However being a sysad is not all doom and gloom.  Occasionally some ray of fun and power shines through the lonely boring Text based computer terminal (where we get to spend most of our working – and non working- hours). THAT day was one of the such days.

I had to do some work in the computer lab the day before. But when I closed for the day I left behind my most priced Scandisk 4GB usb thumb drive. I left it attached to a workstation I was setting up. I realized this very late and even then was too tired to bother going back to get it. Next day when I got to work I discovered that my thumb drive was missing. I asked some students who use the lab if there have seen my drive but no one seem to have any information about it. I was going to give up when a colleague suggested I check the syslog to see when the drive was removed from the pc it was attached to.  Syslog showed it was disconnected around 22:05 5  hours after I closed from work.

Jul 22 22:05:19 aust-desktop kernel: [25109.783629] usb 1-6: USB disconnect, address 4


Every computer where I work has been configured to authenticate with our central ldap server. The particular PC I was working on however has not been set up to use this authentication so chances are that the individual who took my usb drive must have gone to the PC with the intention of use it for work before noticing the drive. He most have tried logging in and  because the PC was not connected to ldap must have been told his login was not successful. Either way I decided to check the auth. Log of the PC which keeps a record of all logging attempts. From there I noticed a failed logging in from a certain username at around 22:03 (about the same time the usb was disconnected).

Jul 22 22:03:49 aust-desktop gdm-session-worker[2653]: pam_succeed_if(gdm:auth): error retrieving information about user nameofuser

I went through the record of our users and was able to link the username to the particular user. Thankfully his phone number was also part of the records. I simply gave him a call and politely asked him to give back what belong to me. He stuttered and said he had taken it for safe keeping. I said I completely understood thanked him and told him I would appreciate if he could drop the drive at my desk. I am happy to say that I got my drive back Thanks to a little bit of luck mixed with some sysadmin Ninja moves.

Guess we can say the moral of the story is NEVER steal a usb drive belonging to your system admin especially when it is connected to a system that runs *Unix. Or better still don’t steal period

Network Manager

Kubuntu uses the plasma-widget-networkmanagement which is just ok for basic network management tasks but when it  gets real complicated, you might want something much more robust and stable. The kde 4 frontend to network manager is still under heavy development and currently is not on per with the gnome network manager in area of features and stability. It is for this reason that I prefer the gnome frontend to network manager. More so since it require very minimal gnome dependencies to run.  (Its a matter of choice really)

Install Gnome Network manager

To prevent conflicts I removed the kde frontend for network manager before installing the gnome version.

sudo aptitude purge network-manager-kde -y ; sudo aptitude install network-manager-gnome

Once installation is complete add nm-applet to your autostart session. Systemsettings -> Advanced Tab -> Autostart Click Add program and paste nm-applet in the dialogbox that comes up Once you have done this the gnome network manager would become the default network manager for Kubuntu upon restart.

Passive Notification

I find the default kde notification quite annoying. It tends draws much attention to itself which always distracts from what I am doing and when you have multiple notifications it then stacks them on top of each other in a way which simply pisses me off!!!
I prefer the passive notification which uses transparent notification which allows click through and really does not get in my way. Although it comes at a cost of not being about to Interact with notification elements like upgrade or click to vew an IM. I think I can live with that.

My Walk Round: Colibri

What is Colibri Colibri provides an alternative to KDE4 Plasma notifications. What I like about Colibri

• Colibri notifications look lighter and are completely passive: they do not provide any buttons. You may or may not like this. Since they are completely passive
• They smoothly fade away when you mouse over them, allowing you to interact with any window behind them.
• They also do not stack each others: if multiple notifications happen, they will be shown one at a time.

Thankfully Colibri is now available in the Lucid repository

sudo aptitude install colibri

Once installed the following setup still need be done because colibri  would not start to work immediately.

1. Right Click on  systemtray and select “systemtray settings” uncheck “Application notification”
2. Add colibri to  startup session (Following the same process as with nm-applet)
3. Go to system settings —> Desktop (Under the Generation Tab) —> “Colibri Notifications”   select which area of your screen you want Notifications to be Displayed apply.
4. Thats all

NB: You may need to logout and login again for Colibri to take effect. If all goes well your Notification should look like this.                                    

Codecs and Multimedia

(k)ubuntu does not come pre-installed with multimedia codecs for popular formats like mp3, AVI, Dvix , Adobe Flash etc due to license restrictions Although it is very easy to install the codecs when you attempt to play an mp3 file for example, you get a popup prompting to install necessary codecs need to play the file. Even then I rather just have all what I need in one go.  Some of the codecs needed for playing popular multimedia codecs are so restricted that there are not included in the Ubuntu Repositories and one would need to add a 3rd party repository. Medibuntu repository  comes with many tools, codecs and applications which can not be shipped in the Ubuntu repository due to license restrictions.  It can be added to your software source with the following command.

echo 'deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ lucid free non-free' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list ; wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update

Once added I usually just install just about every Multimedia Codec I would ever need on Kubuntu with the following command.

sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg libxine1-ffmpeg ffmpeg kubuntu-restricted-extras libdvdread4 ; sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh

Multimedia Apps

I would like to go through some of the multimedia apps I always resort to in my day to day use of kubuntu. For the most part I prefer to stick with Kde/Qt apps due to their integration with the rest of kde. But I always use the best tool for the Job Qt or Gtk doesn’t matter (As long as it is not too tired to gnome or need half of gnome desktop to install)

Audio Encoder

Soundcoverter Like the name suggests soundconverter is a small GTK app which reads anything the GStreamer library can read (Ogg Vorbis, AAC, MP3, FLAC, WAV, AVI, MPEG, MOV, M4A, AC3, DTS, ALAC, MPC, Shorten, APE, SID, MOD, XM, S3M, etc…), and writes WAV, FLAC, MP3, AAC, and Ogg Vorbis files. Its extremely easy to use and IMHO the best Audio Converting app on free desktop.

sudo aptitude install soundconverter

Video Encoder

Winff Winff is a GUI frontend to FFMPEG, it converts any video file supported by FFMPEG and can all do multiple file convert i.e You can for example convert mpeg’s, flv’s, and mov’s, all into avi’s all at once. Just like Soundcoverter winff is very easy to use and also support 3rd party presets for Nokia and Android devices. The only flaw I found with winff progress indicator instead you get a commandline window which displays working of an encoding process in the most geeky way lol

sudo aptitude install winff

DVD Rip

Handbreak is a great app (some will say the best for the job) Personally though I prefer k9copy.  K9copy is a program that allows you to copy DVDs in Linux. It is similar to DVDShrink, and has the following features:

Features

• The video stream is compressed to make the video fiton a 4.7GB recordable DVD  
• DVD Burning
• Creation of ISO images
• Choosing which audio and subtitle tracks are copied.
• Title preview (video only)
• The ability to preserve the original menus.

sudo aptitude install k9copy

Video editor

Video editing is not one of the strongest areas of Linux. However that trend is changing as more applications like openshot and Pitivi get matured and add needed functionality and features. However the best and most feature packed Video editor on Linux today is Kdenlive. The list of its features are so numerous that its better to just check them out yourself

sudo aptitude install kdenlive

Audio Editing

Audacity is a cross platform open source software for recording and editing sounds. While Audacity would not be winning any award in UI design any time soon. It is indeed one of the most powerful open source sound editor out there.  

sudo aptitude install audacity

Internet and Social Networking

Browser

Konqueror the default browser which ships with kde sucks, I wish there was a mild way to put that but really it does. And please don’t get started on Firefox its integration with KDE is just appalling. ReKonq is a decent browser but it crashes a lot and can be unstable. My browser of choice on kde is Chromium. Its faster, lighter and although a gtk app has better integration with kde compared to Firefox.  

sudo aptitude install chromium-browser

Microblogging

I am a heavy microblogger and you would find me on both identica and twitter. When it comes to microblogging on kde it starts and end with Choqok. Really there is nothing more to add here.

sudo aptitude install choqok

Blogging

I am a fan of blogging client which allows me to blog even when am offline and publish my post when connected. Blogilo allows me to do this and much more. You might want to check out a review of the app I did I while back

sudo aptitude install blogilo

IRC Client

Kubuntu ships by default Quassel IRC client. Which is a pretty decent IRC client, but I was never able to find my way round it.  For IRC I use Konversation which I find much easier to use and less cluttered compared to Quassel. Konversation has the following features    

• Standard IRC features
• SSL server support
• Bookmarking support
• Easy to use graphical user interface
• Multiple servers and channels in one single window
• DCC file transfer
• Multiple identities for different servers
• Text decorations and colors
• OnScreen Display for notifications
• Automatic UTF-8 detection
• Per channel encoding support
• Theme support for nick icons
• Highly configurable

sudo aptitude install konversation

Packge Management

Kubuntu ships with Kpackagekit as package manager. Which is pretty decent but feels very incomplete and can be quite unstable compared to Synaptic. So I just go ahead and install synaptic

sudo aptitude --without-recommends install synaptic

Note: The “–without-recommends” ensure that only the basic needed dependencies are installed with synaptic. I use this options anytime I am installing a gtk app. It helps to slim down the bloat so I get just what I need.

Other Apps I use on Kubuntu

Video Player = Vlc
Note Taking = Zim
Email = Thunderbird

The above applications are very popular and can be easily installed from the package manager.

My Kubuntu Tweaks and Customizations

Here is where I share some of the little tweaks and customization I did to the Out of the Box Kubuntu to make it further meet my everyday use case.

How to make gtk apps running as root not look like A**

One major grip I have with the gtk toolkit is how gtk apps always look like some win95 era app when used outside of a non gtk enviroment. Thankfully the Kubuntu theme have done a good job Integrating it with Qtcurve which helps give gtk apps a kdish look and feel. Unfortunately gtk apps which are run as root aren’t covered and still always look like s**t. Hence if you run synaptic on KDE what you get is a tool that is so ugly it hurts.

My Walk around this was to install the gtk-chtheme package

sudo aptitude install gtk-chtheme

Once installed alt + F2 and run the following from krunner.

kdesudo gtk-chtheme

The way I got it to work was to first select the “Releigh” Then select “QtCurve” you can also choose a fonts. Once done remember to click “ok”

When you start synaptic again it should look much better.

Setting up Window Share

For some reason  the process for setting up a samba network share on Kubuntu is not as straight forward as it is on Ubuntu. Ideally If I want share a folder I should right click on it go to properties –> share tab and click configure sharing. Then the system asks me for my password and tells me it needs to install some packages before it can proceed, I say yes it installs the packages and my Samba share is done. Well the situation is quite different on Kubuntu. When I get to the part where I am suppose to share my folder, it asks me for my password and then nothing happens no error message, no sharing no feedback on what failed, everthing just seems normal except the fact  folder is also not shared.
I did some digging and found that I had to install the following packages

sudo aptitude install samba kdenetwork-filesharing

Once Installed, sharing any Folder via samba becomes a matter of point and click ™.

Repeated Button actions

There is a minor annoyance with the repeated button actions. e.g things using the volume key on your laptop for volume control or the multimedia keys to control amarok always skip two step forward or backwords.
Fortunately the fix to this problem is very easy. Start kde Systemsettings and go to keyboad and mouse under the general tab. You would see the “enable keyboard repeat” already checked. Uncheck it and click apply. Then check it again and click apply. Doing this Surprisingly that solved the problem for me.

Font Setup

Refer to this post I wrote a while back.

Finally

IMHO Kubuntu is the best Kde Distro I have tried. It very close to the kde upstream and provide a solid Ubuntu base for stability. It really not easy getting a compilation of everything I did to customize my Kubuntu to suit my everyday needs, probably left out somethings. If you have some tips or recommendation of your own please share.  I hope someone out there find 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.

1: The default fonts The default font setup on Kubuntu Karmic is ok. But I wanted some better than ok,   so I install the liberation fonts which has always served me well in the past (especially when I was a gnomie ) It comes as part of the  Kubuntu-restricted-extra package.

You can install as a standalone package by clicking 

It  can always install the package from terminal

Once installed you can change the system fonts by going to System-Settings/Appearance/Fonts and click Adjust all fonts then select Liberation Sans from the list. (I got the best appearance by using size eight)

2: The fonts for gtk application are just way too fugly that it hurts the eyes. Plus they look very out of place from the rest of the KDE UI.  Thankfully I was able to fix this issue by replacing the .fonts.conf in my home directory with  this  one  file rename the .raw.txt file to .fonts.conf and place it you your home directory (remember that a file with a . (dot) in front is hidden in Linux. You can always view all hidden file in KDE with Alt and .(dot) keyboard combination) Once you have done this you can log out and login back for the changes to take effect.  After applying this fix around you would notice a clear difference in the way gtk app fonts are displayed. The Fix makes fonts for gkt application to be very smooth and consistent with the rest of the KDE UI

Before the fix

After the Fix

I will let you be the judge of that.

Hope someone finds this useful.

NB

I have edited the post and used codepad instead of mediafire as the download source, since it more appropriate for this type of thing. Big thanks to Mark who made this suggestion to me

The first thing I fell in love with since  moving to Abuja is the abundant (unspoilt) natural environments (having loved little since then.)  Even from my sit in the plane my first view of Abuja  was a wowed moment for me. The grassland dotted with trees, the little (sometimes large) hills and rocks which surrounds the city.

This is completely different from what I am used to in Lagos, which unlike Abuja lies in the Rain forest region of Nigeria, characterized by Thick Rain forests, many of which are being lost to Urban expansion everyday. (A story for another day.)   Abuja lies in the Guinea Savannah belt (Where the desert meets the forest)

I made a promise to myself that one day I would take a walk into the wood lands and get lost.  So last week I needed to clear my head after a tough week of work (and other things) I decided to fullfill that promise. It was the most refreshing experience ever.

The best things in life are free. In a world obsessed with concrete and anything with an electronic chip, it was such a refreshing change to be alongside nature.  Escaping from all traffic and human structures, all I could feel was the wild breeze blow across my face. I had time to really take in every little detail such as watching the trees, to feel so tiny and insignificant among rolls and rolls of grass land, dotted with trees which stretch as far as the naked eye could see. It felt so good, that I came back to my apartment with a clear, calm head and mind. I was ready to face another day in this concrete and electronic chip obsessed world

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.

Now if you are like me and always find it hard to create a strong enough password.  My situation is also made worse by the fact that I work as a System Administrator which means I get to maintain lots of  administrative passwords for many mission critical systems at work.  throw in my blog, 4 emails address. over 20 forum account, 2 Micro- blogging accounts and 5 IM accounts, and  it wont take a genius to know that I would be needing a password manager which would among other things allow me to create strong passwords, and store my passwords in a safe and encrypted format.  I did a little research and settled for KeepassX

KeePassX is an application for people with extremly high demands on secure personal data management. It has a light interface, is cross platform and published under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

source

Some of the features of KeepassX includes:

I have made a screen-cast on how you can easily use Keepass X to create a password. (don’t laugh at me.. its my first screencast ever )  (although I blabbed about this in my screencast. You would need to create a database for the first time you try to use KeePassX. )

Basic Intro to KeepassX from Bobby Adesuyan on Vimeo.

Installation

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.

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This new theme is not as cool but at least it gives me a proper sidebar and also width for my guides so its not quash down. eventually i hope to host my blog on my server and i have already started working on that. for now i would appreciate feed back on what you guys feel about this new look.