I’m sure the Amarok guys had good intentions with Amarok2, but I just don’t like it. Actually I hate it and think it really sucks. Not intuitive at all – I just want to play my music. The “upgrade” is an unfortunate side effect of upgrading Ubuntu from 8.10 to 9.04. I’m going back to 1.4.
I’ve been using Ubuntu on my home, work and laptop boxes for months now. At work I listen to music almost all the time and find xmms to be my player of choice. I hate all the players that want to be my music manager, etc. – I just want a decent mp3 player and xmms fits the bill. The problem is that xmms is not a Gnome app, which is was Ubuntu has all the standard key bindings for. But I have found a solution that works quite well… and doesn’t require a bunch of custom configs and hacking files all over, etc.
In the Preferred Applications settings applet in System -> Preferences, in the Multimedia tab, I set the “Multimedia Player” setting to “Custom” and then use “xmms -t” as the Command – don’t check “Run in terminal”. Then in the Keyboard Shortcuts applet, I set “Media player” to use the Pause/Break key.
Now when if xmms not running, it’s launched and if it is running, play/pause is toggled.
That’s all I needed! Now I’m a happy camper!
Maybe I should look into xmms2, but haven’t bothered yet.
The other day I had to work on a RedHat 7.3 box that nobody knew the root password – and no rescue floppy was made. Also, box was setup to use lilo with the prompt disabled – so “linux single” was not at option at that point.
So I got out my trusty tomsrtbt floppy (aka “Tom’s Root Boot” disk) to at least try to get to the file system. I was able to find out that /dev/sda1 had /boot and /dev/sda3 had /. So far so good.
I mounted /dev/sda3 to get to /etc/lilo.conf. I edited the file appropriately using vi and saved off lilo.conf. But, unlike grub – where I could just edit the grub.conf file, I would need to run the lilo command to reinstall lilo in the boot sector. I saw that tomsrtbt had lilo so I ran it. I knew I had to specify the location of the lilo.conf, but I still got “‘map segment is too big”. Turns out, lilo is version specific, so the one installed and the one on tomsrtbt are different. I tried a few more things, like using the lilo from the mounted file system, and then Googled for a solution…
That’s when I found the glory of “chroot”. I learned that chroot allowed you to change the root filesystem location for a command. Here’s what worked…
cd /mnt
mkdir v
mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/v
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/v/boot
chroot /mnt/v /sbin/lilo
That installed my new lilo settings and I could then enter “linux single” at the lilo prompt. Change the root password, and get things working!