Xaprb » ubuntu

Switching from Ubuntu to Fedora, and Thunderbird to Claws Mail

Xaprb — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 06:02:49 +0000

This weekend I backed up all my data, repartitioned my hard drive, and re-installed. I needed to do this because the only thing I had on the laptop was Ubuntu, and sadly, the reality is sometimes my clients use things that require me to use Windows (and sometimes a virtual machine won’t solve that). So now I’m dual-booting Windows. I think the last time I did that was sometime before 2001, so I’ve regressed 9 years.

I took this opportunity to switch from Ubuntu to Fedora. Why? They both released new versions almost at the same time, and I grabbed the live CDs and noticed that Fedora just worked better — better support for dual monitors, for example. And some things about Ubuntu have always irked me, such as “sorry, can’t play WAV file, that’s a proprietary codec, you must install some big package of proprietary codecs.” WHAT? When did a codec become necessary to play a PCM file? Codec stands for “code/decode” and that doesn’t make sense for PCM. Anyway, these are small things, but sometimes they add up. I did not do a default install of Fedora. I don’t trust ext4, and ext3 works fine for me, so I stayed with that. I also disabled SELinux right away — no thanks, *shudder*.

The much bigger switch was ditching Thunderbird in favor of Claws. I last used Claws back in… 2003, maybe? It was called Sylpheed Claws then, and was GTK1 or so. Now it’s much nicer looking. Anyway, Fedora installed Thunderbird 3, and after giving that a small test drive I decided that my long-standing love/hate relationship with Thunderbird was due for a change. I just need a mail client that can open a yes/no dialog in less than 1.5 seconds — is that too much to ask? I’m much happier with Claws. I use email a lot, probably something like 350 emails per day, and I’ve already found Claws more capable than Thunderbird in every way but one: I can’t quite figure out how to get the functionality I got from Thunderbird’s quicktext extension. Everything else is amazing — I don’t need extensions, everything’s built in by default. I use filters extensively, and the filtering and searching in Claws is much nicer than in Thunderbird. There are a handful of other things.

One notable thing is an archiving feature. I like to move emails to a folder after I’m done with them. I had sort of a hack in Thunderbird. The key combination Ctrl+Shift+M moves the selected message(s) to the same folder used for the last move operation. This worked acceptably well, until I moved a message elsewhere and forgot that my “archive” key combo no longer sent my messages to the archive. In Claws, I set up a custom action and attached it to the Y key, and voila I have real archiving functionality (without pressing 3 keys, too). I also remapped keys so it’s more vim-like. Gmail is the client I use for my personal accounts, so now I have consistent keystroke commands between both emails and my favorite text editor.

Another notable thing is that when I send an email, the sending process happens in the background. This is so much nicer. In Thunderbird, I’d Ctrl-Enter and then have to alt-tab my way past the sending dialog and the compose window, back to the main window to keep working; in Claws, I press Ctrl+Enter to send, and I’m immediately back at the main window. This might seem silly, but it’s actually a big deal. It helps me process email quite a bit faster.

Further Reading:

How to set up host interface networking for VirtualBox on Ubuntu

Xaprb — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 03:26:09 +0000

VirtualBox is really nice, but if you’re like me, maybe you found the networking confusing. There are three ways to do it, as explained by the manual, and the best way is with host interfaces, which don’t have limitations like the inability to ping and so on. I found what I think is a pretty good way to set up host interface networking.

The manual explains a bunch of ways to set up host interface networking, generally involving complex modifications to your system’s network configuration to add bridging and so on. This is necessary (contrary to what you might think, creating a virtual network interface won’t work). But the way they explain to set it up is a lot more complex than it needs to be, and actually left my machine’s networking nonfunctional.

I created a little shell script and put it into my $PATH. All I have to do is run this before I start my virtual machine, and it sets up bridging and so forth:

#!/bin/sh

set -e
set -u
set -x

sudo tunctl -t tap0 -u `whoami`
sudo chmod 666 /dev/net/tun
sudo /usr/sbin/brctl addbr br0
sudo /sbin/ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0 promisc
sudo /usr/sbin/brctl addif br0 eth0
sudo /sbin/dhclient br0
sudo /usr/sbin/brctl addif br0 tap0
sudo ifconfig tap0 192.168.1.51 up
sudo bash -c 'echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/tap0/proxy_arp'
IP=`ifconfig | grep 192 | head -n 1 | awk '{print $2}' | cut -d: -f2`
sudo route add -host $IP dev tap0
sudo arp -Ds $IP eth0 pub

The script assumes that your machine’s primary network device is named eth0. For this to work, you need a couple of packages installed:

sudo apt-get install uml-utilities bridge-utils

Specify ‘tap0′ as the network device in the VirtualBox machine’s settings.

One of the biggest reasons I like this more than the methods in the manual is that it doesn’t mess with my networking config in a permanent way. There are no surprises after a reboot, for example.

Further Reading:

Ubuntu 8.10 rocks my Inspiron 1501

Xaprb — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 13:33:47 +0000

I’m really really happy about Ubuntu 8.10 because it lets me stop kicking myself so much for buying a Dell Inspiron 1501. This little laptop was the el-cheapo option for me, found via dealnews.com. I was going to buy the virtually identical one that came with Ubuntu installed, but then Dell offered a deal on the 1501, which had Windows Vista, and I caved in to the allure of saving about $200.

Of course I promptly discovered that the two most important differences between the models involved hardware for which no good Free Software drivers existed: the video card and the wireless card. The Inspiron 1501 has a “ATI Technologies Inc RS482 [Radeon Xpress 200M]” and a “Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN (rev 01)”.

I use dual monitors; it’s pretty much a necessity for me. And I just couldn’t get the radeon driver to work right with them. I spent a lot of time trying. I ended up going to the ATI driver, which is proprietary; it had its own issues with mouse pointer corruption and the lot, which eventually were fixed, but it still disabled suspend/resume, and plus it’s non-Free. My colleagues know this irked me — they just heard me griping about it a few days ago.

But now, praise be, the radeon driver works with my dual monitors! And the drag-and-drop point-and-click configuration interface works, too! I’ve got a 1680×1024 external monitor, positioned above my 1024×800 laptop display, and I have never so much as peeked at /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Thanks to all the people who worked so hard on this! (It didn’t work flawlessly until I rebooted, but who’s complaining.) Suspend/resume now work great!

I haven’t gotten the wireless card working yet; the bw43-cutter package seems to have disappeared. But I’m actually hoping that I won’t need proprietary drivers for this, too.

Further Reading:

How to swap Caps-lock and Esc keys in Ubuntu

Xaprb — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 22:00:55 +0000

Here’s a productivity tip that has saved me countless work while typing. Swap your Caps-lock and Escape keys. If you’re like most people, you use Caps-lock virtually never, and Escape quite a lot. Especially if you’re a programmer who happens to use the best text editor, Vim. Read on to learn how to do this.

An easy way to do it on Ubuntu with Gnome: step one, create a .xmodmaprc file. You can run the following command to create the file and put the correct contents into it:

echo > ~/.xmodmaprc '! Swap caps lock and escape
remove Lock = Caps_Lock
keysym Escape = Caps_Lock
keysym Caps_Lock = Escape
add Lock = Caps_Lock'

Step two is to make this run every time you log in. Open up System-Preferences-Settings. Click the Add button to add a new entry to the additional startup programs list. In the “name” box, enter “xmodmap” or something else descriptive. In the Command box, enter “/usr/bin/xmodmap /home/[user]/.xmodmaprc”, where [user] is your username.

And now get used to being able to hit Escape without reaching for it. If you like this, you might also be interested in using the Dvorak keyboard — I can type on either Dvorak or QWERTY, but Dvorak has saved me from something approaching total paralysis of the hands, so it’s worth checking into also.

As your reward for reading this far,

Q: what’s the integral of 1/cabin?

A1: Natural Log Cabin

A2: Houseboat (Natural Log Cabin + C)

Further Reading:

How to digitize records with Ubuntu, a USB Turntable and Audacity

Xaprb — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 22:18:21 +0000

I’ve been digitizing my LP collection recently and thought I’d share a quick howto, since I haven’t seen a good complete tutorial on the whole process online. Hopefully this will show up on Google and people can find it.

It takes time

Before I begin, I want to make a few comments about the process overall. I’ve borrowed the turntable I’m using (actually borrowed two, from different people) and read a lot on the Internet about this. It strikes me that most people posting on the forums underestimate how much time it takes to convert LPs to digital form. Sometimes there is no way to just replace the LP with a CD, but I’ve decided to do so in many cases. I suppose another alternative is to get a system that’s more automated, such as the one I’ve linked at the right. Maybe that helps take some of the tedious time-consuming steps out of it. But I haven’t tried it. I think it’s worth it for some of my LPs that are not available on CD, or that cost upwards of $50 on CD.

I also read on the internet about someone who played their LPs at 45RPM and then pitch-shifted them back to normal speed. This person reported there was no audible difference between doing this and recording the music at 33.3RPM. I listened to the files they’d posted and I have to say I thought the difference was as plain as day. Perhaps they were not listening over decent-quality speakers or headphones. But the 45RPM file sounded utterly horrible to me. I don’t think this is a good technique at all.

In short, I doubt it can be sped up. Just count on it taking time.

Set up the equipment

Aside from your computer, you really need nothing else than a USB turntable. The most popular ones seem to be those made by Ion, aka Numark. I’ve pasted an Amazon product link to the right for one of the ones I am currently using. The other I’m using is a slightly different model from the same company.

There are other ways — you don’t have to use a USB turntable. You can use a higher-quality turntable and put the input into your sound card, and so on and so on. But this is how I’m doing it.

When I plugged the turntable into my USB port, I saw the following in dmesg:

[ 2813.605274] usb 4-1: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 2
[ 2813.694013] usb 4-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 2813.697148] input: Burr-Brown from TI USB Audio CODEC  as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:13.3/usb4/4-1/4-1:1.3/input/input13
[ 2813.721924] input,hidraw3: USB HID v1.00 Device [Burr-Brown from TI USB Audio CODEC ] on usb-0000:00:13.3-1
[ 2813.901813] usbcore: registered new interface driver snd-usb-audio

And that was it. No further ado, no drivers required. You may recognize the name Burr-Brown. They make a lot of analog-to-digital (and vice versa) converters.

The next step is to get some recording software. I used Audacity for recording the LPs.

sudo apt-get install audacity

This installed libflac++6 also. I configured Audacity by selecting Edit-Preferences, and in “Recording” selected the “ALSA: USB Audio CODEC: USB Audio (hw:1,0)” input. On my computer I had trouble enabling playthrough (a feature that lets you listen to what you’re recording). So I left that unchecked.

Record the LP

Actually recording the LP is straightforward. Just start Audacity recording, then start the turntable and lower the needle. I’m not going to tell you about cleaning the LP and all that… you probably know it already.

Once you have recorded some music, you probably want to chop it up into individual songs and export them as MP3, OGG, or FLAC. (I’m loving FLAC. My HP Media Vault streams FLAC to me via iTunes or Rhythmbox just fine.) I experimented with a variety of ways to do that. I settled on the following method.

Record the first side, then press Stop and flip the LP over. Press Record again and record the other side. I do this because when I export the songs, Audacity embeds the song number in the song’s meta-data, and if I record one side at a time I get two sets of songs which begin at track number 1, which is a hassle. Each side will be recorded in a separate track in Audacity.
Trim the silence (and the noise of the needle dropping, etc) from the start and end of each side’s music. You can just highlight it with your mouse and press Delete.
Find the start of each song. (Hint: you can use the Home and End keys to move the cursor all the way to the start and end of the whole recording.) Put the cursor where you want in the track by clicking into the track. You can use the arrow keys to move it to the left and right for fine adjustments, and zooming in and out is helpful too of course.
Label the start of each song by pressing Ctrl-B and typing the song’s name.

When you’re done, the result should look like the image on the right. Now you’re ready to export the files.

Use File-Export Multiple to do this. Choose the type of files you want to create and adjust the settings if you wish. To make sure each labeled song becomes its own file, select the option to split the file based on labels, and name the files using the label/track name.

During the export process you’ll also get the chance to edit the recording’s meta-data, such as the artist and album name. This is fine, but the dialog box to do this is touchy — if you press Enter it will assume you’re done and just start exporting files even if you’re not ready. If you cancel the export and restart, it won’t show the meta-data dialog box again, but you can get to it via File – Open Metadata Editor. I got into the habit of editing the meta-data that way to begin with so I didn’t have to fuss with the dialog later.

Audacity names the files after the tracks, but it doesn’t have any flexibility about file naming. So you can’t tell it to place the song number at the beginning of the filenames, for example; and thus the files won’t sort in the right order when you view them in your file browser. I just use easyTAG to quickly fix the track names after the export is done. I also use it to insert the year meta-data, since Audacity doesn’t seem to do this in a way other programs understand. There are a few settings you might want to tweak with easyTAG too; I disabled the auto-scan at startup and a few others to make it behave the way I wanted.

I found easyTAG a little confusing so I have uploaded a screenshot of it with labeled steps. Once I’ve selected the directory containing my files, I press the button to select all the files, then the green scan button; that pops up the scanner dialog. On this dialog (this took me a long time to figure out!) I press the green scan button once again; then I press the Save button on the main toolbar once again and it applies the changes I made (renaming, filling in the album year, etc). (To fill in the album year, select all the files and fill in the year, then press the small dot to the right of the year to apply the change to all selected files.)

And that’s about all. I had a few incidents with Audacity where I tried to play tracks from one recording while another window was recording, but the good thing is it recovers from crashes beautifully; I didn’t lose any recordings.

Audio quality

The audio quality sounds pretty good to me, by most counts. I mean, there’s the inevitable record noise and some clicks (a lot of my records are things like old Mike Oldfield albums and early Tangerine Dream, Jeff Beck, and the like). But even though there are ways to remove this noise, I’d rather have all the noise and all the music, than some of the noise and only some of the music. I’m not listening to the noise, I’m listening to the music. I have a beautiful pair of Sennheiser HD 590s (linked the 595s at right — the 590s are discontinued, but they’re the nicest headphones I’ve ever owned; very bright, but easy to drive from a portable music player (no dedicated amp needed) and extremely light and comfortable) and it really sounds good. You can probably guess that I’m not saving the files as crummy low-bit-rate MP3 files.

The USB turntables I’m using aren’t audiophile-quality. There is some wow and flutter. It’s acceptable to me. If you think you’ll be bothered, use higher-end equipment. Personally, I don’t go down this path, because for me it’s a road with no end. I know people who spend many thousands (or tens of thousands) of dollars on each piece of their system: pre-amps, turntables, tone arms, cartridges and needles. (Got a $6000 needle anyone?) I don’t see myself ever spending the price of a small house on audio equipment; I’d rather put the money into buying more music, rather than more equipment. But if you’re that kind of person, you probably aren’t reading this article anyway.

Summary

Converting LPs into digital form the way I’ve shown is fairly time-consuming and tedious. You have to record the LP; then trim out the unwanted parts of the recording; then find the start of each song and type in the song name; then the artist and album information. I multitask while I’m doing other things, but I still notice the amount of time I’m spending on it. Hopefully this article helps you cut some of the repetitive work out yourself, or decide whether you want to get into this before you buy the equipment.

Further Reading: