I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 3. A few days ago Ubuntu announced a new branding. One of the things they changed is the order of the window button layout. Instead of the expected Minimize | Maximize | Close they changed to Maximize | Minimized | Close. Very confusing and I kept pressing the wrong button each time I wanted to maximize my screen.

Luckely there's an easy way to alter it. Open the Configuration Editor, navigate to /apps/metacity/general and modify the button_layout key to:

menu:minimize,maximize,close

If you've ever installed Apache and phpMyAdmin on Ubuntu 9.04 and you changed the Apache run user and group to your local user (because it's a lot easier when developing that way) you will most likely have encountered a WSOD when loading the phpMyAdmin page.

The reason behind this is that the permissions of those files on your system are no longer correct. Luckily this can easily be solved by changing them back. By default Ubuntu creates a group with the same name as your user so if your user name is foo the group name is most likely also foo. All we need to do is change the group permissions and everything should work again.

Some time ago Microsoft released the RTM versions of Windows 7. I never used Vista myself, except for some testing, but we all know Vista was a bloated and slow OS. I mainly use a Windows OS to perform some tasks I cannot emulate using Wine and no Linux alternatives exist.

The first thing I did was switch back to the Windows classic theme. The well-known Vista start menu is still present, but at least I got rid of those 10 pixels wide borders. So far I must say it looks really slick and fast and I haven't experienced any issues. I hope we can keep it like that.

Me and my desktop music players have always had a love-hate relationship.

When I started out listening to music on my computer I started with Winamp, like most people. It was light, fast and easy. At that time I did not really care much about the way my music files were organized on my hard drive nor whether all relevant ID tags were filled in correctly.

When I started using Linux I started using XMMS, which looked and worked like Winamp and I was happy. I always felt Rhythmbox was too big for my needs and I did not like the way it looked with the weird browser at the top.

Than Banshee came. Banshee was good looking, light, easy to manage and had decent playlist support and I don't really care about the fact that it's made using Mono. At that time for me it was a revelation. I also started to take great care of the way my files were organized and that the ID tags were filled in correctly. This was a lot of manual work but I simply did not know any better.

Around 2006 I found myself using Windows alot and I gently made the transition to iTunes. I also bought an iPod so the choice was obvious. iTunes also introduced me to a real media player and library. It automated my file organization, had support for cover albums, lots of playlist features and iPod synchronization.

When I went back to Linux Banshee had made a drastic user interface change, looking more like Rhythmbox and it lacked decent compilation album and iPod support. Some things worked, but more often it didn't.

On my quest for a decent iTunes alternative i tried out various programs, sometimes combining multiple to achieve what I wanted. When I stumbled upon Amarok 1.4 it immediately became my first choice. It has great collection support, iPod synchronization, album cover management and so on. Everything was working great and I was happy.

When the Ubuntu folks released Jaunty they included Amarok 2.0. To this day I still don't understand why they did that since it lacks about every feature a decent music player should have these days. Luckily a PPA archive of Amarok 1.4 was available which provided me with a way to continue using my favorite player.

A few days ago the guys from Banshee released version 1.5. All looked good and I decided to give it a try. Everything seems to work nicely but the file organization was not really how I would like it to be. After some bug reporting someone wrote a nice patch which I applied to a local copy of the repository and I must say that I am really pleased. As of today I imported my entire music collection and I removed Amarok 1.4.

I really hope they can keep up the good work like that and, with some minor bugs left, I think I found my new desktop music player.

I have been playing online poker for quite some time now and I noticed that I recently started playing more and more. I think I went from one or two hours per month to around one hour per day. I also never cared much about my plays. Did I play a lot, did I win a lot, what were my chances when I played certain hands. Across many forums people post advanced graphs of their hands and overall progress so I set out to find something similar. Wine has come far, yet certain Windows applications still cause a lot of problems.

I opted to use PokerTracker. It was recommended by me and has a free 60 day trial. The installation of PokerTracker was easy. Much like any normal Windows application. Troubles came afterwards.

PokerTracker uses a PostgreSQL database to store all the information about your hands. After an hour of trying to install the Windows version of PostgreSQL without any success I gave up and attempted to install PostgreSQL on my Ubuntu installation. Installing stuff on Ubuntu is fairly easy:

$ sudo apt-get install postgresql postgresql-client postgresql-contrib pgadmin3

Done. All I needed to do was set some passwords and PostgreSQL was finished. (Make sure to replace the word mynewpassword with your new password.)

$ sudo su postgres -c psql template1
template1=# ALTER USER postgres WITH PASSWORD 'mynewpassword';
template1=# \q

After I changed the password for within the database I needed to change the password of the Linux postgres user. Easily done as follows:

$ sudo passwd -d postgres
$ sudo su postgres -c passwd

For future usage I also enabled the admin pack.

$ sudo su postgres -c psql < /usr/share/postgresql/8.3/contrib/adminpack.sql

Almost done. The only thing we need is a PostgreSQL ODBC driver which we can download from here. Extract the zip file and install it like any other Windows application using Wine.

The last thing I had to do (found here) was to change some registry settings:

wget http://www.holdemresources.net/hr/linuxpoker/pokertracker/ptrack-reg.txt
regedit ptrack-reg.txt

When I started PokerTracker it asked me to install PostgreSQL. When I clicked the cancel button it asked me for my PostgreSQL database information. I entered my password since I kept everything else to its defaults and of it went.

I am a Linux user with an iPod. Like people in my situation will know, the iPod support from the various Linux music applications is not that good. (I know there are several external applications, but I want an all-in-one iTunes alike solution.) They all lack something which makes me don't want to use it and up until now I've only found 2 players who actually do a decent job: Banshee and Amarok.

Banshee lacks compilations support though, which is a problem for me since I have lots of compilation discs. They hacked together some sort of implementation in the latest version but it still seems to cause iPod synchronization issues and you have to apply weird tricks to your MP3 tags. Not user friendly at all, thus not usable. I really like the Banshee project, but they seem to keep doing things wrong somehow.

Amarok works OK on all fields. They have compilation support, MP4 video support,... The current Amarok version is quite perfect for my needs. Until you read the release notes of Amarok 2.0. If it works and everybody's happy with it, don't change it. When will they learn?

So, unless anyone can provide me with a decent alternative I'm afraid I will stay with the current Amarok version...

One of the great things about Linux is the fantastic Package Management System. Unfortunately, once in a while you want to install software which is not included in any of the repositories available for your Linux distribution and you run into troubles. You either need to convert package files from distribution X to your distribution or compile the source code yourself and figure out all the dependencies too. Quite painfull.

One of the commercial applications I use is VMWare and installing that from source on Ubuntu always required some kind of kernel modifications and extra non-supported patches. But those they are over it seems because VMWare now allows you to install it using a .bundle file which is basically a clean and nice installer. Installing software outside of your Package Management System has never been easier and I can only cheer for things that make our lives easier.