Category Archives: Linux

Project media server

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As I’ve often said, “Ubuntu on the desktop, Debian on the server” is the way to go. That said, I’ve mixed and matched the two a fair bit over the past couple of years, and would now say that as Ubuntu is ready for the server, so Debian is a damn fine desktop distro which is also surprisingly easy to set up to play every possible kind of media file I can throw at it.

So yes, I went with Debian (stable) because the computer I’m using was already running it. I’ve set the machine up, copied all the music, movies and TV shows across, and now have a very pretty and totally functional media machine. So far I’ve played some music, watched a documentary about T.S. Eliot (who still to this day inspires me more to write than any other person living or dead), and have some live footage of Leonard Cohen to look forward to at some point this week. I’ve also got it on our wireless network, so I can dump media onto it from anywhere (anywhere being largely my main laptop which lives upstairs).

It currently looks something like this:

Default Debian desktop

Default Debian desktop

I’m using Rhythmbox for music, Totem for video, and have installed very little extra apart from the required media codecs (I seem to have a mix of pretty much every type of media file for some reason). I can’t say I really came across any problems, and Debian did a great job of being able to find and install whatever was needed to make each file type work (although I’m systematically converting everything to .ogv and .ogg so a lot of this won’t be required soon).

So far so good.

Review – Mandriva 2009.1 (KDE edition)

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I’ve finally got round to installing the KDE version of Mandriva 2009.1 in a VM on my laptop. I’d been holding off, because I don’t really use KDE, and I wasn’t too impressed with how the other major distributions had implemented KDE4 (which is basically a total revision of every aspect). Happily, I can easily say that this is the most usable implementation of KDE4 I’ve ever come across, and it does a very good job of not getting in my way whilst still enabling me to be productive.

The desktop has seen some major customisations, as is usual with Mandriva (see http://www2.mandriva.com/ for a screen shot), and it actually looks and feels like a more polished version of KDE 3.5 (the last version of KDE I used for more than a couple of hours). There are sensible defaults, and I think the only application I would want to add is Thunderbird, because I still really don’t like Kmail.

But could I use it full time? Almost certainly yes, and if I wasn’t very tied to Gnome and the Gnome libraries and applications then I’d consider making the switch. As it is, I’ll happily keep it as a VM, which gives me the option to have a play with KDE4 every now and again without having to make any major life changes.

Converting Quicktime movies using Linux

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Another “so I don’t forget it” post.

Converting Quicktime (.mov) files to Ogg Theora (.ogv) is now rather simple (although takes a while).

Firstly, install ffmpeg2theora (it should be available for most distros).

Then just launch it from the command line. The syntax is:

ffmpeg2theora name_of_file.mov

Or to do a whole directory:

ffmpeg2theora *.mov

Easy.

Changing hostname in Mandriva

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I’ve been doing a bit of work on Mandriva recently, and I always forget that there are two places you need to change the host name before it “takes”.

in /etc/sysconfig/network add the following line:

HOSTNAME=hostname

Where hostname is whatever you want the computer to be called.

Then in /etc/hosts just add the hostname after localhost on the first (and probably only) line in the file. It should look something like:

127.0.0.1       hostname localhost

Where again hostname is the name of the computer.

Do this, reboot, and all should be well.

Trying new Linux Distributions

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This week I’ve been installing various things on the collection of SD cards and USB sticks I have lying around. Fedora 11 is looking very good, and runs like a dream on my EeePC. TinyCore looks interesting, and boots in about 10 seconds, but I don’t think it’s what I’m looking for other than as a curiosity. SystemRescueCD looks useful, and pretty much does what it says on the tin.

I’m keeping all three for now, although I still need to make an installable version of Ubuntu 9.04 at some point this week.

And now to prepare for another day involving more people than computers.

Mass converting .bmp to .jpg

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I’m largely posting this because I’ve had to do it twice recently and forgot how to do it both times.

The command to convert a whole folder of images from .bmp to .jpg (on Linux, obviously) is:

mogrify -format jpg *.bmp

It’s really that simple, and is actually a lot quicker than I thought it would be. You need ImageMagick installed, but most distros will have that by default anyway.

Synching with folders outside of /dropbox

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This could probably be summed up in a few words (the words being “use symlinks”).

Basically, what I wanted to do was to sync several folders outside my dropbox folder (for various reasons). The solution was to create a shortcut in the folder I wanted to sync, and then moving the link to my dropbox folder.  This can be done of the command line by typing something like:

ln -s /home/folder/to/sync /home/andy/dropbox/synched_folder

This could be used in all sorts of ways, some of which I may blog about over the next couple of weeks.

Using wcid instead of NetworkManager on Ubuntu 8.10

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This post came about due to an issue with NetworkManager connecting to our wpa-enterprise authenticated network at work, but demonstrates that there is more than one choice when it comes to almost everything on Linux. It’s not too fiddly, and I’ll hopefully have a rebuild of Ubuntu incorporating these changes within 24 hours.

First off, you need to add a line to your sources list, by issuing the following command:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Add the following line at the bottom of the file:

deb http://apt.wicd.net intrepid extras

Then press ctrl+o to save and then ctrl+x to quit and then issue the following command:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install wcid

This will download wcid (a network management tool that doesn’t suffer issues connecting to enterprise level networks), uninstall NetworkManager and then install wcid. At some point in this process you will lose network connectivity, but this is fine.

To make wcid start at boot, go to System > Preferences > Sessions and add a new item to startup. The path for the application is:

/opt/wicd/tray.py

Reboot, and you should find that wcid adds an applet similar to nm-applet which will allow you to view available networks, and connect and configure them. I’ve tested this with my EeePC 701 and an Acer Aspire One (both running Ubuntu 8.10), and it is known to work (with a bit of tweaking) on Fedora 10 as well.

xmessage

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This week I’ve been looking at ways of setting up alerts that only actually happen when I’m sitting in front of my computer to read them. This has lead to me using xmessage. For example:

xmessage -center Hello! This is a message created using xmessage &

This would give me a message popping up with the text I choose to input. Not too useful on its own, but when used as part of a shell script it becomes really powerful.

What I’ve done is set up several of these as cron jobs. These run when I need to do something useful like stop checking email and get ready for work, or (most usefully) when I have to go to bed in order to get my perscribed 6 hours of sleep.

The package in is Debian and Ubuntu at the very least, and the manual is straightforward.

Debian to the rescue (again)

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The PPC version of Debian Testing seems to solve all the problems I’ve been having with my iBook.

It’s also the only Gnome based Linux Distro I can use for more than 5 minutes without changing the theme and wallpaper.

It might only be a backup laptop, but with my luck recently it’s better to be prepared.