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iTunes alternatives?
by James Elsey 28 Aug '09

28 Aug '09

What are you guys using for media players? Since getting an iPod, I've become fond of how iTunes manages music collections, and I haven't been able to find a good Linux alternative. Exaile comes close, but I'm still missing the following iTunes had a lovely way of storing compilation albums separately, so your main "list" of artists wasn't cluttered up by those on compilation CDs. Exaile/Amarok seem to list everything by artist > album, and when you have several compilations, this list becomes difficult to manage Audio books, iTunes has a nice way of storing those "out of the way", can't see anything in amarok to do this.. There's some other features I can't find good implementations of, but these are my two pet-hates at the moment. I haven't heard of any iTunes Linux versions on the horizon, and I don't think running under WINE would be ideal Any suggestions? James Elsey

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Re: [ALUG] Any experience of the "Fit PC 2" here?
by Alex Scotton 28 Aug '09

28 Aug '09

*(Sorry if this reposted; I keep getting mails about postponed posting because of "suspicious headers")* Putting all your eggs in one basket, aye? I want to do this too, currently running a media server, wow server, ftp server on my windows box (hides head in shame ha ha) and with 4 other pcs in the house all from time to time using bittorrent (especially me hehe).. would love to set up a buntu box as a server providing dns, possibly a few domain services (i.e. possibly storing user info etc.. people in the house log onto the server not their local account...) and in so doing provide an intranet possible of handling the bittorrent web ui, enabling peeps to upload their torrent file to the server and then leaving that to download the file and place it on a public drive when it's finished downloading.. would love to have a service that detects network load and adjusts bittorrent's bandwith allocation as appropriate... Would also love an app to sense new computers on the network and ask my permission for it's access etc.. Let me know how your venture goes chris Alex Scotton

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Anybody had experience of this?
by Chris Walker 27 Aug '09

27 Aug '09

http://maemo.nokia.com/ I've been tempted to trade in my old Nokia phone for a Nokia N97 but have been put off by the reviews - and the £500 price tag. I've thought about an Android phone and an iPhone but today I read about the Nokia N900. It has a Linux OS but having downloaded an SDK for the N97 and installed it on my Windows machine, am I likely to have problems trying write something for a Linux OS on a phone? I have to confess that my programming experience is limited to BBC Basic on a model B back in the 80's and now that I'm about to retire I thought I'd buy myself a new phone and do something useful with it. So 2 questions really. One is about the thoughts of the people here around Maemo. It's been used before on other devices but is the fact that it's based on Linux that important and is it any good? Second question concerns programming. Has anybody done any programming for a Linux phone, other than tweaking? I wouldn't be pestering you for advice so don't be afraid to answer ;-) Just in case you're wondering what sort of thing I'd be programming (more accurately trying to program), it would be a beer database. Just the sort of thing to show off at one of the monthly meets in a pub :-)

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First report on WD MyBook II box - and a question
by Chris G 25 Aug '09

25 Aug '09

Well I have my WD MyBook World Edition II now and "it just works"! :-) To expand a little, I plugged in the power, connected the ethernet lead and turned on. Using 'arp' I discovered its IP address and then was able immediately to connect to its web configuration pages. I have enabled ssh and nfs and am now able to log in to the WD box's command line (seems a pretty standard Linux system) and can mount nfs shares from the box. What more could one want? (Well, a little, see below.... ) Now the question, I use dnsmasq on my desktop system (well that's where it is at present) to provide local DNS on our little network. It's set up so that DHCP clients can be accessed with just their host name or with the domain suffixes. E.g. I can access 'maxine' or 'maxine.isbd.net', or C475IP or C475IP.isbd.net. However the WD box registers with dnsmasq as 'garage.local' rather than just 'garage' (which is the host name I have given it). Can anyone suggest why this might be and/or how I can fix it? -- Chris Green

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Tonidoplug
by mark fernandes (IFR) 25 Aug '09

25 Aug '09

With respect to small low powered linux servers - I did come across this beastie courtesy of LXer Linux News: "TonidoPlug is a tiny, low power, low cost home server based on 1.2 GHz Sheeva processor that allows you to access your applications, files, photos, music and media from anywhere (Powered by Tonido). TonidoPlug comes pre-installed with powerful Tonido Applications - Photos, Jukebox, Webshare, Workspace, Thots, Explorer, Torrent and Search - all running on top of embedded Ubuntu Jaunty Linux OS. Additionally, TonidoPlug can be extended by installing new applications from Tonido App store." It has a 512 Mb flash drive, Ethernet port and a USB port for additional storage for a $100. Website says currently shipping only to US :-( but shipping to other countries will open shortly (whatever that means). http://www.tonidoplug.com/tonido_plug.html http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/Online/Blogs/Productivity-Sauce-Dmitri-s-op… Hope that this is helpful, Mark

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Re: [ALUG] A low powered backup solution probably/possibly.
by James Elsey 25 Aug '09

25 Aug '09

If it were me I would certainly take the price into consideration, as it all depends on what you are backing up. If you are running a small business from home, or have documents that you can't lose then this would be a viable option. If its just personal files/photos/media, would it not be best to buy a spindle of CDs and come up with some rotation system for backup? It would have its benefits. 1. cheaper 2. less can go wrong 3. probably less prone to weathering (does the garage get extremely hot during the summer? 4. less enticing to any thieves 5. doesn't cost anything to run! Maybe I'm too naïve, but I'd favour CD/DVD media as backup over a server! J -----Original Message----- From: main-bounces(a)lists.alug.org.uk [mailto:main-bounces@lists.alug.org.uk] On Behalf Of Chris G Sent: 24 August 2009 13:39 To: main(a)lists.alug.org.uk Subject: Re: [ALUG] A low powered backup solution probably/possibly. On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 10:36:36AM +0100, Chris G wrote: > On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 10:34:17AM +0100, Chris G wrote: > > Synaptic, Qnap and IcyBox all offer NAS servers which handle NFS as > > Oops, that's Synology not Synaptic. > A little further research on Google (especially the reviews and comparisons found at www.smallnetbuilder.com) has led me to the Western Digital My Book World Edition II. Price for a 2Tb version of this is about £215, it has ssh access built in, no hacking needed, power consumption is 16 watts when active, 5 watts when idle. The performance is not quite as good as the top of the range Synology and Qnap ones but it's *way* cheaper. £215 for a low powered Linux box with 2Tb of storage seems excellent value to me. So I'm off to buy one and will report back when I've played with it a little (if anyone is interested). -- Chris Green _______________________________________________ main(a)lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above! __________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 4362 (20090824) __________ The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus. http://www.eset.com __________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 4362 (20090824) __________ The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus. http://www.eset.com

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A low powered backup solution probably/possibly.
by Chris G 24 Aug '09

24 Aug '09

After all my recent maundering about there being no low powered systems suitable for backup servers I did a bit of lateral thinking and looked at NAS servers again (I had looked a couple of years ago). They have got a lot cheaper now and there seem to be two or three which offer what I'm after (specifically Linux/NFS support). Synaptic, Qnap and IcyBox all offer NAS servers which handle NFS as well as SMB shares. Synaptic and Qnap go beyond that and offer SSH access to the server, a web server, PHP/mySql and python even! It may be that the IcyBox servers do as well but I haven't investigated in detail. Power consumption is pretty low, the Synaptic DS209 for example, with two 750Gb disks claims 25 watts when active, 10 watts when idle. Prices are in the £100 to £200 range without disk drive, adding a big SATA disk will only be £70 or so. I think there will be one replacing my garage linux box quite soon and I can use the garage system as my general purpose test bed. -- Chris Green

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Any experience of the "Fit PC 2" here?
by Chris G 23 Aug '09

23 Aug '09

Does anyone here have any experience of the Fit PC 2 ? They are getting almost reasonably priced now - CPC have the Linux one for £285 (plus VAT) which for a really tiny and low powered machine isn't at all bad. Power consumption is 5 watts, it has 1Gb of memory and a 160Gb hard disk and Gigabit ethernet. It would thus seem to be quite a good basis for various Linux based "boxes on the network". It comes with Ubuntu 8.04 installed. -- Chris Green

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Maintaining music libraries in various formats
by Jon Dye 20 Aug '09

20 Aug '09

Hi all, I currently have my music collection as a bunch of mp3s, oggs or flacs on a fileserver on my home network. That's fine for me using linux to play them back but we have several devices (including Windows machines and iPods) at home that don't support either ogg or flac. I also don't really want to copy the files as flac to my mps player (my mobile phone) as they take up a lot of space so I currently transcode them to ogg or mps. Ultimately I'd like to keep everything as flac as I have lots of space so I will be gradually re-ripping stuff to flac. Because file space is cheap I had a crazy idea to keep a directory of originals on the network and then to run a periodic script to build a directory of mps3 or oggs from the originals. This would save time transcoding and would support the various devices on the network better. Has anyone heard of a scheme like this or knows of any software designed to do this. Ideally the update script would: 1. Create/Update the corresponding mp3/ogg file whenever a file in the originals directory changes (i.e. I rip a new CD) 2. Update the metadata in the originals directory whenever the metadata in a mp3/ogg directory changes. 3. Support all file formats in the originals directory (as I won't have only flacs there at the start). I suppose hard linking mp3s/oggs where relevant is therefore a good option here. I had an idea to somehow use SCons to "build" the mp3s/oggs from the flac files but that only supports requirements 1. The other option was to write a custom python (or similar) script to do it. My question is, does anyone have any suggestions for existing tools that do something similar or for ideas of how to implement what I want. JD

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Iceweasel plugin selection
by Richard Lewis 19 Aug '09

19 Aug '09

Hi ALUG, So I'm trying to get a WAV file to play in an HTML document in Iceweasel. I have an <object> with an <embed> inside it: <object classid="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B" codebase="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab" type="audio/wav" width="1" height="1" class="griller" id="griller"> <param name="AUTOPLAY" value="False" /> <param name="src" value="AK_2049_AR_12318-1.wav" /> <embed width="1" height="1" type="audio/wav" qtsrc="AK_2049_AR_12318-1.wav" src="AK_2049_AR_12318-1.wav" AUTOPLAY="False" name="griller" enablejavascript="true" /> </object> This works on Safari with the Quicktime plugin, but not on Iceweasel. I'm guessing the problem may be with the plugins Iceweasel is using. In Edit | Preferences | Applications, I can select the plugin to use for "WAV audio", but the options are only "Use Movie Player (default)", "Use Windows Media Player Plug-in (in Iceweasel)", or "Use other..." (which browses for an executable). about:plugins tells me that I have the VLC plugin installed and that it knows how to handle content of MIME type "audio/wav" or with ".wav" suffixes. I also have the mplayer plugin installed which (AIUI) pretends to be WMP and also knows how to play .wav files. Why does VLC not appear in my list of available plugins in the Preferences | Applications dialog? Is this true for others? Best, Richard -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis ISMS, Computing Goldsmiths, University of London Tel: +44 (0)20 7078 5134 Skype: richardjlewis JID: ironchicken(a)jabber.earth.li http://www.richard-lewis.me.uk/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- +-------------------------------------------------------+ |Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.| |http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html | +-------------------------------------------------------+

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