davehayes.org

If you’re a Gnome user, like me, you’ve probably spent a little bit of time wondering what the best music player for Gnome is. Most people will readily agree that Amarok is the uncontested music playing champion of KDE, and many people run it with Gnome. I, however, would prefer to use an application built with GTK+ at the very least. Full Gnome integration would be ideal, but what exactly is out there?

Banshee

Banshee, in a word, is cool. It’s a great looking program, for one. It’s very feature rich with integrated CD burning, ripping, tag editing, podcasting, Last.fm support, music sharing (via DAAP), music recommendation as well as lots of other nifty plugins. Banshee is also one of the premier applications built with Mono, which makes it even more interesting. The only problems I see here are performance issues. Banshee (especially the search feature) tends to choke on my 18,739 song library. However, Aaron and Gabriel have some very exciting things in store for us that should make slow searching a thing of the past.

Exaile

Exaile is written in Python and aims to be a GTK+ equivalent to Amarok. I’ll be honest… I don’t like Amarok, so It’s probably no surprise that I don’t really care for Exaile, either. It seemed to deal with a large library pretty gracefully and has a lot of nice features like a cover art finder and a large number of plugins. If you like Amarok, but want something that will integrate well with Gnome, give this a shot.

Listen

Listen is truly an amazing piece of software. Its interface is very easy to use, probably the best execution of a “play queue” arrangement I’ve ever seen. It’s ability to dynamically grab cover art, Wikipedia articles and lyrics from the web make it very appealing to metadata junkies. It’ll also integrate somewhat with Last.fm and do some web radio and podcasting stuff. My only complaint is that I’ve had some stability issues, though I’m told they have since been resolved. Definitely give this one a shot.

Quod Libet

I haven’t spent much time with Quod Libet, but the degree to which it can be customized is staggering. You can choose from many different views including the iTunes style paned view or the pictured album list. In the album list, you can customize (with html, apparently) exactly how the albums are listed. The depth in which in utilizes metadata is striking and the included tag editor (Ex Falso) is handy to boot.

Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox is written in C so it’s quick, it doesn’t choke on large libraries, it’s competitive in terms of features and it will actually monitor my music folder and remove songs when I delete them or add the new ones in a sensible manner. One thing it does do that is rather unique is the integrate with the Magnatune and Jamendo online music stores. It’s really just a great all around player. That’s not to say it doesn’t have it’s own little shortcomings, like how it manages to be slightly offensive to the eye, though I can never put my finger on why.

Conclusion

There is a basic feature set shared by pretty much all the players. They’ll all show you cover art (most of them will even find and download it for you), most of them will let you share your music or listen to other people’s shared music via DAAP, they all offer some level of integration with Last.fm, they’ll all provide notifications via libnotify… there are really only a few major differences in terms of features, and even those are rapidly changing due to the fact that most of the players are extensible.

Things are looking pretty good for those of us using the Gnome desktop environment. All of the players we looked at today are feature rich and very usable and give you a lot of room to decide exactly how you want to manage your music. That freedom of choice is exactly what is so special about open source software, and it’s great to see that exemplified in software that we use every day.

So which one do I use? Well, I use Sound Juicer to rip my CDs and I tag and rename all of my music with MusicBrainz PicardQT and do most of my listening with Rhythmbox and burning with Serpentine. I find Rhythmbox’s speed and stability to be the deciding factors (rather than things like integrated ripping and burning), as it’s the player whose search isn’t painfully slow. That could very well change, though, with the upcoming release of the new generation Banshee.

You’ll also notice I didn’t make any mention of iPods. I don’t own an MP3 player, especially not an iPod. I’m a very big believer in open source software and Apple and their iPod are the antithesis of that in every way. If iPod support is important with you, I’d recommend you check the sites for each individual player and see where their support is, but not before you consider picking up a more Linux-friendly player.

Those of us using Gutsy were lucky enough to get a peek at the GIMP 2.4 release candidates during testing. Now that Gutsy is out, and GIMP 2.4.1 has been released, we’re still stuck on that old 2.4.0~rc3 release.

If you want to run the latest version, there are several ways to go about it. You could just download the source and do the standard ./configure --prefix=/usr && make && make install, but then our package management wouldn’t be aware of the new files and we could run into some trouble down the road. But we don’t want to wait for an official .deb (which could come as late as April ‘08), so it looks like we’ll have to make our own. This is actually very easy, here’s what you do…

First off, we need to make a directory in which we can work, and then enter it like so:

mkdir ~/Projects
mkdir ~/Projects/gimp
cd ~/Projects/gimp

If you get an error like “mkdir: cannot create directory `/home/dhayes/Projects’: File exists
“, you can just ignore it. We’re also going to need a couple packages, so let’s make sure they’re installed.

sudo apt-get install fakeroot devscripts

Now, we need to get the source package for the current version of GIMP in Gutsy (which is 2.4.0~rc3). We do that like this…

apt-get source gimp

That command will probably take a while to finish (for me it was about 15 to 20 minutes), so go get a cup of coffee or watch a couple episodes of Squidbillies while you wait. When it finishes, we’re going to need several development libraries to be able to successfully compile the GIMP, and we can use this command to make sure we get everything we need:

sudo apt-get build-dep gimp

You probably have time to watch another episode of Squidbillies while this one is going. Now, once that’s done, we need to get the source code for the new version. We’ll just use wget to download it.

wget ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.4/gimp-2.4.1.tar.bz2

Again, this might take a couple minutes. Once that’s finished, we need to enter the old package’s source directory and tell the system where the new source code is.

cd gimp-2.4.0~rc3
uupdate -u ../gimp-2.4.1.tar.bz2

Once that finishes, we can change to the new package directory.

cd ../gimp-2.4.1

Now, we just have one more tiny little thing to do before we can build the package. The older Ubuntu package contains a patch that fixes a bug which no longer exists in the newer version. Therefore, before we can build the package, we need to remove that older patch. Here’s how we do that:

rm debian/patches/04_ubunut_bug_148380_upstream_fix.patch

Now we just need to build the package.

dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

Now just kick back, watch a couple more episodes of Squidbillies and wait for that bad boy to compile. When it finishes, you’ll have some nice shiny new .debs that we can install like so:

cd ..
sudo dpkg -i *.deb

And that’s it! Bask in the goodness of the GIMP 2.4.1!

I’m not sure myself, to tell you the truth, but it has been long enough to notice that I’ve heard the same song more than once. That and to go ahead and make a list of the songs I’ve heard which have now been repeating themselves for an hour or so. They apparently play randomly rather than in some defined order, but so far I’ve heard…

• Peter Gabriel – In Your Eyes
• Cyndi Lauper – Time After Time
• Belinda Carlisle – Heaven Is a Place on Earth
• Bob Dylan – The Times They Are A-Changin’
• Kool & The Gang – Fresh
• Martha and the Vandellas – Dancing in the Street
• Billy Ocean – Caribbean Queen
• The Romantics – Talking In Your Sleep
• Cyrkle – Red Rubber Ball
• Eric Clapton – Layla (Unplugged)
• Sade – Smooth Operator
• Enya – Orionoco Flow
• Buddy Holly – That’ll Be the Day
• The La’s – There She Goes
• The Bangles – Walk Like an Egyptian
• Gladys Knight & The Pips – I’ve Got to Use My Imagination

Someone, please, kill me now.

i’m bored so here are a couple pictures i made or collected recently that you might enjoy.

cheers!

so we have some idiot over at associated content that calls themselves tsu dho nimh who has so graciously decided to bless us with their own idiotic “is linooks ready for teh desktops!?!1” article. as if we don’t see enough of this pointless and moronic discussion on the forums every day, this little gem managed to make it all the way to slashdot. now, i’m not sure what kind of a cranial vacuum managed to spawn this piece of garbage, but just for entertainment’s sake, let’s have a look.

right off the bat, we can tell this is going to be nothing but a boat load of asinine n00b drivel. the author provides us with a list of “non-negotiable requirements” that are all the evidence we need. just look at them:

1. It must have a GUI interface for installing and configuring the system.
2. Existing hardware must remain usable and the new operating system must make it “just work” without my having to edit text-based configuration files.
3. Existing software must remain usable unless the new operating system has equivalent features to the ones I use, and I can switch without losing data or doing much work.
4. Because I need to use software that has no Linux substitute, the Linux distribution must make it easy to create a dual-boot system. It has to recognize and preserve the existing operating system and its data during installation, and give me access to the data on the Windows drives after installation.

before we go any further, i want to address this list in two ways. first, without reading the rest of this stupid article, i can tell you that ubuntu linux meets and exceeds all of these ridiculous requirements.

1. the ubuntu desktop install cd boots directly to a live cd desktop and the complete install is done from there. you can surf the web, chat over your favorite im network, play games, whatever you want to do all while the installer is going. when it finishes, simply reboot into your newly installed desktop. there is nothing text-mode or command line to be done.
2. most hardware is going to be detected and work out of the box automagically. if not, you’ll know as soon as you boot the livecd, before you make any changes to your hard drive. you might want (or need) to install a proprietary driver, which is accomplished quite easily using the very friendly add/remove applications front end for synaptic.
3. ubuntu will resize windows partitions without data loss and provides a mechanism to migrate much of your data from your windows user account to your new ubuntu installation.
4. ubuntu will also automagically create entries in grub to allow you to boot either windows or linux and will automagically mount all your windows drives so you can access them from ubuntu.

the best part about this, aside from the fact that ubuntu linux blows his ridiculous requirements out of the water, is that the operating system this moron is currently using (windows 2000) doesn’t even come close to meeting them.

1. the first half of the windows 2000 installation (as well as xp) is in text mode. this includes the initial partitioning and whatnot.
2. windows 2000 does not make your hardware “just work.” hopefully you have your driver disk for you sata controller handy as well as a floppy drive to put it in or you may not be able to install it at all. after that, you’re most likely going to have to either locate discs or downloads containing drivers for your video card, motherboard chipset, sound card, network card, printer, etc to get any of those things to work properly.
3. windows 2000 does not provide any automated data migration facilities at all. not even from other versions of windows, let alone other operating systems. if you’re installing on a computer already containing an OS, you’re going to have to do some very careful partitioning to not lose any data and it’s going to be a fair amount of work getting everything transferred over.
4. windows 2000 does not provide any mechanism at all to boot any other operating system besides itself. it also cannot access the partitions and drives of any other operating system without 3rd party software, so it certainly is not going to work out of the box.

so, right off the bat we can see that this person is already doing the age old double standard thing and trying their best to run the complete opposite direction from objectivity. anyway, to dive into the article, let’s take a look at what the n00b thinks are problems.

Problem 1: The NVIDIA graphics card needs non-Linux drivers to get full benefit of the card’s features. The Ubuntu help on their website explained how to install what they call “restricted drivers”. Their solution was clear, easy to understand, and best of all, it worked. This is definitely an improvement.

savor this, it’s pretty much the only objectivity you’re going to come across.

Problem 2: Even after installing the correct drivers and rebooting, my 1280×1024 monitor could only be set to 1024×768 pixels. The answer is in the Ubuntu “community documents” area, and it works. It involved opening a terminal and using the command line (I cheat, I cut and paste instead of typing), but it also worked.

oh horror of horrors, you had to use the command line. perhaps we have scarred your poor little brain by forcing you to learn something? the thing here is, out of the box with ubuntu, your 2d works fully on an nvidia card. you don’t get the crazy slow screen redraws like you do on windows when you’re not using the driver. secondly, you can either obtain your driver from nvidia and download and install it (like you would have to do with windows) or you can use ubuntu’s mechanism to do it, which is very well documented.

not to mention you’re still making the glaring mistake of approaching everything like a windows nerd. from now on i’m going to start griping about how i can’t find my xorg.conf to change my monitor settings on windows, since obviously all my linux knowledge applies to any operating system i’m going to try to use.

Problem 3: Although CDs played immediately, to play DVDs I had to locate and install some files that bypass content protection coding. The website I acquired them from, www.getautomatix.com , warned me that I might be installing something illegal, but I said, “Yarrr, matey”, and clicked the install button. Automatix installed itself, then I selected what I needed. More files were downloaded and installed … really automagically! After that DVDs worked. I have no clue what it did, and that’s the way I like it.

dvds don’t play out of the box on windows 2000 either, captain. and news flash, unless you paid for dvd playing software for windows 2000, you’re just as much of a pirate when you watch them there, too. and i’m glad you like being ignorant because you’re doing a damn fine job of it.

Problem 4: The Linux Flash players did not work with YouTube, and Adobe’s Flash video player was extremely difficult to install. I have a 64-bit microprocessor, and installed 64-bit Ubuntu. Although 64-bit Linux has been available for more than five years, Adobe hasn’t bothered to develop 64-bit version of Flash for Linux yet. My live-in geek tracked the problem down for me, and Adobe is reportedly working on 64-bit software.

here you’re already breaking your testing method. if you just read and clicked you would’ve downloaded the i386 version and not the 64 bit version and you wouldn’t even have this problem. if you had done what you said you were going to do, all you would’ve had to do was install the flash player package in the add/remove programs thing.

and suddenly, it’s linux’s fault adobe doesn’t make a 64 bit flash? hell, they don’t even make a 64 bit version of windows 2000. even better, adobe doesn’t make a 64 bit version flash for any operating system, not even xp or vista! just the fact that you can even run anything in 64 bit mode puts you 110% ahead of windows 2000.

Problem 5: Google’s Picasa does not work. Every time I launch Picasa it locks up my computer and sends the CPU utilization to 100%. The problem is Google, not Ubuntu. Instead of writing real Linux software, all Google did was take their Windows version and wrap it in WINE (fake Windows) to make it work in Linux. I expected Google to do better than that.

no, again, the problem is that you installed the 64 bit version of ubuntu, which is not supported by picasa. you wouldn’t have this problem if you had done what every other sane and reasonable person does and stuck with the i386 version. and in the end you say that the outline feature of word is the showstopper that keeps you from using linux?

you are not ready for the desktop. in fact, you’re an idiot. i’m begging you, please stick with windows. the linux community does not need blockheads like yourself running around spewing idiocy all over the place and getting in the way of development by complaining about things that we have no control over. for the love of all things holy, stick with windows and stay out of our hair. and keep your asinine opinions to yourself from now on, too.