Personal Bytes

I’ve been using Ubuntu a lot lately. It is based on Debian, rock-solid stability, it has apt-get and the thing I most appreciate is the community.

I’ve had some small issues regarding Ubuntu Breezy, so for those of you who may pass through the same, I’ll save you some time and synthetize them:

• Playing mp3: $ apt-get install gstreamer0.8-mad
  But remember to activate the universe repository on your /etc/apt/sources.list and then doing an $ apt-get update;
• Music player: I really enjoy iTunes’ interface, and as you know it isn’t available for GNU/Linux nor it is Free Software. But it is a very good piece of software. If you’re looking for something similiar, Banshee will do the trick. Together with iFolder, they’re the only Mono applications that I consider useful.
• QT apps looking good: I only found out that it was “broken” when I tried to use LyX. The default QT theme is Motif (!) and fonts are huge. A small fix could be editing QT settings by running $ qtconfig, but definitely this is a much more elegant approach.
• Reducing network timeout: When Ubuntu boots, it tries to configure all of your network cards, including wireless, which can take a lot of time. Hitting Ctrl + C will cancel the task but it isn’t a solution. What I did was installing ifplugd that immediatly tries to connect to a network when it receives a LINK status and then decreasing the priority of networking while booting, which can be accomplished by typing
  $ sudo update-rc.d -f networking remove
$ sudo update-rc.d networking defaults 99
  A more detailed explanation and other approaches are available here.

I hope you enjoy these quick hacks :-)