WMLUG Lucid Questions Answered

Posted on April 30, 2010 by brousch

I gave a demo and talk about the newly-released Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx LTS at the West Michigan Linux Users Group last night. There were a few questions for which I had inadequate or no answer, so I will try to do cover them in this post.

A couple of people asked about the MP3 codec situation in the UbuntuOne Music Store. The following information comes from a section of the UbuntuOne FAQ:

Canonical has put effort into making the customer experience as effortless as possible. When you visit the Ubuntu One Music Store, it will detect if you have MP3 support installed. If you don’t, the store will install the Fluendo MP3 plugin for GStreamer. The MP3 plugin is distributed worldwide at no charge under a license from Fluendo. An Internet connection is required.

There were a few questions about quality, DRM, watermarks, and format of the music available. The following information comes from another section of the UbuntuOne FAQ:

Songs purchased through the Ubuntu One Music Store are available in high quality 256 kbps (sometimes higher) MP3 audio encoding and without digital rights management (DRM). MP3 purchases can be:

  • burned to a CD any number of times
  • played through any software on any type of computer that you own that supports MP3
  • synced to any MP3-enabled device such as a portable music player

There will be no embedded ‘watermarks’ of any kind on the MP3s in the Ubuntu One Music Store.

Some have asked for songs in other formats such as Ogg Vorbis or FLAC. Acquiring popular songs in this format was not possible at this time, but Canonical will continue to look for future opportunities to improve the quality of the songs found in the Ubuntu One Music Store.

A question was asked about whether the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud has an Elastic Block Storage component. I got the answer from this whitepaper which has a lot of information about UEC.

Yes, UEC does have an EBS component. UEC covers Amazon’s EC2, EBS, and S3 API and components using the Eucalyptus platform.

I think that covers everything I couldn’t answer last night. Let me know if you have any other questions.

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Annoying Downloads

Posted on February 24, 2010 by brousch

Dear Autodesk,
You’re doing downloads wrong.

  1. The default installer for Autodesk Design Review – a “lightweight” program for viewing AutoCAD drawings – is a stub program that downloads a full version. Nobody likes these stub installers; they’re worthless. Really, what possible advantage do these stubs have over a full downloader? It’s very inconvenient for any offline or multi-system installations, and if you’re installing online to a single system, you download the same amount of program anyways.
  2. You make me use a separate Java app downloader to get an offline version of the Design Review installer instead of just using my browser’s default downloading capabilities. Your downloader is tuned to use as much bandwidth as possible with no option for decreasing the number of connections or download rate. The 15 other people using my T1 really don’t appreciate this.
  3. Come on, 766MB for a drawing viewer and markup tool?! This thing is bloated way out of proportion to its features.
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Choice Georgie

Posted on January 14, 2010 by brousch

Anyone who’s talked to him knows that 26 month old George is quite a character. He’s really expressing himself lately, and we can understand a lot more of what he says. Here are a few recent amazing and funny interactions with George.

— Super Why —
We watched an episode of a new (to us) kids show on PBS. George sung along with part of the theme song and at one point in the show they ask the viewers to “Say your name”. George yelled out “CarterChloe” – the names of two older kids at his daycare. I guess we know where he’s been watching Super Why.

— That’s Cool —
I have as much fun with George’s electric Thomas the Train sets as he does. I recently built a tunnel tower out of Megablocks (more photos here) that allowed tracks to cross at a right angle. When George saw how it worked he very clearly said, “That’s cool Dad.” Oh, yeah, I’m cool.

— R —
George grabbed one of the foam alphabet letters (all upper case) in the bathtub and was holding it upside-down. I asked him what letter it is and he said, “R”. I said, “No” and told to him to turn it around. He turned it over and smiled and said, “J”, which was correct. Then he turned it back around and said, “R”. That’s when I realized the upside-down J looked like a lower case “r”. I had no idea he knew the lowercase letters!

— Messy —
George and his Mama were coloring together at his table. George was scribbling all over in the way a two year old does, and Lori was carefully coloring Percy the Train, but had a few stray marks from George moving the book. Lori finished and asked his what he thought of her train. George said, “That’s messy!”

— Shapes —
George was playing with a plastic shape sorter with his daycare provider. She asked him what shape each one was as it was inserted, but he kept saying seemingly random numbers. Afterwards she realized that he was reading numbers that were written inside of the shapes!

— Bork Bork —
I downloaded a few of the new high def Muppets Studios music videos so we can play them on the big TV. These are two of George’s favorites, along with what he calls them. It’s hilarious to hear him singing along with Beaker and Animal and to watch him head-banging to Queen.

Bork Bork

Mama

Posted in george, personal | 2 Comments

Pump Up the RAM

Posted on January 14, 2010 by brousch

The guys in #ubuntu-us-mi were talking about “pumping up the ram” in a System76 laptop, and as always happens whenever someone mentions pumping up anything, Tecknotronic‘s “Pump Up the Jam” started looping through my head. Due to being fueled by 1/3 of my Biggby’s Super Red Eye, I came up with this remix:

Pump up the RAM.
Pump it up
while your procs are runnin’
and the ram is pumpin’
Look at here the disk is swappin’
Pump it up a little more
get the info going on the quad core
Seek time is where the slowness’ at
and you’ll find out if you skip that

Creative Commons License
Pump up the RAM is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Posted in fluff, grlug, linux, planet-ubuntu-users, tech, wmlug | 2 Comments

Linux File Type to Opening Program Mappings

Posted on January 5, 2010 by brousch

I learned a few useful things while helping a chap troubleshoot a problem in #ubuntu-us-mi today. It seems that VLC had taken over as the default program for opening folders and directories on his Ubuntu computer, and he couldn’t figure out how to fix it. He found that if he uninstalled VLC, then the folders opened correctly again, but this was not really a solution as he needed VLC.

After some Googling, I found out where the default programs for each file type are specified, and also where the user-specific programs are set:

System Defaults: /usr/share/applications
User Specific: ~/.local/share/applications

Most GUI programs that can open a file have a .desktop entry in those folders. The actual file type to program mappings are in the following text files:

System Default: /usr/share/applications/defaults.list
User-Specific Overrides: ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list

My mimeapps.list looks like this (note that I have both Ubuntu and Kubuntu installed):
[Added Associations]
application/x-shellscript=gedit.desktop;
application/x-extension-grab=gedit.desktop;
image/x-pcx=firefox.desktop;
application/x-php=gedit.desktop;
application/x-aspx=gedit.desktop;
application/x-executable=userapp-mono-63I5PU.desktop;
application/x-config=gedit.desktop;
text/x-python=gedit.desktop;userapp-mono-63I5PU.desktop;wine.desktop;openoffice.org-writer.desktop;kde4-kate.desktop;gvim.desktop;

In his mimeapps.list, the user had a line like:

inode/directory=vlc.desktop;nautilus-folder-handler.desktop;

After deleting that entry in his mimeapps.list normal behavior was restored.

One other observation is that the line was unchanged when VLC was uninstalled. So Gnome simply skipped over the vlc.desktop when it couldn’t find the program and used the next one in line to open folders.

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