Musings on computers, music, travel and other such things.
I’ve just installed the latest version of Foresight on my spare laptop, so I thought I’d investigate the package manager, conary, which is something I’ve never used before, but which looks like it could be as useful as apt and urpmi.
It’s really quite simple. To update to the latest version of all installed packages, type:
$ sudo conary updateall
And to install a specific package, type:
$ sudo conary update packagename
I’ll write more when I’ve explored further.
I’ve finally got round to installing the KDE version of Mandriva 2009.1 in a VM on my laptop. I’d been holding off, because I don’t really use KDE, and I wasn’t too impressed with how the other major distributions had implemented KDE4 (which is basically a total revision of every aspect). Happily, I can easily say that this is the most usable implementation of KDE4 I’ve ever come across, and it does a very good job of not getting in my way whilst still enabling me to be productive.
The desktop has seen some major customisations, as is usual with Mandriva (see http://www2.mandriva.com/ for a screen shot), and it actually looks and feels like a more polished version of KDE 3.5 (the last version of KDE I used for more than a couple of hours). There are sensible defaults, and I think the only application I would want to add is Thunderbird, because I still really don’t like Kmail.
But could I use it full time? Almost certainly yes, and if I wasn’t very tied to Gnome and the Gnome libraries and applications then I’d consider making the switch. As it is, I’ll happily keep it as a VM, which gives me the option to have a play with KDE4 every now and again without having to make any major life changes.
Another “so I don’t forget it” post.
Converting Quicktime (.mov) files to Ogg Theora (.ogv) is now rather simple (although takes a while).
Firstly, install ffmpeg2theora (it should be available for most distros).
Then just launch it from the command line. The syntax is:
ffmpeg2theora name_of_file.mov
Or to do a whole directory:
ffmpeg2theora *.mov
Easy.
I don’t write about emusic enough. I signed up a few months ago on a 50 songs a month package, and have downloaded countless really good songs that I would never have bought otherwise. This month I’ve concentrated on new releases, and have downloaded the new albums from Super Furry Animals, The Thermals, and Camera Obscura (as well as a smattering of individual songs). I’m aware that you need to have a fairly eclectic taste to get the best out of emusic, but I would really recommend it if you like Indie music and are organised enough to remember to download all your monthly allowance.
I’ve been doing a bit of work on Mandriva recently, and I always forget that there are two places you need to change the host name before it “takes”.
in /etc/sysconfig/network add the following line:
HOSTNAME=hostname
Where hostname is whatever you want the computer to be called.
Then in /etc/hosts just add the hostname after localhost on the first (and probably only) line in the file. It should look something like:
127.0.0.1 hostname localhost
Where again hostname is the name of the computer.
Do this, reboot, and all should be well.
This should work on any recent version of Mandriva, but specifically on 2009 (current) and 2009.1 (cooker).
So far so good, but as always, your mileage may vary. It’s the first one I’ve built on a VM (my physical build machine died), but it installed fine on my EeePC, so hopefully all will be well.
This is how it works…..
I post anything under 140 characters to identi.ca using the Ubiquity extension for Firefox. This then posts them to Twitter and Facebook, and adds them to the right hand menu of this blog using the Twitter Tools plugin. Then, once a day, they all get spliced together by Loudtwitter and posted to my Live Journal.
I also add posts to my LJ using the Deepest Sender plugin for Firefox. I only post there if I need to lock things down to custom groups of people (or if what I write cannot be in the public domain for whatever reason).
Everything else gets posted here. Also via Deepest Sender.
Additionally, everything I listen to all all my computers and my iPod is sent to Last.fm, which then adds the last 10 songs to the right hand menu of this blog.
I think that is pretty much everything.
I reviewed the first Abscondo album a while ago, and actually still listen to it a fair bit. So I was actually quite nervous about downloading the second one in case it didn’t live up to my expectations. Thankfully Stages builds on Midnight Snow, whilst at the same time not deviating too much from the style that made the first album so enthralling. It’s mainly all about the lyrics, which make me think a lot, and which are both political and personal without making me feel uncomfortable. There are also a couple of melodies that stick in my head like glue, which makes me think I’ll be dipping in to this album over and over again.
It’s availabe for free from Jamendo, and from the artist’s website, and available to buy from iTunes.
According to last.fm, the list goes like so:
I think that’s probably fairly accurate.
As of 4pm tomorrow I’m on holiday for 10 days. It’s the first break of any length I’ve had for a few weeks, and I am very much looking forward to it. Last time I was off I ended up spending most of the week working on various projects, but I do intend to make at least a half hearted effort to step away from my laptop for a few hours each day and actually enjoy the sunshine.
I will also review some music, seeing as I’ve actually been asked to by some of the people who make it (which still scares me).
Of course, it would be a good time to upgrade all the computers to Ubuntu 9.04, but I think I may wait a couple of weeks for that.