Place of Stuff

For all of my love of control and the other great stuff that comes with my usual distro, I also like to try out new things and see what’s going on elsewhere. To that end I decided to give Kubuntu a go. And I have been pleasantly surprised.

Firstly, the install itself. When you first boot up the build disk you are given several options, the one to use the disk as a live disk is still there, but you can choose to install directly from boot (as with other distros), I chose that and it went very quickly, as you would expect. I won’t go through the steps here as there were only a small number. Kubuntu installs a limited number of apps on first install, leaving you to use them or add to them as you wish.

All of my hardware was detected and installed, even my wireless card, with no tweaking from me. On first boot you are presented with an empty KDE 3.5.9 desktop – the trash icon is down by the clock. Very clean, very attractive. All the apps (where possible) are KDE apps – Kopete for IM, Konqueror for browsing, digiKam for photo management and so on. Oddly, the office suite is OpenOffice.org rather than KOffice – probably because OO.o is the most well known. Loooking through Adept (rather than Synaptic) you can also choose to install Firefox 3 instead of (or as well as) Firefox 2.0.0.14. The software is new enough without being totally bleeding edge and seems very stable.

As I’m a laptop user, I have the suspend/hibernate options available and so far have briefly tested suspend. It works absolutely fine with no tweaking – though it should be said that I am on a Thinkpad R40 which is old enough that it should work: there are no brand new bits of kit to get used to. I suspended for a few seconds and it came back with only one problem: randomly keys repeat even though I only press quickly. This may not be down to Kubuntu, though I haven’t seen it in either Debian or Slackware. Small gripe number 2: my wireless card had to be removed and reseated as hibernation disabled it. It’s PCMCIA though, so a matter of a second to get it redetected. Otherwise, suspend seems to work well and with minimal problems. To compare with a well known OS, I have known of Windows laptops to also have great issues with suspend and hibernate, so it shouldn’t be taken as a showstopper or that Kubuntu is left wanting.

For those of us who find sick pleasure in having to search for solutions to things that you would expect to work well, Kubuntu comes up trumps. I wanted to test playback of commercial DVDs and so assumed that they would work out of the box. Not so. Because of legal limitations on libdvdcss in various countries, you need to install that seperately. This is a 2 step process as I have learned: first you install the Medibuntu repositories. Medibuntu stands for “Multimedia, Entertainment & Distractions In Ubuntu” and provides for all the codecs you need to play various multimedia files but are restricted from doing so in various countries. This will give you win32 codecs and libdvdcss – among others. The latest version of libdvdcss is 1.2.9 and does not work. Instead, you need 1.2.5 and everything works fine. Unfortunately, when Kaffeine loads up it tries to find this itself and looks to http://kubuntu.org/packages which doesn’t have the required files. Hopefully this will be fixed in future releases because it gave me a frustrating time. Instead you should run /usr/lib/kaffeine/install-codecs and, after accepting the legal warning, it installs the older version and gets things running.

(click for better quality)

In previous versions of Kubuntu, I have fallen foul of the root user/password restriction. Some programs require root rather than sudo access. So far, this hasn’t been an issue. Frankly 8.04 seems, within the first 24 hours of usage, to be the first version I could envisage keeping on my system for more than few days. It seems stable and doesn’t have any long term quirks that would prompt me to remove it.

A good first system for the average computer user and a decent system for someone who doesn’t want to have to delve too deeply into the inner workings of the OS.

Download the current version here. Get the KDE 4 Remix version here.

Just like everyone else, I like to listen to music. I have an iPod for when I’m on the train or walking and I have my music files stored in iTunes. Unfortunately, Apple have so locked down their proprietary format that you just can’t listen to your music in the native format on non Windows or Apple computers.

By converting your music to MP3 format you can extend the number of media players it will play on. As a KDE user, I like to use Amarok. I won’t go into the method I used to convert the files here, I’m unsure of the legality and I’m sure you can all use search engines by now. What I will do is to explain, with pictures and words, how I go about installing Amarok to give as full functionality as I need. Your methods may vary, but this works for me. I did something similar in the post Words and Pictures in Linux and that still works as a handy reference for me.

Firstly, I am using Slackware 12.0 with KDE 3.5.7. I will be installing practically everything from source. All of the programs I install will probably have prepackaged versions for your own distro (.rpm, .deb or whatever) and there are also likely to be Slackbuilds available. I still like to install from source so that’s what I’ll be doing.

To begin, go to the Amarok website and click the Download link. You will also need to read the Getting Started page – there you have the Requirements and Installation instructions. One comment I will make is that it’s not obvious how to get to all of these links. At least it wasn’t to me, maybe it’s the way I navigated to the pages. As I am doing this from source, I click the link to the stable sources on the Download page. The stable version as at this time of writing is 1.4.7 – please ensure that you use these instructions in conjunction with the instructions on the Amarok Wiki, the Wiki will always be the most up to date.

There are 4 mandatory dependencies: KDElibs 3.3, Ruby 1.8, TagLib 1.4 and Qt-x11 3.3.8. As I have a version of KDE that is higher than 3.3, the first is covered on my system. By opening a console I can find out whether I have the rest:

$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.6 (2007-03-13 patchlevel 0) [i486-linux]

$ slocate taglib
< snip>
/var/log/packages/taglib-1.4-i486-3
/var/log/scripts/taglib-1.4-i486-3

Remember I said that I’m a KDE user? You have to have Qt installed to install KDE, and my Qt version is 3.3.8. So those requirements are met. You also need to have a mutimedia backend installed, whether Helix (included with RealPlayer) or xine-lib 1.1.2 – I have xine-lib 1.1.7 installed. You also need a database backend, SQLite is shipped as a part of Amarok and is perfectly fine for my needs. If you need a bigger database, MySQL and PostreSQL will both work with Amarok.

The requirements above will get you Amarok with most of the functionality enabled. One thing you absolutely must remember: when you install, all dependencies will have dependencies of their own. I have no problems with tracking down dependencies on my own, use your package manager or a search engine to find the things you need.

Optional Dependencies:

• KDEbase 3.3 to enable the sidebar
• K3B 0.11 will enable you to burn CDs from Amarok
• Libtunepimp 0.4 or 0.5 will provide MusicBrainz support to look up meta data from song tags
• KDEmultimedia 3.3 allows the ripping function to, erm, function
• Libvisual 0.4, Libvisual plugins and SDL 1.2 give you the sexy visuals
• OpenGL accelerated X-Server allows for the 3D analyzers

It should go without saying that all of the versions are minimum versions, you can go higher if you wish. However, those versions are the ones tested by the Amarok devs and are known to work.

Because I am utterly awesome, I have all of the required dependencies and even the optional ones. All I need now is libgpod to make my iPod at least talk with Amarok.

So, if you’re playing along at home, you’ll now have all the dependencies satisfied with the exception of libgpod. We’ll now start by installing this final dependency.

Download the source file to your PC and then look at the installation instructions. We can see from these instructions that this dependency has it’s own set of dependencies:

• Gtk 2.x
• Gettext 0.11 (or higher)
• LibID3tag

Optional Dependencies:

• Mpeg4ip (to play Apple’s format)
• Mp3gain (to normalise volumes) - the GUI version is Windows only the CLI version can be used on Linux
  
• A software music player of some description
• Multisync (to sync your contacts and other non music iPod features)
• FAAD2
• FAAC

So, as can be seen, reading the instructions can be very valuable when you are installing. While not installing every dependency isn’t fatal it can leave you scratching your head when something doesn’t work.

All I need to install are mpeg4ip – everything else is already installed to my system or I don’t/can’t use it. Odds are that you’ll be in the same situation, but check first. So I now install mpeg4ip, then faad, then faac (both of these are dependencies for mpeg4ip).

Final reminder to you all: when you run ./configure, make sure you check the output for errors or unmet dependencies.

We’re now ready to do what we came here for: install Amarok. I would run through the steps, but everything I would say has been said better on the Installation page for Amarok. So make sure you follow the instructions!

The output of ./configure --with-libgpod --with-mp4v2 --prefix=`kde-config --prefix` on my system looks like this:

==========================
=== Amarok - PLUGINS ========================================================
==========================
=
= The following extra functionality will NOT be included:
= - NMM-engine
= - Helix-engine
= - yauap-engine
= - MySql Support
= - Postgresql Support
= - iRiver iFP Support
=
= The following extra functionality will be included:
= + xine-engine
= + libvisual Support
= + Konqueror Sidebar
= + MusicBrainz Support
= + MP4/AAC Tag Write Support
= + iPod Support
= + Creative Nomad Jukebox Support
= + MTP Device Support
= + Rio Karma Support
= + DAAP Music Sharing Support
=
===============================================================================
Good - your configure finished. Start make now

So I know I was successful. And since I was successful, I can now run make and su -c "make install". I then check the Multimedia entries in my KDE menu and can see that Amarok is installed.

Using source code may take a little longer but it does make you think about what you’re doing and you don’t end up with unknown dependencies. Obviously, using a package manager or pre-built binaries is quicker, but you are somewhat reliant on the assumption that the packages were built on a clean environment and that the packager hasn’t added anything to the program without telling you.

Screenshots

Once Amarok has run through your music files, it compiles your collection.

Amarok also has a context browser which shows your recently played songs and albums.

Amarok allows you to import and create your own playlists

Magnatunes works in a similar way to the iTunes Store, except there’s no DRM here and all of these artists get to share in the profits.

When you plug in your media device, the autodetect window comes up and you can tell Amarok what you have.

And then Amarok detects and shows you your music.

Amarok also allows you to submit your tracks to Last.fm so as to update your likes and dislikes. In all, this is a very fully featured music player. It minimises to your task bar and has the very nice wolf logo. It works best with mp3 players and costs you only the time to download and install it.