So this is a short post on one pestering problem. If youre using Jaunty and find this problem then use the link that follows.

When i installed Jaunty i had problems (as usual). One of them was this. First off, videos wont play in any video player. Codecs are in place, no doubt. But the player would go crashing down. Even vlc, which uses a seperate set of codecs fails

Then, desktop effects wont enable. No matter what. An irritating piece of  thing.

But it was so queer that when rhythmbox (may be others too; i dont know) starts playing (not just open but playing) videos work! But i dont think video players should be dependent on music players.

So what worked for me was I rolledback to intrepid’s version (2.4) version of xserver-xorg-video-intel. Now no problems videos play and compiz is enabled.

Click here to find out how to revert to the 2.4 version.

Hope this helps.

Amarok 2 users would know that Amarok 2 series is a shadow of its old Amarok 1.4(”Amarok Classic” self) - and quite a few people still prefer Amarok classic to Amarok 2 - primararily because of Amarok’s missing support for visualizations, equalizer amongst others. I don’t use equalizers - and as for visualization - well don’t use that either.

Coming back to the point - Amarok 2.0 release was somewhat like a KDE 4.0 release - more of a framework release, basic building blocks in place, but just about. I terribly missed queuing support, and promptly stopped using Amarok (and on a different note, switched to Gnome - Rhythmbox is sweet!).

Amarok 2.1 brings in a lot of improvements - and the most obvious one is the improvements to the playlist and main play window area. With Amarok 2.0 - the playlist area was a bit of a hit and a miss the lyrics, Wikipedia info was there but wasn’t obvious, you had to “Add the plasma” and once you added multiple plasma(”applets”) you had no idea how many were there without “zooming out” and overlooking it. And with the zoom effect not at its  slickest best it was a big chore.

Amarok 2.1 fixes this by adding buttons which bring up the respective applets making it easy to remove the exisitng applets, add new ones or simply re-arrange them.

Another nice feature introduced is “bookmarking” - any track with a length greater than 10minutes and Amarok will save the last listened position, so when you return to playing the track, it resumes from the last bookmarked place. There are other improvements too - only I couldn’t figure it because the damned player wouldn’t play anything

I’ve put my query in Ubuntu forums over here - my problem is that Amarok just refuses to play any local files. If any of my readers can help me figure this out, it’ll be great, just drop a comment.

Edit: Fixed the problem .

As for installing Amarok, its straightforward, Goto System -> Administration -> Software Sources.

Click on third party sources, click on Add, enter the below line.
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backports/ubuntu jaunty main
Save, update. Launch Synaptic, search for amarok and mark for install.
That’s it, Amarok 2.1 is ready to rock. Were you able to get Amarok successful run on your system ? Do drop a comment.

1. Sign up for Dropbox using this link (Disclaimer: The link is a referral link, if you signup with the referral code then I get 250MB extra space on my Dropbox.)
2. Install Dropbox client by following the instructions here.
3. Create a private shared folder in Dropbox.
4. Now lets configure Transmission. Launch Transmission. Click on Edit -> Preferences. Ensure that “Automatically add torrents from:” checkbox is checked, and point it to your Dropbox folder. Also ensure that Start when added is checked, Display options checkbox is unchecked and point the destination to a suitable folder.

transmission-options

That’s it. Next time, whenever your upload a torrent file to the chosen Dropbox folder, the Dropbox client ensures that the torrent file gets pushed to your chosen folder, and Transmission will automatically start the download. Simple, isn’t it ?

The first thing we need to do, is have a Calender system in Mozilla Thunderbird. There are couple of addons for this, but IMO the Lightning project is probably the best of the lot. Lightning project also allows you to accept Outlook meeting invites, but we’ll get to that in a while.

Head over to Lightning project homepage, and download the addon as per your platform. Next, install the addon by clicking on Tools  -> Addons -> Install and then point it to the location where you have downloaded the addon. Restart Thunderbird and you will get a Calender and tasks pane on the lower left corner, and an events sidebar.

Now that our calender system is ready, lets do the next step - Integration with Google calender. This requires another addon, Provider for Google Calender which basically allows  Lightning to access and write back to Google calender. Follow the same steps as mentioned above to install the addon.

Next, lets configure Thunderbird to use Google calender. Click on File -> New -> Calender -> On the nextwork radiobox. Now click on the Next button.Click on Google Calender radio box. In the location, enter the location of your Google Calender shared URL. You can obtain this URL by logging on to Google Calender and then clicking on the Settings link from the left sidebar. In the lower corner, you will see an “Calender address” section, right click on the XML button and copy the link address. Now enter this address in the Location textbox mentioned above.

Click next, you will be prompted for your Google  accounts username and password. Login you’re done! Next time you receive a meeting invite, it will be available under Invitations link!

As a bonus, if you use Google contacts to keep your contacts in Sync, use the Zindus addon to Sync your Mozilla Thunderbird Addon with Google Contacts!

So I proceeded to download the AMD64 version on Jaunty - though I don’t have enough RAM for a 64-bit OS  to take advantage of. Once download was completed, burnt the iso onto a DVD-RW and booted off it. First thing - yes you’ve heard about the bootsplash screen, Jaunty comes with a new bootsplash screen with a more slicker looking, narrower progress bar. One thing *still* bugging me about Ubuntu - the text mode screen at Grub - for a distro emphasising a great experience for new users, I still can’t figure out why text mode bootload selection screen is used. I know, I know, its easy to change it, but c’mon! Most distros have graphical grub OS selection screen - and so far no distro comes nowhere near openSUSE’s.(kill me, I’m an openSUSE fan). This might seem minor, but trust me, these minor things makes a *whole* lot of difference.

The bootscreen gave me a (much needed) option of installing directly, rather than booting into the Live session and start the install - I really had no reason to try the Live session, because I was fairly confident that most, if not all of my hardware would be detected and work out of the box. The install took about 45 minutes (no thanks to my DVD drive, which can be rather slow and troublesome). During install, I was asked if I wanted to migrate my Vista install documents into Ubuntu, and I selected yes - this was another unexpected thing for me, as Fiesty and Gutsy never seemed to detect this.
Once the install was done I booted into my installed desktop - and yes boot time is pretty impressive, from a coldboot to fully usable desktop in little over 40 seconds.

If you are looking for a new look well you’d be disappointed, the much loved and hated brown is still the standard colour scheme, though the awesome looking Dust theme is available, and I switched directly to it.
So lets start with the hardware: As expected, all of my hardware was detected and usable out-of-the-box. One little peev that I had was that I manually had to create a connection for my WPA2′d WiFi, though I had no problems connecting to it and future boots connected to it automatically. I proceeded to install nvidia’s drivers for my 8600m GT, enabled Compiz and trimmed it down to the effects I need.

Software wise: Jaunty comes with the usuals: Nautilus for the filebrowser (and YES! gvfs! Something Gnome desperately needed, atleast IMO), Firefox for browser, Evolution mail client(though I proceeded to install Thunderbird), Pidgin for IM, OpenOffice for your Word processing and Spreadsheet needs. Multimedia-wise, Jaunty features Totem movie player, Rhythmbox as your audio media player - I proceeded with installing Exaile and SMplayer. Transmission features as the BitTorrent client - though its simplistic, its pretty good enough for most users and hey I get a Web interface for controlling my torrents from anywhere in the world.

I also needed some key apps which are vital for me - a Terminal Services client, and a vnc server running. I’m still trying to find a way of connecting to my office VPN (Cisco client, anyone ?).
Performance wise- Jaunty is indeed very impressive, very slick, extremely responsive. And something with caught me totally off-guard was Suspend/Resume and Hibernate - all of these worked flawlessly.

One more thing to note that in Jaunty, the usual Ctrl + Alt + BkSpace no longer kills the X-Server, there is a workaround this though. openSUSE has had this disabled but openSUSE’s way was to hit the keys twice to Kill the X-server, this unfortunately doesn’t work. As mentioned above, the workaround is to install dontzap, here’s how you can enable this feature.

In conclusion - I’m very impressed by Jaunty - I think Jaunty just might be one of the best Ubuntu releases. Think I will stick to Jaunty for a little bit more, and switch to it completely once its released. What’re your view ? Do post a comment or two and let me know!

Here’s my Jaunty desktop right now:

First, switch to root using su
su

Next, type
cdrecord -scanbus

You’ll get something like this:

scsibus0:
0,0,0      0) 'TSSTcorp' 'DVD+-RW TS-L632H' 'D200' Removable CD-ROM
0,1,0      1) *

Note the first 3 numbers corresponding to your CD/DVD writer.
Next, type

cdrecord -v dev=x,y,z <name-of-iso-file>

replacing x,y,z with the numbers obtained in the above line and the name of iso file as well! Simple!

To make it even simpler, you can wrap the command around a shell script accepting the filename as the input for even faster access. CLI FTW!

Rather having no updates at all, decided to post some links which I found interesting and made for good read. So here we go!

1. Linus Torvalds facts - Some hilarious dope here. Props to Jun Auza for the link.
2. fwbuilder - Manage Firewalls easily 
3. The World Beyond Microsoft - Wiktor writes on hypothetical post-Microsoft-crash world.
4. Fastest way to disable PC speaker - really helpful if you work a lot on terminal and get irritated by those buzzing sounds.
5. Customizing the terminal - Parts I and II - Binny writes on how you can customize the terminal prompt and add aliases
6. Control your openSUSE Media player from an iPhone 
7. Find it using findit! - Locate a find using findit, and get funky using some of its advanced features
8. Show Popular Posts in WordPress without a Plugin - Binny continues his Plugin killer series of posts and writes on how you can show popular posts in WordPress using a simple query change.
9. Simple ways to Optimize Gnome for Netbook displays - Jun Auza writes on simple ways of making your Gnome desktop look better.
10. Finally, Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope hits beta. 

Below video shows where and how you can enable the video recording feature. Note this video was recorded using KWin.

Though it isn’ the best, Kwin’s video recording plugin works pretty well, but its just a basic thing.  As of now it cannot grab any audio.

Another quirk with this is that KWin saves the video recorded as a .cps file (some weird capsury format).  Before this can be view you need to recode this using a tool called cpsrecode. The quirk isn’t over yet. After recoding, I found that the video was flipped by 180 degrees and mirrored. This meant I had to use mencoder to correct it. To make this worse, mencoder can rotate only by 90 degrees at a time. Which means to get the final video you need to

1. Recode this using cpsrecode
2. Flip it by 90
3. Flip it by 90 degree and mirror it

Found these rather tedious, so I chained all three to a single command, and with Mehul’s help made it into a script.

So click on the link below, make the file executable by typing
chmod u+x recode.sh

To convert goto the directory where the recode.sh file is, and type

./recode <input-file-name> <output-file-name>

Here is the script:

download: Recode.sh (1.42KB) added: 06/03/2009 clicks: 207 description: A simple shell script to make the video grabbed by KWin viewable

Yeah, get rid of NetworkManager, install Wicd.

Here’s how:

Installing in Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch, Slackware & Gentoo:

Head over to this page to read up on installing wicd on each of these distros.

Sabayon 4:

Install wicd from using equo
equo install wicd
Next, remove NetworkManager so that it no longer the default tool for managing network connections
rc-update del NetworkManager default boot
Make wicd the default tool for managing networks
rc-update add wicd default

Also we’ll add an entry to startup so that wicd starts automatically. Have a look at the video below, that will show you how you can do so.

World of Goo - in a nutshell can be described as a extreme-physics-added version of Lemmings. Basically you have to “guide” the “goo-balls” to the specified pipes - seems easy, well that’s where the Physics & levels come in. The levels aren’t the straight forward ones, you have to build bridges, towers by “Connecting” the goo balls from one to other.

There are different types of goo-balls, each with their own unique set of properties and behaviours. I suppose this write-up isn’t doing much in making you understand, best would be to play it and experience it yourself - it is a wonderful and unique game.

Graphics wise its plain 2D with little hints of 3D but then its all rendered beautifully, and have a really nice cartoony-look. Audio is where World of Goo really stands out - the score is awesome, and immerses you totally into the game.

The game soundtrack is available as a free download - and you can download it from here.

The game, while is not free - you can purchase it for $20, you can download the free demo version and evaluate it and see how it is - the demo version offers you only the First chapter of the of the total Five chapters available. I do  urge you to try the demo version - you just might be surprised how addictive the game can be.

Download the free demo version | Visit World of Goo website.