Adventures in Linux

Banshee 2 way sync

2011-09-15T09:45:00.000+01:00

Anyone out there able to help get 2 way sync working properly in Banshee 2.0.1 on Fedora 15? Here is my situation, 2 PCs and a USB thumbdrive. I want to be able to use the thumbdrive to sync the 2 PCs, the thumbdrive also gets used in the car. So if I buy some music via the Banshee Amazon plugin on one machine, sync to the thumbdrive I then want that file to automatically find its way into the

Fedora 15 and Gnome 3

2011-05-26T08:37:00.000+01:00

My main machine(s) are now all running Fedora 15, complete with the Gnome 3 desktop interface. After a few niggles to get things running (getting latest nvidia drivers for one machine, issues with NTFS formatted disk on another) I can happily say if feels quicker and more responsive than my Fedora 14 experience and that was pretty good. Installed on Fedora 15 launch day (yesterday, 25 May 2011)

Helping other people...

2011-01-31T08:41:00.000Z

Times they are a changing. I've considered myself a Linux user for quite a number of years at a basic level, but since moving to a fulltime Linux setup on all my machines I've learnt so much more as a user of course but more still about the Linux world in general and sysadmin side of things. Even to the point where I have become the goto person for Linux (Fedora) help for a few folks now. Now I

Reinstalling X? :(

2009-11-12T07:42:00.001Z

Seems the graphics driver thing has caused more than just the odd yum glitch...https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2006-February/msg01178.htmlIn short, because of the way ATI bundled the driver, I will probably have to reinstall the X server and stuff that goes with it. That doesn't sound like it will be a fun job at all. :(

Some of the update issues sorted...

2009-11-11T18:09:00.001Z

Turns out switching on the rpmfusion-free-update repository sorted out a lot of the issues with doing a yum update.Now left with ....[root@yeti yum.repos.d]# yum updateLoaded plugins: dellsysidplugin2, refresh-packagekitSetting up Update ProcessResolving Dependencies--> Running transaction check--> Processing Dependency: libnetfilter_conntrack.so.1 for package: iptstate-2.2.1-5.fc11.i586--->

kmod-fglrx issues

2009-11-11T16:28:00.002Z

Recently ran through the upgrade process of Fedora 10-11. Preupgrade went smoothly but no upgrade, so had a look at grub.conf and discovered I had to select the upgrade option there during boot. Duly done and complete, kind of.A $yum update gives me a bunch of dependency issues, here are a couple....Error: Missing Dependency: libnetfilter_conntrack.so.1 is needed by package iptstate-2.2.1-5.fc11.

New Evolution build, still no mobile sync

2009-07-20T08:18:00.002+01:00

My hunch anout Evolution recurring appointment bug being the problem seems incorrect. Opened Evolution today, it has been updated to 2.6.3 which fixes that bug.Tested and indeed I can now create recurring appointments without a crash, but it hasn't sorted my mobile phone sync issues. Back to the drawing board :(

Battling with syncing

2009-07-16T15:25:00.003+01:00

Time has come to try to figure out synchronising my mobile with my Fedora desktop calendar program.For no reason other than it's the default in Fedora, I'm using Evolution as my local calendar program. I have a Nokia N85 and a Google calendar.Somehow I want to get them all talking/synchronised with each other.Using open sync and some other stuff (http://www.dafoot.co.uk/index.php?option=

N85 sync with evolution...success :)

2009-07-01T09:45:00.002+01:00

Finally got round to looking into getting my Nokia N85 to synchronise its data with my (Fedora) Linux PCs.After much scrabbling about and fighting with it, it seems to be working now for both my Calendar and my contacts, syncing between the phone and the Evolution Outlook-a-like program.I've put some notes on the hows and and whys on my personal website:http://www.dafoot.co.uk/index.php?option=

Learning everyday....

2009-06-29T09:24:00.002+01:00

Been a while since posting here, learnt a few things during that time.Booting into runlevel 3 by default can have some odd side effects when you've spent time building scripts in runlevel 5.Namely, I discovered my backup script wouldn't work for some reason when I tried to fire it off from the command line. I had taken the command generated by GRsync GUI and put it in a #! script so I could run

Dynamic DNS (contd.)

2009-06-03T11:20:00.003+01:00

Turns out I was looking in the wrong place in my router config. I was expecting it to live under the firewall options and open a port there, but instead it is actually under 'Virtual servers'.Ahh well, either way it works now and I can get CLI access from anywhere to my home machine via SSH :)

Playing with DynDNS

2009-06-01T11:49:00.002+01:00

My router is an older one. But it was a good one when I chose it, still does the job even if it can't support latest WiFi encryption tech (so have to rely on WEP!).What it dows support however is out of the box dynamic DNS. So having a play with it last night and getting some odd results.If I give my browser the magic URL it goes out, get redirected to my router, which passes the request to a

Update breaks keyboard (and mouse!)

2009-05-15T08:12:00.002+01:00

Got a fright at the weekend, after my PC booted to the login screen sans problem I found I couldn't login. Not because my password/user had become corrupt or anything like that but I simply could not enter my username/password as both my mouse and keyboard were dead.Both are plugged in to the box via USB->PC2 adaptors. I unplugged them and plugged into my USB hub and presto - fully functional

Hurrah for Nokia!

2009-03-28T21:33:00.002Z

Here's me, sat at home. Knowing at some point if I am to use my shiny new Nokia N85 for music at the gym etc I am going to have to spend some time fiddling to get my Nokia and Banshee talking nicely.So I try plugging in that little USB cable to see if Linux recognises a mass storage device. Not only is it recognised but Banshee instantly adds the phone as a writable device for syncing my

Banshee 1.4.2 problem with flash drive

2009-03-20T14:51:00.002Z

Since upgrading to FC10, the Banshee install I have has been refusing to write to my generic USB sticks.When transferring tracks, using the Banshee interface, to my USB drive I was getting an error "Object reference not set to an instance of an object".While I have a reasonable grasp what the error means from a coding perspective, I don't have the time nor the inclination to dig into the source

Streaming Radio1 now works :)

2009-02-02T12:11:00.004Z

Followed a link from the BBC help pages to get to the rpm download of the latest (11) RealPlayer (http://www.real.com/linux).Installed as root:yum installlocal /home/-path to .rpmRestart my browser and hey presto it works :) Much more succesful than previous attempts with Realplayer10 pluging nonsense!

Laptop now on FC10

2009-02-02T12:04:00.003Z

It wasn't without issues but I now have Fedora10 running on my laptop.I tried installing using ext4 filesystem.The WiFi setup was a nightmare, using the system admin options for network (as root) simply refused to do what I wanted I was probably using it wrongly!Finally found some errors around writing to disc in the logs. Something to do with ext4 so I tried a format with ext3 to try FC10 on

Maybe a format is the answer

2009-01-26T10:32:00.004Z

I ran the online upgrade process using preupgrade and apparently everything went smoothly upgrading to FC10.The machine seems to behave itself and everything works as it used to, only when I run an update yum downloads packages marked with fc8 rather than fc10. So it would seem everything is not quite as good as it could be.I was contemplating doing a format and install of FC10 to take advantage

Upgrade in progress...

2009-01-23T08:20:00.003Z

Yesterday I read about the next iteration of Fedora (11) being discussed as en-route. As I'm still on 8 I reckon it is a good time to take the plunge and do an upgrade.So after a yum update to make sure my FC8 is up to date, I launched the preupgrade program I mentioned in an earlier post and started it doing its' thing to upgrade me to FC10.Needless to say, downloading and installing an entire

Fedora 8 and FireFox 3

2008-12-19T21:29:00.004Z

Fedora 8 comes with FireFox 2.x.x out the box. It seems policy of whoever decides these things is that yum should be restricted to the same major version of software as first installed. So it's FireFox 2 only on FC8.Unless... Some kind sole creates a repo for FC8 that includes FireFox 3.http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=192162&highlight=firefox+fedora&page=2So.... as root...wget http

Upgrading FedoraCore8

2008-12-08T09:34:00.002Z

My Linux distro is Fedora.I am currently running 8 on my main machine which, now that 10 is out, is coming to end of supported life.I've been running FC9 on my experimental machine (laptop) for a while and quite happy with the stability, so have decided that the main machine can be moved to FC9. FC10 is still a bit young yet to go on my main machine!So I get hold of the handy preUpgrade GUI

2008-12-04T08:51:00.003Z

As per previous post, Banshee wasn't showing my USB thumb drives properly (well, at all really!).Added a file called .is_audio_player to the root of the drive, unmount it. Re-insert it in the USB slot and presto, like magic I can now drag/drop tunes in Banshee between my library and the thumb drive :)

mp3 stuff sorted but file write oddness

2008-10-20T11:09:00.002+01:00

I now have an mp3/music manager that I can use to encode mp3s while automagically downloading track/artist details AND it saves the info tags correctly!Rather than fight with RythmBox I tried (at someones recommendation) another system called Banshee. Seems to do everything I want wight now, though it did take a bit of tweaking to get it behaving as I want. So that's my music sorted.The plan

Ryhthmbox and ID3 tags

2008-09-12T08:13:00.001+01:00

So I have Rythmbox creating mp3s at last :)When I stick a CD in, off it goes to the magical interweb and fetches loads of meta data about the CD it has found in the drive... artist, album, track names year etc etc."Lovely" says I, assuming the work was done. If only it were that simple.Turns out that while creating the mp3 files, from a CD that the software has found meta data for, the metadata

It lives!

2008-09-11T19:30:00.004+01:00

Really exciting mp3 encoder that is!I have been trying to get Rhythmbox to rip CDs to mp3 for use in the car for a good few hours sans-fortune.After numerous attempts to manage audio profiles through the gnome interface, everytime I try to encode to mp3 all I would get was .flac files. Could encode to Ogg fine, but doubt that would work with the portable devices Iwant the music for.With some help

IE (Internet Explorer)

2008-08-26T13:27:00.001+01:00

In my enthusiasm to move full-time to Linux I missed a crucial element of my system: IE! Kinda useful to have for testing my sites (as I discovered recently when I used another machine to check the notoriously awkward in IE float properties of !).Yes, I know IE is a MS/Windows product I've now got IEs4Linux running now on FC8 sans-problem.Had a few issues to start with, first off IE7 crashed

IE running on Linux?

2008-08-23T00:03:00.003+01:00

Tonight I was tinkering with a website (www.yhjudo.org.uk) and it occurred to me that I should probably test with IE.Now since I have moved my full-time platform to Fedora Linux this would prove awkward as it doesn't have IE installed (duh!).Thankfully, some folks that understand WINE a whole lot better than me have kindly created this page of instructions here:http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux

Picassa issues

2008-06-30T09:49:00.001+01:00

Following on from the Picassa bother in previous posts, last night I added the missing line to the config file as directed in the linked forum posts.Naturally being Linux I didn't need feel the need to reboot so wont find out if it's worked for a bit. Probably at the weekend in fact after my next photoshoot! Blogged with the Flock Browser

SVN botheration...

2008-06-29T21:45:00.001+01:00

I'm trying to persuade SVN to run on my FC8 PC so that I can keep my laptop codebase upto date easily so I can do some coding on that in front of TV...save the Mrs getting upset I spend all my time coding in the other room!I'd hate to try this on Windows, this sort f thing is where Linux excels, but....I've tried to follow instructions from here:http://www.botsko.net/blog/2007/05/...

Picasa seems to be fixed...

2008-06-22T20:42:00.001+01:00

...kind of :/Following instructions here:http://wiki.winehq.org/PreloaderPageZeroProblemReffered to from the discussion here:http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Labs-Picasa-for-Linux/browse_thread/thread/91d956e2d643cb19/9a025ba32fad6e60It seems Wine had the problem which can be fixed with the instructions given above, unfortunately where the instructions say change the value of something in

HELP!

2008-06-22T20:19:00.001+01:00

Garrr...A very promising first few months with Linux is starting to fall apart.I've been tring to sort out realplayer plugin for my browser so I can listen to BBC 'listen again' stuff with no luck. So, thinking it was time to get away from things that are stressing me out I thought I'd have a go at sorting out my latest batch of photos.... some chance!Seems now that when I try and start Picasa it

Printers...

2008-06-01T16:53:00.001+01:00

So I finally got round to looking into getting my printer setup and working.It's a HP 3310 WiFi all-in-one jobby, nice machine. Only hope I can get it working under Fedora Core now!I have switched off auto yum updates as on those occasions when my internet connection went down my computer would take ages to get going. Seems yum trying to connect (but failing) was the cause of the delay.So run an

That was a mistake!

2008-05-10T13:25:00.003+01:00

In my friggin about with the system to get DVDs playing (see previous post) it would appear somehow I've managed to break BBC liveplayer support :(Flock also seems to refuse to accept that Youtube contains videos. Largely because it hasn't figured out how to play flash content...

Found a new headache...

2008-05-10T01:41:00.003+01:00

DVDs!Something that is taken for granted by so many in Windows land looks like it may cause headaches in Linux land.Apparently Linux distros don't ship with DVD playing software by default, something to do with regionality/encryption/copyright stuff.There are plenty of players out there it seems though...Totem (installed by default)MPlayergXine (Gnome GUI version of xine)...are all now installed

Finally sorted BBC media player

2008-04-05T11:43:00.002+01:00

My Fedora Core 8 was refusing to player the BBC radio feeds as I like to do.Rather than fighting with the Windows Media format and getting mplayer working as a browser plugin I went for the Realplayer approach. Mostly because I've associated Realplayer with streaming media longer than I have WMA.So after a little googling for answers I came across a tutorial here...http://www.gagme.com/greg/linux

Gimp, UFRAW and ARW

2008-03-21T17:36:00.003Z

Lots of strange names, al about cameras and photography this time.ARW is the file extension given to RAW files from my A100 Sony camera. On windows I was using a free image editor called Gimp and seeing as it came bundled with my Fedora 8 installation it seemed sensible to continue using it on Linux.I was using a program called UFRaw to read the ARW(RAW) files and import them into gimp, but this

mp3s + phone

2008-03-13T16:11:00.002Z

After discussing the mp3 thing with another Linux bod, I tried Amarok as that is what he was using to sync properly.A quick play with it and decided it probably wasn't the approach I wanted, however in the process of following instructions somewhere online for using Amarok with the N95 I discovered the idea of telling the media player where the portable device is.I wasn't expecting to have to do

2008-03-02T18:47:00.002Z

Today I discovered to wonderful world of customising the panels in Gnome. So after lots of fiddling and panels everywhere I've got something behaving in a way I like. Lovely.I'm easily distracted! The original aim was to get the music player (Rythmbox) to write to an external media, namely my phone, so I can easily dump a load of music on it before heading out to gym or whatever. Not as easy as I

Cameras

2008-02-24T17:15:00.003Z

Tried plugging in my Sony Alpha 100 to download some pics, but nothing happend. No detection of the dvice it seemed, so tried plugging into the memory card reader directly. Appears that isn't understood by Fedora Core 8 either.Just on the off chance, I tried plugging into one of the mainboard USB ports on the rear on the PC, that worked and up popped the 'import images' tool which was useful in

Yum loving

2008-02-18T10:09:00.002Z

Decided to leave the WiFi card thing for a bit... I don't *need* it sorting so it can wait. Maybe I'll just keep eyes open for a one with 'proper' Linux support.In the mean time, a bit of tinkering and I've got my Apache http working with PHP stuff.Isn't yum great?!Tell this program I want xyz, and off it jolly well goes and fetches and installs them automagically.So a 'yum install php-xml'

2008-02-16T20:49:00.002Z

A bit more digging and it seems that maybe MadWifi isn't what I need....trying to install some other drivers...http://acx100.sourceforge.net/wiki/Distribution_list/FedoraFrom lspci:01:08.0 Network controller: Texas Instruments ACX 111 54Mbps Wireless InterfaceA bit of googling leads me to believe I've actually been trying to use MadWifi when I should be using a different driver (acx111).

2008-02-16T19:52:00.002Z

Having added the ATrpm repo to yum I downloaded the MadWifi stuff as instructed but still no sign of the device in the network control widget.So I try following the guide (for dummies) here....http://madwifi.org/wiki/UserDocs/FirstTimeHowTo- svn checkout- make- make installSo far, so good :)Then I need to use modprobe to install it apparently... I thought I just had with the 'make install'? :/

re. WiFi card

2008-02-12T15:15:00.000Z

Shouldn't be too hard then...http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=118537Just need to find how to add repositories to the Yum conf and hopefully it'll deal with it quite easily.

It's finally happened

2008-02-12T14:44:00.001Z

After a number of failiures over previous months that I have recovered from, my RAID-0 setup failed once too often for me to tolerate. Given that every time it happens I have to dig about for a floppy drive in order to get the windows installer to recognise the SATA drives. So I figured next time it got into that situation I'd get a new disc and rather than install WinXP, take the full plunge to