Funnily enough, I am still looking. I was going to purchase one as my Christmas gift to myself, but as fate would have it, my cell phone died instead. So, I bought a new phone instead. However, the OGG player search has not ended. I just have more time to find a good deal.

I’ll check out the Samsung. I think I’ve actually seen those one in town here. Does it handle the variable bite rate ok?

I noticed that the cover manager really sucked. It was wrong in 90% of the cases. It appears to do a really rudimentary title search which is…well…rudimentary.

My player doesn’t have any ability to display cover art, so I didn’t go back into the cover manager to notice that they get deleted.

Seems like weird behaviour to me.

Thanks - I’ll take a look.

Sadly this is turning into a ‘what can I get in my local neighbourhood (cuz I like to play before I buy) rather than a ‘what’s the best I can get’

I swear to God, Canada is the biggest techno-retard country on the planet. We have like 8 cell cell phone handsets to chose from.

I’m mucking around with Kubuntu right now…it’s OK, but I had to jump through hoops to get Skype running again (it’s not in the Kubuntu repositores and the *.deb from Skype has dependency issues.) It’s running now, though. I just have to use it for a while to see if it breaks again.

I used Gnome briefly last night on the Ubuntu Live CD and I just…ick. I really don’t like it. A lot of that has do with the fact that I’ve been using KDE for along time now and I’ve forgotten all my Gnome skillz, but that’s not all of it.

J

Actually, the laptop stuff applies to Ubuntu as well. Frankly, I’m not sure the Kubuntu has the same support, though I’m 99.9% sure it does (same back-end for both distros). I made my Ubuntu into Kubuntu by removing Gnome and installing KDE 3.5. I ran Gnome for awhile, but KDE is faster, and Gnome is too limiting for me. To an extent, I agree with Linus. But for Grandma, Gnome is king.

Dammit, I just d/l’d Ubuntu thinking that it was high time I tried Gnome again (I’ve noticed when writing on New Linux User that I don’t have a clue how to do things in Gnome anymore), but your advice on the latop benefits of Kubuntu is making me doubt myself….I’ll download both and figure it out :)

Oh, and don’t worry about me taking it as hate mail. I used to get LOTS of hate mail so I can tell the difference between a well deserved poke, a valid opposing view point, and hate mail. I don’t get much hate mail anyhow…it’s kind of nice :)

In fact, it’s been a while since anyone called me a dork. Someone better do that soon or I might start to get a swelled head.

Off I go to d/l Kubutntu…

J

make sure you enable universe…and it’s derivatives–you can do that thru the gui in synaptic.

then, add these for some fun stuff:

deb http://people.ubuntu.com/~doko/OOo2 ./
deb http://soulmachine.net/breezy unstable/
deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/kde35 breezy main
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu breezy-backports main universe multiverse restricted
deb http://ubuntu-backports.mirrormax.net/ breezy-extras main universe multiverse restricted
deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ sarge main
deb http://debian.scribus.net/debian/ breezy main restricted

These should enable nearly everything you’ll ever need.
doko=OOo2
soulmachine=E17, if you ever want to play w/it
kde35=it’s obvious, and this is an *official* repository
backports=backports from 6.04 (not sure if this is listed by default)
extras=goodness you can’t get from the main repos
debian-marillat=libdvdcss, w32codecs, latest mplayer, etc
scribus: latest dev version of scribus. matters to me, but maybe not you

remember to check for updates frequently, because dev is ongoing–esp on kde 3.5

Re: research. OK, I’ll give you that you’re not exactly “advocating” LOS–I’m well aware of your reservations. You love the very thing that I loved about it. It has a great OOBE, but it stops there. I do agree that has ther right idea, however–now, to do it w/o being the bastard child of Debian…that’s the better thing. I’d considered using a different word; I guess I should have.

You’ll find that Kubuntu “just works” pretty well with 5.10. And I use it on an IBM Thinkpad T23. I agree with you that at the end of the day it needs to work, and that’s actually why I’m using Kubuntu. Although, I have to say, I’ve used Kanotix…and it’s my close-second choice. It’s amazingly fast…but difficult to get help.

At any rate, please don’t take this as hate mail. I just didn’t get it, that’s all…

When you get it, try adding these repositories to your sources.list (and you can do it all thru the gui in *ubuntu, very easily–but stick to synaptic rather than the KDE package managers, IMHO. If for some reason synaptic won’t start properly for you, then open a terminal and type “sudo ln /usr/bin/kdesud /usr/bin/gksudo” and you should be set. It’s just a little trick to getting all gnome-based apps the require sudo to work in KDE seamlessly. I like the gnome network tool, too–does a better job than KDE’s in my experiences (in any distro–discovered it on Kanotix).

I’m going to miss my suspend on Linspire though…sigh

Thanks for the feedback.

Re: Research. It’s true that I’ve kind of had my heart set on doing a Mail Merge show and I didn’t really have a plan B. I toyed with the idea of just not doing a show this week, but since there’s going to be at least a week during Christmas where there won’t be a show, I thought that would be a bad idea. I had been playing with amaroK and Lsongs recently and I was genuinely surprised to see how easy podcatching was with amaroK, so I thought it would be a good idea for the show. I’m also not going to go out on a tangent, but I’m going to reiterate (again) that it takes between 4-6 hours a week to make a 45-60 minute show. Some weeks I just don’t have that type of time. I try, but they’re not all going to be winners :)

That’s what I love about the community, though. You can’t get away with anything. Someone’s always going to call you out, but I like that because it’s free feedback :)

Your other statement needs to be addressed a little more strongly. I think that if you do your research (touche!) you’ll find that I am most defnitely not advocating Linspire. I don’t believe I’ve ever told anyone to use it and I think I’ve been quite clear about my reservations with Linspire. I’ve taken quite a bit of flak over on the Linspire forums for being critical of Linspire, so I don’t see how you could think that I’m advocating it.

I do think that Linspire has the right idea from a business perspective. If GNU/Linux adoption is going to reach any serious proportions, then consumers have to be able to buy GNU/Linux boxes in Walmart, Futureshop, and BestBuy. It’s the same problem that Firefox is facing: Everyone’s all excited because it has a 10% market share but really, that’s abysmal and it’s not going to get much higher. Why? Because people have to download it and install it. Until FF comes pre-installed, 10% is the best deal it’s going to see.

The separation from the business idea and the technical aspects of the OS are two different beasts and have to be treated as such.

From day one I expressed concern about the silo that Linspire has created and concern for how far Linspire has strayed from the Debian way and what this would mean in terms of applications. I was (and remain) very impressed at how effortlessly it picked up and configured all my hardwarehowever, I predicted that sooner or later I would run up against a wall with Linspire which I have with OOo2. Granted I would have thought that the wall would have been about something esoteric that I wanted, not about something as main stream as OOo. I don’t care what anyone says, they’re pushing two months to get OOo into the CNR and it’s still not there. The most recent post on the forums is that it might not be out until next month. There’s no way to explain that except that Linspire has absolutely butchered the guts of Debian and is trying to kludge OOo to make it work.

I agree with you that the LOS dev team isn’t up to the task. This task, anyhow. The forums are full of statements like ‘there are bugs in OOo that need to be fixed, when I asked the question about whether the bugs were in OOo or in Linspire’s hacking of it, it was conveniently ignored. Normal, everyday users don’t really know what a ‘bug’ is and when people start talking about ‘bug’s in OOo which prevent it from running on LOS’, I cry bullshit. Everyone who isn’t running LOS seems to be running OOo 2 OK.

Re: Klik…good to know it runs on LOS. However, when I do a show, I like to do it with a plain vanilla install. That way I ensure (as much as possible) that my installation is behaving like my listener’s installation. There have been many suggestions on how to work around the LOS OOo debacle (yes, I’m officially calling it a debacle now) ranging from Klik to Cosmopod, but I don’t feel comfortable doing that. I’m just not confident that those installs will behave the same as a vanilla install from the repositories or the OOo site. Now that I’ve seen how long the LOS team is taking to get OOo into the CNR, I also have no confidence that the LOS version will resemble everyone else’s either. So, I’ll do it on the Kanotix box upstairs when I get there. That box has been basically unavailable to me for the past semester because that’s where Kelly works.

Same with Kubuntu. I documented quite heavily exactly what my problems were with it. It’s documented on this blog and my personal blog, so I’m not sure why you’re not sure what my problems were with it. If it’s the comparison between my disliking Kubuntu’s support and ‘advocating’ Linspire then that’s already been put to bed. The problem, quite simply, is that my killer apps don’t work on Kubunutu - specifically Skype. I need Skype, I cannot live without Skype and until Ubuntu, I’ve never had a problem with Skype. Kubuntu’s Skype didn’t work on my machine and the normal packages available for Debian didn’t work either. That’s the problem at the end of the day: my stuff has to work. If it doesn’t then I don’t care why, I’ll go find a distro that does work. That’s the beauty of GNU/Linux.

I took a lot of flak over documenting my experiences with Kubuntu. I don’t know why…I’m pretty sure people would like to know how things work for me instead of me making stuff up or just ignoring the stuff that doesn’t work, but I guess people get offended when they fall in love with a distro and someone comes along and talks about the problems they’ve had with it. Doesn’t make sense to me, but the 50+ hate emails and comments I got from Ubuntu lovers spoke volumes. But you know what? It still doesn’t work for me, so what am I supposed to do?

I’ve freely admitted a hundred times that the fact that I use a laptop and that presents some problems that desktop users may not experience. That’s why all the ‘it works for me’ emails don’t help at all. I’m glad it works for so many people, but it doesn’t work for me.

Penguin: At least Virgil made it into the hat! I think Kelly and Mandeep are the only ones who get ‘Bloreo’ :)

J

But on another note, you’ve hit on two of the major reasons I’m not still running Linspire. Basically, it’s locked down. You have to really hack things and remove features that *make* Linspire what it is in order to customize it. An example is the autoplay functionality with Lsongs–you really can’t customize it w/o really hacking around. This is certainly not something for newbie Linux users. There are many, many other things that can’t be customized about the OS–some of them are convenience or compatibility issues. But, with LOS, like Windows, you just have to live with it.

I don’t want to live with it. I’m whiney like that.

Second thing that really annoyed me: the fact that LOS is WAY behind the curve in app releases. New releases in the F/OSS world fix things that are broken and add important new features (like undo in Scribus 1.3.x–which LOS finally got in October), and LOS always seems to lag way behind on this stuff. Maybe they need a bigger dev team, or a more efficient way of doing things–or perhaps they need to not deviate so far from mainstream Debian. I dunno, but it’s really annoying.

Incidentally, Klik *does* work on LOS, so you could install OOo2 (and several other apps) that way. AMOF, LOS is the first place I tried Klik.

PS–I’m not sure what happened with your Ubuntu/Kubuntu installation, but I’ve had no real problems with it. I don’t understand your “support” issues…perhaps it’s semantics. But to me, just b/c Canonical doesn’t officially “support” something doesn’t mean it won’t work. In fact, thousands of users have never had any problem with the universe repositories, including me. You squawked about *ubuntu being locked down and then installed Linspire? You talked about freedom and now advocate Linspire? I don’t get it. You can install almost anything that’s mainstream Debian on *ubuntu and it will work. Try that on LOS…no dice, as you’ve seen yourself with OOo2. Not only that, but Kubuntu already has KDE 3.5 packages, and had OOo2 packages unofficially available (and working fine) within days of release. I’d encourage you to try it again, and if you need some tips on installation, etc, contact me.

Hey, I still love you guys, even when I disagree with you.

And when you don’t name the penguin Virgil…

“Bloreo”…bleah! ;)

I’ve been getting A LOT of feedback that the iRiver really isn’t a good piece of gear. I’m going back to the drawing board on my choices :)

Thanks for stopping by.

I’m happy with the way things are. I think by now people know where to go to get episodes and I think in only one case has the week’s show not been up on Monday (maybe two cases…but that’s pretty reliable).

The other point is that I prefer that people subscribe. Well, more correctly, TPN prefers that people subscribe. Therefore I can predict Cam’s response when I ask him to implement something to make it easier to not subscribe :)

You’re welcome!

I use Ipodder^W Juice Receiver, but for those folks that like to pick and choose why not a mailing list to remind them a new cool GNU/Linux user show is out, and ready to download? Even better if it could just send out the show notes when you post them? Is there a wordpress extension to do something like this I wonder?

Thanks a mil’ for another great show!

Fergus

Eric

They all have the 700 series low end flash players which are comparable in price & features to the Iaudio5 line. None of them can play low bitrate ogg files. I would of bought the IRiver if it wasn’t for this issue. Supposedly it was going to be corrected with a firmware upgrade. That hasn’t happed yet. I’m very happy with the Iaudio player.

Or maybe I will…..

I think that depends on which iriver you buy. I have one of the iriver H340 (its 40gb version) and that plays all the ogg files I’ve thrown at it - Including GNU Linux User Show and Linux Linc Tech Show :-)

I’ll check out your recommendation…man..512 for $89 is cheap (even in American funds!)

Thanks!

Merry Christmas!

Pat

Wow…lots of good information on your comment, thanks!

I totally forgot about choosing the layout when I ran amaroK for the first time, you’re right. Now that you’re reminded me of that, I should mention that there’s an option (in the Tools menu I think) to re-run the first-run wizard in case someone wants to change the layout or change the directory their music is stored in.

Ahhh…thanks for clarifying ‘the konqueror way’. I’ve never actually tried that but it sounds wicked. If I can rip into amaroK, then I’m ditching LSongs today. I hate having to use two applications…must slicker with one.

Ahhh KDE 3.5. I fear that’s a long way off in the Linspire CNR however I’m definitely going to get it running on my desktop!

Thanks, Ash.

I’m a big amarok fan and I’ve just listen to your latest podcast on it, here’s a few comments…

Not sure what linspire has done with amarok (or even what version you are running) but you can run it in two different “layouts” both of which have play|pause|stop buttons, you can see them on this screenshot…
http://amarok.kde.org/images/stories/albums/album03/amarok13.sized.png
and you can choose between the layouts using the first run wizard.

Ripping tracks the “konqueror way” is easy, just bung in an audio cd and have kde auto mount it, double click on the CD icon that appears on your desktop (or use the kde media applet). You will see several (virtual) folders on your CD… CDA, FLAC, Full CD, Information, MP3 and Ogg Vorbis - just copy any of these folders on to your desktop (or any other folder of choice) and it will rip them on the fly, how much easier could you get :-D. The ripping settings are managed in the kcontrol panel I think under sounds and multimedia.

Another great amarok integration is if you are using kde 3.5 and kopete. Kopete 3.5 now allows you to enable the “Now Listening” feature which means everything you are listening to in amarok is displayed as your sub message in you msn messenger name (and yahoo, etc…).

Also you can set amarok to use the recommendations from last.fm to append suggested tracks to your play list (obviously appending tracks you already have on in your collection) based on the currently playing track.

All very cool stuff.

Ash.

This is more an issue of ‘WTF is taking so long with Linspire’ than a pressing need to get my hands on OOo2.

I think I mentioned in the Linspire show (26?) that I wouldn’t be surprised if and when I ran up against a wall with the Linspire silo. This type of situation is exactly the problem with the Linspire model - GNU/Linux users aren’t used to sitting around waiting for stuff that everyone else already has. I’m not ready to move on or anything because, for my laptop anyhow, the pluses far outweigh the minuses. But still, this type of thing is predictable.

At the least it’ll solve the library problem that (i think) messed up your menus in the version of OO.o you installed. From what you said it kinda sounds like OO.o is missing some library it wants.
Though I suppose installing OO.o this way might involve more messing around with the system than it’s worth.

And thanks for the link to the OGG audio players. I suspect I’m going to be stuck with the iRiver here in Canada (not that that’s so bad), but maybe I’ll find something on that list that I can get here.

The mail merge is not the best way since this was done from a spreadsheet as opposed to a database, but most people (wrongly) used their spreadsheet for database.

The link is the following:
http://es.openoffice.org/files/documents/73/3071/mail_merge.swf

Also you can check a more extensive tutorial done by Bruce Byfield on mail merge at Linux Journal:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8238

This is an extensive list of OGG players:
http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/PortablePlayers

Yeah…ThinkFree…grumble.

Dual boot: I have a perfectly good copy of OOo2 running on my Kanotix box. The problem is that Kelly has been studying for her finals and using the dual-booted computer that Kanotix is on. Therefore, it’s not available to me. And my laptop? No. I’ve been through enough hell with that thing over the past year. With my added responsibilities over at b5, I can no longer afford the downtime that using my laptop as a test machine generates. I’ve therefore decided that is it my official ‘production’ machine and will not be used for testing any more.

However, Kelly is done school for the semester so I will be able to do the OOo show sooner rather than later.

Hey - on that note, can you point me to a decent reference of mail merge? I’ve got some stuff, but I’m looking for more.

Thanks!