Oops…I did it again!

Oh yah! Impatience is another name for me. Barely few hours after my lost post about my experience with Hardy Heron on my desktop, I installed it on my newly bought Dell’s Vostro 1400 laptop. I just could not resist. I made it dual boot with Vista Home Basic that came with it.

Contrary to what I read in the net as to how Vista may trouble dual booting, my experience was quite normal. I had read that we should not use any Linux partitioning apps to partition the Vista space (mine was the regular company install with whole drive being the C drive). The author had suggested using Vista’s ‘Shrink Volume’ utility. Thankfully I read it after I did partitioning with GParted LiveCD. I had partitioned the drive the very same day I received my laptop!

I just put the Ubuntu 8.04 CD inside my optical drive and started the liveCD mode after reboot. Once inside, I clicked on the ‘Install’ button and everything went smoothly. Only thing I noticed was that inspite of 2GB RAM and a Intel Core2Duo processor, I thought the speed was not as good as on the desktop with only 1GB RAM and an old Sempron processor. Anyway the installation took less than 35 minutes and after I rebooted I was greeted with regular dual boot option.

I logged into Ubuntu and spent some time there and created a FAT32 partition so that I can share data between Vista and Linux. I again restarted my system just to see if I have any problem booting into Vista. Thank God, nothing such happened. Its working normally. Even the FAT32 partition created for data share is working properly.

Ofcourse, I’ll have to check the system performance for quite some time to come to any conclusions. But as of now, there seems nothing to worry.

Happy mobile computing with Linux!

Ubuntu Hardy as sweet as the ‘Laren n Hardy’…

I was eager to try the new release from Ubuntu house… so eager that I could not wait for another 4 days to obtain the iso copy of Hardy Heron.  Today I downloaded the 8.04(LTS) Release Candidate and installed on my desktop.  I’ll not keep the suspence till the last paragraph of this log to give my verdict.  Its 9 out of 10… Ubuntu, you have won me over…!

I now have some experience in installing the Release Candidates (RCs) and found that essentially not much changes in the release after a distro development reaches this stage.  May be last minute touch-ups, polishes…  We can safely download a RC version and install it on our system for regular usage.  Anyway we can use update manager to keep up-to-date and to get rid of any bugs.  Its a good idea also from the point that once the distro is released the servers a bombarded by eager users to get the latest offering thus making our downloads a lot slow than it should be.  The download requests at RC level is comparatively low and if we go the ‘bittorrent’ way our headache is further reduced.  Infact I was surprised that I could download around 700MB file in less that 1 1/2 hour!

Ok, I downloaded the iso file, checked the md5sum and confirmed the integrity, burned it to a blank CD and put it in the DVD-writer tray and hit the restart button.  The first screen has changed a bit (not too much).  It asks whether we want to try it before installing(live CD mode), install it, CD check etc…  I choose the live CD mode and was in the default screen in no time.  I just moved here and there in the desktop, used firefox and afterwards hit the install button.

The installer has not changed much and all it took was around 15-20 minutes get installed on my harddisk.  This time however, the grub bootloader was not forcefully installed.  Nor did it ask whether to install or not.  I have Debian installed on my system and I always want my Debian bootloader to manage multi-booting.  Ubuntu behaved as if it ’sensed’ my preference and left bootloader uninstalled.  I just logged into Debian, edited the /boot/grub/menu.lst to include Ubuntu option and am booting fine into Ubuntu now.  But one thing I see in liveCD is that unless it auto installs the grub, we only see an initrd.img*.bak file, not the initrd.img* file.  If we use this file we cannot boot into the OS.  Don’t remember the exact error message though.  So, I copied the initrd.img.*.bak file to initrd.img.* file and used it in ‘initrd’ argument in the grub loader file.  Correct method or not, its working for me!

Once booted into Ubuntu the first thing that I liked is the default theme, background.  The default theme, which is always a point of complaint againt Ubuntu, has improved a lot this time.  There are minor changes in the layout, default programs etc… For example, Brasero is the new CD-Burner, Transmission is the bittorrent client…etc. All my media is clubbed under ‘Removable Media’ now, though I think my harddisk partitions should not have been there (We have always been taught that HD is a fixed disk )   Otherwise, the look and feel has not improved drastically.  May be its good especially when we know that the actual changes are seen in the way the programs now behave.  Most of them are being executed fast, no crashes as of now, programs look more polished and hopefully are less buggy.

Coming to multimedia, Totem is the default media player.  The .ogg and .wav files played natively but for .mp3, .mpg, .vob etc I had to install the ugly plugins…which ofcourse was as easy as confirm, enter, enter… stuff.  The .vob file does not play that good though.  We see some distortions… I cant explain it in ‘engineering’ terms… but its not clean, kind of hazzy…  Don’t know if its problem with that particular file or the format itself.  Let me confirm that later…

Firefox version is the latest 3.0 beta 5 and I found it to be extremely fast…probably as secure…  Evolution, is the default mail client.  Though I like Thunderbird more, I usually am forced to use Evolution as it has support for the Microsoft Exchange server which is not available in Thunderbird.  Evolution is slow and buggy.  But what to do… either the Evolution team have to deliver better or the Thunderbird team has to provide the Exchange server support.

Although my internet connection is working out-of-the-box, when I go to the Networking Tool, I see that the options are locked.  I clicked on ‘unlock’ and gave my sudo password, still its not unlocking!  Have to try that again sometime later.  And it has not recognised my wireless adapter which is D-Link DWA-110G USB adapter.  May be I have to use ‘ndiswrapper’.  Again, will keep it for later.

Well, overall I’m very much pleased by this release of Ubuntu.  Everything seems to work…work fast too…  Its not as eye catching as some of the other distros like Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva… but it still has smooth and clean interface.  I’ll try my hand at Fedora 9 (Sulphur) too and then decide which one to install on my newly bought Vostro-1400 laptop.

Fedora, my love, you have a great competitor this time.  Its very tempting.  Keep up to my expectations or bare with the infidelity…

gconf error while trying to open ‘Gnumeric’ spreadsheet.

When I tried to open ‘Gnumeric’ spreadsheet program I used to get error msg as ‘An error occured while loading or saving configuration information for gnumeric. Some of your configuration settings may not work properly.’

Upon clicking the ‘Details’ button I got detailed messages as:
Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details – 1: IOR file ‘/tmp/gconfd-svzard/lock/ior’ not opened successfully, no gconfd located: Permission denied 2: IOR file ‘/tmp/gconfd-svzard/lock/ior’ not opened successfully, no gconfd located: Permission denied)

This msg repeated several times.

On googling I came across a page for mysql bugs with similar looking error. The person who reported bug also had posted a suggestion that the file was searching gconfd in the tmp folder so he linked the file to his home directory’ gconfd.

Taking the clue I just did ls -la in my /tmp and found that the owner for gconfd-svzard was 500. 500 is default for users in Fedora/Redhat but I had edited it to 1000. So I changed the owner to svzard and the problem got rectified. I still dont understand the details of it. Just a superficial problem-solving. Nevertheless it was a good experience.

VLC Mediaplayer

Do you believe in good things happening by sheer accident? I do.

Today I found an open-source media player that plays virtually all kinds of audio/video formats (except realmedia files?) including streaming audio/video. It has precompiled binaries for all major linux distros and for Unices(BSDs and Solaris) and for Windows and for Mac OS X! Ofcourse it provides source code too if we want to compile it ourselves. I’m talking about VLC Media player.

After my success with mp3 to ogg conversion, I wanted to convert my mpegs to theora format. So I downloaded and put the ‘ffmpeg2theora‘ converter (binary format) in /usr/local/bin. Then converted one of the files for testing. But sadly the quality was worse than worst. Don’t know what happened. Did I make any mistake? Ofcourse I did not use any ‘options’. Later I found out that it was problem with the Kaffaine media player not ffmpeg2theora script. But before I could know this I only thought that ffmpeg2theora didnot work.

I was not in a mood to study ‘ffmpeg2theora’ so I just googled to see if I can find something easier. From Xiph.org page, I was led to theora.org page and from there to the VLC player’s page. I was really impressed with the information in the homepage. I clicked on the link that had binaries (for fear of dependencies) for Fedora. It said the binary was available from livna repos and provided a link to livna . Livna is a repository of add-on packages for Fedora. We have to install the repository rpm for our version of Fedora to access the packages through yum. I installed the Fedora 7 repo-rpm(livna-release-7.rpm) with ‘rpm -ivh livna-release-7.rpm’ which automatically put the repo files in /etc/yum.repos.d/ directory. I then did ‘yum install vlc’. It installed the player taking care of all the dependencies and bingo I was ready to watch all the available formats in my box.

After this I thought why not play my theora converted file to see where the problem was? Was it with the converter or the mediaplayer? I was indeed relieved to see that my theora file played perfectly well in VLC. As I say I’m not gifted enough to differentiate in qualities between formats. For me the quality of theora file was as good as the original mpeg file. Just to reconfirm that its Kaffine’s fault, I logged into Debian which has only GNOME and played the file in Totem. It worked fine in totem too.

Once I was convinced that the theora-converted file plays well, I converted all my proprietary files into theora. I still use VLC but all my multimedia files are now free-format files. Probably its illegal to convert the file formats (Does the prop. license prohibit the format conversion?). I don’t know. Also, not all the files I’ve are purchased ones! Who cares?

mp3 to ogg conversion: why stick to proprietary formats when we have free/open formats!?

 

 

I’ve Fedora 7 on my multiboot box. As one is aware Fedora has no out-of-box support for proprietary music formats like mp3, mpg, aac, etc. In their webpage the Redhat states that instead of giving support for proprietary formats and their by letting users to continue using them it wants to kinda force them into using free formats like ogg, theora etc. Some may say its against the spirit of freedom. But I strongly support RedHat in this issue. Yes, if we are provided support for mp3 would we ever bother to use ogg format? Would we take the trouble to download necessary plugins or to convert the mp3 files into ogg files and use them? We all are slaves of inertia. It needs some ‘force’ to change the status.

So, instead of downloading plugins to play mp3 files I googled for mp3 to ogg converters. Among all the available choices the following two attracted my attention:

1. http://linux.oldcrank.com - A shell script which can be used to convert mp3 to ogg from command line.

2. http://soundconverter.berlios.de – A GNOME utility for mp3 to ogg conversion.

I downloaded the soundconverter source file and tried to install it. As I feared I got lost in dependency maze. I then downloaded the mp3ogg script from first site. Changed the permission to 755 and put it in /usr/local/bin.

The next step was, ofcourse, to test it. I selected an mp3 song and typed

mp3ogg filename.mp3

Guess what? It works. Now I’ve found a way to satisfy my ‘ear’ly urges on Fedora too.

We can give to options to this:

-s : to suppress all error messages.

-d : to delete the original mp3 file.

The converts the file into ogg file with the same name and in the current directory. I didnot try changing directories and all. I guess it first converts the mp3 into a wav file and then converts it into ogg file. Anyway, thanks a lot to Loran for writing such a nice script file.

Experts, ofcourse, say that ogg is a lossy format and if we convert from mp3 which is already a lossy format, the quality further degrades. If at all we are converting it is better to convert to FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) which as the same says is a better free format. If we are using audio cds, its better to use tools like grip and to rip the songs directly into ogg formats. Well, they may be right. While I completely agree with second suggestion, I’m not sure if I want to convert my files to FLAC. I guess the file size is bigger for flac format compared to ogg. My disk space is not impressive. Moreover I’m not a music guy. Not expert enough to feel the difference in quality anyway. All I need is to listen to song when I feel like. I love linux (read ‘Freedom’) and any kind of music format that runs on it is ok for me.

Now friends, when we can convert music files to free formats why continue to use proprietary formats? Why go with the tide? Remember we are never going to save our lives unless we swim agaist or across it! If we do not have necessary converters we can’t help. But when we have converters we better make use of them.