Archives for October, 2005
Ubuntu on a Tablet PC
For any Ubuntu lovers out there, I found this to be very cool. I friend of mine has got Ubuntu loaded and working on his Tablet PC (Compaq TC1000) including the ‘magic’ pen. Check it out over here with photos.
Philips GoGear and Linux
For those looking for a way to sync your music files with your Philips GoGear media player, you’ll likely find that MusicMatch is the officially supported tool. However, for those who wish to use this with Linux, MusicMatch is not an option. It only took me two minutes to find this set of tools available for the Linux community provided by the Linux community.
Linux Digital Media Manager (LDMM) has the ability to add and delete MP3s from the device, and manage the album and artist databases. It has a GUI front-end and a straightforward interface. It was written in Python specifically for the HDD060, but should work fine with the HDD070 as well.
openGogear is a suite of tools for working with Philips GoGear HDD0xx MP3 players. Though these devices can be mounted with the standard usb-storage module, these tools implement the file indexing required to hear MP3s. openGogear has a debian package available. JGoGear is the Java-based GUI front-end for openGogear.
PyGogear is obviously written in Python exchanges information about the tracks from a Sqlite database file, usually named MyDb. This program reads the ID3v1 tags from the MP3 files placed on the player and inserts the most important ones in the database. There is no GUI available yet, but it is in the works.
pymaj was rewritten from pyGogear 5.8.4 with some changes and folders support added. Program can read the ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags from the MP3 files placed on the player and inserts them in the database. M3U playlists are supported as well.
See my previous post regarding Philips GoGear here.
Update:
Ubuntu (Breezy Badger) mounted the HDD070 as ‘Philips MassStorage-Disc: 1.9GB Removable Volume’ available under ‘Computer’. Its actual location is /media/usbdisk/. Under this device, you’ll find the following structure:
/_system/
/firmware/
/FWimage.bak
/FWimage.oke
/media/
/audio/
all mp3 files here...
MyDb (the file that contains the ID3 index information)
/drmv1pm.tmp
Ubuntu Upgrade
Well, today is the day that the Breezy Badger edition of Ubuntu is released. I’m currently running Hoary Hedgehog and here is what I did to upgrade:
- Modify
/etc/spt/sources.listchanging all instances of ‘hoary’ to ‘breezy’ sudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get dist-upgrade(took about an hour)sudo apt-get install ubuntu-base ubuntu-desktop(took about 10 minutes)
My breezy-backports were non-existent, so I did receive some errors here and there, but mainly for not being able to reach that source. I’ll need to update those.
All went well and I now have Breezy Badger running.
Updates: Some programs that have not upgraded well: 1. Azureus - apparently, it doesn’t work with the new version of Ubuntu and the repositories do not have an installation candidate 2. Xine - same situation as Azureus
Update: To update Azureus run these three lines
1. sudo apt-get install j2re1.4 libcommons-cli-java liblog4j1.2-java libseda-java libswt-gtk-3.1-java 2. wget -c http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/contrib/a/azureus/azureus_2.3.0.4-3_all.deb 3. sudo dpkg -i azureus_2.3.0.4-3_all.deb
**When you run Azureus, you’ll probably get a message about running an outdated version of Java, but it should all work without updating Java at this point
XMMS Hang
Upon first install, I found that anytime I tried to use XMMS, it would hang and I would be forced to kill it at the process level. After comparing to another linux installation, I found that switching the Output Plugin (under Audio I/O Plugins in Preferences) to eSound Output Plugin 1.2.10 put everything right and XMMS had no issue playing at that point.
In summary: -XMMS Hangs when attempting to play song -Switch Output Plugin from OSS Driver 1.2.10 to eSound Output Plugin 1.2.10
Ubuntu Hoary and Java
If you’ve just installed Hoary and you need to install Java for running Azureus, then you’ll find that most instructions on the Internet aren’t working for you. I spent several hours trying and testing many different suggestions, but thanks to Sun, Java installation went from easy to difficult. Appartently successful installations and missing dependencies are many things you’ll run across.
This post seems to have the answer. Essentially, you’ll download the self-extracting Linux file (.bin) from Sun, and create a .deb file using tools on your system. All of this takes place in your home directory. After that, you install as root using dpkg like any other .deb file, and amazingly everything works great.
I was able to install Azureus and everything has worked out. There will be peace in the world again.
Annoying error (fixed by this method): depends on sun-j2sdk1.5debian
Linux Equivalents to Windows-based applications
Since I started working with Linux 5 years ago, I ran into the issue of figuring out what tools to use for what in Linux. I knew what to use in Windows, but those programs usually aren’t available in Linux. For anyone who is in the search for the ’somewhat’ equivalents to those Windows-based applications in Linux, here is a list:
| Windows | Linux | Job |
|---|---|---|
| Dreamweaver | Nvu | WYSIWYG Website Editor |
| Homesite | Bluefish | Code-based Website Editor |
| Photoshop | Gimp | 2D Graphics/Photo Manipulation |
| MS Word | OOo Word Processor | Word Processing |
| MS Excel | OOo Spreadsheet | Spreadsheet |
| MS PowerPoint | OOo Presentation | Slide Presentation |
| MS Visio | OOo Drawing | Diagram drawing |
| MS Access | OOo Base | Entry Level Database |
| MS Project | Project Planner | Project Management |
| MS Money | GnuCash | Money Manager |
| MS Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, ICQ, etc | Gaim | Instant Messenger |
| WinZip | File Roller | Archive Manager |
| Partition Magic | gParted | Partition Manager |
There are tons more, but this list looks like a good start. Some things that both have in common are the Azureus BitTorrent Client, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Mozilla Firefox, and Mozilla Thunderbird to name a few.
HDTV
Okay, I’ve made it through some tough times. Okay, they weren’t so tough, but I thought I wasn’t going to get HDTV. It seems I failed to test my setup fully before giving up and calling support. Samsung Support was extremely helpful in getting me on track and I cannot praise them enough. Now onto the good stuff. I haven’t actually mounted my antenna yet, but my TV is large enough that I can rest it across the back side of the TV and only have about 8 inches sticking out of the front of the TV. It looks silly, but it’ll do for now, because I’m watching HDTV!! Several months ago, I purchased the ATI HDTV Wonder for my PC and hardly used it, but I think that was an crumb compared to the quality of this thing. Much of the quality comes from the strength of this antenna despite costing only 75% the other antennas I tried for the PC version. If you need a good high quality antenna for your HDTV, definitely go to AntennasDirect.
The picture quality on this TV is incredible in SD (Standard Digital) or HD (High Definition). This puts my current cable connection to shame. If it weren’t for Nip/Tuck, I’d probably drop the cable.
See my previous entry about equipment.
AntennaWeb.org can tell you what HD channels you have in your area.