day I don’t think I want to go back to Gnome. I love KDE. Gnome is great for people who dont want options. If you want it simple, stick with Ubuntu and Gnome.

I may break down and try Kubuntu which was also released today, but I don’t know. It is usually a few hours work getting Linux running on my GeForce 7800/Dell 2405 video card/monitor combination. Plus, I have read that previous versions of Kubuntu were not as quick as openSUSE. This release claims to be quicker than past ones, but will it really be worth it?

In the end I will probably end up trying it out. I’ll post back in the future with a comparison if I do.

Last Sunday I had a few files on my system go corrupt. If I had a recent backup of my system I probably could have just restored it, but I didn’t. Some Linux fanboy I am. I tried to reinstall the components that went corrupt but I still couldn’t get X to start. If I took the time to troubleshoot it more I probably could have fixed it, but I really didn’t have the patience. I had read about people upgrading to Feisty beta to fix some of their problems in the past so I decided to give it a shot.

The upgrade was over 400MB and took over an hour to install. After all was said and done I was able to get back into Ubuntu. Everything looked ok, but I was having some (beta related) crashes. I have been wanting to try a distro that used KDE for a while so I decided to download openSUSE 10.2. Last night I burned the ISO, backed up my configuration, and started the install.

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If you don’t know the basic rules of soldering, don’t try to mod your Wii. It’s not easy. Follow the link below for more pics and how this botched mod job was actually salvaged.

How not to mod your Wii

I just want to point out that Microsoft’s Live Search for images is my favorite image search engine. Really it’s only for one reason too: I love it because you don’t have to click “next page” ever. As you scroll down it automatically loads more pictures. You can continue scrolling forever and if there are pictures to load, it will load them. Kudos to Microsoft on this feature.

Now if they could somehow create a spotlight style search where images start appearing in the results view as you type your search, that would be a sweet feature.

End transmission.

Here is a quick tip for Linux. I use this all the time. If you are trying to remember a command you once did but cant remember the syntax use the following:

history |grep keyword

So if I do history |grep chmod it will tell me all of the commands that I have typed in that contain the word chmod.

matt@ubuntu:~$ history |grep chmod
   70  chmod a+x vlc
  325  chmod a+x downgrade.sh
  326  sudo chmod a+x downgrade.sh
  505  history |grep chmod

You can pipe a lot of things through grep. cat filename |grep keyword can be handy too. This will give you all the lines in filename that have the word keyword in them.