Another linux question
 

So, just for fun, I installed a copy of Ubuntu. Everything works fine and I haven't had any problems, but one thing is bugging the crap out of me. My screen is SO BLUE looking! In Windows, I could use Adobe's Gamma Loader (or ATI's configuration tools) to fix this, but I can't seem to find any equivalent tool here.

Does such a calibration tool exist? Where can I get it? All I really need is something that will allow me to independently adjust the levels for R, G, and B for my monitor.

Did you have to adjust that in Windows as well? If so, you might want to use your monitor's controls to make things right instead.

Well, this is a laptop, and there are no controls for that sort of thing. In Windows, what I did was just use ATI's utility to slightly lower the gamma for the blue channel, and it worked great and looked normal again.

Ubuntu uses GNOME by default......I'll try starting into GNOME when I get home and seeing if I remember anything, but I think the setting might be around somewhere in the Gnome Control Panel.

I'm also having trouble installing the Musepack plugin for XMMS. (Most of my music is in MPC format.) Can somebody walk me through this? I have a package full of files (I guess it needs to be compiled or something). It was much easier in Windows. Open zip file. Drag plugin to C:\winamp\plugins, and use.

Oh well, perhaps having things more complicated will help me kickstart my mind again.

Install xmms-musepack though Synaptic or apt or Adept or whichever interface to the packaging system you use. It really couldn't be easier. Try running basic searches through your program (I know Synaptic can do this) in search of packages--a lot of it is already in repos for you to use without having to build yourself.

I already tried that, I can't find any listings for that.

You need to enable the universe repositories.
Do this through Synaptic, or manually edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file and add universe to the end of your "deb ..." lines for general packages. Alternately, you can provide it here and I (or someone else) can show you the changes.

You're talking to a total linux idiot here, cut me some slack. :(

In the meantime, I'll try what you said.

Edit: Cool, it worked.

My screen is still a shockingly blue color though.

You being new is why I added the bit at the end about one of us being able to help you with it if you wanted. ;)

Beyond that, though, I don't know anything about gamma correction.

There's this command line utility called xgamma. You can access its manual by typing "man xgamma" into the terminal. Play around with it until you get decent results, I'm sure someone else here will know how to apply the command on the start of the XServer.


Edit:
I posted a sources.list for Ubuntu Dapper here. It should give you access to all branches of the official repositories. You might want to change the region-specific prefixes in some of the lines though ("au" in the list I posted, "de" in mine, yours could be "fr").

Getting it to act along with the server startup is simple.

Let us say you decide upon using this (replace the argument values as appropriate):
You would then stick that command into a file in your home directory named .xinitrc, and append a " &" to the end of the line, like so:

Hehe, another useful config file (three years Linux and it never caught my attention). My best bet would have been the KDE autostart but since the regular Ubuntu comes with Gnome...

Awesome, my display looks normal again. Thanks!

Dummy question: Do you mean the directory named home, or my own personal root directory, ( /piccolonamek/ ) or something even higher up in the tree? Also, does this file already exist, or do I need to create it? I did a search and found a file named .xinitrc, but there's nothing important in it, and it's buried in a pretty deep directory.

Also, I was trying to modify a file so that my Windows NTFS drive would be auto-mounted each time I started up, but I wasn't allowed. Do I need to log in as root? I tried logging in as "root" and a number of other names, but to no avail.

By "home directory", I mean your personal folder, where your profile information, program settings, and personal files are stored (by default). "Home directory" is a fairly common term in the Linux world, and bash (the command-line) helps to accomadate you here. In Bash, you can switch to your home directory quickly by typing simply cd as a command. Also, the character ~ is used to reference your home directory in Bash as well, such that:

~/.xinitrc is translated by Bash into /home/piccolonamek/.xinitrc.

To get the .xinitrc up simply, run this on the terminal to fire up gedit using the proper filename. If a file doesn't exist by that name, gedit will write it for you when you save your work.

Awesome, now what about my hard drive? :D

Edit: Bah. I created and saved the file exactly like you said, but it didn't do anything when I restarted by computer. Everything was still blue, and I had to enter the command manually.

Double Post:
On another note, how do I get this MPC encoder working. The file I downloaded from musepack's website only contains one file "mppenc-linux-libc6-1.15v.tar-1".

I don't want to have to compile any shit. Damn.

.xinitrc needs to have 0644 permissions (or better). Does it? To check, run "stat ~/.xinitrc" and see what the Access line shows. You can also go and add it to the Sessions in Gnome by using System > Administration > Sessions or something to that effect--add the command with a priority of 20 and it should work fine.

MPC encoder? Do you have a command available on your computer called "mppenc"? That's the musepack encoder. Search your repos for mpc/musepack and see if anything looks helpful?

Compiling is the easiest three-step process ever, provided you don't have to fulfill any dependencies (and that you have build-essential installed.)

./configure
make
make-install

Done and installed.

But there should be an XMMS musepack plugin already in the repositories, I think.

I have the XMMS plugin for playing MPC files, but there's nothing about an encoder (which I need and frequently use.)

At any rate, I still have no idea what I'm supposed to do with this cryptic file.

Another thing I am going to have to do is figure out how to run Cool Edit 2000 on this system. I don't want to have to boot back into windows just to work on some WAV files. No other audio editor will do. CE2000 is the best of the best for plain old waveform editing, and nothing else even begins to compare.

Did you even look for mppenc? But that file you have is a tar, so you will need to unpack it using the tar command.

This should work:With that attitude, I can't help you find anything comparable. You don't even want to try anything else, it seems.

I didn't mean to seem snotty, it's just that I've tried everything else, and I mean everything else, and nothing even comes close in terms of speed, ease of use, user interface, features, and configurability. I edit audio for a living, so all of these things are important. Only super high end tools such as Protools could possibly match Cool Edit's greatness, but they are in another class entirely.

And yes, I searched for mppenc. Nothing. But the tar unpacking command worked, thank you. (Edit: Too bad the files are useless by themselves. Doesn't anything just work with this OS?) I got the gamma command to work on start up as well, thanks a bunch for that.

It doesn't "just work" on Windows, either. You have to install the encoder there. Here, you do the same thing. Unpack that tar, then read the README file enclosed.

Though Merv's commands should build and install it for you. I really don't see what's so hard, here. It worked fine for me on Ubuntu, SUSE, and Gentoo. :\

On Windows, it does "just work". I open the zip file, drag the mpc batch encoder .exe onto the desktop, tell it where the encoder is, and boom, it's ready to go, just like that.

I unpacked the tar file, and got two files, mppenc and another file, static-mppenc, or mppenc-static, one or the other, whatever. No readme file (or any files other than the encoders) was included. Clicking on on them does nothing, and they can't be run from a command line either. I also realized that there are no good linux frontends for the encoder either. I suppose I'll just have to do it all manually, once/if I get everything working.

Oh well, it isn't that big a deal. I can always reboot into Windows when I need to encode some WAVs. Other than that, everything is working fine. I was hoping to eventually abandon Windows completely, but It just doesn't seem fesible. I can't even imagine how hard it would be to get Cool Edit working over here.

Just wait until I try to network this PC with the other PCs in my house... *psycho strings*

For now, I'm going to bed. Later.

You can run such binaries by entering "./[file name]" in the command line. If it does not work, run "chmod +x [file name]" first (gives the file executable rights). Copying a binary into /usr/bin will make the program available system wide (and without the "./"). The static version should work in most cases since the library data needed to run it was included in the binary when compiled (the regular/dynamic version relies on libraries installed on your system, if these are missing or versions don't match, it won't work).

As for frontends, I'm not sure wether there is anything similar, that does not rely on KDE's extensive libraries but K3b's CD ripping component is pretty configurable. I feed it a certain LAME command line for example.

And while Audacity's interface is ugly as hell, at least give it a try for basic wave editing. ;)

It's those dependencies that usually become such a pain in the ass. Exept for very simple tools and my custom kernels I never compiled anything myself (though I tried numerous times over the years). MPlayer comes to mind as THE baptism-by-fire-app. Besides, it's usually nicer to install programs with the package manager of your distribution, so you don't have to preserve any uninstall scripts.
I know there is make-kpkg for Debian-based distros (I use that for kernel building) and I presume creating ebuilds for Gentoo isn't that hard either. I'm probably just lazy and had the luck to switch OSs around the time when getting by on Linux without compiling became feasible for power users.

That's not "just working", Namek. You still had to do work to get it installed, much less working. You should not expect switching your OS to be an easy feat at first (even from Windows to OSX), or else you will be looking for trouble. About the readme, that's odd. The version I download always had a README file, but it also needs to be compiled, so...

Oh, also. As a random note, you may need to be mindful of your paths when you use mppenc. As an example, if the path to an audio file has Japanese in it anywhere, mppenc bombs on this end. It may not for you, or this might not be relevant to you (English-only filenames), but just a warning.

Be careful about modifying anything in /usr/bin, and make sure you don't nuke or change anything you don't know about in there, since blowing up things like gnome-control-center would be quite inconvenient. ;)

Heh, Audacity is full of sadness and fail compared to Cool Edit. One thing that I couldn't stand about it was that when playing a WAV file it wouldn't scroll smoothly, it would rapidly jump ahead when the marker got to the end of the current segment. That's very annoying when you have to listen to the file while you're editing it. And when I noticed an error I needed to fix, I actually had to press stop! In Cool Edit, clicking the waveform stops the scrolling, even if you're still playing.

CE2000 also has a significantly more advanced compressor, something that I use very frequenly. Audacity doesn't even let me change the release time. :( And, VERY stupidly, if you apply any effects while zoomed in on the waveform, it zooms all the way out! What the hell? The blue on gray color scheme is annoying as well, and unfortunately, it can't be changed. It also seems like the whole interface is running at 5 FPS.

The level meter in CE2000 is actually maked in db from total silence all the way to clipping, and has convinient clipping indicators as well. This is useful for knowing where the noise floor is and how loud the signal is in comparison.

Small things like this matter, and make anything other than Cool Edit completely unusable to me.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v1...ek/Editing.jpg

Truly one of the best programs ever written. I've attatched an example of my work, a before-and-after. Listen to it, it's actually quite funny. ;)

Your problem is that you're expecting a windows clone. And like so many others before you realized - Linux is none.
If you don't want to abandon Cool Edit you've to stick with Windows. Or use Wine, VMWare, etc. to get it running. But that's not what Linux was built for.

I wasn't expecting a Windows clone. I what I wasn't excpeting was having to use such laborious and roundabout measures to do simple program installs with a Linux distro that is supposed to be extra newbie friendly.

But I will deal with it. Despite all of my whining, I learn quickly, and soon I'll look back on my difficulties and laugh. Eventually, I would like to attempt to emulate Cool Edit, because it is the one Windows program that I really need. Otherwise, everything is working very well. If all else fails, I can keep my windows partition just for running Cool Edit.

See, your problem is that you're too windows bound. For the native linux user these 'simple program installs' are a breeze when working on the console. You're expecting that everything works by clicking some button. Trust if I say it's best for a 'newbie' (I really don't like that expression) to work only with console at the start. You learn a lot more than starting you linux career with a gfx interface.

Imagine someone using linux for his whole life. Now he wants to install some software package on windows. At first he does not find the package manager (nearly every linux distri has one), maybe he realizes he has to download the packages by hand from the net. This done he wonders about the strange method of mounting filesystem (C:, D: <- ???) while browsing the directories for this home-directory. Eventually he finds the exe he has downloaded, and double-clicks. After reading some serious bullshit about license, etc. the install ends and the poor guy tries to execute the application, but where to find the right icon to click?? (at least he learnt to click everything *g*)
You see, it's also hard for the linux guys to understand windows.

But you have to admit that this is entirely possible on most distros these days. If an Ubuntu or Debian user doesen't want to hack "apt-get install [program]" into the terminal there is always Synaptic.
Plus graphical user interfaces have more advantages over a text-only interface than "stuff you can click on". Tool tips come to mind, intuitively organized menus, stuff like that. The console is for people who preferably know what they want and how to do it. That's not exatly newbie friendly and it never will be.

Synaptic requires just as much information and skill as using Aptitude, or even apt for that matter. Many people I know can type faster than they can click to things, and just for reference most of them are in their thirties. Not using that to say anything negative about you, but I just don't really like GUIs.

Back to our old friend Synaptic/Aptitude. Go fire up Aptitude and try to tell me that again. Besides, what if X breaks? If the person is completely reliant on gedit for editing, they'll be pretty much screwed without vi, nano, emacs, or friends (since it's really easy to break things in vim). Alternately, what if they need to get something reinstalled, but are inconfident in their skills with apt? Aptitude is much more familiar, and usable.

How is it not newbie friendly? You can do everything a GUI can much faster on the terminal. I will admit to you here that I used to be a "GUI or Bust" type, but then I found the wonders of man. Namek seems to know what he's doing with Windows, just that the transition from being a "Windows Power User" to "Linux WTF" type person will confuse anyone. As an example, I have a friend's parents (in their seventies) on Linux and they can use it fine, since they're not looking for all this eclectic stuff you are (much less, they're on Gentoo).

It's all choice, though. Want it to "just work" when you were raised on the OS? Go Windows.

I sure hope I know what I'm doing with Windows; I've been using it since Windows 3.1 came out! Speaking of terminals and command lines, I was an MS-DOS master! I knew every command and could navigate my way around almost as quickly as I can clicking on directories in Windows. I hope I can achieve the same proficiency in Linux.

Anyway, everything is running smoothly now, except for the fact that my laptop won't suspend properly. It seems a lot of other people have this problem as well. Also, there seems to be a problem with sound playback. I was watching a video on Youtube, and the sound was nearly one second out of sync with the video right from the get-go. It also sounded very muffled, like there was no treble at all. It runs and sounds just fine on Windows...

Not a big deal at all, but what it causing it? XMMS' MPC plugin sucks as well, it abruptly stops playing the file about five seconds before the end of the actual song, and the timer constantly goes out of synch.

Yeah sure, same here.
I'm faster at a lot of taks with the terminal as well, one of them being software installation. My Ubuntu is a server install upgraded to a just-what-I-need desktop and for most other administrative tasks, nano and mc are my tools of choice. But you just cannot throw this at newbies and be like "here, eat up!" or act as if their Windows-grown liking for GUIs was some kind of primitive tribal tradition.
After all, Open Source software is about choice, steaming from people's individual preferences. I'd never gotten into Linux in the first place if it had not been for a solid base of easy to use graphical programs to cover my basic computing needs (like putting on some music in XMMS/BMP ... with a few no-brainer clicks). Of course, when guiding people through their first steps with Linux, I show them a few basic things on the terminal but there's usually plenty of other stuff they will regard as a tad more urgent at that point.

Heh, about three minutes ago, my copy of Linux actually crashed. I went to take a shower, and when I came back, the screensaver was on. So I moved the mouse, and bam, total system crash. I was forced to restart.

I don't really need the screen saver at all, but that is just ridiculous that trying to stop the screensaver would cause the system to fail.

Double Post:
Speaking of suspend mode, does anybody know why my sound quits working when I come out of suspend? It displays an error message, but it isn't there long enough for me to read. Is there any way I can capture this message for a bug report?

I have another question. Does anyone know of a good GUI-based partitioning tool for Linux? I've got this configured to the point where I can use it for 99% of my activities. The only thing I need Windows for is to run Cool Edit, Photoshop, and possibly some games, so I want to make that partition smaller, and this one bigger.

Qtparted should be fine for that. (Or gtparted?)

It's actually gparted for the Gnome version, qtparted for the KDE-ish version.

In your case, Namek, get gparted as Ubuntu uses a Gnome base. The interface is not that dissimilar to that which PartitionMagic uses, if you are familiar with the latter program.

Now how do I get it to let me edit the partitions? :(

You cannot edit partitions on a drive which is active (mounted) in any way.

Unmount all active partitions on the volume, and try again. A Knoppix LiveCD could be of use for you.

I tried unmounting it; it still wouldn't work.

I also encountered something lame tonight. I wanted to install my preferred torrent client, ABC, but you have to compile the source yourself. Of course, there is NO documentation whatsoever. They just assume everybody knows how to do this. So I tried Azureus next, (it is on "the list") but it's dependant on a bunch of java libraries, (understandable) and, for some stupid reason, the Mozilla web browser suite (WTF). Well, I already have Firefox, so I don't need Mozilla installed, sitting around and being useless and taking up space.

Shit.

Let me guess, you're trying to work on /dev/[h|s]da, right? That'd probably be the same drive where Linux is installed. You cannot unmount the drive if Linux pulls files from it while you are within the OS. Use fdisk -l to get a list of partitions, and cat the /proc/mounts file to see what is where.

First, ABC's experimental on Linux, as far as I recall. Second, rtorrent is far superior, so grab that instead if you want.

Also, about compiling, Merv pretty well explained the process. Change into the source directory, ./configure --help, then ./configure with appropriate options, make, and sudo make install. Google would have even told you this, if you search for "Linux compile process".

I tried that. Didn't work. Should I use my camera to make a video of it as proof?

No need for that.
What's the error? And, again, ABC on Linux is experimental. Go read their FAQ, and if the bolded experimental doesn't give it away, his warning on that page should explain why I'm against you trying to use it anyways.

Well, I'll just use the app you suggested then.

Double Post:
It doesn't matter any way, it seems it is physically impossible to make my Windows partition smaller and reallocate the freed space to my Linux partition. Either that, or the program simply isn't advanced enough to do it.

This really sucks because I need more space to store all of my Mp3s on this partition, and just more space in general. The only way I can see of doing this is wiping the whole HD clean and restarting from the beginning with nothing but Linux, but that really isn't an option.

There is a stable tool, named ntfsresize (part of the ntfsprogs package) that you can use to resize you ntfs filesystems. Do this and after that create another ext3/reiserfs/xfs/your_choice_of_linux_fs on the free space. Than you mount the new FS and voila, more diskspace directly usable within linux.

cya
liquid

It doesn't matter, I just deleted the whole Linux partition. It's too difficult to work with and just isn't usable enough, so I scrapped it.

It sucks, because that was the first Linux distro I've ever liked. It just isn't ready for use as a primary desktop OS, though.

You should point out that's your point of view - because I think a lot of linux users would state the contrary. Try Gentoo next time - it's a lot harder to install (not using the newer gui-guided install method, but the old one), but you learn a lot about the system internals and how configuring the system to your needs. And if you finished install and config it simply works :D

Sad to hear you scrapped it...

cya
liquid

Hm, I kinda doubt Piccolo would have the patience for Gentoo - no offense.

In my experience a friend who knows Linux is the best way to get into the OS and stick with it in the long run. Not only is someone to talk about what distro to chose, expectations, specific requirements, etc. a big help, setup issues can be solved much faster and the healthy "don't expect a Windows"-ellbow check from time to time helps keeping things in perspective.

There are reasons other than that. For example, my laptop wouldn't suspend properly, and when I did, I would lose all sound upon waking. Only restarting would bring it back. I always suspend my laptop when I'm not using it, so that was just unacceptable. Sound playback itself wasn't as good, either, with an obvious drop in quality and severe lagging when playing videos.

Lack of tools equivalent in quality to the tools I use in Windows was another factor. This isn't really Linux's fault per se, but rather, the fault of people who either A) Won't release their software for Linix, or B) People who write crappy programs for Linux. I'm sure it would be possible to have a Linux sound editor that's equally as awesome as Cool Edit. It's just that nobody has created it.

A fix for your suspend problem. Before suspending, shutdown the sound system (mostly ALSA) und unload the kernel modules for the soundchip/soundcard. This can be done by script. Then on resume you only have to reload the modules and restart the sound subsystem.

You see, here's the thing: I shouldn't have to do all of that just to keep my sound working. I shouldn't even have to make a one-time script.

I was thinking earlier you wanted to try Linux, but now I see this isn't entirely true.

Not every single bit of hardware will work properly on Linux because it's generally developed for Windows and Windows only. We have scripts to make tasks easier in lieu of a total remedy for this. Scripts can also be used to automate other tasks, as their name and usage implies. :)

Did you look if it was a bug within ALSA or the driver? If within ALSA, report it so they can actually fix it; same for the drivers, but less can be done on this end. If you feel that you "shouldn't have to" do something to get your system working, I frankly think you shouldn't use Linux, as you're in the totally wrong mindset for it.

You might think that I'm just spouting "Linux is easy!" here, but I'm really not. I know Linux takes a great deal of adaptation to get used to, but going "IT SHOULD WORK LIKE WINDOWS!" is quite naive, sir.

It shouldn't work like windows per se. It should just work. Ideally, all operating systems would just work. But alas, this isn't an ideal world. Maybe some day.

You're right, though. Linux and I just weren't meant for each other, so I had to let her go. Sucks, too, she was pretty, and nice. :p. You're definitely right about my mindset, too. I want to worry about (and work on) the internal functions of my computer as little as possible. I don't care about how my computer works or the nature of the programming and how it interacts with the system. I don't want to compile code or write scripts just to keep something working. I just want it to get the hell out of my way so I can actually get some real work done.

You know what I need? A Mac. Many of the people I work with use Macs, and I use their computers regularly, so I'm fairly familiar with them. Maybe when I have the money I'll buy one. Then I can have the security and stability of a Unix-derived OS and also something that "just works".

Why shouldn't you? Why does everything have to be built especially for you? If you want something to work for you, then learn how to use it. Have you read any of the documentation for Ubuntu or Linux? Have you made any attempts to actually try to adapt yourself to Linux? Why should anyone even bother to help you when you're not willing to do any work? If you really prefer Windows then just use Windows and stop wasting our time. If you actually want to learn how to use Linux then before you start asking questions you need to Read The Fucking Manual.

Couldn't have said it better myself *g*
Thx Magic ;)