shwango! blog » linux http://blog.shwango.com life, love and some other stuff... Sun, 14 Jun 2009 15:51:07 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Good software gone bad http://blog.shwango.com/2009/06/14/good-software-gone-bad/ http://blog.shwango.com/2009/06/14/good-software-gone-bad/#comments Sun, 14 Jun 2009 15:50:22 +0000 osterday http://blog.shwango.com/2009/06/14/good-software-gone-bad/ 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.

]]> http://blog.shwango.com/2009/06/14/good-software-gone-bad/feed/ 0 Ubuntu, xmms and key bindings http://blog.shwango.com/2007/11/29/ubuntu-xmms-and-key-bindings/ http://blog.shwango.com/2007/11/29/ubuntu-xmms-and-key-bindings/#comments Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:21:29 +0000 osterday http://blog.shwango.com/2007/11/29/ubuntu-xmms-and-key-bindings/ 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.

]]> http://blog.shwango.com/2007/11/29/ubuntu-xmms-and-key-bindings/feed/ 5 chroot, lilo and a lost password… http://blog.shwango.com/2004/02/03/chroot-lilo-and-a-lost-password/ http://blog.shwango.com/2004/02/03/chroot-lilo-and-a-lost-password/#comments Wed, 04 Feb 2004 00:04:27 +0000 osterday http://blog.shwango.com/2004/02/03/chroot-lilo-and-a-lost-password/ 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!

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