Ubuntu For Free

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/


Today I discovered a program that think I might be using a lot more in the future. It’s called Basket Note Pads. It’s a very versatile program for taking notes. I prefer the tree based and free form views available in this new software as compared to Tomboy or KNotes.

Some of it’s features include:

• Easily take all sort of notes
• Collect research results and share them
• Centralize your project data and reuse it
• Quickly organize your toughts in idea boxes
• Keep track of your information in a smart way
• Make intelligent To Do lists

The website is very feature packed, and offers several screen shots.

To install in Kubuntu, simply use

sudo apt-get install basket