Engineered

If somebody asked my why I thought Mac's were good, I would sum it up in one word - engineered. Sure OSX is a sweet operating system on the Mac's. Sure everything runs smooth.

But why?

Apple doesn't just sell an operating system. They don't just sell sexy looking computers like the Macbook, they sell computers (including iPods, iPhones, and so on) that are designed for their operating system. (Hence why you can't buy it by itself or easily put it on another computer.)

In previous blog about Dell and Ubuntu, I mentioned that on Dell's site, you can now buy a machine that comes preloaded with my personal favorite operating system. The preloaded PC's ship with the latest version of Ubuntu on the machine, ready to fire away.

Dell PC's with Ubuntu is like an Apple. It's smart. It's engineered.

I have nothing against Windows - it's a great operating system and will continue to be for a long time. Windows is serving businesses worldwide and always will be, but it Windows is on a huge hardware market. New types of processors, new hardware, and even the no-name branded hardware is always being released everyday. Microsoft has a huge race that only Microsoft could run. It's doing well to accommodate for the hardware it can be put on.

Instead, Apple went a different route. They went for specific hardware that only Apple decides can be used, and now Dell makes PC's tailored to best run Ubuntu, with room to tweak some hardware peripherals.

Ubuntu has been evolving like a baby, and over the past couple years, I have witnessed it firsthand growing and becoming more user-friendly and more compatible with certain hardware (like the Dell Inspiron 6000 I'm using right now). Now, I can pop the Ubuntu install CD in my computer and in 15 or so minutes, everything is working as it should, with no drivers to install or anything. It just works.

Engineered for greatness, tailored for speed.

Rhythmbox Music Manager

Well, Nic has brought it to my attention of the new capability to install Rhythmbox with PlaysforSure support. Anybody with Ubuntu (not Kubuntu) will already have Rhythmbox installed. It is the default music manager for Ubuntu, and is full of features. The latest version has even more features.

The rest of this post will explain how to install the latest and greatest RB with MTP (PlaysForSure) support and all the other goods.

Here's a quick run-down of the improvements on MTP in Rhythmbox:

• It works. (awesome enough)
• There is not much lag when it is scanning the device (maybe 15 seconds at the longest)
• You can play straight from the device
• You can send/recieve from device

This guide is for Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty).

1) Let's make sure we have the goods needed

sudo aptitude purge rhythmbox

sudo apt-get install build-essential gnome-common subversion libmtp5 libmtp-dev

sudo apt-get build-dep rhythmbox

2) Now we need to get the latest version of Rhythmbox

svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/rhythmbox/trunk rhythmbox
cd rhythmbox

3) And now the install

./autogen.sh --with-mtp
sudo make
sudo make install

4) Plugin your player, run your new Rhythmbox for the first time, and make sure you go to Edit > Plugins and enable "Portable Players - MTP"

5) Enjoy.

Amarok Music Manager

History Lesson
I am currently running Ubuntu Edgy (6.10). As stated in the previous article, I have a Creative Zen Xtra PlaysForSure (MTP) device. PlaysForSure started out as a strictly Microsoft-only thing, but then an open-source library called libmtp came into the scene.

Fact:
Amarok rocks your face off.

Another Fact:
Amarok supports almost every type of portable music player. Including PlaysForSure devices.


Why I'm writing this:
I have just recently installed the latest version of Amarok from source into my Ubuntu distribution (Edgy). The latest and greatest version supports all of these portable devices, whereas the one in the Ubuntu repositories does not. To see a full feature list, visit Amarok's main site.

The rest of this article will focus on how to set up and install the latest version of Amarok from source into Ubuntu Edgy (6.10).

The next release - Feisty (7.04) - will come with a version of Amarok that will support PlaysForSure (MTP) devices.

For each of the command's given, copy and paste each line into a terminal window.

i) You must have the repositories enabled to do anything else. Note that you will need the administrator password for all of this as well.
- Click on System --> Administration --> Software Sources
- Make sure all of the check in the first tab under "Internet" are checked.


1) First we must make sure you do not already have Amarok installed.

sudo apt-get remove amarok amarok-xine

If you have previously installed amarok with checkinstall and a different package name, use Synaptic to find it and remove it.

2) Installing the necessary tools to build Amarok
*NOTE - this step will require approximately 160mb of hard disk space.
*Thanks Cigar_Jack on the correction.

sudo apt-get install build-essential checkinstall
sudo apt-get build-dep amarok

2a) Installing the latest version of libmtp from source.
- Travel to http://sourceforge.net/projects/libmtp and download libmtp to your desktop.
- Right-click the archive and select "Extract here"
- Then do these commands:

sudo apt-get remove libmtp2 libmtp-dev #Thanks to oxyrosis at ubuntuforums!
cd /home/$USER/Desktop/libmtp*
./configure
make
sudo checkinstall #I named it libmtp-built, to avoid any problems

2b) Installing the latest version of libgpod from source.
- Travel to http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=67873&package_id=156254 and download libgpod to your desktop.
- Right-click the archive and select "Extract here"
- Then do these commands:

cd /home/$USER/Desktop/libgpod*
./configure
make
sudo checkinstall #I named it libgpod-built for the same reason as above.

3) Download the file.
- Browse to http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Download:Source
- Click on tarball
- Click on a local mirror.
- Create a folder on your desktop called Amarok
- Click on the file "amarok-1.x.x.tar.bz2" and save it into the folder
- Browse to the folder, right-click the file, and click on "Extract Here"

4) Install the program
- For the last command, make sure you rename the package before hitting enter the third time. Don't leave the package named as "amarok" - Ubuntu will "update" it to the older version. Instead, rename it to "amarok-built" or something different than "amarok". Just follow the on screen directions and you should be ok.

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /home/$USER/Desktop/Amarok
cd /home/$USER/Desktop/Amarok
cd amarok*
./configure --with-libnjb --with-libmtp --with-libgpod --prefix=`kde-config --prefix`
make
sudo checkinstall

This how-to was written with the help of this how-to at ubuntuforums:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=316246&highlight=amarok+mtp

The [almost] Greatest OS today?

Well, after having thoroughly read reviews, prices and watched conferences on the new and upcoming Operating Systems from Apple and Microsoft, I have concluded that the best OS out for a PC is neither (especially in considering the difficulty one would have in placing OSX on a PC). The greatest is actually Ubuntu. Ubuntu is an entirely free, Open Source operating system based on Linux. To learn more about Open Source, click here. In short, Open Source is based off a mentality to have freely developed software available to everyone.

Over the past few months, Ubuntu has evolved from something good to a truly spectacular operating system. In the screenshot, I have the latest Ubuntu Edgy installed - which only took 15 minutes to install ground-up.

Already out of the box upon installing Ubuntu comes Evolution - almost the equivalent to Microsoft Outlook... just better, the latest and greatest of Firefox - 2.0... the entire Openoffice.org Suite, which eliminated my need for any office software; I even had database tools. There was also The Gimp installed - which is a fairly equivalent to Photoshop - a handful of games, music listening/ripping/burning sofware, and GAIM. Gaim is the best instant messaging client any human being could ask for, and what a better way to use it than to place it on the operating system for human beings.

After I installed Edgy, I grabbed Automatix2 - a tool used to easily install the most popular used apps to your system - by following ubuntuguide.org. In a matter of minutes, I had GoogleEarth, Exaile! music player, a number of developing programs, Blender3d - an opensource equivalent to 3dMax - and a web development tool. My computer had become a multimedia video/audio/image studio, along with a complete developer's backyard to write applications.

Gamers! You can also be excited! If you can't leave your Windows games, there are ways to play them in Ubuntu. Cedega offers a solution that can allow your gaming goodness to become a reality in Linux. The software isn't free, but it is worth it. What's even better is that some terrific games are already ported to Ubuntu. Nexuiz is one of those games. It offers the gaming fun of Unreal Tournament, with some of the latest graphics offered in games like Half-Life 2 (such as the bloom and HDR effects).

Low graphics settings - I was on a non-gaming laptop.

One more AMAZING plus to Ubuntu is AIGLX. It is incredibly easy to install something called Beryl, and it will then turn the computer into a 3d-fluid desktop environment, featuring a 3d multi-desktop, transparent window titles (which was a possibility before Windows Vista was even released), and many more cool effects.


The last and biggest thing that would have held me back from Ubuntu is a little thing called PlaysForSure. If you own an mp3 player other than an iPod, odds are it is PlaysForSure - and was MS's attempt at locking you in to Windows. But now it works, thanks to the release of libmtp2 and Gnomad2 (v 2.8.9+).


The ONLY thing that still is not enabled in Linux is the ability to play music bought through an online music store like iTunes or URGE.

At least not yet - the Open Source community is always changing, always growing, always supporting.