so, uh... i wanna go back to linux

[sharkz]

lately on weekends i start to think about it and i really think my current winXP installation is crap.

When i had linux before, like 2 years ago i enjoyed it pretty well. I used mandrake.

So what i'm looking for from this thread is suggestions on the following things:

what distro i should use - mandrake having gone commercial (correct me if i'm wrong about that), what do you guys like? I've heard good things about suse (i know they're commercial too but i think i could get ahold of it) and also debian although i'd be a little unsure of myself with debian's installer. recommendations pleeeeeeeeeeez.

Applications:

iPod - I know there's a buncha stuff out there for updating your iPod with linux, but if there's anyone here who's done it hearing from them would be great comfort.

Video Editing - again, i know there's stuff out there. but any recommendation would be great.

DVD Authoring - I got a DVD burner (<3<3<3) a while ago and would be looking for an app, wouldn't have to be complicated, that i could make a nice simple menu for my videos that i want on DVD.

also would be looking for a nice CD burning app.

edit -
Photo Importing Software - something in the ilk of iphoto or picasa that supports my camera [USB, xD card]

[raublekick]

try ubuntu, it's pretty basic (i.e. it doesn't come with a bunch of software that all does the same thing) and it's only 1 cd. it is based on Debian, but it it updated more often and it uses Debian's apt-get for updating stuff. of course, i tried installing it a few weeks ago and it fucked up my MBR, but i wanted to dual boot.

don't use Fedora, it is really bad with media. and i hate KDE, so fuck Suse.

[sharkz]

i heard good things about ubuntu also.


don't use Fedora, it is really bad with media. and i hate KDE, so fuck Suse.

yeah... i didn't really have a reason, but i wasn't really about trying Fedora.
and I also dislike KDE. I ended up using IceWM a lot when i had mandrake.

[raublekick]

i never really tried anything other than KDE or GNOME. i did install one when i was using Fedore, but the name escapes me now. it was really small and minimalistic and i didn't like it at all. GNOME fits all my needs.

[GT2000]

I really don't have any suggestions here, I used linux on my server for a while but was forced back to win2k on it when I couldn't get samba to work after several attempts, I need to give it another go sometime, it's something I feel the need to be more than proficient in.

[johnny]

i'm running ubuntu right now, and it's good. the install is simple, and like raub mentioned, there's only one cd for it, so that's a bonus. here's the set of screens for installation and configuration of the latest version of ubuntu ("hoary") (http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=305&slide=1).

i figure that within a few weeks, i'll be going back to gentoo (http://www.gentoo.org/), which is a great linux distro (it's been a while since i've had it installed). if you're interested in installing gentoo, be sure to read the gentoo manual (or handbook or whatever they call it), because even the simplest form of installation--a stage 3 install--is pretty do-it-yourself... it just sets up the more difficult things for you.

also, my laptop is running suse 9.2 right now, and it's pretty decent. i also don't like kde, but it seems to work just fine. and i've heard that in future versions, suse is going to be going with gnome instead of kde, so maybe 9.3 will install gnome by default, and work with it properly.. but in any case, a REAL man uses the tab window manager. :P

[raublekick]

another thing i forgot to mention about ubuntu is that you can easily upgrade from one version to another. for instance, they just released Hoary a few weeks ago. instead of downloading the new cd you can just edit the repositories list that apt uses, and it will upgrade. the one that is one huge feature that i love over other versions. you should never have to reinstall linux when a new version comes out, which is quite often for some distros.

[sharkz]

johnny, thank you for that link.

my last concern which i remembered last night was making sure my wireless card works well under linux...

[raublekick]

Ubuntu 5.10 comes out in a few days and it seems to meet pretty much all of my needs. I wasn't able to test everything with the live CD, due to the nature of live CDs, but it detected all of my hardware, sound is working (needs some tweaking), USB automounts, etc...

I'll be installing it when it is officially released and hopefully it won't fuck up my Windows drive this time (I have high hopes... and it's fall break this weekend so I have time to fix it).

Sharkz, it's supposed to have great wireless support!

[sharkz]

I installed ubuntu on my iMac which was getting too old to run newer versions of OS X. Runs okay but I still don't use it much, simply prefering that this computer is in my room.

I have an IBM netvista at my disposal... It's either going to me or my mom. If I get to keep it, it will almost certainly be ubuntu.

[raublekick]

got Ubuntu installed and dual botted no problemo.

i think i'm going to take advantage of my fall break and reconfigure my system though. windows and linux will reside on my 60GB IDE drive, and i'll use my 120GB SATA as storage for both OSes to use.

[GT2000]

I'm installing Ubuntu on my server right now..may recall my server has been shut off for several months, but, I got more hard drives and wanted to give something different a shot...

So I'm putting 5.10 ubuntu in, and, with the now 4 250gb wdse's i have, going to try out a raid 0+1, should be interesting as long as I can get the controller to work properly (it detected the drives already..hope building the array's will be as simple).

Also, samba..hopefully my previous issues won't prevail again.

[raublekick]

donnie, you should test out the dapper beta. 5.10 ran fine for me, but dapper is gonna rock the house. unfortunately, for some reason the beta won't let me connect to the internet, but eth0 and everything else looks fine.

[GT2000]

Yeah, I watched my friend install dapper on his laptop, i might have to give that one a try..right now I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with my server though..when i first booted it back up a few days ago after many months of being shut off...booted into win2k fine, but since formatting the main drive and trying to install different os's on it, getting nothing but fails, win2k3 server, nope, ubuntu, nope, i put in a new dvd rom drive, but it won't boot off the ubuntu dvd I downloaded/burned, but my main system boots it fine, downloading kubuntu now as a cd iso to give that a shot, might have to take the system apart and play around with it.

[GT2000]

Hah, kubuntu failed too...same thing as ubuntu..fails in base installation...nice.

[GT2000]

In the end i said piss on it...put xp back on the server, remote desktop ftw.

[johnny]

a few weeks ago i installed ubuntu again, and made the switch back to linux. the only reason i installed windows xp a while back was because i wanted to use itunes with my (at the time) brand new ipod. there didn't really seem to be a good linux alternative. but just recently i decided to do a little searching and found yamipod, which works wonderfully. there is also gtkpod, which i haven't played with yet.

soon-ish, i'm going to decide whether i want to install the dapper drake version, or give gentoo a try. the main thing against gentoo is that i'm lazy and the install is more involved.

[raublekick]

i'd stick with dapper, personally. i've heard tons of people raving about gtkpod, definitely give it a shot.

[Jesse]

When I tried Linux, I used KDE, and I didn't like it at all. I've always wanted to have a Linux partition, but it never seemed very practical for me.

I'd still like to do it sometime though, for as they say "shits and giggles".

[johnny]

kde is just a window manager; not an actual linux distribution.

but i don't particularly like kde either. gnome and xfce are both better, in my opinion. (twm and fvwm are sometimes fun too, even if they are pretty ugly)

[raublekick]

i always install KDE and give it a shot, but it just never feels right to me. Gnome works so well, and I actually like the fact that it's not as flashy.

[Jesse]

Oh, well, shows how much I know then.

[Liss]

unrelated, but my computer crashed today and lost my 10 page ethnic studies midterm thats due tomorrow, plus all my writing and my photos and all. Second time in a year....I hate dell.

[johnny]

and I actually like the fact that it's not as flashy.i am with you on that one. gnome is pleasing to my eyes without being, i dunno.. over-the-top.

[johnny]

so the next ubuntu release is slated for june 1st, still. a few days ago they released a release candidate for dapper, and an update for the update manager, so i guess if everything seems to be in order the official dapper release should be on time. i was thinking of installing kubuntu and giving kde another shot (fer the hell of it), instead of just upgrading my current ubuntu install, but maybe i'll just put kubuntu on my laptop..

[raublekick]

i installed dapper today. ran into some trouble like i did with the beta. apparently the kernel muffed some stuff up with the drivers for my ethernet card, which causes DHCP to fail. even static IPs fail too.

grabbed an old card from my dad and have it working now.

johnny, you know you can have ubuntu and kubunu (and xubuntu and edubuntu) installed all at once, right? just run:

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

[johnny]

i was fucking with kubuntu for a few days, and i was trying to like kde, but to no avail..

i just installed dapper and the only problem i've run into so far has to do with my screen resolution. i want 1280x1024, but i can't seem to use it. i've added it to my xorg.conf file, which (i think) ought to fix it, but i still can't use it. i'm stuck on 1024x768, which sucks. the installers on previous version would allow you to choose which resolutions to allow to be used, but dapper kinda.. glossed over that stuff. and now i'm stuck with a big ugly screen. if i don't figure it out in a few days i may have to go back to using breezy.

[raublekick]

that happened to me, but i know you can't just add it to xorg.conf

did you install the video driver (if you have ati or nvidia)? that should fix it. other than that i'd just try reconfiguring xorg, but i forget the command to do it. i need to get my middle mouse working.

<edit> here you got johnny boy

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

[johnny]

yea, i found that solution somewhere on the ubuntu forums last night. gave it a try this morning, and everything looks correct again. phew! i couldn't stand 1024x768 for very much longer.

[raublekick]

haha i know what you mean, i'm using my widescreen monitor with a native res of 1440x900, running at 1024x768 is awful.

i need to find a nice green theme somewhere. i love clearlooks 2, so maybe i'll just edit one of the themes to be a nice lush green. (the outdoors theme that's in there already is pretty nice).

[johnny]

i'm digging the rusty colours. it's brighter than the browner human theme from breezy. but that background image is sorta fugly.

[raublekick]

yeah, it is fugly. i need to find a nice rustic one to match the outdoors theme.

i tried out KDE tonight and it's pretty good, but still some weird stuff that i don't like.

[johnny]

i find kde's control-panel-like program to be glitchy sometimes. they may have resolved that now though..

[johnny]

anyways, why bother with the kde when you could be using xfce? it's not quite up to par with gnome, but it's still good.

[raublekick]

i try to use XFCE, but... why use XFCE when i could be using Gnome :)

yeah, the KDE control panel is pretty much the one thing i really hate about it. so hard to find what you need. i still can't figure out how to make Konquerer display all directories in list view by default. plus none of the new transparency stuff worked for me at all, it just did nothing.

i really wish i could get emulators working well in Linux, they just don't work right for me.

[johnny]

i haven't really had to bother with emulators yet, so i can't help much.

i was thinking of isntalling dosbox (i think it's called dosbox, anyways..) and tracking down some old dos games. maybe play some leisure suit larry or king's quest.

[raublekick]

yeah, it's dosbox. i think emulators don't run well because of ALSA or whatever sound driver they use. on windows they run perfect, but in Linux not at all.

and on my laptop in windows they run like they do in Linux because it is just a shitty onboard sound chip.

[johnny]

well anyways, i've started playing lieutenant skat and now i'm hooked to it, like i once was to freecell. simple card games have always been the best computer games i guess.

[Mr Biglesworth]

now that ubuntu didn't work out on my desktop, i just got my sister's old laptop (PII) and i'm thinking ubuntuing it. more to follow.

[johnny]

why didn't it work out?

[raublekick]

i installed openbox and having quite the time getting it all configure... part of me is kinda scared because it looks like some of the openbox config stuff is intrusive to Gnome, KDE, or whatever other WM you have installed.

[sharkz]

i don't think i ever added that i'm finally using linux again (ubuntu dapper) and loving it. using KDE... looks to have progressed very far since 2002.

[raublekick]

i don't think i ever added that i'm finally using linux again (ubuntu dapper) and loving it. using KDE... looks to have progressed very far since 2002.

haha yes, it's amazing how far linux has gone since just a few years ago.

with XGL and Compiz, linux has beaten Vista and surpassed OSX into the cool window effects realm.

[johnny]

i put xubuntu on my laptop about two weeks ago, 'cause running xfce makes the most sense considering my laptop's weak hardware, and i'm thinking i'm liking it even better than gnome. but now i'm using gnome on my desktop.. i guess i like both. but kde?? :(

[raublekick]

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=192106

that's the Openbox guide I wrote. i've been using Gnome lately, but Openbox would be my favorite if i could figure out all i want to do with it. it's just so... god damned customizable.

[raublekick]

i just installed Kubuntu on my laptop. i've always been a Gnome/GTK guy, but i decided on KDE for a few reasons:

lots of config option
better networking
GTK apps run much better in KDE than KDE apps run in Gnome

i still use Gaim, Synaptic, Firefox, Gimp, and lots of other GTK apps, and they all work perfectly in KDE.

[johnny]

so i went ahead and decided to mess around with openbox today. it's pretty nifty. yer howto was helpful raub, because i probably would have been to lazy to figure out a few of the customizations on my own. also, that olive window decoration is pretty neato. i might actually stick with it for a while.

[johnny]

y'know, a few weeks ago i was actually using kde quite regularely, and now i find myself using it more again. it's kinda like i'm turning over to the darkside?? i dunno, the more i toy with kde and get to know it better, the more i prefer it to gnome. and reading about kde 4 also makes me want to use it.

it's too bad they faggotted up the kubuntu colour scheme (the purple!!?) in the latest edgy eft beta release.

[raublekick]

yeah, i really like the Dapper theme, but i use the plastik window decoration. kde 4 should be hella awesome.

hey johnny, you ever try visiting here with Konquerer? for some reason it doesn't render links for the first half of the page (at least for me)

[raublekick]

anything above Computers, to be precise... (this post coming from konquerer)


speaking of... it's nice that konquerer has aspell built in.

[johnny]

you know, i have noticed that. there have been a few times that all the links worked fine on thetesttube, but typically i get the same problem you did (and i get into the computers forum by doing a search, haha..). but it's never happened on any other site.

[raublekick]

yeah exactly, it's just this site that i've encountered problems with. it sucks, because konquerer is such a nice browser to use, such usefulness.

[johnny]

it's weird. the links in the top menu work, and the links in the shoutbox work. the links in the moderator column of the forum display work. but the links for the forum names, and most recent topics don't.. all the way until the testing forum.

and once i'm viewing a thread, all the links work okay. it's very strange.
i'll think i'm going to find another vbulletin site and see how it works in konqueror..

[johnny]

hey raub, try this: click the up arrow in the top-right corner of the shoutbox to hide it. now do all the links work? they do for me. and when i click the arrow again to make the shoutbox visible once more, the links go fucked up again. odd. same deal for the front page which displays the shoutbox and news posts.

[raublekick]

hey yeah, that did the trick! awesome find dude.

[johnny]

i had a go at installing gentoo 2006.1 on my laptop tonight, to mess around with that. but there were some issues, and x couldn't start, so i couldn't do the nice livecd graphical install. the system installed okay through the command-line dialog, however.. my screen is still fucked and running startx throws errors back at me. i was googling for help through links until i got fed up. i have a feeling that the solution to the problem may involve a re-install anyways..

i think i'll have fewer headaches if i stick to more useable distros. (i tested the livecd on my desktop; it just hangs up at a black screen after starting x and gdm.. and, like i said, x totally fails running from the livecd on my laptop.. wtf machines does it actually work on!?!)

what's annoying is really, all i have to do is type "emerge kde" and it's all systems go on my laptop, if i could get x to start. this shit makes me angry too easily.

[raublekick]

i'm too wary about trying hardcore distros like that on my laptop. on a desktop i could manage most problems, but i just don't feel like dealing with getting wireless and all that to work.

[raublekick]

hmmm... gnome 2.16 is looking pretty keen. i'll stick with KDE for now, but I might start my Edgy trip off with Gnome first when it is released.

[johnny]

i think i'm going for kde from the start, when edgy is released. i'm looking forward to that. i do still like gnome; up until recently it has always been much better than kde.. but things seem to be turning around.

i think i'm going to fire up gentoo on my desktop this weekend. i know once i get the system going x should be okay; it just fucks up on the livecd. so i can run the installer through the cli dialogs, and then set up x, and xdm or gdm.. and i think i'll go with openbox. it'll probably take forever to compile kde or gnome.

[raublekick]

woorrrd, i love openbox, i should install it on here.

i think i'm gonna install ubuntu-desktop on here today and just do some heavy fucking menu editing so each one has it's own menu without made KDE apps showing in the gnome menu.

[johnny]

a while ago, it got to the point on my ubuntu setup that a la carte wouldn't even open anymore. something was very wrong with it. i guess i should have ran it from a terminal to see the errors it sent back, but it didn't occur to me at the time.

but the kde menu editor works pretty nicely. my only complaint was that it seemed to.. re-order some of my menus when i saved them, without asking me. but oh well, everything that i wanted was there, at least.

[johnny]

so i'm giving swiftfox a try, but to be honest, i'm not noticing a huge difference between it and firefox. i've actually been using opera mostly, lately. it's come a looooooong way.
deb packages for ubuntu: http://www.getswiftfox.com/ubuntu.htm

[raublekick]

i am really skeptical of how good swiftfox is. is it just an architecture optimized build of firefox and nothing else? i've used the 686 kernel in ubuntu and never really saw too much improvement, although people do claim that full 686 distros are much snappier. but i doubt that one package, especially one that's pretty intense anyways, is gonna get all that much better.

i really need to get my middle mouse button working. i think about it everytime i sit in front of my computer but i never actually do it. i think i said this before. deja vu.

[johnny]

wheel mouse? i dunno, my middle button/wheel has always worked fine.

[raublekick]

really? it's just a logitech wheelmouse, nothing special. the wheel works, but the middle click doesn't. i've fixed it before, i'm just lazy.

[johnny]

have you accidentally set the xorg.conf setting "Emulate3Buttons" to yes? 'cause that might confuse it?

[raublekick]

it's just set to the whatever it detected when i installed.

[johnny]

ah, bizarre. 'cause so is mine, and i have a generic logitech wheel mouse too. odd that mine would work perfectly, and yours doesn't.

i'm not sure i could live without the handy middle-button-to-paste-highlighted-text feature.

[johnny]

so i've pretty much decided that xfce is my window manager of choice. it's got the best balance of lightness and speed, and features and useability. i think i might install arch linux, with xfce. i hear arch is quite fast.

[raublekick]

i installed arch but couldn't get networking working. i spend a few hours getting help on their IRC channel, and after trying several things, the conclusion of everyone who helped me, and myself, was "i dunno, i mean, everything looks fine, it should work"

i'd really like to try to get it working again sometime, but that might not be too easy with my laptop. plus it's pretty plain. no arch-desktop package, just straight up plain gnome, kde, xfce, or whatever.

[johnny]

i ended up installing arch. it went pretty smoothly, and it's working nicely, but there are some configurations i had to do which i think ought to be done automagically (though i guess i did learn a thing or two, in doing those configurations on my own). and it is pretty speedy. finely tuned!

i don't really like pacman, though.. i'd prefer portage, or even aptitude.

[raublekick]

from what i used of pacman, i really liked it. but asking for arch to do things automagically is like asking debian to speed up their development process, it's just not how it gets done in that distro.

so, thank the fuck god for live CDs. last night i tried to get my second monitor working really quick so i could try to play a DVD on it. well, after i restarted, X wouldn't launch... it would load up all the boot up stuff like normal, and then when it would get to where it should switch to the logon screen, it just stuck at the bootspash image with a 0 progress bar and no info at the bottom. i tried commenting out some stuff in xorg.conf myself, but i wasn't sure exactly what the second monitor settings added and if they added stuff anywhere else. anyways, booted up the live CD, mounted my kubuntu partition, copied xorg.conf from the live CD to my hard drive, rebooted, and like magic i was right back to where i was before i messed around with it.

i think i am gonna work on a back up script in my spare time that will be something like 'backup -Xfmh ~ /my/target/location' where X determines if it should back up xorg.conf, f for fstab, m for the modprobe info (i have to blacklist my internal soundcard), and h for home directory. i might make it more complex because i don't always want all of the hidden .whatever folders copied. well, i guess it's good to do regardless, but the most important is my mail folder.

[johnny]

yea, xorg.conf can be pretty touchy. one wrong word, and..! yikes.

i guess pacman is okay, but portage is still a zillion times better. i just don't know whether to stay with arch, or go back to gentoo, on this machine. ubuntu goes on my laptop because so far it's been the only distro able to figure out my laptop's hardware straight away. it's all pretty standard shit, but attempting to install other distros has been nothing but problematic. suse was close, but it was still a pain to get x working correctly. and i wasn't a huge fan of suse, though it did have it's strong points. but that was suse9. maybe (open)suse10 is an improvement? i haven't bothered to investigate that.

[raublekick]

so johnny, what do you think of all these distros moving over to Gnome now? Suse used to be heavily KDE, and now opensuse is Gnome. Mandriva used to be KDE, now it's Gnome... ok that's only two... But still, it's now the case that almost all of the big name distros are Gnome based.

my Gnome vs KDE struggle is that i like the concepts and beliefs of Gnome so much more, but KDE just does things much better in the long run.

[johnny]

i think it would be have been better if some of those distros were gnome-based several years earlier, 'cause up until now-ish i think gnome has been the better window manager, overall. but now with kde4 on the way, i'm not sure what to think; kde4 is looking pretty nice.

but i also think that gnome is friendlier to new linux users, which counts for quite a bit.

[raublekick]

yeah i agree. but i also think gnome helps promote the idea that linux isn't powerful. i dunno, it's hard to explain, but gnome is really simple, and that can hurt it. Windows isn't simple, but most everyone can manage that. My feeling has always been that Linux is just a different, but by no means harder, way of using your computer. The only reason it is hard at first is because it is different. If you went from using Linux all your life to suddenly wanting to try Windows, I think Windows would be the one that is too hard. so then people use Gnome and it is way simpler than Windows, and that can come off as not as useful (although in some respects it is true).

last year we were working on a program in the linux lab at school, and my one friend stretched all of the desktop icons to their full size and was like "look, MyFirstLinux!" wow, did it ever look like just some toy computer.

KDE4 should be the bees knees, though.

[johnny]

i wouldn't necessarily say that gnome helps promote the idea that linux isn't powerful. but even if the simplicity of gnome does make linux seem less powerful to some people, i'm not sure that its much of a problem. the averge computer user doesn't need linux to be powerful, perse; they just need it work, so they can.. browse the internet, email, work with open office / koffice / abiword, maybe play some games every now and then, etc.

[raublekick]

oh yeah i completely agree. the average computer user only needs the basic functions of an e-machine, but still things like flash and even photoshop (despite the gimp covering almost all needs of the average computer user) keep people thinking 'what? this sucks!"


speaking of koffice, have you tried it out? i never touched it because i know how to use openoffice pretty well, and it never seemed like koffice would be any better for me.

[johnny]

i used koffice a bit, but that was a few versions ago. it was okay, and i'm sure it's better now. i'm not too crazy about openoffice anymore, though, so i just stick with abiword. and i guess if i had to do spreadsheets i'd probably use gnumeric.

[raublekick]

hey johnny, i know you get a boner over XFCE, so maybe you will like DreamLinux, they seem to have a really awesome XFCE setup. i think i might test out the live CD sometime.

http://www.dreamlinux.com.br/english/index.html

[raublekick]

actually, the mkdistro tool they include seems really awesome. i never knew about it before today. perhaps a testtubelinux is in the works!? or perhaps not... haha

[johnny]

i've actually gone back to gnome temporarily. (forgive me xfce, for i have shamed you! :o)

what i think would be ideal is xfce on either an arch or gentoo setup, but i'll wait around until the next release of xfce. currently xfce comes with xffm, which i must say, is god awful; however, i've heard rumblings that thunar will actually become a part of xfce in the next release?? so until then i'll be using gnome and xfce (xubuntu-desktop) back and forth on my ubuntu install. thunar is still a masked package in portage, and i can't remember if arch has a thunar package.

and dream linux looks sorta interesting. i'll investigate more later when, hopefully, it doesn't take ages for images to load from their server. fuck!

[raublekick]

yeah their site is slooooow...

i do believe Thunar will be part of XFCE soon

[johnny]

thunar v0.4 is in the latest xfce 4.4 release candidate, now that i check. so whenever they serve that up, i'll be checking it out. xubuntu will get 'er done for now.

[johnny]

we should rename the computers forum to "linux" and there is only allowed to be this thread

also we're both mods http://www.thetesttube.com/forum/images/icons/icon6.gif

[raublekick]

sounds good to me!

[johnny]

here's something you might find interesting.. a few months ago i wrote a simple little perl script to rip cds and encode them as *.ogg files. (i'm never happy with the other programs out there...)
you need to have the cdparanoia and oggenc commands available to you in order for this to work correctly [sudo apt-get install cdparanoia vorbis-tools]. what it does is gets information about the album from a text file i've created. here's an example:
album=Green Cosmos
artist=Deerhoof
Come See the Duck
Green Cosmos
Malalauma
Spiral Golden Town
Hot Mint Air Balloon
Koneko Kitten
Byun
so the script reads that, prompts you whether or not you want to go ahead with ripping the cd, then uses cdparanoia to make *.wav files, and then uses oggenc to encode *.ogg files.

the script:
#!/usr/bin/perl

my $album, $artist, $numtracks;
my @songs;

open ALBUMDATA, "<album.data"
or die "album.data file is missing!?";

# read the album name, artist name, and track
# names from the album.data text file
$album = (split /=/, <ALBUMDATA>)[1];
chomp $album;
$artist = (split /=/, <ALBUMDATA>)[1];
chomp $artist;
while (<ALBUMDATA>) {
chomp $_;
push @songs, $_;
}
$numtracks = scalar @songs;
close ALBUMDATA;

# give the option to cancel ripping if
# the album.data information isn't good
print "\nalbum to rip: $album by $artist\n";
print "$numtracks songs\n";
for (my $i = 0; $i < $numtracks; ++$i) {
print $i + 1 . ". " . $songs[$i] . "\n";
}
print "\nrip it? (y/n) ";
$line = <STDIN>;
chomp $line;

# if they say 'y', do it; if they say ANYTHING
# else, then don't do nothin'
if ($line eq "y") {
# rip the *.wav files
print "ripping tracks with cdparanoia...\n\n";
# system "cdparanoia -d /dev/hdc -B";
system "cdparanoia -B";

# encode the *.ogg[/*.mp3] files
print "encoding ogg files...";
for (my $i = 1; $i < ($numtracks + 1); $i++) {
$tnum = ($i < 10) ? "0$i" : "$i";
$title = $songs[$i - 1];
$cmd = "oggenc -N $i " .
" -t \"$title\" " .
" -l \"$album\" " .
" -a \"$artist\" " .
"--output=\"$tnum - $title.ogg\" -q 5 track$tnum.cdda.wav";
print "\n\nripping track $tnum...\n";
#print $cmd
system $cmd;
}

# all done; tidy up and delete the *.wav files
# and end the program
print "done encoding .ogg files!\n\n";
print "erasing .wav files\n\n";
unlink glob "*.wav";
print "ripping/encoding completed\n\n";
}

on some machines, the cdparanoia command would need a bit of extra information, if you have more than one cd drive (and example is commented out just above the command that it actually runs). if you can run "cdparanoia -vsQ" and cdparanoia finds the drive with the cd in it and displays a track listing to you, then "cdparanoia -B" ought to work for ripping the *.wav files. but sometimes you might need to do "cdparanoia -d [device] -B" in order for ripping to work from the correct device.. (i'm sure i'm not explaining this very well :/)

and if you wanted to make mp3s, you can just swap out oggenc for lame.. i should also mention that the oggenc command generates the ogg tag information for each file. it would be kinda silly to skip over that..

once you've put the right information in the data file (album.data) all you need to do is perl ripper.pl and it will go to work.


some things i should add:
- regular expression to remove characters that aren't allowed in file names, so it doesn't try to create a file with a bad name and die.
- make it use the Audio::CD perl module to do a cddb lookup so i don't have to type out the track names every time i rip a cd (but i'm too lazy to install this module and learn how to use it..)


who knows, somebody here just might find this useful.

note!!: i tacked on a .txt extension to each file so i could upload them, so if yer gonna download them just remove it. (or copy the text in the code boxes into brand new files called album.data and ripper.pl..)

[raublekick]

awesome script, johnny! i've actually been thinking about doing something similar, although i would have used python instead of perl.

i want to do something similar to retag files, though. i have yet to find a really good tag editor / file renamer.

[johnny]

the plan is to rewrite it in python with a pygtk front-end. but perl on the command line works just fine for now--i never seem to get around to fixing this up.


i've also been planning on writing a quick address book/contacts app. with python (pygtk gui again..). i really like orage for a calendar program, and i haven't been able to find something equally simple and small for an address book. i have to do everything myself, it seems like! :(

[raublekick]

dude i completely agree with that. i had a fling with Evolution and that just was too much after I discovered Orage.

perhaps we can team up to make some XFCE apps? XFCE really needs to more apps that don't rely on gnome libs.

<edit> i am looking through your script, trying to brainstorm how to port it to python... the logic all makes sense, but perl syntax doesn't! chomp $album? WTFBBQ!?

[johnny]

i'll be happy to answer any questions you have. chomp is a handy function that removes the newline ('\n') character from the end of a string. it's necessary 'cause i'm reading this stuff from a text file that has each song name separated by a newline.

and i'm not sure if you're familiar with perl's file i/o, but if you're not then i can explain that each time you see "<ALBUMDATA>" that just reads a line from the file i have open. and in the loop ("while (<ALBUMDATA>") the line from the file is read into a default variable ($_).

perhaps we can team up to make some XFCE apps? XFCE really needs to more apps that don't rely on gnome libs.that doesn't sound like a bad idea at all. all i've ever needed is some more motivation--my big problem is coding guis. i'm able to, that's not the problem. i know how to work with pygtk and wxpython.. it's just such a chore.

[raublekick]

i've never done any perl programming, and never really had any desire to thanks to its nasty syntax.

xfce apps, here we come!

[johnny]

perl isn't that nasty. the problem is that it allows people to make it nasty.. you can do some really weird one-liners. i think my perl code is pretty readable. chomp is just a built-in function :P

[raublekick]

perl isn't that nasty. the problem is that it allows people to make it nasty.. you can do some really weird one-liners. i think my perl code is pretty readable. chomp is just a built-in function :P


yeah but... chomp just doesn't make sense! how does chomp == remove \n from end of line? my first inclination was that MAYBE chomp "chomped" a line from a text file, but the newline thing just comes out of nowhere.

[johnny]

i think it's because chomp is, more or less, an extension of the chop function, which simply removes the last character from a string and returns it (whether or not that character is '\n'). chop -> chomp. chomp is just like a smarter version of chop, for a specific situation.

[johnny]

so i'm downloadin' the dreamlinux 2.2 live cd, because i got curious the other day. i don't think i'll actually install it, but i guess it's worth investigating. engage looks very nice (i think it's from enlightenment..?).

[johnny]

so i've been on the hunt for a browser lately.. firefox is sort of the standard, i guess, but i've been wanting something a bit better lately. so now i will run through a list of options:

swiftfox: does it really seem faster?? i don't think so
iceweasel: doesn't seem special to me (i'm using it right now). even though it doesn't come packed with any non-free software, like firefox apparently does (??), most people end up installing plugins (flash!!) and/or extensions that are probably non-free anyways. so what's the point again..?
opera: too... opera-y.
mozilla suite or seamonkey: too much extra junk.
konqueror: okay, i actually really like konqueror. but do i want to install qt and shit?

i don't think i could handle using dillo or links2 ("links2 -g" fer gui). sure, they'd be quick and show me all the content.. but everything would be so ugly.

so i guess i just stick it out with firefox, or maybe.. go ahead and install konqueror?

got any ideas?

[raublekick]

fuck dude... i have the same problem, and i have not reached a suitable conclusion... basically firefox is a bit to sluggish for me sometimes and i want something lighter.

swiftfox really isn't all that much faster, and any firefox based browser is gonna be just as bad as firefox. epiphany is ok, but it's not nearly as packed with features. opera isn't free software and the suites are just too much.

konquerer is pretty good, but it renders some pages strangely, mostly with fonts being too small. there really isn't much plug-in support that i know of, and nothing like down-them-all. being able to use it for pretty much everything KDE related is nice, but like you said, it is a QT app and sticks out.

the reasoning behind iceweasel is a little tricky to understand. according to the FSF, firefox isn't free software, because not only does the windows and official linux version contain non-free elements, but they also host and give access to non-free plugins. add on top of that the whole artwork fiasco that happened. the FSF is a little zany sometimes, and so are those debian dudes, so i guess they figured they would stick it to the firefox dudes, because really they are doing some anti-free software practices. firefox has become the standard for the most part, so i think it is a fairly big deal that something that has become the champion of open-source is really not so free.

so i just stick with firefox and hope that something else comes along eventually...

[johnny]

i just got enlightenment (dr17) up and running, and it's pretty sweet. http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=319336

i think the one in ubuntu's repositories is dr16.. kinda old. e17 is really nice.

[raublekick]

johnny, do you post on ubuntuforums, or just browse? i should post on there more, but it's kinda overwhelming to actually help people sometimes.

post a screenshot in the screenshots thread!

i've never really been too interested in installing e17. despite the fact that i've been using xfce for the past few months, it doesn't feel natively complete for me, like ubuntu's gnome is. now, don't get me wrong i love stuff like openbox that is just completely nothing more than what it is, because there you gotta tackle everything from the beginning. but e17 looks like it would be like xfce where it has a lot of cool stuff, but there are gaps here and there and fixing them can be a pain.

[johnny]

johnny, do you post on ubuntuforums, or just browse? i should post on there more, but it's kinda overwhelming to actually help people sometimes.i post on occassion. not much though, 'cause it can be hard to follow. but i decided to try using vb's thread subscriptions, and they make it alot easier to find the threads i'm following again.

i didn't find too many gaps in e17 though. everything seemed to work pretty smoothly.. (unfortunately though, the version of engage which is in the edevelop.org repositories doesn't seem to work out-of-the-box. i think i'll try to make it work some other time..)

[johnny]

i guess i got bored with *buntu, so i decided to give arch linux a try.. i've installed the base system (and updated it, which caused a kernel panic which i then had to fix :x), xorg, and openbox. i looked at the font preferences dialog in leafpad, and there are about.. 9 different fonts installed right now. everything looks pretty ugly.
but it works!:
http://matrix.senecac.on.ca/~jrmatth1/images/screenie.png

as you can see in the screen.. the locale settings are buggered up. (who knew cowsay accessed them anyways..? i learned something new tonight, i guess)

[raublekick]

haha wow that IS ugly!

i graped creeper's bandwidth yesterday and installed arch as well. i have gnome up and running pretty basically. there's some things here and there that i need to fix up but i haven't had the time. i like arch, but it's kinda weird to get some things working. i don't mind doing things the long way, but ever since they switched to the mkinitcpio stuff, the old wiki's seem out of date or just confusing weather that is the way it should be done now. the hooks are really cool, but i have no idea what the hooks actually pick up and when.

do you know where i can find this sort of info?


i also want to install opensuse sometime soon. it seems like it has some really cool stuff, but i've heard nothing but bad things about using the opensuse repos.

i see i'm not the only one that names computers after videogame characters. my old desktop was named mario, my laptop luigi, my sister's computer is peach, and my new testing box will be bowser.

[johnny]

vid names are the best.

i'm thinking if things go bad between arch and i sometime soon, i'll just wipe my machine out again and do some testing of the feisty herd 2 disc.

[raublekick]

how big is your hard drive? mine is only 80GB and i have it set up to triple boot, and that is with a 45GB home partition for Ubuntu.

[raublekick]

oh boy... i just fucking borked my arch setup...

[johnny]

my hard drive is 80gb too, but i never seem to keep things installed for very long. i've just gotten used to starting fresh every so often. (i don't have much data to move around anyways..)

how'd you bugger up yer arch system?? are you getting that stupid kernel panic? (kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to....) 'cause if you follow the install guide instructions (1. do a install with just base packages 2. do a --sysupgrade 3. then install everything else) it's likely to happen.. and easy to fix.

[raublekick]

nah, i have dealt with that problem before though, and now i deal with it by FTP installing :)

my problem was trying to get X set up correctly. the hwd -x didn't set up a good xorg.conf, because it didn't get the right resolutions. i figured i could just pretty much use my ubuntu xorg.conf, except for a few things here and there. well, that didn't work out cus i guess the nv driver isn't installed in arch (no idea how to install it either). then things just kinda snowballed from there. even xorg-config wouldn't give me the option to do 1920x1200, only up to 1280x1024.

basically, what turned into a simple xorg,conf issue turned into ,xinitrc issues because it was trying to load wmaker?? then i couldn't get gdm to run. awesome.

[johnny]

ah, i ran into the exact same problem! here's how i solved the nv issue:
typed "nv" into the package search box on archlinux.org, and among the results found:
Current x11-drivers xf86-video-nv 1.2.0-1 X.org nv video driver 2006-09-09
so pacman --sync xf86-video-nv, and then a run-through of the xorgconfig command got me an xorg.conf that worked just fine. nb: the nv driver is #18 in the big driver list in xorgconfig.

also.. i've got alsa configured, some gtk-engines installed so firefox doesn't look shitty, the tango icons installed, and bitstream vera and dejavu fonts.. things are looking good. screen -> http://matrix.senecac.on.ca/~jrmatth1/images/newscreen.png

i'm still short on some fonts i think, though.. or at least, i have fucked up some kind of important font configuration. lots of websites still have super tiny text. though the fonts in gtk2 are good (like the fonts used in program menus, etc.)

edit: solved that annoyed locale warning... had to uncomment the right locale in /etc/locale.gen and then run /usr/sbin/locale-gen

[raublekick]

check in the firefox prefs to make sure that it is actually using a good size. for me, it is set at 16.

thank you for that info, i'm gonna give it a shot right now!

[raublekick]

ok so i got my xorg issue pretty much squared away. i have the nv driver working, but not the nvidia driver. my god, xorgconfig has the WORST formatted output ever. i like ubuntu's xorg.conf.

now i just need to get sound working (see's my card and my internal, both are unmuted, doesn't work)

[johnny]

have you added the alsa daemon to rc.conf and done alsactl store to save yer sound settings?

[raublekick]

derrrr! thanks man. i get so confused on what needs to be in rc.conf and what doesn't. i guess any daemon needs to be, but modules actually don't unless you need to load them in a certain order or some other special need.

[johnny]

when i tried using the nvidia package, x seemed to work.. but it was painfully slow and there would be ugly artifacts left all over my screen when opened up the openbox menu and windows and stuff. so i'll just stick with the generic nv driver, 'cause it does the job considerably better.

and i've never actually changed font preferences in firefox before (under any sort of installation). normally in ubuntu, windows, suse, whatever else.. the fonts would just be a touch bigger. though i have found, from my web design class days back in college, that the definition of a point can differ from computer to computer, depending on what is installed.. so it might just be that some of the sites i'm browsing don't do a good job of setting up their style? (go ems!! points iz bad)

[raublekick]

i installed this today:

http://www.beatniksoftware.com/blog/?p=53

it is REALLY nice for such a new project. not quite as refined as SLAB, but it's more what i want. made by the developers of Tomboy apparently.

[johnny]

nah, i have dealt with that problem before though, and now i deal with it by FTP installing :)i'm curious.. when you did the ftp install, did you manually have to load some modules to get yer net connection working, or did it detect everything..? i wasn't really sure, and it didn't seem to work for me. you'd think they would have the sense to include some of that stuff automatically.. the cd has room for it--it's only a ~500mb iso. and my connection is cable, so it's pretty damn simple for linux to configure eth0..

[raublekick]

i'm curious.. when you did the ftp install, did you manually have to load some modules to get yer net connection working, or did it detect everything..? i wasn't really sure, and it didn't seem to work for me. you'd think they would have the sense to include some of that stuff automatically.. the cd has room for it--it's only a ~500mb iso. and my connection is cable, so it's pretty damn simple for linux to configure eth0..

i can't do it wirelessly, because i use the ipw2200 module, and Ubuntu is the only distro i have found that includes the firmware for it by default. using wired ethernet just requires me to have the installer detect my card and all that jazz.

[johnny]

i guess the installer just could detect my card then.. maybe the 0.8 installer is a bit better.. oh well, everything is all set up now anyways, so it's no matter.

i ended up installing gnome and gdm, and i'm getting it setup to my liking.

[raublekick]

yeah i need to get on that... my gnome in arch is just a stock gnome and it's not really pretty

[johnny]

i really haven't changed mine drastically, 'cause i actually like the stock gnome look (i guess that's pretty vanilla of me..). i got rid of those pesky desktop icons.. changed the background image.. kept the nice blue clearlooks theme :)
i fired up gnome-screensaver. now i need to find the pacman screensaver somewhere

i think my next experiment will be mpd. probably with one of the console clients to begin with--the curses one (i think it is ncmpc) looks pretty nifty.

[raublekick]

i really haven't changed mine drastically, 'cause i actually like the stock gnome look (i guess that's pretty vanilla of me..). i got rid of those pesky desktop icons.. changed the background image.. kept the nice blue clearlooks theme :)
i fired up gnome-screensaver. now i need to find the pacman screensaver somewhere

i think my next experiment will be mpd. probably with one of the console clients to begin with--the curses one (i think it is ncmpc) looks pretty nifty.


yeah i've always wanted to give mpd a shot but it seems like a lot of work just to play music, and i don't really see the benefit. i talk to the guy who develops gmpc on #ubuntuforums every now and then.

[johnny]

now that i've looked at the example config file, i've become a bit less keen on it.. maybe another day when i have lots of time to waste.

[raublekick]

now that i've looked at the example config file, i've become a bit less keen on it.. maybe another day when i have lots of time to waste.

exactly...

[raublekick]

damn, i wanna do some work on that applet i linked to, and reading up on gnome programming stuff i brain melting. perhaps i am trying to gain more info than i really need?

[johnny]

have you looked at the applet's source code yet? i assume that would give you a better idea of what to research.

[raublekick]

oh yeah of course, but i've never used gtk or any of that stuff, i have no idea what the gnome standards are, i have no idea how to get the modified source back to the author, etc...

anyways, the only actually coding i need to do right now is figure out how to detect a mouse-over instead of a mouse-click

[johnny]

at least you're starting small!

[raublekick]

any suggestions? :-/

i can't find a reference for it anywhere and i have no idea if it's a gtk+ thing or a gnome libs thing or what.

[johnny]

so i'm downloadin' today's build of the feisty herd 2 (live) cd :D

i kinda got the itch to see how things are shaping up; i'm sure i'll be posting my thoughts later in the day (got about ~1.5 hours of download time left, then the fun will begin).

[johnny]

any suggestions? :-/

i can't find a reference for it anywhere and i have no idea if it's a gtk+ thing or a gnome libs thing or what.i would assume it's a gtk thing, 'cause you'd just being using an event handler to catch a mouse-over event. at least, that's what i assume. have you checked through the tutorial? http://www.gtk.org/tutorial/

[raublekick]

gg

so far i have basically just started at developer.gnome.org, and then followed links from there for anything relevant.
'
thanks

[johnny]

have you ever tried to setup obpager?? it looks like a nice addition to my openbox environment, but i'm having strange problems when i try to build it. kinda frustrating.. i think i'll go back to it later.

[raublekick]

have you ever tried to setup obpager?? it looks like a nice addition to my openbox environment, but i'm having strange problems when i try to build it. kinda frustrating.. i think i'll go back to it later.


yeah nothing but problems when i tried recently.

openbox kinda sucks in Ubuntu right now (although you are in arch, but might encounter the same issues).

pypanel doesn't work, and some other things weren't packaged correctly

[johnny]

pypanel isn't tough to fix in ubuntu.

aside from that, and that little problem with the names of libobparser and libobrender which cause obconf to screw up, openbox has always worked just fine for me in ubuntu. both problems are relatively easy to solve (though that's not an excuse for them.. 'cause both should just work in the first place)

i don't think i like arch as much anymore. it's a nice system, but some of the things that i've had to manually configure that it should be able to figure out for me.. it's getting on my nerves. my burner doesn't work properly.. not sure how i'll get that fixed. and i don't really like pacman all that much; aptitude and portage are both considerably better.

[raublekick]

yeah the thing with pypanel and obconf is that they just should work. and when you are planning on writing a script that installs those, it's kind of a pain in the ass to have to fix someone else's mistake.

as for arch, i agree. i don't mind so much having to configure gnome or whatever to my liking, but i just don't understand why i actually have to do so much. i know they keep a KISS philosophy, but still... if i install a daemon, such as GDM, why wouldn't i want it in the daemons list in rc.conf? there are little things here and there too that should be more automated. plus, arch doesn't really follow a standard linux setup anyways, so it's not really an all purpose learning tool.

[johnny]

the keep-it-simple approach is a nice idea, but i don't think it would fly with most people. i think i'll just stick with ubuntu.. if i do a base install with the server disc, and then build it up just like i did with arch, i assume that the difference in performance will be negligible.

[raublekick]

i think i am getting the hang of GTK programming. haven't really gotten my hands too dirty with it quite yet, and every example is in C and not Python (which is fine, i know C better than Python, but i plan on using Python). signals and events are slowly making a little more sense to me.

[johnny]

once you get used to it, coding functions to handle events is no big deal. i find actually designing a gui and getting it to look decent much more frustrating :(

[raublekick]

do you mean like coming up with a beautiful interface concept in your head, or taking a beautiful concept and actually getting it to work out in gtk?

i think i am moving along quite nicely. i was able to add the "quit" button at the one part with no problem, and now i realize that i didn't have to declare GtkWidged *quitbutton, because the *button that was already declared can be used to make any new button!

[johnny]

do you mean like coming up with a beautiful interface concept in your head, or taking a beautiful concept and actually getting it to work out in gtk?i was talking about actually coding it, though coming up with a good ui (by drawing mockups and so on) can be equally difficult.

[johnny]

so i figured i'd give arch one last chance.. because it does have some nice redeeming qualities, and now i'm running xfce 4.4. it's very nice, though firefox seems a touch slower to start than i was used to when i had openbox running. i'm not sure why, but oh well.. no matter, i guess.


what program do you use to burn cds??? i've always had the best experiences with k3b, but i'm not installing qt and all that shit.. gnomebaker was pretty okay too, so i might go with it, but i'd also like to avoid those extra gnome libraries. i need ideas (i've toyed with bashburn, and xcdroast.. don't particularly like either. heard about graveman.. not sure about it yet though)

[johnny]

update: xfce 4.4 is pretty sweet; it's nice having thunar by default (outside of xubuntu of course, which already had it by default) instead of that pesky xffm.

http://matrix.senecac.on.ca/~jrmatth1/images/thumb-xfce4.4screen.png (http://matrix.senecac.on.ca/~jrmatth1/images/xfce4.4screen.png)

[raublekick]

hey looks pretty nice! getting things like xfce 4.4 right away is a very nice aspect of arch, but in the end, i think it is just not for me right now.

[johnny]

i'm still totally undecided between arch and *buntu. but i guess as i learn more and more about arch, i will lean more towards arch. there are still some kinks to work out, though..

[raublekick]

uuuh i'm getting that arch itch again! i always get that arch itch when i really just have to use my laptop for other things :D

maybe i'll use arch for a server?

[johnny]

i've got my arch system setup pretty good.

there are still a couple small things for me to investigate.. but i'm lazy.

[raublekick]

i think tonight i will boot into arch, at least for a bit. i also think i am going to, at some point, do another arch install but use it for svn/cvs stuff. i realized that using Ubuntu for something like that would probably be more problematic than something like Arch.

[johnny]

i've gotten over most of the issues i had initially with arch, and learned a few new things in the process.. and i imagine i'll stick with arch from here on out. i'm not sure what i'll do when feisty is released.

i wish my laptop wasn't fucked up, otherwise i'd play with other distros on it.. :/

[raublekick]

what issues were they, and what have you learned? i am quite interested. i keep thinking more and more about using Arch as my main setup and just keeping Ubuntu as a backup when i screw things up. but i already have Ubuntu set up pretty firmly as my main OS, and it owns the /boot partition. not sure how / if i can swap which distro uses that partition.

i didn't boot into arch tonight because i realized that the latest kernel update overwrote my menu.list and i needed to boot into Ubuntu to fix it anyways. besides, all i really need to do in Arch is "pacman -Syu" and maybe check out some different things to add, and i can't check my email in it either.

[raublekick]

ok johnny, how did you get fonts looking nice in Arch?

[johnny]

i think what you're supposed to do is set the dpi correctly in your xorg.conf file. but i did it the quick and easy way;

edit the /usr/bin/startx script and change this line:
defaultserverargs=""
to this:
defaultserverargs=" -dpi 96"

but this only worked to an extent, because once i set up a display manager (i use slim), startx is no longer a factor, so i had to edit which arguments were sent to the x server from slim, in the /etc/slim.conf file. if you're using gdm/xdm/kdm, simply editing the startx script probably won't work.. so you can either check out some settings/config files for you display manager, or fix it the other way (editing xorg.conf). here's the portion of the xorg page on the arch wiki that discusses display size and dpi (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg#Display_Size.2FDPI)

while we're talking fonts... did you do a sysupgrade on your arch setup yet..? 'cause i've read some complaints on the arch forums of how the latest freetype update messed with the way some people's fonts look. i haven't done an update in a while, so i still have the older version of freetype. so even if you get x's dpi set correctly and things are still weird, it could be freetype. that problem might have been rectified though. i'm not sure.

[raublekick]

hmm yeah my font dpi is fine, the fonts just generally look like ass, and none of the settings in GNOME's font config makes it look good.

i tried to do a pacman -Syu last night, and it hide ~150MB of updates to download. On my connection, that is a lot. So I watched some TV while it was updating and came back to find myself at the GDM login screen. I know it didn't reboot, because it would have been in Ubuntu if it had. So I logged in, and did pacman -Syu again, but there was still a lock on it. So I'm not sure if it did update or what, I just shutdown and went to bed.

[raublekick]

i think i am going to install Foresight Linux in the very near future. it has been looking more and more appealing, and after reading up on it, it sounds like it could be a possible replacement for Ubuntu.

what is attracting me is the conary package manager, which seems like a very robust package manager, and the fact that it aims at a nice GNOME desktop. also, it is a rolling release structure, so basically it has what i like about Arch and what i like about Ubuntu all rolled into one.

[johnny]

can't say i've heard of it, but now it's on my radar--research to be done later!

i think i might be (more or less) done with gnome, though.. so i don't know how keen i'll get.

[raublekick]

yeah their gnome desktop is aimed to be pretty much a stock gnome except for the theme. they recently switched the default browser to Epiphany for that reason. Firefox is still installed by default, i think, but not the default. they also have jre and all the "bad" gstreamer plugins installed by default too. so it's not really a completely free distro, but i install all of that stuff anyways it's not a big deal for me.

unfortunately my install didn't go well. i had to run the installer with the "noprobe" option or else it locked up, and the second disc is borked.

[johnny]

it's a two cd installer?? forget that.

[johnny]

so did you ever get foresight up and running??

[raublekick]

no, the second CD is being weird. the md5sum checks out, i just can't seem to burn a good copy of it... the first one i did struggles when browsing the package directory in nautilus, but the second one doesn't, but neither of them work. just keeps saying it can't find the mono package. i had trouble with this on the zenwalk installer as well.

i burn as slow as nautilus will let me, not sure what else to try!

[johnny]

i've always had poor experiences with gnome's cd recording functions.. i usually just do it from the command line with cdrecord. but i'm sure that nautilus just forks a cdrecord process to do the burning anyways, so i'm not sure how much of a difference would be made..

btw, here's a quick shot of my ion3 desktop (i've not configured it much yet..)
http://matrix.senecac.on.ca/~jrmatth1/images/thumb-screen-ion3.png (http://matrix.senecac.on.ca/~jrmatth1/images/screen-ion3.png)

[raublekick]

Well, I finally got Foresight installed last night... It is a little disappointing to say the least.

It looks nice, but there's some weeeeeird oversights. Conary is weird to use on the command line, there is no "install", just "update". And the terminology is weird. What the hell is a "trove"? Searching for packages in the Foresight manager thing is problematic, because it doesn't just search the Foresight repositories. You are given the option of installing packages from the rPath and the 64-bit repositories. I have no idea if they would actually install, but if they did it would no doubt fuck some things up.

I was under the impression that multimedia codecs were installed by default, but that doesn't seem to be the case. The mplayer plugins are installed for firefox, but they don't work for me, they just buffer but don't play. I moved them out of the plugins directory, and then discovered that the gstreamer plugins either aren't installed or don't work, and mplayer isn't actually installed.

The biggest gripe though is that the installer lied to me. I swear it said it was installing grub to hd(0,7) (the / and only partition I gave to Foresight), and it just installed it to the MBR instead. It was quite surprising to reboot and see a boot menu with just Foresight. Luckily I didn't install Ubuntu's or Arch's grub to the MBR, so I just had to copy some text to get my old installs working again.


Overall, it has promise, but right now it's just got so many flaws.

[johnny]

that certainly isn't a ringing endorsement..

to add the story of my ever-changing window managers: i think i've settled on pekwm (which i've been using for a week and a bit now). it's very customizable (and the config files are really simple to boot), and though it isn't a tiled window manager by design it can do tiling/grouping quite nicely. and another thing! the themes seem pretty easy to make, so i might have a go at making one of my own. but for now i'll stick to downloading themes from hewphoria.com and customizing them as i see fit.

and now something to complain about... apparently v2.4 was the last version of pypanel--they're done with actively developing it--so now that i've installed python 2.5 it's fucked up. i could do a "pacman --sync python2.4" and run it with "python24 /usr/bin/pypanel" but that seems like a bad solution to me. i don't want out-dated stuff that's just going to cause me problems :( i'm thinking of looking to perlpanel or fbpanel next, or maybe i'll just use xfce4-panel..

[raublekick]

yeah, pypanel is fucked in edgy as well. i saw your screenie on ubuntuforums, it looked nice. there is a how-to in one of the openbox threads with how to get pypanel working that might work with arch as well, but it seems like too much of a hassle personally.

[johnny]

downloading the ubuntu 7.04 beta cd to play around with it (doubt i'll bother to install, just see what the live cd is like).

[johnny]

hey, remember that perl script i hacked together to rip cds? this afternoon i decided to rewrite it in python. complete with cddb lookups! it needs pycddb (http://pycddb.sourceforge.net/), discid (http://discid.sourceforge.net/), and lame. i'm not sure if pycddb and discid are in the ubuntu repositories, but i'm sure they'd be easy to compile if they aren't.

the code:
import os, commands, PyCDDB

def cddblookup():
# get the disc id, create a PyCDDB object, and do the lookup
discid = commands.getoutput("discid")
db = PyCDDB.PyCDDB()
try:
matches = db.query(discid)
except ValueError:
# since i'm not testing the value returned from
# discid this is necessary (in case the drive has no disc)
print "no cd in tha drive!? :("
exit()

# did i find anything?
if len(matches) > 0:
if len(matches) > 1:
# shit: multiple matches.. give the user a choice
print "multiple matches for this cd. choose of the following:"
for i in range(len(matches)):
artist, album = matches[i]['title'].split(" / ", 1)
print "%d - %s by %s (%s)" % (i + 1, album, artist, matches[i]['category'])
matchidx = input("enter the number of the correct match: ")
matchidx = matchidx - 1
else:
# easy: one match (hope it's correct!)
matchidx = 0
albuminfo = db.read(matches[matchidx])

else:
# no results.. for now i'll be lazy and exit()
print "cddb lookup failed, or no results found :["
exit()
return albuminfo

def ripandencode(albuminfo, enccmd):
# rip *.wav files with cdparanoia
ripstatus = os.system("cdparanoia -B")
#print "cdparanoia -B"
#raw_input()
# encode mp3s using lame
for track in range(len(albuminfo['TTITLE'])):
if track < 10:
tnum = "0" + str(track + 1)
else:
tnum = str(track + 1)
lamecmd = enccmd.replace("%NUM%", tnum)
lamecmd = lamecmd.replace("%TITLE%", albuminfo['TTITLE'][track])
lamecmd = lamecmd.replace("%ALBUM%", album)
lamecmd = lamecmd.replace("%ARTIST%", artist)
encstatus = os.system(lamecmd)
#print lamecmd
#raw_input()
print "done!"

if __name__ == "__main__":
lamecmd = "lame -V 4 --tn %NUM% --tt \"%TITLE%\" --tl \"%ALBUM%\" --ta \"%ARTIST%\" track%NUM%.cdda.wav \"%NUM% - %TITLE%.mp3\""
albuminfo = cddblookup()
# i have the shit from cddb--ask if it's good before i rip
artist, album = albuminfo['DTITLE'].split(" / ", 1)
print "%s by %s" % (album, artist)
for track in range(len(albuminfo['TTITLE'])):
print "%02d. %s" % (track + 1, albuminfo['TTITLE'][track])
gogogo = raw_input("rip and encode this cd? (y/n): ")
if gogogo == "y":
# rip with cdparanoia and encode mp3z with lame
ripandencode(albuminfo, lamecmd)
else:
exit()

it's a bit ugly right now, but it gets the job done. there are some spots where i ought to return some sort of error code, or throw an exception (from the cddblookup() function) rather than just do an exit(), but i got lazy.

if you comment the two calls to os.system(...) and uncomment the print and raw_input() statements below each, you can see all the commands it will run without actually ripping anything.

to-do:

change it so it handles multiple cd devices (right now you'd have to edit the calls to discid and cdparanoia in the script)
add some sort of configuration file so a user can customize what sort of command is used to encode the *.wav files that cdparanoia produces (you could use a custom lame, oggenc, etc. command), and so they can customize the file naming scheme
delete the *.wav files when it's done (maybe put an option in the config file to keep them)
make the output nicer
maybe think about doing up a gui (i hate coding that shit :()

[raublekick]

yo that is pretty solid! i would use that for sure if there was a way to add your own info and / or edit the CDDB info.



Debian 4.0 is out for anyone who wants to go back to last year LOL

[johnny]

eventually i'm going to make that script better.. i'm just a slacker.

i finally got my laptop up and running again. i ended up doing a floppy/ftp install of arch (cd drive is fucked). i had some problems with all that kernel panic business, but now everything is working fine. i haven't installed X yet.. just been learning how to use gnu screen, which is pretty nifty. this machine is usually pretty slow, so i might just go without X and a window manager, etc.. as long as i can find decent console-based solutions to all the things i might do on this machine (i don't use this laptop very much..)

[raublekick]

i wan to learn sceren so bad

[johnny]

heh, sceren.. :P

i've been looking through some documentation for screen, and for the most part it's pretty simple. loads of keyboard shortcuts to remember, though.. what i'm having more difficulty with is the ~/.screenrc file. i've been looking at sample files online, and some of them are pretty ugly.

another thing which has piqued my interest in the past few days is LaTeX. so i've been reading docs for that too.

[raublekick]

mmm... feisty

[johnny]

so, how is it? has the installer improved? the installer used to always get my resolution wrong -- can you choose resolutions in the livecd installer now?

post your thoughts!

[Mr Biglesworth]

NERDS!

I'm still yet to try Linux, though I'm curious to. I'm getting a laptop when I go back to school, so I could possibly throw it on there.

[raublekick]

Well it's uh... not really too different on the surface. Gnome 2.18 is nice, and the new little codec add ons and the restricted driver stuff is nice. It's a bit zippier and banshee doesn't crash all the time, at least not yet!

Senior Baglesforth, there are tons of Live CDs, so if you just want a good, but slow, preview, check one out!

[johnny]

i've decided i'm going to install feisty on my desktop. i'm definitely going to stick with arch on my laptop -- arch is great for slower machines -- but i think i'll go back to running ubuntu on my desktop. it's just a bit simpler. as much as i enjoy some of the extra challenges that come with configuring a good arch setup.. i think i'd like for my desktop (main computer that i use) to just work without much fuss. for the most part it does work fine with arch, but every now and then something else will come up..

[johnny]

ah, another change of plans..! i figured i'd have a go at a gnome desktop in arch before i went all out and replaced arch with feisty. gnome 2.18 is pretty damn nice. also i've been using epiphany instead of firefox -- epiphany is much better, i say. :)

[raublekick]

is there any sort of compatibility between firefox plugins and epiphany plugins? i do like epiphany a lot, i just need some firefox plugins.

[johnny]

iunno. i don't really use any plugins or extensions, except flash. so it works fine for me.

[johnny]

so i've been using exaile and it's really nice. is there a way to make the osd always on instead of only displaying when the song changes? maybe there's a plugin fer that?

[raublekick]

hmm no idea, i haven't been using exaile for a few months now. i've been giving banshee a go and have started to like it a lot more.

[johnny]

so pidgin 2.0 is finally here! i really like the new logo and icons.

[raublekick]

yeah the new look is solid, but i'm happy with Gaim on Feisty right now so i'm not in a hurry to upgrade.


Life with Feisty has been pretty boring... I mean, everything has been working well :-/ I have everything set up how I want it, I haven't changed themes in a while, and so on.

The only real complaint I have is that compiz is a bit slow, but hey, I didn't have to jump through hoops to get it working.

[johnny]

i still don't see the attraction of compiz/beryl... :p

[raublekick]

yeah i still agree, it's not too useful yet. however, i am too lazy to remove awn from my startup apps, and it requires compiz or beryl...

[raublekick]

god dammit, i have become so accustomed to AWN, i don't think i can go back.


</official johnny call>

[johnny]

ah, the linux thread..

a while back while i was using gnome for a bit i thought i'd try awn, but i couldn't get beryl working 'cause my shitty onboard graphics card wasn't playing nice. but i've pretty much settled in with nice, simple tiling window managers and more text/console-based solutions. i was using wmii for a bit, and then took the plunge and tried out dwm; it's pretty much perfect. i find that this is the best sort of environment for me to work productively in ('course that's just me.. :))

two screens: click (http://xs219.xs.to/xs219/07356/septscreen2.png) and click again (http://xs219.xs.to/xs219/07356/septscreen1.png)

also: how come yer never around ubuntuforums? sometimes it's tough to keep up with threads you've posted in because it's so busy, but still.. it's a pretty decent community to try to keep up with.

[raublekick]

yeah i haven't visited there in eons. pretty much i only went there to check the screenshots thread, hah! no, it's a great place, but i just haven't had time to keep up with it much. after spending 8 hours in front of a computer at work, i try to minimize the amount of time spent in front of one at home.

good to see my johnny call worked.

[raublekick]

fuck awn! i disabled the desktop effects stuff and am back to just straight metacity. ah, my computer is responsive again! i still miss AWN, but i can deal without it if it means that X won't lock up when i mess with pygame stuff.

[johnny]

yea, awn is dumb! you could use wbar as a launcher kinda thing..

[raublekick]

hey, wbar looks pretty sweet. i'm going to build it right now and give it a shot. how do you find out about these things? i mean, i don't browse many linux forums anymore so i guess that's a big out for me.

[johnny]

i think it's mostly from the arch forums; it's much easier to follow than ubuntu forums, 'cause there is less traffic. you can almost always find about something new in the screenshot thread or user contributions forum.

also, doing searches in the aur usually turns up stuff i've never heard of (which may or may not be useful :)).

[raublekick]

so how about judd resigning from Arch, eh? pretty sad news, hopefully it keeps on keepin' on.

[johnny]

yes, that was interesting -- i think things will be okay. it seems like he was too busy to be involved anyways. and the guy who's been appointed as arch's new "leader", from what i can tell, is a good choice.

so are you gonna upgrade to gutsy when it's released?

[raublekick]

of course :)

honestly though, i have had pretty much 0 problems with feisty. it's kinda sad in a good way, because with every new release of ubuntu, i have had less and less of a real need to upgrade.

[johnny]

i guess you've got to if you want up-to-date package repositories. that's one thing that's handy about a rolling release.. :D

i've been getting curious to try out gentoo again when they do their next release (2007.1, which i think will be late november), but i keep trying to tell myself it won't be worth the headaches. i really have no problems in arch, and if i can exercise some will-power and resist the urge to tinker with other stuff i don't think i'd have to do a fresh install ever again. i guess when everything "just works" i get bored, lol.

[raublekick]

gutsy is pretty sweet

still can't get my second monitor working with my laptop, but it's not totally necessary. actually i probably COULD get it if i felt like messing with xorg.conf right now, but i don't. i managed to get it working except the resolution on my laptop wouldn't go to the right resolution.

[Mr Biglesworth]

Alright dawgs, I just took my first plunge into linux. Installed Ubuntu on a partition on my Dell laptop, then upgraded to Gutsy Gibbon. Eventually I'd be happy to get rid of the windows partition at some point but i haven't got my wireless card working yet and I still need to find applications to replace my favourite ones in windows. Also I'm completely clueless and don't know anything about linux, but I'm glad I've made this move.

[raublekick]

What kind of wireless card do you have? If it doesn't work out of the box then the driver either doesn't exist (possibly could use ndiswrapper + the Windows driver) or it's just restricted so that it can't be distributed by Ubuntu.

Try going to System -> Administration -> Restricted Drivers Manager and see if it shows up in there.

What applications are you trying to replace?

[Mr Biglesworth]

Alriight, I'm online. I was using restricted drivers manager but it didn't seem to work, then I tried it again last night and it did work.
The only app I really use a lot is Microsoft OneNote which I keep my research organized in, which is pretty valuable to me.
Anyway I'm really liking it so far. I've been playing with compiz and I think its nifty. I like the overall ubuntu system, though I really don't know my way around it yet. There's been some things that run buggy, like the help system and network controls which freeze up. But I'm going to stick with it because I'd like to eventually switch entirely to open source. Someday I'd like to be in a position to advocate for open source software in the 3rd world so I'd better start getting comfortable with it.

[raublekick]

I've never really used OneNote, so I'm not sure what all it does, but if organization's your thing, check out Tomboy. It's a very simplistic wiki-based note taking app. You can make a note called "Groceries", that lists groceries you need, and then make tasklist note with a task "1. Get groceries", and the word "groceries" is automatically linked to your list of groceries.

[johnny]

i just googled a bit about onenote, and i'm not so sure that tomboy matches up. tomboy is just way simpler.. but! you should check out basKet (http://basket.kde.org/), 'cause i think that's the closest linux alternative you're going to find right now. it's in gutsy's universe repository (http://packages.ubuntu.com/gutsy/kde/basket), so it will be simple to install from synaptic. the only shitty thing is that (i assume) you're using gnome.. and basket is a kde application, which means synaptic will have to install a bunch of dependencies (kde libraries, the qt graphic toolkit, etc.). it should work just fine, but it will look different ('cause it's using qt, rather than gtk)..

[Mr Biglesworth]

Thanks Johnny, I'll install it later and see if I can feel at home with it.
Also sorry for not getting back to your e-mail.. i guess i'm bad like that.

[johnny]

i almost forgot about that, but now you're not getting off the hook... you asshole! but i totally do the same thing; if i don't reply to an email the first time i read it, i'll never get around to it again..

basket is only at version 1.0.2 i think so i'm sure it's still maturing/growing, but maybe it can accomplish most, or some of, what you want. i doubt it will match up (feature-wise) exactly with onenote, though.

[Mr Biglesworth]

Hey I just found out I'm going to Toronto next weekend (2nd and 3rd). I'm booked into a hotel Friday and Saturday nights (all expenses paid) and I've got workshops during the day on Saturday and Sunday but I'm free Friday and Saturday evening... got any time to do something?

[johnny]

fer sure! saturday might be a band rehearsal, but friday i'm definitely free. and i could maybe blow saturday's rehearsal anyways.. we're not really preparing for a show or anything right now.

[raublekick]

yo johnny, what kind of music are you playing in your band?

[johnny]

i dunno.. rock music i guess. sort of punk- and garagerock-influenced.

[johnny]

hey rauble, have you ever used fish (http://www.fishshell.org/)? i switched from bash to zsh a couple months ago, but today i decided to give fish a try and it seems really good. the tab completion is very sharp, and it has syntax highlighting as you type on the command-line.

[raublekick]

wow fish looks pretty cool. i don't really use the terminal much these days (i don't really use my computer for much other than web browsing these days...), so bash is fine for me.

[sharkz]

have yet to upgrade to gutsy, but i guess i better do it and hope my wireless card finally works again (hasn't since hoary)

no complaints with feisty though. running xfce now, like it overall

[johnny]

ahh, the linux thread has been left dormant for too long!

did you upgrade and get everything working right shrakz?

i continue to be a happy arch linux user. my desktop computer is on ice right now, because i messed up my install on it a while back. after that i attempted to setup kde4 with one of the kubuntu hardy heron alpha cds, but it didn't work out so well. i should have just re-installed arch, as somebody in the arch community has a kde4 repository setup.. but i went with kubuntu. it pains me to say it, but i think kubuntu might be one of the worst kde distros! ah well.

i think i'll wait for kde 4.1 or something.. even though they've 'released' kde4, it seems like 4.0 is still the equivalent of a beta. i might as well wait for them to iron out some of the wrinkles, especially since kde has always seemed slightly more bug- and crash-prone to me (stable releases and all).

lately i've been toying with evilwm (http://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/), which is nifty (and very minimalist!). here's a screenshot (click fr big) -
http://xs223.xs.to/xs223/08036/screen130108-thumb100.png (http://xs.to/xs.php?h=xs223&d=08036&f=screen130108312.png)

this screen is from last sunday. i've since tweaked the conky display (made the bars vertically centered with with text, moved a couple lines around..) but otherwise, all is the same.

also, rauble: are you a vi(m) person? if so, have you heard of the vimperator (http://vimperator.mozdev.org/)? it's awesome, and the only reason i started using firefox again.

[johnny]

oh, almost forgot to mention this: have you played teewars (http://www.teewars.com/)???? just stumbled upon it a few days ago at ubuntuforums, and it's really fun! you should give it a try, and maybe we can have some deathmatches or something.. as far as i'm aware, it's not in the ubuntu repositories (fortunately for me, it is in the aur :)) but it should be easy enough to build. according to the pkgbuild the dependencies are alsa-lib, libgl, and mesa (there are probably some *-dev packages you'd also need since, in ubuntu, you don't necessarily get all the headers required to compile things when you install libraries).

[raublekick]

woah, Teewars looks pretty rad! I'll check on UF to see if anyone's made a .deb for it, if not I'll try to build it myself.

I've tried to be a vim person, but I never really do much basic text editing, so when I do, I'd rather just edit that one line as quickly as possible rather than fiddling with vim to do it.

KDE4.0 is definitely not a "ready" release. Aaron Seigo has been trying to get this point across because people have definitely been backlashing against KDE for how incomplete 4.0 is. I kind of see both sides. And yes, Kubuntu really IS the worst KDE distro.

[johnny]

hopefully kde4 will give the kubuntu people reason to make kubuntu way better. i'm sure kubuntu hardy heron will be, mostly, more of the same thing.. but maybe the release after that (is there a codename yet, i wonder?) will make big improvements. that would be nice.


oh, and in case you hadn't found anything: turns out there's a deb for teewars @ getdeb (http://www.getdeb.net/app.php?name=TeeWars).