Pastebin Plasma Widget from Bobby Adesuyan on Vimeo.

The Pastebin plasmoid is part of the standard set of plasmoid shipped with Kde 4.5

My previous favourite was winff. It is a nice frontend to ffmpeg and is capable of some pretty neat stuff. However there is a new* kid on the block which I found to be the coolest Media Converter  on Linux in terms of easy of use and number of cool features it packs.

Mobile Media Converter

(The name is self explanatory I guess)

is a free video and audio converter for converting between popular desktop media formats like MP3, Windows Media Audio (wma), Ogg Vorbis Audio (ogg), Wave Audio (wav), MPEG video, AVI, Windows Media Video (wmv), Flash Video (flv), QuickTime Video (mov) and commonly used mobile devices/phones formats like AMR audio (amr) and 3GPvideo. iPod/iPhone and PSP compatible MP4 video are supported. Moreover, you can remove and add new formats  or devices through the internet

source

Features

Some of the really cool features packed into MMC include

• Integrated YoutTube downloader for on the fly downloading of files from youtube and converting to preferred formats
• Trim and Crop Support It allows the user to trip audio clips or crop video clips taking out unwanted parts (excellent for rings tones and stuff)
• Subtitles Support Allow subtitles to be encoded onto the video for watching even on devices that does not supports them. Just drag and drop your video files and their subtitles on Mobile Media Converter

My Experience

Ease of Use

The first impression I got from using MMC is the ease of use. Even though it does comes with some very powerful features it manages to (brilliantly) expose these features allowing the users to easily make use of them. A good example is how the Video Trim feature is implemented It uses two sliders (top and bottom) the top slider is used to select where to start the trim and the bottom slider for where to stop the trim. I found this to be very intuitive and easy to use. The Crop feature is just as dumb proof. There are two vertical sliders (left and right) and two Horizontal sliders (Top and Bottom) Adjusting the sliders can be used to crop out unwanted section of the screen

Simple Sleek and Logical UI

One of the things that struck me about MMC was just how simple sleek and logical the UI was. It is not cluttered by menus and every feature is implemented in a way that makes them easy to discover and logical to use It supports dragging and dropping files to convert. To edit a file all you have to do is right click and edit It also makes use of very unobtrusive animation which provide smooth transitions between tasks. Overall it manages to unlock some of the most powerful features of FFmpeg and mencoder (Both commandline utilities) and exposes them to the user in a very simple way.

Features and Stability

Ability to embed subtitles to files, download files from youtube and encode them on the fly are just some of the neat features packed into MMC yet it manages to performs all the function without crashing or hogging my CPU. It also supports quite a large number of preset and allows for additional preset to be downloaded from the web providing a UI for the latter

Usage and Result

I have to admit I did not do a thorough test of MMC. But couple of Videos I tried converting all seems to work fine without any issues. The encoding went fast. The output was pretty decent. I have unable to test out some of the advanced features because I have not had any need for them. In all MMC is pretty much a frontend to FFmpeg which is a pretty solid tried and tested (knock on wood) commandline tool for doing that kind of stuff.

Installation

MMC is cross platform hence they are packages for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X If you are running Ubuntu Then you can easily download a .deb package and double click to install. The download instruction can be found here

So I guess you can call this my little review for the Mobile Media Converter. I hope someone finds it useful.

There is a Post on how to enable Multitouch support using a patch not supported with this work around, you might want to take a look first.

I got my self a new laptop recently. The old one was well getting old and starting to lose it, so when I got an offer I could not refuse, I sold it and didn’t look back. I settle for the HP Probook 4420s which turned out to be the best notebook in terms of performance, under the hood awesomeness, and build (Hopefully a review would come later. )

The first thing I did after unboxing my laptop was to install Kubuntu 10.04 which installed and ran smoothly with everything working out of the box. When the beta version of Kubuntu 10.10 was released, I decided to give it a go but noticed that I was unable to rightclick with the laptop’s clickpad.

Clickpad

Clickpads are the latest innovations from Synaptic (Not the package Manager Gui ) It replaces the traditional touchpad which is convention with most laptops.  It is  (From what I read)  suppose to bring better gesture support and multi touch. Unlike tranditional Touchpads which has 3 physical button, built with single touch in mind. The clickpad is just one Click Button which has been mapped into Zones (i.e there is the right and left click zone etc)

Ubuntu Support

Support the for clickpad on Ubuntu is still a bit flaky.  Not only are advanced features like enhanced gesture support and multitouch not available out of the box on Ubuntu. Other basic features like right clicking, horizontal scrolling, click and drag etc can be quite a hassle.  On Ubuntu 10.04 some of the basic features have been fixed (although multitouch support is still lacking).

Same thing can not be said of Ubuntu 10.10 because there was a regression which make it impossible to right click using the touchpad.  Already a bug has been filled concerning the issue which should hopefully be fixed during the Maverick release circle.

Walk  Around

The Good news is there is a walk around this issue for those who won’t mind getting their hands dirty with messing around with the command-line. The walk around involves using a psmouse patch submitted by Paul which fixes the issue. (At least for me)

For this walk around some packages would have to be installed namely the build-essential package and the dkms packages. Build-essentials helps install basic tools needed for compiling packages from source, while the dkms  ”is a framework designed to allow individual kernel modules to be upgraded without changing the whole kernel. It is also very easy to rebuild modules as you upgrade kernels. framework designed to allow individual kernel modules to be upgraded without changing the whole kernel. It is also very easy to rebuild modules as you upgrade kernels.” which in English means whatever module we patch  would not need to be repatched should the system’s kernel be upgraded. (At least that’s the idea)

sudo apt-get install dkms build-essential

The fix involves patching the psmouse module using the paul’s archive which is the mouse source directory for   linux 2.6.35-22-generic (The version of Linux Kernal which shipped with Ubuntu 10.10 as at blog time)

First download the archive file from here

save the downloaded file to your desktop

Open a terminal (Application/Accessories/Terminal –  Kubuntu users should go /System/Konsole)

Move to the Directory where the archive was saved (In this case the desktop) and extract the content of the archive

cd $HOME/Desktop && tar xvf  psmouse-2.6.35-22-generic-patched.tar.bz2.tar

The name of the package as changed since writing this post the new command which reflects the change is

cd $HOME/Desktop && tar jxvf psmouse-2.6.35-22-generic-patched.tar.bz2


Move the extracted folder to /usr/src which is under the root directory hence the command would have to be executed with sudo

sudo mv psmouse-2.6.35-22-generic /usr/src

Move into the /usr/src directory

cd /usr/src

Then install the psmouse module with the following commands running them one after the other

sudo dkms add -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

sudo dkms build -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

sudo dkms install -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

Once installed reboot for the module to be loaded.

If you are still having issues with right clicks. This command would help check if the psmodule is installed

sudo dkms status -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

The output should be something like this

psmouse, 2.6.35-22-generic, 2.6.35-22-generic, i686: installed

If it is not installed. It can always be rebuilt with the following command

sudo dkms build -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

sudo dkms install -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

In case you followed this guide and it did not work for you, or Ubuntu releases an official fix for the issue (in which case you would have to remove the changes made following this guide to prevent conflicts) or for some reason you would like to revert the changes made following this guide. simply do

sudo dkms uninstall -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

sudo dkms remove -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic --all

Following this guide does not lead to the nirvana of clickpad awesomeness (at least not for me). There are still some issues with Jumpy mouse which also affect windows 7. However it does make the clickpad much more useful under Ubuntu even then I would suggest that for serious work it won’t hurt to have a mouse handy

NB You can track the bug concerning this issue here

Thanks to Paul and Tob who really helped with the patch which fixes this issue.

I hope someone finds this useful.

Recently I decided to fix things up  between me and kopete so rather than run to its gtk cousin (looking at pidgin) I sort to see if  I could resolve the problem. (after all its free and open source software we are talking about so there has got to be a way around the issue right?)

After a bit of googling I found that I am not alone (which is a good sign cause misery loves company)

From my readings it seem to be a problem with the libkyahoo library which is shipped with kde 4.4.  Some are suggesting that cause is the new stealth feature introduced in kde 4.4  and occurs only when there are many contacts in contacts list.

Fix

Update

Thankfully the issue as been fixed with the recent kde 4.4.3 updates.  Just add the kubuntu ppa to your sources.list and do a full upgrade

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/ppa ; sudo aptitude update ; sudo aptitude full-upgrade

There are 3 ways to fix this issue. The first is the hardest one.  It involves  downloading kopete source code, applying this patch https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=226699#c50 and compiling

The second way is to be patient and wait for the issue to be fixed by Kopete upstream and the fixed applied to kubuntu through the update channels

The third way is to do what I did which is

Step one : Download the version of kopete which is  shipped with kde 4.3.5 from here

Step two : Paste the downloaded deb file into your Desktop (seriously this step is not that important, its mainly for those who just want to copy and paste my command. You can skip it if you know what you are doing)

Step Three: Extract the content of the deb file to your working directory using the following command.

cd ~/Desktop ; dpkg -x kopete_4.3.5-0ubuntu1~karmic1_i386.deb .

NB: What the above command does is to extract the content of kopete_4.3.5-0ubuntu1~karmic1_i386.deb to your Desktop . If you take a look at the desktop directory you would find a directory named usr/  what were are going to do next is extract libkyhoo library from the usr/ directory on your desktop which works fine and use it to replace the one which came with kopete for kde 4.4 (ok enough talk)

Step four:  Remove the libkyahoo library which comes with kde 4.4 and also remove file symlinked to it

sudo rm /usr/lib/libkyahoo.so.1*

Step five: Then copy the libkyahoo from the usr directory on our desktop to /usr/lib/ and create a symbolink

sudo cp usr/lib/libkyahoo.so.1.0.0 /usr/lib/ ; sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libkyahoo.so.1.0.0 /usr/lib/libkyahoo.so.1

Step six: To be sure that all went well when  run the this command

ls -l /usr/lib/ | grep libkyahoo

The output must be like this

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 2010-04-27 10:25 libkyahoo.so.1 -> /usr/lib/libkyahoo.so.1.0.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 505132 2010-04-27 10:25 libkyahoo.so.1.0.0

Now the final test.

Start Kopete and check if you are able to send chats to your yahoo contacts. It worked for me on Kubuntu Lucid RC. I hope it’ll work for you too. I also hope this issue is fixed in kubuntu final release.

So there is how I patched up (no puns intended) my relationship with kopete. (I wish my real life relationship were that easy to patch but that is quite another story)

Hope this helps somebody

Artha is a free cross-platform English thesaurus that works completely off-line and is based on WordNet. It is released under the GNU General Public Licence version

Source

Features

Although a gtk app  it has very little gnome dependencies (So KDE fans dont have to worry -much. Yeah yeah I know its would have been better if written in Qt but then “what can we do”  :(  ) However Artha has tons of features to make anyone (Gnome, Kde, whatever floats your boat) Drool.

• Offline : Unlike most dictionaries which can only be used if you are online. Artha works completely offline. So if you like me are not completely bought up by all this cloud computing craze and live in Africa where Internet sucks. Then Artha is a no brainer for you.  (Even if you are lucky and have highspeed internet Artha is also a no brainer )
• Regular Expressions Search : OK lets say there is a word you  vaguely know or you are unclear as to its meaning or spelling. (Happens to me a lot ) you can speed up/narrow the search using regular expression to locate the particular word they have in mind.
• Suggestions : Say you mispelled a word Artha can give you near matching suggestions (I also love this)
• Relative to Sense Mapping : Artha doesn’t just give you the meaning of words. It so includes words like Synonyms, antonyms. When you Select a relative its corresponding definition is scrolled and highlighted for easy comprehension.

The Awesomest  Feature that rules them all : Yeah I saved best for the last.  For me the feature of Artha which kills every other Dictionary software out there is its support for Notifications.  Here is how it works – Lets say I was going through my RSS reader and I found a word am not familiar with I just need to highlight the word, press the keyboard combination Ctrl+Alt+W (Which can be changed to any key combo that suits you) The meaning of the word gets displayed as a Notification Bubble .

Hence I can easily check the meaning of the word without having to launch the application window.

The notification feature of Artha is supported system wide and works with just about every application which support text highlighting.

Installation

Ubuntu / Debian : Although Artha is available in the Ubuntu / Debian Repository The version there is quite dated. However the latest version has been compiled to .deb and can be downloaded from   here

Fedora (Leonidas/11 or above) :  Artha can be installed with

yum install artha

Note* The version in the Fedora Reposittory is 0.9.1

Other Linuxes : If a binary package is not available for your distribution, you can easy download the source code from here and follow this installation instructions on how to compile from source.

Configuration: After installation, the rest is easy. When you start Artha Its minimizes in the Notification area of your desktop.  From the application window you can easily set you keyboard short cut by clicking on the settings. The default keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+Alt-W.  By default the Notification feature is disabled but can be easily enabled by right clicking on the notification area icon. The rest is easy.


I found Artha to be very useful and goes a long way to enhance my workflow and user experience.  I hope someone find this useful.

There’s a PPA for that
PPA is means Personal Package Archive. It provides a way to easily install application which can not be found in the Ubuntu official repository on Ubuntu ( since the Ubuntu official repo takes a conservative approach to updates and number of applications it includes in its official repository with focus on stability over latest and greatest packages.) PPA is one of the coolest thing about Ubuntu. It creates an avenue for developers, packagers and even users to create their own personal repositories and include their packages which can easily be added and installed on Ubuntu.

The down-side of all these is that most of the applications contained in a PPA can be quite too bleeding edge and not as well tested as  what comes with the Ubuntu repos, so the users would sometimes want to revert back to the official Ubuntu packages. This is where PPA-Purge comes in handy

PPA-PURGE:    ppa-purge will reset all packages from a PPA to the standard versions released for your distribution.  So basically its like a way to restore your system back to the way it was before you installed packages from a PPA.

Installation: ppa-purge is very easy to install. You can grab a deb executable file directly from the web page of the xorg-edgers repository

Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope)

Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

Usage

ppa-purge is very easy to use.How this works is e.g If I wanted to remove say the blueman PPA I just go to terminal and paste the following

sudo ppa-purge ppa:blueman/ppa/

A break down of how this work is

sudo ppa-purge ppa:repository-name/subdirectory

e.g ‘deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/blueman/ppa/ubuntu karmic main’ the part in bold is the part you need to add to

sudo ppa-purge ppa:

to make it

sudo ppa-purge ppa:blueman/ppa

I actually tried the tool after I installed the xorg-edger repository to see if it would solve my graphic display issues, unfortunately it only made things worse, thankfully I was able to use ppa-purge to remove the PPA and reset (downgrade) my packages back to the default version on karmic.

So there you have it. You can go on installing all the latest and greatest packages using the Ubuntu PPA. knowing full well you have something to fall back on. I hope someone finds this useful.

So some months ago I got me an E71 Nokia phone, among other things I was hoping to use it as a music device so I slammed in an 8gb memory card, and was all set but for one factor: 60% of my music collection are in ogg format and nokia default music player does recognize ogg. Sure there are some 3rd party music apps for E71 which can play ogg files out of the box but they all lack the kind of integration which you get with the Nokia default music player. While in confused mode I decided to call up a friend nucco and he gave me the tip about .is_audio_player.

What is .is_audio_player

If like me, you have a music library made up of different music formats, and you want to be able to sync them to your portable music player in one music format say mp3. Example, my music collection is composed of different formats, .mp3, ogg, aac but I want to sync everyone of them as mp3 to my Nokia e71. This is where .is_audio_player comes in handy. Nope its not an application, nope its not a codec, its not a library either. Its just a file (yeah file) its a file you place in the root directory of the storage of your music device from where it does its magic.

Configuration

First you open your favorite text editor (gedit, kate, emac, nano, vi whatever). Then you place in the following entries:

audio_folders=Sounds/Digital/

folder_depth=3

output_formats=audio/mpeg

Explanation

audio_folders = Here you indicate the relative path of the music folder on your portable device. On my Nokia its in Sound/Digital

folder_depth = Here you indicate the folder depth of the music folder (remember that every storage device attached to your Linux computer is mounted on /media/ hence you will start counting from the device mount point. In my case it was.

/media/e71/Sound/Digital

Since our final destination ™ is Digital (in my case that is) which is 3 step away from /media I indicated the value for folder_depth to be 3

out_formats = The last parameter is quite straight forward it’s asking what media format you want your files to be encoded in before sync. In my case i want them encoded to mp3 hence i added audio/mpeg

Now configure the file the way it meets your needs and then save as .is_audio_player remember the . (dot) in-front of is_audio_player. Once the file is saved, place it at the root of your music device (Nokia, Sony Erikson, China Mp3 device etc). In my case i placed it inside the memory card of my nokia phone (make sure you are using a mobile phone that can be seen as a mass storage device)

Note: Any file with a . (dot) in-front of its name is hidden by default in Linux hence you may not see the file after saving it until you tell your filemanager to view hidden files (ctrl +h) for (gnome) and (alt + .) for (kde)

Below is the .is_audio_player file inside the memory card of my nokia.

Once all is set, you can now plug your portable music player to your Linux computer and open Rhythmbox.

If all goes well Rhythmbox will detect your audio device. (in my case my nokia.)

All that is left is for you to select the tracks you want to sync. (you can always create a playlist) Drag and drop them into your portable music player’s icon. (You can also drag from your portable music player into your Music library.)

Transferring from your music library in rhythmbox to your portable music device might be slow, especially if it has to encode them to another music format before the transfer.

In the end I was able to encode all my ogg to mp3 files and sync them with my freedom hating E71 on the fly. I hope this helps someone out there.

FYI:

• I don’t know if this method would work with ipods.
• Legends have it that Amarok supports .is_audio_player I can’t tell since I have not been able to get it to work in amarok 2.1. If you have been able to please let me know.
• The Original ogg file on my music computer library is unaltered.

=-=-=-=-=
Powered by Bilbo Blogger

How it all started

Ever since i started a blog i had always wanted a wanted a application which would allow me do my blogging (preferably offline ) without having to use the web browser. One of the reasons for this was because i (as at then) did not have a stable Internet connection and had to go to Internet cafe to do my blogging which wasn’t really convenient. I wanted a way to do my blogging offline and then upload later. Even when i had a stable Internet connection i still prefer to having to use a browser for blogging. Unfortunately for me most of the blogging applications ( Drivel BloGTK KBlogger gnome-blog) i tried on Linux just didn’t cut it, some didn’t work with wordpress and the once that did weren’t powerful enough or were buggy or just too basic.

I gave up and resigned my self to the web for blogging. This was until recently when (I Cant quite remember how it happened) i found about about Bilbo Blogger and Beng. I saw the tool i just needed

Bilbo Blogger

Bilbo Blogger is a free/Open Source Blogging client, focused on simplicity and usability. Its is based on Qt4 (KDE) but should work well on gnome (i haven’t tried it but it should.. just remember i said should)

Here are some Summary of some of its Features

Currently featured:

• A full featured WYSIWYG editor + An HTML editor

• Previewing your post with your blog style! like when you are visiting it at your blog.

• Support for Blogger1.0, MetaWeblog, MovableType (WordPress supports All of these!) and Google GData (used on Blogspot.com blogs) APIs!

• Support for Creating/Modifying/Deleting posts.

• Support for creating drafts and scheduled posts!

• Support for uploading media files to your blog (Just on supported APIs e.g. MetaWeblog and MovableType)

• Support for Fetching your recent blog entries.

• Support for adding Images to post from your system. It will upload them on

• Submitting post to blog (Just on supported APIs e.g. MetaWeblog and MovableType)

• Support for saving local entries before publishing.Saving your writing copy to prevent data loss, at configurable intervals.
• Internal auto spell checker. (KDE spell checker used so most of languages are supported)

Installation

Although as of blog time there were only two binaries available for Linux and one for windows.

Archlinux users Bilbo should be available in the arch community repository ( am not sure about this as i don’t have an arch installation to confirm) but in any case an arch package can be downloaded from here

(K)Ubuntu

To install on ubuntu. You are going to add a third party repository popularly called PPA To your system. This is not hard.

To start open Terminal and copy and paste the following command (you can do this via GUI but when writing a guide some things are better down using commandline copy and paste of cause i would explain every process so at least you know what you are doing)

First we download and add the key for the repository we are about to use and add it to how system.

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com \ 0xfe0272d55c41c17774052e575646f8b10331274d

Then we add the repository with this command

echo deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/neversfelde/ppa/ubuntu `lsb_release --short --codename` main | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list

Then we refresh the system and download bilbo with

sudo apt-get update ; sudo apt-get install bilbo

Once installed you can find Bilbo on the Internet section of your application Menu

Now i give a brief guide on how to configure Bilbi blogger to your blog

First your start bilbo ( like you don’t know that already hehe) once installed you will find it under the Internet section of your application menu.

The first thing you want to do is to add a blog, (my blog is hosted on wordpress.com hence that is what this guide would be based on. )

Just select Add Blog from under Blog menu

This would open a dialog box, something like this

Type in the URL of your blog then enter your blogs username and password and click the Auto Configure button. In my case it was http://ubuntunigeria.wordpress.com and i clicked the Auto Configure button. Then Bilbo would work its magic and Auto configure the settings for the blog. If all goes well (and it always did in my case) The dialog box would now look like this.

Bilbo has auto configured my blog settings, pulling the Title of the blog, the correct URL. You can go to the Supported features tab and check out the list of features bilbo has support in your blog here is mine

Once your blog is configured and loaded up. you would see a page which looks like this.

So here is the layout of Bilbo Blogger, it always you to use both WYSIWYG, or for code warriors you can always use the HTML editor field. one really cool feature with bilbo is the ability to preview you draft and see how it would look like on the blog page, This for me is one of its killer features

HTML Editor

Normal Preview

Preview with blog style

Other cool features of Bilbo

• It support multiple blogs hence you can setup more than one blog at a time.
• It also allows you to edit previous blog posts ( or delete them)
• If you are working on a blog post, you can always tell it to save locally, like as i was writing this post, i got disconnected, if i was using the web interface i might have lost some of my works or would have to wait for the Internet to get back before i continue. With bilbo i just told it to save my work locally and continued working.
• It also allows you to add tags and post the blog to a category

Bilbo also supports tabs you can edit more than one blog at a time with it just by opening a new tab.

Most importantly i found bilbo to be very stable, its doesn’t slow down on me or crash on me. i never experience on crash with it.

There is just so much to talk about Bilbo you would have to give it a spin to see your self.

I
hope someone finds this useful.

However one thing i have always wish it had was the ability to run in the background so that if i close thunderbird i want it to minimize to the system-tray/notification area and inform me real time when i have a new mail. Thunderbird has a small memory footprint hence am not bothered about it sucking up my system resources. For a very long time i took what life offered and made do with opening thunderbird to check for a new mail and closing it when i am done (i hate having my task manager side of the system panel filed up with running applications). Then one day i was like heck i have had enough and decided out to find a way to get thunderbird to do exactly what i want (run in the system-tray when not needed.) i did some googling and the name firetray came up, turned out it was just want i wanted.

Installation and Configuration

Firetray is an add-on for thunderbird and can be downloaded from here download and save the file to your hard disk. In Mozilla Thunderbird, open Add-ons from the Tools menu.

Click the Install button, and locate/select the file you downloaded and click “OK”.

After this you need to restart Thunderbird for the firetray to start working. You might also want to go through the preference of firetray to configure how you want it to behave, for example by default thunderbird does not minimize to the system-tray when you close it. You can go through the settings and configure it to your taste. Here is how i have configured mine.

Conclusion

I have come to find firetray a very valuable plugin for thunderbird.

It allows me to make Thunderbird run in the background and get out of my way. when they is a new mail, i get notified and it tells me how many unread mail i have in-box

One more cool thing i love about it is how it makes it easy to check for new messages and even send a quick email, By just right clicking on the icon on the system-tray

Ok that is the end of my rant. Hope this helps somebody.

FYI: Firetray can also be added to firefox, sunbird, seamonkey 2 and songbird, allowing to set up custom icon, minimizing to tray instead of closing, control playback using multimedia keys in songbird

Remuco is a duplex remote control system for Linux media players and mobile devices equipped with Bluetooth or WiFi.

With Remuco, you can remotely control your favorite media player. You can switch to the next, previous, or any other media within the current playlist, browse your media library and activate other playlists, rate your media, adjust volume, and more. On the mobile device (the remote control), it displays information about the current media, including cover art.

source

**Ok the name is by no means cool or an a good indicator of what it can do, some of its features include**

Features

Remuco allows you to control:

* Playback

*Seek forward or backward in current playing item

*Set the playlist to repeat or shuffle

*Control volume

*Rate,

*Tag Media being played

on your PC from your mobile phone

It also Displays:

*Current playing songs including album art

*Volume level

*Progress level of current playing song and its current rating

Media browser features includes:

*Browse Currently active playlist and apply actions to them

*Browse the play queue and apply actions to them

*Browse the players media library and apply actions to them

*search for items in the player’s media library and apply actions to items in the search result

*browse the local filesystem and apply actions to files

*** Not all feature is available on all media player example Rhythmbox seems to be better support compared or other media player***

Installation

Installation of Remuco is in two part, A player adapter is installed on your PC and the client on your mobile device

How to install the player adapter:

(K)Ubuntu

First you need to add the 3rd party repository to your sources.list this can be done from synaptic

System -> Administration -> Synaptic Manager -> Settings -> Repositories.

Here you can enable the repositories for Ubuntu Software and Third Party Software.

For Third Party Software select Add -> enter the repository’s address.

Ubuntu 9.04

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/remuco-team/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Ubuntu 8.10

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/remuco-team/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

Ubuntu 8.04

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/remuco-team/ppa/ubuntu hardy main

Now you need install the repository Key

Open your terminal and enter:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 51A6F565

Now you will need to reload your sources by clicking the reload button on synaptic once done search for the team remuco, and you will see a list of remuco adapters for different Media players for linux

e.g I am on kde and i use amarok so i just installed the remuco-amarok package

Other Linux Distros can check here for installation Instructions

you now need to add remuco to the list of startup application

Amarok

The Amarok adapter requires Amarok 2.

The Amarok adapter can be started with:

remuco-amarok

Audacious

The Audacious adapter can be started with:

remuco-audacious

Banshee

The Banshee adapter requires Banshee ≥ 1.4.

The Banshee adapter can be started with:

remuco-banshee

MPD

The MPD adapter requires MPD ≥ 0.13.

The MPD adapter can be started with:

remuco-mpd

Rhythmbox

Start Rhythmbox and activate the plugin Remuco in the menu Edit → Plugins.

Totem

The Totem adapter requires Totem ≥ 2.22.

Start Totem and activate the plugin Remuco in the menu Edit → Plugins.

TVtime

The TVtime adapter requires TVtime ≥ 1.0.

The TVtime adapter can be started with:

remuco-tvtime

NOTE: With the exception of Rhythmbox and Totem, Remuco adapter for other Media players can be started automatically by adding remuco-media-player name to your startup session e.g for amarok add remuco-amarok to (gnome) System/Preference/Sessions (or startup application). (KDE) System-settings/ Advance Autostart

Client side installation

Installation on your mobile can be done by downloading remuco package here (the latest version on remuco in blog time is 0.9.0) extract the .tar.gz and goto /client/app/ and send the .jar file to your mobile device and install it from there

(Note: The client requires a mobile device with JavaME support (MIDP ≥ 2.0, CLDC ≥ 1.1). If you use Bluetooth to connect to a player adapter, additionally JSR-82 (Java Bluetooth) must be supported.)

Once installed on the device in my case i open terminal and run the following command remuco-amarok then i start amarok and start the client on my Nokia E71

Connected remuco to my laptop, it did its thing and yola i was able to control my amarok player from my phone.

Remember to first go to More and key-binding to set your own control key preference

Happy listening and I hope this helps someone .. (sorry if this is badly written haven’t had time to blog in a while been very busy so am a bit rusty i guess)