Robert Small, The blog thereof.

So, you paid your money, bought a CD, and installed a cuddly Koala onto your computer. However, you feel it’s not doing everything you wanted a ball of furry FOSS to do.

You feel a need to make Ubuntu 9.10 do more for you. To make your Karmic Koala climb it’s tree. So, here I am, your Ubuntu zoo keeper to give you some tips.

The first thing to realise is that there are some changes, one which makes me particularly happy is that you can add sources by ‘ppa lines’. Simply put you can change where Ubuntu gets it’s software with shorter lines. Call me a lazy belly dancer and beat me with a mop but this makes me happy.

See? Easy as that.

Another big thing for me was the new ATI graphics driver for my HP Pavillion DV7 2050ea and it’s ATI M92 (Mobility Radeon 4500 series, 4530). They seem to work very well which makes me extremely happy. I’ve simply used jockey (the ‘Hardware Drivers’ item in ‘System > Administration’) to adjust it. One note must be made. The kernel you use can cause issues with the kernel module being compiled. I advise keeping your old kernels that work whenever you change/recompile.

Without optimisation this already has given me a massive performance boost. I can now run XBMC (which I will discuss later).

Moving on from the new drivers there are a few other updates. There’s a new Firefox which should make everyone happy, and Empathy has taken over from Pidgin. I’m not quite sure how I feel about this to be honest, over the last few years I’ve switched almost completely to IRC (using XChat). I do however use Bonjour to talk to people on the same network occasionally and Empathy seems to handle this reasonably well.

So, once you’ve run Jockey to get all your hardware working well there are some programs I would recommend and a few things to do to get yourself up and running.

A music player

One of the most important things in modern computer usage is playing music. Recently I’d been enjoying Songbird, unfortunately when I’d first installed Ubuntu 9.10 it caused an error. While looking at alternatives I found Banshee which offers me something else.

Songbird

When first trying Songbird I was presented with two problems:

1. GetDeb didn’t have a copy.
2. When I downloaded the source it failed to start with the following error:
   ././songbird-bin: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/gst-0.10/gst/_gst.so: undefined symbol: gst_task_pool_get_type
   Could not initialize GStreamer: Error re-scanning registry , child terminated by signal

However, there is a usable solution. Firstly download from http://www.getsongbird.com/download/, then go into the ‘lib’ folder and delete everything starting with libgst. Once you’ve done this it should start perfectly. There are some great plug-ins and cool themes.

Now GetDeb has a copy, but if it doesn’t work for you that might be a helpful solution.

Rhythmbox

Install: sudo apt-get install rhythmbox

This is a feature full alternative to the original media players. Until I discovered the fix for Songbird I used Rhythmbox and I found it very usable. I personally don’t like it as much as Songbird. It should be installed by default, if not see above.

Banshee

APT line: ppa:banshee-team/ppa
Install: sudo apt-get install banshee

This media player is much more like what I like. It provides a fair few features and if you haven’t used it you should give it a shot. Banshee gives excellent iPod/Android/RockBox synchronisation and I’m sure it provides more syncing but I don’t have any more devices to try. I have noticed a few small gaps between playback but I know that the Banshee team are working on gap-less playback support and I’m excited to see it.

A media centre

There are several options for this. I personally love XBMC, others swear by Moovidia and some by MythTV.

XBMC

I love XBMC, I run it on my dad’s media centre and it’s always done me really well.

Moovidia

I’ve recently tried Moovidia, it’s nice but it doesn’t seem to offer anything to draw me away from XBMC, however I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to have a good interface to their music, films and TV shows.

Development Environment

There are two development environments that I really like, both of them are built with Java and have support for multiple languages out of the box.

Eclipse

Install: apt-get install eclipse

I’ve always used Eclipse and PyDev for Python development, I’m not sure if I could change if I had to. One of my first things to do was to install eclipse. I also use it for Java/Android development, all in all it’s a great IDE.

NetBeans

Install: apt-get install netbeans

NetBeans seems to be primarily for web development, I use it for PHP (http://www.v8d.org/qdb) and I know other people who use it for HTML, Java, JavaScript and etcetera. One feature I especially like is that it can upload my edits immediately after I finish them.

Video Playback

Presumably you’re going to install all the mediabuntu goodies so you can play lots of different formats.

SMPlayer

Install: apt-get install smplayer

This is now the only video player I use for desktop applications. It provides massive format support from MPlayer, bookmarking, and unbelievable reconfigurability.

Audio Tagging

Music Brains Picard

Install: apt-get install picard

Picard is to us music lovers as air is to you other people. It tags music from a massive database and if you have something it doesn’t then you can submit it for others to be able to tag.

TV Shows

If you don’t have your own PVR to provide XBMC with content then you should certainly consider getting something like Hulu desktop. It’s in their labs section and available for Linux

Hulu Desktop

Install: Follow the instructions here

In closing

There are so many more applications out there, you’ll never find them all or use them all. If you want something first search the repo’s (Synaptic or whatever you use), then progress to GetDeb and Google. However, I will give you some suggestions for other applications you may be interested in.

• VLC – This used to be my favourite video player, it uses a brilliant play engine and manages to cope with almost any form of network stream.
• digiKam – Best. Photo. Management. Ever. (IMNSHO)
• K3b – Excellent, fast and easy CD/DVD burning/cloning/creation/decryption/etcetera.
• Audacity – Very good linear audio editor with great plug-ins.
• Handbrake – Video en/de/transcoder.
• soundKonverter – Conversion from and to various audio formats.
• Kate – Excellent text editor.

I’m sorry this wasn’t posted sooner, I started it and then things happened like marriage and Christmas. Talking of which, Happy New Year to all!

Kind regards, Robert.