I just read a great article on the current state of desktop Linux over at dedoimedo.com called “Screw this, I’m going back to Windows!” I really think it’s worth the time to read for anyone who’s involved in the Linux community, whether you’re a developer, or just a casual user like me.
The author doesn’t have comments enabled on his site, so I sent him an email. Here’s a copy. Continue reading
Some MP3 encoders fail to create the proper file headers when encoding variable bit rate MP3 files. When that happens, the song length displayed will often be be incorrect when playing the song back. One of the ways this can be handled is by adding a Xing header to the MP3 file. One tool that’s available on Linux to do this is vbrfix.
To install vbrfix in Ubuntu, first make sure that the universe repository is enabled in your software sources. Then you can install it through one of the graphical package managers, or from the command line with: Continue reading
I recently got a new TV that allows me to stream audio and video from my computer to the TV. I tend to archive music from CD’s I’ve purchased in FLAC format. Unfortunately, FLAC is not one of the formats supported by my TV. I decided to write a little script to convert my music archive into one of the supported file formats. Continue reading
In the Linux world, tarball refers to a compressed tar archive file. The most common type uses gzip compression and the file typically ends in tar.gz or .tgz. The tar command itself has its origin in Unix systems where is was used to save files to magnetic tape. The name tar stands for Tape ARchive. Continue reading
LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and php, (or Perl). It’s one of the most popular web hosting platforms. If you’re developing websites, it’s good to have your own private development environment to use while you build and test your websites. This post will show you how to install and configure a LAMP web development environment on Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot to use for testing. It can also be used to set up LAMP on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or a Dedicated Server, but please note that this post does not cover setting up proper security for serving content to the internet. Continue reading