There’s a proposed workaround on the linked bug report, namely to add a timeout to the beginning of the Glipper code. It seems to work alright for the most part, but Parcellite offers the same functionality without any of the downsides: it doesn’t depend on Gnome Panel and, of course, it doesn’t crash.

The easiest way to get it is, as always, sudo apt-get install parcellite. A more recent version can be obtained using the Web Upd8 PPA.

You can then run the VNC viewer like this:

vncviewer -LowColourLevel 1 localhost:[local port]

The color level setting here is what results in the best mix between speed and prettiness for me.

-LowColourLevel level
Selects the reduced colour level to use on slow links. level can range from 0 to 2, 0 meaning 8 colours, 1 meaning 64 colours (the default), 2 meaning 256 colours.

If you are connecting from Linux to Linux (as opposed to from Linux to XP), more efficient means may be available.

My most basic requirement for an audio player is, logically, playing audio well. While that sounds too obvious to mention, the primary reason I only came up with four audio players is because none of the other players I tried met what I mean by this, which is the following:

• Good audio quality. It would seem that all players on Windows as well as Linux have reasonable output quality these days, and I remember that 10 years ago that wasn’t necessarily the case. What player you chose could significantly affect the output. Either way, I still list it because it’s probably the most important requirement.
• Gapless playback. No fading in and out and no pauses. Fading might be alright between songs from different albums, though I feel that true gapless playback removes any need for silly fading practices. At any rate, even though this applies most strongly to only a minority of albums it’s a prerequisite.
• ReplayGain. I don’t like to be surprised by overly loud music or some such. But perhaps most important, this means album gain, not just track gain. Many players that support some form of RG fail here because they only do it on a per-track basis.

Then there are some peripheral things I like that aren’t directly related to audio quality:

• Must not freeze when adding a few files. Preferably it’ll be able to do it completely out of your sight, but I’ll take some kind of “busy” notice as long as it doesn’t interfere with the application’s ability to play music, be paused, go to the next track, and the like. It seems that any Python-based application utterly fails here, including Quod Libet, which says “Do other media libraries choke and die after a mere 10,000 songs?” Perhaps it doesn’t die, but it certainly chokes for enough time for me to stop caring if it will so I’ll kill it manually.
• Shouldn’t lock out the interface or keyboard bindings while adding music. If the GUI doesn’t freeze, but does lock me out with a “nice” adding files dialog it isn’t really that much better than freezing, is it? Still, at least you’ve got a rough idea regarding what’s going on and whether it’ll take seconds, minutes, or hours before you regain control. Plus there’s usually a cancel button for instant control, whereas a frozen GUI requires killing and restarting for that.
• Last.FM scrobbling. I just like it. All in all I suppose this is the least important feature.
• Media library. foobar2000′s library contains a bunch of track metadata and it automatically monitors folders for updates. It’s quite neat.

Neither Aqualung, Deadbeef, GogglesMM, nor mpd quite succeeds at all of these requirements, while they are all part of foobar2000′s base package or easily added with plugins. I haven’t even touched on the wonderful things I can do in foobar2000 with the command line, keyboard bindings, and columns_ui, but I suppose can’t expect that.

Aqualung generally seems to succeed best at the requirements I listed, save for Last.FM submission. However, because I don’t use Ubuntu/Linux as my primary media playing OS (that’s still XP) I generally tend to vary a bit between Aqualung and Deadbeef as my music player of choice. Nevertheless I’m quite confident that Aqualung would be my primary choice if I played more than the occasional few tracks or podcasts.

Rather than explaining what Aqualung does right, which I think I already did while listing my requirements, I’ll explain what’s less optimal about the alternatives from the perspective of my second-favorite player, Deadbeef.

• it does ReplayGain well, including on MP3 with ID3v2 tags — Aqualung: equivalent; Goggles: worse
• it doesn’t choke when adding lots of files, but does lock out access to the interface while it’s adding files — Aqualung: superior; Goggles: equivalent to worse (since Goggles requires files to be added to the music library, which isn’t something I necessarily want just to play some random file or song)
• it only does gapless playback on some filetypes — Aqualung: superior; Goggles: equivalent
• it supports Last.FM scrobbling — Aqualung: worse; Goggles: equivalent

Aqualung is clearly superior on all accounts save Last.FM support, but I’m glad that Deadbeef, Goggles, and mpd are around to show other players how not to suck. I have to say that if mpd could play random files easily I’d probably be using that instead of anything else. Plus I don’t really want everything to be in a library before I can play it. Since I don’t typically use Linux for “real” music listening I sometimes pick Deadbeef’s or Goggles’ Last.FM submission over Aqualung’s technical superiority.

Basically, Deadbeef and Aqualung deliver what Quod Libet promises: “Are you sick of audio players that think they know how to organize your music for you? Do other media libraries choke and die after a mere 10,000 songs?” Goggles is a little too focused on its library for my taste, but it’s certainly not horrible. Still, the point is that I like Quod Libet’s philosophy better than Goggles’ philosophy. Quod Libet, meanwhile, does not deliver on its promise at all and it chokes horribly. I suspect it’s due to Python, because all Python-based players seem to suffer from the same defect.

Finally, I must admit that I haven’t properly investigated terminal-based players such as cmus and MOC because I only found out about them recently, after I tried tons and tons of music players in order to end up with the list at the top of this post.

If you know any other players that more or less meet these requirements, particularly the playing back music well part, I’d love to hear them.

There are an awful lot of possibilities listed in man screen, but I only need a few.

• screen starts screen, obviously
• Ctrl + a, d to detach from a screen session
• screen -r to reattach
• Ctrl + a, c to create a new console (or type screen command to forgo on an essentially useless Bash session)
• Ctrl + a, Ctrl + a switches to the last active window
• Ctrl + a, n and Ctrl + a, p switches back and forth through windows
• Ctrl + a, X, where X is a number
• Ctrl + a, " gives you a list of windows to choose from; this isn’t very useful without naming the windows with Ctrl + a, A

I mostly learned this through a slightly more detailed guide, for the screen man page was a little too overwhelming to figure out what was useful and what wasn’t.

The release of Ubuntu 10.10 coincided with this change for wintry weather; however, while I’m sure it’s swell, you won’t see me upgrading just yet. Perhaps I’ll have to look a little harder into acquiring a netbook so I can use it with the Ubuntu Netbook Edition.

Of more interest is the announcement that Opera 11 will have extensions. Or, more particularly, that I was the first to guess this in a contest.

Luckily the situation is easy to rectify. sudo apt-get install glipper, right-click on a panel, click “Add to Panel,” select the entry named “Clipboard manager” and click “Add.”

If you want to paste something other than the currently active copied text you can either select it from the Glipper icon or, if you prefer a more keyboard-based approach (like me), you can press Ctrl + Alt + C to pop-up a list of available items. Of course you could change that keyboard binding to anything you like.

The default settings are fairly sane, so unless you want to keep more than the last 20 copied items in memory you can leave it be.

This entry only deals with the basics of getting Lighttpd up and running with PHP. To get started, use:

sudo apt-get install lighttpd php5-cgi

Then run lighty-enable-mod and enter fastcgi.

Then you can edit /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf. Stick the following at the end:

fastcgi.server = ( “.php” => ((
“bin-path” => “/usr/bin/php5-cgi”,
“socket” => “/tmp/php.socket”
)))

Recommended: sudo apt-get install php5-curl php5-tidy to be able to run Tubes with all functionality, and of course any other modules you might like. There’s nothing to it; you don’t even have to edit php.ini.

When you’re done customizing things to your liking, use sudo /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart to see the changes.

In Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10, the following applies:

1. The easiest option in this particular instance:

   Alt + F2, gnome-system-monitor, Enter

2. The slightly more complicated (though still easy), always applicable option:

   System > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts

   Click Add

   Type whatever you like in name. “System Monitor”, “Task Manager” or anything you like. It doesn’t really matter, just so you can identify it yourself.

   Type gnome-system-monitor in Command.

   Click Apply.

   Scroll down to the bottom (Custom Shortcuts)

   Click on where it says “Disabled”

   Press Ctrl + Alt + Del (by default this keybinding gives you the logout/shutdown screen, so you’ll probably get a warning about reassigning this particular combination).

For more information on keybindings in Ubuntu, I’d advise you to read the community documentation. If you’re interested, you can also check out the original context of what I wrote in this post.

Before you can use sshfs, you’ll need an SSH server. This is useful for all kinds of things, but that’s not important here. To set up an SSH server in Ubuntu, all you need to do is sudo apt-get install openssh-server. Setting it up in Cygwin (like I did to access my Windows box, and to tunnel VNC through it) is a bit trickier, but there are decent tutorials out there. Once that’s taken care of, you can set up sshsf.

sudo apt-get install sshfs
sudo mkdir /media/dir-name
sudo chown `whoami` /media/dir-name
sudo adduser `whoami` fuse

Log out and log back in again so that you’re a proper part of the group.

Mount using sshfs [user@]host.ext:/remote-dir /media/dir-name; unmount using fusermount -u /media/dir-name.

It all worked perfectly for me, but if not, there’s apparently a solution.

If you get the following error:

fusermount: fuse device not found, try ‘modprobe fuse’ first

You will have to load the fuse module by doing:
$sudo modprobe fuse

You can add fuse to the modules that are loaded on startup by editing the file /etc/modules and adding a line with only the word “fuse” in it, at the end.

and then issue the sshfs command above again.

If you’re on Windows, don’t panick. Dokan SSHFS will perform the same task.

It should be noted that this is even easier within KDE applications, where you can simply use fish://your-server.com, but sshfs cooperates better with the rest of my system. Trying the same with Dolphin in KDE on Windows results in a KIOslave going crazy using all the CPU it can, however.

Aside from easy editing of files directly on my Windows box, this finally enabled me to stream videos from my Windows box, although right now only lower quality ones since it’s also connected through WLAN. With Samba things just weren’t working out, and the same applied to FTP (though it was better for file transfers than Samba, I have to say). Admittedly, this still actually uses FTP under the hood, but it just works better. Besides it will also be more secure to use remotely thanks to SSH.

$ sudo update-grub
Generating grub.cfg ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-16-generic
[…]
Found Windows 7 (loader) on /dev/sda1
[…]
done

This is what /etc/default/grub wants to set the default boot entry:

GRUB_DEFAULT="Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda1)"

Thanks. That really made things so much simpler.

As always, in Ubuntu it’s a piece of cake with sudo apt-get install exiv2.

Adjusting Exif Date/Time

With exiv2, exiv2 ad -a [-]HH[:MM[:SS]] file does the job.

For example, my camera was still on DST when I shot my new year’s fireworks pictures, which made them appear as if they were shot at 1 AM. Thus, I ran the command exiv2 ad -a -1 *.JPG to fix it.

Using a Command File

I use a file named exif-copyright-2010.txt (and another one for 2009 etc.) with just two lines in it, which I apply instantly when grabbing pictures from my camera. This file contains the following lines.

add Exif.Image.Artist	Ascii	"My name"
add Exif.Image.Copyright	Ascii	"Copyright © 2010 My name"

This can be applied using exiv2 -m /somewhere/exif-copyright-2010.txt file. I used to mess about with batch processing in graphical applications — which worked fine — but this is much faster.

Read More

You can read more about all of this on the official website.

microblog-purple offers convenient integration into Pidgin, which I already use for chatting. It’s easy to install on Ubuntu using sudo apt-get install pidgin-mbpurple, but you may want to consider using PPA for both Pidgin and microblog-purple. Note that the microblog-purple from PPA is named pidgin-microblog, so if you already installed pidgin-mbpurple you’ll have to remove that first. That’s what it is, after all: a chat service with a 140-character limit — most chat services offer at least 500 characters or so. At least it has better offline and history support than most. You also need to enable the plugin named Twitgin so you get a character count on the window where you communicate with Twitter.

Since, like I said, almost everybody uses it, I figured it might also be a good idea to announce new blog posts on Twitter automatically. I searched around a bit in the forest of Twitter plugins and WP to Twitter sounds like it best meets my needs. This post is a test of the plugin, and it announces my partial submission to the crowd — not submission in the sense of Islam, but submission in the sense of realism.

wget -r ftp://user:pass@domain[/folder]

Audio

My #1 biggest problem with Linux is still audio-related issues. Luckily they are mostly fairly trivial to fix – at least on my laptop. I haven’t figured out how to make my desktop output 5.1 audio through optical out, so I’m still using Windows there.

Crackling Sound

If I boot into KDE4 instead of Gnome then my audio is messed up afterward. I have no idea why, but to fix it I can run alsamixer -Dhw and turn the PCM volume all the way up (or at least higher than 0). Source.

Another issue I’ve noticed is that after adjusting the volume in Gnome or KDE, I can never quite get the volume back up to what was previously 100% (i.e. the same max as in Windows). Starting alsamixer shows that the front and headphone volumes get stuck at about 70%.

Audio input/output

Apparently the Ubuntu System > Preferences > Sound doesn’t properly set the default inputs and outputs for PulseAudio. To use different inputs or outputs for audio for programs you can use pavucontrol. It makes the latest betas of Skype usable on Linux.

Last.FM submission (in Quod Libet and Perhaps Other Applications)

You need to install the Last.FM submission daemon (sudo apt-get install lastfmsubmitd). Also see this bug report.

Browsers

Chromium

I like having a bunch of browsers at my disposal and Chromium comes right after Opera, Links2, Firefox, Epiphany, and Konqueror in my list of favorite browsers. That puts it ahead of most notably Safari and IE.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu karmic main

Install using sudo apt-get install chromium-browser. If you forget about the browser suffix then you’ll end up with some kind of Space Invaders clone. It’s quite nice actually, but I keep forgetting about its existence.

Links 2

Always nice to have. sudo apt-get install links2.

Opera

No OS is fully functional if it doesn’t have Opera. Download the latest Qt4 build from FTP because the repository, which is primarily aimed at Debian, doesn’t seem to be working properly right now—and if it did, it would install the Qt3 rather than the Qt4 version. I find that Tango CL does a pretty good job of blending my Opera in with various types of Gnome and KDE looks, although there may be more specialized skins available to take this even further. I use the purple color scheme because it seems to fit in better with the blue looks of my system than the blue color scheme does.

If Flash doesn’t want to work on YouTube in Opera, get rid of all the flashplugin-alternative.so files (or at least make sure that Opera doesn’t see them).

Miscellaneous

AmarokAudio Player

Rhythmbox is some kind of iTunes clone full of bugs. Utterly useless unless you want to listen to one of the predefined Internet radio channels while Ubuntu is installing. Get Amarok with sudo apt-get install amarok. First things first, go to Settings > Configure Amarok and uncheck Show splash screen on startup. While very self-explanatory, still very annoying. I mostly use Amarok for playing internet sources, such as Librivox, Last.FM and various internet radio channels. For my local music I prefer something like foobar2000, which probably translates best to Quod Libet in a Linux context. I would not use Amarok. Goggles Music Manager is my current audio player of choice in Linux, though it leaves much to be desired compared to foobar2000.

Background

I like to use a touch of red as my background on Ubuntu. Source.

Circular scrolling

Install GSynaptics using sudo apt-get install gsynaptics. Go to System > Preferences > Touchpad. Go to the tab Scrolling. Enable circular scrolling. Much better use of the touchpad.

Compositing

I haven’t yet figured out what window manager I want to use. I do like Compiz, but its application switching capabilities are pure bile. Metacity has compositing, but it feels slower than with compositing turned off and you can’t seem to configure anything. I don’t want shadows and all that junk; I just don’t want my windows to take half a second to appear when I switch desktops. I could try to use Metacity compositing in combination with superswitcher, but it just lacks some of that nice 3D accelerated flair. If only the Compiz plugins were properly annotated, perhaps I could take a stab at writing a SmartTab.org clone myself. It’s a pity that with all of Ubuntu’s usability improvements over Windows, application switching isn’t one of them. Perhaps I’ll have to use Kwin, which is much better but feels somewhat out of place.

Compiling Software

Don’t forget that when a ./autogen.sh or a ./configure is complaining about missing a package it’s talking about package-dev. Gave me a headache a couple of times, but I don’t suppose I’ll break my head over it again.

exiv2

Very useful command line utility for taking care of the metadata of your photos. Find out more with man exiv2, my post highlighting some of my favorite options, and at exiv2′s official website.

Glipper

xclipboard forgets what you copied if you close the application from which you were copying; luckily the situation is easy to rectify. sudo apt-get install glipper, right-click on a panel, click “Add to Panel,” select the entry named “Clipboard manager” and click “Add.”

Grub2

Ubuntu 9.10 comes with Grub2. The relevant command to make it dance and sing is update-grub. Things like default boot entry can be set in /etc/default/grub. Don’t forget to add parentheses. Recovering is horribly complicated compared to ye olde grub.

Keyboard Disabling for External USB Keyboard

It depends on the specific hardware and drivers, but the generic principle may still apply.

To disable internal laptop keyboard: sudo sh -c 'echo -n "i8042" > /sys/bus/platform/drivers/i8042/unbind'

To enable it again: sudo sh -c 'echo -n "i8042" > /sys/bus/platform/drivers/i8042/bind'

If it disables more than intended, at worst you’ll have to reboot.

Keyboard Settings

In System > Preferences > Keyboard go to the tab Layouts. I tend to use USA International (AltGR dead keys), but these settings would probably yield real usability improvements in any layout (most notably the plain USA one). In Layout Options, check the following boxes. I’ve also made a screenshot of my settings.

• Adding EuroSign to certain keys: 5
• Compose key position: Right Ctrl
• Key to choose 3rd level: Right Alt

Now you can type the € sign using Right Alt + 5, type various accents like é using either Right Alt + e or Right Ctrl > ' > e and do other fun things like typing the en dash using Right Ctrl > --. and the em dash using Right Ctrl > ---. There’s an extensive compose key reference available for the characters that you can produce with the compose key; the characters that you can type with the Right Alt modifier depend on your keyboard setup. This can be viewed by utilizing the Add Keyboard interface, but there has got to be an easy way to view the current keyboard layout.

In KDE the same can be achieved in by going to the KDE System Settings > Regional & Language > Keyboard Layout configuration. Under the Layout tab, select Enable keyboard layouts. Then go to Advanced and there you can put the same as outlined above.

MS Core Fonts

Don’t forget about them. They make browsing more pleasant because many websites use MS fonts like Verdana. Install using sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts.

SciTE

Gedit is insufficient and Kate is too slow. Grab the latest version because Ubuntu 9.10 comes with the ancient 1.71. I do like to sudo apt-get install scite it first because it fixes up the icons, menu entries and such—although it fails to properly register it for all the file types that it automatically registers Gedit and Kate for. Note that after make install it results in a /usr/bin/SciTE binary. I simply delete the remaining scite and then rename the SciTE binary to scite, but there are probably some good reasons not to do it like that—too bad.

Some settings that I like for my .SciTEUser.properties.

position.width=700
position.height=800
# Indentation
tabsize=2
indent.size=2
use.tabs=1
#indent.auto=1
indent.automatic=1
indent.opening=0
indent.closing=0
#tab.indents=0
#backspace.unindents=0
statusbar.visible=1

# Sizes and visibility in edit pane
line.margin.visible=1
line.margin.width=4
margin.width=16

# Wrapping of long lines
wrap=1

Screen Capture

You can make videos of applications, regions on your screen, or your entire screen with recordMyDesktop. Install with sudo apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop.

Temperature sensors

Install sensors-applet to be able to monitor temperatures of various hardware components in a Gnome panel. This depends on lm-sensors, which is of course installed automatically. To make it actually detect all available sensors run sudo sensors-detect. Without doing that, I can’t monitor the temperature of my CPU cores.

Network

Enter Password to Unlock Keyring

To get rid of this annoying behavior, check Available to all users in the settings for the respective network. I prefer to have my network available ASAP, as do many others.

Internet Connection Sharing

I don’t know what the guys at the Ubuntu documentation are smoking, but all you need to do is right click on the NetworkManager icon, Edit Connections, pick the one you want to share through, and pick Shared to other computers in the Method drop-down. They really scared me with that when I wanted to share my laptop’s wireless connection with my desktop to download some updates (not that they got the Linksys wireless USB to work properly).