John's Linux and Computer Stuff Blog

ATI/AMD Graphics and Gnome Shell

2012-02-11T00:38:00.004-08:00

Almost a year ago I first tried the Gnome 3 Desktop. I
have 3 computers to experiment with. 2 with AMD/ATI graphics
one with a 3200 Raedon graphics chip another with a 4200
Radeon and one with an older Nvidia Geforce 4 chipset. All of
these work well with Linux including 3D graphics, However;
I wasn't able to find a single Live evaluation disk of Linux
with the Gnome 3 desktop that actually worked with Gnome
shell. While I could install most of the versions I tried I
found myself in a bit of a catch 22. I didn't want to install
it until I tried it and couldn't get it to work correctly
unless I installed it.

FINALLY, after almost a year I found a live evaluation version of

gnome 3 that could run proper 3D graphics and run Gnome Shell.
Sabayon version 8 will correctly run from a Live evaluation disk
with my ATI/AMD graphics chips.

So what are my Impressions of the new desktop? When
Gnome 3 first came out I wrote an article about gnome 3
in which I said that I wasn't really impressed, more than
anything I didn't like the fact that it needed 3D graphics
to function properly and that I tried it with 2 of the
most supported 3D graphics chips with Linux and couldn't get
it to work properly. Without 3D graphics working Gnome 3
feels a lot like Gnome 2.x but missing much of the
personalization available to the older desktop.

Upon trying Gnome3 with it working properly(mostly it still
has a few glitches) I'm not sure of how I feel towards it.
It has is good points, It definitely is a very eye pleasing
desktop with lots of effects. Even though its a bit of a
resource hog, if run on the right hardware it is snappy
and quick. It gives the Linux desktop more of its own
personal identity. It also may be a little easier to
customize with the following resources.

https://extensions.gnome.org/

and

http://gnome-look.org/

http://live.gnome.org/GnomeTweakTool

On the bad side, Gnome 3 seems less intuitive

than the older version. When using the
activities menu and pulling up a program seeing
all of the applications at once until clicking on a
sub category is just cluttered. Having system
administration tools glopped together with regular
programs could also cause issues with kids or
inexperienced users. Having huge Icons all over
the desktop when the program manager is open
to me is just distracting. I also find the window
switching though very neat to watch but a bit
clunky to use.

One of the big Issues I had when I first tried

Gnome 3 is I couldn't put the widgets that I
wanted upon the desktop. And while Gnome 3
put several widgets and controls automatically
some of the ones I wanted for power management,
CPU temp, and battery management either
weren't available or just didn't work the way
I wanted them to, Fortunately now Gnome
3 has all the control widgets I need and want
and they are easy enough to install. I can
use a number of these widgets and
customization's together with a bit of tweaking
to get a more Gnome 2.x feel.

see:

https://extensions.gnome.org/

for more on this.

So What are my thoughts on Gnome 3 now that I have it

working properly and have used it for a few days. Well

the verdict is still out. It has some neat features and lots

of eye candy but I still think I like the old Gnome 2.x and

XFCE especially XFCE 4.8.0 better. I like it better than KDE

4.0 when it fist came out but I like KDE at this time better

than I do Gnome 3 but I think when Gnome 3 has matured

to the place where KDE is now it will surpass KDE.

For now I'm still sticking with XFCE but I'm

keeping my eye on the new Gnome 3 desktop. while it still

has some issues that I think need working out it does have

promise.

-----------------------------------------------------------

I have created an index page for all my posts. Most of my
posts are centered around Desktop Linux and using
Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

Also here is my original post from a year ago on Gnome 3

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2011/04/gnome-3-not-crazy-about-it-so-far.html

Linux, Windows, and a Canon Pixima MG5220

2012-02-07T23:31:00.006-08:00

Recently, I purchased a Canon Pixima MG5220 series printer.
Initially, I was a little reluctant to buy a Canon due to
Canon not having the best compatibility with Linux.
I originally was looking at the HP Envy series but in one
of the reviews I read it recommended the Canon Pixima
MG5220 as an alternative. The article I read said the
Canon offered similar features and same modern style
for about half the cost. Which I found to be true The canon
was about half the cost of the HP. One big difference between
the Canon and the HP printer is the Canon is about twice the
height of the HP though but still has a nice sleek profile.

Upon getting the printer home and un-boxing it. The
printer is heavily packed and comes with a pretty extensive
user manual. Several steps need to be completed before
using the printer. BE SURE TO READ AND FOLLOW THE
INSTRUCTIONS when setting up this printer. Their are
numerous steps to get this printer up and running the
first time. Their is also additional instructions for setting
up WIFI. If the printer is used with WIFI it needs to be setup
through a router or an access point and can not do ad-hoc
connections. The printers WIFI connection will also needs
to be activated from the printers menu.

Setting the printer with Windows is pretty easy. I just ran the
setup disk (with an administrator account.) and followed the
wizard. The instructions mentioned something about copying
a network profile to the printer. I didn't do this step and the
printer works just fine. If using the printer through
a WIFI network the printer will need to be setup from the
printers menu first.

Upon install 4 icons for printing are setup upon the desktop
to help manage printer including a scanning program. For
windows scanning will even work via the wireless connection.

For Linux the printer works just fine. To get the printer to
work with Linux the following drivers need to be downloaded

http://support-au.canon.com.au/contents/AU/EN/0100301702.html

for printing and

http://support-au.canon.com.au/contents/AU/EN/0100303002.html

for scanning

Note: the files provided by Canon are Deb files if using
RPM or pacman the files will need to be converted.

Upon downloading the files they will need to be extracted
these files consist of an install shell script and a folder of
deb files. For me using Linux Mint 9.0 the install.sh file
didn't work but I was able to install the necessary files
by just running gdebi or USC with the deb files for my system
installing the common.deb file first then the specific
deb file for this printer. Once the files were installed
I went into system administration printers and installed
the printer as I would any other printer.

For scanning common utilities like sane and simple
scan did not detect the scanner. Linux can still use
the scanner via the software installed by Canon.
Scangear from Canon can be run as a Gimp plug-in
or as a stand alone program by typing scangearmp.

For WIFi access for Linux users the printer works
just fine, however; the scanner wasn't detected via
WIFI and needs a USB connection. (might be able
to build a pipe shell script looking into it)

For Linux users the card reader works just fine and
media will show up on the desktop
(via USB connection).

All in all, the printer seems to work well with
both operating sytems and I am happy with it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
have created an index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

note: The spell check Spells Canon the brand as cannon as it would be spelled for
artillery. The spell check replaced Canon with cannon. This error has been fixed
on this post 2/15/2012.

Thanks,

John

Linux Games Revisited

2012-02-02T21:48:00.000-08:00

Many users of Windows prefer it because of its performance
with Games. Windows does have many advantages, DirectX 11
Graphics and tons of commercial support. For this reason gamers
often think of Windows as the premier gaming platform.

While Windows is seen as the premier gaming platform
Linux shouldn't be overlooked. Linux may not have every big
commercial game but it has tons of potential as a game platform.
There are tons of great games for Linux. Many of these are unusual
indie games that don't fit with the norm. Many Linux games have GL
graphics and many other features of some of the most sophisticated
modern games. Linux can also emulate just about every older game
system and a number of older computer systems.

There are basically 5 different ways to play games on Linux. When all
of these methods are used together thousands of games can be run on
Linux. from some of the very first games like Brezerk, and Pong to some
of the most modern games like Doom3, Quake, Prey, Pnumbra and others.

Here are the Five ways to run tons of great games on linux:

1. Native Games

Linux has tons of great native games. Some of these offer all the modern
bells and whistles of the most sophisticated modern games. Others
are more like retro games. there are tons of great freebies that are
distributed under the GNU/GPL license
along with an ever growing selection of commercial games.

For more info see:

http://happypenguin.org/

http://www.penguspy.com/

http://www.lgdb.org/

http://icculus.org/lgfaq/gamelist.php

2. Wine

Wine is an application layer that allows Linux run numerous
Games and applications originally created to run on Windows.
Some cool games that Ive personally ran on Linux via Wine are
Prey, Half Life, Dues Ex, Need For Speed Carbon, Star Wars
Jedi Academy, Star Wars Rouge Jedi among others. Wine can even
run games designed for Windows that modern versions of Windows
may no still no longer run. This had led some people to suggest
Linux with Wine may actually run more games and applications
than Modern versions of Windows.

One issue new users of Wine experience is that upon
install Wine is only minimally compatible with Windows programs.
This is because Wine only comes as a very basic open source
framework. Layers like DirectX, Java and others that are commercial
property of Microsoft,Oracle and other companies. While most
of these can be easily downloaded and installed for free via the
Internet they are not open source and are commercially licensed
and can't be bundled with Wine.

In the old days, Installing all the extras needed to run programs well
with Wine was a tedious and technical process. Now it is much easier
to install the extras needed. Tools like Winetricks, Play on Linux, and
Vineyard make this much easier.

For more info on Wine see:

http://www.winehq.org/

http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks

http://www.playonlinux.com/en/

http://vineyardproject.org/

http://www.gog.com/

3. Emulation

Linux has emulators for most older computer systems and game systems.
Emulation can be controversial. Are older games and
applications qualified as abandon-ware, shareware, or free-ware or are
using them with emulators a type of piracy? Should one just get games
for a few days, only get copies of games already purchased or games
no longer being supported or marketed? Is using older games piracy
or a way of preserving and keeping the great creativity of older games
that may of been forgotten with the advent of new technology?
Are emulators just tools for people to play old games or do they
offer a simpler easier to use more familiar environment
for programmers and developers for new games and applications?

Emulation does its gray areas. In this article I just want to talk about the
availability and function of emulators. The how, when, and why emulators
are used are completely up to their users.

For more info on emulators checkout:

http://linuxemu.retrofaction.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Linux_emulation_software

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&sTitle=Browse%20Applications&sOrderBy=appName&bAscending=true

4. Web based games

With the progression of Flash, HTML 5 and Java many games can be run from
the Internet Right out of the users favorite browser. Most of these games
are platform independent. There are thousands of web based games available
on the Internet.

For more info see:

http://www.kongregate.com/

http://www.y8.com/

http://www.atari.com/

5. virtualization

Linux can run other Operating Systems within itself. You can easily
run Windows and others within Linux. Virtualbox and Qemu can
create an environment within Linux that creates a fake x86 computer.
While this environment is generally slower than running natively and
may not support all hardware it does have its advantages.
such as setting up a virtual machine for games or business software
that is cut off from the Internet and less likely to get contaminated
by viruses and other security threats. Multiple versions of
Windows, Linux, Be, ect can be run on the same computer and
backups can be made of drive images in seconds.

For more info see:

https://www.virtualbox.org/

http://wiki.qemu.org/Main_Page

http://virtualboximages.com/

https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=2525

With these resources most Linux enthusiast should be able to
run thousands of games on their Linux machines. I believe once
users learn what resources Linux has to run games and how to
use them they will find that the Linux Gaming experience
can be as good as any other platform.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
have created an index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note: I decided to remove my original post "Gaming in Linux" Created in 2009
upon creating this entry as most of the information therein had become dated.

SOPA Stop Online Public Areas

2012-01-18T10:30:00.000-08:00

OK, the bill is actually called the Stop Online Piracy Act. But I'm
afraid it will become the latter. This bill worries me in the way
it could affect public forums like Youtube, Vimeo, Blogspot, Wiki
and others that don't have the ability to monitor all of their content.
I worry about it hitting bloggers, You-tubers, pod-casters and others
that may unwittedly put something on their blogs or video productions,
music, etc that may be a little beyond fair use but are in no way true
piracy. I also don't believe that this bill will not stop or even slow down
on-line piracy as no other laws in the past have ever really made much
of a dent into on-line piracy while it could create huge problems
for various public on-line forums.

Index

2012-01-09T19:14:00.002-08:00

After doing numerous post for the last three years I've generated
quite a bit of content. Here is a basic index of articles and posts
for this blog.

2/11/2012

ATI/AMD Graphics and Gnome Shell. Finally, after almost a year
I've found a live evaluation version of Gnome 3 that works with
my Raedon graphics chip to allow it to work properly with Gnome
shell.

2/8/2012
Linux,Windows and a Canon Pixima MG5220 -- Initial impressions
of my new printer :)

2/2/2012
Linux games Revisited a Nice list of game resources for Linux

1/18/2012
SOPA Stop On-line Public areas. My personal concerns with
the Stop On-line Piracy Act.
1/9/2012
Happy New Year 2012 - Just a basic post thanking people for
using the blog in the last year. Some info on page updates
getting rid of old dated posts.

12/5/2011
Xubuntu 11.04 New Install. Install of Ubuntu 11.04 with some
post install tweaks for Multimedia use

11/29/2011
ManDVD Rocks - Short summary of ManDVD DVD authoring software.

11/2/2011
Build Your Own Menu for Touchscreens With Xfce. Create a custom
program launcher menu with the file manager in Xfce.

10/31/2011
Another Pulse Audio Sound Fix - An article describing how to
permanently Disable and remove Pulse Audio form most Ubuntu
based distros with minimal problems.

10/14/2011
Xubuntu 11.04 More Xfce - My first install and impressions of
Xubuntu 11.04.

10/4/2011
Linux mint 11 on Antique Computer - New Linux Old hardware.

9/2/2011
Xfce Desktop Becoming My Favorite. Just an opinion post on Xfce.

9/2/2011
Aurora Rocks - Test drive of the Aurora web browser.

9/2/2011
Fun with Dosbox - Some info on emulation of older DOS
programs and games. Information on a couple of nice
front ends for DOS.

5/27/2011
Unity Linux Doesn't Seem to Use Unity. A little about Unity
Linux which uses the innovative Enlightenment desktop.

5/26/2011
Thoughts on Unity. My first experience with Ubuntu's Unity desktop.

5/7/2011
No Compositing Debian Linux Part 1 @ 2
An account of my installation of Debian Linux on a Portable and getting
different things working like power management, 3D graphics, etc.

4/20/2011
Linux Mint Xfce 201104 The Gnome 3 Alternative. Heavily customized
Linux mint Xfce with lots of eye candy.

4/19/2011
Gnome 3 Not Crazy About It So Far. First impressions of Gnome 3.

4/15/2011
To Turk or Not to Turk That is The Question. My experience turking
on Amazon.

2/13/2011
Here a Few Great Pictures of The Great Smokey Mountains - Just some
cool pictures of my area I thought make nice wallpapers.

2/4/2011
Video Conversion Using WinFF. Basic transcoding.

1/20/2011
Cannon Vixia HF R100 Windows and Linux. First impressions of my
video camera.

1/15/2011
Video Conversion Front Ends for Most Portable Media Players. Info
on how to convert video files for a variety of mp4/mp4 players.

1/5/2011
Pulse Audio Scripts to Turn Pulse Audio on and Off.

1/1/2011
Eureka Ive Finally Found a Sound Fix for Pulse Audio - Found info
on disabling and enabling Pulse Audio.

1/1/2011
Happy New Year 2011. Just wishing everyone a happy new year.

12/1/2010
Menu for Songbird 1.8.0. Menu to add numerous web based multimedia
resources to Songbird.

11/29/2010
Igloo Cleaning Some basic Housekeeping. Use of Bleachbit, Chrootkit,
Klamav, and methods to get rid of Flash Cookies.

1/8/2010
Gnome Themes Advanced - How to make custom themes for Gnome 2.3.x.

10/28/2010
Project Clairette the Grapes of Wine. My personal attempt to create
something similar to Vineyard.

10/11/2010
Libre Office on a Debian Based Computer Native and With Wine.
Post showing a couple of different methods for installing Libre
Office and some great screen-shots.

9/30/2010
Installing Windows 7 a Linux Users Perspective. A post describing my
experience installing Windows 7 on a new PC

9/30/2010
My Gateway NV 52 4u with Linux Mint Isadora Compatibility Chart.

9/26/2010
Linux Mint Isadora Advanced Configurations Part 3 - Post install
tweaks and configuration for the portable.

9/26/2010
Linux Mint Isadora Complete Setup With My Gateway NV 52 4u - Part1 Part2

9/10/10
More Fun With MIDI keyboards and Linux. Just having fun with some
of the music creation software for Linux with my new Keyboard.

9/7/2010
Linux Mint 9 and a Casio Wk 500 - first impressions of the music keyboard
and use with Linux.

8/25/2010
To Pulse Audio or Not to Pulse Audio That is The Question - The
continuing saga of my Love/hate relationship with Pulse Audio.

8/5/2010
Xfce Rocks - first impressions of Xfce

6/6/2010
Songbird 1.2.0 Revisited - Utilization of songbird and some basics on
how to modify it.

5/3/2010
Microphone Revisited - The fight with Pulse Audio and my sound-card
continues.

4/20/2010
The build - Configuring Advanced - Installing Linux Mint on My desktop - My Custom
Home PC Build Using Linux Mint.

3/27/2010
Getting Boxee. Installing and using Boxee media center software on Linux.

2/18/2010
Linux Mint With The NV touch - Using Linux to add video and audio files to
my phone.

2/16/2009
Getting Minty - First install of Linux Mint

2/16/2009
Linux on a Pen Drive. My experience putting Linux on a pen drive
and using it.

9/22/2009
Fun with Graphics Installing Proprietary Graphics for ATI/AMD on Ubuntu
This post is dated but I sill get a number of hits on it for people still using
older versions of Ubuntu.

9/16/2009
Play Rip Burn Anything With Linux- Different software and resources to handle
multimedia within Linux -- somewhat dated hope to have a new post on this
in the next couple of weeks.

9/14/2009
My New (now 3 years old) Gatyeway NV52 4u with Ubuntu Linux 9.04
The post that started it all and one of my most popular post. I feel
this post is dated but its still one of my most visited posts.

Happy new year

2012-01-09T19:01:00.000-08:00

I want to wish everyone a happy new year. I hope this page has been
useful and entertaining over the last year. I hope that my blog and
the Linux desktop continue to draw interest and grow.

For the start of this year I want to do some housekeeping the
following post have been removed from this blog

Easily Create a Metro Type Menu for Linux. _Just no real interest

Cool Halloween Spoof - Another post that didn't get any real attention.

Super Easy Gnome Shell Type menu for gnome 2.3.x. No interest really
not as functional as gnome shell.

Gen 5 Ipod Blues - dated

Songbird Blues - dated

File Transfer - dated

Managing Getting and Discovering New Music - dated

Better Flashplayer With 64 bit Editions - Dated

Linux Mint 9 without Pulse Audio - Much easier ways to remove/disable Pulse Audio
in later posts.

Customizing the Linux Desktop - Better resources posted later.

Getting Winey - Better post later.

I have created an index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

Xubuntu 11.04 New Install

2011-12-05T00:58:00.001-08:00

My Xubuntu desktop after a few tweaks. Ive
removed the Mac-ish dock from the bottom
and added another panel which I added a
Window bottom menu and desktop switcher.
I also added my favorite apps to the top panel
and various system monitoring and mangement
widgets. With Xubuntu 4.8.0 this isn't much
different from Gnome 2.x

see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2010/11/gnome-themes-advanced.html

Xfce isn't exactly the same but the gist is basically the same.

I recently Decided to Change Distos again on my Portable. If you've
read some of my previous post, this is my 4th time distro hopping.
Recently, I installed Debian Linux on My portable and everything
worked just fine and I used it for almost a year. Despite this I've
really been tempted by Xubuntu 11.04 after installing it on an older
computer I have setup for some of my projects. There is several things
I like about Xubuntu over my Debian install. First of all Xubuntu uses
XFCE 4.8.0 which is easier to configure and use as opposed to the
Debian 4.6.x version. Second, the performance seems to be much
better with Xubuntu especially with wireless networking. Lastly,
one of the main reasons I installed the Debian version originally is that
Debian doesn't need Pulse Audio. With the install of Xububuntu on my older
computer I found the post Elegantly Disabling Pulse Audio here:

http://www.jeffsplace.net/node/12

Installation:

Ok, for the install, I'm not going into a great deal of detail about the

install. When I install Linux usually I create a drive for all my personal stuff,
Pictures, music, games, etc. I usually call this disk 1 on my systems.
This makes it easy to reinstall a new distro without having to re-copy all
my personal stuff back to the drive. This partition I left intact. The rest of the
drive system I reformated to use with Xubuntu. When naming the filesystem,
Unfortunately, I couldn't put in my own names with Xubuntu so I'm calling disk 1
/srv. This is normally a place set aside for server data but will work fine for my
purposes.

Post Install:

After installing Xubuntu I want to do a few tweaks to get it up and

running properly with my system. first of all I want to install the
proprietary AMD/ATI drivers for my graphics card. Newer
versions of Ubuntu come with Open source drivers for 3D
acceleration for AMD/ATI, Nvidia and Intel chipsets. As shown
below 3D graphics are working right out of the box but after installing
the proprietary drivers the performance is much better.

It's simple to install the drivers from AMD/ATI,
Just run the installer from the Xfce Menu. The
computer will need to be reset after the drivers are
installed.

As GLX Gears shows there is a definite performance
increase.

After installing the graphics drivers there are a few other
tweaks I want to do to get the system up to Its best performance.

Some Xubuntu or Xfce users may see a lag when they first run the
Thunar file manager. Originally, I had this problem on my old
computer and thought it might be a power management problem
with the older PATA drives the system uses. When I was playing
around with the CD-ROM version of Xubuntu on my newer computer
I found it had the same problem. The cause of this wasn't what I
expected. Its actually caused by Thunar not initializing completely
before it tries to find network shares. this can be fixed by
changing

/usr/share/gvfs/mounts/network.mount

automount variable to false

Next I wanted to disable Pulse Audio. Personally I found that Linux

works much better without it.

So I decided to disable it using this post:

http://www.jeffsplace.net/node/12

Next I decided to install The proprietary codecs and such for

Xubuntu.

This post is the easiest way I've seen to do this.

see:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats

Personal software and preferences after getting
the basics the way I want them.

After getting the basics up and running I want to re install the software
for the system. most of the software I can just use apt-get install.
This is the quickest way to install multiple programs. For some
of the more complex software packages like Libre Office that has
multiple parts Synaptic Package manager and Ubuntu Software
Center work well. For a few packages ,Picasa, ManDVD, and PCSXR that
aren't available through the repositories I went to the developers web sites
and downloaded the programs in deb format. Once I downloaded the
programs I used the Ubuntu software center to install them. Ubuntu
Software Center had no problems installing the files with dependencies.

Songbird 1.2.0

One package I personally enjoy using is Songbird. Although I prefer the 1.2.0
version over the newer version. I can do much more with the old version with
plugins, addons, and personally created menus and such. Unfortunately the
1.2.0 version is getting harder to find. Here is a link to the old
songbird 1.2.0.

http://www.mozillaes.org/foros/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=28831

This file downloads as a tar.gz file. to use this file it will need to be
extracted. The program will run fine from the extracted directory
when the Songbird executable script is run within the directory

cd /home/user/Songbird

./songbird

But for this system I want to put in the regular directory structure under
user. To do this open Thunar in stupid user. Then copy the songbird folder
to /usr/local/ then create a link of the songbird launcher file and copy it to
/usr/local/bin. Songbird should then be able to be accessed from the command
line just by typing in songbird. Song bird is based upon the Mozilla browser
framework and can use just about any web content that Mozilla/ Firefox can
but it needs to have the proper plug-ins located in its directory. The
easiest way Ive found to do this is to copy the plugins from
/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins to the plug-in directory in the Songbird
directory.

To quickly access different sources of multimedia from the internet I've
created a menu for Songbird located at:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3365103/songbird%20menu2.zip

If you want to try the menu first checkout

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3365103/songweb.html

This menu also may be interesting.

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2011/09/easily-create-custom-menu-with-metro.html

To play with.

This has some of my personal favorite web resources for multimedia.
These are my personal favorites. If these aren't preferred they can easily
be changed in virtually any HTML editor. I originally created this menu
in Kompozer and it is simply comprised of HTML Links and
Tables and is pretty easy to see how it works and modify. To use it
just download the menu and copy the directory into the Songbird
directory then access it through the web browser feature in Songbird
then bookmark it or set it as my homepage.

Type:

file:/// to access the filesystem from the web browser to find where the
menu is installed. I put the menu folder in the Songbird directory.

With Songbird 1.2.0 it is easy to create links to different web content. To do this
just use the integrated browser feature to go to the desired page then right button
click on it then book mark it. I've put links to several of my favorite places to
get multimedia from the web, Hulu, spreeTy, shoutcast ect.

Wine

Wine is an application layer that allows Linux to run a number of programs
natively that were originally created for the Windows platform. While I wouldn't
consider Wine "white box" compatible, yet it will run numerous Windows
applications. Actually, since Wine can run many older applications and games
that present versions can't some people have suggested it actually has more
compatible programs than most modern versions of Windows. However,
Windows programs can be really hit or miss with Wine.

Because of different intellectual property issues Wine only comes with the
basics. Layers like Direct X, Java, Net framework and numerous other
components have to be installed manually on Wine. This can be a tedious
process. Also, even though most all the resources are available
free on-line, almost all of the parts are not part of open source and can't be
bundled or redistributed with Linux.

For a list of programs listed that I presently use wine with checkout:

(if you decide to use this method to configure Wine see paragraph below first)

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2010/10/project-clairette-grapes-of-wine.html

This also gives a pretty good description of how I originally configured Wine
to get it working with all the different programs I use. At present, if configuring
Wine, Wine-tricks should be able to simplify and automate this process to make
it much easier check out:

http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks

Also check out:

http://www.playonlinux.com/en/

Personal Tweaks

When I installed Ubuntu 11.04 and in my previous install of Debian
I'm not using Pulse Audio. Even though Pulse Audio has it faults, it
does make certain functions of the sound-card easier to use. Things
like switching from analog to HDMI sound, and loop-back recording
are much easier to configure with Pulse Audio. The basic ALSA
sound-card driver is capable of doing both of these things but
configuring it to do so can be challenging.

Loop-back recording:

Loop-back recording, while the most basic way to do loop-back recording is simply
to use a patch cable to run line out back into line in. ALSA can also do this digitally.

.asoundrc and asound.conf files can be created and used to manipulate ALSA
to do more than just the basics here is a routine to have .asoundrc script to
get ALSA to record directly form input form the soundcard.

note: Script created in home directory as .asoundrc instead of asound.conf
to keep it from interfering with the scripts below.

pcm.teeraw {


type empty


slave.pcm "tee:default,'/tmp/out.raw',raw"


# 48000 S16_LE 2ch (aplay -t raw -f dat)


}

to have an application to use the script

FLASH_ALSA_DEVICE=teeraw firefox  for flash with Firefox

This should create a out.raw in the /tmp directory
file with the sounds recorded from the app.
This file is not usable by most programs within
Linux but is pretty easy to convert with Lame.

Lame out.raw out.mp3 (options)

HDMI:

To switch between analog and HDMI I wrote the following script.
It works by adding and removing a asound.conf file that switches the
sound-card between HDMI and analog output. Then re setting ALSA.
This script may crash any sound program that is running at the time.
It will also need to be run as stupid user to change the configuration
files in /etc. This script assumes that no asound.conf already existing
within /etc. If one does for other soundcard functions it will need to
be backed up. It can also be integrated into the menu.

#!/bin/sh
ans="";
# this will be one line
ans=$(zenity --list --text "Analog/HDMI ALSA switch" --checklist --column "pick" --column "options" FALSE "HDMI" FALSE "ANALOG" --separator=":" );echo $ans;
#
S1="HDMI";
S2="ANALOG";
if [ "$ans" = "HDMI" ]
then
cp /etc/alsa.hdmi /etc/asound.conf;
elif [ "$ans" = "ANALOG" ]
then
echo" back to analog";
rm "/etc/asound.conf";
else
echo "no change";
fi
etc/init.d/alsa-utils stop
alsa force-reload
/etc/init.d/alsa-utils start

This script also requires a file called alsa.hdmi in the /etc
directory, here is mine. This should work for most AMD/ATI 760
to 880 chip-sets using on-board sound. Hypothetically, it should
work with intel GMA 4500 HD card machines with on-board
sound but I've not tested it.

pcm.!default {
type hw
card 1
device 3
}

This file may need to be customized to match the computers sound system.

For more info see:

http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/2310/hdmi-ati-hda-sound-how-i-got-hdmi-sound-working-in/

also:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2011/05/no-compost-linux-part-2.html

Power management:

Under the settings manager there is a power management settings
Icon which different power management options can be changed.
Suspend and sleep buttons can be activated deactivated. sleep
modes can be set and critical low battery settings can be set.
AT THE LEAST IF USING ON A PORTABLE set up the critical
battery settings. (note: if power management utilities are
not present use Synaptic to install them) My system crashed due to
low power causing it to go into fschk mode for more than an hour
before totally recovering. Also, installing Xfce power manager plugins
and Xfce goodies installs widgets to monitor battery life, CPU Load,
and thermal information form the portable.

To monitor and change the CPU frequency scaling policy install
cpufrequtils

sudo apt-get install cpufrequtils

In my previous install of Debian I created Zenity scripts to create
a GUI interface for CPUfreq in the Ubuntu 11.04 version it comes
with a widget to do this. just activate it in one of the menu bars.

Virtualbox:

Virtualbox is easy enough to install, all that Xubuntu 11.04 needed was
to get the proper .deb file from Oracle. To install the extensions just download
them then under preferences extensions in Virtualbox open the file manager
and find the extensions pack and install it. It will ask for the Stupid user password
to install the package and also show licensing agreement details. Once in
Virtual-box guest additions can be installed from the menu for most
versions of Windows and Linux.

The Virtualbox web site has comprehensive directions on setup and
creating virtual machines. There are a number of sites that offer
pre made drive images just search for VDI or virtualbox drive images
in any search engine.

Networking:

For my portable I just need the basics Pyneiborhood should do fine.

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ManDVD Rocks

2011-11-29T23:54:00.000-08:00

I recently decided to create a DVD for my relatives of our family with videos I created with my camera over the last year. I have used a couple of open source
DVD authoring software options in the past Varsha, DVD styler, Tovid-Todisc
and others. While these all do a pretty good job at creating a DVD from my video
files all had some shortcomings. Either being too complicated, needing the video
trans-coded to a proper format before using it, or not offering advanced features menus and such. So I decided to look for a better solution.

So I downloaded ManDVD ver 2.5-5 which was available from the repositories for
Linux Mint 9.0. It's proving to be an excellent piece of software for authoring DVD's on Linux. ManDVD has an excellent slide show creator, can trans-code
most video files(for a few of my video files I did pre-transcode with winFF. Mainly
AVCHD files), and a great menu builder, it can create ISO files to easily make multiple copies and is reasonably easy to use.

All in all, ManDVD is proving to be an easy to use and powerful DVD authoring
choice for my Linux computer. I only have a few minor issues with it. These
are be sure to choose the PAL or NTSC for your region when starting and create
a new directory for its data files. When shifting between the different menus
make sure to get everything right before shifting to the next menu. Often going back and forth causes the program to lose any changes made and when making
menus watch out for fonts too small for the DVD resolution baseline. I would
recommend using a font size of 15 or better. Despite these small issues which
are more of a nuisance than anything else ManDVD works great for creating custom DVD's.

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Build Your Own Menu for Touchscreens With Xfce

2011-11-02T09:35:00.001-07:00

Create a custom launcher for your dock

Menu Icons made bigger by zoom in function in Thunar.

Here is a basic menu and subdirectory for Internet applications.

Add emblems to the directories for easy recognition.

Create directories to organize the elements of the menu.

Recently, Ive seen a lot of interest in menus which are more touch screen
friendly with large icons and Full screen views. These have been included in
desktop environments such as Gnome 3, KDE 4.x and Mac OSX Lion.

I thought to myself could I create a similar menu in Xfce 4.8.0. Actually the process was fairly basic and relatively easy. All I needed to do is create a folder in my home directory then add the elements in an organized fashion.

Ok, this menu is created by basic file manipulation via the file manager. But it
should give the same functionality as menus in Gnome and Unity with minimal fuss.
It also gives a neater way to format stuff as opposed to having icons for everything
strode all over the desktop.

To do this I created sub folders-directories for each category in my Xfce menu.
after creating them I assigned an emblem to them. which can be done by right clicking on the folder icon then going to properties then to the emblem tab and
choosing a relative emblem.

Next I wanted to add the programs I wanted to use with the menu into their associated directories. In Xfce 4.8.0 this is easy enough just drag and drop them
in the proper directory.

next I want to link the directory to one of the dock menus to do this right button click the dock then add new items then add a launcher. Then right click the new launcher and choose file manager. The hit the edit menu and change it like so

exo-open --launch FileManager %u

to

exo-open --launch FileManager %um '/home/user/mymenudirecory'

The Icon can also be changed to something more appropriate here also.

This may seem simplistic but it does a pretty good job at creating a big icon menu for small screens and touch screens.

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Another Pulse Audio Sound Fix

2011-10-31T11:39:00.000-07:00

Pulse audio bugs me, while on one hand it offers more options as far as manipulating sound functions. On the other it can add tons of latency,
crash interfere with Jack and other nuisances. I personally find it to be a huge resource hog.

In the past, I've posted many posts for Pulse Audio including my own scripts for
enabling and disabling it.

see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2011/01/pulse-audio-control-scripts-to-turn.html

and
http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2011/01/eurika-ive-finally-found-soundfix-for.html

Just recently I installed Xubuntu 11.04 on one of my older computers. While Pulse
Audio works OK on this machines hardware it still causes chipping while using Mame and a few other applications. Disabling Pulse Audio improved sound functionality immensely on this machine. To do this I found this link

http://www.jeffsplace.net/node/12

Note: If you decide to do this read twice and do once. I can see where this
if it were done incorrectly could mess up the sound system.

and for me it worked beautifully. The only thing is it causes Pulse Audio to take a permanent vacation but It adds a dummy package that seems to allow some
of the applications that use Pulse Audio exclusively like Alien Arena to work
correctly. At present I can't vouch that it will work correctly with all applications
but every application I tested seemed to do just fine.

Note: Some applications like Clementine I had to go into settings and change the sound server from Pulse Audio to Alsa.

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Xubuntu 11.04 More Xfce

2011-10-14T02:26:00.000-07:00

Mac-ish themed screen shot of Xubuntu
with Xfce desktop.

I recently installed Xubuntu 11.04 upon an old desktop system I pulled out of the closet. I originally installed Linux Mint 11 and was happy with it for the most part except for a few issues. These issues were that some of Linux Mints themes and such are hard to work around and performance on this antique could be better.

So since I haven't got too far into really using this computer yet, I installed Xubuntu
11.04. This comes with Xfce 4.8.0 and pretty much everything works on this computer right out of the box. Xubunbtu doesn't come with multimedia codecs but they are easily installed by the Ubuntu software center. It also recognized that I had an NVidia graphics card and asked me if I wanted to install the drivers for it.

see:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats

Xubuntu is designed to be compact and install from a single CD so it didn't come with a lot of utilities or software when first installed so I installed Libre Office, Inkscape, My paint and a number of other software packages I use often. This was easy enough using synaptic and apt-get. I personally prefer these over the Ubuntu Software Center just because it is much faster if familiar with the different software
Linux has to offer. I Like the Ubuntu software center also, especially for discovering
new software especially for new users. It is very well laid out and easy to use.

Pulse Audio works Surprisingly well with this machine everything generally works correctly. For better control I installed Pulse audio device chooser and Pulse Audio
volume control.

I'm presently not using Compiz or any additional 3D compositing. XFCE has its own
compositing and sometimes using this in combination with Compiz can be a little buggy. I have 3D Graphics and they work well with PCSX and Mupen along with
other software. I am also using Docky to give the desktop a little more pizazz.

All in all I am very happy with Xubuntu I think it is a fast, stable, usable uncluttered desktop. Everything seems to work right out of the box. Even though it doesn't have
the multimedia resources of Linux Mint they are easily enough to install. Xubuntu
is the Linux desktop done right for me.

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Linux Mint 11 on Antique Computer

2011-10-04T22:19:00.000-07:00

Note: I noticed that on an older computer formating the drives ext3 instead of ext4
improved overall performance significantly.

Recently I decided to set up an area to play with some of my multimedia stuff in the
garage so I can set it up and play with it and leave it for a day or two without the family messing with it. For the main computer in the house I have an AMD quad core machine. This machine replaced an older machine I was using with an AMD XP class CPU and an NVIDIA 440 8X AGP with 1 GB or ram that I built about 7 to 8 years ago.

I recently pulled this machine out of the mothballs and decided to put Linux Mint 11 upon it. I originally wanted to put Debian on it but had trouble getting the old NVIDIA card to work correctly with Debian.

When I installed Linux mint 11 I was really surprised at how well it works on this machine. 3D graphics work well and even though this machine came over on the
Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria its performance wasn't all that bad. The desktop was
very responsive. It could do MTS video files at least reasonably well. Movie player and GMplayer was able to play the video reasonably well. Unfortunaly, VLC dropped too many frames. PCSX and Mupen64Plus worked well. Fspot was quick and responsive managing my photo collection and Banshee did well with my music collection. Pulse audio worked better for me than it has in the past even though its still a little buggy. Playback was perfect, recording Had a little more latency than I would of liked but it actually worked well. I was also able to use Google messenger and phone without any serious chipping with Pulse Audio.

My only complaint is that file operations seemed to take forever. This is probably because the machine still uses PATA drives. Doing things like moving files from
my backup drive, indexing my music collection the first time with Banshee or
my photos with Fspot seemed to take forever. Although, once these apps built a database they both worked fine.

All in all I'm actually really impressed with how well this fossil of a computer works with Linux Mint 11.

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Xfce Desktop Becoming My favorite

2011-09-02T17:20:00.000-07:00

In april I installed Debian Linux with the Xfce desktop on my laptop. After using it for several
months I'm really impressed with the performance. The Xfce desktop is fast and lightweight.
Running it with Debian Linux without Pulse Audio and 3D effects (I have the Catalyist drivers working I prefer to use them with games and applications over desktop pretty) makes For a very responsive and stable desktop. Xfce does'nt lack in customization options either.

I personally believe having a simple functional desktop is better than alot of glitz. One of the
strengths of Linux is the wide range of hardware it can run upon. Linux is excellent for older
PC's. Even an old pentium III or pentuim 4 can be pretty resonsive with the right configuration
and desktop and still have modern software and features.

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Aurora Rocks

2011-09-02T09:54:00.000-07:00

I've been playing around with some new browsers lately in Linux. While
Firefox is still my main browser, I've found another browser I'm starting
to really enjoy using, Aurora. It has most of the features Firefox does and
a few that Firefox doesn't have. In my opinion this is an excellent browser
and one definitely worth checking out.

see:

http://code.google.com/p/arora/

for more info.

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Fun With Dos Box

2011-09-02T08:35:00.000-07:00

Dosbox is a DOS emulator that can run on many platforms and can run the vast majority of programs originally created for DOS. This includes even complex DOS games like Quake,
Casm of the rift, and others. I've even run Windows 3.1 on it. Recently, I decided to front end my DosBox emulator with Quikmenu III. This is a shareware program originally distributed by NeoSoft.

At this time, I don't believe Quikmenu is still supported by NeoSoft but, it can be found
in several shareware and abandonware sites see:

note: Quickmenu is still available from Neosoft at:

http://www.neosoftware.com/order-legacy.html

http://www.download-central.ws/DOS/Apps/Q/QuikMenu/

Originaly, Quikmenu III was available as shareware for 30 days but would work
longer than 30 days but would come up with banners until a serial number was entered.

To get Quikmenu to automatically run on DosBox startup add the following lines to
the Dosbox.conf file. Located under the hidden .dosbox directory in the the users home
directory with Linux.

[autoexec]
# Lines in this section will be run at startup.
# You can put your MOUNT lines here.
mount c /disk1/DOS
cd c:\QUIKMENU
c:
qm

note: This assumes programs are in DOS directory and Quickmenu is in the Quikmenu directory therein.

For more DosBox fun checkout:

Abandonia

http://www.abandonia.com/

Dosgames

http://www.dosgames.com/gameindex.php

Seal: another Gui for DOS and its GPL

http://sealsystem.sourceforge.net/about.php

If your not familiar with Dosbox, it is a multi platform DOS emulator that
can run numerous classic DOS games and applications see:

http://www.dosbox.com/

for more info.

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Unity Linux doesn't Seem to use Unity

2011-05-27T23:14:00.000-07:00

I just though this was kinda funny. While looking up more information on the Unity Desktop with
Ubuntu, I found a Unity Linux Distro that doesn't seem to use the Unity Desktop. They have some great screenshots for XFCE and E17 though :)

check out:

http://unity-linux.org/

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Thoughts of Unity

2011-05-26T05:22:00.000-07:00

After playing with Ubuntu 11.04 and Unity I'm not sure what I think. One one hand
like gnome3 its very pretty. Unity gives a new look to the Linux desktop. It also makes it easier for new Linux users to get familiar with Linux applications. The desktop workspace switcher is cool. On the other hand, it seems less customizable than gnome 2.3.x Finding applications can be an experience and I'm personally finding the desktop unintuitive and clunky. Some of the menus use tons of screen real estate. I think computer users that use just a few applications might like the interface but power users with lots of applications might find the menu system annoying.

Sill like Gnome 2.3.x and XFCE better. Both Gnome3 and Unity create a new desktop
experience. Perhaps they will create more interest in the Linux desktop. I could see
where both might work better in a touch screen environment and with smaller screen devices. For me, although I like the new look and innovations, usage is
clunky slow and unintuitive for both Unity and Gnome 3. I personally like KDE
but I feel its become a huge resource hog. Perhaps its time to look at some of
the alternate desktop environments like XFCE,LXDE, and others.

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No 3D Compositing Debian Linux part 2

2011-05-07T02:00:00.000-07:00

1 Sound

A. Using ALSA Without Pulse Audio

For my no 3D compositing Linux project, I want to put together a Linux desktop based on
XFCE. For the sound I want to use just ALSA and not use Pulse Audio. In Gnome
Pulse Audio Makes a good replacement for ESD. Since XFCE doesn't really need
ESD for much of anything or at all, I don't really think XFCE or my project
needs Pulse Audio. While some may be a fan of Pulse Audio my feelings are
really mixed. On one hand, it does add more flexibility with the sound-card.
On the other it can add tons of latency, cause parts of the sound card not
to function correctly and eat tons of resources. Usually, Pulse Audio can be
tweaked to run perfectly most of the time but having a sound system that needs
to be tweaked and manipulated and monkeyed with to get it to work correctly and
stably makes Linux feel unrefined and unprofessional. Pure ALSA with Debian and
most other distros seems to be at a point where it just works and seems to manage
most sound cards just fine. ALSA can now do multiplexing just fine(except limited
with individual volume control for applications which is great for podcasting and
recording but I don't miss it for everyday stuff) and doesn't need an extra layer
attached to it.

B. More advanced stuff with ALSA

While ALSA runs just fine for about 95% of the things that I want to do with it and
works just fine for everyday use. I have a few more complex things I like to do
with my soundsystem.

i.) Loop-back recording, while the most basic way to do loop-back recording is simply
to use a patch cable to run line out back into line in. ALSA can also do this digitally.

.asoundrc and asound.conf files can be created and used to manipulate ALSA to do more
than just the basics here is a routine to have .asoundrc script to get alsa to
record directly form input form the soundcard.

pcm.teeraw {


type empty


slave.pcm "tee:default,'/tmp/out.raw',raw"


# 48000 S16_LE 2ch (aplay -t raw -f dat)


}

to have an application to use the script

FLASH_ALSA_DEVICE=teeraw firefox  for flash with Firefox





This should create a out.raw file with the sounds recorded from the app


This file is not usable by most programs within Linux but is pretty


easy to convert with Lame





lame [options] out.raw [options] mypodcast.mp3

type lame -- help for specifics.

for more info see:

http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php?title=Recording_audio_playing_on_the_computer

ii. HDMI no Pulse Audio

One of the major reasons that I have stuck with Pulse Audio in the past is that
it does a good job with my computers for managing audio for my HDMI port.
Recently I found some articles which allow me to use HDMI audio without using
pulse audio.

see :

http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/2310/hdmi-ati-hda-sound-how-i-got-hdmi-sound-working-in/

I also created a Zenity script to help turn HDMI sound off and on

#!/bin/sh
ans="";
# this will be one line
ans=$(zenity --list --text "Analog/HDMI ALSA switch" --checklist --column "pick" --column "options" FALSE "HDMI" FALSE "ANALOG" --separator=":" );echo $ans;
#
S1="HDMI";
S2="ANALOG";
if [ "$ans" = "HDMI" ]
then
cp /etc/alsa.hdmi /etc/asound.conf;
elif [ "$ans" = "ANALOG" ]
then
echo" back to analog";
rm "/etc/asound.conf";
else
echo "no change";
fi
etc/init.d/alsa-utils stop
alsa force-reload
/etc/init.d/alsa-utils start

This script also requires a file called alsa.hdmi in the /etc directory
here is mine. This should work for most AMD/ATI 760 to 880 chip-sets
using on-board sound. Hypothetically, it should work with intel GMA 4500
HD card machines with on-board sound but I've not tested it.

alsa.hdmi

pcm.!default {
type hw
card 1
device 3
}

Also make sure sound for HDMI isn't muted.

See the link above for directions on creating a working alsa.hdmi file for
your personal computer setup.

If you get this Zenity script working, you can make it executable and put it
into /usr/bin since it makes changes to files in /etc it will need to be used
in stupid user mode. If making changes watch the rm statement in the
elsif section. For testing put a -i in the rm statement to help make sure the
program if modified doesn't mess up anything in /etc and run the script from
the command line.

C. We got the Jack

So I've Decided not to use Pulse Audio so why use another sound server.
Sometimes I want to do more advanced things with the sound card than just
basic stuff. Jack is more complicated to use and is less automated than
Pulse audio but it does have several advantages. The first and most
important is that it can be setup when doing more advanced stuff and left
alone for doing just basics like watching a movie or listening to music or
using a program like Skype. The second thing is that it has considerably
better latency than Pulse Audio. Third while it is more complicated to
configure, configurations for audio projects can be better managed and
customized. For best results Jack should be used with only programs
designed for Jack

For more info check out:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/friends-jack

http://apps.linuxaudio.org/apps/categories/jack

D. New and Even Better Songbird Mods

Songbird is my favorite music manager for Linux. It is powerful versatile and based
on the Mozilla browser. Because of this, Songbird is very easy to customize and
even write software. For My No compost Linux project I want to get Songbird 1.2.0
to work like my original posts:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2010/12/menu-for-songbird-180.html

And

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2010/06/songbird-120-for-linux-revisited.html

I want to add my songbird menu and links as created for Songbird 1.2.0
links can be created from from Mozilla/Firefox to Songbird so that it can
use all the browser plug-ins or they can be instlled anew same as Mozilla.

I have also recreated My songbird menu to make it easier to install and use.
Just unzip the file here and put in the Songbird directory then create a bookmark
to the main web page within.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3365103/songbird%20menu2.zip

To create Links within the Songbird menu from my menu I just went to the menu used it to go to the resource I wanted then book marked the page by right clicking on it (songbird 1.2.0 and Earlier only).

If you need an earlier version and are having trouble finding it check:

http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/13002366/dir/mandriva_2010/com/songbird-1.2.0-2mdv2010.0.i586.rpm.html

or

http://www.mozillaes.org/foros/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=28831

To install the first package Debian distros will need to use Alien. I personally like
creating a tar file. then extracting it then manually copying the files where
they need to go to install an RPM on a debian system.

Here is a link to the new menu I created with songbird:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3365103/songbird%20menu2.zip

This consist of 3 web pages which should link to each other so long as they
stay in the same directory. To use them with Songbird open a new tab put
File:/// into the browser box then use this to find the HTML files for the menu.

see:
http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2010/10/project-clairette-grapes-of-wine.html

For the older version of My Clairette/Wine project.

2. Project Clairette Remix

Clairette is my personal configuration for the Wine application layer which allows
Linux to run several applications originally designed for Windows. Freshly downloaded Wine will only do the basics. Many programs run on top of other layers Like DirectX and others. Once these layers are installed, Wine compatibility with Windows goes up considerably. I put together my original Clairette project to give a recipe install the layers to run most of the software I like running with Wine which includes a number of emulators for older computers and game systems. Clairette doesn't have a menu like Play on Linux or Transgaming. I wanted a more integrated feel. I wanted it to be more transparent. I don't presently have a long list of compatible software but using the emulators and Wines compatibility as installed should runs tons of games and apps and give as good of compatibility as Play on Linux or Trans-gaming. It can also live happily beside Play on Linux. At present I am running this version of Clairette with 3D accelerated graphics while not nessassary, it it highly recommended. Also I recommend having the drivers from AMD/ATI or NVIDIA as opposed to the open source alternatives. I haven't personally tried it with Intel GMA equipment as I have no equipment with these chip-sets to test it with.

As for the remix, my original Clairette project is one of my top viewed pages but as
configured it came out to be a 24 page post and I believe that it is way too complicated. So for project Clairette remix I want to just get the basics up and running and leave out all the emulators and compatability list. I may do these
as a separate post for now I'm just going to leave it as part of the original
Clairette project.

Ok. getting down and getting out hand dirty with Clairette to setup the basics. I will perform
5 basic tasks.

1. install Wine.
2. Install DirectX. I'm still going to use 9.0c for best compatibility(now installed
with winetricks).
3. Selectively select add-ons to install with Winetricks.
4. Install Firefox with Flash and Shockwave.
5. create a backup to reinstall for different users and to back up the original work.
users but I'm not sure it will work until tested.
6. I also want to give a discription of how to install more fonts for both wine and basic X windows

1. Install Wine.

This is easy enough, to Install Wine just install Wine with all the dependencies
recommended by Synaptic Package Manager. Next Wine will need to be setup
for the user. To do this type winecfg at the command line. This should create
a .wine file within the users home directory with the users software and wine
configuration. The wine configuration menu should also come up with different
things to tweak to get wine running correctly on the system. For my system
Wine setup correctly with no problems. Sometimes these settings may need to
be changed to run certain applications.

2. Use Winetricks to install applications and dependencies to make Wine more functional.

Since My original Clairette Post Winetricks has changed considerably. I found it easier to install all the components I wanted to use with Wine. For this build I
used Winetricks to install everything except Firefox and Flashplayer. This is because
the newer versions Winetricks installs are more buggy than the older versions with
Wine. For Firefox I manually installed Firefox 2.0 and manually installed Songbird 1.2.0 and manually installed Flash 10.1.51.66. I downloaded all these older versions
from file hippo:

http://www.filehippo.com/

When using Winetricks I did break it a few times before getting the configuration
that I wanted. If this happens Winetricks stores information in .cache and .wine
Just erase these directories and start over if wine gets broken in the process. deleting .wine will mess up all wine configurations. the .cache file also stores
all the files that Winetricks downloads so that if they can be manually re installed
if need be.

Presently installed by Winetricks

All Fonts
DirectX 9
MS Net 2.0
Mfc42/Vcrun6
MS XML 3.0
OGG - Don't select browser plugins
Shockwave
vcrun2003
vcrun2005
vjrun20
xact
xact_jun20
xinput
7zip
cmake
vlc

Left off allcodecs seems to be broken. VLC doesn't need it.

This should run everything except Libre Office for windows originally posted
as part of the original project Clairette project.

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2010/10/project-clairette-grapes-of-wine.html

This installation may pu alot of junk in the XFCE Menu under other. To get rid of it
right click the XFCE menu and choose properties and choose use default desktop menu file or choose a custom menu. This can be created using the instructions here.

http://wiki.xfce.org/howto/customize-menu

I also wanted my own Directory to manage my wine programs and settings.
For this I created a file called Clairette and added a launcher for wineconf
put the winetricks shell and created a link to the wine filesystem by creating
a launcher and typing thunar /home/user/.wine/drive_c/. I also created a directory
for links to wine apps. To create a link to a Wine app with XFCE create a launcher
and type

env WINEPREFIX="/home/john/.wine" wine "C:\Program Files\7-Zip\7zFM.exe"

or

env WINEPREFIX="/home/john/.wine" wine "C:\path to my app\myapp.exe"

and a launcher for Wine installer. I also created a directory for Emulators
that I wan to use with wine. Most emulators are self contained and will install
in their own directories.

now that I have wine configured the wat that I want it I want to back up my wine
configuration.All wine software and addons are stored in a directory in the users
home folder. Called .wine. This is a hidden directory and thunar will need to be set
to show all hidden directories before it will see the file. to backup the wine
configuration.

cp -avr /home/user/.wine /destinationfolder

Then rename it something. For my setup I just renamed it using Thunar

Ok, so you have wine setup an a great functional desktop how do you preserve
the settings for other users. Once a functional desktop is created it can be cloned.

This script run from root will clone 1 account to another.

sudo bash


cd /home/bob


tar cf - .  (cd ../pete;tar xf -)


chown -R pete:pete /home/pete


exit

Install fonts, linux can use TTF files just download them from some place like
Haloween fonts unzip them and put them in /usr/share/fonts/truetype as root.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

No 3D Compositing Debian Remix Part 1

2011-04-23T19:48:00.000-07:00

XFCE Desktop Lots of tweaks.

Libre Office On Linux

The Gimp and MyPaint used together to
manipulate graphics.

Open Shot and MyPaint

note: 12/12/2011

Checkout:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2011/12/xububtu-1104-new-install.html

This is an install of Xubuntu 11.04 with similar configurations.
Using Ubuntu as a base is much easier to put together and uses
Xfce 4.8.0.

When I run Linux I like lots of special effects and glitz. I like watching Compiz make the desktop whirl around in a cube. I to watch Cairo make Icons glow and dance. I like the effects in Gnome 3. Aside from being very cool it makes Windows users green with envy.

The problem is all these effects make Linux hugely bloated and eat up tons of resources. It also makes Linux harder to run on older computers. Recently I became
interested in Gnome 3 and XFCE as an alternative to Gnome 3. I like XFCE because
it doesn't need tons of resources or 3D graphics to work properly. While XFCE isn't
as functional as gnome 2.30.x I am using it more as I feel Gnome 2.30.x may be
less used as gnome 3 and Unity become more popular. XFCE may provide an alternative that will continue to be developed for and uses GTK.

Originally, I played with Linux Mint XFCE which I liked and is a very well put together Linux distro. When I installed it I also had it run Compiz and Cairo.
While it created a really cool destop with lots of effects it ate more system resources than my other computer with Gnome 2.30.x and it even ate more
resources than Gnome 3.

I like XFCE and still want to use and play with it. Inspired by

Wolvix and

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=26566

I decided to create an XFCE destop that was beautiful functional very cool and
didn't use any 3D compositing.

To do this I started with the net install of Debian Squeeze. I did the install
without installing a graphic desktop. I installed the base plus files for a portable
so the OS could do battery monitoring and such.

After the initial install I used Nano as root to go into /etc/apt/sources.list to # out
any CD-Rom entries and used apt-get update to make the changes take effect.
Next I wanted to install ALSA and Xorg with the xfce desktop to do this i just
typed in

apt-get install alsa-base alsa-utilities hal udev gdm xfce4 xfce4-goodies xfce4-mixer
thunar-archive-plugin

This installed the XFCE desktop, ALSA, GDM and HAL and all the basics to get the desktop working. This took about 40 minutes and installed more than 100 files.
Next I wanted to get power management, temperature management and networking
up and working. Fortunately, XFCE-Goodies installed the CPU monitor the sensors monitor, the battery monitor and CPUfreq which makes things easier.

Next, I wanted to get my wireless working. To do this I installed network-manager and network-manager-gnome using Synaptic package manager. This package will work perfectly with XFCE. I also tried Wifi radar but it didn't work nearly as well. I installed NdisGTK even though for my computer the native Linux drivers work just fine and I don't need it. Installing NdisGTK with APT or Synaptic will install everything that is needed to use the Windows wireless drivers with NdisWrapper where compatible.

Next I installed the ATI proprietary drivers following the guide here

http://wiki.debian.org/ATIProprietary

and Mesa-utils with the Synaptic package manager to test the graphics with the glxgears command.

Now that I have the basics installed I want to make the desktop pretty. XFCE is very
them-able like Gnome. However, doing so may be a little trickier. To change the stuff installed by default XFCE has 4 different places to look for settings. These are
under apperance, window manager, desktop and screensaver which are located under the settings tab. Appearance controls style, icons, fonts, and desktop settings.
Desktop controls backgrounds, right and middle mouse button menus and what basic desktop icons show. Window manager controls the widow border style.
Screen-saver controls which screen-saver used and whether or not screensaver is activated.

The basics are pretty good but I want more. With Synaptic Package Manager under theme their are many options that can be installed. These Include window manager themes, icons, and many other options. Under screensaver their are more screen savers which can be installed. Some theme material and screen-savers may not work correctly, but most under GTK, Gnome or basic Xwindows should.

Tons of theme stuff can be installed from the Synaptic Package Manager. To add even more theme stuff checkout:

http://xfce-look.org/index.php?xcontentmode=420

To use theme materials from xfce. I created 2 directories. (.theme) in my home
directory where I put different theme elements so that XFCE can find and use
them. and /usr/graphics where I'll put backgrounds and other graphic elements
so they won't get lost. A new directory in USR will need to be created with
the super user account.

Now that I have all the basics setup for the portable this includes. power management, heat management, and the Catalyst 3D graphics setup The next
step is to install the software I use and multimedia codecs.

Earlier, when I installed the proprietary ATI/AMD drivers I already added the
non-free repository to my apt-sources list so I should be able to install most of the
multimedia codecs. Generally, I won't install these first. I'll install them with software that uses them. Often when a package like Audacity or VLC is installed it also installs the proper codecs.

so here's a list of stuff I'll install
I'll use Synaptic Package manager to install most of this stuff

Internet:
flashplayer-nonfree Official flashplayer plugin for browsers
chromium - fast web browser also use for gmail
Azerus - bittorrent client -will also install JAVA as a dependency
Skype - VIOP instant message client - install from .deb package from skype

Graphics:
The gimp - Bitmap graphics program
MyPaint -Bitmap graphics program
Inkscape - Vector graphics Program
Scribus - DTP program
picasa -photo management -
********************************
install from
http://picasa.google.com/linux/download.html#picasa30
just use gdebi to install it
If desktop integration doesn't work add a launcher to the desktop or
menu bar.
************************************
Office:
Abi-Word full function word processor
Libre office

************************

installation of Libre Office on squeeze get
Download Libre office install and helppack from

http://www.libreoffice.org/download

Extract the help pack first. Use Thunar to go into the created directory Lib0_3
keep opening folders until the .deb package shows up then move it somewhere
else. Then delete or move this directory. Then extract the install package open up
the LibO directory and keep opening up the files inside until the DEBS directory
is present then open it and copy the .deb file from the help pack here. Right
button click on Thunar and open terminal in the DEBS directory. Once the terminal is open then use su to become super user then type

dpkg -i --force-depends *.deb

This should install Libre office.

To integrate Libre office with the desktop go into the desktop integration directory
and use gdebi to install the .deb file. When I did this it gave me an error but built
the menu entries anyway

**************************

Multimedia:
****************************
To get the multimedia files installed the Debian multimedia repository needs
to be installed follow the instructions here

http://debian-multimedia.org/

For Tovid utilities

http://tovid.wikia.com/wiki/Installing_tovid/Debian
***********************************************************
Also decided to install Artista Transcoder -it will need all Gstreamer plugins
and gnome codec install( which may not install automatically with xfce)

see:

http://www.transcoder.org/

Note: better to install from Synaptic vs getting the package here.

Audacity - Non Linear Audio Editor -should install MP3 and all other audio codecs
Acidrip - DVD ripper -should install video codecs and dvdcss
Avidemux Video converter NLVE
Cheese -webcam software should install codecs for webcams
Tovid - transcoder
WinFF - transcoder - should install more codecs
Openshot -NLVE
VLC media player - plays just about anything need libdvdcss for DVDs
Mplayer Mencoder- play transcode just about anything
Songbird -mp3 player organizer.
Sound Juicer - GUI CD Ripper
Sound converter -nice gui sound transcoder.

To install songbird install get it from:

http://gratis.net/songbird-1-2-0-beta-2/

utilities
*****************************************
Gnome-System tools- This primarily adds users and groups to
system. This sometimes conflicts with XFCE settings.
*****************************************

Tweaks and finalization:

One thing that I couldn't find with XFCE is a way to set the CPU policy. This
can be important to maximize battery life and reduce CPU heat. So I decided
to write my own. The following is a Zenity script to front end cpufreq utilities
to change CPU policy. It will need cpufreq and be run as super user.

If you want to use this script do the following:

To see if you have cpufreq installed and working
type
cpufreq-info

This should give a variety of info about CPU scaling

if its working.

just copy this script to a text editor and save it as zenitycpuset.sh
and save it.

zenitycpuset.sh

#!/bin/bash

#this next line should be one continuous line with no breaks
ans=$(zenity --list --text "CPU governer policy setting " --radiolist --column "Pick" --column "Option" TRUE conservative FALSE powersave FALSE "ondemand" FALSE "performance"); echo $ans
#
cpufreq-set -g $ans

To test it type sh zenitycpuset.sh as root and see if it works.

Then try a few of the options. To see if it worked type

cpufreq-info -p

at the command line.

If it works and you want to install it , change the shell to executable
and add it to /bin /sbin or /usr/bin

Next, I want to link it to the menu bar. To do this right click on the menubar
and choose add new item then launcher then type in the program name, description
and command(this shell will need to be executed as root to work so precede the command with su-to-root -X -c) and choose an appropriate icon.

su-to-root -X -c zenitycpuset.sh

On this desktop I decided to stay away from utilities like K3B, Krita and any
program or utility that uses KDE libraries. While these offer great functionality
they like a lot of resources.

For the time being, I'm not using Pulse Audio. While I like Pulse Audio, its a bit
of a resource hog and still a little buggy. I actually want to experiment with
Jack for loop back recordings and other things I use Pulse Audio for.

After doing all this I have a beautiful, fast effective desktop. For part 2
I want to install some games, emulators and my Clairette/Wine project from earlier
I should be doing this in the next few days.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

Linux Mint XFCE 201104 The Gnome 3 Alternative

2011-04-20T03:04:00.000-07:00

Screen Shot of heavily themed XFCE session

Recently, I started playing with the live version of Linux Mint XFCE. From the Disk I was really impressed with the features that the Linux Mint guys put into this project. The desktop is fast simple and responsive. So I decided to install it.

Here are some of the details of the install. Linux Mint 201104 installs just about the same as the regular Linux Mint Julia the only difference is that it uses Gparted to set up the hard drive. Once it is installed, I wanted to do some things to optimize it to work with my portable. The first thing I wanted to do is get power management working the way I wanted. In the past I've experimented with XFCE and despite really enjoying the desktop experience, lack of power management was a major setback to my using it as my primary desktop. Getting power management to work with this version is pretty easy just install the XFCE goodies package. this should install all the widgets needed to monitor and manage the PC's power. for my machine I have the sensors widget monitoring CPU Temp and the CPU freq widget monitoring CPU throttling. At this point I'm still manually setting the CPU throttling via cpufreq at the command line. I want to build a Zenity script to do this later. Widgets for wireless networking and battery life were already installed.

Next, I wanted to get networking between my two machines working for this all I needed to do is install PyNeighborhood to manage samba connections to my other computer.

the next thing that I wanted to do is install the ATI/AMD catalyst drivers this was actually not any harder than installing on regular Mint just follow the tutorial here.

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=70589&p=408949

After installing the 3D drivers, I wanted to get Compiz to work. to do this I installed
Compiz, compizConfig, and XFCE Mint Desktop. XFCE mint desktop makes it easy
to setup and initialize the compiz effects with XFCE. I tried to do this manually first and I got errors and the window borders didn't show up on the desktop.

I also setup The Cairo Dock, This is a dock similar to OSX that really cool I just
installed it with Synaptic Package Manager then set it up to run automatically at
startup within XFCE. this can be done by going in the XFCE setting manager and
going under the sessions and startup section and then adding Cairo to the section.

Finally I did some personalization by changing things with the appearance program. Its not as easy to theme as gnome 2.30.x but its not bad.

All in all I am enjoying XFCE and Linux Mint 201104. I was surprised how easy it was to get the power management and the 3D graphics and effects to work. At
present XFCE is not as robust as Gnome 2.30.x but its not trailing by much and
is a great desktop experience. If Linux distros push users into gnome 3 and Gnome
2.X series begins to be phased out, XFCE provides users who want to keep that Gnome 2.x look and feel and functionality a pretty good alternative.

------------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

Gnome 3 not crazy about it so far

2011-04-19T01:04:00.000-07:00

Gnome 3 screen shots without 3D drivers and Gnome Shell

I've been using Linux for 10 years when I first started using Linux I enjoyed the KDE desktop. Eventually, KDE went to the 4.0 version. I tried it and thought yuk. Its less stable, less customizable, and less intuitive than the old version. I disliked so much that I switched to the Gnome desktop.

I had used Gnome before and it was OK but It didn't seem to have the features KDE had and seemed a little clunkier than KDE. When I switched to gnome with Ubuntu I noticed how much more polished it was compared to before. It was very easy to customize the way that I wanted and had everything I needed for power management on a portable and most all the features I wanted in a desktop. I absolutely enjoyed and still enjoy Gnome.

Recently, The Gnome Group officially released its Gnome 3 version. I tried it and to be honest I'm not real impressed. To start out with I tried the live evaluation version of Gnome 3 Suse version. from:

http://www.gnome3.org/tryit.html

I am using a ATI/AMD Raedon HD graphics card and Suse wasn't able to utilize it. Some of the things that I read said that Gnome 3 needed 3D acceleration to work. It doesn't BUT the features are scaled down considerably from Gnome 3 with 3D. Actually, Gnome 3 without 3D to me is much less usable that the present version of gnome 2.30.2 or XFCE for that matter. The desktop without the activities shell is similar to gnome 2.30.2 but without many of the bells and whistles. Despite this I'm glad to see that it works without 3D graphics. Much of the Linux audience uses live versions, Although most chips by AMD/ATI, and Nvidia are supported by Linux the for 3D graphics, the drivers have to be installed before they will work properly. If using a live CD this is virtually impossible to do. While some live CD's do come with the drivers, often I've found them unstable and older versions. Also, people running advanced applications like servers with their system that use a desktop may not want 3D because may make a system a little less stable.

Anyway, more messing with Gnome 3. I like to super customize my desktop. With Gnome 2.30.2 this is super easy. I just pull up the appearance manager and go to town. In the Suse Gnome 3 version I didn't find this available. I'm not sure whether this is a SUSE thing of a Gnome thing. It does however have the Gconf-editor which can be used to modify theme details. gconf-editor is more thorough for me but much less intuitive. This may be a move to make the desktop more standardized. Many gnome users customize their desktop so much it looks like a completely different platform.

Some of the things that I've read have talked about how much of a resource hog
gnome 3 is. Truthfully, I didn't check the stats on this, but I was surprised that the desktop was really responsive. This is one of the surprising things that I found That I liked about Gnome 3. I also found that Gnome 3 was aesthetically pleasing. Gnome 3 tries to put the right widjets on the task bar for different hardware options. Gnome 3 put the battery monitor and network manager on the desktop automatically when I ran it on my portable. This is a neat feature and does add to the standardization of Linux desktops but I still would prefer to be able to do this myself. I wasn't able to find any menus to do this.

After playing with Gnome 3 on a live CD I found it interesting but not interesting enough to install and get the 3D working. This was because of several reasons.
Gnome 3 was customizable but for me doing so wasn't nearly as easy as Gnome 2.30.2. Their was too large a difference with gnome 3 between running it without 3D drivers. I found it somewhat less intuitive to work with than gnome 2.30.2 I also wanted more ability to customize the menu bars and other features a little better.

Gnome 3 is an interesting project. I could see where it could have many advantages in a touch screen environment. It is very aesthetically pleasing and surprisingly responsive. I don't personally feel it it the disaster KDE 4.0 was for me but their are some things that I think could be better. 1st of all I wish it was less dependent on 3D graphics to use all the features, second I wish it was a little easier to customize.

Other thoughts: I noticed that when Gnome 3 didn't run in 3D mode it was similar to the old 2.30.2 Gnome. I wonder if users were to hack Gnome 3 the and disable the Gnome shell they could possibly get it to work with Compiz.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

Note: 2/11/2012 I have a new post on Gnome 3 I finally got Gnome shell
working using a live evaluation version with Gnome shell using my
Raedon graphics chip for more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/02/atiamd-graphics-and-gnome-shell.html

To turk or not to turk that is the question

2011-04-15T00:07:00.000-07:00

Recently, I discovered Amazon's Mechanical Turk. This is a web site sponsored by Amazon where they offer various jobs to people that computers can't do. These jobs include simple copy-writing tasks, simple proofreading tasks, surveys, and numerous odd jobs with the computer.

For the experience, on the good side, I enjoyed some of the tasks especially some of the copy-writing tasks. Some of the tasks were good as a kind of puzzle game. Some tasks were a bit boring and repetitive, but with all the tasks I personally enjoyed seeing myself make money directly for the effort I put in.

For my experience on the negative side, I got canned after 3 months due to "poor performance" from only a couple of complaints from people requesting service. Which I personally felt was unfair because I had a 98 percent accuracy rating and had completed around 3000 turks and it only took 1 or 2 complaints to have my account suspended. I found many of the tasks didn't pay very much. While some of the best tasks paid me up to 10 bucks per hour, most tasks would barely make 2 to 3 dollars an hour and the best tasks got nabbed up quickly.

So are you interested in trying it? here's some of my personal advice from my experience. Don't expect to make a ton, while it would be possible to make enough money to have extra money for a hobby or extra Christmas money making real money would be really hard. Be cautious of some of the customers. Some just don't want to pay. Try one or two tasks with the customer before committing a lot of time and effort with them. One example for me was Jofer IM Inc This customer filed a complaint on me after I did several articles for them. I came to find out people have a blog complaining about this customer.

http://turkers.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=shame&action=display&thread=5784

It seems if customers complain they may get out of paying. After deciding to try Mechanical turk give it a little time. The longer I worked at turking the more money I made. I would also recommend trying all sorts of things. Some jobs were super easy and paid well others were terrible. Some of the jobs made me suspicios as to the motives of the requester. Watch out for cons they are a few out there DON'T GIVE ANY personal or financial information to any of the customers without being very careful . BE VERY CAREFUL with installing anything on your computer from customers. TaCheck out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.htmlke care in choosing jobs on Mechanical Turk just be sure to read the job and use
a little common sence when choosing to do them.

All in all, my experience with Mechanical Turk wasn't bad especially some of the copy-writing tasks. For the money I really can't recommend it. If you want to try it, sign up and see, but if you do any other personally enriching or money making tasks I would be careful in weighing the time spent turking against these doing things.

---------------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

Here's a Few Great Pictures of The Great Smokey Mountains I think are Cool for Backgrounds

2011-02-13T00:34:00.000-08:00

I live in the mountains between NC and TN here are some personal pictures That I think make really nice background shots.

----------------------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

Video Conversion Using WinFF

2011-02-04T00:01:00.000-08:00

WinFF is a front end for FFmpeg a transcoder for both Linux and Windows(believe FFmpeg and
WinFF are available for MAC and Be/Haiku also). WinFF takes a lot of the guesswork out of
properly converting video. It has several presets that help with converting the video to proper
formats and getting them to work correctly.

In an earlier post I written several scripts for converting video into common formats for the
cameras and personal media players I own. I can use the conversion scripts to create presets
for WinFF to incorporate them into a little neater and functional graphic fron end.

To do this fist get and test scripts to use with FFMPEG my previous post

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2011/01/video-conversion-for-most-portable.html

has some good info and links for this.

here's another helpful link.

http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/19-ffmpeg-commands-for-all-needs

once the FFMPEG script is tested it can easily be incorporated into WinFF by opening
winFF and Going to edit-presets and filling in the boxes. For the FFmpeg script line
leave out the -i and input filename and the output filename so

ffmpeg -i source_video.avi input -acodec aac -ab 128kb -vcodec mpeg4 -b 1200kb -mbd 2
-flags +4mv+trell -aic 2 -cmp 2 -subcmp 2 -s 320x180 -title X final_video.mp4

would be:

 input -acodec aac -ab 128kb -vcodec mpeg4 -b 1200kb -mbd 2 -flags +4mv+trell -aic 2
-cmp 2 -subcmp 2 -s 320x180

After entering all the information into the appropriate boxes, hit the add/update button
then save the entry. If the entry doesn't work, after correcting the entry just save it.

------------------------------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

Canon Vixia HF R100 Windows and Linux

2011-01-20T01:05:00.001-08:00

I just recently purchased a Canon VIXIA HF R100 HD Camcorder. This camera records HD video to standard SD memory cards. I am using the camera with both Linux and Windows 7. I have Linux and Windows 7 presently installed on a home built computer with a AMD 630X4 processor with a 785g controller with integrated ATI 4200 graphics, and 4 gig of ram. I also want to use the camera with my Gateway portable running Linux Mint 10.

Here are my early impressions of the camera. I like the compact size of the camera and that it uses standard SD cards. The cards will need to be formatted by the camera before they can be used but the format is easily read by both Windows and Linux(will need NTFS utilities and proprietary codecs installed). The camera shoots excellent quality video for the price of the camera. The audio quality is excellent with this camera and the camera has a mic and headphone jack. The camera has some built in special effects like transition fade. The only gripes are the camera may not be as good at adjusting to sudden light changes(for better results, try some of the manual lighting modes instead of auto if lighting is an issue) as some of its competetitors and less able to do super quick shifts LR or UD. The video output also needs a pretty powerful computer to view the video without distortion in its native format. I would recommend at least a solid dual core and decent graphics card to do this. If the video is presented on an older or less powerful machine the video will need to be trans-coded first to an easier format for the computer to handle. The camera has some built in ability to transcode to a lower overhead format. Software like WinFF or Handbrake works well for this. One small technical issue with the camera is when you plug it into the computer, the camera needs to be in playback mode before the computer can find the camera.

Using the Camera With Windows.

When unboxing the camera i---------------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.htmlt comes with 3 disks with software, a few music files
*(MAGIX MUSIC MAKER 16 more reccomended for this, can use the sound files
with Linux and Audacity also)* that can be looped, and a manual in PDF format. These disks consist of. A transfer utilities disk, a video tools disk and a manual and photo applications disk. The disks install the basic drivers and software to use with the camera. The disks ask for the serial number of the camera upon install. The disks install the Image mixer software. This is a combination of video manager that works similar to most photo management software, a very basic function NLVE, a disc creator capable of making a DVD, Blue Ray, or Data discs, and a basic video player.

As I used the software In my opinion, the video manager part was OK, pretty much what you'd expect from most photo management software. The NLVE was very basic all I could really do with it is title video's and combine different cuts into one larger file and some basic cut and paste options. I can also add other sountracks. All in all these options were pretty basic. I like the disc burner. It is simple and very easy to use. The disc burner can make blue ray disks, DVDs and Data disks.

To do a little more with the video files I downloaded handbrake to help with trans-coding the video to other formats to make it easier to work with so it could be used with other media equipment and software. I also downloaded WinFF a front end for FFMPEG to help with trans-coding.

I also downloaded Windows Movie maker 2.6. The videos will need to be trans-coded before they can be used with Windows Movie Maker. Once they are trans-coded, Windows Movie maker can do a lot more with the video including fades and other effects. (camera has some of these features built in). (some loss of quality may be noticed when trans-coding video files with WinFF. To maximize the video capability try several different options with WinFF to see which is best.)

All in all, the camera works well and works well with Windows, my only wish is that the video in the basic HD format didn't need to be trans-coded to work with it outside of Cannons own software. (playback is fine with Windows Media player and VLC -set de-interlace on with VLC-) (Some of the more expensive software like Premier PRO or Sony Vegas may be able to use the video natively not sure. I also read Blender can handle the video format natively but I haven't tried it). As HD video becomes more widely used I see it being used more in the future by other software. I am presently looking for an inexpensive NLVE that can handle the
native video effectively with Windows and do the effects and such that I want.

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Using the Camera with Linux.

At present I am using Linux Mint 9.0 and 10 on my computers. Linux Mint has all the necessary codecs and NTFS files. Linux mint 9 will find the camera as a mass
storage device and the video are located under the /PRIVATE/AVCHD/BDMV/STREAM directory on the camera.

Linux Mint 9 can play the video with numerous players. VLC and Totem seem to do the best job. As with Windows for best results set deinterlace with VLC. To my surprise Tovid and Openshot could handle the native video without trans-coding it. At this point I've not really gone into depth with all the features or how stable these
programs are with the native video or how long it takes to render the video. Trans coders like FFMPEG and Tovid could also trans-code the video just fine. Although, at this point I've only used them to trans-code to DVD format.

As for making data discs K3B can do just fine making a data disk. TovidGUI can make a DVD. At this point I don't know of any method to make blue-rays with Linux. but for me its not an issue because I don't have a Blue Ray player or Burner yet.

My first impressions of the camera are pretty good. It makes very good quality video to me, especially the sound quality. It has good compatibility with both
Windows 7 and Linux. In the next little bit, I want to test the video more with
Openshot and KDEnLive. I also want to test it more with WinFF and FFMPEG
and write some of my own transcode scrips for the HD video with WinFF. I also want to make Decoding scripts for my portable media players using WinFF as
an alternative to my other programs listed earlier on this Blog.

---------------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

Video Conversion Front Ends for Most Portable Media Players with Linux

2011-01-15T23:25:00.000-08:00

Earlier last year I wrote an article on how to convert video for most common MP3/Mp4
players. This included some scripts I'd written to front end the conversion process. These
scripts were crude at best. Recently, the server that I used to post these scripts canceled
my account. So now I have a new account and am re posting these scripts after getting some
more interest in the original post around this last Christmas.

Anyway, I've reposted these scripts and have added scripts that will help with converting
video media with most Chinese based MP3/MP4 players. I have also added a set of scripts
that use Dialog for a front end. Even though at this point they are a little crude.

To use the scripts the following dependencies will need to be installed on Linux

FFMPEG

FFMPEG -AMV for amv players

Mencoder

and

Tovid

These scripts were tested with a Sony Walkman, Sansa View, 1st gen Eclipse ,and a Polariod
touch screen MP4 player. These scripts are written independenly of any of the following
vendors and presented AS-IS

Also, the following links have everything I used to create the scripts if you wish to build your own.

http://code.google.com/p/amv-codec-tools/wiki/HowToConvertToAMV
http://code.google.com/p/amv-codec-tools/
http://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/37
http://www.anythingbutipod.com/forum/showthread.php?t=25289
http://library.gnome.org/users/zenity/stable/
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=593756
http://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-doc.html
http://linuxgazette.net/101/sunil.html
http://www.linux.com/archive/feed/55389
http://www.freeos.com/guides/lsst/

I hope this helps with using Linux with any personal media players you may have.
I hope the scripts also provide a some basic examples of scripts with the terminal,
Dialog, and Zenity.

Thanks, John Babb

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download link:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3365103/conversion2.zip

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

Pulse Audio Control Scripts to turn Pulse Audio ON and Off

2011-01-05T21:25:00.000-08:00

In my last post I mentioned I found a web site that provided a way to better control Pulse Audio by giving users the ability to turn Pulse Audio off and on at will. In that article I mentioned that I was going to write scripts to better control this process.

Here are the scripts that I wrote and control files. These files are presented AS-IS and only tested with my own personal computers. Even though they should work with most newer versions of Linux Mint and Ubuntu. If you decide to Download these files, please read the instructions first. Failure to do so could mess up your soundcard configuration. Also, double check the source code and configuration files to see if they will work with your particular configuration. Everything is pretty straight forward and I've provided all the links to the resources I used to create the scripts within the documentation.

link to Scripts:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3365103/pulseaudio_utils.zip

Note: 11/1/2011 Also see this post for an alternative soundifx for pulse audio.

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2011/10/another-pulse-audio-sound-fix.html

--------------------------------------------------------------------
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Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

EURIKA I've Finally Found a Soundfix for Pulse Audio and My Internal Mic

2011-01-01T01:09:00.000-08:00

I have used my Gateway NV 52 4u for a year and a half and used Linux except for using Windows in Virtual Box. For that period of time I've been happy with the performance of Linux. I've used Linux Mint primarily for most of the time that I've had Linux on the computer. I am presently using Linux mint 10. Despite good performance and most every piece of harware functioning perfectly with Linux one thorn in my side has been Pulse Audio.

The basic problem with Pulse Audio is that when I use it the internal microphone and microphone jack can't be accessed. Because of this, I at one time removed Pulse Audio. This fixed the internal mic/mic jack problem but without Pulse Audio I couldn't figure out to switch the sound between analog output and HDMI output.

I later decided that I wanted use the HDMI sound more than the internal mic. I also purchased a USB soundcard adapter to be able to use a standard mic with Pulse Audio. Then I re installed Linux to get Pulse Audio back.

For the last year I would occasionally check the forums for a better solution for my sound hardware without any real success. Then today I found it. I found the solution here at:

http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/7130/2/

With this tutorial I was able to fix the Pulse Audio sound daemon turn off and on at will.
So now if I want to use pulse audio I just turn it on and if I don't I leave it off. Or if I kill
pulse audio it now won't re-spawn.

When I made the changes, I commented out the old settings instead of erasing them in case
I have problems later. I can easily change it back to the default for Linux Mint if necessary.

I may write a shell script with a Zenity front end to either implement the changes or go back to
the default settings in a day or two I will post this if I get it working properly.

Note: 1/11/2011 check out this post for an alternative sound fix for Pulse Audio

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2011/10/another-pulse-audio-sound-fix.html

--------------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

Happy New Year

2010-12-31T22:07:00.000-08:00

I just want to wish everyone a happy new year. I hope everyone has a wonderful 2011.

I hope to continue writing new articles and such on my blog and they are interesting and helpful
to everyone that visits. I also have some new toys to try out and write about in the coming months
as soon as I get past the ESO ( equipment smarter than operator) phase.

anyway,

Best wishes for the new year, and thanks for the interest my blog received in 2010.

Thanks,

John

Menu for songbird 1.8.0

2010-12-01T09:13:00.000-08:00

I recently changed from songbird 1.2.0 to 1.8.0. Unfortunately, the newest version
of Songbird doesn't allow me to create links to other multimedia sources that I use.
Because, Songbird is still made on top of the Mozilla framework. I was able to create
an HTML menu with Komposer that will allow me to create links for to the different
online multimedia pages I like to use with Songbird. To make songbird use it I just select
the created menu as as the homepage in Songbird by going to edit, preferences, and
putting in the location where I put the menu into the homepage URL box. This menu
can also be easily modded by using any HTML editor.

Note: To get all the content this menu links to to work properly, Songbird will need
all the plug ins for Flash, Java, etc. installed for it. Also, to activate the menu go to file new
tab then hit the home button.

see:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:7

or

If you have Firefox for linux with all the plug ins installed just link the Firefox plugins into
the Songbirds plug in directory.

Example below is a working example. Blogspot is messing up the placement a little
Its much prettier in Songbird. you'll need flash and Java for some resources.

Just scroll down, still having problems with blogspot and nested tables: :(

TV and Video	Web Radio	Tools and Addons	Music Stores
Hulu Internet TV	Shoutcast	Songbird Addons	Magnatune
Spreety Internet TV	Live 365	File System	Amazon Music
You tube	PoddOmatic	Save Vid	FYE
Diggnation	Groove Shark
Jupiter Broadcasting	Pandora Radio

source code:

Available at:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3365103/songweb.html

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3365103/moviemenu.html.html

Note: decided to change it up a little and also add a movie menu.

----------------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

Igloo Cleaning Some Basic Linux Housekeeping

2010-11-29T20:05:00.000-08:00

Note: this article works best for a Gnome Desktop and Deb package based system.

Linux has a reputation as a secure OS without the problems of spy ware, bloat ware and other
problems. That doesn't mean that it completely immune. Occasional checks for problems and a little housekeeping makes for a better OS experience.

So lets do a little housekeeping with Linux, the first thing to look at is getting rid of Flash cookies. I didn't even know these existed until I read the following article.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2371172,00.asp

So, does my system have flash cookies and how do I get rid of them ? The answer is yes
and the following article shows how to get rid of them.

http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/6709/1/

To get rid of regular cookies in Firefox go to tools and then clear recent history. This should show a menu to get rid of all th cookies stored by Firefox.

Next to make sure external sites like Google aren't keeping the systems web history. If you have a Google account, your web history is possibly being tracked, by Google when the Google account is active. To see if Google is tracking go to settings - Google account settings - web history. This will show up in a bar across the top of the Google page if your signed in to a Google account . Here you can view the web history that Google has stored, and turn off web history if desired. Also, watch out for library computers and public kiosk machines. Someone can setup a Google account and leave it open then use this feature in Google to track the machines activities. To be sure this isn't happening erase the cookies on the browser before and after using it. Also if you use a public machine to check your Google mail etc be sure to sign off after you get done. Also, if using a public computer, most browsers store information locally about your activities. Be sure to know how to protect your personal information before using them for anything that might be personal or sensitive information. Also some browsers like Firefox and newer versions of IE have a private browsing setting which keeps personal info from being stored on the system.

http://www.microsoft.com/protect/mobile/public/publicpc.aspx

A couple of good utilities for cleaning and checking your Linux machine are Bleachbit, KlamAV
and Chkrootkit. Bleachbit Is a utility to clean up logs and temp files on the Linux system which
will free up space and resources and help protect privacy. KlamAV is a KDE based front end for
Clamav a popular virus checker for Linux. Chkrootkit checks the Linux machine for root
kits. All of these programs should be in the standard repositories for most Debian and Ububtu
based systems.

If you want to remove a piece of software from the system which was installed, Synaptic Package Manager available for most all Debian/UBUNTU based distros does a pretty good job for this. To activate it just go to su or sudo and type synaptic from the command line. this should bring up the Synaptic Package Manager. Here just search for the package installed in the search box then right click on it and choose mark for removal or complete removal and then hit the apply button to uninstall it. RPM based systems can use YUM utilities the same way. Some
distros like PCLinuxOS also use Synaptic with RPM files.

If the system has software installed on top of Wine getting rid of it can be a little trickier.
To find the program turn on show hidden files in Nautilus then go into the .wine directory
then the drive_c directory then search for the program and erase it. Then to get rid of the entry within the Wine tab on the Gnome menu go to preferences, main menu then open the Wine tab and erase the entry.

If you need to completely nuke the settings for a program that may of broke or doesn't function properly, most programs for Linux store their configuration files in hidden directories within the users home directory. To see them just turn on see hidden files within Nautilus if in Gnome this should show these hidden configuration files. To get rid of a broke configuration file just erase it. When the program associated is run afterwards, it should then create a new config file. Just don't erase the . Gnome or .KDE or .bash files as this may crash the user account. Also, if you do this to Songbird or Firefox all the Bookmarks themes and add ons will need to be re installed.

----------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

Gnome Themes Advanced

2010-11-08T01:36:00.000-08:00

Linux Desktop Customization the Basics

One of the things that I enjoy about the Linux desktop is that just about every element can be changed. I am presently running Linux Mint 9 Isadora and using the Gnome desktop. Gnome at the time this is written, is the most popular desktop environment for Linux. Most versions of Linux come with a default environment usually Gnome or KDE, however, other environments can be installed if desired. Some of the other choices include KDE, Enlightenment,
XFCE, LXDE, Fluxbox and number of others.

for more info:

http://xwinman.org/

http://moonos.org/

http://peppermintos.com/

http://www.sabayon.org/

Within most of the different desktop environments, numerous elements can be changed. This includes, adding panels and docks, changing window decorations, changing colors, changing the icon set, changing default applications, changing backgrounds, Changing menu layouts, adding widgets and more. In my opinion the two most versatile and easiest to change are Gnome and KDE

for more info:

Gnome:

http://www.gnome.org/

http://art.gnome.org/

http://gnome-look.org/

KDE:

http://www.kde.org/

http://kde-look.org/

If a computer running Linux has a supported 3D video card and the proper drivers are installed, the desktop for the computer can be made to do numerous special effects. The most popular way to do this is with Compiz.

for more info:

http://www.compiz.org/

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CompositeManager/ConfiguringCompizPlugins

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiz

At present, For this article I'm running Gnome 2.30.2 with Linux Mint Isadora 9 with 3D acceleration and Compiz installed. I want to do two customizations for this article.

I want to create a look like the old Mac 7.0 to 9.0,Amiga, Acorn desktop had survived and continued to be developed to the presentand a super sleek modern look that doesn't look like Windows or Mac. Even though, I think Linux Mint does a pretty good job with this already especially Linux Mint 10.

To start off with, I'm going to start with just the basic Gnome desktop
with Linux Mint 9 which looks like this:

As shown above, the screen is pretty basic just a panel at the bottom with the Mint Menu and a notification area and clock across the bottom. This is simple
and elegant and just fine but I want to do some things to the desktop to make it
more functional and customized for me.

The Basics Part 1: Setting Up New Panels and Menu on the Desktop

The first thing I want to do to change the Gnome desktop is to create a panel on the top of the desktop. Here I can add more stuff. All the things I want to add can be just as easily put on the original panel. For my desktop, I want to create a top panel for more real estate and for my personal preferences . To add a new panel just right click on a preexisting panel and choose new panel from the menu.

Next, to add some new items to the panel, right click on the panel and choose add to panel.

This brings up the add to panel menu shown above, here different Items can be added to the panel. These items include a standard Gnome menu, power management tools, network monitoring tools, clocks and other applets. To put
an item from the menu on the panel just click on the item and drag it to the panel.
Once it's there, the item can be right clicked again to move it or lock it to the panel. To move locked items they need to be unlocked first. Items can also be added to a panel by dragging them from either the Mint Menu or the Gnome Menu to the panel.

The basics Part 2: Theming the Desktop Using the Appearance Menu

The second thing to change the Gnome desktop is to use the appearance manager to change some of the appearance settings. To bring up the appearance manager just go to system, preferences, appearance on the Gnome menu or all
applications, preferences, appearance on the Mint menu. This should bring up the appearances menu shown below.

With the appearance menu numerous aspects of the Gnome Desktop Environment can be changed. This includes, window borders, backgrounds, fonts
visual effects(even though CompizConfig does better for this will explain later).
Under the theme tab different themes can be chosen and customized. If the customize button is pressed another menu comes up allowing the controls,
window border, icons and pointer to be changed. Once these are changed the
changes can be saved into a new theme.

The Basics Part 3: Reconfiguring the Gnome and Mint Menus

The third thing to customize the Gnome desktop is change the Gnome Menu. Sometimes If numerous software packages are installed on the system the Gnome menu gets a little over crowded. Gnome menu can scroll to help with this. I prefer to change the arrangement of the different elements to make them fit better into the screen real estate. To do this go to system, preferences, main menu on the main Gnome menu or all applications, preferences, main menu on the Mint menu. this should bring up the following menu.

In the Following illustration, the main menu has been opened along with the
menu to add a new menu and another menu to change the Icon for the new
menu created. Here I've started by creating a new menu within the sound and
video section brought up on the left.

Once a menu/directory is created within sound and video new programs can
be dragged and dropped into it. This is done by going to the location you want to move stuff out of and dragging and dropping from right to left into the new menu. The menu editor will flip back and forth when items are moved. This will also make a copy to the new directory/menu and doesn't erase it out of the original directory/menu. It can be removed or turned off in the original directory/menu. I prefer to turn them off in case something gets messed up I can always go back.

The Mint Menu can also be changed. The first change can be made by double clicking on any of the headers. This makes them appear and disappear. When they disappear, a mini button in the corner replaces the header. The second change can be done under the favorites menu. It is easy to change out the programs listed here with other programs that may be more preferred. To remove something from this menu, just right click on it and choose remove from favorites. To add to favorites, just drag and drop the application from all applications to favorites. Items can also be dragged and dropped between the horizontal dividers in favorites to group them into likes.

If the right mouse button is clicked on the Mint Menu tab in the panel it resides
on, a menu comes up which the Mint Menu's preferences can be chosen. Here the transparency, color, border and layout can be changed. Also, when the menu tab is right clicked, there is a edit menu selection which brings up the same menu as before for the Gnome Menu.

The Basics Part 4: Setting Up 3D Effects With Compiz

The fourth thing to customize Gnome is to tweak the different 3D effects that can be done with Compiz. The easiest way to change the Compiz settings is with CompizConfig settings manager. This is located under system, preferences, CompizConfig. CompizConfig should be automatically installed when 3D graphics are activated within Linux Mint. If not, then use Synaptic Package Manager to
obtain it. Some Linux versions may not activate Compiz effects by default

see:

http://xubuntublog.wordpress.com/2007/12/09/xubuntu-compiz-pretty-pretty-xubuntu/

for more details.

Once setup and open, the CompizConfig menu look like this:

Here different effects can be activated and deactivated. Sometimes there are
conflicts between two different settings. If this happens a menu like the following
one will appear.

Sometimes it is necessary to turn one effect off to get another to work. Sometimes the hot key for that effect may need to be changed etc. The best way to learn is just to play with it and try different options.

If you click on a particular effect withing CompizConfig the effect may have options to tweak it even more. Here is the desktop cube's menu.

Here the Cube effects color, transparency, caps and background can be changed to add more to the effect.

Linux Desktop Customization Taking it to The Next Level

OK, so now that the basics have been covered, lets take it to the next level.
To create a desktop experience that has the feel like the original Mac 7.75 to 9.0 or an old Amiga or Acorn machine form the 90's series of computers had survived to present day and kept a similar look and feel there are several things that can
be changed to create this look.

To start off with, her are some original screen shots from this era.

http://toastytech.com/guis/indexapple.html

OK, so now to use this page as a point of reference and create a 90's style desktop theme. There are different places on the Internet to get resources needed to get the look.

The first thing to find is a nice tile to build the background with. for this go to:

http://www.grsites.com/archive/textures/

and get some background tile for the theme.

Once the graphics are obtained put them in a folder that wont be erased or
misplaced that the computer can reference. For my machine I created a folder in
USR called graphics. Since its in the protected part of the file system to create and modify it the user needs to be in SU to to this. This is just a personal preference for me. Most things in the USR directory are protected and not easily manipulated or accidentally erased during regular housekeeping.

Once the tile/tiles are where they need to be kept, they can be activated for the background. To do this just right click on the Gnome desktop and open change desktop background. This should open up the menu for backgrounds.This menu can also be activated under system, preferences appearance. then drag and drop the tile/tiles here. To make the tile look right hit the style button
and change the scaling until it fits right as the background.

Next, to change the look of the window decorations, icons, and controls
to create the look for the theme go to:

http://gnome-look.org/

Here there are all sorts of new items to customize the theme. To start out with
the window decoration can be changed for the theme. Once in the gnome look
page, go under the Metacity to find a look that matches the theme for the window decorations.

For the theme being created Classic seems a good choice

located here:

http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Classic?content=46208

To install it first, download it and put it into the theme directory . This should download as a tar.gz file. To install it just go to system, preferences, appearance, install and then select the file. Most theme stuff installs this way. A few themes may not, if the theme doesn't install in this way it will usually come with instructions on how to install it.

Next to find a controls theme that matches the created theme go under the GTK 2.o heading to look for the appropriate theme for my controls.

For the theme being creating the Amiga 3x located at:

http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Amiga3.x

should work fine.

install it the same way the window decorations were installed earlier.

Next, to find a nice Icon theme.for this theme go to the Icons section
of Gnome Look and search for an Icon theme that will work for the desktop look.

for the theme Ultimate Gnome located at:

http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Ultimate+Gnome?content=75000

should create the desired look.

Next, to change the nautilus file manager background open the file manager and go to edit then backgrounds and emblems and drag the pattern wanted into the part of the Nautilus window want to be changed.

So far so good.

Now that the desktop look pretty good for the theme different applications can
also be themed. To start off with Firefox has numerous themes which can be installed to find a theme for firefox that works with the created desktop theme
got to:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/themes/

To add a theme just click on it and hit the add to Firefox button this should install it. Not all themes will work with all versions of Firefox. If it wont install it wont work with Firefox.

To add elements to Compiz that match the theme there are several changes with
CompizConfig that can be done. Presently, this system has Compiz running with the cube effect, wobbly windows, and expo. The graphics for the background and top can be changed in the cube effect to match the theme. To find some cool graphics for this check out:

http://art.gnome.org/

http://gnome-look.org/

http://kde-look.org/

For this example for the background for the Compiz cube effect I decided to use Drift located at:

http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Drift?content=135063

and golden line located at:

http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Golden+Line+2?content=128938

for the top .

To use the graphics, go under CompizConfig, desktop cube, appearance open up skydome and cubecaps. Then erase out any old entries under cube caps and skydome. Then replace them with the new images desired.

The net result:

For a super sleek modern look I'm not going into a lot of detail. Since, the steps to create a really great theme are documented above.one thing that I should mention is that there are several things that can be installed from the native repositories for Linux Mint. To see what is available just run Synaptic Package Manager and type theme into the search box this should bring up all kinds of different things that can be installed to customize the desktop.

Here are a Couple of screen shots of my sleek modern look.

to see more check out my videos at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcFSkevJ6Cw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3ZbYRTU1J8

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

Project Clairette the Grapes of Wine

2010-10-28T01:06:00.000-07:00

project clairette.

Part 1:

What is Project
Clairette?

In the last few months I've posted several
articles on my blog about Linux. The two most popular things that
I've posted are articles about my Gateway NV52 and things I've
done using Wine. Wine is an application layer that allows Linux to
run numerous applications originally designed for different
versions of Windows. When Wine is newly installed it works but is
limited in what it can do. Different things can be added to Wine
to make it much more compatible and functional. These things
include Direct X, fonts, Java, audio and video codecs, different
Windows components etc. Even though these things are usually
freely available on the Internet, they are not included with Wine
due to intellectual property issues. As I have used Wine to run
different software and used it on different systems I've tried to
document my experience with it. The problem is the articles I've
posted in the past are scattered and don't completely tie in
together.

The purpose of this article is to start over from
scratch with Wine. Rebuild it for a new user on my computer and
install ALL the software I use Wine for in one place and document
the process.

part 2

The basic configuration on which this project is
built.

The system:

Home built computer with AMD quad
core processor and on board ATI/AMD 4200 GPU with 4 gigs of
ram. DSL connection to the Internet.

The OS/Distro:

Linux
Mint 9 - Isadora 64 bit DVD version with the default ATI/AMD
Catalyst 3D drivers installed. Wine version 1.2 with all
dependencies from the Synaptic Package Manager also installed.

part 3:

Basic Construction
of Wine for Clairette

To setup Wine for Project Clairette
there are 3 things 1 want to do

1. Setup a basic Wine
configuration for the user.

2. Use Winetricks to
setup some basics. This can be tricky.

3. Manually setup
Direct X, VLC, and Mediacoder

Note: EVERYTHING BEYOUND THIS
POINT ASSUMES THAT WINE WILL BE CONFIGURED FOR A NEW USER ACCOUNT
AND NOT FOR A PRE EXISTING
ACCOUNT IN WHICH WINE IS ALREADY
INSTALLED AND BEING USED.

To setup a basic configuration
for Wine, all I need to do for each user is go to the terminal and
type in winecfg. This should build a basic Wine configuration for
the user. When Wine
installs software on the system, each user
has their own Wine configuration and the programs
are installed
and live within the users account directory. This can be changed,
but for the sake of simplicity, I'm keeping it this way for now.
When Winecfg is run from the command line, a menu comes up showing
different options that can be changed, these include drive
locations, sound server, graphics setup etc. Linux Mint does a
pretty good job with the base configuration, so for now I'm just
going to leave it alone. If something needs to be changed within
the configuration, sometimes the menu has a little lag so expect
that. Once Winecfg has setup Wine for the user, Wine is now ready
to have software installed upon it.

Winetricks is a script
written for Linux to install numerous basic things on Wine to get
different programs running. Things like fonts, networking
components, program components, etc. Winetricks comes up with a
menu similar to the Synaptic Package Manager and when it is used
to install software it will go out to the Internet and find the
software and install it. Unfortunately, It doesn't check for
conflicts or dependency issues. In the past, I've had to run it a
few times to get a configuration which I liked. If Winetricks
messes up the Wine configuration, just use the file manager to
show hidden files and erase the .wine file and start over with
winecfg. NOTE: if this is necessary it will remove all previously
installed software for Wine for that user.

Winetricks can
be found at:

http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks

For
the Clairette Project installation of Wine I have used Winetricks
to install:

NOTE: I installed these packages ONE AT A TIME
this significantly reduces conflicts
and
crashes.

1. 7zip
2. cmake
3. core fonts
4. mfc42
5. ffdshow
6. ogg
7. vb6run
8. tahoma
9. vcrun2010
10. vjrun20
11. allfonts
12. vcrun6
13. vcrunsp6
14. windowscodecs
15. xvid

This should give
a good base for installing stuff later. Now that I've installed
what I want to
from Winetricks there is a couple of components
I like to install by hand. These can be installed with Winetricks,
but I feel that if I install them by hand I get better
performance.

Direct X 9.0c multimedia layer for
Windows

VLC -a video player for Windows - installs codecs
for most All video audio formats

Mediacoder – trans
codes most everything has most all audio and video codecs.

To
install Direct X the best way I've found to do this is via the
tutorial I found
at:

http://www.wine-reviews.net/microsoft/directx-90c-march-2008-
redistributable-on-linux-with-wine.html

or If this page is no longer available:

Copy the following section below
at the bottom of the user.reg file within the hidden .wine
directory for the user and save it.

[Software\\Wine\\DllOverrides]
1206264929
"d3d8"="builtin"
"d3d9"="builtin"
"d3dim"="native"
"d3drm"="native"
"d3dx8"="native"
"d3dx9_24"="native"
"d3dx9_25"="native"
"d3dx9_26"="native"
"d3dx9_27"="native"
"d3dx9_28"="native"
"d3dx9_29"="native"
"d3dx9_30"="native"
"d3dx9_31"="native"
"d3dx9_32"="native"
"d3dx9_33"="native"
"d3dx9_34"="native"
"d3dx9_35"="native"
"d3dx9_36"="native"
"d3dxof"="native"
"dciman32"="native"
"ddrawex"="native"
"devenum"="native"
"dinput"="builtin"
"dinput8"="builtin"
"dmband"="native"
"dmcompos"="native"
"dmime"="native"
"dmloader"="native"
"dmscript"="native"
"dmstyle"="native"
"dmsynth"="native"
"dmusic"="native"
"dmusic32"="native"
"dnsapi"="native"
"dplay"="native"
"dplayx"="native"
"dpnaddr"="native"
"dpnet"="native"
"dpnhpast"="native"
"dpnlobby"="native"
"dsound"="builtin"
"dswave"="native"
"dxdiagn"="native"
"mscoree"="native"
"msdmo"="native"
"qcap"="native"
"quartz"="native"
"streamci"="native"

Then get the Direct X 9.0c March
2008 release
from File
Hippo

http://filehippo.com/download_directx/

Then
run the program once its downloaded.

NOTE: to run a
Windows program with Wine two things need to be done. First right
click and under the properties tab change the permissions to
executable. Then under the open with tab make sure the default
program is Wine.

This step will not install Direct X but
will extract it to be installed. So an empty directory will need
to be created to extract Direct X to. Once thats done just run the
extractor program with the created directory

Once the
files are extracted, go into the directory the files were
extracted and run DXSETUP.EXE. If everything is setup correctly
the installer should work just fine. If it crashes, you may need
to erase the .wine directory setup the winecfg again.

Next, I want to install VLC, to install VLC by hand will
use File Hippo and get the 1.0
version

http://www.filehippo.com/download_vlc/

and
then just run the .exe file for it and let it install.

NOTE:
If there are problems with running the program see the previous
section on Direct X. Also, if Direct X is not installed this
program may not run correctly.

Once VLC is installed, a
few settings need tweaking. The windows version of VLC sometimes
causes X-Windows to go black. To fix this change the preferences
for video under tools/ prefrences tab. For my system I chose
Direct X 3D video output. This could vary on different systems
depending on how the video is setup.

Next for the Clairette
project I want to install Mediacoder, which is a trans coder that
can trans code just about anything

to do this just go to

http://www.mediacoderhq.com/editions.html

and
download and run it.

Note: Make sure your getting
Mediacoder when you download it. The site for Mediacoder has links
to about 5 other similar software packages.

This should
give a strong base to install the other software I want to use
with Wine.

part 4

Testing and installing software on Wine with the Cliarette project configuration:

Installed as Part of Project Clairette:

program	issues	native equivalent
VLC	Video needs to be configured to prevent black screen, Go to tools then preferences then video and change settings	VLC, Totem, Gnome Mplayer, Kaffeine,
Mediacoder	Make sure to download the right program when downloading it. Also, the installer wants to install some kind of registry fixer with program this is completely untested don't install.	Winff Ffmpeg Tovid Soundconverter

New software installed:
Starting with the hardest I've found to install and get working correctly
except for software relating to the Internet and browsing software
installed separately later.

Almost have the formatting problems fixed, just keep scrolling down. Hope to

have this last bug fixed in a day or so.

Thanks, John

Program	Issues	native equivalent
NullDC Sega Dreamcast emulator	Works fine, need to tweak plug in settings for best performance. Full screen mode may crash X Windows upon exit. Set all .exe files to executable permissions. Can use Compiz zoom function for an alternative to full screen . See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NullDC http://code.google.com/p/nulldc/ 4shared and other community sites may have NullDC with all the plugins and components needed to run it pre compiled. If obtaining Via community site use Clamav to check it before installing.	none known
Dolphin Gamecube Emulator	Works, crashes on exit, plugins need to be configured, may need to download a couple of different builds to find one that works. Full screen not recommended. Scalable window or Compiz zoom works. 32Bit works haven't got 64 bit working will recognize CPU as quad core 64 bit. Quad core and respectable graphics card recommended. downloaded from: http://dolphin.jcf129.com/	Dolphin needs Nvidia for the native version.
Libre Office Office Suite	Works, need JRE to get it to work correctly, Like the native version better. When it computes space requirements and system resources it may take a little while. See also: http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2010 /10/libre-office-on-debian-based-computer.html	Libre Office use this tutorial to install it on Linux http://www.unixmen.com/linux- tutorials/1218-install- libreoffice-in-linux-fedora- ubuntu-debian-
X Mame for Windows Arcade emulator 1978-1995	MameUI32_0.139.exe Works- need to get Gui version. A little better ROM compatibility than the Linux version. A little crash prone mainly in the menu once in game it runs OK. Easier to configure and manage than the native version unless, using the native version with Kxmame or other front end. see http://www.mameui.info/	Xmame Kxmame native
Zinc with ZincGui arcade emulator early 3D games	Zinc is an arcade emulator with several games installing Zinc with ZincGui requires that that are installed both in the same directory. Also the version of Zinc used needs to match with the correct version of the cpzn rom. This is usually the problem if Zinc is not working properly. If its running way too slow change the graphic settings with ZincGui here are links to Zinc and ZincGui http://www.zophar.net/frontends/arcade/zincgui.html http://www.emuhype.com/index.phtml?s=zinc&ss=files for the proper Zinc system ROM search for cpzn Zinc emulator or Zinc emulator system ROM. It may take more than a couple of tries to get the correct one. Note: not sure of the intellectual property status of the system ROMs for this emulator.	Zinc native If it runs way too slow try an older version.
EPSXE Playstation 1 emulator	Works, The 1.7.0 version is working almost perfectly except D3D plug in crashes on exit. see: http://www.epsxe.com/ Search 4shared or other community sites for version with all plug ins. If obtaining via community site use Clamav to check it before installing.	PCSX EPSXE hard to get working with GTK 2.0+
WinKawaks Capcom -Neo Geo emulator	Works, sometimes crashes on exit. see: http://www.kawaks.net/ Search 4shared or other community sites for version with all plug ins and necessary components. If obtaining Via community site use Clamav to check it before installing.	GnGEO
NosGBA GBA-DS emulator	No$GBA works perfectly. See: http://nocash.emubase.de/gba.htm Search 4shared or other community sites for version with all plug ins and necessary components. If obtaining Via community site use Clamav to check it before installing.	Desume Vgba Mednafen
Gens Plus Genesis 32x emulator	Works need BIOS for 32x ROMs. If in full screen, click the mouse on left corner to bring up menu. See: http://www.retrobase.net/ Search 4shared or other community sites for version with all plug insand necessary components. If obtaining Via community site use Clamav to check it before installing.	Generator Dgen.SDL
Magic Engine PCE emulator	Works perfectly: project seems to be dead, will have to find on community web sites. If obtaining Via community site use Clamav to check it before installing.	Mednafen
pro system Atari 7800 emulator	works perfectly: See: http://www.zophar.net/a7800.html	Stella
zsnes	works perfectly: see: http://www.zsnes.com/	zsnes snes9x
PsXeven	works perfectly once plugins are properly set: see: http://emulator-zone.com/doc.php/psx/psxeven.html search 4shared or other cosmmunity sites for version with all plugins and nessasary compnenets.	PCSX
Raine	works, annoying to get setup properly once setup works perfectly. See: http://rainemu.swishparty.co.uk/	Raine native version extremly crash prone with newer linux, Xmame
Project 64 N64 Emulator	Works, installs from exe file, needs to be run in Virtual desktop. If using ATI graphics run in full screen mode IN the Virtual desktop to eliminate flickering. Nvidia users may have less issues though untested.	mupen64plus use native works better
Dosbox Dos Emulator	Works perfectly, installes from installer may offer more options than native a little slower than native version.	dosbox native
Steem Atari ST emulator	Works, Needs TOS ROM See: http://steem.atari.st/download.htm can use MIDI if available See:	Steem Native

part 5: installing Internet and browsing software:

I decided to separate browsing and Internet software from the rest for two reasons.

1. sometimes Browsers modify the some of the basic files in Wine where the other really programs I installed generally don't.

2. Windows based browsers and such may offer more functionality, newer versions of Flashplayer , Shockwave compatability ect, BUT may expose your system to more of the Windows security issues.

1 Firefox.

I have used Firefox before with Wine with no real problems. Installing it is pretty easy.

To install it first of all I will go to File Hippo to download a version of Firefox for Windows. I use File Hippo instead of the main Firefox page because it allows me to choose an earlier version of Firefox if the current one doesn't work correctly.

To install Firefox for my build I'm going to download version 3.5
(Used/tested earlier)

After downloading, just run the installer with Wine. It should install and run straight from the download. After installing I want to install Flash player and Shockwave.

To install Flashplayer Just go to the site and download it. This should automatically start the install. Just follow the instructions and it should install perfectly on Firefox. NOTE: Flash may ask you to exit the browser before continuing this is OK.

To see if its working properly go here.

http://www.kongregate.com/
http://www.y8.com/
http://www.youtube.com/

Next, I want to install Shockwave. Just download the Shockwave installer form Adobe. and Install it. If it asks to install Mcaffee say no. Then exit and rerun the browser to get it to
work.

Go here to see if its working
properly:
http://www.shockwave.com/home.jsp

Tested Java at Javaboutique unfortunately no go.

http://javaboutique.internet.com/aster/

Songbird
1.2.0

I am using the 1.2.0 version of songbird which I downloaded from File Hippo

http://www.filehippo.com/download_songbird/5794/

I use the 1.2.0 version because It is the easiest one for me to modify.

See:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2010/06/songbird-120-for-linux-revisited.html

Songbird Is a music/multimedia manager based upon the Mozilla project. It is my personal favorite music program. It will run natively on Linux or on Wine. Sometimes the Windows version of Songbird will crash if run with Compiz. To fix this run it in a virtual desktop.

To install in on Wine.

Download the 1.2.0. version from file hippo. Then run the installer It will install Songbird and several recommended plugins. Next tell songbird where to find your music. File/Import media/directory of music. NOTE: If you are using Songbird with managed mode turned on it will build your music into its own directory structure and copy th music there. This should cause songbird to build a database of your music. If you've installed Firefox with the Flash and Shockwave first on Wine. The plugins should carry over to Songbird if not, go to the Songbird add ons tab and click on it this should bring up the songbird add ons web page and a URL bar at the top. type in the web page for Shockwave and Flashplayer or go to Google and do a search, here and download and install them the same way as mentioned in the Firefox section above.

Part 6

Links of
interest:

The
Basics
http://www.winehq.org/

http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks

http://www.wine-reviews.net/microsoft/directx-90c-march-2008-
redistributable-on-linux-with-wine.html

Other Wine
Resources:
http://www.von-thadden.de/Joachim/WineTools/
http://www.playonlinux.com/en/

Software:
http://www.filehippo.com/
http://www.gamershell.com/
http://www.gog.com/en/frontpage/
http://emulator-zone.com/
http://www.4shared.com/

My Older Wine
Posts
http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2010/10/libre-office-on-debian-based-computer.html
http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2010/09/linux-mint-isadora-advanced.html
http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2009/09/getting-winey.html

Part 7:
Now that I have Wine setup for the user, how to backup and transfer my Wine configuration.

Step One:
Create a Backup

Create a directory for the backup for my system I called it wbackup. Open the file manager
and show hidden files. Then go into the .wine directory and copy everything except the dosdevices directory. (This directory is a set of links to the other directory structure copying
it may cause an infinite loop.) This should create a backup.

To restore it or to transfer it to another user, run Winecfg to setup a basic Wine configuration
then copy the contents of the backup directory into the new .wine folder copying over any previous files. Then chmod and chown the .wine directory for the account.

NOTE: doing this may replace the old .wine configuration if one already exist.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-to-use-chmod-and-chown-command/

Note:
This project as configured via the instructions about was about 2.5
GB complete.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

The Month of October Brings My Blog Even More Interest and A Few Suprises

2010-10-27T09:27:00.000-07:00

October is Just about finished, and as I go into November with my blog, I've had another record breaking month. In my blog my original post about installing Linux on My Gateway Laptop is still number 1. Last month, I rewritten this post with new material with more comprehensive details and to document my switch to Linux Mint. I also created a new entry with Linux on Laptops but its not been added to their page yet.

I did a post earlier about using my Casio keyboard with Linux with some different Midi software this seems to be gaining in popularity. I would like to do some more here with that a little later.

This month for this blog I created a screen cast showing a menu I created using the drawer function in Gnome as a foundation for an alternative to Gnome shell. I placed a couple of videos of this on YouTube. I'll admit, the project was a little green, especially with the first video. Since then, I've added even more features such as the ability to do Compiz effects like expo. I've played with some theming where I experimented with just using the menu and no other menu bars. But I'm not going to post another video on this by itself. I don't want to ride a good horse to death. I might do more on this in a video about theming with Compiz and Gnome later and add it in as part of the video.

For my video on YouTube this was my first video ever . It got around 200 views for the month which shows the power of the video media. The thing that I found unusual is that it didn't give my blog a tremendous number of additional hits as I would have expected. I also didn't receive the comments I would have expected. In my mind, I thought I would receive comments by people interested in GTK programming, Gnome and theming saying it was a cool concept. Hopefully, I would create a buzz with It. I also thought, I would Get a chorus of "this sucks" for the overly greenness of the project and the over simplicity. In reality, I did get both of these type of comments. The thing is , out of around 200 views I only received two comments, one of each.

I noticed that my blog has received a good deal of interest in some of the things that I've used with Wine. I have posted several entries on my blog about things I've done with Wine. These post are scattered throughout the blog. I've been working a project to consolidate all of my wine entries into one post. I hope to have it finished and posted here in a few days. This is my most ambitious post yet. I think it's a really cool project. With this post I put together Wine with a number of things to give it better compatibility, a number of emulators that can be run via Wine on Linux, a couple of browsers with Flash and shockwave Plug ins, and utilities to play and trans code most kinds of AV media. I show how to install Libre Office on Wine. Finally how to back up and transfer the Wine configuration once its put together.

I hope that people who use my blog are finding it interesting and informative and helpful. I hope to bring even more projects here continually in the future and they get even better.

Thanks,

John

Libre Office on a Debian Based Computer Native and Wine

2010-10-11T01:33:00.000-07:00

NOTE: The original contents of this article was posted only a few weeks afterLibre office was made available. Presently, most all major distros should come with Libre office by default. In some cases it may not be installed by default due to its large size but most major Linux distros should have Libre Office in thier software repositories.

NOTE: I found the following tutorial to install Libre office on deb based distros
on Unixmen and tested it installs easily and works just fine - Still needs JRE.

http://www.unixmen.com/linux-tutorials/1218-install-libreoffice-in-linux-fedora-ubuntu-debian-

Recently, Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems leaving the fate of certain parts of the Linux OS in Limbo. These things include JDK/JRE, Open office, Open Solaris and other projects that Sun contributed. A new alternative to Open Office has emerged called Libre Office built upon the framework of Open Office but independently managed. I recently downloaded this program for my computer. The Linux version is comprised of numerous RPM files. I find, it would be hard to install this on an RPM distro like Fedora or Suse and could take aeon's to install it via converting it with Alien to debs or to a tar file. I found an easier way, although there is two issues. number 1 its cheating, I installed it upon Wine. The second was that in order for it to work I needed to install JRE on Wine from Oracle(not sure if real Linux version would need it) which puts the project back to square 1. It still needs Oracle's JRE to work.

Anyway, Here is a few screen shots of Libre
Office running from Wine on Linux Mint

Note:

This entry in my blog is getting tons of interest. So I though, I would also put some screen shots of LibreOffice running natively on Linux.

Also the following video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3ZbYRTU1J8

Was created using LibreOffice with LibreImpress using GtkRecordmyDesktop
and OpenShot video editor and Tovid(although looking for an alternative to Tovid
due to the artifacts on the sides due to screen mismatch).

for my post

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2010/11/gnome-themes-advanced.html

------------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

September Rocks

2010-10-01T21:52:00.000-07:00

For Sptember this blog again saw more hits than any other month. Even though its not getting a huge number of views, the amount of interest is certianly increasing. I appreciate all the interest in my blog and hope that it has been useful and interesting to the people that have visited it.

I have some new projects for the future and this month. These include a series of new posts for my Linux Mint Isadora install on my Gateway NV52 4u with a new posting on Linux on Laptops. I hope to elaborate more about all the details. I did a quick and dirty post last month. I hope the new post later in October will give a more indepth look. I also want to rebuild my Wine install and document all the parts I use to get it working with the software I use with Wine. I also may do some more post about using Pulse Audio and some multimedia stuff.

In the last month I definitely appreciate the interest. I hope to continue making my post here and making them continually better.

Thanks,

John

Installing windows 7 a Linux Users Perspective

2010-09-30T23:27:00.000-07:00

I enjoy using Linux. For most things I like doing with the computer Linux is my personal choice. I personally enjoy Linux because it is an open source project
managed by the community that uses it instead of a hanful of corporate entities. I like the fact that most all programs for and components of Linux are released with
the source code. For me this means If I want to change a program or use a program as a model to create my own program I can. Linux is super customizable most everything can be changed to suit my needs. For example, I can set up Linux as a high power workstation with all the bells and whistles with Compiz, and Gnome or KDE desktop, NLVE software, NLAE software, 3D animation software ect. Or I can setup an economy version of Linux with a simpler desktop like LXDE or XFCE among others for an older computer with less horsepower. I can setup Linux as a Web or File server with no desktop at all if I wish. I presently have 3 computers I run Linux upon an old AMD athlon XP machine, the Gateway portable and a AMD quad core Athlon 630 machine. All of them function very well with Linux

Despite this, I also use Windows. With all the advantages of Linux there are still
some things that I still need to use Windows for. This includes running software
for to manage the accounting of a small mom and pop, running some software
needed for school, running some software needed for work, and oh yes I-tunes.

I recently installed a new OEM copy of Windows 7 upon a computer system. Most
people that use Windows never need to install Windows on thier computers. On
most PC's it comes pre installed. Actually, on a lot of newer computers the computer comes with Windows pre installed. The manufacturers don't offer a copy of Windows on disk or a recovery disk. Most newer computers do have some type of backup utility that can make these disks for the computer. Which if this is the case, I HIGHLY recommend using the backup utility to make disks before really using the computer.

One of the setbacks of using Linux is that it seldom ever comes pre installed on
a computer. I think many would be Linux users are turned off by this. Linux
is not hard to install but it does take a little technical know how do do things
like setup user accounts, format and partition the drives for use,install drivers ,install codecs and plugins etc. If installing Windows or OSX the same steps are necessary

Also to install Linux in most cases, the computers hard drive needs a partition for Linux to exist on. Which means, if the computer already has Windows installed resizing the original windows partition to make room for Linux can be technical.

http://apcmag.com/the_definitive_dualbooting_guide_linux_vista_and_xp_stepbystep.htm

When people buy a Windows computer usually its like buying a refrigerator or toaster everything is done for them ahead of time. PC builders who I like to build their own have to install the OS whether its Linux, Windows, Haiku - Be, etc. themselves.

Recently I installed Windows 7. Its not necessarily hard to install but it did take quite a bit of time. Some people who try Linux complain about it being technical or hard to install. Personally I find Linux easier to install than Windows if your doing
a new install.

Anyway:

My Windows 7 install:

About 3 days ago I received my copy of Windows 7. I was surprised how big of
a box it came in for just a piece of software. Once I opened the box I saw why.
I was expecting just a disk in an envelope. Instead, I received a plastic security
wrapped package with warning and stop all over the front of it saying if
you buy the OEM copy its not refundable once its open. Also, your supposed to
agree to the licensing agreement written on the back in micro print inside the
blurry packaging before continuing. After using the kitchen sheers to open
the package, on the inside it had a DVD version of Windows 7 which was in
a standard DVD box with even more security tape on the outside.

personally found this funny. If your a Linux user you know that you can get hundreds of different distros by downloading them online or from magazines or books from the bookstore, Or form a local user groups without 10 layers of packaging, secret codes or micro printed 3 page+ long licensing agreements.

After opening the packaging and going to the machines BIOS to set it up to boot from the CD ROM, I inserted the Windows 7 disk. It booted up and then then it just sat there looking like It was doing nothing. no drive activity no nothing. Then it came up with a menu to setup the time keyboard currency etc. then a menu to partition the drive.(for custom install) I just chose the defaults. It also asked for the security code here. After that it came up with a screen that had a checklist of things it was doing to install the system. Again, it just sat there like it was doing nothing for an extended length of time. If you didn't know that it was supposed to do this, it would be easy to reset the machine thinking the install had crashed. Actually, I did this the first time I installed Windows 7. After quite awhile the machine began run the DVD to install the OS and the machine reset itself. Then went into the desktop.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
After Windows 7 installed itself, I knew I needed to install some drivers for the different features of my motherboard. I inserted the motherboard driver disk and it automatically started. The disk asked me if I wanted to install various drivers and such including a 90 day install of Norton Anti Virus which I didn't install. After the driver disk installed all the drivers, Windows frequently asking me if I want the driver disk to change the systems configuration or install various pieces of associated software and resetting twice. (note: If you do an install like this leave the disk in until its completely finished) . Then a message came up in the corner saying that I had an issue with my computer. so I click on the message which turns out to be a message telling me that if I wish to use this computer. I need to obtain some kind of virus protection. OK, so if you KNOW the system needs this WHY doesn't it come with it in the first place? So I go on line and get my personal favorite Ad-Aware by Lavasoft and install it upon the machine.

After getting the basics setup. I install Microsoft Works, then I install the Adobe Flash plugin then the Thunderbird mail client. and Apple iTunes, and Mozilla. I find it funny that It took me more than an hour to install Windows 7 then afterward I needed to install my office suite, a mail client, virus protection, and a music manager.

My Linux Mint install came with all of these things pre installed (Open Office not MS, Rythmbox instead of iTunes )except the virus protection (Clamav with Klamav front end and Chkrootkit and Bleachbit ) which only took me a couple of minutes to get with Synaptic Package Manager. Linux Mint also installed all the drivers I needed right off the bat except for the advanced drivers for 3D with my video card which only took a few minutes to install with the hardware drivers utility in Linux Mint. Linux Mint also only took about 15 to 20 minutes to install on similar hardware.

All in all I like and use Linux and I like and use Windows. I prefer Linux. Both work well once installed. If doing a fresh install both are about equally technical to install. Linux does take less time to install compared to Windows for most distros. This is assuming it a fresh install and repartitioning the hard drive for a dual boot system is unnecessary. Linux also lets you try it out first with live distros. I feel both have similar capabilities. I think Windows is better for gaming(If you have the right resources with Linux it can hold its own) and commercial support. Windows has better support for newer hardware and is more universally accepted and commercially supported. Linux is easier and less expensive to install and to install new software. Linux works better with older computers. Linux is more customizable. Linux is free free as in open source and can be obtained for free. Windows can also be obtained for free via cheaper computers that part or all the bill for the OS is paid for by trial software demos and such which are installed for advertising purposes or by buying a used machine which Windows is pre installed. Linux generally is lighter weight than Vista or Windows 7. Linux is more customizable. I personally feel that Linux with Gnome is also a little easier to use.

Note: this post is more for commentary and entertainment if your looking for a good technical guide to install Windows or Linux try.<>

For Windows:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2354687,00.asp

For Linux Mint:

http://linuxtrends.com/linux-mint-tastier-ubuntu/

For Linux reviews of different Linux distros many with install instructions:
www.distrowatch.com

--------------------------------------------

Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

My Gateway NV 52 4u with Linux Mint Isadora Compatability Chart

2010-09-30T21:50:00.000-07:00

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note: If your interested in this article also check out

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2011/01/eurika-ive-finally-found-soundfix-for.html

for better sound card control.

For more info check out my other post relating to installing Linux Mint on this computer.

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2010/09/linux-mint-9-isadora-complete-setup-and_26.html

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2010/09/linux-mint-9-isadora-complete-setup-and.html

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2010/09/linux-mint-isadora-advanced.html

Linux Mint 9 Isadora Compatibility Chart With My Gateway NV 52 4u

Hardware	Compatability
Microphone	Works -buggy with Pulse Audio .
Webcam	Works need to download Cheese Skype or some software to use.
screen	Works wide display also works well.
Special Function Buttons	Works some buttons may need to be defined, most work correctly with install.
sleep mode	Works
keyboard,track pad mouse button bar	Works
power management battery cooling	Works - For better use put computer temp, CPU scaling, Processes Management widgets on the menubar. Battery manager will show up in notification area when the machine is unplugged. CPU cooling seems to be handled automatically by the BIOS. I haven't found a manual way to control it. Seems to work OK for most uses. If doing something like trans coding video for a long period. Or playing compressed video from the web for extended periods of time I like to use the CPU scaling monitor to under clock the portable to keep it from overheating. Though I've never had it shutdown or give alarms while doing these things. When using the computertemp widget I've noticed the computer runs warm to hot occasionaly while doing processer heavy operations
CD/DVD ROM	Works - need to download k3b, Brasero or other to use CD/DVD burning. Mint comes with Brasero.
Graphics Card	Works - for 3D the proprietary AMD/ATI drivers need to be setup and use Compiz setting manager for advanced 3d effects . HDMI works, will need to use Pulse Audio to setup sound from HDMI port. VGA port works.
USB	Works
wired networking	Works
wireless networking	Works only tested with wireless G equipment. To activate, go to notification area and hit networking icon and choose a network to use . In a post last year I had a guy say he had problems getting his wireless to work. They may be some Gateways that use a different chipset.
Sound	Works - If you use Pulse Audio the internal mic will not function. If not using Pulse Audio mic will work but, HDMI sound will not work properly (or at least without some serous changes to the ALSA config). If not using Pulse Audio you can route sound from the 3.5mm jack to line in as an alternative. Also note: when I uninstalled Pulse audio and then tried to re install it this crashed my sound system. If using Pulse Audio most any external device supported by ALSA should work fine. tested with Startech adapter, Sony PSX Webcam, Logitech microphone, and Logitech USB headset.
modem	untested
In conclusion:	I've used this portable with Linux for a year now and have been very pleased with the results. Most everything on the portable works perfectly with Linux. The only exceptions are the modem which I just don't use and is basically untested. I've had some issues with Pulse Audio. For playback its absolutely fine. but Pulse Audio has trouble with using the internal mic for recording and with programs like Skype. Pulse Audio can be disabled by uninstalling it. This will fix the mic problem BUT it will make sound output via the HDMI cable unusable. I also wasn't able to re install pulse audio once it was removed without crashing the soundsystem. If you want to use the portable with Pulse Audio and use it to record or with Skype several USB devices can be used with Pulse Audio and the portable.

Linux Mint Isadora Advanced Configurations part 3

2010-09-29T21:17:00.000-07:00

In the 1st and 2nd part of my post on Linux Mint on my gateway nv52 4u. went into details about getting the basics of mint up and running on the computer. In this section I want to discuss some more advanced stuff once the basics are installed.

1. Installing new software

The first thing I want to discuss is installing new software to the system. There are
several ways to do this. If familiar with Linux, you know there are thousands of
programs and applications for Linux. Most of the packages are kept and distributed for free in repositories.

In Linux Mint 9 there are 5 basic ways to install packages. apt, synaptic package manager,the software manager, from Deb files and from the Linux Mint web site.

The first method I want to discuss is apt, this is run from the command line and is
the traditional Debian way to install new packages. Old schoolers love apt because
you can install multiple packages at one time and apt also installs any dependencies that go with the programs quickly and easily.

With Linux you need administrators privileges to install new software.

sudo apt-cache search vlc ---> to find the package or to see if its available

sudo apt-get install vlc --> to download and install the package

sudo apt-get install vlc totem mplayer acidrip --> to install multiple packages

The second way is with Synaptic Package Manager.Synaptic controls apt via
GUI you can search for packages by typing in the program you want in the search menu. You can use Synaptic to browse the packages in various categories audio, video, games, etc. You can also choose repositories to use. Synaptic can be used to install, uninstall or update packages. To install, uninstal a package with Synaptic
just click the box beside the package to select it and hit the apply button to start
installing or uninstalling the package/packages you want.

---------------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

The 3rd way to install new software in Linux Mint is by the software manager.
This is a new software manager to install packages available with Linix Mint and
newer versions of Ubuntu. The software manager makes installing new software
a little more intuitive than using Synaptic or apt. The software manager gives better descriptions of the packages and rating and more info about them.

The fourth way to install packages with Linux mint is by downloading a installer
from the Linux Mint page and having it automatically install the package. This is
an uncommon method only used by a couple of different distros but one I believe
is important. This type of package could eventually be adopted by places like File
Hippo or Softpedia or other sites traditionally used by Windows developers.

http://community.linuxmint.com/software

The fifth way is via stand alone packages. The default package for Linux Mint
is a deb file originally developed for the Debian distro. With deb files, if you
download one the archive manager can automatically install it and look for
dependencies. You can also install RPMs and Tars and Bzip files among others but they won't be checked for dependency issues. For other packages you may also need to install the parent uninstaller program to be able to use them with the unarchiver such as 7zip, bunzip, alien, ect.

2. Pulse Audio

In the past I've written about Pulse audio. In my other post I mentioned that I'm running pulse audio on the desktop and decided to take it off the laptop. Well
I've put pulse audio back on the laptop, I still have problems with using the internal mic with Pulse Audio. Even with this and a few other annoyances it causes me I've decided to keep Pulse Audio. Why, after fighting with it so much? I've found I want to use the HDMI sound output more than the internal mic. I also found a bit of a swiss army knife for Pulse Audio. When I used Pulse Audio in the past, I noticed that when I used the internal mic for whatever reason the latency was horrid. But when I plugged in a set of Logitech USB headphones or the Logitech USB mics that come with sing it for the Playstation, they worked fine. So after doing a little research I found the Startech USB adapter. It works perfectly
with ALSA and Pulse Audio. I can use it to record from the mic or use it
to play sounds to an external device or headphones and its no harder to hook
up than just regular headphones with a mic. I can also line in to the mic jack.
The only issue with this is if you use it with pulse audio it treats line in as a mono signal but when I used it with Audacity it did record 2 tracks. Also if you don't get playback through the device check to see that the devices volume is properly set
and not turned down too low with Alsamixer.

For more info on Pulse Audio checkout my earlier post.

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2010/08/to-pulse-audio-or-not-to-pulse-audio.html

3 Wine

Wine is an application layer that works with Linux to get it to run numerous applications originally designed to run on Windows. There are thousands of
native Windows application and games that will run with Wine possibly more than will run on any one single version of Windows. HOWEVER, Wine is not
stable or complete enough to say it gives Linux Complete Windows compatibility
or anywhere close. If you install Wine by itself its not too powerful its just gives
a very basic compatibility for Windows programs. I hate it when people install
Wine and run a few simple programs and say look here look at Linux it can now
run Windows applications.

Wine can run a number of Windows programs but to get the best use out of it a good deal of extra stuff needs to be installed on top of it. I presently have a Wine setup that I have setup and transfered between different machines that has a good deal of the extra stuff needed to get Wine working with the native Windows applications I want to run. Some of these things are DirectX, audio and video codecs, web browser components, fonts, networking components etc.

Even though I have what I consider a good Wine setuhttp://www.winehq.org/
p that I can use I decided I wanted to re setup a new version to use with the portable to do a little housekeeping and install some newer versions of some of the add ons for Wine and perhaps tidy things up a little.

For my new Wine setup I used synaptic package manager to install Wine. once Wine was installed I decided to get various add ons to make wine function better. To do this I started by downloading Winetricks. This is a shell program which downloads various components for Wine similar to the way synaptic loads programs for Linux. Some of the programs have multiple versions that Winetricks can download and they sometimes conflict. If the Wine addons break Wine, just show hidden files in your home directory and erase the Wine file and start over. Note: after doing this you will need to re install any software you previously installed on wine . Also: if you get Wine just the way you want it you can move the contents of the wine directory to any other user. Then chmod and chown them to set up wine for the other user.

I used Winetricks to install 7zip, cmake, corefonts,vbrun6, vcrun2010, and vcrunsp6. I felt this would give me a good starting point to be able to run more programs with Wine. I can use Winetricks later if I need to install something else.
Also I prefer the following method (see link)to install Direct X over using Winetricks. Next I downloaded and installed direct X 9.0c via these instructions.

http://wiki.jswindle.com/index.php/Winetricks

http://www.wine-reviews.net/microsoft/directx-90c-march-2008-redistributable-on-linux-with-wine.html

Then I installed VLC. and Mediacoder on Wine. These two programs can play and trans code just about anything. They could also act a replacement/enhancement for the proprietary codecs in Linux or possibly a replacement for the impossible to find allcodecs.PBI if using a couple of other open source projects the ones with deamons, giraffes, a big star and poetry or perhaps even some not so open source projects like the ones with fruit or Delphi residents as their mascots. These two programs can be installed easy enough. If installing a new package for Wine, with Linux Mint, first of all, go the the *.exe file and then right button click on it. Under properties make sure its being run by Wine. Secondly, make sure the permissions are set to let this file be executable. Other .exe or binary files activated by the primary program may also need to be changed.

I originally posted this article when I installed and setup wine check it out
for more info:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2009/09/getting-winey.html

Later I want to do a post with all the programs I use Wine for and their status as
far as how to set them up etc. Presently without taking a complete account I use VLC, mediacoder, nullDC, Dolphin, Snes9x, Epsxe, Ps7, Mame, Kawacks, Raine and more.

In the past I've run Firefox with Flash and Shockwave, Safari, Duex EX, Serious Sam, Serious Sam 2nd encounter, Star wars Jedi academy, Rouge Jedi, NFS III, Tivola phisicus.

for more info on running games checkout

http://www.playonlinux.com/en/

http://www.winehq.org/

---------------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

Linux Mint 9 Isadora Complete Setup and Usage With My Gateway NV 52 4u Part 2 Post install

2010-09-26T22:46:00.000-07:00

After I installed Linux Mint 9 to my system, I wanted to do some post install tasks to make my system function better. These things include updating the system. Installing the proprietary Catalyst drivers from ATI which will allow me to do Compiz effects, better video game and emulator performance, and better video performance. Set up the power management which will allow for two important things with a portable. These things are managing cooling better and managing battery life. Finally, doing some basic customization and setting up

Compiz.

Step 1: Updating the system.

In Linux Mint, there are two things that need to be done to update the system. First, go to the Synaptic Package Manager under the Mint menu and goto the settings tab and click repositories and choose all of them. Then hit the reload
button to activate them.

Secondly, go to the Mint menu and click the control center icon then when the control center comes up under the system area hit the update manager . This will bring up the update manager. Then click the install updates icon in the update
manager to start the process. This can take several minutes. It took my system about 20 minutes to finish.

Step 2: Configuring power management.

If you are installing Linux or even that other OS on a portable you want to make sure power management is properly setup. This will help the computer keep its cool and improve battery life.

Linux Mint has several utilities to do this. Here is my setup for the Gateway. For my personal setup I like to start by creating a second menu bar/panel. This is easy enough to do just right click on the menu bar/panel and add new panel. This should make a new menu bar at the top of the screen. This step is unnecessary
but I think it makes things neater and easier to manage. After the menu bar is created, right click on it and choose add to panel.

There are several utilities to help with power management in Linux Mint. The 1st thing I added is the CPU scaling monitor. This will change the number of CPU cycles the computer is actively using. Since my computer has two cores, I setup two instances of this utility. one for the first core and one for the second. If I change the Settings for CPU scaling I like to do them symmetrically for both CPU's.
This is so if I set one low it won't overwork the other.

The second thing use for power management is computertemp. This program monitors the computer temperature. It is not installed by default to obtain it run the Synaptic package manager. In the search bar type computertemp and have it
search for the app. Then click on the box beside the application then hit the apply icon to Install it. Once it is installed it should show up in the add to panel section. Sometimes if you add a new program it may not show up Immediately, if the app is not in the add to panel menu, logout and log in the new app should now
show up.

The third thing I add is the system monitor. This shows the
systems activity and can alert me to things like zombie
processes and other things that may be hogging resources
unnecessarily.

For battery life. The system notification area on Linux Mint
already has a utility. It should show up automatically when
you are unplugged from the wall.

Other power management:

Function keys work on install
WiFI on off Key works but if you turn off the WiFI
the system will need to be reset to get it to work again.

sleep works

Step 3: Installing the Proprietary Graphic drivers from
ATI and some customization with Compiz and desktop settings.

To install the 3D drivers and get Compiz working with Linux Mint
on My gateway and Desktop was super easy. My Gateway NV 54 4u
uses an ATI Raedon HD 3200 and my desktop uses a ATI Raedon 4200
HD via the 785 series chip set. Installing the proprietary drivers
is easy because Linux Mint comes with a utility to install them
quickly and easily. In the past, I've used the Nvidia drivers
instead of ATI due to it being more difficult to get the
ATI/AMD drivers working properly. In the last 2 years,
ATI/AMD has done a great job at creating better drivers.
Linux Mints Utility for installing them is also excellent for
getting everything working.

Note: From what I've read the Debian version of Linux Mint
doesn't have the utility yet

To install the proprietary drivers go to the Mint menu hit control center then from the control center under hardware click the hardware drivers icon. this should bring up the hardware drivers menu. In this menu just click the activate button. This should start your system downloading
and installing the new driver. Once its complete the computer will need to be reset for the new drivers to be utilized.

If the drivers are working correctly, the screen animations will look a little different. If the super key and tab is pressed at the same time, a desktop switcher should appear.

Once the 3D drivers are installed, you can have the computer do
all kinds of neat effects like the ones seen on You tube. To configure them you can use the Compiz Settings manager under the Mint Menu go to all applications, preferences, compiz setting manager. Here all the different Compiz settings can be customized.

Step 4: personalization

For my personal system I like to do several customizations of both the Gnome settings and Compiz settings. Here are some of the changes I want. These are just a few of the things that can be done with Gnome and Compiz. Fist of all, I want a second panel at the top of the screen. (If your reading from the top of this post you know I already did this)
To do this click on the bottom panel then choose new panel. This should put a new panel on the top of the desktop. Once the panel is created, new things can be added. To do this right click on the panel and select add to panel a menu will come up and show different options that can be added to the panel. A couple of things I have personally added are stuff to monitor power management(see top of post in first section) another thing I add to my panel is a gnome menu bar. This creates a menu like typical Gnome or Ubuntu if you prefer it over the Mint Menu. Secondly
I like adding a desktop switcher. then I like adding logout and shutdown buttons. If these aren't in the right place you can right click on the icon and choose move and move it on the panel wherever it is desired. Some widgets are locked in place. To unlock/lock them right click then choose lock unlock then move to move them.

Icons for programs can also be added to the panel by dragging and dropping them there. Drawers can also be added for grouping like packages. Just add the drawer to the panel then open the drawer and drop and drag program icons etc here.

Ok so now I've got Gnome the way I want it. I want to work on Compiz.
The first thing I do is get some new graphics from Gnome Art. I get some backgrounds to use with the cube effect in Compiz. When I install a new system, I like creating a folder called graphics under usr in the protected area. I do this so that my graphics don't get moved around and lost by the programs trying to use them. To do this from the command line I type in sudo nautilus and this brings up the file manager in administrator mode. I hit the back/up key on nautilus until I'm in the root directory. Then I go to the /usr directory and have nautilus create a new folder called graphics. When I download new graphics elements for themes and such I put them here. This is just a personal preference you can just as easily create a graphics folder in your home folder anywhere else.

Now that I have my graphics I want I go to the Compiz setting manager and choose the cube effect and rotate cube. Then under the desktop cube icon I open the appearance tab and there are entries for cube caps and sky dome. First of all delete any previous entries then click on the folder icon for eac section. here you can look for new graphics. The sky dome is the background the cube floats in front of. the Cube caps are the top and bottom of the cube. If you hit the cube color icon you can change the color of the cube. If you hit the transparency tab you can change the level of transparency or opacity of the cube. Once done the Cube effect can be activated by hitting the center button of a 3 button mouse or clicking the desktop switcher.

Another couple of effects I personally like are Wobbly windows. If I choose this a message comes up saying to use Wobbly windows I Must disable fading windows. Some effect in Compiz don't work with others so expect this every now and then.

The last effect I like with Compiz is the shift switcher. when I choose
this option I can hit the super key and tab to activate it.

There are tons of different ways to customize Gnome and Compiz. I can
spend Hours figuring out the elements to create a perfect theme here
are some of the things you can do

change/install backgrounds
change/install icons
change/install window decorations
change panels
add animated docks
change colors
change/install windows decorations
change Compiz effects and much much more

I hope do do a more complete theming and customization post later.

-------------------------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

Linux Mint 9 Isadora Complete Setup and Usage With My Gateway NV 52 4u Part 1 The Basic setup

2010-09-26T02:55:00.000-07:00

A year ago, I purchased a Gateway NV 52 4u portable computer. When I purchased the computer I installed Ubuntu 9.04 upon it which worked reasonably well. Later I installed Linux Mint 8 and Linux mint 9. I recently decided to do some house keeping and re install Linux mint 9 Isadora 64 bit version. I also decided to create a new blog entry to discuss what I am doing to setup and utilize Linux on this system.

Step one installation:

To install Linux Mint on my gateway, first I needed to get an ISO image from the Linux Mint web page. I chose the 64 bit DVD version to install.Once its downloaded. I used K3B a disc burning utility in Linux on my desktop machine to burn the ISO image to a DVD.

There is also software for Windows that can create a CD/DVD from an ISO file.

http://www.petri.co.il/how_to_write_iso_files_to_cd.htm

Once the CD/DVD is created, to boot from the CD/DVD the notebooks BIOS
needed to be changed to boot first from the CD/DVD ROM. To do this with the
notebook, hold down F2 while the machine is booting. A menu like the following
should come up.

Here you can change the boot order.

*****NOTE: YOU CAN MESS UP THE COMPUTER BY CHANGING SOME OF
THE SETTINGS IN THE BIOS. DO NOT CHANGE ANYTHING THAT YOUR
UNSURE OF*****

Once the computer is set to boot from the CD/DVD drive. Linux Mint will
boot up just fine. Once it boots, it will run from the CD/DVD ROM. A live CD/DVD
can be used to test the Machines hardware compatibility and get a general feel
for Linux. Unfortunately, when running from the live CD/DVD nothing can be
permanently changed or permanently installed this includes new software or
proprietary drivers like the NVIDA and ATI drivers or net cards that use the
NDIS wrapper. It will also run MUCH slower from the CD/DVD ROM in most
cases.

So anyway, I've decided to do a permanent install of linux mint to my hard
drive. for my machine I am eliminating all the previous installed material.

**NOTE: If you are wanting to dual boot with Windows the hard drive
will need to be repartitioned to setup a space for Linux. There are a couple
of ways to do this. First, if you were at a housekeeping point where you
wanted to install Windows over. You could just leave free space on your hard
drive when you install Windows and use the unused hard drive space to install
Linux. Linux has boot loaders which can boot both Linux and Windows.

There are also utilities to resize the windows partition to allow free space on
the hard drive to install Linux. THIS CAN BE DANGEROUS be SURE to backup
ALL your important data first. ALSO, your computer will run for quite awhile
to do this. During the process the computer can not be turned off or shut down.

Linux Mint and a few other Distros can be installed on top of the NTFS file
system. This works but, when I have done this in the past, I felt like Linux took
a performance hit running from the alien file system.

Dual booting can be complicated.

for more info check out:

http://apcmag.com/how_to_dual_boot_windows_xp_and_linux_xp_installed_first.htm

http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_isadora_whatsnew.php#system

**********

As for my system, I'm Doing an install on a clean hard drive. So all I need
to do is run the installer from the desktop. I also make sure networking is up
so the installer can do some updates on line. I can check to see if networking is
up in the notifications zone on my menubar.

When doing the installation Linux Mint will ask questions about the system,
Keyboard layout, time zone, ect. The installer will also create initial users for
the system then the installer will prompt with options to partition the drive.
The installer can do this automatically or you can choose how to manually
partition the drive.

To check to see if networking is up.

installer

The Linux Mint installer needs at least 1 user to be created to access the systems

I have decided to manually partition my drive. I chose the Ext4
file system. From my experience the Ext3 and Ext4 is the best choice
for me. I don't recommend using Ext2. It is not journalized, and if your
system is turned off abruptly. The Ext2 file system has a much greater
chance of getting damaged.

Here is my personal setup. I have a partition labeled "/" for the main partition which all the components of the OS and most of the software will be installed. A "/home" partition for users personal data. A temp folder for temporary storage. My temp file is fairly large for working with video. I have a folder on my system labeled /Disk1. I set up this folder as a universal storage area for all users for pics, music etc. I also have a swap area. I usually try to get it to match the memory
I have in the machine.

Once the system is partitioned, Linux mint will begin its install. This will take 15 to 30 minutes. Sometimes it asks for world fonts to be installed. This can take awhile. I usually just skip this step. If I need them I can always get them later.

After the installation Linux mint will ask you if you want to continue evaluating
or restart to boot into the new installation. When the system is rebooted the live
disk needs to be removed so the system can boot from the hard drive.

More Fun With Keyboards and Midi in Linux

2010-09-10T21:54:00.001-07:00

In my last post I wrote about my first impressions with my Casio WK 500 and Linux. To my
surprise they actually play really well with each other. In my last post I mentioned using
Rosegarden to manage between vsynths like Timidity and Bristol and my real Casio.
The dis advantage of doing it this way is that I wasn't able to communicate in real time.

I found a very easy solution for this with Linux. Kaconnect does an excellent job with this.
Just select an input device and an output device and hit the connect button. An arrow
will be drawn between the two elements. After that, they should be linked for use.

Also, I wanted to mention, with bristol it much more stable if you start it first when you want to use it. Also, if you use the keyboard on Bristol the note will stay depressed until its clicked on again. Virtual keyboard installed with synaptic makes Bristol easier to work with. Although, using it in place on a real keyboard is still really clunky. But Virtual keyboard may be useful if you are just hacking out an idea.

----------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

Linux Mint 9 and a Casio WK500 First Impressions

2010-09-07T23:04:00.001-07:00

Concerto running on Steem. Yes, at one point
I did own a real Atari ST from 1988 to about
1995 until I started using Win 95 and retired it.

Music Studio running on Steem.

Rose Garden running on Linux.

up and ready to go

This is what it looks like assembled.

This is the stand put together folded down. Notice the rods in the back are together. Also
notice that the feet on each side are small and large. If you fold it the other
way you will have small small, large large. You can tell the proper orientation by the
clasp in the back.

When Building the stand the indentions and cut outs need to be on the outside.

Here is a shot of the inside and outside assembly, I don't have the bottom
attached yet to allow me to slide the pieces together.

I have decided to retire my 20 year old Kawai K1 ii for a new keyboard. I chose the Casio WK 500.
I didn't think It would work well with Linux, turns out it actually works great. For MIDI the keyboard has a standard USB plug which works for MIDI input and output. For play through and sampling, the keyboard has a line in/aux in jack and a mic jack. Rosegarden automatically recognized the keyboard and started using it. Depending on the setup, you may need to go to the studio tab then manage midi devices and select the keyboard in Rosegarden. The Windows version of Steem via Wine also worked. The native Linux version wasn't able to find the keyboard. For Brystol and Timidity I haven't got the keyboard to work with them yet. But I can have Rosegarden record from the keyboard and then switch to Timidity or Brystol and have the computer play the sample through them. Also for Brystol, if I make a really cool sound patch that I like, I can record it to the keyboard via the sampling function. This also eliminates some of Bristol's wonderful stability issues. I can also play more sounds in polyphony through the keyboard.

All and all, I'm really enjoying the keyboard. The key action is excellent, may bee not as good as weighted keys but pretty close. You can tell the keyboard keys are better than some of Casio's lower end models. No clack and the keys have a better feel. It has most of the features that home keyboards have like auto accompaniment, auto chords, demos and a teaching system. Plus sampling, MIDI, touch sensitivity, very good sounds, mic and line in input and many other professional features also.

If you purchase this keyboard new, it comes with a stand. I'm a total noob when it comes to these things but building it was a little challenging. Here are a few pics that may help get things together. I have also made a couple of pics of the keyboard working with linux.

Note: See my next post, I got everything working in real time with the MIDI stuff using
Kaconnect.

-----------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

Some Times Linux Is A Pain But It Could Be Worse

2010-09-04T16:58:00.000-07:00

Recently, I wrote about some of the issues I've had with using pulse audio to do
recording and telephony and such. Sometimes Linux is a less polished with things
like this but I was recently reminded that that other OS can have its issues also.

I start up my computer, Upon startup the crapware virus detection that installs itself by default on my system tells me I have a Trojan and it puts my systems
security at risk. So I click on the button to fix the problem. Does it fix the
problem -NO- it takes me to their web site and tells me it can fix the problem
so song a s I buy the full version at 29.95. Well, I decide to use ad Adaware Free
Edition to see if it will fix the problem first. Adaware after scanning for 30 minutes wide open finds the problem and gets rid of it OK. Then the big fruity
companies media player wants me to do updates (again). Another 10 minutes goes
by. Then I need to restart my computer. Then that other popular OS wants to do
17 crucial updates upon restart. And in about an Hour I was successfully able to read my E-mail.

Note I do like Adaware by Lavasoft's virus and spyware protection. The Free version
doesn't seen to do continual scanning, But if you do get a problem it WILL get rid of it. If you download the free edition, I would recommend scanning you system about once a week.

------------------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

My Gateway NV52 4u and This Blog a Year Later

2010-09-01T19:18:00.000-07:00

One year ago I started this blog to document my experiences with Linux and my
computer hardware. I did this just after purchasing my NV 52 portable. For the
most part my blog has been just a site for my own reflection and reference. I barely
received over a 100 hits in a year.

Last month all that changed. I received 140 hits in just one month this exceeded
all the previous hits I recieved in the last year. Some of this may be due to a couple
of articles I posted on methods to fix Flashplayer with Linux Mint for the 64 bit
version. In 5 pages worth of material I explained how to fix the problem via virtualization or using Wine. While these methods work just fine I found they were
extremely overcomplicated and decided to pull them after Linux Mint released a
better solution mentioned in my Bttter Flashplayer with 64 bit editions post.

The second thing I noticed was that my article on my initial install of Ubuntu
9.04 was still getting a lot of attention. This may be due to a post I put on
the Linux on laptops page. Since posting that article I've actually distro hopped
twice with this machine from Linux Mint 8 Helena 32 bit to Linux Mint 9 Isadora
64 bit. I like both distros. Actually, i didn't see huge differences between them the
main reason I switched was to run a 64 bit version instead of a 32 bit version.
Switching did improve performance greatly and I've not found any software to
cause me any problems. I worried about whether the 64 bit version would support
the ATI Catalyst drivers and networking. For my personal machine they both
work just fine with both the 64 and 32 bit versions of Linux Mint.

Overall, I am happy with running Linux on this machine for the last year so in
response to last months interest and after a year of use I decided to make another post of how this machines hardware is working with Linux Mint 9

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
power management

CPU throttling --- work to control add CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor to the menubar. I presently run two instances to control each core one setup as core
0 and the other as core 1 under the settings.

CPU temp -- install computer temp and add to menubar

Fan control -- seems to be working automatically no way to manually control
fans works OK

***Note: If I use this portable with a couple of Items over time I have noticed
that it can run hot. Here a couple of things I found help with this***

If running streaming video say from like Hulu or such for a long period of time
say more than a hour go to the cpu monitor and switch it from ondemand for each
cpu to 1.05 or conservative. This may also be helpful if transcoding large video
files. If your transcoding large files it will take longer this way but it will help
you keep oyur cool.

Generally, for most of the applications on Linux I run it on demand mode. When
I've down shifted the processor to run at 1.05 mode to run the PC more conservatively to reduce heat and improve battery life I've not noticed a big
performance hit. The only two exceptions I've found are NullDC under Wine and
Nosgba under Wine.

Jumpstarts -- suspend works -- hibernate works **save data before attempting just
in case --- not bad advice for that other OS also.

battery monitoring -- works may not see the battery monitor until unit is unplugged
or needs to charge.

brightness Hot keys work

networking hot key works ** may need to restart the machine to get it to switch
back on

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Graphics AMD/ATI Catalyst work perfectly for 3D acceleration
after the proprietary drivers are activated under the hardware drivers tab

**** to maximize desktop effects go to the compiz settings manager. Here the
3D desktop effects can be tweaked and customized. *********
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
networking wired wireless --- works out of box may need to setup network by
clicking the Icon in the notification area-------

CD/DVD burner works out of the box -- will need burning software like brazero
or K3b to use CD/DVD burning feature.

Track pad works out of box.

USB works out of box

Special keys work out of box

most everything else works straight out of the box

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sound:

For playback sound works fine right out of the box. For recording or using
the onboard mic some changes need to be made

When I installed Linux mint 8 and 9 both come with the Pulse Audio sound
system pre installed. Pulse audio for playback is fine but for recording and
use of the microphone gets in the way.

I wrote an earlier article Pulse Audio or No Pulse Audio that is the Question
where I went more into detail about my use of Pulse audio with both my desktop
and my Gateway Laptop. In the article I have said that I am using Pulse Audio
on the desktop but not using it on the Laptop due to the internal mic issue.

So if you own a Gateway NV 52 4u should you use Pulse Audio or not.

Here's my thoughts

With pulse audio
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Playback is fine most all application work fine with it.
Loop back recording works just fine.
HDMI output works just fine.
You can adjust individual volumes with pulse audio for different sound sources
you also have better sound monitoring.

However: I found it was nearly impossible to get the internal mic working.
or improved line in via mic jack-- though not recommended
External USB Logitech headphones and mic work fine with Pulse Audio

Without Pulse Audio

Note: I removed pulse audio by going to synaptic package manager and just uninstalling it. I left
all the other components of pulse audio intact. When I tried to remove these elements Synaptic
told me it would break parts of the multimedia system in Gnome. So after just uninstalling Pulse
Audio I went to preferences - main menu and hid the extra Pulse Audio stuff from the menu.
Recently, I read an article from The Linux Journal talking about how people broke Gnome completely
by getting rid of Pulse Audio in Ubuntu 9.04 and up and they offered a web page with a different
solution.

note: See my post

new entry for 1/1/2011

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2011/01/eurika-ive-finally-found-soundfix-for.html

for a better solution for pulse audio.

I haven't personally tested this method yet

but this from reading the article seems like a good solution
Keeping Pulse Audio at bay

Judgement Day Studio Dave Test Ubuntu Studio 904
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Internal mic works.
Most sound works just fine. A few programs may not work correctly,
Istanbul, totem, sound for open arena and a few others.
You'll need to install a volume control. I personally like the mixer for the XFCE
desktop.
You can do loop back recording BUT you'll need a patch cable and your patching
into the mic jack which I'm personally not crazy about doing. Especially with
a portable which if you damage the internal soundcard your screwed.
Also you can line in this way if using external source though not recommended.
Works fine with USB external devices I tried Logitech headphones and microphone.
No sound with HDMI output or at least with present ALSA setup

link about linking mic to line in Note: gateway advises against
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The verdict: If you want to use the internal mic or line in with the internal soundcard
I would disable Pulse Audio. But if you don't use the internal mic or the internal sound card for recording and especially if you have external sound devices for recording I would keep Pulse Audio.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Modem -- untested ----

Basically, I've used Linux with the Gateway NV52 4u for a year and am very happy
with its performance with Linux most everything works right out of the box. My
personal favorite distro with this machine or in general is Linux Mint. Mint is
based on Ubuntu but is much more polished, has most all the codecs I need for
multimedia and offers excellent hardware compatibility.

To Pulse Audio or not to Pulse Audio That is The Question

2010-08-25T09:33:00.001-07:00

Note: If your reading this also checkout my post

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2011/01/eurika-ive-finally-found-soundfix-for.html

In the last few months I've been running Linux Mint 8 32 bit on my desktop. I recently decided to upgrade to Linux mint 9 64 bit on my desktop via re installing and writing apt-get scripts to install most of the software I use. Then backing up my home directory stuff. Then re initializing and chmod-ing my communal drive space where i keep my mp3s pics personal data ect. When I used Linux Mint 8 I disabled Pulse Audio. When I disabled Pulse audio in Linux Mint 9 after using it for awhile on my desktop, I noticed some of the programs I use did'nt work correctly.

So I decided to give pulse audio another try. With Pulse audio, playback is fine recording with
the computer can be a real challenge. So I went through and sound checked everything and after a bit of learning curve and tweaking. I found Pulse audio actually works pretty well for both playback and recording on the desktop.

I presently use a computer with a Gigibyte MA785GM-US2H and I'm using the intergrated
soundcard on the motherboard. To get pulse audio working correctly with my setup I did the
following. To sound check the system. Open Pulse audio Device chooser from applications sound and video from the main menu. This should put a little jack looking icon in the notifications area of the menu bar. Click this icon a menu should pop down from it choose volume meter playback and volume meter recording. Then click on the volume control icon on the menu bar. If this is not on the menu bar from the command line type gnome-volume-control. If this is not located on the menu bar, it will be handy to create a launcher for this and put it on the menu bar.

After clicking on the volume control icon open sound preferences. Go to the hardware tab
there should be bar called profile. Here different settings for the device can be chosen. For me
for basic everyday playback and recording. I chose analog surround X.X output (presently
using a 4.1 configuration) and stereo input. This allows playback through the analog system
and input from line in or the MIC jack. I can also use a loop back cable with this configuration
by hooking it up from rear output to line in. Under the Input tab in sound preferences i can choose front or back mic or line in with this configuration. I can see if its working by looking a
the pulse audio meter for input to see if it registers input and output.

With my system to loop back record without a patch cable with my system. I just choose analog
stereo, 4.1, 5.1 output under the sound preferences tab without a input method. I can check to
see if it is correctly for loopback recording by opening the Pulse Audio volume meter for both
input and output and playing something from a sound source. Both meters should be active
and reacting the same. If one meter is slower than the other, there might be latency issues. Otherwise it should be able to capture sound from the system.

Here are a few issues I had with Pulse Audio. These things are more of a nuisance than anything else. Its just figuring out whats going on

I noticed if I switched between having the input from the soundcard active and not. I didn't always show an input method from under the input tab in Sound Preferences. To fix this I figured out that I needed to activate just input such as just analog stereo input then go back and activate a selection that included output and input like analog stereo input and analog stereo output under the hardware tab in profile of sound preferences this usually fixes the problem.

Sometimes when I restart my system I noticed that I don't have sound. This is caused by
the output has defaulted to digital instead of analog or if using a HDMI cable vice versa. To
fix this All I needed to do is go to the output tab under sound preferences and choose digital
or analog whichever I'm using.

Also Some programs that have their own controls for using the sound system may need
to be configured correctly to work. For Audacity I have ALSA as the host and Pulse
Audio for both playback and recording. Under Jokosher for recording I have Gnome settings
and for output I have pulse audio. For GTK Record my Desktop I just use the defaults. Xvidcap
I could'nt make work. (note: to just record one specific area with GTK record my desktop click select area within the litte sub window with in the menu not on the actual desktop).

A couple of major issues.

When I tried to install OSS support with Pulse Audio this crashed
the entire sound system. I had to remove OSS support to get the sound system working properly again. Also, I wasn't able to remove Pulse Audio and re install it without crashing the sound system causing me to reinstall Linux Mint to fix the problem.

All in all after I finally sat down with Pulse audio and really worked to understand what It was
doing I actually like using it with my desktop. It offers me independent volume control for each source better down mixing and better management for digital sound cards. Its still a little buggy in some aspects. Some of these problems may also be caused by newer features and functions of newer sound cards like 4.1 5.1 and digital output management. But once I sat down with it and learned its quirks and how to use it better I now am happy with using it for my desktop.

On the flip side

On my portable I have decided to remove Pulse Audio. I have a gateway NV 52 and on it I had some
issues with Pulse Audio. Mainly It couldn't find the internal microphone. Which is Important
to me for skype and such. Without Pulse Audio I use the XFCE volume control to control the soundcard volume and aspects. All and all on the portable I don't miss Pulse Audio. Even though taking it out did remove the ability to use audio with HDMI. I could keep pulse audio if I wanted to. I found that when I used an external device like my Logitech USB mic or headphones
these worked fine and are completely usable with Pulse audio. I have contemplated a Dual install
one with and one without Pulse Audio. Also If I decided to use a professional external device
for recording/playback I would keep Pulse Audio. I may Play a little more with Pulse audio on
a flash drive install of Linux Mint 8 or 9. Now that I have a greater understanding of how Pulse Audio works and if can get everything on the portable working with it, I may put it back in the portable. If so, I will post my experience here

--------------------------------------------------------

Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

XFCE Rocks

2010-08-05T21:19:00.000-07:00

I have an older computer which I use for some of my other projects. The Computer is a 6 to 7
year old Athlon XP with an Nvidia GeForce 440 graphics card 1 GB of ram and about 250 gig
of hard drive space vie 2 IDE/PATA drives and a Sony CD burner. I have experimented with several
different distros and Windowws 7 on this machine. I have in the past run Windows XP, PC Linux OS
2007, and Mandrake 10.1 community edition.

When I installed Linux Mint on my new machine, I decided to re use this old machine as a Windows machine.
my copy of XP wouldn't re install at all. I didn't want to go back to an older distro of Linux
that I had used before so I could use some of the newer software like KDEnlive ect. I also tried
Windows 7. Windows 7 was abysmal on this machine sound didn't work properly, the Nvidia graphics
card is no longer supported for 3D graphics and Windows 7 was horridly slow on my old machine.

After playing around with my old computer awhile, I decided to install the XFCE version of Linux
Mint 9. I was very impressed with the distro. I liked It better than the Lxde version of Mint and a few other lightweight distros I tried. My Nvida card works perfectly now that I've installed the proprietary drivers with Mints utilities. Compiz and Emerald work perfectly. Though, I had to go through options and turn them on and then configure and theme them to my liking. The system
,even though it came over on the Mayflower, purrs like a kitten. Only using about 200 MB of ram. For basic everyday things like web browsing, graphics, ect the system runs at about 20% cpu or less.

I tred A few HD video samples they worked fine on this antique also. Granted, I do have an Nvidia graphics card which was the stuff when it came out and still gives OK passmark scores and I'm
using the proprietary Nvidia video drivers. The system ran the cpu at 80 to 100 percent to work with these files.

Here is a couple of screen shots of my desktop after some tweaks and customization.
Note: 3D screen shots were in motion so some glitches were created making the screenshot . I have no problems with artifacts when using the computer with Compiz.

------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

Songbird 1.2.0 for Linux Revisited

2010-06-10T06:02:00.000-07:00

Song Bird 1.2.0 Revisited.

I like Songbird. It does a great job at managing and playing my music
files. Unfortunately, Songbird is no longer being supported by its creators
for Linux.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/songbird-leaving-linux-behind

Despite this, I still think that songbird is a very good program. One of
my favorite things about it is that it is based on the same framework as
Mozilla.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_%28software%29

The reason that I like songbird being based on the Mozilla framework is for
2 reasons one is the plugins that have been developed for it

http://addons.songbirdnest.com/

I presently use:

Mashtape, news, pics, videos of artist chosen from the song list
Grid View and Mediaflow - view album selection with cover art
Lyric Master - shows song lyrics if songs are properly tagged

Secondly, since songbird 1.2.0 can function as a full function web browser,
it can integrate many multimedia web sites.

for me this includes:

TV and video

hulu- free -TV and movies on line
Spree TV - more movies and TV
Revision 3 - tech shows

ripping and transcoding

Kickyoutube - copies transcodes video form you youtube
Vixy - copies transcodes video from various web sites
Keepvid - copies transcodes video various web sites

(with Linux, I can also copy videos and music from the web with Istanbul)
http://live.gnome.org/Istanbul

For audio "

Shoutcast - web radio
Live 365 - web radio
Pandora -web radio
Groove Shark - web radio

For pod cast

Podcast.com

for buying and discovering new music

Amazon Music
Fye

I also have songbird access my other media via a link to my hard drive system.

To make songbird do all this extra stuff is easy with the 1.2.0 version.

1. go to songbird addons

2. This should open a browser window at the top there should be a bar for URL address
place the URL of the web site you want to integrate (www.hulu.com)

3. Once the page is loaded, just book mark it by right clicking on the page and then book mark the page. The web page link should show up in songbird's side bar.

For some multimedia pages you may need the Java or Flash Plugin. Songbird uses the same plugins as Firefox/Mozilla web browsers.
for Linux Just copy the plugins from the Mozilla folder for plugins to the Songbird plugins directory. For Windows
the plugins should auto install like they would for Firefox under Windows.

Some of the web sites I have integrated do show commercials and ads. I figure That these sites can be added or removed at the discretion of the user.

For showing my file system:

All that needs to be done is:

1. Go to the Songbird addons tab as before.

2. Instead of putting in a URL type File://
this should pull up your computers file system.

3. bookmark it as in previous example

4. To use this with other media just go through you file system and find a piece of media such as an AVI file.
right button click on it and then choose open in default browser. Then choose a program to be associated with the
file type such as VLC for AVI if not already assigned. This should work with any type of media.

All in all By using these resources with Songbird, I can give Songbird a lot of new functionality. I can also choose the level
and type of extras that I personally want without them being chosen for me, like some other popular music organizers.
I presently use songbird for playing and arranging most all of my multimedia.

Also, though I presently don't use this, it could be possible to add a site like Kongregate for games or an online photo
gallery site for more functionality also.

microphone revisited

2010-05-03T23:20:00.000-07:00

note if you reading this checkout:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2011/01/eurika-ive-finally-found-soundfix-for.html

Recently I posted a post about the microphone on my Gateway NV524u in his post I mentioned that the
NV52 worked very well with Linux Mint 8.0 Helena. Just about everything worked correctly right out of the box. The only problem I have with it is the microphone which Linux Mint doesn't discover
correctly. I mentioned That I could get it to work some of the time and others not. To solve this
problem I suggested using a compatible USB set of headphones or a compatible USB mic. This solution
works fine for me but I wasn't completely satisfied. I wanted to use the native hardware on my machine. I found a workable solution, this isn't the way I would prefer but it works for me for basic telephony and simple recording. First of all I made a Persistant copy of Dream Linux to
a SD card. This process takes awhile when it creates the persistant file system the computer
Idled for about 25 min. After creating the Dream Linux persistance drive on my SD card, I set the computer to boot from it. Afterward, I tested the mic with sound recorder. The sound worked fine
after that I tested downloaded audacity and tested with it. Again everything worked fine. Next
I tried to use a couple of telephony clients. Unfortunately Skype didn't work with Dream Linux,
I tried ekiga it works but doesn't find the camera, (CHEESE WILL). Then I tried the Icall web phone
It works fine. All In all this solution works, its not the most elegant solution, but it doesn't
require ant additional hardware just a free SD card or thumb drive and a little time.

Note: 8/2/2010 After installing version 9 of Linux Mint, I uninstalled Pulse Audio and now my sytems microphone works fine. And I've only had a problem with one or two programs not having the
Pulse audio program to be able to run.

------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

configuring and installing more advanced

2010-04-28T19:31:00.000-07:00

When I Installed Linux Mint on my new computer Most of the applications I wanted installed with
relative ease. For 90% of the stuff I used apt-get or Synaptic Package Manager. There are a few
applications that required more for me to get them installed and configured correctly. These
include

Wine

Sun Virtualbox with Windows XP

Dropbox

Picasa

Songbird

and several game emulators run under Wine

For wine, I cheated a little by copying my wine directory from my portable to my new computer.
(I set up wine earlier as described in the Getting Winey section I wrote about earlier) To do this first of all, I ran Winecfg to setup the basic .wine(this file is hidden and to see it show hidden files in the file manager needs to be turned on) file in my home directory. Then I copied
the drive c directory from my .wine file form the portable to the new .wine on my new desktop along with the system.reg, user.reg, and userdef.reg. Once this was done, My .wine directory had all the parts necessary to run the games and applications I wanted to run using wine. If this had not functioned correctly, I could of just erased the .wine directory from my home folder and run Winecfg to build an new .wine file and went through the steps described in Getting Winey that I posted here earlier. I had also thought about running something like Play on Linux to automatically install the components to necessary get various wine applications running correctly. Generally,
when I've used a tool like Play on Linux. I like to set it up under its own user account.
Wine sets up differently for each system user. So I can set up play on Linux under a different user and not mess up or interfere with my original configuration.

At present I would like to run Linux without a need to run Windows programs. If I ran Linux solely for my own ideas and projects I would have no problem with this. Linux comes with
good to excellent solutions for most everything I want to do. For instance, open office and
Zoho are excellent for an office suit. The Gimp is excellent for photo manipulation and
digital bitmap art projects. Scribus is excellent for DTP. Kdenlive is good for video editing,
along with Cinelerra and others. Tovid/Todisc is excellent for trans-coding video and DVD
authoring. Audacity is excellent or NLAE. LMMS, Muse, Rosegarden, Cheesetracker and Hydrogen
are all good resources for composing music. Songbird and Rythmbox are both excellent for managing my digital music collection. K3b and Brazero do a good job at creating and burning CDs.
These are some of about 20 diffferent applications I use regularly under Linux.

Despite this, there are some software packages that I still get stuck using Windows mostly to
be compatible with computers at school and work. For this I have set up Virtualbox.
With virtualbox I can run Windows within Linux via virtualization. I can also run other versions
of Linux, other OSes like Haiku and BSD.

To install Virtualbox on Linux Mint. I just installed it from the packages listed by synaptic package manager. With Linux mint It sets up everything automatically. When Virtualbox installes
itself it has to build a custom kernel module. This didn't cause me any problems but It took
a little while for the software to install.(note: In a previous install of virtualbox from the packages provided by the virtualbox web page, after installing I had to setup a vboxuser group and allow the users I wanted to use virtualbox access. For more info type install virtualbox on Linux into Google and Yahoo. There are several tutorials on this).

After installing Virtualbox, I installed Windows XP upon it. To do this I selected, new within the menu and then windows and windows XP in the
next box, then created a virtual hard drive file. this created a vm machine entry within Virtualbox Then I setup up the CD to boot from my internal DVD rom. put my Windows XP CD in ran the Virtual machine. and installed Windows just as if it were installed on native hardware. This took about 1/2 hour to 45 min. Once I installed Windows XP. I changed the CD from the native DVD rom to use the VboxGuestAdditions.iso image in the virtualbox settings menu and loaded the Virtualbox Guest Additions iso image from /usr/share/virtualbox directory and started windows. Once inside windows I went to my computer and installed the CD. This sets up the drivers for virtualbox for Windows.

Once this was done I set the CDROM back to the native DVD ROM and installed the software I wanted to just as I normally would.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To install Dropbox was fairly easy. I just went to the web sight and got the deb and installed it. Once its installed It asks if I want to create a new account or use an old one. After this step dropbox downloaded some extra files then set itself up on the computer.

Picasa just downland from repositories and install it. Once its installed, The directories it
searches need to be set. Otherwise it will pick up every picture on the system including video game skins, backgrounds, browser cache pictures etc.

For Songbird, First of all I like using the 1.2.0 version as opposed to the newest version. There
are some extras I can install with it that I can't put on the new version. To get songbird
Just download for its web page. Uncompress it into the directory you where you wish to place it
and run it. When it runs one important option is whether managed mode on or off. If managed mode is turned on songbird will build the music collection into a specified directory.
This means any music that any music you already have on you hard drive will be re written here once songbird does a media search. For my collection I preferred this, so that Songbird can manage my music better. To have songbird manage my music when I reinstalled my music form the backup drive I installed it using songbird. To do this I just dragged and dropped the musix into Songbird. Songbird automatically copied it from my backup hard drive into the pre specified directory arranging it by artist and album. For improperly tagged items I created a play list within songbird and copied the music here first and then fixed the tags using the built in tag editor.

Songbird has a number of plugins that can be installed upon it. For my personal setup I have:
The mashtape plugin which shows info and pics of the band bieng listened to, A song lyric plugin, a sleep timer, and equalizer plugin, and gridview and mediaflow media viewer that can show cover art and other info.

you can find songbird addons at

http://addons.songbirdnest.com/

Songbird is built upon the Mozilla browser framework, Because if this, with the 1.2.0 and
back versions you can use any browser resource within songbird. For my personal songbird
setup I have created links within it to:

pandora Radio, -- radio on demand
Grooveshark, --radio on demand
Hulu -- online TV and movie resourc
Revision 3 -- online tech shows
Magnatune -- online music store
Podcast.com -- online podcast list and player
Kick youtube - youtube dowloader
and a file index -- which I've linked VLC to to play all media formats

To do this in the songbird 1.2.0 version I went to the link for songbird addons. This brings up
a browser page with a http address bar. In the address bar I just put the web page I want
such as http://www.pandora.com go to the page then right click upon it to bookmark it.
this builds a bookmark within the left column of the app. If you install mashtape it will install
Flashplayer. If not Install it by downloading it unzipping it and copying it to the plug in
directory within songbird.

to view other media within songbird first of all I opened the browser as mentioned before
and instead of typing in a web page i type file:// and hit return showed the file system
in which songbird is installed. then I foundd where my media is stored. I found a media file and
clicked on it. Songbird comes up with a dialog that will ask whether to open
with an applicaton or download it. I answered open with application and choose VLC or my favorite media player for whatever media. This will create an association within songbird for this type of media so that next time I open the media songbird automatically chooses the right player.

There are several game emulators that I use Wine to run. these include DCemu, Dolphin, gensplus
Winkawaks,No$gba,PsxSeven, and raine. These run under Wine as configured in my getting winey secion. most of these require MS Directx to be properly installed and run corectly.
Once installed most of them need to be tweaked to get the best performance. This can vary between different systems. Generally, all these work well, Dolphin is a little slow with
some of the things I've tested with it.

------------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

Installing linux Mint On My New Desktop

2010-04-20T09:16:00.000-07:00

After building a new desktop I decided to Install Linux Mint on my desktop. I chose
Linux Mint 8 Due to the favourable experience I had with My portable.Linux mint has
most all the audio and video codecs I use built in. It has awesome hardware detection
and It is easy using the proprietary hardware drivers utilities to get most newer ATI/AMD
and NVIDIA graphics cards to work with full 3D acceleration. Linux Mint has one of the best
systems for installing software. There is basic apt-get, synaptic package manager, and there
own packages you can download from mints web site. These packages install the package and any dependencies you need also. Also, the .DEB package manager can install necessary dependencies
along with the deb file. Linux Mint has a archive file manager that can handle most
compressed files easily. Linux mint has easy backup tools. Linux Mint also has a well put together
version of Wine.

I installed Linux from the Live evaluation CD this took about 15 minutes. After Installing,
I let it install all the latest updates. This took a little while maybe a half an hour to 45 minutes. then I used the proprietary driver utility to install the ATI/AMD Catalyst drivers
they easily installed and work flawlessly on the system so far. Afterword I installed a number
of extra packages that I use on my Linux Mint Laptop. Generally I used the apt-get command
to get the software from the system repositories. I can download and install several packages at the same time this way. I have got all my Basic packages Quickly and easily this way.

I also have a few packages which are a liitle more complex to install I will install later
these include Virtual-Box, wine and various software I run with wine, Drop Box, Boxee and
a few others. I will do this later an probably write an article on it.

Testing the system

sound works both recording and play - just tested 2.1 output haven't tested full 7.1 but
recognized by mint

Video works including 3D Graphics

Power management works **** note when I built the machine I noticed the CPU cores were only running at 800 mhz. This Is supposed to be that way. The CPU throttles up when under heavy demand. This can be viewed/ changed using CPU scaling monitor. To see all 4 cores an instance needs to be set up for each core. Also, I would recommend if the core speed is manually changed
to change all four cores symmetrically

USB Works

networking works

HDMI shows up corectly presently untested

eSATA- "

firewire "

This is just the basics so far I hope to test more thoroughly in the next few weeks

---------------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

The Build

2010-04-20T08:38:00.000-07:00

NOTE: parts discussed here are mentioned in detail in last article.

After getting all my parts in from Tiger Direct I went to build my machine.
To build it I just followed the instructions provided by Gigabyte. Everything
fit into the cooler master case well. Although I had to use a few ties to secure wires
and keep them out of the fans and such. To put in the DVD burner and Multicard reader
in I had to take off the front plate of the computer case to remove the drive slot covers.
This was easy enough. I just had to unclip it form the case by unclipping the clips in the
corners. Then un clipping the clips for the drive bay covers and remove them. Then I realigned
the faceplate and re clipped it. For the hard drive and DVD-R the cooler master elite case has a
screw free mounting system to easily mount and unmount the drives. For my multicard reader I couldn't use the screw free system and had to use screws which worked just as easily with this case. The reason for this is that the multicard reader is shorter than a standard device mounted into the drive bay.

When I mounted the motherboard, to the case I had to be careful that my rizers were in the correct place. The MATX configuration on the Gigabyte motherboard (mentioned in last article) Is a little tricky in this regard. When I built the system I had to call Tiger Direct
about an issue with connecting the power supply. The motherboard also has another ATX_12_2x4 which needs to also be connected for the motherboard to work properly. The instructions weren't super clear on this. When I called Tiger Direct, I got through to a tech right away and he knew how to answer my question. I was actually really impressed with this. Usually, When I call a company about something this technical I get put on hold, and end up talking to 5 people before I get an answer. This didn't happen this time I was really impressed with Tiger Direct's service.

All in all putting the computer together was relatively easy. The instructions provided by
Gigabyte with the mother board were simple to follow, except for being a little vague about
how to hook up the power. The Cooler Master Elite case everything fits in really well with no
real obstructions. The case also looks great.

After I got the machine Up and running, The system is relatively quiet although for music and stuff may be a little noisy but all in all it is much quieter than my old machine. The BIOS
did a good job of automatically detecting and configuring my hardware. The only change I made
was to change the boot order on the drives. Everything seems to be working smoothly and autoconfigured.

---------------------------------------------------
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Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

New Linux Desktop Machine

2010-04-20T07:56:00.000-07:00

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ordering a kit for a new Linux desktop.

For my new Linux desktop I decided to build on the AMD/ATI 78xx chipset
with an amd Quad core processor. I decided to use this configuration for
3 reasons reasonable cost, decent power and Linux compatability. I priced
parts at Tiger direct, Newegg, compgeeks, and best buy. I chose to build
my kit from Tiger Direct event though the competition was close between
the stores. For Best Buy instead of buying a kit and building it They had
a couple of factory refurbs that were suitable for what I wanted in a competetive price range. I wanted to stay on a budjet of around 400 bucks.
The kit I chose was 442.92 plus shipping and tax this put the build at about
500 bucks.

The kit I ordered was based on the Gigabyte MA785GM-US2H motherboard. I chose this board based on reviews placed on both NewEgg and
Tiger Direct. Both sites had numerous positive reviews and reviews from Linux
users. Secondly I chose a AMD athlon II X4 630 quad core, a quad core with
a passmark score of around 3000 and 95w power consumption. For around a hundred bucks I felt this processor would offer alot of bang for the buck. Some may argue that the I5 and I7 intel offer more performance. but I personally found by the time I bought the pricier processor and compliment motherboard I would be spending considerably more.(compared to the EVGA P55 With I5 processor for instance).Although, most of the I5s and all the I7s did offer better performance.

I am putting 4 gigs of ram in the machine. for the memory I just tried to
find a good deal on 4 gigs and I wanted at least 667 mhz and dual channel. I used OZC Dual channel 800mhz memory. Mainly because it was a good price.
I also got a LG DVD burner, a multi card reader, a 500 7200 rpm WD hard drive
and for my case I order the new cooler master elite with a cooler master
500w power supply. If I wanted to cheap out a little I could of probably
spent less on a case and power supply and saved around 40 bucks. But, I like the looks and design of the cooler master case. I also considered the centariun case by cooler master but I like the drive mounts and and other features of the elite case better. But I like the centurion case for looks a little better.

I really, didnt have to order much to get this kit started. the gigabyte
motherboard has most of the features I want already built in. Including
ATI 4200 graphics with DVI and HDMI, 7.1 channel audio, fire wire, ESATA,
USB 2.0 and other options.

I already have a keyboard and mouse I'll be using from my previous PC. Even
though these are cheap enough online. If needed these accessories are usualy
half the price or less when ordered online VS going to Best Buy or most office stores. I may also use my older ATI TV wonder VE from my present
computer although it is a bit legacy with TV going to digital and services/
programs like Boxee and Hulu.

Complete parts List

Sabranet USB 2.o Card Reader

WD Caviar 500 gb SATA 7200rpm/16mb/3gs Hard Drive

OCZ 4 GB DDR2 800Mhz PC6400 ram

OEM SATA 24x DVD Burner

Gigabyte MA785GM -US2H Motherboard

AMD Athlon II x4 630 2.8 ghz AM3 quad core CPU

Cooler master elite case

AMD/ATI TV Wonder VE *****canabalized from older computer
not purchased new

cpu thermal paste, tie downs bought after inital order

Getting Boxee

2010-03-27T02:31:00.000-07:00

I recently installed Boxee on my Linux Mint Helena machine. Boxie is a media center- manager
That can manage movies & video audio files, manage on line TV shows from the internet from
sites like Hulu and others. It has a really nice interface which actually matches up well with the
native theme stuff from Linux Mint. I personally found it much easier to setup and install than
Myth TV. My only complaint is that I need to turn off the screen saver before use. Sometimes the screen saver activates and black out the screen, kills mouse input also. I tried to get caffeine( not Kaffeine) to work for LM to solve this problem. I hope LM puts this program in thier
software repository soon.

links

http://www.boxee.tv/

https://launchpad.net/caffeine

Note: I tried re installing caffeine on my system using the Ubuntu 9.04 and it instales
and works.

Linux Mint with the LG ENV Touch

2010-02-18T08:04:00.000-08:00

I recently purchased an LG NV touch. I wanted to know how well it would play with Linux
Mint Helena. Actually, the phone does pretty well. The phone will link up with Linux
via USB cable. The phone can charge from the computer and it can be used with Linux for mobil web. When I plug the phone in and activate it, the phone shows up on my wireless network notification. It then can hook up with the web from the notification menu. At present, I don't use this feature because my carrier wants to charge me for additional services. I can tell the phone links up because it will load my carriers homepage from the link to the phone but will not go out on the net. To get my music, pictures, E books etc to the phone I use a 4 gb micro SD card. To use it with Linux Mint I put the card in the phone and initialized it. This step put the appropriate direcories on the micro SD card. Then I pulled out the card and placed it it a micro SD to regular SD card adapter and pluged the card into my card reader then transfered the files I wanted to the phones MicroSD card and put them in the proper directory(some versions of linux may require NTFS compatability tools. These should be available from the software repository just search for NTFS. Also, at present I am not able to find the phones internal storage via hooking it up to the usb port but I may find an answer for this later). For ringtones and such I've been using Myxer to make and download them to the phone.

Same for Motorolla Rival except didn't make an entry for video on the SD card. Also use as
a modem untested, not sure if supported no data plan on phone.

---------------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

Getting Minty

2009-12-16T01:28:00.000-08:00

I recently installed Linux Mint 8 on a pen drive. I wanted to experiment with it and check out
its features. I am presently using Linux Ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop. After experimenting with
Mint on the flash drive I decided to install Linux Mint on my partition that I originally had a
second copy of Ubuntu 9.04 installed without the ATI/AMD catalyst drivers I used as a fail safe.

I did this because of several features that mint had. First of all, the built in installer for the'
drivers for the ATI 3D acceleration worked flawlessly and has less glitches than when I built
and installed the drivers from from the ATI/AMD for my Ubuntu 9.04 install. It also uses
Compiz settings manager by default. I installed it on Ubuntu 9.04 from The Synaptic package manager. Secondly, Mint 8 deals with the sound card more effectively. It was much easier
to setup the sound card to work with the HDMI port. It seems to manage Pulse Audio better
also. Third, It has most all the audio and video codecs already built in and can play most
media by default. I also liked the theme and graphic work they did, I only made a few Tweaks
to the basic look and feel of the OS. I also like the custom Mint menu for docking my favourite
applications.

Linux Mint 8 in my opinion is the most refined version of Linux I've seen yet. Just about everything worked perfectly on my Gateway NV52 out of the box. This includes power management utilities, networking wireless and wired, 3D graphics once installed by the proprietary driver installer, It manages sound well with Pulse Audio, It has most all the video/audio codecs pre installed. And Linux Mint is Well presented and themed.

My only complaints are that I wasn't able to get some GTK 1.2.x libraries to install thus some
older applications may not work. Specifically, Epsxe for Linux (I have the windows DirectX version working with Wine, I can also use PCSX which installs from the repositories). and SEGA Generator(same, Dgen works as an alternative). -Update : ( I found a couple of emulators that work better with my wine setup. Gens+ has more control options and better
speed control and sega 32x compatibility. For the
Play Station, I found PSXeven works better than the wine version of EPSXE. even though I had to install Petes GL plugins for 3D acceleration. I also found out I have less sound lag if I switched the sound driver in Wineconfig
to OSS instead of ALSA.

Also, I had to manually install Comptemp from a DEB file from the Debian repositories. Temp
montoring and fan control work without it. Comptemp just gives me a visual of how well
cooling is working.

Also on Note: If using a laptop the battery monitor wont show up unless the computer is
running on battery or charging.

Note: The internal microphone gives some issues with Pulse Audio. See my post to pulse audio
or not to pulse audio for more details.

Even with these minor issues, Linux Mint is by far the best version of Linux I've seen. Actually,
I like the way Mint is put together as well or better than that big fruity companies OS or the one that has the butterfly.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

Linux on a Pen Drive

2009-12-16T00:59:00.000-08:00

recently I decided to experiment with putting Linux on a pen drive. This has some advantages.
First of all, it allows me to use Linux without changing my original file system. This can be done with boot able CD roms also. The advantages of putting a distro on a flash memory card or pen drive over a CD are that the distro settings can be changed and new software added. It is also generally faster booting and running vs a CD rom.

There are a couple of ways to install Linux on a pen drive. The first method is to use something
like UNetbootin which can convert any live distro into a boot able pen drive. Unfortunatly, I wasn't able to change the distro once it was installed to the pen drive. To have a distro installed on a pen drive that can be changed it needs to be installed with persistence. With a pen drive
with persistance, a file is created to save changes to the pen drive. To do this, Fedora Linux and
Linux Mint among others have an installer that will make a persistent Pen drive install.

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/create-a-linux-mint-7-usb-flash-drive-from-cd/

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/install-fedora-9-to-a-flash-drive-using-windows/

I chose to install Linux Mint to a pen drive, Instead of Linux Mint 7, I installed Linux Mint
8. I used the instructions in the above link but I didn't need to change the sysconfig file as
described in the article.

Actually, after installing Linux mint on my pen drive and experimenting with it for a few days
I decided to install it on a partition on my regular hard drive.

For more info on installing Linux to a pen drive check out

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/

------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------
Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

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Starting over Fresh

2009-09-25T20:41:00.000-07:00

After using Linux Ubuntu 9.04 on my NV52 4 u for about 4 weeks . I did a number of experiments to get everything working properly. From this I feel that the NV52 4u
is an excellent platform for running Linux. Actually, I had only one "rusty bolt" to
deal with when installing and tweaking the system. This was the ATI/AMD 3200 HD
graphics. They actually work very well with this machine once there installed correctly. However, it took me six different installs to get the graphics to work
properly. The solution was simple enough once I found the correct instructions to
install the graphics drivers correctly. I posted my experience getting the graphics to work correctly in the Fun With Graphics section on this blog

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2009/09/fun-with-graphics-installing.html

Because of my multiple attempts, I had junked up the system with multiple grub
entries, some broken packages, and the previous Ubuntu install with the ATI graphics from Ubuntu and some other bugs. I wanted a fresh start. I decided to
re install the system this time with the feel of a professional install. My goals are

1. Basic housekeeping, getting rid of the old installs and re install.

2. Install Ubuntu 9.04 with the 3D graphics driver properly installed. I also want
to do a second install without the 3d graphics just in case there's some application
that is unstable with the 3D graphics that I just cant live without. Using the install without 3D enabled may also help with battery life although untested.

3. Install audio/video codecs and other extras.

4. Install and configure Wine with DirectX.

5. Install most of the software I use regularly or like to play with.

6. Theme the system. I want to do a theme that is either man, myth and magic
oriented or a techno theme or a little of both. I would like to give it a professional
feel like the Mac or PC with just a little personal mystique.

Starting the process, I started the install with the Ubuntu 9.04 live evaluation
disk. I completely cleaned the hard drive and started over. I made a 30 gig partition
to put the OS on and a 100 gig Partition to use for the home directory, a 4 gig for
swap space to match the memory of the computer, and the rest of the space minus
20 gigs as disk one for my music, video, pictures and other media. I left the 20 gig
space open to install Ubuntu without the 3D graphics enabled. After formatting, I
continued the install following the instructions provided. once installed, I needed
to do some post install tweaks to my system 1st I installed the graphics as I had
described in my fun with graphics section. Next I erased the hardware configuration
utility form the system menu that installs the proprietary ATI/AMD, NVIDIA drivers
from Ubuntu. next I installed the Conexant sound drivers from:

http://www.linuxant.com/alsa-driver/

This took about 5 minutes, the package builds a kernel module and is slow to complete. At this point, I had Ubuntu 9.04 working perfectly even with the 3D graphics.

I decided to also to a second install of Ubuntu 9.04 with the basic video drivers
without 3D acceleration. I did this for a couple of reasons. First of all, as a failsafe
for the system. Secondly, if there was some gotta/have-ta piece of software that
conflicted with the 3D drivers.

In the configuration for the non 3D version I installed the Conexant sound drivers
again. I Installed startupmanager to make changes to the grub bootloader. I want to set the default boot to the install with 3D graphics enabled. I may also use startup
manager to do some theme stuff later also. When I did second install of ubuntu,
I have the system set up to share the home and disk1 partitions. To do this I have
different user names for each of the installations in the home directory to keep
them from overlapping. IMPORTANT I also didn't format the home and disk1 partitions when I did the install to preserve the data on the home and disk1 partitons. I left the primary
partitions that I did my original install on invisible to the other install to keep them from
being messed with. If I wish to fix them in case of emergency, I can use stupidvisor
access to mount and repair them.

After installing Basics, and getting them to run successfully I decided to re install my Video
,Audio and Multimedia favorites as described in my post.

ttp://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2009/09/play-rip-burn-transcode-and-edit.html

I also wanted to set up monitoring for the heat and power management. To do this, most of the
utilities I needed were part of the Gnome applets(right click menubar then add). I setup the Battery Charge Monitor, The CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor, setup 2x set one up as cpu0 and and one up as cpu1 to monitor both cores , the Inhibit Applet, The System monitor and The Computer Temprature Monitor. The temp monitor wasn't originally installed on the system and I needed to use Synaptic to find and install it.

At this point, I feel I've got a very good Linux install all the major features including 3D support, sound, wifi, system cooling and power management are working correctly.

In the next few days, I hope to get Wine and most of the programs I use with Wine to work
correctly. I also want to install my game resources . When I get these things up and working I
will post it here. As far as hardware, everything seems to be working properly, modem and
Bluetooth still unused/untested. All in all this portable does an excellent job with Ubuntu 9.04
and hardware support.
-----------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------
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Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html

Fun With Graphics - Installling the Proprietary Drivers From ATI/AMD

2009-09-22T20:28:00.000-07:00

Fun with Graphics -Installing the Proprietary Drivers from ATI/AMD
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
After using my Gateway NV52 with Ubuntu 9.04 for a few days and installing numerous software applications and a few games. I noticed the video performance wasn't up to my expectations. I originally installed the default drivers for ATI for my system from Ubuntu by using the device manager. They worked OK, they passed my 4 tests Compiz Graphics, EPSXE with Petes GL Plugin, Mupen64, and NullDC via Wine. But the system Video performance was irregular Alien Arena Flew, VLC worked well once set to X11 for the video, Brutal Chess played , but it was extremely flickery, EPSXE with Petes GL Plugin worked OK, but the performance was better with Pete's Software Plug-in. Kaffeine worked but was extremely slow. I

note:
(If you plan to tweak the video drivers this way, read the next part of this article first, though slightly complicated, if you can get it working correctly it works MUCH MUCH better.)

had some stability problems mostly with the video players crashing. I was able to tweak the system to fix a number of the instability and flickering problems. For flickering I installed Brutal Chess and played with the Catalyst settings until Brutal Chess didn't flicker. This helped some of my other apps also. For video playback I set all the video to X11 this helped with stability. I also did another install of Ubuntu with no 3D accelerated graphics to work with video. The regular video drivers without 3D seem rock solid.

I felt like I should get better performance from my graphics after reading articles here.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_780g_linux&num=1

After a few days, I decided I wanted to try the proprietary drivers directly from ATI/AMD
on my install without 3D graphics enabled. After numerous failed attempts, I found instructions at the following web site which helped me to install the drivers correctly.

*** If you want to use this method read the rest of my article before continuing ******

http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Intrepid_Installation_Guide

note: When I built the ATI drivers I changed 8.10 to 9.04 in build instructions.

note: Also, when I installed the packages the ATI driver created, I used sudo dpkg -i *.deb instead of installing each package separately, this worked fine. Also, after installing the drivers Ubuntu asked me if I wanted to install updates. I went ahead and installed them. I wondered if the updates would interfere with my 3D graphics drivers install because the updates installed a new kernel but this didn't seem to cause any problems. Also the updates installed Compiz so desktop effects worked when I rebooted.

*** If you want to use this method read the rest of my article before continuing ******

This page gives instructions on how to install the ATI drivers correctly. However,
I found out if I used the latest divers provided from ATI, (my article was written 9,23,2009) X Windows would crash. Why? I thought, it worked for the writer of this page and for testers at Phoronix. After many failed attempts, I figured it out. I needed to use the EXACT version of the ATI drivers they used on the web page to get the drivers to work. When I originally down-loaded the drivers from ATI/AMD I used the wizard on their driver page to get the newest drivers which didn't work. When I decided I couldn't get the newest drivers to work and wanted to try the older driver that was used on the following web page . I didn't see a resource on the ATI/AMD page to download older versions of the driver . So to find the exact version they used on the web page listed above, I cut the entry for the driver listed on the website and put it into Google search engine. From this, I found the older version of the driver they specifically used on the web page. I installed it via the instructions provided and viola it works. No more flickering and the video performance is MUCH MUCH better and so far no crashes.

I've tested this so far with Compiz, Brutalchess, Totem and Epsxe and NullDC via wine (needs DirectX and C++ classes installed with winetricks) with much success.
I hope to try and test more stuff here in a few days. As I try stuff I will post it here.

9/28/2009 had no problems with Kaffiene, Mplayer or VLC video now . The 3d video now
seems pretty solid . At least as solid as the Nvidia driver or the computer with Windows and
Aero.

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Check out my index page for all my posts. Most of my posts are centered around
Desktop Linux and using Linux with multimedia. For more info see:

http://johnslinuxandcomputerstuff.blogspot.com/2012/01/index.html