22 May 2005
Totem is great, but adding plugins via its brilliant drag-and-drop-couldn’t-be-easier “Add Proprietary Plugins” interface does absolutely nothing if you’re using the totem-gstreamer version (the default that ships with Ubuntu). Switching to totem-xine makes the playback with these plugins possible, but potentially introduces problems of its own.
The inbuilt configuration of Totem is pretty poor, but thankfully there’s a way around it. The actual configuration exists in a hidden folder in your home directory – for me, this is /home/josh/.gnome2/ – the file you’re looking for is totem_config
For me, it was simply a case of uncommenting audio.driver and setting it to “esd” (audio.driver:esd) – but depending on what distribution and sound server you’re using, YMMV.
Anyway, Totem now works great, and I have cooler visualisations than gstreamer’s!
21 May 2005
The Sydney Morning Herald has had a series of rather unfortunate snippets published of late. I found them immensely amusing (perhaps I’m just childish), and thought I’d share two.
From the article Six stranded on Luna Park ride, the closing paragraph reads thus:
“That accident was believed to have been caused by a cap which blew off a passenger’s head and caught in the Mad Mouse’s car wheels.”
Just for the record, no-one was injured in this incident – It’s just a crap sentence.
And then there was this headline (probably by now ubiquitous due to syndicated news services – this one was from AP) — “Probe ordered into Saddam underwear photos.” I’ll leave the misreading of this to the reader… again, maybe I’m just childish!
UPDATE: The Saddam headline didn’t make it to the next edition’s print, but no such qualms were had about printing the last paragraph of the Luna Park article… ahhh, journalists.
21 May 2005
Thought I’d just praise Bigpond for a moment, seeing it doesn’t happen very often.
I just downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu using wget. The numbers speak for themselves:
18:50:56 (1.09 MB/s) – `ubuntu-5.04-install-i386.iso’ saved [615,307,264/615,307,264]
I was also browsing at normal speed, whilst streaming 96kbps audio and watching Flash video. Cool for $AU60 a month, hey?
21 May 2005
For a hedgehog.
No, really – it’s like Warty, only beautiful. It feels like a far more mature system, and everything just works. They’ve switched it to X.org from the old X server, and the font rendering shows it. Applications which previously clawed your eyes out when upgrades were attempted now work flawlessly (most notably Firefox and Liferea, for myself). Audio works a charm, with even XMMS now playing nice.
It’s good.
Mostly because of the interfaces.
In related news, I downloaded that ISO and didn’t use it – no big deal, seeing as I grabbed it from files.bigpond.com (doesn’t count towards my quota) and it went quickly – because it’s possible to simply edit the sources.list file and use Synaptic to update everything!
Basically change all references from “warty” to “hoary” in your sources.list file ( /etc/apt/sources.list ) and run Synaptic. Took me about an hour and a half from editing the sources.list file to a completed upgrade, no breakages.
Good work, Ubuntu!
20 May 2005
“How do you want to approach this revision?”
“From a distance… with a large, pointy stick.”
– Andrew responds to a teacher’s suggestion that revision be undertaken.