Amarok 2 Beta 2 screenshot review

A few days ago the second beta of Amarok 2 was finally released. I have to admit that a year ago I was looking forward for the final release. But now… I’m not at all (I guess it is because of Songbird).

Anyway, this second beta release is much more better than previous versions: it works really fast, and there are many new features. For example, the developers decided to use MySQL instead of SQLite, collection statistics, stop after this track and much more.

I installed the last version on my Ubuntu using this repositories:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/project-neon/ubuntu hardy main

And then installing:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install amarok-nightly

And this is what we get:

Tags: Amarok, KDE

Disabling free modules on Ubuntu

Since the kernel 2.6.27 was released we can take advantage of the new free modules that support almost all webcam and wifi devices. But there is something weird sometimes, above all on wifi devices, what happens is that the free module is so much slower than the privative one.

The way to fix it is disabling the free modules and installing the privative one. To do this on Ubuntu (Intrepid) we need to edit the file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and add a new line for each module we want to disable. Of course, it is completely necessary to know which is the module name.

Here are two examples: with atheros and bcm4xxx devices. My problem was that the top speed with the “old” privative driver was at least 300kb/s (the speed line), however, with the free module, this speed was 100kb/s (just annoying).

So if we want to disable these modules, here is what we have to do. Open a terminal and:
sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

A new window will appear. Go to the bottom and add these lines (it depends if you have one or the other device):
blacklist ath5k
(for atheros devices)

blacklist bcm4xxx
(for bcm4xxx devices)

And that’s all. The install the privative drivers and all will work fine.

Tags: atheros, bcm4xxx, kernel, Ubuntu

News on Saterday

We are going to take a quick look to all those important news that were published during this week:

• OpenOffice.org 3.0 RC3 was published. Even though it was supposed to be published at the end of September, it seems that they want to fix some issues by this time. So we have to wait until…
• Yesterday was also published Ubuntu 8.10 beta (there is nothing important to say, except the horrible wallpaper that they set as default, download it). Novell released the second beta of OpenSUSE 11.1 as well (download it).
• Gentoo team decided to cancel 2008.1 release, so until 2009 we won’t see another big release.
• A courious new: a hackers kernel team achieve to boot a linux on an EeePC in only 5 seconds!
• There is a new KDE release, the 4.1.2, that fix a problem removing files (now is faster).
• And The Gimp 2.6 was also released, and it came with a lot of changes: now the menu bar is not on the drawing tools window, developers changed it to a new window. The result is: Gimp is approaching its aspect to Photoshop (on Mac). It is possible to have it on Ubuntu Hardy using the getdeb repository.

Tags: Gentoo, Gimp, KDE, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu