Ubuntu For Free

What a disappointment. I’ve previously written about experiencing the Blank Screen Bug in Gutsy with the Release Candidate CD. Today, I was forced to experience that the problem is still there on the official release. I used Adept Manager to update 16 packages it noticed that were behind. After the update, it finally figured out that I was due for the distribution upgrade. It started the process and crashed. I rebooted and it informed me of 1304 updates. I started that process, it crashed, and failed to boot again.

I used the ISO for the Kubuntu 7.10 official release and tried to install. The first try, GRUB failed to point to the correct hard drive. The second time, it still used the wrong drive, but I edited the GRUB configuration and it successfully booted.

 The strangest thing, was even after I installed and booted up, the Adept Manager informed me of a couple of updates, and I updated those, and then it prompted me for a distribution upgrade… again. This time, I think I chose correctly when I opted to decline the upgrade.

I found a great program for converting my audio files from any format (flac, ape, spx, bonk, mp3, mp4, ogg, wav, wma, etc) to any other format. It’s called transKode and so far, it has actually supported all the formats I required, which was my biggest demand. I’ve got a Rio Carbon and my wife has a Creative Zen. I’ve been enjoying a lot of the wonderful free for non-commercial purposes music from sites such as Jamendo. Jamendo’s site only lets me download the .ogg files via torrent, and since neither of my players support that format, I’ve been looking for a program that converts them nicely for me.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t in the Ubuntu repositories, so I had to compile it. However, it was a lot easier than I had anticipated. I did have to compile one dependency, Taglib, and that was even easier.

Here’s the break down of the steps I went through, including taglib.

change to the folder where transkode was downloaded

cd /home/vmadmin/Downloads/transkode-0.7beta/

run the program to extract transkode. i used arK because it was easier than looking at a man page. i opened konquer in the current window using

konqueror $PWD&

change to source folder

cd transkode/

configure the setup

./configure

make the components

make

install the app

sudo make install

cleanup the source directory

make clean

download taglib

change to download folder

uncompress taglib

tar xzf taglib-1.4.tar.gz

change to the source folder

cd taglib-1.4/

configure the setup

./configure

make the components

make

install the components

sudo make install

cleanup

make clean

remove anything left behind

rm -f -R transkode-0.7beta/
rm -f -R taglib-1.4/