RutSum

Archive for the ‘Open Source is my life’ Category

I’m a little late this time. At the end of May, Mark Kretschmann, the lead developer of Amarok, gave us Amarok fans a little surprise by adding integrated support for playing music videos within the Amarok window. The video looks perfectly integrated thanks to Plasma, and now you can manage you music videos along with your music collection, and not as a separate tab/section. Giving us this new candy, Mark clearly mentions that this video support will remain minimalistic, so that Amarok remains a music player and does not become a video player. Therefore, it won’t be including features like full-screen mode or DVD playback.

Later, in the first week of June, Nikolaj Hald Nielsen, another Amarok developer gave us a bonus gift by adding video podcast support using Mark’s Plasma Video applet. So now, in addition to the awesome music podcast collection that Amarok already has, you can expect your favorite video podcasts to be included. I think they will include options for watching streaming music videos from YouTube too. Lets cross our fingers and hope that Amarok 2 will be worth the wait.

So it happened that I gave away my USB drive to Vishal for a while, because I needed him to give me some of the awesome downloaded stuff that he has on his 250 Gb hard drive. He had a barely working Ubuntu installation on his PC which he was using to survive, because Windows XP had given up on his system after his graphic card died.

Anyway, I told him to remove the junk that has made a permanent place on my USB drive, and wipe it clean before he put in the new stuff. Sadly for me, Vishal is one of those guys who doesn’t use Shift+Delete, but uses Delete and then removes the stuff later on from the trash. A feature of Nautilus is that it doesn’t transfer your trash to the Trash folder, but instead transfers it to a folder called “.Trash-1000″ on the same partition.

Somehow, maybe because he forgot to unmount the drive before he pulled it out, the FAT filesystem on it got corrupted, and I lost control of my own drive. I could see all my old data inside the “.Trash-1000″ folder, but I couldn’t delete it. When I mounted it at my own place, it got mounted as a read-only medium, something like a CD drive. I couldn’t write to it, even as root.

As usual, I barged into the PCLinuxOS support forums. There, first I was told to do an fsck on the drive, which did not work, since it was a FAT filesystem. So I installed dosfstools first.

$ sudo apt-get install dosfstools

I then did a dosfsck on the drive, which returned a long list of errors.

Somebody told me that if I didn’t need the data on the drive, I should nuke it and start afresh. So I formatted the drive with the ext3 filesystem by using -

$ sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1

Well the “.Trash-1000″ folder was apparently gone, but the drive was still getting mounted as read-only for me. This time it was a permissions issue, that is, I could write to it as root, but not as the normal user. To get ownership of the mount point temporarily, I did -

$ sudo chown apoorv /media/disk

But this was not satisfactory as I would have to do this everytime for every new USB drive I mounted. To gain permanent write access, a chmod was necessary.

$ sudo chmod +t /media/

And that was it. Now all USB drives will be mounted in write mode, irrespective of their filesystem.

I recieved a mail from the Amarok promo team. Usually, this mail contains latest updates and news. In this mail, Mark Kretschmann, the founder of the Amarok project, has asked for help from the open source community.

Hi there!

The Amarok team is looking for new capable SVG artists to join our
project. Our goal is to make Amarok 2 really beautiful, but we
currently have a severe lack of artists.

As you can see, we’re trying to make Amarok 2 pretty, but we’re not
quite there yet. There’s lots of room for improvement, and we
programmers simply can’t do proper artwork. So please consider help
making Amarok 2 a really beautiful application!
But please let me get the following things out of the way, to prevent
misunderstandings:
1) You should be somewhat experienced.
2) You should actually like Amarok.
3) We’re looking for artists that stay with our project, but not so
much for one-time contributions. Over the past year we’ve had close to
10 interested artists wanting to help us, but none of them stayed
around!

So, please contact us if you would like to make Amarok 2 really beautiful

With this, he included a screenshot from the latest internal build of Amarok, and indeed, it is looking quite beautiful. Though the grey theme looks a bit Mac-ish. Reminds me of iTunes.

You realize how true shitty phrases such as “necessary evil” are, only when you truly face something like it. Real did only one good thing in the entire time it has been in existence - it created a bunch of media formats (rm, rv, rmvb) that have awesome compression with minimal loss in quality. But after they did that - they gave you good reasons to hate them too - they made sure that their format would remain proprietary and exclusive to them, and tried to force this on Linux users too. They did everything they could to make it difficult for us to use their format without their codecs.

I posted earlier on how RM and RMVB files had managed to make my life miserable, because of their poor compatibility with Linux. I tried to play them with all players out there for Linux, installed all codecs required, but in vain. With Real Player for Linux, I did achieve some success, but it still wasn’t satisfactory.

Apparently this problem was native to PCLinuxOS, and I did recently manage to solve it. The glitch lies in the package win32-codecs. The package installed all the codecs in the directory /usr/lib/win32, while all the players looked for the codecs in the directories /usr/lib/codecs and /usr/lib/real. This was the main problem, and I couldn’t locate it because I assumed that after installing the package, the codecs were available to the players, and the problem lay in the codec itself.

To fix this, all I had to do was create 2 symlinks, /usr/lib/codecs and /usr/lib/real, both of which pointed to /usr/lib/win32. To do this,

$ cd /usr/lib
$ sudo ln -s win32 codecs
$ sudo ln -s win32 real

Another problem that I faced today was that I couldn’t associate KPlayer to open with RMVB on a double click through Konqueror. I tried everything, moving KPlayer to top priority in application preferences, completely removing all other players from the application preference list, checking the “Remember application association for this type of file”, and changing preferences in KDE Control Center.

The reason for this problem was that KDE treated rmvb files as “RealMedia” instead of “RealVideo”, and placed it under that ‘applications’ mimetype rather than the ‘video’ mimetype.

To fix this, I fired up KDE Control Center, went to ‘KDE Components’ and then ‘File Associations’. In the search box, I searched for ‘rm’. Then in the results, under ‘application’, vnd.rn-realmedia, I removed *.rmvb from the ‘Filename Patterns’ box, and added it to the vnd.rn-realvideo, which was also in the search results. Then I moved KPlayer to the top position in the ‘Application Preference Order’ box. A quick session reboot, and all was ok.

Adobe recently released an alpha version of their much-talked about runtime environment, AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), for Linux. I got to try it only yesterday.

Adobe provides the installation package in the form of a binary executable file. The installation was rather simple, I just had to grant execution rights to the binary, using a simple chmod command.

$ chmod +x adobeair_linux_a1_033108.bin

After this the installation was simple, I just had to double click on the installer, and follow the instructions. The installation requires your root password.

They have also provided sample applications which you can install just by double clicking on the *.air files, and the launch using their corresponding shortcuts. I found the Fresh and RoadFinder to be interesting utilities and decided to try them out.



Fresh

The first thing that you notice is the shiny light blue interface, which is a clear rip-off from Microsoft’s Ribbon interface. Fresh is an RSS reader, so the first feature you would use in an RSS reader would be the addition or import of your feeds. Fresh has an automatic feed discovery service, which is a must for a news reader. The discovery service is not as efficient as my current RSS reader, Liferea.

Another disappointment was the already existing tons of feeds which I had to delete manually. I want new applications to be wiped clean, and not force their own stuff on me.

The actions take place with stupid and unnecessary visual transitions, such as fade-in and fade-out, which are not even smooth, instead they make the application slow and laggy. The reason why I chose Liferea as a news reader was that it presented me my news in a readable manner, and was snappy and blazingly fast. Fresh is sore on the eyes, and is high on memory usage, so a complete no-no.

RoadFinder

RoadFinder brings Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps to your desktop, by combining them in a simple widget-like, lightweight application. It can prove to be quite useful for guys who actually use Google or Yahoo! Maps extensively, but for people like me, it is nothing more than a toy.

One thing that I noticed because of RoadFinder was that Google Maps kick the shit out of Yahoo! Maps, and a search for the only man-made thing visible from the Moon, the Great Wall of China, made my point clear.

Twhirl

Though these two applications worked just fine for me, but I had an urge to try out applications that were designed for Adobe AIR for Windows and Mac OS X. So I tried out Twhirl, a popular twitter-ing application.

The installation was same as the previous two applications, but a thing was missing - the installer did not create a shortcut in KMenu for launching the application, which the previous two applications did. This shows that the apps in the ’sample apps’ section have been modified suitably to recognize the KMenu and menus from other popular desktop environments from Linux, such as GNOME and Xfce.

I launched the application from the installation directory, and it worked fine, except for some disk permission issues, perhaps. Features include a customisable visual interface and uploading pictures directly to twitpic. The remember password feature and support for Jaiku did not work, even after I entered my Jaiku API key instead of my password, as mentioned in the Jaiku FAQs.

     

Though AIR is a rage these days, I do not see any future for it in Linux or any mainstream operating system, primarily because it does not integrate with your desktop as much as a native application would do, and thus it would remain a playing tool rather than a mainstream runtime.