Ubuntu

Ubuntu / Web — Comments Off
28
Nov 05

Tell me what you listen to…

Note: this is a repost of an old post from my previous blog(s); it’s probably quite obsolete by now and is included here for archival purposes.

.. and I’ll give you more of that!

This is what Pandora project (a child of Music Genome Projects) seems to do. You tell them the name of one song or artist, they search their database and create a radio station that plays that kind of music. You can fine-tune the selection (“I like it” / “I don’t like it”), and see why the specific song is playing.

Totally cool!

They do this by having a huge database of songs with a lot of attributes which describe them, and I don’t mean just artist / genre info, there’s information about the vocals, the rhythm, the sounds, etc, etc … or so they say. I guess the search is just an attribute matching. Too bad this isn’t more open. Currently they’re using Flash. Dear Santa: This year I’d like an open web service provided by Pandora for searching for similar songs.

A long tradition…

In other news, I’ve recently found out that Ubuntu distribution has a long tradition:

<onkarshinde> reter: Which Ubuntu? 5.04 or 5.10?
<reter> 5.94

That’s eleven years! :-)

Update: Of course, only after I blogged this, came the realization that the fraction represents the month, not the year. So, that’s Ubuntu from Oct 2012. Hey, a time-traveler! I must ask him a bit about lotterry ;-)

Ubuntu — Comments Off
3
Nov 05

Brave new Ubuntu world

Note: this is a repost of an old post from my previous blog(s); it’s probably quite obsolete by now and is included here for archival purposes.

My Ubuntu adventure continues! Since the last post, I’ve upgraded to Breezy proper, and was really impressed with how smooth the thing works. I also began preaching about it to my friends (well, just mentioning it at strategic times, in fact :), and got in an argument with zvrba about whether Ubuntu or Gentoo is better and why (yeah, I know, it’s silly).

One thing that I’ve always held agains Debian, and now Ubuntu, is the principle of “if you need something, download it off the ‘net”. That’s cool if you have broadband Internet connection, but here in Croatia most people are still stuck on 56k modems. Imagine downloading kubuntu-desktop over that ;-) So, I started thinking about compiling a list of mostly-used packages and putting it on DVD. The newly-created Croatian LoCo team liked the idea, so a new project was created: Ubuntu Ningi (this is an unofficial project, but we hope that the Ubuntu powers-that-be will like it).

Check it out, tell us what you think, and if you have Breezy, upload your list of packages and help!

Oh, and as a side-effect, I’ve become a de-facto member of Croatian LoCo team, so now I’m in the process of officially registering with them :)

Ubuntu — Comments Off
30
Sep 05

Breezier than thou

Note: this is a repost of an old post from my previous blog(s); it’s probably quite obsolete by now and is included here for archival purposes.

(I haven’t blogged for a while, because I was too caught up and had little time to tinker with fun things with computers about which I could blog). Yesterday I switched to Breezy Badger (Ubuntu 5.10) preview.

About my Linux distro history: I’ve started with Slackware as my desktop distro (this was around Slack 2.x or 3.0, ..). Since then I’ve briefly touched RH, Debian, Suse and a few others, but always kept returning to Slack, although I’ve preferred Debian for server setup. I also like GNOME; when Slackware decided to drop GNOME support, I started looking for alternatives, and found out about Ubuntu.

Being Debian and Gnome based, I decided to give it a try (I installed Hoary Hedgehog release), and was very satisfied (as I hear it, many ex-Slackers like Ubuntu – is there a pattern?). After a few monts, I’ve learned to totally like it, and was looking forward to the next release, primarly because I followed the GNOME development closely and saw many “exciting new and innovative features” (as PR folks like to say). I asked around and determined to make the upgrade when Breezy proved stable enough.

And it is. Folks, it really works! ;-) After downloading and installing ~500MB of software packages, I half expected it to crash and burn. Due to the lack of time, I finished the upgrade remotely, and rebooted. I expected it to not show online. It did. Then, I got home, logged in, and almost everything worked. The only two issues were:

  • GNOME icons – I had a custom theme, mixing Clearlooks with Industrial GTK+ engine. Something screwed up during upgrade, and I ended up missing many icons. I solved the problem by removing my custom theme (and applying the default), and then recreating the theme (you can do that in theme preferences dialog).
  • Keyboard layout – I use Croatian keyboard layout. After reinstall, US keyboard was forced on me, and gnome-keyboard-properties dialog couldn’t change it (although I did select Croatian by default). Looking on Ubuntu forums, it seemed that precompiled keyboard definition was wrong, or something similar (i have zero knowledge about XKB), so I tried to force update it by manually setting keyboard layout in xorg.conf. Restart X, GNOME figured out that there was mismatch, asked me which keyboard layout I wanted, I selected “GNOME default” (which was set to Croatian), and voila – there’s my layout. Seems like a bit of a black magic, but just because I didn’t want to investigate the thing any further. It worked ;-)

Everything else works perfectly (so far so good … ;-). Also, I had several nice suprises. I use Mono, so I installed mono and MonoDevelop. I fired MD up, selected a new Glade# project, clicked a few times in Glade interface builded, hit F5 and … it “just worked [TM]!”

Now, I know things are supposed to work that way, but there always seems to be some catch. Always I had to tweak a bit more, or dig into terminal, or something. Not now; it just worked. Kudos, Gnome, Ubuntu, Mono & all other devs! Keep up the great work, and thank you for a terrific software!