raoul's blog

So last night I upgraded my Amarok 1.3 to 1.4.3 so that I could get the file organisation features. It was quite simple really, all I had to do was to uncomment the dapper-backports repositories in my sources.list file and sudo apt-get update, and then I could upgrade Amarok. Be careful though, it has to download a bunch of python and ruby libraries if you don't have them installed, because of the scripting you can do in Amarok.

Being an open source type of person, using Ichthux (a Kubuntu derivative), by default my computer doesn't support playing mp3s. This isn't a problem for me as most of my music is in Ogg Vorbis (.ogg) format, which is a much better format anyways. However, the problem is that most of these flash and hard drive based players don't support .ogg playback. Fortunately I found a page which lists all the portable music players which can playback .ogg files: http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/PortablePlayers.

One of the really nice features of Amarok 1.4 (and no, it's not in 1.3) is the ability to organise your music files from within Amarok. So, if you're like me, and in the past you just dumped a whole lot of mp3 and ogg files in one directory, then you can use Amarok to create new directories and rename and categorise your files.

So this past week I re-installed my server, and I decided to write a howto for others who would like to have their own web/files/etc server at home. I decided to use Dapper, since it is the stable and well tested release. It contains recent enough software to be patched, and since it's the Long Term Support release, it'll still have security updates coming out for the next 5 years.

My setup at home is something like this:

Well, last night was successful, and I got my server up and running, dialed up to the internet, et al. Network shares are working swimmingly and LAMP with virtual hosts is fine, thanks to bind9. I'll post a HowTo early in the next year (perhaps even on New Year's day if I have the time), which will detail exactly what I did. I'll probably also then add it to the CLUG wiki so that others can benefit from it. That's all for now. Its bedtime!

I have decided to move to Ubuntu. Reason(s)?

• Ubuntu Just Works (tm).
• I use Ubuntu at work.
• I recently set up a new Ubuntu server at GnuWorld
• My server at home used to run SuSE 10.1 with ISPConfig. ISPConfig is terrible, you don't have control of your server anymore.
• SuSE's virtual hosts is messed up.
• I've been wanting to move away from YaST and to get to know the config files.
• Oh, and I'm not sure of this whole M$-Novell thing.

Well, this is to say that my blog is back in action! My previous blog was being overrun by spam, and so I *had* to get rid of it. I've also moved to WordPress, and installed the Askimet plugin to reduce comment spam. Also, people have to register/log in to be able to comment. This theme was HACKED together by me. WordPress' theme system is atrocious! You can't do ANYTHING. So I've had to revert to some hard links and things. Perhaps with a bit more fighting, I can get around the hard links.