Stuphi

Having looked at gOS recently, I decided that it was time to re-visit e17 myself on my Ubuntu system. I have used e17 in the past on Debian before I switched to Ubuntu.

There is a really cool script called easy_e17.sh that does all the work, and here is a how to that details the use of the script.

Now, I followed the steps, and have installed e17. The problem is that I don’t like it. I really want to, but it just does not look right when first installed. Although the themes are easy to install and change, they only affect the e17 elements. Gnome and GTK applications don’t look right.

With some effort it would be possible to match themes in e17, gnome, gtk etc., but I can’t be bothered. Am I getting lazy, or am I just not interested any more in fluff? Either way, it was a relief to get back into Gnome and all that Human consistency.

I will now just wait and see if anybody does a good Ubuntu derivative that has a fully configured e17 desktop. Failing that, I may keep e17 and whenever I am bored, chip away at the configuration until it feels right.

Today I downloaded gOS so that I could have a look at it.

I was impressed. If you are a fan of Google™ then this could be right up your street.

I have no idea who is behind it, but it is based on Ubuntu and uses the excellent e17 version of the Enlightenment window manager. I have liked e17 for a long time, and it is great to see it used like this in a distribution.

The end result is a system that is lightweight, suitable as a portal to common web based services, particularity those provided by Google.

I will be keeping an eye on how this develops.

I installed the Myth-Archive package to be able to backup any shows that I had recorded that I may want to keep. However, it did not work first time, so I gave up with it. It would probably have been better ti fix that, but I could not be bothered, so I have tried a different approach. First I was going to simply query the database and find out which mpeg file is associated with which program, and then manually do the archiving.

What I noticed is that some of the files have a .nuv file extension. This is not very helpful, so I did a quick Google, and found Nuvexport. This looks like a great little program. When it is run, a number of options are presented to you, and it is possible to select a number of programs to process. Options are given for what format it is to be saved in. Once I have extracted the files from Mythtv with this utility, I will use some of these recipes to create some DVD archives.

Update: Nuvexport refused to recognise the aspect ratio. Instead, I am using mythtranscode directly to export the file from Mythtv. It may not be as intuitive, but it works.

I have just upgraded this blog to use the new Wordpress 2.3 release. It was so easy, I thought that it had not worked! It is not exactly clear what has changed, but I do now have Tags and a funky tag cloud. Having only one plug-in installed, and a theme that is only a small modification of a standard theme probably helped.

One of the reasons that I wanted to upgrade to Ubuntu 7.10 before it was released was so that I could have a play with the new developments in compiz. It was therefore more than a little disappointing to discover that it did not work. When I tried to enable desktop effects, it would simply state that it could not, and would revert back to metacity.

At first, I was a little annoyed as I could not even see any error message as to why this had failed. Finally, for another reason, I started gnome-settings from the command line. When I then selected the appearance tool, and tried to turn on desktop effects, some useful information scrolled up the screen.

It would appear that by default, compiz checks that the graphics card has at least 64 MB or RAM before it will allow compiz to start. No doubt this is done for a good reason, but this does not help me with my 32 MB graphics card in my laptop.

A little bit of googling and I discover that compiz in Ubuntu has a wrapper script called /usr/bin/compiz A quick look in here and it is easy to see where the check for the RAM is done. I dropped the limit to 32 MB and tried again. Yay! Wobbly windows

Now all I need to do is find out how to configure compiz ….

I know that I said I would resist the urge to upgrade to gutsy, but I got bored today.

I am now wondering how much of my system will break

I am currently running Ubuntu 7.04 on two computers at home. In the past, I have always found it hard to resist the urge to install the development version of the next release of the distribution I am running. This started when I was using Debian. With its slow release cycle, Debian stable did start to feel a bit tired as a desktop system.

I would find that the latest version of some software with the features that I was interested in was not available. Rather than muck about with back-ports etc., I just went and installed testing, and then unstable. These are only my own machines, and the need for stability was not critical. The only time this did bother me was when I wanted to print. I found that my printer needed to be re-configured at regular intervals. A couple of times this did bite me as I wanted to print something quick, and due to changes in CUPS or whatever, my printer was off-line.

I then moved to Ubuntu. With its shorter release cycle, I decided that I would have the best of both worlds. I could have the more recent versions of software, and not have unpredictable breakage. Two upgrades a year should be ample. Well I could not wait for the final release of version 7.04 so I installed that a few months early, to try out compiz IIRC.

Now I am trying hard to resist the urge to upgrade to 7.10 before it is released. I fully expect that it is already stable enough for my use, but it would be good to wait until it has been released to try it. Not long to go now!

As mentioned before, I have a new DVD Burner. After getting it to work, I needed to start using it. The first pack of media that I bought had the LightScribe surface. For those that don’t already know, LightScribe is a technology developed by HP that uses the DVD burner laser to effectively print directly onto the surface of special discs. Now I need to get this to work with Ubuntu.

First I went to the download area of the LightScribe website, and in the pre-release area, they have a few Debian packages that are compatible with Ubuntu. I installed these following the instruction provided, and started to use the simple labeller application.

This worked great, but is limited only to the most basic format of label, which consists of only two lines of text with a few provided graphics in a narrow band near the centre of the disk. My handwriting is not the best, so was happy with this as a simple solution, but it would be nice to have more.

I did a quick search to see if anybody has made any other label software for Linux that can use LightScribe, and drew a blank. This seems strange to me as HP have made the API available and even provide a sample application with the SDK. It would be nice to one day bite the bullet and have a go at writing my own application. Maybe this is the one!

A little bit of further research and I found LaCie have provided a LightScribe program for Linux. Initially I discarded this, as I was sure that it would be somehow crippled to only work with LaCie drives, and not with my Samsung one. Well it turns out that it is not. I only need to download the application, as I already had the LightScribe support files from the LightScribe site.

The LaCie software makes a good companion to the LightScribe software. The LaCie software only prints graphics, but will print to the full face of the disk. The clever thing with LightScribe is that the drive is able to recognise the position of the disk, so I can use the LaCie program to put a picture on the lower half of the disk, and leave the top area blank. I can then use the LightScribe simple labeller program to add a line of text. It is even possible to print the same label twice to get a darker image.

So I am happy. I have a method of marking my disks that looks smart, and it all works in Linux. I could really do with making a template for Gimp or Inkscape so that I can generate images easily, but that can wait. I now need to work on a few recipes to cook up some content suitable to burn.

I decided to buy myself a DVD Writer. A quick search and I decided to get a SATA device from Samsung that has LightScribe. I have a SATA controller on my motherboard, and I don’t like the idea of buying old technology, so I wanted a SATA interface.

I did a quick check to make sure that there was a good chance such a device would work with my Ubuntu desktop system. No major issues were highlighted, so on Tuesday I went bought the drive. I guessed that it would be only a few minutes to install, and then I would be up and running.

How wrong was I? To cut a long story short, I found that I have two different SATA controllers on my motherboard. One is incorporated in the southbridge, and one extra one. If I plugged the DVD into the extra one, then the machine would not even complete the POST. If I plugged it into the one on the southbridge, it would boot, but very slowly, and the DVD would not work, and the lots of error messages would fill dmesg.

It turns out that I have an early motherboard with SATA, and that it is not very good. Eventually I gave up trying to get it to work, and just bought a new SATA controller card. Now the machine boots without errors. Next thing is to learn how to create DVD’s and see if I can get LightScribe to work.

I have just installed MythTV on my Ubuntu desktop machine using the instruction found here. I am really pleased with the result even if I did have to jump through a few hoops to get here.

I first looked a MythTV a while back, when I first got the DVB USB adapter. I had trouble setting it up and was a bit disappointed so I did not bother to use it. Instead I just use Xine to watch live broadcast, and then dvbstream via the ‘at’ command to schedule recordings. It worked, but was not very elegant.

I decided to have a go again after reading the guide mentioned above. The initial set-up probable went OK, but for some reason I could not get the schedule to download the information required. I fiddled about lots and tried alternative methods, only to later discover that I had a network problem, not an issue with MythTV. By this time I had already sent an email to the guy who wrote the guide above.

To avoid untangling the mess I had gotten into, it seemed that it would be easier to remove what was already set-up, and start again. This time the schedule was working in that the data was retrieved from the website, and could be seen in the schedule. However the problem now was that the channels had been duplicated in the schedule. When I selected a channel that had program information, I could not tune in. When I selected the version of the same channel that had no information, it would tune in OK and display the channel on the screen.

From the replies that I received from the author of the guide, it was apparent that the information for the channels is stored in the channel table of the mysql database that is used by MythTV. Well a quick view of that table showed me what was wrong, and a quick bit of SQL editing, and I had the channel table sorted.

Now I have a fully working MythTV setup that I am quite pleased with. The only thing I would like to do now is to set-up the system so that it can be run in a window in the corner of the screen, much like can be done with Xine. My hardware now probably needs some attention as it is not exactly the quietest machine.