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…
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).
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.
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
