Amarok mp3 player automation

Amarok complains that your mp3 player must be mounted before you can connect to it. It can be a bit of a faff having to mount the device first, so here's how to do it automatically.

1. Install pmount

sudo apt-get install pmount

2. Make sure your user is a member of plugdev

3. Test you can mount you mp3 player with

pmount-hal /dev/[device]

pumount /dev/[device]

4. In amarok goto settings > configure amarok > Media Devices > Add Device

5. Select Generic Media Player, Enter a name for the device, and the directory that it will be mounted to. Then select ok

6. Go to the devices tab. Select the device and click the gears icon.

7. Enter the pmount commands as above in to the top two boxes.

Done

Post comments if you want more detail

Subscribe to Podcasts in Amarok

If your using firefox, then you may have come across the feed subscription page when clicking on podcast links. It would be rather nice if you could configure firefox to subscribe to the podcast using amarok wouldn't it! Well go on over to http://porpoisehead.net/hi/?q=node/25 and you'll find a rather handy script (akadd) to do this for you.....

.... but before you do, you might want to know that you may need to install xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support for this to work. This was the case for my install of Hardy KDE4 with firefox 3.

ref: http://www.mail-archive.com/ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com/msg967942.html

Launching programs from remote computer using ssh

If you have an old laptop lying around that doesn't quite have the juice to run newer programs such as firefox (takes about 250mb to run well), then this howto will show you how to make use of the old girl yet.

Even the latest versions of ubuntu (such as hardy 8.04) can be installed on fairly modest machines with a reduced system (unlike windows or macox). Xubuntu is a easy to use system for older machines that still looks good and has full functionallity. If your machine is really old (like mine) and you have the wherewithal to run shell commands then download the alternative installation cd, install the server version of ubuntu (no graphical interface) and manually install icewm. This is probably on a par with win95 for looks, but is far less thirsty.

This is where the magic begins - although ..... I may have neglected to mention earlier that you'll need a more powerful desktop pc that can run the required software - a small omission I know. Linux has a reasonably simple to use graphical tunneling network system. This means that you can run a program on one machine and view it on another - assuming they are networked. If you have a wireless router then you have the ideal setup.

The required software is ssh (secure shell). You'll need to install it in most ubuntu distributions. Once installed all you have to do is run the following command on the laptop:

ssh -X xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx firefox

Note the -X is uppercase. The xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the IP address for the desktop machine. You can usually find this on the router's admin page (often it will be 192.168.0.x or 10.0.0.x). You will need to have a user account set up on the desktop for this to work. However if someone is logged on to that user on the desktop and is using firefox then it won't allow you to start another instance. You may wish to create a new user on the desktop specifically for the laptop to use. If this is the case then you will need to tell ssh to use a different user name with

ssh -X username@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx firefox

The next step is to create an icon to shortcut this command. Unfortunately this won't work because the command requires a password. However you can remove the need for a password by setting up keys. Here's how.

On the laptop type:

ssh-keygen -t rsa

then press enter at each prompt to set no password.

As you will notice this creates a file called "~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub". This file needs to be copied to the desktop machine so that the desktop machine can authenticate the laptop for future logins.

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub username@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

Samba Share on Ubuntu Hardy

Here's a quick howto on creating a network drive under ubuntu (i used this set up to connect from windows mobile 6 - with total commander)

1) Install the package "samba"

2) edit /etc/samba/smb.conf

3) Add the following lines to the end of the file (keep the square brackets)

[name for network drive]
path = path of drive
browsable = yes
read only = no
guest ok = no

4) restart samba with /etc/init.d/samba restart

5) add user passwords with

sudo smbpasswd -L -a username
sudo smbpasswd -L -e username

6) test the connection with

smbclient -L "name of host"

7) connect with the path //hostname/networkdrivename

8) if you are mounting in ubuntu, you may need to install the package "smbfs" and make sure that you have ownership of the mount point. An example fstab is shown below

//{computer}/{shared_folder} /mnt/{mount_point} smbfs rw,user,auto,uid={username},gid={group},username={username},password={password} 0 0

replace the {} bits with your settings. Having your password in this file isnt very secure.

Ahhhh my mobile's memory card gone got corrupted.

The wonders of vfat and wm6 left me with a corrupted memory card on my pocket pc mobile phone. In the digital camera folder no-less. But don't worry, this story has a happy ending!

Trying to perform ls on the dcim folder gave me:

ls: cannot access 100media: Input/output error

dmesg said:

FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sdb1)
fat_get_cluster: invalid cluster chain (i_pos 0)

so first-things-first, I made a direct copy of the memory card via

dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=memorycard.iso bs=2048

I could then play-around with the iso image without having to worry about loosing data (It took a while to copy the 4Gb over usb). I had to run this as root.

To fix the problem I ran fsck (I changed the ownership (chown) of the iso to my user first so I didn't have to run fsck as root.)

fsck.vfat -a memorycard.iso

This reported:

dosfsck 2.11, 12 Mar 2005, FAT32, LFN
/dcim/100media
Contains a free cluster (8712). Assuming EOF.
Reclaimed 5225 unused clusters (171212800 bytes) in 246 chains.
Performing changes.
memorycard.iso: 8454 files, 33037/124112 clusters

I then mounted the iso image:

sudo mount -o loop memorycard.iso /mnt/temp

In the root of the iso were lots of .rec files. These turned out to be perfectly preserved copies of the lost files (minus the file name). I opened the folder in a file manager and it recognised the files as jpgs and mp4s. All that remainded was to rename the files and format the memory card.