Technology Tales

Installing Nightingale music player on Ubuntu 13.04

Ever since the Songbird project concentrated its efforts to support only Windows and OS X, the Firefox-based music player has been absent from a Linux user's world. However, the project is open source and a fork called Nightingale now fulfils the same needs. Intriguingly, it too is available for Windows and OS X users, which leaves me wondering why that overlap has happened. However, Songbird also is available as a web app and as an app on both Android and iOS, while Nightingale sticks to being a desktop application.

To add it to Ubuntu, you need to set up a new repository. That can be done using the Software Centre but issuing a command in a terminal can be so much quicker and cleaner, so here it is:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nightingaleteam/nightingale-release

Apart from entering your password, there will be a prompt to continue by pressing the carriage return key or cancelling with CTRL + C. For our purposes, it is the first action that's needed and once that's done the needful, you can execute the following command:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install nightingale

This is in two parts: the first updates the repositories on your system, while the second actually installs the software. When that is complete, you are ready to run Nightingale and, with the repository, staying up to date is not a chore either. In fact, using the above commands brings another advantage: it is that they should work in any Ubuntu derivatives, such as Linux Mint.

A need to update graphics hardware

As someone who doesn't play computer games, I rarely prioritise graphics card upgrades. Yet, I recently upgraded graphics cards in two of my PCs despite nothing being broken. My backup machine, built nearly four years ago, has run multiple Linux distributions. It uses an ASRock K10N78 motherboard from MicroDirect with an integrated NVIDIA graphics chip that performs adequately, if not exceptionally. The only issue was slightly poor text rendering in web browsers, but this alone wasn't enough to justify adding a dedicated graphics card.

More recently, I ran into trouble with Sabayon 13.04 with only the 2D variant of the Cinnamon desktop environment working on it and things getting totally non-functional when a full re-installation of the GNOME edition was attempted. Everything went fine until I added the latest updates to the system, when a reboot revealed that it was impossible to boot into a desktop environment. Some will relish this as a challenge, but I need to admit that I am not one of those. In fact, I tried out two Arch-based distros on the same PC and got the same results following a system update on each. So, my explorations of Antergos and Manjaro have to continue in virtual machines instead.

When I tried Linux Mint 15 Cinnamon, it worked perfectly. However, newer distributions with systemd didn't work with my onboard NVIDIA graphics. Since systemd will likely come to Linux Mint eventually, I decided to add a dedicated graphics card. Based on good past experiences with Radeon, I chose an AMD Radeon HD 6450 from PC World, confirming it had Linux driver support. Installation was simple: power off, insert card, close case, power on. Later, I configured the BIOS to prioritise PCI Express graphics, though this step wasn't necessary. I then used Linux Mint's Additional Driver applet to install the proprietary driver and restarted. To improve web browser font rendering, I selected full RGBA hinting in the Fonts applet. The improvement was obvious, though still not as good as on my main machine. Overall, the upgrade improved performance and future-proofed my system.

After upgrading my standby machine, I examined my main PC. It has both onboard Radeon graphics and an added Radeon 4650 card. Ubuntu GNOME 12.10 and 13.04 weren't providing 3D support to VMware Player, which complained when virtual machines were configured for 3D. Installing the latest fglrx driver only made things worse, leaving me with just a command line instead of a graphical interface. The only fix was to run one of the following commands and reboot:

sudo apt-get remove fglrx

sudo apt-get remove fglrx-updates

Looking at the AMD website revealed that they no longer support 2000, 3000 or 4000 series Radeon cards with their latest Catalyst driver, the last version that did not install on my machine since it was built for version 3.4.x of the Linux kernel. A new graphics card then was in order if I wanted 3D graphics in VMware VM's and both GNOME and Cinnamon appear to need this capability. Another ASUS card, a Radeon HD 6670, duly was acquired and installed in a manner similar to the Radeon HD 6450 on the standby PC. Apart from not needing to alter the font rendering (there is a Font tab on the Gnome Tweak Tool where this can be set), the only real exception was to add the Jockey software to my main PC for installation of the proprietary Radeon driver. The following command does this:

sudo apt-get install jockey-kde

After completing installation, I ran the jockey-kde command and selected the first driver option. Upon restart, the system worked properly except for an AMD message in the bottom-right corner warning about unrecognised hardware. Since there were two identical entries in the Jockey list, I tried the second option. After restarting, the incompatibility message disappeared and everything functioned correctly. VMware even ran virtual machines with 3D support without any errors, confirming the upgrade had solved my problem.

Hearing of someone doing two PC graphics card upgrades during a single weekend may make you see them as an enthusiast, but my disinterest in computer gaming belies this. Maybe it highlights that Linux operating systems need 3D more than might be expected. The Cinnamon desktop environment now issues messages if it is operating in 2D mode with software 3D rendering and GNOME always had the tendency to fall back to classic mode, as it had been doing when Sabayon was installed on my standby PC. However, there remain cases where Linux can rejuvenate older hardware and I installed Lubuntu onto a machine with 10-year-old technology on there (an 1100 MHz Athlon CPU, 1GB of RAM and 60GB of hard drive space in a case dating from 1998) and it works surprisingly well too.

It appears that having fancier desktop environments like GNOME Shell and Cinnamon means having the hardware on which it could run. For a while, I have been tempted by the possibility of a new PC, since even my main machine is not far from four years old either. However, I also spied a CPU, motherboard and RAM bundle featuring an Intel Core i5-4670 CPU, 8GB of Corsair Vengeance Pro Blue memory and a Gigabyte Z87-HD3 ATX motherboard included as part of a pre-built bundle (with a heat sink and fan for the CPU) for around £420. Even for someone who has used AMD CPU's since 1998, that does look tempting, but I'll hold off before making any such upgrade decisions. Apart from exercising sensible spending restraint, waiting for Linux UEFI support to mature a little more may be no bad idea either.

Update 2013-06-23: The new graphics card in my main machine works well and has reduced system error messages; Ubuntu GNOME 13.04 likely had issues with my old card. On my standby machine, I found and removed a rogue .fonts.conf file in my home directory, which dramatically improved font display. If you find this file on your system, consider removing or renaming it to see if it helps. Alternatively, adjusting font rendering settings can improve display quality, even on older systems like Debian 6 with GNOME 2. I may test these improvements on Debian 7.1 in the future.

A little look at Debian 7.0

Having a virtual machine with Debian 6 on there, I was interested to hear that Debian 7.0 is out. In another VM, I decided to give it a go. Installing it on there using the Net Install CD image took a little while but proved fairly standard with my choice of the GUI-based option. GNOME was the desktop environment with which I went and all started up without any real fuss after the installation was complete; it even disconnected the CD image from the VM before rebooting, a common failing in many Linux operating installations that lands into the installation cycle again unless you kill the virtual machine.

Though the GNOME desktop looked familiar, a certain amount of conservatism reigned too, since the version was 3.4.2. That was no bad thing, since raiding the GNOME Extension site for a set of mature extensions was made easier. In fact, a certain number of these were included in the standard installation anyway and the omission of a power off entry on the user menu was corrected as a matter of course without needing any intervention from this user. Adding to what already was there made for a more friendly desktop experience in a short period of time.

Debian's variant of Firefox, IceWeasel, is version 10 so a bit of tweaking is needed to get the latest version. LibreOffice is there now too, and it's version 3.5 rather than 4. Shotwell too is the older 0.12 and not the 0.14 that is found in the likes of Ubuntu 13.04. As it happens, GIMP is about the only software with a current version and that is 2.8; a slower release cycle may be the cause of that, though. All in all, the general sense is that older versions of current software are being included for the sake of stability and that is sensible too, so I am not complaining very much about this at all.

The reason for not complaining is that the very reason for having a virtual machine with Debian 6 on there is to have Zinio and Dropbox available too. Adobe's curtailment of support for Linux means that any application needing Adobe Air may not work on a more current Linux distribution. That affects Zinio, so I'll be retaining a Debian 6 instance for a while yet, unless a bout of testing reveals that a move to the newer version is possible. As for Dropbox, I am sure that I can recall why I moved it onto Debian, but it's working well on there so I am in no hurry to move it over either. There are times when slower software development cycles are better...

Using a variant of Debian's Iceweasel that keeps pace with Firefox

Left to its own devices, Debian will leave you with an ever ageing re-branded version of Firefox that was installed at the same time as the rest of the operating system. From what I have found, the main cause of this was that Mozilla's wanting to retain control of its branding and trademarks in a manner not in keeping with Debian's Free Software rules. This didn't affect just Firefox but also Thunderbird, Sunbird and Seamonkey with Debian's equivalents for these being IceDove, IceOwl and IceApe, respectively.

While you can download a tarball of Firefox from the web and use that, it'd be nice to get a variant that updated through Debian's normal apt-get channels. In fact, IceWeasel does get updated whenever there is a new release of Firefox, even if these updates never find their way into the usual repositories. While I have been known to take advantage of the more frozen state of Debian compared with other Linux distributions, I don't mind getting IceWeasel updated so it isn't a security worry.

The first step in so doing is to add the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list using root access (using one of sudo, gksu or su to assume root privileges) since the file normally cannot be edited by normal users:

deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports squeeze-backports main
deb http://mozilla.debian.net/ squeeze-backports iceweasel-release

With the file updated and saved, the next step is to update the repositories on your machine using the following command:

sudo apt-get update

With the above complete, it is time to overwrite the existing IceWeasel installation with the latest one using an apt-get command that specifies the squeeze-backports repository as its source using the -t switch. While IceWeasel is installed from the iceweasel-release squeeze-backports repository, there are dependencies that need to be satisfied and these come from the main squeeze-backports one. The actual command used is below:

sudo apt-get install -t squeeze-backports iceweasel

While that was all that I needed to do to get IceWeasel 18.0.1 in place, some may need the pkg-mozilla-archive-keyring package installed too. For those needing extra information beyond what's here, there's always the Debian Mozilla team.

Installing the Cinnamon Desktop Environment on Sabayon Linux

During the week, I did an update on my Sabayon system and GNOME 3.6 came on board without too much of a bother. There was no system meltdown or need for an operating system re-installation. However, there was one matter that rankled: adding and updating extensions from extensions. gnome.org was impossible. The process would create a new folder in ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/  but not fill it with anything at all. Populating from another Ubuntu GNOME Remix 12.10 machine didn't seem to achieve the needful, and I am left wondering if it is down to the version of GNOME Shell being 3.6.2. However, even adding an entry for the current version of GNOME Shell to metadata.json for one plugin didn't appear to do what I wanted, so resolving this issue needs further enquiry.

Meanwhile, I added the Cinnamon desktop environment using the following command and will be using that from now on. If the GNOME Shell extension issue ever gets sorted, I may move back, but there is no rush. GNOME 3.8 sounds like it's bringing an interesting option that makes use of the approach Linux Mint took for version 12 of that distribution, and I can await that, especially if it avoids the need for adding extensions on a personal basis like now.

sudo equo update && sudo equo install cinnamon

With the installation completed by the above command, it was a matter of logging out and choosing the Cinnamon entry (there is a 2D version too) from the session dropdown menu on the login screen to get it going. Then, it was a matter of tweaking Cinnamon to my heart’s content. Getting a two panel layout required logging out and in again as well as choosing the appropriate setting in the Cinnamon Panel options tab. Next, I decided to check on what themes are available at cinnamon.linuxmint.org before settling on Cinnamint 1.6. It all feels very comfortable, apart from not having an automatically growing list of workspaces that are a default offering in GNOME Shell. That goes against the design principles of Cinnamon though, so only hopes of someone making an extension that does that are left.

Adding Quicktime movie support to Firefox running on Linux

For whatever reason, my installation of Ubuntu GNOME Remix 12.10, didn't have QuickTime support added to Firefox by default. To make a website work near enough as it was intended, this needed to be remedied. The solution was to issue a command to install the missing software:

sudo apt-get install mplayer gnome-mplayer gecko-mediaplayer

Mplayer is the main component here but running the above command adds all the required supporting packages too, so that a Firefox restart was all that needed to get things going.

Sorting a kernel upgrade error in Linux Mint 13

Linux Mint 14 may be out now, but I'll be sticking with its predecessor for now. Being a user of GNOME Shell instead of Cinnamon or Mate, I'll wait for extensions to get updated for 3.6 before making a move away from 3.4 where the ones that I use happily work. Given that Linux Mint 13 is set to get support until 2017, it's not as if there is any rush either. Adding the back-ported packages repository to my list of software sources means that I will not miss out on the latest versions of MDM, Cinnamon and Mate anyway. With Ubuntu set to stick to GNOME 3.6 until after 13.04 is released, adding the GNOME 3 Team PPA will be needed if 3.8 arrives with interesting goodies; there are interesting noises that suggest the approach taken in Linux Mint 12 may be used to give more of a GNOME 2 desktop experience. Options abound and there are developments in the pipeline that I hope to explore too.

However, there is one issue that I have had to fix which stymies upgrades within the 3.2 kernel branch. A configuration file (/etc/grub.d/10_linux) points to /usr/share/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib instead of /usr/lib/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib so I have been amending it every time I needed to do a kernel update. However, it just reverts to the previous state, so I thought of another solution: creating a symbolic link in the incorrect location that points to the correct one so that updates complete without manual intervention every time. The command that does the needful is below:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib /usr/share/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib

Of course, figuring out what causes the reversion would be good too, but the symbolic link fix works so well that there's little point in exploring it further. Of course, if anyone can add how you'd do that, I'd welcome this advice too. New knowledge is always good.

Getting rid of a Dropbox error message on a Linux-powered PC

One of my PC's has ended up becoming a testing ground for a number of Linux distributions. The list has included openSUSE, Fedora, Arch and LMDE with Sabayon being the latest incumbent. From Arch onwards in that list, though, a message has appeared on loading the desktop with every one of these when I have Dropbox's client set up on there:

Unable to monitor entire Dropbox folder hierarchy. Please run "echo 100000 | sudo tee /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches" and restart Dropbox to correct the problem.

Even applying the remedy that the message suggests won't permanently resolve the issue. For that, you need to edit /etc/sysctl.conf with superuser access and add the following line to it:

fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 100000

With that in place, you can issue the following command to sort out the problem in the current session (assuming your user account is listed in /etc/sudoers):

sudo sysctl -p & dropbox stop & dropbox start

A reboot should demonstrate that the messages no longer appear again. For a good while, I had ignored it, but curiosity eventually got me to find out how it could be stopped and led to what you find above.

Making GNOME Shell work through extensions and customisation

There has been a lot of doom and gloom spoken about the GNOME desktop environment and the project behind it. These days, it seems to be the fashionable thing to go constantly criticising it, especially after what Linus Torvalds said. KDE went through the same sort of experience a few years ago and seems to have got far enough beyond it that some are choosing it instead of GNOME. For a good while, it was the other way around.

Since its inception, the GNOME Shell has attracted a lot of adverse comment. However, since my first encounter, it has grown on me to the point that I added it to Ubuntu and Linux Mint and use it as my default desktop environment instead of Unity, Mate or Cinnamon. The first of these may not be so surprising because of the unique approach that has been taken. The use of lenses and an application launch bar are items to which I could adapt, but it is the merging of application menus and title bars with the top panel of the desktop that really puts me off it. Application window buttons can be moved to the right everywhere but on this global menu, so I tend to view things from afar instead of using it every day. There just is something about the experience that won't grow on me. Strangely, that also applies to my impressions of KDE, albeit differently; there just is something less slick about the appearance of the bottom panel, the plasmoids and other items like them.

Given that Mate and Cinnamon continue the GNOME 2 approach to things that dominated my home computing for much of the last five years since I turned to Ubuntu, my decision to use GNOME Shell instead of either come as a surprise. It isn't that the environments aren't slick enough, just that I have come to prefer the way that GNOME Shell handles workspaces, spawning them as you need them. If that could be an option in Cinnamon, then it might become my desktop of choice. However, that seems to go against the philosophy of the project, even if someone adds and extension for it.

For a time, I played with going with LXDE rather than either Unity or GNOME Shell; as it happened, my first impressions of the latter weren't so positive until I spent a day with the GNOME variant of Fedora 15. Being not dissimilar to GNOME 2 in the way that it worked was the main attraction of LXDE and my initial use of it was with Lubuntu running on a netbook; the LXDE version of Linux Mint 12 now runs on it so there hasn't been so much change on that machine.

Sometimes, the only way to deal with change is to have a look at it to see what's coming and to decide what you need to do about it. In the case of GNOME Shell, my day with Fedora 15 on a backup PC changed my impressions, and Linux Mint 11's GNOME 2 desktop looked a bit old-fashioned afterwards. In fact, I popped GNOME 3 on there and have been using it as my main desktop environment ever since.

With computing, there always are some who expect things to just work and be the way that they want them. The need for extra configuration is a criticism that still can be levelled at GNOME Shell. Before going with Mate and Cinnamon, Linux Mint went the same way for a while, leaving me to wonder what can be done with such an approach. Will someone else pick up that baton and do the handiwork so that users don't have to do it? Not yet, it seems. Since no one is following the lead of Linux Mint 12, the need for user tweaking remains, even if I have found which ones work for me.

The first place to begin is GNOME's Extensions website, from where I raid a few extensions every time I do an operating system installation. The Alternative Status Menu extension is among the first to get added so that I have the shutdown option again on the user menu, a common criticism of the default set up. Since I always install the GNOME Tweak Tool from the distro repositories, I add the Advanced Setting in User Menu extension to get an entry in the status menu that grants quick access. Frippery Bottom Panel comes next on the list because of its workspace switcher and application window list. Others like Frippery Move Clock, Monitor Status Indicator, Places Status Indicator, Removable Drive Menu, Remove Accessibility, Shell Restart User Menu Entry and User Themes follow in some order and make things feel more pleasing, at least to my mind.

You aren't stuck with the default theme, either, and I have chosen Elementary Luna from deviantART. For adding your own themes, the above listed User Themes extension is needed. Because I want the Frippery Bottom Panel to match the top panel, I tweaked its stylesheet and that's where the Restart User Menu Entry extension is useful, though some care is needed not to crash the desktop with constant shell restarts.

Doing the above makes GNOME Shell really amenable to me, and I wouldn't like to lose that freedom to customise. Saying that, the continued controversial changes aren't stopping yet. Those made to the Nautilus file manager in GNOME 3.6 have caused the Linux Mint project to create Nemo, a fork of the software, and Ubuntu is sticking with the previous version for now. Taking some action yourself instead of just complaining loudly sounds like a more positive approach, which makes its own statement. However, at a time when many want the GNOME project team to listen to users, the new Nautilus appears and is not to be what they needed to see. Could the project go on like this? Only time can answer that one.

While it appears that many have changed from GNOME to other desktop environments, I haven't come across any numbers. A reducing user base could be a way of sending a message about any discontent, one that makes use of a great feature of free software: there is plenty of choice. If the next version of Nautilus isn't to my taste, there are plenty of alternatives out there. After all, Cinnamon started on Linux Mint and has gone from there to being available for other distros too; Fedora is one example. Nemo could follow suit.

Now that GNOME's constituent applications are seeing changes, GNOME Shell may be left to mature. Computer interfaces are undergoing a lot of change right now, and Microsoft Windows 8 is bringing its own big leap. Though controversial at the time, change can be a good thing too and us technical folk always like seeing new things come along (today saw the launch of the iPhone 5 and many folk queueing up for it; Google's Nexus 7 ran out of stock in its first weeks on the market; there are more). That could be what got me using GNOME 3 in the first place, even if my plan is to stick with it for a while yet.

Renaming multiple files in Linux

The Linux and UNIX command mv has a number of limitations, such as not overwriting destination files and not renaming multiple files using wildcards. The only solution to the first that I can find is one that involves combining the cp and rm commands. For the second, there's another command: rename. Here's an example like what I used recently:

rename s/fedora/fedora2/ fedora.*

The first argument in the above command is a regular expression much like what Perl is famous for implementing; in fact, it is Perl-compatible ones (PCRE) that are used. The s before the first slash stands for substitute, with fedora being the string that needs to be replaced and fedora2 being what replaces it. The third command is the file name glob that you want to use, fedora.* in this case. Therefore, all files in a directory named fedora will be renamed fedora2 regardless of the file type. The same sort of operation can be performed for all files with the same extension when it needs to be changed, htm to html, for instance. Of course, there are other uses, but these are handy ones to know.