Sirius Stuff

Really liked this article. PC World - Linux Audio Players, Tested and Graded I’m working my way through the Linux equivalents of Windows apps. I’ve used iTunes under Windows because it would talk easily to my iPod.

I tried Rhythmbox but it was out immediately. I want to keep my songs on a network-attached storage drive. Basically, the SimpleShare is a hard drive with an ethernet port. I don’t expect it to be as vulnerable to attacks as Windows XP. I don’t have to punch holes in its firewall that might allow people to get control of my Linux box or my wife’s Mac. Rhythmbox wants import all my music to one local location. No.

I moved on to Exaile because it didn’t require me to bring music locally. It’s OK. What I don’t like is how hard it is to play one song. If I want to listen to song X by artist Y, I can find it easily. But I expect to be able to double click. Or click to select and then play. Or something. Also, it’s not obvious how I connect my iPod.

So I tried installing Banshee. Gorgeous. Good (apparent) support for iPods and podcasts. But it again wants to import all my music to local disk. No.

So I found the PC World article. Looked at exaile again. It has simple, clear instructions on how to upgrade from the 0.2.8 version distributed with Feisty Fawn to the current 0.2.9. I’m not thrilled about adding sources to apt but OK. The logo for Exaile is now a play button instead of an equals sign or whatever it was. Good improvement. Has plugins for SoundJuicer and iPods and other things. Cool.

So I’ve removed Banshee and Rhythmbox. One of the things I hated about most Linux distributions was that they gave you 10 ways of doing things. None of which quite worked. Part of the value that I see with using Ubuntu is that they’re making decisions about what players to include. I might say that their choice was wrong for me when using Rhythmbox instead of Exaile but at least they’re making some decisions.

Next week’s project will be looking at movie players. Is gxine the best for me? Or is there something better?

One thing that was kind of exasperating about Ubuntu was the “weird” version numbers. The successor to 6.06 was 6.10? The next version was 7.04? Huh? Fortunately, somebody finally blogged about this: What’s With the Ubuntu Version Number Scheme? — Johnny’s Thoughts

No big secret: the first number is the year and the second is the month. So 7.04 translates as 2007 and April or month 04.

Now I can sleep at night.

Was reading Deep Jive Interests about Deep Jive Interests » Dell’s Crowdsourcing More Than Hype: Tells Microsoft to “Suck It!”

I’ve spent some time the past 10 days or so putting Ubuntu 7.04 on 3 PCs, all of them dual-booting some flavor of Windows.  Obviously there’s a lot of interest in doing this on Dell’s site but it’s not clear at all that Dell is going to reduce the price just because they don’t install Microsoft.  I still don’t have hibernation working properly on my desktop - haven’t tried on the kids’ or my laptop yet - so I’m a lot more interested in paying the same price as a Windows box just to have hibernate and wireless work without a glitch.

Working on the hibernate scripts is not fun for me.  I can’t imagine it’s fun for a programmer.  So, OK.  I’m willing to pay to have better support for Linux.  It would be nice to be able to either specify “just hardware that plays nice with Linux” or have Dell lean on their suppliers to just make it happen.

Yesterday, I referenced what it was liking living with Vista

Today I ran across an Apple ad mocking Vista.   Unfortunately, they pretty much got it right.

I’m hoping for an update that fixes this.  Please, Microsoft?

OK, I’ve had Windows Vista installed for 9 days now and my verdict is … it’s not worth upgrading.  Vista is supposed to be more secure than XP but this manifests itself in really annoying ways.  The screen flashes black and a box pops up that must be dealt with.  That’d be great if it were only for important things but it happens all the time!

I’ve had it happen when I want to change the smallest system setting.  I’ve had it happen while downloading files.  C’mon, get out of my way.

I’m having trouble doing backups with Quicken.  Intuit probably had to do something so that they could force writes of data every time you changed something so that it wouldn’t be lost.  But wow, this was coming for a while.  

I wanted to look at Vista before thinking about Mac OS.  It’s tough, though, because you can get a 17″ HP or Dell laptop for $1000 less than a 17″ MacBook Pro.  Granted that it might take another $250-$300 to bring the laptops up to apples-to-Apples (heh) specs but that’s still a lot of money to spend on an OS.   Guess I could be one of the elite then, though.

Makes me wish for FreeBSD or Linux.  But I don’t really want to deal with an ugly, clunky windowing system as well having to reboot to run the few Windows programs I need.