Ubuntu community

GWC Community Off-Topic/Other
#1

I am a recent convert to the world of Ubuntu (used linux at school and work for a long time, but never tried it at home). I see a lot of GWCers using Ubuntu in Show Us Your Desktop thread, and I thought we can all trade tips and share which app is better to use.

I’ll start.

Applications:

Browser:
Firefox/Chromium/IE 6.0 (just in case a bank site only displays in IE)

Instant Messaging:
Pidgin/aMSN

Simple Photo viewer:
Eye of Gnome

Photo Manager:
F-Spot

Graphic Editor:
Gimp

Music Player(Itune replacement):
Rhythmbox/Songbird

Media Player(video):
VLC

Simple Text Editing:
gedit

Every Text (binary/programming) Editing:
MadEdit

Dock:
Cairo Dock

Widget:
Cairo Dock

Torrent:
Deluge

Apps I can’t live without:
Gnome Do
Ubuntu Tweek
gcin (for inputting Hanji, however it isn’t perfect for my need either)

Except for the browser, items with two apps in it means I am not really satisfied with either.

I would be fine with Rhythmbox if it could load the GWC podcast rss, but it doesn’t load for me. So i went with Songbird, but Songbird have some of its own problems.

I have tried SMplayer and VLC for media players. While SMplayer has more options and I can have an interface more suited to my needs, it freezes often when I jump forward. VLC is a lot more stable, but the interface is a bit lacking.

Any suggestions?

#2

Use Fedora :smiley:

Serious response: Have you tried Banshee? It’s the best GUI media player I’ve used in Linux. It’s in the Ubuntu repositories, but Ubuntu never seems to update any apps (aside from the core apps and web browsers/mail clients, one of the reasons I stopped using Ubuntu) between releases, so you’re better off adding the Banshee PPA to your software sources and installing it from there.

If you’re comfortable with the command line, I suggest using Transmission for bittorrent. I actually prefer the daemon, it allows me to check torrent status easily from any other machine via the command line. Installing the daemon installs two binaries, transmission-daemon and transmission-remote. Running transmission-daemon from the command line will start up the daemon and fork it into the background. I also add two aliases to my .bash_aliases, like so:

# transmission-remote is too damned long
alias trans=transmission-remote
# monitor downloads (ct=check torrent)
alias ct='watch transmission-remote -l'

With these aliases, running “ct” in a terminal shows the current status of all torrents, and updates it every two seconds.

Transmission is very actively developed, so again Ubuntu is going to lag behind when it comes to the version available in the repos. I personally build it from source and install it within /opt so as not to confuse it with software installed from the repositories. This also requires that I add the following to my .bash_profile:

PATH=/opt/bin:$PATH
export PATH

Let me know if you have any questions.

#3

Maybe this thread should be renamed to “Linux community”. Not all Linux users run Ubuntu, after all. Maybe it also belongs in the “Geek Hobbies” section.

Just my $0.02, don’t spend it all in one place. :smiley:

#4

makes sense, and great info.

#5

Imma going to keep it “Ubuntu” branded for the time being. Anyone savvy enough to note the distinction will also note that it’s not much of a distinction, methinks.

Anyone who doesn’t note the distinction would do well to be steered to Ubuntu.

#6

I honestly prefer AWN as a dock. And I also recommend banshee.

#7

i tried AWN first, but it didn’t work well with my graphic card i think…

#8

I’m not really much of a “dock” person, myself. Or someone that cares for using a mouse all that often. I’m a big fan of using Gnome-DO as a launcher because it doesn’t require me to take my hands off the keyboard.

#9

Do any of you use encryption? I encrypt pretty much every file on my computer with important information stored in it. If anyone’s interested in learning more about using GPG, I’m happy to help.

#10

please do share! that sounds interest.

about the Gnome-do, after being showed the ropes on how to use Gnome-Do, I now also use Gnome-do a lot. There is one slight problem with gnome-do though. I can’t turn on my IME within Gnone-do, which means I can’t call for things not in Latin alphabets. If i want to call up a song or a document with non latin alphabet title, it’s a bust. It’s not that big of a problem, because all programs are named in latin alphabets anyway. So i can just call up the program then browse to the document.

Though sometimes when i am just sitting back browsing, the mouse is still my best friend.

#11

How do you call the IME? If there’s a shell command to do it, you can launch it in Gnome DO. When you bring up the Gnome DO window, hit the period key (or whatever key “enter text mode” is mapped to in DO’s preferences) and type the shell command, then hit tab. If the shell command is within your PATH, you’ll see an option in the right pane called “Run”.

Regarding GPG, I’d start by running the command below to install GPG and GPG-agent (a useful companion tool for GPG). I’ll delve into it in more depth tonight when I’m not at work :smiley:

sudo apt-get install gnupg gpg-agent

Also, what is your preferred mail client? Once we’ve got GPG set up, I can show you how to sign and encrpyt your email.

#12

Mercury, you may be able to help me – could you recommend any good podcast catching software? One of the reasons I’m trapped with iTunes is because of its convenience. Do you know of any good podcast catching programs?

#13

I’ll have to investigate Gnome-DO.

I may have that issue when I listen to my Jpop and anime music.

I prefer doing as much as possible w/o using the mouse. I type one handed (the IYKWIM joke has been done many times), and the mouse slows me down. My friends and family always lose track what I’m doing or are impress at how fast I can do things just using keyboard shortcuts.

That, and I love my Thinkpad keyboard.

#14

Are you interested in a podcast-only solution? If you don’t particularly care about the extra bloat, Banshee is an excellent podcast downloader, but it’s also a media/streaming radio player. If you’re looking for a dedicated podcasting app, gPodder is the best there is, IMO. Nice GUI, and it’s still being actively developed, unlike a few other projects. In fact, it looks like a new version was released over the weekend.

gPodder should be in the Ubuntu software repositories, but as I mentioned earlier in this thread, Ubuntu doesn’t really update many of their packages between releases. So if you love a piece of software and want to get the latest updates as soon as they’re available, many projects have what is called a PPA (Personal Package Archive). PPAs allow people to create their own Ubuntu packages and run their own Ubuntu-compatible software repository.

As a learning exercise, let’s add the gPodder team’s PPA.

Their Downloads page has a link to the PPA right near the top. Once you get to the PPA homepage, click the link that says “Technical details about this PPA”. That will expand a section below it with a drop-down menu where you can select the version of Ubuntu you’re running. Once you’ve selected your version, the box below the drop-down will contain a couple lines of text like so:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/thp/gpodder/ubuntu karmic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/thp/gpodder/ubuntu karmic main

You can forget about the “deb-src” line, this is for more advanced things like rebuilding packages, which you probably won’t be doing just yet.

Next step is to add this software source. I believe you’re using Kubuntu, but I’ll include instructions for both Ubuntu and Kubuntu in case others want to follow along.

UBUNTU

  1. Click System->Administration->Software Sources
  2. Click the Third-Party Software tab.
  3. Click the Add button.
  4. Paste in the “deb” line from above and click the Add Source button.

KUBUNTU

  1. Click the KMenu, then click System Settings.
  2. Click Add and Remove Software.
  3. Click Settings, then click the Edit Software Sources button.
  4. Click the Other Software tab.
  5. Click the Add button.
  6. Paste in the “deb” line from above and click the OK button.

For security purposes, software packages from an Ubuntu PPA (as well as Ubuntu’s own software sources) are signed using a GPG key. I won’t go too much in depth about signing (I’ll save that for my GPG post), but think of it as what it sounds like: a digital “signature”, a way for your system to verify that you’re actually getting the package from the proper source, and that the package hasn’t been tampered with. Ubuntu will try to verify the signature of each package that it installs, and if you haven’t imported the software source’s public key then you’ll get a pesky warning that the package’s provider can’t be verified. To get rid of this warning, we’ll need to import the PPA’s public key. There are ways of doing this through a GUI, but this is one instance where it’s much less of a hassle to use the terminal. If you look under where you found the repository address before, you’ll see something that says “Signing Key”. Below it, you’ll see a line that says the following:

1024R/89617F48 (What’s this?)

To import the key, open up a terminal window and run the following command (you’ll be prompted for your password):

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 89617F48

Easy, wasn’t it? Any time you want to add a PPA, you can easily import their key this way (just replace that last part with the numbers and letters after the slash), and you don’t even have to wait to add the software source before you do it.

You’ll now be able to install the latest version of gPodder directly from the developers themselves, rather than waiting for Ubuntu to get around to it. It’ll appear right within the Add/Remove Software tool.

#15

Sorry hansioux, I’ll have to wait a little to write up some info on GPG. I spent too much time having fun writing up the PPA walkthrough!

#16

great info on the PPA. I am always looking for PPAs for the software i like. I still don’t get why Songbird doesn’t have their own. It’s an interesting program, even if it hasn’t worked out all its kinks.

i am going to try banshee next, when i get back to my linux…

#17

Cool. Banshe has a PPA too, just FYI.

https://edge.launchpad.net/~banshee-team/+archive/ppa

#18

Also GetDeb is a site that maintains a PPA for some of the greater applications

http://www.getdeb.net/

Go here and click Applications, you will see the packaged applications that can be filtered by genre.

To install and maintain these apps, first you have to add the following PPA to the source.list

deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu karmic-getdeb apps

and then add the key by using this command:

wget -q -O- http://archive.getdeb.net/getdeb-archive.key | sudo apt-key add -

then you can install the more recent versions of the softwares or update those already installed.

#19

Ahh nice, back when I was running Ubuntu getdeb didn’t have a repository.

#20

I think I have now officially tried every frakking music player available in the linux GUI world…

these are my thoughts:

Amarok:

For some reason this was the most suggested player when I first tried to find a player. But at the time that I tried it, this KDE native program has some software conflict with Gnome interface. And it simply won’t produce any sound. And I have to say I wasn’t too impressed with the aesthetics of the native interface either.

Pros: I didn’t get to see the pros. The software conflict with Gnome is possibly resolved by now. But i didn’t bother to try…

Cons: Didn’t work when I tried it.

Audacious:

A Very Winamp looking player. Which lacks the winamp media library function. It’s probably great for 1998, but even a big itune hater like myself have gotten used to having the search-able library. Oh, yeah, and it crashed on me.

Pros: nice clean winamp like interface.

Cons: no media library

Rhythmbox:

Rhythmbox is the first player that i tried on extensively. It has a nice bix album cover box on the lower left. Decent plugins (besides the lyrics, i can’t get it to work). Good support of ipods and my podio MTP devices. My only problem with it was for a while I couldn’t get it to download GWC. Which for some miraculous reason it was just fixed one day. Had it not been for this tiny problem, I never would have tried the next two.

Pros: Clean interface, Many many pre-installed plugins, decent tools. A well maintained plugin info page on project website.

Cons: The interface has its awkward parts. For example, you can not rearrange the order for the visible category column. After clearing the search area, it does not automatically go back to show all items (you have to use the mouse or use a hot key). But really have I not used Songbird or Banshee, I would not have noticed these small flaws. Also, panes not customizable.

Songbird:

This mozilla project is more like a music player slapped on to the firefox browser core. Before I tried it, this idea might sound retarded to me. But afterwards, it was pretty clever. Come to think of it, itunes also has a browser core, it’s just that they only let you browse itune store for the most part. It is the only player that isn’t already in the ubuntu repo. But the getDeb site solves that problem, and the crew at songbird promises that they will get the player to the official repo soon.

Songbird is able to import and export to/from the itune library. The interface is also a lot more flexible(customizable). There’s a main player pane on the left. And the panes at lower left, bottom and right are all customizable. You can hide them, show them, change their size and functions. Which is a great thing when you have plenty useful extensions.

The extension are managed just like firefox. As far as extensions go, it is certainly the best managed out of all players. In fact many of the firefox can be ported straight to Songbird. The only extension that i use all the time in firefox and hasn’t been ported to songbird is the mouse gestures. It would be pretty cool to be able to play songs with gestures.

The extensions written specifically for songbird works great. There’s a media flow for that itune feel. And the lyrics plugin is amazing and it works (unlike lyrics plugins on other players). Especially when there is a vertical pane, you don’t have to move the lyrics windows around. It also have an extension called the exorcist, which can find ghost/duplicated items in the library.

But because it’s from Mozilla, it has things i expect from Firefox that it didn’t deliver. For Firefox, I can set my linux machine to share the profile with my Windows Firefox. So I don’t have to maintain two Firefox browsers.

Though Songibrd also has a profile manager, when I set it to the Windows profile, it does nothing. Which means I have to maintain two copies of library and extensions. Really not a big problem, because I pretty much have to do the same if I use other players. But it would be nice if worked just like Firefox.

Also, besides finding RSS for the podcasts and copy and paste to the “new subscription” function like most other players. Songbird has an amazing ability to find the podcast files automatically when you are viewing the page. You can also subscribe with the website instead of the RSS feeds. Useful feature for some cases.

I can see a lot of good to come from Songbird. Maybe one day there will be a Songbird Tab extension in Firefox. Or maybe Songbird will be so refined, that I won’t even bother to use Firefox for browsing. But for now there are flaws. Such as the player will try to download every file right away when you subscribe to a podcast. You can stop them of course. But there are still kinks that needs to be worked out.

Pros: Incredible flexibility and customization. Firefox like extension management. Easy podcast subscription. Great device support.

Cons: Attempts to download every podcast file when first subscribe. Can’t use the same profile in Windows.

Banshee:

Upon suggestion, I tried out Banshee. It has a similar feel to Rhythmbox, but the UI is better designed, making it way easier to use. The only UI complain I have comparing to Rhythmbox is that Album cover is a bit small. Of course it is huge under the now playing frame, but then I can’t do others things with the player.

Like Rhythmbox, the interface is mostly not customizable. But it does have a useful context pane which is fixed at the bottom that can be utilized with plugins.

The real down side of Banshee for me is the extensions are not very well documented or organized. Also, I see a bit of the same linux coder attitude towards feature requests.

Take lyrics plugin for example, it only does popup window and the lyrics comes in a blob of text. I see people asking for the context pane to display the lyrics, and got the response that the context pane is horizontal and not suitable to display lyrics. That is a shame, the better way would be for user to make that choice, because users have the choice to expand the context pane.

An even better way would be giving users the choice move the context pane to the right side, which would suits lyrics display. Instead of users having to use hot key to call up the lyrics window for every song, and deal with an extra window.

In fact, I haven’t found any extension that in-cooperates the banshee context pane besides the Last FM extension.

Pros: Clean and well designed UI, easier to use than Rhythmbox. Didn’t ran in to the difficulties of subscribing to GWC. Can import itune library. Has a rescan library function which is lacking on Rhytmbox.

Cons: You have to look hard to find extensions. Works well with ipods bit doesn’t work with iphones/ipod touch as far as i know. Not very customizable interface.

Conclusion:

I haven’t found one that I am completely satisfied with. Out of the three main ones, I will be using Banshee for now. But if Songbird keeps getting better, I might start using Songbird, especially if i can share the library and extensions with the Windows Songbird.