cloudsoup

A little while ago I was playing happily with Ubuntu on an old laptop. With a new job, I’ve been obliged to spend more time on a Vista/.NET platform. Helen’s just bought a new Vista laptop so I’ll be using her old one to install Ubuntu again.

I’m not quite geeky enough to turn over all our five laptops and two old desktops to Linux but I really should be spending some more time on Ubuntu. My last foray into it was interesting and a brief entry about establishing a wireless network connection is still one of the most popular posts on this site.

So, after the latest work project goes live I’ll be spending some time reconditioning the oldest laptop and having another play. Last time I switched to KDE – wonder if anyone has any thoughts on the relative merits.

Ok, so I know I should update Ubuntu and I’ve read that Breezy isn’t the best for sound but I’ve finally – after an afternoon of messing about – managed to coax Audacity to use my Logitech USB microphone.

First of all, I downloaded the (beta) source for Audacity 1.3.2 and following the helpful advice on mics in Ubuntu here, compiled the source with:

./configure --with-portaudio=v19 --without-portmixer

– which didn’t do the job. Not quite. The problem is that Audacity’s recording preferences appear not to let you change the device from /dev/dsp to /dev/dsp1. According to reports, Audacity won’t find /dev/dsp1 unless there’s a /dev/dsp0. And this is the final fix that worked for me; change to root and type:

ln -s /dev/dsp /dev/dsp0

which creates /dev/dsp0 as a symbolic link (like a shortcut to you Windows folk) to /dev/dsp

then Audacity picks up the USB mic and everything works. Check out this forum entry too.

Might do another podcast now that’s sorted. Still got a problem with my Olympus Digital Voice Recorder on Ubuntu, though.

For the first time since taking up Ubuntu, I’ve been lost in the content of work and forgot completely the OS I was using. I was on autopilot, on Linux ,and thought for a moment that I was Helen’s laptop rather than my own. She uses XP at home.

I haven’t been able to use Ubuntu as much as I’d like – I’m not able to use it at work – and this is the first time that Ubuntu’s presence has been absent (© J.P.Satre). Until now, all those little differences and difficulties have been as if I were wearing someone else’s shoes.

It’s a start. Next: write some extensions for Amarok…

First, I installed Ubuntu. Then Mark Pilgrim installed it. Now Cory Doctorow copies us.

One day I’ll tire of being in the vanguard of technology and fashion.

Did I make a mistake in installing Ubuntu rather than Kubuntu? Kubuntu is Ubuntu with KDE rather than Gnome and I seem to be having problems installing some applications.

Well anyhow. Here’s what I want to install.

Audacity
Some podcast organiser / downloader
An RSS reader (can’t get on with Bloglines)
A good FTP client
A good development environment
Apache
MySQL
PHP

I may have some of these. I don’t know and I’m not sure how to find out either. I think I saw Python installing itself during the setup…

Finally managed to connect to the Web using Ubuntu and my home wireless network. The default Gnome network admin tool didn’t do the job so I had to manually edit the /etc/network/interfaces file to read:

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.2.1
wireless-essid cloudsoup
wireless-key **********
wireless-channel 11
wireless_mode Managed

where ********** is my WEP key, of course. The thing that really swung it was that wireless_mode Managed line.

Took a long time.

My main laptop has wireless built in. The old laptop on which I’ve installed Ubuntu needs a wireless PCMCIA card. I have two cards; one is recognised by the new operating system and the other is completely ignored.

So, for the moment, down to one card and now I’m trying to setup the network connection … for my home wireless network. I was expecting a few difficulties but this is getting silly. Still, it’s what I was expecting. So for the moment, haven’t been able to give up on XP.

Installing Ubuntu on an old laptop – or trying to. Just burning a working ISO from another laptop and trying to run through a completely automated install has taken all afternoon already and I’m back to square one, beginning again.

I know some people think Ubuntu’s a bit too easy – or, rather, hides some of the nuts and bolts that Linux users really should know about – but it’s had good press recently and the distro just happened to be on a magazine I bought, so why not.

I’d like to make a leap to OpenSource but it’s a big step. I’ve worked on Linux systems before now, even done some C/C++ programming on them, but I still don’t feel too at ease with them. There seems to be so much going on I don’t know about and don’t even know I should know about.

If this final install works I’ll have a go at giving up on XP at home for a month or so, see how I get along.