David Carrington

Two weeks back I noticed my PC running slow under Windows XP. I’d spontaneously acquired a virus! But hey - you expect that on a Windows machine surely? So - that weekend, I plugged in a fresh hard drive and installed Ubuntu 7.04 (aka Feisty Fawn).

• My rare-ish printer isn’t supported (not too bothered)
• I’ve not spent time getting my Pocket PC to sync up
• The old Dexxa webcam worked straight away… although it has sizing issues in certain modes and I still manually change the brightness and white balance in terminal every time I use it
• I’ve not looked at hooking up my GPS (serial, not USB, which hints at problems)
• The nVidia graphics driver was happy once I gave permission for Ubuntu to use it
• The multi-card reader built into the PC was picked up just fine (better than Windows, which detected it as USB 1.0)
• UT2004 works without any hassle (allowing me to play Alien Swarm - woohoo)
• I’ve finally found a nice fast and clean torrent client (Deluge)

Is anything else important? It just works.

I use IRC quite a lot, and switching from mIRC to xChat has been easy - even the requirement to start learning Python so I could replicate some of the scripts I’d written for mIRC.

Time to work on some of those points above :)

Not exactly one of the “age old” problems, but an interesting morning challenge: GarageBand lets you stream audio music down from their site - but what if 10 people want to listen to that stream (using headphones) on the same network? VLC player and a PHP-generated playlist was the answer.

My PHP code does a few things:

1. Download all of the GarageBand “Genre” and “Chart” pages
2. Parse those pages for artist links
3. Download every artist’s XML podcast
4. Parse the podcasts for MP3 links
5. Dump the list of MP3s into an M3U playlist

Now what? Well we could all separately download the songs on the playlist and stream from GarageBand. However, that’s not geeky enough - so we’ve got it so Geoff is playing the music through VLC player - and has configured that to broadcast out across the network.

The only annoying problem is that I have to hit play each time a new track comes up as the connection is lost - I’m sure we’ll sort that out.