Chris’ Blog

A new month a new desktop wallpaper:

… about this. Well more likely is I am just being too lazy. But it has been quite a while since I wrote anything of much substance up here, currently I am unable to sleep which sucks somewhat. I’ve been very busy as of late, I’ve finished my quite frankly ludicrous 5 week “Easter” “break” where I did not much but work, bum around, and drove places. So I am back at the grindstone that is university, ploughing through coursework at such a rate I guess I could describe as “relaxed” but that maybe pushing definition boundaries. I’m looking forward to next week when the last of my coursework is handed in and I am free to revise for exams, oh heck!

I’ve had a new desktop for the latter part of April inspired by a trip to Weston’s Cider of Much Marcle, Herefordshire over me holiday.

I am moving towards a landmark on last.fm, 100 000 tracks played. Not decided what will be my 100 000th track hopefully I don’t go over it by mistake with something non-worthy.

I leave you with the thought, why would a dairy company write “Allergy information: contains milk” on the side of a bottle of milk? Surely that is the whole idea? Or maybe I am missing something…

A new month (2 weeks ago), a new screen and thus a two new desktop backgrounds (and last months):

I find a firewall on my windows installation personally a waste of resources, so I have it removed in my nLite customised installation media. Well I had problems installing the Company of Heros: Opposing Fronts Beta, it kept trying to adjust Windows Firewall and of course failing. So I had to reinstall it, found out how to here.

This is a really ugly sed one liner that configures grub how I like it.

$ sudo sed --in-place 's/#\(hiddenmenu\)/\1/;s/^\(timeout[ \t]*\)[0-9]*/\12/;s/^\(# lock.*=\)false$/\1true/' /boot/grub/menu.lst
$ _GPASSWD=$(read -s -p "Enter Grub Password (note type carefully): " _GPASSWD; echo $_GPASSWD | mkpasswd --hash=md5 --stdin); echo; sudo sed --in-place "s/# password topsecret/password --md5 $_GPASSWD/" /boot/grub/menu.lst; unset _GPASSWD
$ sudo update-grub

I keep meaning to document this, the installation procedure for my MCEUSB2 remote control with lirc under Ubuntu, so here we go.

1. $ sudo aptitude install lirc lirc-modules-source module-assistant debconf-utils

2. $ wget http://static.cs278.org/conf/debconf/ubuntu-704_lirc-modules-source -O- | sudo debconf-set-selections
   $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure lirc-modules-source

   This was needed before but is now automated:
   Select mceusb2 and then No, and chooseInstall the package maintainer’s version if the option appears.

3. $ sudo sed 's/MODULES=""/MODULES="lirc_mceusb2"/' /etc/lirc/hardware.conf --in-place

4. $ sudo m-a update,prepare
   $ sudo rm /usr/src/lirc*deb
   $ sudo m-a clean lirc
   $ sudo m-a a-i lirc
   $ sudo depmod -a

5. $ wget "https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Install_Lirc_Feisty?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=lircd.conf.mceusb" -O- | sudo tee /etc/lirc/lircd.conf

6. $ sudo modprobe lirc_mceusb2
   $ sudo /etc/init.d/lirc start

Sources:

• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Install_Lirc_Feisty
• http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_LIRC
• http://wiki.videolan.org/How_to_Use_Lirc

Quick tip:

gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/volume_manager/autoplay_vcd_command "vlc %m"
gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/volume_manager/autoplay_dvd_command "vlc %m"

No more crappy totem spawning when you insert a DVD or VCD, but instead the pleasure of VLC.

I have found a solution to my media player woes, Amarok, it serves as a nice replacement to mpd which has served me well. I will miss the flexibility of mpd but the featureset of Amarok is just amazing, all I need now is to get my QT apps looking more like GTK ones.

My Ubuntu installation had been getting rather touchy and unstable so I eventually bit the bullet and went for a total system nuke and reinstall. After a royal screw up I got my system reinstalled. The CD image I downloaded got corrupted on the wire but still worked, one of the core Gnome packages got modified and the MD5SUM checking failed and it refused to install. So, I got left with a broken installer and a text mode system, eventually I managed to get Gnome up and redownload the ISO and reburn (verifying the MD5SUM of the ISO before this time) and reinstalled again and it worked first time, even though I did fall asleep.

Now my next problem is finding a media player I like, looks like I might be going back to mpd, which is the root of all my problems I think.