Just a quick tip for you today. It may be that everyone already knows about this, but I ran into an interesting problem this week and wanted to share the solution. My mum has been using Ubuntu on her laptop for a long time now and she likes it a lot. The other day though she asked me why it opened “some other weird box” when she clicked on email links in web pages. She’s a savvy computer user, she taught me how to use a computer when I was a kid, but this confused her.

It was launching the Evolution mail client and starting a new mail message every time a “mailto:” link was encountered. I remember this behaviour from years ago with Outlook on Windows. I have never bothered to do anything about it on my own machine because I tend to copy and paste an email address from a page straight into a new message. I’m a geek though and trying to explain that to non-technical users is hard, it shouldn’t really be necessary either. Clicking a link and expecting it to open a new message in the client you use is not unreasonable. So after some searching around I found that the solution is actually very simple. You can set Firefox to use Gmail or other webmail providers for email links in the preferences. It’s 2 second job, and here’s how you do it. Read the rest of this entry »

Spotify is a free and legal service which gives you access to millions of songs. They achieve this by licensing the tracks from record companies in a similar way to radio stations, and they pay for it with advertising. You hear the occasional advert between tracks, and there are also options to pay a monthly subscription for a premium account. When I first heard about it, like many others I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. I also discovered there was no Linux version, so I pretty much gave up on it. That was until recently, when a friend was extoling it’s virtues to me so enthusiastically that I decided it warranted a second look. To be fair to them when you try and download the software on Linux the site does direct you to a wiki page for making it run under WINE. It turns out it’s pretty easy to install and configure on most Linux distributions. So I wanted to share with you how I did it, in the hope it might prove useful to others. Read the rest of this entry »

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Downloading Unetbootin

I realise by now practically everyone in the world has been using USB flash memory sticks for a long time but for some odd reason I’ve never actually bought one myself. Why is this you ask? Well, I suppose mainly because the places where I worked often supplied them to me as part of the job and I also carry my laptop around with me everywhere, so I already have all my data. I’m beginning to worry I’ll need expensive surgery to separate me from that computer when the time comes but that’s for another article. Last week I was asked to install Ubuntu on a netbook for a friend and the most obvious way seemed to be booting from a USB stick, netbooks don’t have optical drives you see so the CD was of little use to me. I bought myself a 4gb Freecom Databar for just a few quid and it was about this time I first tried the niftly little program I’d like to talk to you about today. Read the rest of this entry »

Howdy everyone, just wanted to mark your collective card about the release of the new Gpodder version 0.15.0 today. It looks like a great release and fixes 2 major bugs which have bothered some people for quite a while. Firstly the file naming scheme which we discussed with Thomas Perl (lead developer) on Linux Outlaws back in December. I had found this somewhat annoying myself and I’m pleased to see it sorted, credit to all concerned for that. The other major change is support for resuming of file downloads for those not fortunate enough to be on a fast Internet connection. I’m a big fan of Gpodder as a podcast client on Linux and it’s well worth a look if you haven’t tried it, you can also get a package for Maemo if you have a Nokia Internet tablet. There’s a decent range of packages on the site which can be installed with one click, so what have you got to lose? Nada.

Download Gpodder

Nice to see the application going from strength to strength and here’s to many more releases. Well done to Thomas and the team. Head over to the official Gpodder website and grab yourself a free copy

LXF Issue 116

Just a quick note to let everyone know the guys from Linux Format magazine are giving away free hi-res PDF downloads of this month’s issue for 24 hours only, so follow the link below and get one while you still can!!

http://www.tuxradar.com/content/linux-format-free-download-24-hours-only

I know I’m late in blogging this, at the time of writing there’s about 11 hours left to download your copy. Hope everyone sees this in time. If you are reading this after that time then I’m sorry about that. The news has been going around various LUG mailing lists in the UK since very late last night but I only just got the chance to pass it on properly. Hope you enjoy the magazine, I haven’t read this issue myself but it’s a very good publication in general and I can recommend it. I hope this idea gets the guys some more publicity and ups the readership as I suspect it’s intended to.

Enjoy

Update: I’ve also just been tipped off by the good folks at Chester LUG about a free Linux Starter’s Pack download. It’s on the same site and isn’t time limited, so anyone new to Linux or even just curious about learning more can download that at the following address – http://www.tuxradar.com/linuxstarterpack

Hope it helps someone

Howdy folks. This is just a quick tip for any Rhythmbox users out there who like me get annoyed with gaps between tracks when playing their favourite albums. When you’re listening to an average album it doesn’t really matter but if you listen to a lot of hip hop, mix albums or live shows as I do it can be a nightmare. I’m pretty sure DJ Shadow never intended there to be 2 seconds silence between each of his beautifully joined tracks, other wise why did he bother mixing them so carefully in the first place?! Uggh There are loads of great media players for Linux these days, some people like Banshee, others prefer Amarok, and Songbird is growing at an ever increasing pace, to mention but a few. They all have something to offer but no matter what I try out I always end up coming back to Rhythmbox. It just fits my needs I suppose but it doesn’t play tracks back without gaps which infuriates me sometimes. So I had a look through the settings to see if I could fix the problem when I hit upon this solution, it may already be common knowledge for all I know but just in case it isn’t I thought I’d share it with the class.

Go to Edit > Preferences on the Rhythmbox menu

Opening the Preferences tool

Then go to the Playback tab where you’ll see the following options

The Playback Options Window

Just tick the box which says “Use crossfading backend” and also the one below which says “Crossfade between songs on the same album”. The purpose of the  2 sliders is a bit less obvious. I set the first one to 0.0 seconds because this is the crossfade duration and I don’t actually want it to spend time doing a crossfade, this is not how most albums are designed, I just don’t want gaps between songs. When you buy a mix album they already did the crossfading for you, that’s what you paid for. You can set this to whatever value you want though, probably best to play around and tweak it to suit your needs. The second slider is labeled network buffer size and if I’m honest I’m not totally sure what this does, I think it’s just how much system memory to use for buffering the next track. I tend to set it to about half way and leave it, this works well for me. Again though it might be best to try some different settings out and see what works best for you.

If this is the first time you’ve enabled the crossfading backend you’ll need to close Rhythmbox and reopen it but after that it should all work fine. That’s all there is to it, try it out and see for yourself. I listen to a lot of hip hop albums this way as the tracks often lead directly into one another, it works a treat for me and makes listening so much better. Yeah boyzzzz!!!

Public Enemy

Hope it works as well for you, let me know how you get on. As always comments and opinions are more than welcome,

Peace out (I’m still in hip hop mode)

Dan