I’ve finally fixed sound via the browser on my Ubuntu 11.04 MythTV media center. MythTV was working fine, but the browsers never even tried to play sound (the sound settings would show NO applications using sound, when Chrome or Firefox should have been).

The information I needed was here and I had no /etc/asound.conf so I had to put the following in ~/.asoundrc -

pcm.pulse { type pulse }
ctl.pulse { type pulse }
pcm.!default { type pulse }
ctl.!default { type pulse }

Ubuntu 10.04 is here! I’ve been running Ubuntu exclusively (my wife has the only Windows machine in the house) since (I think) around 6.XX and it just keeps getting better. Last year I converted my parents to Ubuntu 9.10 and every now and then they boot into windows because they don’t know how to do something, but thats just because I’m in a different country – otherwise I’d be able to help them a lot more, and show them around. I’ve got remote control working well now (Remmina has an option to drop the colours to 256 which means it performs fine across the Tasman) so that means I can show them how to do things easily.

I’m looking forward to the new social network aspect of Ubuntu 10, with tight integration into chat and social networks – hopefully this will keep me in touch with my family much more. By the way, I really like Gwibber, and look forward to seeing that evolve.

If you like the sound of Linux and/or Ubuntu, I encourage you to try it out. It can make an old PC feel young, and trying it out is pretty easy. I like the way Ubuntu can be installed on a USB stick so that you can boot from it AND you can save to it – better than booting a live CD – which is also cool, but lets face it, CDs and DVDs are obsolete. You can buy a 1T drive for $100 so you wouldn’t even use them for backups would you?

I’m also set up on one.ubuntu.com which has been steadily improving over the last couple of months.

If you are looking for games on Linux, have a look at http://www.playdeb.net/. This is a great directory of games for Linux. Also see:

• http://www.linuxlinks.com/article/20100425112203997/ExtraHotGames.html
• http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7745/1.html
• http://www.foresightlinux.se/blog/2008/09/24/top-10-kids-games-for-linux/
• http://www.foresightlinux.se/blog/2008/06/21/top-15-linux-strategy-games/
• …
• awww shoot, just look at http://delicious.com/prule/games+linux

If you want to learn more about Ubuntu, check out:

• http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/1004features
• http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu
• http://ubuntu-manual.org/
• https://help.ubuntu.com/9.10/index.html
• https://help.ubuntu.com/community

Don’t forget, there is a NetBook edition of Ubuntu, which may make your PC feel even younger – with a simplified interface its probably a good option for older PCs or non-power users. When all you need to do is surf the web, organise your photos, edit home videos and process documents, maybe the NetBook edition makes all that a little easier.

I’ve heard comments about gyms not being able to use commercial music without paying royalties. This sounds insane to me, but maybe it will help promote creative commons music. RhythmBox is a music player that comes with Ubuntu, and is integrated with Jamendo, Magnatune and Ubuntu One music store:

• Jamendo: On Jamendo artists allow anyone to download and share their music. It’s free, legal and unlimited.
• Magnatune: We select the most amazing independent musicians and offer you unlimited downloading and listening for only $15/month.
• UbuntuOne music store: Ubuntu users have access to purchase popular music from all of their favorite artists that make up an expanding catalog of millions of songs available in the Ubuntu One Music Store.

This makes finding music and buying music fantastically easy, and after my experiences with BigPond music and with iTunes being so closed, I say bring it! Any artists putting music out there that would be good for gym tracks should be getting in touch with these gyms and making themselves known!

I’ve just now stumbled across Rapache, a useful GUI tool that makes configuring apache easy. I found it by accident in the Ubuntu Software Center, but unfortunately it would freeze while trying to add a new domain. I searched the web for answers, and found a bug report.

This didn’t specifically reference Ubuntu 9.10 (rather, 9.04) and the file that needed to be patched didn’t exist in the given location.

I found it easily enough:

paul@paul-laptop:~$ sudo find / -name RapacheGui.py[sudo] password for paul:
/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.5/RapacheGtk/RapacheGui.py
/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/RapacheGtk/RapacheGui.py
/usr/share/pyshared/RapacheGtk/RapacheGui.py
paul@paul-laptop:~$

I edited the last one (/usr/share/pyshared/RapacheGtk/RapacheGui.py) as documented in comment 23 to add the following at line 79:

        if not Shell.command.ask_password(): sys.exit(1)

Note, this line MUST be preceeded by 8 spaces – indentation is important in Python.

Now, rapache would prompt for the system password and then close!

I’ve got it working now, by starting it with sudo:

sudo rapache

Everything seems to work. I’ve added a domain, turned on the include module, and added “AddOutputFilter INCLUDES .html” to the virtual host definition – all very quickly using rapache.

So, server side includes now work on my new virtual host – which is what I started out wanting to do before going off on this tangent.

Something happened on my Ubuntu install sometime which meant that double clicking on an HTML file resulted in the file being opened by gedit. Not really what I wanted. I started looking through the GNOME system menu (Preferences and Administration) to find how to change the default action – but that turned out to be the wrong place.

In Nautilus, simply right click on the file and select ‘Properties’. From there, go to the ‘Open with’ tab and select the appropriate application.

I’ve always wondered how to add items to Gnome menus. Well, it turns out it is relatively easy – as you would expect – and its documented here.

It’s as simple as creating a text file in the right place – refreshing easy compared to the binary shortcuts in Windows.

When I was working on ToolInstaller, I added support for Windows shortcuts by using the OrangeVolt ant tasks library.

Now that I have the missing piece of the puzzle, ToolInstaller could be easily modified to support Linux (GNOME).

ToolInstaller was a project I started years ago – it was inspired by how easy it was to install software on linux (i.e. apt-get, yum) by using a repository of software, combined with the simplicity of programs which can just be unzipped.

I’ve found VirtualBox to be very easy to create virtual machines – it’s free, open source, and available on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris. One of the features I particularly like is being able to create a virtual disk that grows as needed (dynamically expanding image). You can also mount an iso image for the CD/DVD drive – which is exactly what I want to do when installing the operating system on my new virtual machine.

Installing on Ubuntu is as easy as:

sudo apt-get install virtualbox

Now, from the Applications/Accessories/VirtualBox OSE menu item, you can start VirtualBox and create virtual machines.

Several things I need to remember after I’ve created a new machine:

1. Under “Settings/General/Advanced” select “Enable PAE/NX” to avoid the “This kernel requires the following features not present on the CPU: 0:6 Unable to boot – please use a kernel appropriate for your CPU.”
2. Under “Settings/Network/Adapter 1″ select “Attached to: Host Interface” to get networking going – this get me network access as I would expect

I was recently trying to copy a directory over an existing one and kept getting prompted – asking if I wanted to overwrite existing files – even though I was using the force option:

cp -Rf dir1 dir2

I found the answer here – it was caused by an alias forcing the interactive mode.

Quick solution is to bypass the alias by an absolute reference to cp:

/bin/cp -Rf dir1 dir2

I’ve been wanting a way to use playlists on my media center either from within MythTV or with any other player. The reason is I have a bunch of short videos (music and documentaries) that I’d like to be able to play consecutively.

It turns out to be a case of just RTFM. You can create playlists for MPlayer from directory listings, and then associate playlists with a particular mplayer command.

To generate the playlist from all files in a directory, I use the following:

dir * | sed 's/\\//g' > all_videos.pls

The sed part of this command removes the \ from escaped spaces… i.e. a file ‘Hello world’ is output from the dir command as ‘Hello\ world’ – the space is escaped. We need to generate a file without these escaped spaces for it to work properly.

I use the following mplayer command associated with the pls extension:

mplayer -shuffle -fs -zoom -quiet -vo xv -playlist %s

I’ve just noticed that I’ve got no swap space! (Dell 1525 running Ubuntu 8.10).

I first installed my laptop with Ubuntu 8.04, and later upgraded to 8.10. After the upgrade I noticed that hibernate no longer worked, and I think (from memory) I found an error message saying something about not enough swap space. I briefly thought about trying to find out how to add more swap (I already had a 4G partition defined, and I’ve only got 2G ram) but then I swiftly moved on to other more pressing issues.

Well, just recently I fired up System Monitor to check on a process, and notice in the bottom right corner it said there was no swap space. Firing up ‘top’ confirmed this – my system had zero swap!

I could see that I had a swap partition defined:

paul@dell1525:~$ sudo blkid
/dev/sda8: TYPE=”swap” UUID=”4bd53cb9-611c-4e57-a9df-4754d6bcdd65″

But the corresponding entry in /etc/fstab had a different entry:.

# /dev/sda8
UUID=e6eb6c47-599c-4612-ac8a-287279ee438b none swap sw 0 0

The UUIDs didn’t match! Thus no swap. Correcting the fstab file and rebooting resolved the problem, but I don’t know what caused it.

Right now, top shows I’ve got my 4G swap space being used, and hibernate has successfully hibernated and resumed. Perhaps now this laptop will perform better too?

As for adding more swap space, I don’t think I need to do that right now – but here is a good article for future reference.

To set the default browser, use update-alternatives as shown below:

paul@dell1525:~$ sudo update-alternatives –config x-www-browser

There are 2 alternatives which provide `x-www-browser’.

Selection Alternative
———————————————–
1 /usr/bin/firefox-3.0
*+ 2 /usr/bin/seamonkey

Press enter to keep the default[*], or type selection number: 1
Using ‘/usr/bin/firefox-3.0′ to provide ‘x-www-browser’.

There is a good write-up of the update-alternatives system here.