Tag Archive for 'karmic'

Amarok 2.3.0 “Clear Light” Is Beautiful

Published on March 17, 2010 in Tech. 2 Comments

The latest edition of Amarok is too good. I was using 2.2.0 prior to this one. The new amarok has a couple of features which makes the experience even more enriching.

The 2.3.0 sees a new toolbar. The left edge has pause or play button, the right end has a sound control and the remaining width is made up of the progress bar. Above the progress bar in the middle is shown the details of the song being played currently. To either side of it are songs before/after this one, serving the purpose of jumping to next/previous song. The beauty of this design is that if you unlock your layout, remove the media sources, playlist and context panels, then you are only left with the toolbar. Resize the window to cover just the space needed for the toolbar. Now you have got an ipod like player. Flick above the progress bar to go to the next/previous song. This is one cool feature. You can have a look at it from this video:

Amarok New Toolbar In Action

Another feature I liked was the bookmarking of timeline for a given song. If there is an awesome guitar solo that you like in a particular song, you can bookmark that point and play it from there whenever you want to. This feature has been in Amarok for quite a while now.

But installing Amarok 2.3.0 in Ubuntu needed more than just apt-get install amarok. The default amarok package available in the Ubuntu 9.10 repositories is that of 2.2.0. To install 2.3.0 you need to follow the steps mentioned here:

Installing Amarok 2.3.0 in Ubuntu

But there was a problem with the installation on my computer. The application would crash every time I opened it. The application would just not start up. A few searches and I found that the info applet was causing the application to crash because of some fault with qt [read this comment]. The simplest solution is to remove the info applet. To do that, open the ~/.kde/share/config/amarok_homerc file and remove the info applet from plugins. The application should start now.

Another problem I encountered was that my local collections was not being displayed or stored. It would scan the files alright, but then it would not add them to the collections list. And if you do not have the collection added to amarok, it takes away half the fun. You need them for dynamic playlist and all.

Again googling around and I found the solution. Here is the link to the forum where this topic has been discussed:

Amarok Not Recognizing Media

For me just installing the below mentioned packages did the trick:

libhtml-template-perl (2.9-1)
mysql-server (5.1.41-3ubuntu6)
mysql-server-5.1 (5.1.41-3ubuntu6)
mysql-server-core-5.1 (5.1.41-3ubuntu6)

Well, I have my Amarok 2.3.0 running now, and am liking it already. Yay !!

But a couple of things are not working for me. They are:

  • I am not getting the mood toolbar even though I have enabled it from the options.
  • I have enabled the display tooltip for songs options, but do not see the tooltip song description.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Adding Startup And Shutdown Scripts in Ubuntu

Published on February 17, 2010 in Tech. 1 Comment

I have my Ubuntu installed in Virtual Box. The very first thing that I needed to do was to setup my Ubuntu to recognize Windows drives. I setup two bash scripts to run at startup and shutdown. The following is what I have done.

anu@sw:/etc/init.d$ sudo vi vboxStartup

#!/bin/bash

# Mount the Win virtual drives - MyDocument, CShared, PidginWin
sudo mount -t vboxsf MyDocuments /mnt/MyDocuments
sudo mount -t vboxsf CShared /mnt/CShared
sudo mount -t vboxsf PidginWin /mnt/PidginWin

# Sync the files from PidginWin/logs to purple/logs
sudo rsync -azv /mnt/PidginWin/logs/ /home/anu/.purple/logs/

anu@sw:/etc/init.d$ sudo chmod +x vboxStartup
anu@sw:/etc/init.d$ sudo update-rc.d vboxStartup defaults

This way my ubuntu pidgin logs are in sync with my windows pidgin logs. Next, I also wanted my Windows pidgin logs to get sync with the Ubuntu pidgin logs whenever I log off. So I create yet another script

anu@sw:/etc/init.d$ sudo vi vboxShutdown

#!/bin/bash

echo "Anuvrat Shutdown Script -- vbox"

# Resync files from purple/logs/ to PidginWin/logs/
sudo rsync -azv /home/anu/.purple/logs/ /mnt/PidginWin/logs/

anu@sw:/etc/init.d$ sudo chmod +x vboxShutdown
anu@sw:/etc/init.d$ sudo update-rc.d vboxShutdown start 80 0 6 .

The funny thing though is that I haven’t yet tested it. I hope it works.

Oh crap! It did not run at startup. Need to check.

Popularity: 36% [?]