Spotify nativo en Linux

Si usas spotify en GNU/Linux, seguramente lo haces a través de Wine, ejecutando la versión para windows. A pesar de que esta opción funcionan bastante bien, a veces suele dar algún que otro problemilla, y además no se integra completamente en el sistema.

Hace algún tiempo, en el blog oficial de spotify se anunció una versión para GNU/Linux, que según dicen, es la que usan internamente los propios desarrolladores de la plataforma. Es una versión preliminar sobre la que no se ofrece soporte oficial y además no está disponible para las cuentas gratuitas, ya que según comentan no han encontrado la forma de mostrar publicidad en ella.

Pues bien, recientemente esto ha cambiado y ahora sí soporta las cuentas gratuitas. Llevo usándola unos días en una Ubuntu 12.04 y la verdad es que funciona muy bien, además de integrarse perfectamente con el sistema.

Si quieres probarla sólo tienes que añadir el siguiente repositorio en /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://repository.spotify.com stable non-free

añadir la clave pública si quieres comprobar los paquetes:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 94558F59

actualizar e instalar el cliente:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install spotify-client

Tips for Ubuntu 9.04

Testing the new release of Ubuntu I found some changes that don’t like very much. First of them is that now the sortcut Ctrl+Alt+BackSpace is deactivated by default, the other one is that the update manager just appear when there are some new update instead of the old icon in the systray. I really hate windows that appear out of control in my desktop.

Fortunately, looking for Internet I could find a solution. In the first case it’s enough to add this lines at the end of /etc/X11/xorg.cong file:


Section "ServerFlags"
Option "DontZap" "False"
EndSection


To avoid that update manager appears whenever it likes just type this in a terminal:

gconftool -s --type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false

I have also some problem with the 3D acceleration of my card, a Intel 945GM, that was fixed downgrading the driver to the intrepid version. For that, I added these lines to /etc/apt/sources.list:


deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/siretart/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/siretart/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main


and doing apt-get update and sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel.

The moral of the post is that Human Beings are prisoners of our habits.

Testing Intrepid Ibex with QEMU

In one of the first posts I told about testing the new version of Ubuntu. In that post I had just upgraded muy ubuntu 7.10 to ubuntu 8.04 Heard5, that was, one month before ubuntu 8.04 becomes stable. I didn’t have any several problem but to be honest I had lots of lucky.

Now I am going to test the next ubuntu release, this is ubuntu 8.10 or if you prefer Intrepid Ibex.
According to the ubuntu release schedule the last version to test if the Alpha 4. Two months left for the release.

This time I am not going to trush on luck. In one of the last sessions of the Master on Free Software, Berto told us about Virtualization. Among the virtualization systems about Berto told us I liked specially QEMU, so I decided to use it in order to test ubuntu 8.10. These are the steps that I followed:

- First I downloaded the iso image of ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 4 from here.

- Installing QEMU:

- Then I created a qemu file image, this will be my virtual hard disk, doing:

- Now I could install ubuntu 8.10 in that virtual hard disk from the iso image just doing:

where 512 is the size of the RAM.

- Finally to run ubuntu 8.10 after installing it:

$qemu -hda ~/intrepid.img -m 512

Some tips:

- If you are using a 64 bits operative system you should use qemu-system-x86_64 as command instead of qemu.

- If you want the virtual system run faster you can install the qemu accelerator:

$sudo apt-get install kqemu-common

you will need to load the kernel module for the accelerator:

$sudo modprobe kqemu

then you can run qemu with the option –kernel-kqemu to use the accelerator.

Encoding video for the NDS

I have had a nds since a couple of months. Of course its best quality is the gaming but it has more possibilities. There are many homebrew or applications that you can download from internet and they let you do many things like surf the web, check your email, you can use it like video and music player even install GNU/Linux.

The video player is a great feature, for example I use a video and music player for my nds called moonshell. The problem is that application uses a specific video format (dpg) so it is necessary to encode the videos before.
Recently I found this script in python, licensed under GPL2, that let you do it easily. You need also mpeg_stat, that analyze the streaming of a mpeg file. The use is as follow:

First you need to copy mpeg_stat to your /bin directory. Then you should copy the script to the same directory where you have the video/s to encode and then you can execute doing:

$ python dpgconv.py file_name.extension

It works perfectly with avi and mpeg videos, once it has done you can copy the video in your nds and to enjoy.

The moral of the post is: Is there anything that it cannot be made with python?