The Spring Clean and the Wine

Every now and again I'm tempted to have a tidy up: I know that I shouldn't, but I just can't seem to help it.

To help you keep your system at peak running efficiency, Karmic has a Computer Janitor utility (System → Administration → Computer Janitor) which searches your computer and finds all those orphan programs and shared libraries that it thinks that you no longer need. If, like me, you are a trusting soul, the temptation is to simply click the Do Selected Tasks option and think no more about it: however, I urge caution!

This is the second time that I've used the utility only to find subsequently that I couldn't use Wine. I only use Wine to run a single program, Memory-Map and to be honest, it doesn't run particularly well: nonetheless, I have a great wide-screen monitor on my Ubuntu box and it makes for superb viewing of 1:25,000 scale maps. Anyway, long story short: it seemed easier to remove Wine completely and start from scratch than it did to try and repair the damage. I went to the command line and typed:

sudo apt-get remove wine

Typed in my password and waited for the system to do its thing. After removing Wine, I noticed that there was still an entry for the program in the Applications menu although nothing would work when I clicked on the shortcut. It turns out that the standard remove command doesn't remove the Windows applications, you have to remove the ~/wine directory manually.

Open a terminal and type:

rm -rf $HOME/.wine

Once the directory is gone, you can then remove the menu entries and desktop items:

rm -f $HOME/.config/menus/applications-merged/wine*
rm -rf $HOME/.local/share/applications/wine
rm -f $HOME/.local/share/desktop-directories/wine*
rm -f $HOME/.local/share/icons/????_*.xpm

Source: Wine HQ FAQ 5.1

Reinstalling Wine from the Ubuntu software Centre is easy enough and replacing the map viewer from Memory-Map didn't trouble me either but I will think more carefully about spring cleaning in the future!

More Codec Issues

It's funny what you forget when you rebuild your PC. This week I decided to start watching the second series of 24 on DVD. I slipped the first disk into the drive and Movie Player just refused to play!

When I rebuilt the PC, I forgot to install the libdvdcss2 package that allows Ubuntu to play restricted content. Easy enough to fix, open a terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install libdvdread4

You may also need the dvdspu gstreamer plugin:

sudo apt-get install totem-gstreamer



With the plugins loaded, Movie Player played the first episode but wouldn't give me access to the menu nor allow me to jog to the next chapter. I switched to xine and was good to go.

Karmic Cash

It occurred to me that my output to date might suggest that I am anti-Windows, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, I'm quite a fan of Microsoft (or, at least I was) and believe that without Bill Gates computing would remain the purview of corporations and academia.

That said, Microsoft (and the other commercial software vendors) also has its flaws not least the constant and unnecessary product upgrades. My foray into open source has taught me that I can be just as productive as I was in my Windows days but save a small fortune into the bargain. Take a fairly average (non-corporate) project manager's software collection:

	Windows		Ubuntu
Windows 7 (Home Prem/Full)	£149.99	Ubuntu 9.10 LTS	£0.00
Outlook	£99.99	Thunderbird	£0.00
Microsoft Office (Std '07)	£349.99	OpenOffice	£0.00
Microsoft Project (Std '07)	£519.99	OpenProj	£0.00
Microsoft Visio (Std '07)	£229.99	OpenOffice Drawing	£0.00
Internet Explorer	£0.00	Thunderbird	£0.00
Windows Media Player	£0.00	RhythmBox	£0.00
Microsoft Autoroute	£49.99	OpenStreetMap	£0.00
Anti-virus software	c.£50.00	ClamTK Virus Scanner	£0.00

That's a lot of cash!

There are a few caveats:

I know that the OS normally comes bundled with a new PC, but if you want to upgrade it will still cost you money and you're tied to the latest technology. Ubuntu on the other hand runs quite contentedly on a pretty old PC: there are exceptions, as my recent experience with Lucid Lynx demonstrates, but you can run an excellent (and safe) system on a recycled base (saving money & the planet).

I've used Microsoft's Retail List Price and no-one pays full price! However, you will pay quite a lot for most of the more arcane Office products (Project & Visio, especially) and they are not always substantially better than the free alternatives.

Some of the commercial software is just better than the free stuff. Again, I would rate MS Project and Visio as far better products than anything that I've found for free: but the question remains as to whether they are so much better as to justify several hundreds of pounds for each version/upgrade.

There are two other considerations when choosing an operating system: virus infections and footprint. Ubuntu is not as prone to attack as Windows and nor does it need the 16GB of disk space to run!

Do You Scrobble?

One of the fringe benefits of teaching myself Linux by attending the University of Google is that I get to learn all sorts of strange stuff that I didn't know that I didn't know (if you'll excuse the Rumsfeldism). For instance, whilst trying to fix my Zen recently, my research exposed me to the hitherto unknown expression, scobbling.

I know, it sounds like something that you'd catch if you hadn't taken precautions! However, as a verb, it appears to mean collecting data (particularly data regarding someone's taste in music) in order to refine service delivery and/or for social networking purposes. The (rather convoluted) wiki definition goes thus:

To publish one's music-listening habits via software, as counted events when songs or albums are played, to selected internet services in order to track them over time, out of curiosity and/or to make them visible to others.

It seems that it all stems from Last.fm, an Internet radio site that records the details of its listeners' musical tastes to better provide content to its audience.

So, there you have it: when we give up this information willingly it's called freedom (or, scrobbling ;)), if it's taken by stealth, it's called invasion of privacy.

Just trying to learn you all something!

Karma and Zen

Lets' face it, Ubuntu doesn't get everything right and it can even be as bad as Windows at times! OK, I've had one of those weeks: first the printer saga and then Windows nuked my Creative Zen V!

The Zen comes with some Windows sync software which (frankly) is rubbish, but I'm a creature of habit (aka, stupid) and still insist on trying to transfer music to my Zen using Vista. Somehow, connecting my Zen to my Vista machine (something I've done countless times before) triggered some sort of kill command and Windows happily obliged.

Alright, I'm overstating it, but you take the point: when I attached my Zen it was one of my favourite gadgets, when I detached it, it was a brick. It only happened because the postman delivered the new Jackson Browne album yesterday and I wanted to get it straight onto my PMP for those long walks in the Welsh hills.

Fortunately, Google had the solution and, to my palpable relief and benefit to my temper, I was able to revive my Zen. That's the good news!

The bad news is that for some completely insane reason, I decided that Ubuntu must be able to sync my PMP with my music on my network and I spent the next twenty-four hours trying to get it to work. Entertainment is one area of personal computing that I think Windows wins hands-down: leaving aside the (excellent) Windows Media Player, there are all sorts of alternative entertainment packages that beat the Linux offerings into the dust. I'm sorry, but that's just how I see it. That said, I really don't want to be tied to Microsoft just so that I might occasionally update my music, so Ubuntu was going to have to play ball (even if it killed me).

The real irony is, when I plugged my Zen into the USB of my Ubuntu box, Linux saw it immediately and mounted it in Nautilus. Now that's impressive! However, the problem comes with the proprietary formats used by Creative: Ubuntu just can't read them without a little help and you need to install the MTP support packages from Synaptic. Even then, you can't just drag and drop as you would in Windows Media Player because the Zen doesn't add the new files to the library (see the wiki link above for an explanation). I wasn't too phased by this: I still had Rhythmbox to try and, sure enough when I opened Rhythmbox, there was my Zen listed in the side panel waiting patiently for me to do something. Unfortunately, everything I tried to do was fruitless. Dragging tracks to the Zen resulted in the music being added to root and not the Music folder: consequently, the PMP couldn't play them. I tried the command line but with the same result (even using the folder ID numbers rather than, names), I wasted hours trying to get it to work - all to no avail.

So, onto gnomad2. This just didn't see the device at all and I had absolutely no joy in finding a solution. My best guess is that, had I owned a Zen V Plus (rather than the Zen V), I might have made it passed the finishing post, but as it was nothing helped. I even compiled and installed the latest version in the vain hope that it would solve the dreaded "No jukeboxes found on USB bus" error message. The lsusb command listed my Zen, so I know that the USB bus was working ok: but nothing I tried (even a firmware update) would coax gnomad2 to talk to my PMP.

In desperation I finally turned to Amarok. The version from the repository was rubbish: it wouldn't even play music in my Music folder on the PC! It didn't see the Zen (until I realized that I had to unmount (I much prefer "demount", but let's go with the lingo) it first) far less read it. Anyway, as a last resort, I compiled the latest version from source and....

It worked!

I can now send music to my Zen and it loads all the artwork and track listings as it should. It is noteworthy that Amarok still won't play music on my PC, but hey, you can't have everything!

By the way, if you have a bricked Zen, try connecting it to a PC via a USB cable, slide and hold the on switch while you use a pin to reset the device. Worked like a charm for me.

Before you blame the Equipment...

I've had one of those days: my network printer ran out of ink this afternoon (yes, I know!) and I remembered that I had an old hp Photosmart 7660 in a box upstairs.

I was confident that I could just plug the USB cable into the back of my Ubuntu box and get on with life because that's what always happens when I plug anything into Linux! However, after connecting it to the pc and wiping the dust away, I began to suffer an intermittent but persistent fault: after printing a document or test page, the printer would just hang and I would get a strange error message from my hplip toolbox if I tried to send anything else to the spooler. I could restart the printer by unplugging it from the mains and then print a new document, but after that, I couldn't get it to do a thing. I confess that my first reaction was to think that it was a hardware problem and that my trusty printer was destined for the local dump (I mean, recycling centre, of course!).

I've had the printer for years and only replaced it when it refused to play nice with Windows Vista (more accurately, Windows Vista refused to play nice with any of my hardware): it's always produced excellent quality print both for office use and photographs, so I was sorry to see it go. More to the point, it didn't consume huge amounts of resource on my old PC nor require the obscene bloatware that accompanied its replacement. The Photosmart 7660 also has an embedded card reader, so getting it to work would have been a seamless replacement for my inkless All-in-One machine and I really didn't want to run around on a Saturday afternoon buying overpriced cartridges from the local office supplies store. I tried everything that I could think of to get it to work: clearing the print queue, rebooting the PC, restarting hplip, having another coffee...

The only thing that didn't occur to me was to exercise the first lesson of PC maintenance: check the cables!

Yep, the USB connection on the printer was not pushed fully home: a small adjustment later and Ubuntu has once again demonstrated its superiority to anything Microsoft has to offer: much faster, up to date information and beautiful prints!

The only thing wrong with my Ubuntu box is the idiot on the other end of the human interface devices! The lesson (had I bothered to learn it way back when Windows 3.1 was my weapon of choice) is to check the cables and connections whenever you have problems with hardware: perhaps I've learned it this time.

More on the Lynx

I've just downloaded Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and run the Live CD on my Inspiron 530s (running Windows Vista) and it works a charm!

I suspect that much time will be spent playing!