Linux and Windows dual booting has always been a hassle. Linux likes to do it it’s way and Windows likes to do the same. Installing one after the other, one usually gets a nice friendly boot up screen that allows you to choose which operating system to boot. Windows 7 in it’s current form for some reason seems to despise other operating systems and does not to put an option to boot other operating systems after a fresh install when you installed Linux first.
While there are many ways to get the Windows bootloader to give you options, I find the best way to get the option to boot into Linux back is to re-install GRUB. I happen to use Kubuntu, so following the instructions step by step on any variation of Ubuntu should work while some other distributions might require some tweaking to the steps.
First you will need the live CD you used to install Linux. Boot into the live CD and open a terminal.
In the terminal, enter the following commands …
sudo grub
find/boot/grub/stage1
root (hd?,?)# replace ? with the information you got from the previous command.
setup (hd0)
quit
That’s it! Reboot and you should get your grub menu back.
Over 100k tracks, all tagged correctly, many rated, I tunes fucked up. The recently released Itunes 7.7 which was supposed to bring among other things … a new firmware and apps to the Touch and Iphone have made me unable to update my Touch because an updated Apple Mobile Device Support won’t install. Every damn document and discussion in Apple forums tells me to “uninstall Itunes and related software” … the problem is, Itunes doesn’t want to uninstall! It keeps rolling back. So how the hell do I uninstall Itunes? Way to go Apple. My apologies I’m not an asstard Apple fanboy. I only love you until you fuck my tunes over.
Well not just you, but with the help of thousands or perhaps millions of other people around the world to download Firefox 3 on launch day.
I’ve been using Firefox 3 for a while now and it’s been great. It seems to be a bit faster than Firefox 2 and if that doesn’t convince you, there are great extensions and it’s prettier!
After months of delays, the public preview of Yahoo! Messenger for Vista is finally here. Too bad I ditched Vista months ago for Ubuntu. If you don’t require all the useless crap modern mainstream instant messengers have today such as dumb smilies, annoying emotes, etc., Pidgin is just as good … even better for those who would rather communicate not BS in instant messages.
Rhythmbox is a great music player for Linux inspired by Itunes … and in many ways, arguably better in some areas than Itunes. If you use Last.FM however, support for it and other Linux media players is limited via the default Last.FM plugin. You can’t scrobble tracks that are in an Itunes server (DAAP) for example. As usual, the free software community comes to the rescue the New Style Last.FM plugin. Tracks are sent to the Linux Last.FM client and is forwarded to the server. Great stuff! The plugin page has repositories to download a whole Rhythmbox package. The Ubuntu repository only hosts a 32bit version of Rhythmbox so if you are on an AMD64 platform, you can download this build AMD64 build from here.
Remember to disable the old plugin. You also need to have the Linux client for Last.FM already installed from their website or from their apt repository.
For some time now I’ve been looking for a media player for Linux that really fit what I wanted. Granted, even with Windows, there wasn’t a media player that didn’t have things I hated about it. Itunes for example wanted pushed me to hitting newborns after I fixed some of my albums by correctly specifying certain albums were part of compilations with multiple artists. I had to re-tag and move around almost one hundred albums because Itunes decided it wanted a different directory structure in my music folder. Instead of uniformly doing it to all tracks in one album, it picked and chose which it wanted. Enough of that, this isn’t about Itunes. But it does show you how frustrating trying to manage a lot of music is.
Some time ago Songbird was released for developers to play around with and it has matured steadily. At the time my main desktop was Vista Ultimate, so I didn’t think nothing of it. Since transferring to Ubuntu 7.10, I have been looking for a decent replacement and it was the perfect time to try out Songbird. Songbird is a multi-platform (runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac) media player that looks like a marriage between Firefox and Itunes. The built-in web browser is powered by the same engine that powers Firefox and the interface eerily looks like Itunes, even amongst different themes which Songbird calls “feathers”.
… not that acting like Itunes is a bad thing, the results are not as gratifying as Itunes however. Search doesn’t work as desired or as expected. Little things like the difference between “Cafe del Mar” and “Café del Mar” made searches give vastly different results. They shouldn’t, the program should either give you the results of both or be smart enough that when you input one thing, you also mean another. Resizing is fubar, at least in Ubuntu … it simply doesn’t maximize. Tagging could also do with a lot of work. Anyone who is going to use a complicated music manager such as Songbird or Itunes is going to want to tag their music … yes please I’ll have tagging on top … preferably something more intuitive than that included with Itunes or Windows Media Player.
Lots of features (ie. Album Art) that should be built into the software aren’t and people are relied upon to build extensions. While extensions in Firefox are great, core functions such as Bookmarks aren’t extensions. On the same note, feathers and extensions on the addons page should really be separated into different sections as well as in the extensions section. Feathers and extensions are NOT the same thing, or shouldn’t be if you are used to the way Firefox does it.
Last, but not least, what is up with Skreemr? While we’re at it, let’s add a link the The Pirate Bay. Nothing against it, but in an app like this?
In the end, there is a lot of things that can be improved in Songbird … but that is a given in Developer Release. Duh! No wonder why there is so many things wrong with it! It’s a developer release! I started using Firefox in it’s pre 1.0 form, I can only hope that Songbird is as great by then as Firefox was. In any case, I look forward to further Songbird releases, but for now, back to Rhythmbox.
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