OpenSuSE 11.2, KDE 4.3 on dell vostro 1520

I while ago, my mum's laptop died. It was a old Acer laptop (for quite a while I had one of these too). This laptop had been running OpenSuSE for quite a while and mum had been very happy with the KDE desktop. The main reason for installing Linux, was that Windows XP had become unusable. A clean install of XP is nice had fast and responsive, however if you then install all the service packs and updates, the system becomes unusable! Recently the hardware had started to fail, first the battery, then the wireless...... So it was time for a new laptop.

After much looking around we got a Dell Vostro 1520 laptop. Now people who have seen my previous posts will know I'm a big fan of the dell laptops. The are built very well and have good hardware at a decent price. The part of the dell website that lets you customize the computer you are buying is fantastic. It means when I spec out laptops for people, it could be tailored differently for the person that will use it. We did look at other makes, but they were either to expensive (Sony, apple...) , a brand I've not heard of, or don't meet the required specs.

I decided to install OpenSuSE 11.2 RC2 as the the time of installing it, their were about 5 days till it's released. I have to say, once again OpenSuSE has made some big step forwards in areas that I care about. With a install using just the packages off the DVD, it was great and pretty much ready to use. However I add a few of the repositories amongst them are Mozilla, Packman and the latest stable KDE repos.

So in the previous release the things I had issues with were broken kde4 wireless application and no way to rip music to mp3 from a CD (k3b was not setup to do this). Both of these seem to have been sorted. Setting up the wireless was a joy. It was very easy. Ripping music from CD to mp3 is still a bit clunky. I would like music to be ripped to the hard disc automatically when a CD is put into the drive. However I get prompted if I would like to extract the audio with K3b or listen to the music with other apps. This works well, k3b was able to extract the audio. Slightly confusing for mum as she did not understand the term Ripping. Maybe these buttons should be called "Extract Audio" in the same way the dialog that prompts be for what to do with the inserted disc.

Their is one other thing I really like in the latest OpenSuSE is the KDE intergration with firefox. This is really awesome. I would like to see this go a bit further. For example use kget as the download manager. At the moment I use flexget to send stuff to kget, but that's a bit clunky. I'd also like passwords to be stored in the KDE wallet. I'm now also wondering if the FireFox hacks could be applied to all GTK apps? I use Eclipse at work and it's very annoying to me that it does not fit with my desktop.

All the hardware in the laptop is working great. Probably the first time that I've installed on a dell laptop and had all hardware working without tweaking. That might be down to the bleeding edge version of OpenSuSE though :-) The only thing that need a bit of tweaking were the special media buttons (play, next, prev, etc....). The just needed to be assigned to the amaork. Would be nice if this was done by default in KDE (though it does depend which media app you use). The volume controls were already assigned to the mixer app, so that was nice.

Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10)

I mentioned in a previous post that a friend had installed ubunt 9.04 on his new dell studio 1555 laptop and that their were no real problems. Well it seems after a bit of time a few problems did show up. The 64-bit kernel (2.6.28) in ubuntu 9.04 had some problems with suspend.

So he installed Ubuntu 9.10 (kernel 2.6.31) and that fixed all the problems with suppend. He has to ad 'noapic' to the kernel line in grub/menu.lst because to get some the special laptop keys working. Their is a bug on it, so maybe it will be fixed in the next few months. Their is also no need to add entries into the modprobe.conf anymore to get the sound working.

So it looks like next release of Ubuntu (9.10) will be a good one for dell studio laptops.

Released PodCaster version 1.0

Just made a release (1.0) of PodCaster. This is the fist time I've removed the beta status from the project. The release is mostly a bug fix release as it's been though quite a bit of testing and bug fixing.

Due to this been a bug fix release, the features are pretty much unchanged:

• Capture Internet radio to audio files.
• Create MP3, WAV and MP4 files.
• Encodes metadata and cover art into the media files.
• Create pod cast from captured radio stations.
• Supports real audio and Microsoft ASF format.

Please goto here to find out more details and download the release.

Ubuntu 9.04 on a Dell Studio 1555 laptop

A friend of mine has just bought a new Dell laptop to run Linux on. Since this is a new version on mine, though it might be useful to blog about it.

The laptop is a Dell Studio 1555 and has the following hardware installed:

Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link AGN driver for Linux, 1.3.27ks
2.0 mega pixel UVC webcam
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P7450 @ 2.13GHz
4Gig DDR2 Memory
ATI Technologies Inc M92 [Mobility Radeon HD 4500 Series]

Ubuntu 9.04 (kernel 2.6.28-15) was installed on the laptop. Apart from the sound, everything worked out of the box. The sound was just a matter of adding the following line on the modprobe.conf, which is going to be included in the new Ubuntu:

options snd-hda-intel model=dell-m6

Seems that dell are now using the Intel Wireless N cards instead of the one that was fitted in my laptop from broadcom. Seems like a smart move as it worked out of the box.

PS3, PSP and remote play

I got a present of a PSP from my wife when ew got married and so far I've been very impressed with this little gaming device. The best game I have for it Burnout dominator, this is well worth a play and quite addictive.

The PSP is great when traveling, I was quite surprised how long the battery life lasted, and the games I have for it are very impressive. One of the first consoles I had was a Sega Game Gear (still got it somewhere). The PSP remainds me a lot of this console, but really shows how far things have come since then.

I'm finding that the PSP is great for those times when I want to game, but the TV is in use so the PS3 can't be used. This let me to wonder about the remote play abilities of the PSP. I'd not heard many people mention it so figured I'd give it ago. Basicly the remote play allows the PSP to connect to a PS3. The PS3 screen appears on the PSP and allows it to be controlled from the PSP. This is pretty neat, but so far I've not actually been able to find a use for it. This is because very few titles work with remote play on the PSP. None of the games I own work with remote play. I might buy one at somepoint to give it a test drive. Also non of the DVD's work over remote play. This is a real shame.

So far I've been using remote play to install PS3 updates, thats about the only use for it that works. I'd love to hear from others that have used remote play. It seems such a neat feature thats almost impossible to make any use of. Same more games don't support it. Might also have been interesting if Sony had given the PSP the ability to work as a wirless controller for the PS3.

MediaInfoFetcher Release 1.2.2

Just made release 1.2.2 of MediaInfoFetcher. This is a small bug fix release mostly. The release can be downloaded from here.

Changes are as follows:

Bug Fixes:

• Updated some of the soruces with changes from in the source html they parse.

First release of podcaster (0.1 beta)

Just made the first release (0.1 beta) of PodCaster. This is a beta release as its the first initial release. Hopefully this will allow me to find any bugs in it and make a solid second release.

Thinking about the next release, I'd like to add some configuration options to allow the tools that PodCaster relies on to be configured.

Here is some of the features that can be found in this release:

• Capture Internet radio to audio files.
• Create MP3, WAV and MP4 files.
• Encodes metadata and cover art into the media files.
• Create pod cast from captured radio stations.
• Supports real audio and Microsoft ASF format.

Please goto here to find out more details and download the release.