So, like n million other gluttons for punishment, I queued up and pulled down the latest Ubuntu release for my netbook yesterday morning to see what all the fuss was about. Specifically, I was hoping to be impressed by the new Unity interface. Admittedly, I had installed Unity from the PPA a few weeks back, so I already knew roughly what to expect. However, it’s what I did not expect that made the biggest impression — unfortunately, a negative one. In a nutshell, all of the glitches and buggy behaviors I had experienced during the beta period were still there. And they annoyed me even more now — this was supposed to be the stable shipping version, right? As a software development professional myself, I must say that [...]

Share
 
HOW-TO: Get better audio quality when ripping CDs in Rhythmbox 0.12.8

So, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS was released last week and it shipped with Rhythmbox 0.12.8. I thought I’d provide an update to one of the more popular posts on this site: HOW-TO: Enable MP3 ripping in Sound Juicer 2.22.0, and blather on a bit about how you shouldn’t be ripping to MP3 in the first place ;) As noted in the comments in that previous post, Rhythmbox uses the same audio format and quality settings as Sound Juicer, so setting them in one place affects them in the other. But let’s focus on getting the results we want out of Rhythmbox, since that’s the Ubuntu default. When you insert an audio CD, Rhythmbox will recognize and display it as a CD device in the left side pane (F9 toggles [...]

Share
 

Recently, my company’s corporate wiki started to sputter. It isn’t that Atlassian Confluence itself is a dog, but when you load it with over 100K+ pages, hundreds of simultaneous users, many GBs of attachments in the DB, and try to run it on Windows 2003 Std and SQL Server 2000, things get rather dicey. (Add in the fact that the same hardware is used for a half dozen other production apps, including our enterprise JIRA install, and you have a recipe for failure.) So, for various reasons, we decided to move Confluence to its own dedicated environment: Ubuntu 8.04 with a MySQL backend. I don’t intend to make this a detailed HOWTO — I can’t imagine that any two migrations will ever be identical. Instead, I’ll point out [...]

Share
 

As with most tasks in Linux involving proprietary or non-free multimedia formats, ripping to MP3 with Sound Juicer is not obvious to setup. So, here’s a quick recap of the steps I took to get things working as I wanted. YMMV. First things first: I am running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on my PC, having done nothing in addition to a fresh installation and performing a system update immediately afterward. (But if you’re leary at all of your repository configuration, check that the main, universe, restricted, and multiverse sources are enabled by going to System > Administration > Software Sources.) Then, install the gstreamer0.10-lame package from a terminal: ricky@zetterberg:~$ sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-lame This will ultimately give you the gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse and liblame0 packages: exactly what you want. Now, start [...]

Share
Your Ad Here