cloudplasma various photographs and (oh too few) mini linux tips

2Feb/100

browser benchmark — test yours with peacekeeper

future­mark (the people behind the fam­ous graph­ics card bench­marks) have a browser test avail­able on their site peace­keeper.

you can check out other browsers res­ults or test your own.

i only have three installed at the moment on ubuntu 10.04 alpha 2 and my paltry res­ults can be seen in this screenshot…

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24Jan/100

upgraded to ubuntu 10.04 alpha 2

this isn’t a review but thought i’d write about the fact that i just upgraded to ubuntu 10.04 alpha 2 from ubuntu 9.04 on my main laptop (a dell inspiron 1545) and everything is func­tion­ing very nicely.

grab the iso here. i stuck it onto a usb key using unet­bootin and was ready to go (obvi­ously back­ing up all import­ant data before proceeding!).

i keep my home dir­ect­or­ies on a sep­ar­ate (encryp­ted) par­ti­tion so format­ted / and /boot but left the rest alone.

the install really is beau­ti­fully simple…it’s been well stream­lined over the years (a far cry from when i star­ted using ubuntu back with dap­per) and was com­plete in 10 minutes or so. all hard­ware was detec­ted out of the box…the cor­rect res­ol­u­tion set for the panel, net­work con­nec­tions work­ing (wired and wire­less), sound play­back and func­tion keys all ok too. after run­ning apt-get update quite a lot of updates are installed even though this is a recent release…after this is com­plete we end up with the 2.6.32–11-generic #15-ubuntu smp kernel.

hap­pily using this as my main system…encountered very few bugs so far (and they were trivial).

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25Dec/090

running ps3 media server on linux

the hard disk on the ps3 has quite a lim­ited capacity…especially after a few games have been installed that require a few giga­bytes of stor­age. so instead of using the local disk i like to stream media from my laptop run­ing linux (cur­rently ubuntu 9.10).

one solu­tion is to use ps3 media server. grab the com­pressed files here and extract them to a dir­ect­ory of your choice.

firstly you may need to change the per­mis­sions on PMS.sh so that your non root user may execute it ‘sudo chmod 777 PMS.sh’. then run ./PMS.sh as a reg­u­lar user to fire up the server.  if your ps3 doesn’t appear like the screen­shot here then go to the ‘Gen­eral Con­fig­ur­a­tion’ tab and enter the IP address of your linux box (NOT THE PS3) and restart the server…hopefully the ps3 should now be detec­ted cor­rectly. next step is to add your media shares. i edited PMS.conf manu­ally with gedit (you could try brows­ing for your dir­ect­or­ies dir­ectly from the server inter­face but that didn’t work for me). after ‘folders =’ add the path to the media you want to share…for example if you want to add your music folder add this ‘\/home\/user\/Music,’. repeat this for all the folders you’d like to share with the ps3, save the file and then restart the server.

if you now go to the music sec­tion of the ps3 and scroll down the ps3 media server icon should appear and you can drill down the dir­ect­or­ies to find the music you want. i’ve shared music (mp3 & flac), video (vari­ous formats) and images. all have played back flaw­lessly. a great little solu­tion to the prob­lem of stream­ing to your ps3 from linux. i’m sure there are many other meth­ods but this worked well for me.

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20Aug/090

get a zen micro 4gb working under ubuntu 9.04

bought a rather ancient 4gb cre­at­ive zen micro from a guy at work…not really sure why as i already have 2 mp3 play­ers but buy it i did.

one prob­lem. as its an mtp device it isn’t detec­ted in the usual ‘mass stor­age’ way by ubuntu (or win­dows for that mat­ter) so i had to find a work around. first stop was the rather clever gnomad2 which can be installed eas­ily with

apt-get install gnomad2

this will install the app along with a couple of depend­en­cies. after this has fin­ished gnomad2 can be found in the ‘sound & video’ menu.

i plugged in the micro and star­ted the pro­gram but was met with the error ‘usb_set_configuration: oper­a­tion not permitted’.

the fix requires you to copy this file (right-click and ‘save as’) to /etc/udev/rules.d/ as root…like so…

sudo cp 99-nomad.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/

after copy­ing the file udev must be restar­ted by issuing

sudo /etc/init.d/udev restart

finally add your user­name to the ‘plug­dev’ group

sudo gpasswd –a user­name plugdev

gnomad2 should now detect the zen micro and tunes can be hap­pily copied across to it. lot of effort for a mediocre media player. might end up stick­ing with my sony nwz-b135 which works with linux out of the box (ter­rible shuffle mode though!). source

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