Air Sharing was an early (September 2008) entry into this arena. Currently the basic version that supports WebDAV is priced at $2.99 and a $6.99 upgrade adds print (to a wireless network printer) and email capabilities. Unfortunately, there seems to be a bug in Ubuntu that is preventing the setup of wireless printing. Once installed, Air Sharing will play or display all file types synced to it and supported by the iPhone platform. I have successfully synced a 350MB movie file and played it.

WebDAV is a file transfer protocol natively supported in both the GNOME and KDE desktops. The iPhone/Touch app will report its assigned IP address on the local network. Typically this will look something like http://192.168.1.101:8080. A GNOME user will go to Places>Connect to Server… and enter the IP and Port into the indicated fields. Depending on the app either a window will open or a folder will appear on the desktop. Files can now be synced to the device via drag and drop. Similarly, KDE users can use Konquerer to open “webdav://192.168.1.101:8080. With documents available locally, printing locally is possible despite the Ubuntu bug.

GoodReader is priced at 99 cents. The basic version supports WebDAV and email and like Air Sharing it will display/play all or most file types. A 99 cent upgrade adds the ability to sync with Google Docs. Again, the printing problem is solved. GoodReader has a free Lite version that will let you try all features before purchase. It is limited to five files. Another upgrade will add FTP ability if you prefer that protocol.

In combination, all the above apps provide you with an office suite for your iPhone/Touch. They will also work on the soon to come iPad. Apple has promised an office suite for the iPad. I can only wonder about what abilities that app will add.

Back in the days when I was a student, I always wondered if classmates who took copious amounts of notes ever really learned anything. It’s much the same with learning Linux. You can copy and paste a lot of commands but that is just blindly making changes. It is not learning.

Apply a tweak in the same way that you would use the command line. You should never issue a command until you understand exactly what it is doing. Neither should a tweak be applied unless the user completely understands its effects. I have pointed out before that the GNOME configuration editor is purposely not enabled in the menus to avoid newbies from messing up their desktop. And if you do tweak, I would strongly advise keeping a record of it in case strange events start occuring at a later date. I practice what I preach, and believe me, good notes have saved my day numerous times.

Tweak only with caution!

Transcode is available in the standard repositories. Install it from the command line (sudo apt-get install transcode) or use Synaptic. Here is the syntax of the command:

transcode -i input.avi – P 1 -s <desired gain> -N 0×55 -o output.avi

Let’s clarify this a little. Input.avi and output.avi are the names of your input and output files. If your input name contains spaces you should rename it to something without spaces. Otherwise you will have to use the “escape” character “\” for the command to parse correctly. For example “My Rip.avi” would be entered as “My\ Rip.avi”. This gets messy, so just rename the file.

0×55 is telling transcode that you want the output sound to be mp3 encoded. You can have other encodings if you so desire. Read the manual by entering man transcode on a command line for further information.

<desired gain> requires a little knowledge about decibels. Decibels follow a logarithmic scale. To double your volume you would enter a value of 3. A value of 6 would quadruple the volume. A value of 2 would result in an increase of about 60% Stay with low values, A value to high could damage your speakers, and sound distortion is likely. Replace <desired gain> with a value of your choosing.

That’s it for now. Let’s hope Ubuntu finally gets sound right in Lucid.

This post at UbuntuGeek instructs on how to install w32codescs and the mplayer plugin. Read the comments as they make some minor corrections to the post. Your success rate will immediately improve but will not be perfect. You might find, as I did, that using a stand alone media player like Banshee, xmms or VLC might be a better way to play the station than with a browser. Let’s use WRTI (Philadelphia) as an example. I like their music selection and I simply ignore the weather and traffic reports that are irrelevalent to me in Florida.

At the WRTI website you will see a LISTEN LIVE button. Clicking on the button will not work. However, if you right click on the button you can Copy Link Location to your desktop. It is a file with a .m3u file extension(classical-247-mp3.m3u). Open the file with gedit or any text editor. This reveals the url of a generic mp3 stream (http://wrti-ice.streamguys.net:80/classical-247-mp3). Opening this location in Banshee or in xmms will play the station. For some reason on my machine Exaile did not like it.

Your success with using Firefox will also be improved by installing the Novell Moonlight (aka Silverlight) plugin. Go to this wesite for installation. Please, no complaints from mono haters. I’m just telling you how to do it, it’s your choice whether to do it.

Finally, you can try RealPlayerGOLD11. It’s open source and promises to play Winows streaming media. I have not tried this but I want you to be aware of it.

Good Luck and Happy Listening!

The GNOME Configuration Editor is installed but not enabled by default. It is a powerful tool and should be used with caution only when needed. This was one of those times. To enable it, go to Applications>Preferences>Main Menu. In the left panel select System Tools. In the right panel check the box next to Configuration Editor. It is now enabled and obviously will appear under System Tools.

Start the Configuration Editor. Navigate the editor by clicking on the arrows next to the subsections. Click on the arrow next to apps. Then nautilus followed by preferences. Scroll down the options until you find the one called “show_desktop”. The box next to the option must be checked. To be sure, double click on the option and it should show a value of “True”. If it does not, recheck the box until it does.

The desktop icons on my machine reappeared. If you follow this procedure and you are not the sole user of the machine, you might want to go back and disable the editor for security.

Doh! Finally I realized that my graphis card might be the limiting factor. So how can you determine your card’s possible resolutions? First install the hwinfo package from the repositories. Bring up a terminal and issue..

sudo apt-get install hwinfo

Or, if you prefer, use the Synaptic Package Manager.

Then from a terminal issue..

sudo hwinfo –framebuffer

Your graphics card will be identified and you’ll see a listing of all possible resolutions. In my case, there was no vertical resolution greater than 768. Oh well!

Begin by right clicking on some empty space in the panel. Among the options you will see “Properties“. Clicking on that will reveal several visibility options. Check the boxes next to “Show hide buttons” and also “Arrows on hide buttons“. Return to your desktop. Notice the arrows on each end of the panel. Click on one. Watch the panel slide off to the side.

Once again right click on empty space. This time notice the option “Add to Panel“. You are now offered a long list of Panel Applets. By default the Workspace Switcher and the Trash applets are activated. The remainder of the panel is used as the taskbar. Yes, these applets are certainly useful but they really don’t need to be fixed to a panel, or at least not to the bottom panel.

A dock also serves as a taskbar. Furthermore, you can add docklets to replace panel applets. My next comments will refer to Docky, the dock that I use, but other docks such as the Cairo Dock or the AWN dock may be equally configurable. Instructions for the installation of Docky appear here.

Docky installs with a few default docklets and you can configure it for others. When running as a taskbar, right clicking on an icon will give you the option to pin that app to the dock. Once you have Docky configured to your liking you can return to your GNOME desktop. Right clicking on a panel icon will give you the option to remove it. On my desktop I removed icons for Firefox, email, trash and clock, all of which were now on the dock.

The only remaining bottom panel applet was the Workplace Switcher. I removed this too but not before adding it to the top panel that had gained some free space. With the email, browser, terminal, clock and trash icons now pinned to the dock you probably only need two workspaces. Why two? Sometimes an app will crash freezing your display and leaving your mouse useless. You can go to another workspace with your keyboard.. CTRL+ALT+RIGHT (LEFT) Arrow. Then you can open a terminal and kill the crashed process. Right click on the workspaces applet and reduce their number to two.

This completes our panel customization. All that remains of the bottom panel is a little arrow in the corner. Mine has not been pressed for several days.

I will assume that you know how to boot into your BIOS setup and cause your machine to boot from live media. Your first step is to visit the Fedora site and download a livecd iso image. Fedora provides several ways of doing this but the preferred way is to use a bittorrent client. The bittorrent protocol has built-in error control that will ensure your downloaded image is good.

Next insert a USB stick into an available port. The Fedora image is 654 MB in size, so your stick must be at least as large. At this point Windows users can use the popular unetbootin utility to burn the iso image to the stick but GNU/Linux can do it easier from the command line.

Bring up a terminal and issue the “mount” command. This will give you a listing of mounted file systems. Look and see what device is assigned to the USB stick. On my machine it shows ‘/dev/sdc1′, on yours it may be different. The numeric ’1′ is a partition number and is not required in the next and final command.

Navigate to the directory where you downloaded the image. Issue the command “sudo dd if=Fedora-12-i686-Live of=/dev/sdX bs=4M“, substituting your device letter for X. This will copy the image to the stick and will delete any data previously on it.

You are done. Reboot and have fun!

In reading another blog I found a GNU/Linux user who tried to install Mint on a friend’s machine. That user encountered the 800X600 limit and for him, it was a show stopper. So… the bug is not limited to Koala. No, not at all.

Today I downloaded a livecd of Fedora 12 (Constantine) and ‘burned’ the iso to a bootable USB stick. Guess what? Constatine is constipated too. Yes, that’s a pun but it’s fitting. The resolution bug is not confined to Ubunu or its derivatives. Once again I could not achieve a screen resolution greater than 800X600. I am not a regular Fedora user but, as the work-around described in the earlier post relies on some Unix commands and not Ubuntu itself, I would expect that affected Fedora users could use the same fix.

What do Koala and Constantine have in common? Could it be the ‘new’ Intel video drivers that both distros have adopted? This is just a guess, but I do know that a huge number of users have boxes with Intel drivers and that enough users are encountering the bug so as to mention it in blogs!

Developers… let’s get this damned thing fixed!

I like to compose my posts offline. For the past few months I have been using the ScribeFire Firefox add-on. This has worked well but Firefox often crashes after a posting. It also seems a bit clumsy to use a web browser to update a blog. A client not involving a browser would be preferable. Bilbo would be nice but I use Ubuntu (GNOME) and not Kubuntu (KDE). Here are your install instructions for Ubuntu.

All of the packages and dependencies you need can be installed with the Synaptic Package Manager. Before proceeding check that you have enabled the universe and the multiverse repositories.

First install the package kdebase-workspace. This package installs all the core KDE desktop libraries. Your KDE applications should run with few problems and they’ll look pretty good too. Next install the four dependencies listed on Bilbo’s homepage. Specifically they are kdelibs5-dev, kdepimlibs5-dev, libboost-dev and libqt4-sql-sqlite. Synaptic will inform you of related dependencies as you go. Finally, install bilbo.

After the install go to Applications>Internet>Bilbo. On the Settings menu choose to Configure Bilbo Blogger. Finally choose Blog and enter your blog details. You should now be able to see, edit and compose posts. And yes, this is my first post using Bilbo.