Boredom... and an Experiment

[techieMoe]

My laptop configuration right now is a single OS: Windows 7 Beta. It's so far as stable as XP, but not terribly exciting. I generally keep at least one Windows installation in my house at any given time for two reasons:

• Work sometimes requires that I sign in to my workstation remotely, and the ActiveX client for LogMeIn (sadly) is far superior in performance to the Java-based version.
• Games

Since this Christmas my gaming has been exclusively on consoles, and I don't see that changing until Diablo 3 comes out (and who knows when that will be!) so my second requirement for Windows is no longer relevant.

A possible solution for scenario 1 is to install XP in a virtual machine (like VirtualBox) and use that to remote in, but the idea of using a remote client inside of an emulator seems somewhat convoluted to me, so I might just have to deal with the poorer performance of the cross-platform client for a while.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, I've done about as much testing on Windows 7 Beta as I'm interested in doing so I think I'm going to wipe the laptop and put a version of Linux on it exclusively.

I'm going to set a goal for myself to keep whatever version I use on there for at least 2 weeks and see if all my everyday tasks are handled to my satisfaction using a mostly-free but definitely no-charge OS. (Note: "mostly-free" because I intend to install multimedia codecs and non-GPL drivers.)

This may sound like non-news from someone who rants about Linux regularly, but very seldom in my tenure using the OS have I ever used it exclusively without a Windows install somewhere to fall back on. It should be interesting.

Oh, and a side note: I'm also going to play around with re-ripping some of my albums in OGG-Vorbis due to the fact that my new audio player (Sandisk Sansa Clip) supports the format.

[techieMoe]

Last night I wiped Windows 7 and threw on Ubuntu 8.10. I decided this time around to throw a proverbial wrench in the works and try to get my wife's brand new Epson Artisan 700 wireless printer working.

Ubuntu detected it just fine (to my surprise) and even offered a driver for it (gutenprint). My excitement was cut short however when I printed a test page and all it did was continuously feed blank pages until I shut it off.

Apparently I'm not the only one having this issue. Hopefully a newer version of the driver will help. This isn't a show-stopper (I rarely print anything at home) but it is annoying nonetheless.

On the positive side, I have yet to see the "plugged in, not charging" problem my wife and I encountered on Vista.

[techieMoe]

My second annoyance is my music player. Although it detects fine in Ubuntu, the Music folder is empty (despite there being music on there). Rhythmbox couldn't see it at all until I created a file called .is_audio_player in the root directory of the device. It still couldn't see any of the songs I had on it.

Following some suggestions I found in a help thread I copied off all my music (1.5GB... took a while), deleted it from the Sansa, and attempted to re-add it both in Ubuntu (drag and drop) and through Rhythmbox.

Drag-and-drop worked fine from just the Nautilus file manager. When I opened up Rhythmbox the song I'd just dropped showed up on the device. I then copied over an album from Rhythmbox onto the device and it showed up just fine.

I'm annoyed at this because I purchased the Sansa over other brands specifically because I'd heard it worked well with Linux. I don't believe it was a file format issue because I had a mix of MP3 and OGG files in my collection.

To be fair, it seems as though if I'd initially loaded the device from Linux I would have been just fine (provided I created that magical file that tells HAL what to do with it). The Sansa will work when coaxed, but plug-and-play it isn't.

::EDIT:: Interestingly enough, music copied onto the Sansa from Linux is invisible to Windows the same way. Rhythmbox-created playlists do not show up on it either. I will be looking for a different media manager on Ubuntu, methinks.

[elija]

I absolutely love Banshee - but it is a Mono application so it won't be to everyones taste

[techieMoe]

Songbird doesn't support MTP devices in Linux, only in Windows (boo). I'm downloading Banshee to see how it fares.

[elija]

Songbird doesn't support MTP devices in Linux, only in Windows (boo). I'm downloading Banshee to see how it fares.

How's that for a crossover?

[techieMoe]

Banshee looks good and behaves nicely, but the Sansa still doesn't recognize the playlists I make with it. I've noticed (strangely) that there is a "Playlists" folder visible in Windows but not in Ubuntu.

[sagnik]

I installed amarok recently and I think it's great for making playlists but Vlc's my favorite when I just want to listen to something once. And about the printer problem, it sounds similar to a problem I was having using my printer on sabayon 3.5. By the way, I found that ubuntu 9.04 beta has released. Might fix those problems.

[techieMoe]

Rhythmbox and the Sansa have not been getting along well. I thought everything was fine (except the lack of playlists) until I tried to pull up one of my favorite classical albums, Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, and the tags were messed up so it wasn't listed under Bach or Brandenburg Concertos. Instead it was unnamed in an "Unknown" album directory. The tags in Rhythmbox claim to be fine, but I don't trust it.

I tried installing Titan Quest with Crossover Games. I can't give a definitive judgment since it's not an "officially supported" title and I've only tried the one game, but it didn't work. Since that's about the only Windows game I play (aside from Bejeweled, which works in regular WINE) I can't exactly give Crossover Games a glowing report, especially since it's a pay-for product.

Since I'm pretty much going for broke I've decided to try and download the latest stable KDE 4.2 and see if amaroK works any better with the Sansa. I've not had good luck with it in the past, so everyone cross your fingers.

[techieMoe]

Well, I discovered why my Bach tracks weren't loading correctly. Either Rhythmbox or one of the other myriad media managers I've been playing with renamed the files and truncated the .MP3 extension, so the Sansa knew it was an audio file and could play it, but it couldn't read any of the tags. Lovely. I'm in the process of fixing it.