Friday 21 March 2008

Gimp, UFRAW and ARW

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 wasn't included in the distro so need to retrieve it.

# yum whatprovides ufraw

Produced no results, turns out the freshmeat rpm repository wasn't working, so add enabled=0 to the appropriate file (/etc/yum.repos.d/freshrpms.repo) and try again. This time yum picked up ufraw so it was to be a painless install.

Checked with fedoraforum.org and it seems there would be a couple more packages I needed....

So, one yum install later (as root)...

# yum install ufraw ufraw-common ufraw-gimp

...and now when I double click an ARW file, Gimp attempts to open it succesfully (well, actually the UFraw Gimp plugin opens it, but who cares - it works :) ).

Thursday 13 March 2008

mp3s + phone

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 this as Windows software would generally figure it out for you. Anyway, /media/N95_storage_card was added to the Rythmbox config and away we go.

Still don't get syncing, but rather I connect the phone and do the following:
1. create a playlist of tracks I want on phone
2. select the playlist in the left pane of Rythmbox - this displays the mp3s on the right
3. highlight all the listed mp3s and drag on the device/N95 icon on the left pane
4. wait....

First time I did this a progress indicator started. I unplugged the phone after 100% but only got half an hour of music on my phone. I guess that progress indicator was a progress made in queing the tunes rather than actually transferring.

So while I haven't actually got a load of music on my phone yet, I do think I know how now :)

Sunday 2 March 2008

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 had hoped. While I've got RhythmBox managing all my mp3s and fiddled about with playlists etc I dont seem able to get it to write them to the phone.

Fedora recognises the phone and pops up the explorer window quite happily so that's not the problem... it seems this audio manager/player can't write tracks to an external device. That can't be right?!