theOlster.net

Being a Linux user is an odd thing, you don’t have to wait five years for the next OS version to be released, you can customise absolutely anything to do with your OS or applications, installing software is usually a one-click process, and the list goes on.

I’ve spent about two months desperately trying to be a Linux user, and you know, it sucks…

To start with things were going pretty well. I installed Ubuntu and had the pick of the best guides and customisation tricks to hand. I wasn’t a complete newbie and knew my way around the file system and command line, which definitely made things easier. But you know, the customisation aspect of Linux is all very well, but I’ve found it to be a double-edged sword.

I’ve spent all this time getting my two computers and server all configured just how I wanted it, and the whole system feels broken. Upgrading from Ubuntu 6.10 to 7.04 was a big pain in the arse because despite an attempt at backing everything up I lost all the customisations that I needed to get the OS working right for me. So from this point in time I can look back at this previous post when I considered switching to Ubuntu, and realise that whilst I thought the grass to be greener, it definitely wasn’t. By contrast Mac OS X isn’t so bad and considering my current situation with Linux by comparison it looks like it’s plated in gold. I don’t like everything in Mac OS X, but I don’t feel the need to customise any of it aswell. So, I’m not only switching back to Mac OS X, I’m going to spend a ridiculous amount of cash on getting the software/hardware I need to operate it.

This will be expensive, but I expect to have much more time to spend on projects that will make me money rather than just getting my working environment set up right. I don’t want to be messing around with my operating system when I could be using it to work, surf, take and edit my photos, blog, make music, build a kick-arse web 2.0 app, oh and *cough* play my ukulele.

Question: Who would build a desk from scratch when one can be bought for a reasonable price at a furniture shop?

Answer: Someone who wants to spend the time customising and designing it to their exact specifications, then reap the reward from doing so.

That someone isn’t me… although I am thinking of building a desk, I wonder if I should bother…

So Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 was launched 3 minutes ago… Presumably… Of course I can’t check or download it because the site is swamped with traffic.

I’ve been giving the previous version of ubuntu some great attention over the last few months, and have come to the following conclusion: I’m probably a KDE user, who hasn’t been told to stop using Gnome. So I’ll give Ubuntu a weeks trial, then unless I really, really like it, I’ll switch to Kubuntu.

Update: I give up.. time to hit the sack.

Yet again I am re-visiting the Mac/Linux/Vista evaluation/switch. Here I will indicate MacBook experiences since mid October, and why I’m want to move away from MacOS X.

I bought my 13inch MacBook about five months ago, and I love it… almost. I love it enough to say that I will never switch back to any Windows variant - ever. But do I love it enough to stay with it?

I’m not sure now.

To understand why, I need to explain why I bought an Apple machine in the first place. For the last couple of years I’ve desperately wanted to like and thus switch from windows to Linux. I’ve patiently installed just about every version of Ubuntu, Fedora and the occasional Suse on my desktop to see if a switch was possible. I’ve often had many problems with a lack of my technical knowledge (although this gap is a lot smaller these days) along with very poor Linux hardware support compared to MS and Apple. I also had some very strict software requirements that I really needed meeting for my work, study and general purposes. At the time these requirements could not be met through choosing Linux, but could with a Mac, and it required little or no technical knowledge, very intuitive. So I bought a Mac.

So what’s changed, why am I thinking about Linux again after only five months?

Well, two reasons… Firstly, MacOS X just doesn’t work in a way that I like. For example, I hate Finder. It is such a pain in the arse to use, and I don’t expect that to change in the next incarnation of MacOS X. It’s not that the way it works is particularly bad, it just annoys me and I can’t do anything about that! Secondly, in five months of using the Mac I’ve learnt not to try and be too clever and live within the limitations of the OS. This may sound a little enigmatic, but bear with me. If I want to give Linux another go I need to accept that although someone else may have installed something, or found a really clever way of doing something else, I need to take a couple of deep breaths, calm down, and try to live within my requirements.

Quite often, when I’ve previously used Linux I’ve tried messing around with the latest features, forgetting my lack of technical knowledge, and broken things. Actually, my MythTV experiences are a notable exception to this rule, but this is just about the only exception. For example I tried messing about with Beryl on my desktop recently, and discovered how buggy it really is! This hasn’t broken my install, but other instances have.

So since I desperately need to upgrade the piddly 55G HDD in my MacBook, I’m going to give Ubuntu a go at the same time.

I also plan to set out my requirements for the system, and document how these have been met in a ‘howto’ kind of way. This can be found here: Ubuntu Edgy on a MacBook (Update: Link removed until this page has been fully completed).

Yes, I know another post on the AudioTraffic project… and it is still little more than a figment of my imagination at the moment - and no-one reads my blog anyway!

Since I’ve switched over to a Mac, I’ve been looking around for a suitable mp3 player that will sync with my Creative muvo m3 player, download podcasts and generally manage my music collection. Although I’m a mac user, I’m an open source fan and have been looking for other programs that will achieve the same aims I have for AudioTraffic. This would be great as it would mean that I don’t have to write the damn thing! Through this post I found through Planet Ubuntu I re-discovered the Songbird project.

I remember hearing about Songbird quite some time ago, and was initially quite impressed by it, but the development was way to slow and I lost interest. Now is a good time to go back and re-visit it. After only 10 minutes of messing around with it I have come to the following conclusion:

What I like about Songbird: A nice simple GUI (basically a black iTunes) - I might even consider some of the ideas here with AudioTraffic.  Internet Radio - very cool and will please many, but I don’t really need this.  RSS (MP3 Blogs) - thank goodness they didn’t call them podcasts!  Network Device - again I don’t need this really (although it sounds very cool)

What I don’t like - (although many features are available the important one isn’t):  Device syncing not yet supported.  There are way too many features in this project, and that does put me off.  After several years of things like song ratings, I just cannot see the point.  I don’t like the way that the mp3 blogs works, Apples iTunes is much better in this point.

Basically, I find that there are way to many things included that I just won’t use and the things I need, (although planned) aren’t yet included. It will continue to piss me off that the stuff I don’t need will just take up pixel space and piss me off. Another thing, the this is a rubbish way to manage rss and mp3 blogs. However, I must start to consider that this is a browser based music managing program.

So would I completely switch to using Songbird if the features I wanted were included? Probably not, this is a browser based program, and I don’t think thats the right platform for this kind of thing. However, I am totally impressed by this software, and by the time I’ve got AudioTraffic up and running and I’ve been using it for a year, I expect that it’ll be time to switch over to Songbird. It all depends in which direction their project goes.

One last thing… Nik Butler also mentions Banshee as well as Songbird. Where is the Mac OS X version !!!

So after a nearly a month of silence since my last post I thought I’d update on my recent programming. I’ve decided to call this project AudioTraffic. So rather than being a media player (with bells and whistles) the name actually says what it does (ish) - i.e. it manages all your audio between the web (podcasts), your PC/Laptop, a network storage (ftp?), etc.

Since Nov, I’ve had no feedback from my email to LugRadio. This is hardly surprising since my project doesn’t really relate to anything they do, so it wouldn’t be fair for me to have a go at them about this!

The other main problem is actually playing MP3s and Oggs. At first I looked at the Java Media Framework (JMF) but this doesn’t seem to have support for Oggs and would require the user to have JMF installed on their machine (although this is not hard, I don’t want to have to ask any users to do this). Then I looked at the some of the JavaZoom classes - decodes music on the fly. Very nice, except that the order in which I looked at them meant that the most suitable BasicPlayer was looked at last! So loads of time wasted here. I still haven’t quite got this working properly, but that seems to be because of Eclipse 3.2. Just my luck eh!

I seem to be having the same problems as here and will now try Eclipse 3.1 - wish me luck!