Life to CURDATE();

School's almost done and the whether is cold and blizzardy. Or, at least it was a few nights ago; That's true Canadian weather for you.

I'm currently finished writing all my assignments and have a quiz and presentation left before I am free at long last. All this free time has also meant I've been tinkering around with my computer more often than usual. Take, for instance, yesterday. While no one was around to see it, I basically spent the whole day compiling on my laptop. A lot has happened since my last post and allow me to bring you up to speed.

+ Sold my Alienware machine that I previously had Gentoo on. Sad, I miss the machine, but some hardware or driver hiccups meant that it was constantly freezing. I'm wary that the problems stemmed either from a bad hard drive or the Vista drivers it came with. Perhaps it is also indicitive of some poor Kernel drivers too, I dunno. Doubtful though. One strange issue I had is that after installing Kubuntu 8.10, it would freeze if and only if the power manager was not on performance. Well such is life. Sold it, payed for another month of insurance, and purchased a beautiful Thinkpad T60 for a fraction of the Alienware's cost.

+ T60 Specs: 2.0 GHz Core Duo, 2GB DDR2 Ram, 512 MB x1400 ATI Radeon video (128 MB dedicated), 100GB 5400 rpm hard drive, 1400x1050 resolution, keyboard light, security fingerprint reader, and a decent speaker system. Total Price? $375. It was a deal to be sure, the last one in stock. Looked brand new except for the outer lid which had some scratches on it. This runs really cool, standard at 40 degrees idle to around 50-70 when working, compiling, and of course, running flash videos. It doesn't have amd64 support unfortunately, one thing I miss. But the keyboard on this thing is where it really shines. IBM and keyboards are like bread and butter. Perhaps I'll pick up an IBM Model M in my lifetime. I remember using them way back and enjoying every minute of it.

+ Installed Gentoo on the T60. Overall, things went smoothly on the third install attempt. I have issues with perfection and things weren't up to snuff the first two times. But I'm becoming more comfortable with the Gentoo environment and more prone to try fixing problems as opposed to the 'reinstall when something goes wrong' methodology which I have yet to shake off. I installed KDE 4.3.5 and that ran wonderfully.

+ Compiled a kernel for my T60. I need to enable plug-and-play usb mouse and keyboard support as those don't work yet, as well as the radeon fb compiled into the kernel. Currently it's as a module which doesn't work. However, responsiveness since the upgrade has increased wonderfully; A pre-emptive high low-latency kernel also helps.

+ Installed KDE 4.4 series unstable on Gentoo. Had some issues, will mention them in my next post. Still loved every minute of using this faster, more streamlined system.
+ Preparing my resume for my life as a cubicle slave. Just kidding though. While I have no qualms about being a code monkey/data entry clerk/ tech documentor, it's not something my ambition will sit well with over the years. I am in fact hoping to eventually work with the government on education, but we'll see where that leads me.

+ Excited to work on my own projects and plans, make some money, pay off debts (first priority), and collect more computer toys. While I love having the fastest and greatest/latest electronic toys in my paws, I also have learned to appreciate the stability and endurance of legacy machines. Remember when towers were made of steel? IBM Keyboard Model M's are still known for their quality. Nowadays, we get cheap keyboard crap built into plastic laptops such as the Toshiba A9, with one of the most gimped keyboards I've ever used. I'm still not sure which is worse: a small backspace key, or a small shift key. Both irritate me like a papercut to the eyeball.

And so, now with a moderately set up Gentoo machine with KDE I feel I am ready to start programming full force, starting with basic plasmoids and simple GUI's in QT4. I still hope to work in Java and am very proud of a Binary Search Tree I built last year for my college. Why are people still using ArrayLists and the like?


Check out my next post for KDE-specific notes and a very frustrating error I think I've gained an understanding on.

Installing Amaork 1.4 in KDE 4 (Kubuntu 9.10)

As per my previous post, playlist functionality was disappointing in amarok 2.x, so here's a brief tutorial on how to get it working in 9.10 (could work in 9.04 and others I'm assuming too). I am using the command line only, so a user should be somewhat familiar with using it, and installing packages via apt with it, as well as compiling sources.

(Please note, this may break your amarok 2.x application:
amarok: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libamaroklib.so.1: undefined symbol: _ZTIN6TagLib3MP44FileE , and I can no longer import a collection into amarok 1.4. LastFM does not seem to work.)

Amarok 1.4 source: http://openports.se/audio/amarok

1. Install.
You will need -dev packages for compiling. Some of these include: kdelibs-dev, kde-devel, xorg-dev, qt3 and qt4 -dev packages, build-essentials, gcc 4.3 or 4.4 (I'm also assuming you have g++ 4.3 or 4.4), and others that may crop up. There are forums that contain the packages you need to install.

(http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1263514 mentions the following packages to install)

sudo apt-get install cdbs comerr-dev diffstat fdupes gawk gettext-kde kdelibs4-dev kdesdk-scripts libaa1-dev libacl1-dev libart-2.0-dev libasound2-dev libaspell-dev libattr1-dev libaudio-dev libaudiofile-dev libavahi-client-dev libavahi-common-dev libavahi-qt3-dev libbz2-dev libcaca-dev libcucul-dev libcups2-dev libcupsys2-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libdbus-qt-1-dev libdirectfb-dev libdirectfb-extra libesd0-dev libfftw3-dev libflac-dev libgcrypt11-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libgnutls-dev libgpg-error-dev libidn11-dev libifp-dev libilmbase-dev libjasper-dev libjpeg62-dev libkadm55 libkrb5-dev liblcms1-dev libldap2-dev liblua50-dev liblualib50-dev libmad0-dev libmng-dev libmpcdec-dev libmtp-dev libmusicbrainz4-dev libmysqlclient15-dev libncurses5-dev libnjb-dev libofa0-dev libogg-dev libopenexr-dev libpcre3-dev libpq-dev libqt3-compat-headers libqt3-headers libqt3-mt-dev libsasl2-dev libsdl1.2-dev libslang2-dev libsqlite3-dev libssl-dev libsysfs-dev libtag1-dev libtasn1-3-dev libtiff4-dev libtiffxx0c2 libtunepimp-dev libusb-dev libvisual-0.4-dev libvorbis-dev libxine-dev libxml2-dev libxmu-dev libxmu-headers libxslt1-dev lua50 mesa-common-dev qt3-dev-tools quilt ruby1.8-dev

I'd recommend viewing the blog as it has a lot of info regarding amarok 1.4.

Another quick mention: MTP. This will give you grief unless you have the right version. The issue is, you need to downgrade to 0.2.6.1 in order for this to work.
Source: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/hardy/+source/libmtp/0.2.6.1-2ubuntu1
This one should be an easy .configure/make/make install (as root)

You will also need xine, and might need to compile it from source as well (I did)

2. Ruby.
This one deserves its own point, because it may give you a lot of grief. Install Ruby1.8 or higher (I used Ruby1.9.1) as well as having the rubyfull and ruby (ruby-dev) packages. If amarok is still spitting out some ruby header errors, then do the following:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall ruby

That fixed it for me, but make sure you have ruby installed.

3. Configure.
I'm assuming you have the source extracted, packages installed, and are ready to configure. First, my recommendations:
./configure --without-arts --program-suffix=-1.4
(I didn't add this, but you probably should. '--enable-mysql')

Don't build with arts, as 9.10 and other new-ish versions tend to use xine and pulse.
I added the prefix so I can run both amarok 2.x and amarok 1.4.10.
Be sure to google any errors that occur, many of them are self-explainatory.

4. Make
Here's where you will need to know if you have gcc 4.3 or gcc 4.4.
According to an Arch package report, having the updated 4.4 version will require some cpp file editing.

Source: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=25712
It's not too difficult even for noobs, but definitely detracts from the experience. Make-ing is the last difficult part of installing amarok 1.4.x.

If compiling with gcc-4.4 and up (as I did), some .cpp files will create errors so you have to add '#include ' to those classes (at the top of the file, I put them before the other include statements) OR '#include ' if that fails. (you may get this error: "error: 'rename' is not a member of 'std'", and including stdio.h will not fix it).
If you are using gcc-4.3, this shouldn't be an issue, but I have not tried it.
I edited approximately 8 .cpp files total. (you can use kate, nano, or any text editor.)

Once make-ing is done, then type

sudo make install

This should go without a hitch.
To run amarok, you MUST call amarokapp-1.4 (program suffix = -1.4, remember)
not amarok-1.4.

One issue I encountered is that the default .ogg file with Matthias's 15 second clip did not play. I already had installed mp3 codec support by running amarok 2's install script so mp3s play great. If I have any issues along the way to using 1.4 now, I'll post them on this blog.

I hope this helps many users hoping to regain the functionality of a quality audio player.
I am not going to test a lot of extra functionality, mostly playlist, tagging, and last.fm support.

You can comment or e-mail me if you'd like a hand, but don't expect a solution.

Anyway, cheers all.

EDIT: Just as a point of interest, amarok2 saves playlists in a .xspf format, which is why the amarok1.4 'm3u' extension is not found. I heard that when a collection is being updated, any playlists should be automatically added. I added the playlists to the /home/$USER/.kde/share/apps/amarok/playlists folder after I updated my audio, which could explain it. But I'm sure you diehard 1.4 fans don't mind.

Removing update-notifier in KDE system tray on startup (Kubuntu 8.10)

[ Summary ]

This post describes removing the system tray icon for update-notifier [-kde] so that user will not be reminded every login that they should upgrade to the next distribution.
This is useful if you don't want the green update notification appearing when it isn't useful to upgrade your distribution (and when no updates actually exist).
** In my case, upgrading to Jaunty breaks my 3D acceleration I get with the ATI catalyst drivers.

[ Method ]

The update-notifier-kde executable (binary) is located in /usr/bin. To remove the system tray icon without the trouble of the 'apt-get remove dependancy hell' (in my case it removed network-manager as well), the simplest solution is to rename the executable.


sudo mv /usr/bin/update-notifier-kde /usr/bin/_update-notifier-kde


Now you can login without being tricked into thinking there are updates. To reinstate the system tray icon, just rename it back to the original file name and reboot/restart the display manager.


If you want to have your pc check for updates without the update-notifier, you may want to place the apt-get update && apt-get upgrade commands in a cron job scheduled for every week.

I hope this little tutorial has helped reduce the frustration that some experience with linux & video drivers. It's been bothering me for weeks. I would rather spend the next 3 months in school not right-clicking and closing the notifier every class.