Tom Purl’s Web Site

I apologize in advance for the corny, rhyming title

I’ve been using an Asus EEE PC 900 netbook for about a year now, and have used it mostly for light word processing and web browsing. I also have a MythTV server running in my basement on an old Duron-based system. I can do almost all of my personal daily work on the EEE PC, but when I need to do anything MythTV-related, I’m forced to switch machines.

This can be a pain, so I decided to try running the “frontend” for MythTV on my EEE PC. To my surprise, everything is working very well. It only took me about 5 minutes to install and configure the frontend software, and after that, I was able to do the following on my netbook:

• Watch live tv
• Watch recorded shows
• Edit shows (i.e. cut out commercials)

And the best part is that it’s all working very well over my wireless G network. Your results may vary, but at least it’s nice to know that this configuration works for some people.

Here’s some more information about my setup in case you want to try this yourself:

• My netbook has a 900 Mhz processor, 1 GB of RAM, and a solid-state hard drive
• I am using the integrated graphics card made by Intel. Apparently, it uses the i810 chipset.
• I am serving up standard-definition television

And finally, a few caveats:

• I don’t know the limits of the video card that comes with my netbook. The highest resolution that I’ve tried is 1280×1024 on a 17″ monitor, and it looked pretty good. I have no idea how it would look at a higher resolution on a more regular-sized TV.
• I have heard that his netbook simply can’t display HD recordings. I’m not an expert on this type of thing (since I don’t have an HD TV or monitor), however.
• As with any hardware purchase, don’t buy anything based solely on a blog post or product review. This system worked well for me, but it could work terribly for you for a variety of reasons. Do a decent amount of research before you spend any money. For example, the MythTV wiki and mailing list are great places to do exactly this type of research.

I’ve been using an 8 GB Creative Zen player now for about a year, and in general, I’m very happy. It was about 25% cheaper than a comparable iPod, it can do more stuff, and it has ended up being very durable and easy-to-use.

Another thing that I initially liked about the Zen was how well it worked with Ubuntu Linux 8.04. From Amarok, I could add and manage files as easily as I could with my old iPod.

Then I updated my OS to use Ubuntu 9.04. The Zen would mount automatically when you plugged it in, but I couldn’t access it using any music player such as Amarok, RhythmBox, or Banshee. And if I could access the player using one of those apps, the connection was always very flaky. I might be able to move one or two songs, but eventually, something would crash and I would have to start over again.

This thread on the Ubuntu forums shows that many other Zen users were having the same problem:

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1146528

The basic advice was to unmount the Zen after it was automatically mounted, and then access it using your favorite music player. This only worked for me sporadically at first. And if that wasn’t weird enough, the Amarok maintainers decided to do the following:

• Completely change the Amarok GUI interface
• Completely change the way you copy music to an MP3 player.

I figured almost everything out eventually, so I thought I would share it here.

1. First, plug your Zen into your computer. You should now see a Zen icon on your desktop.
   • 
2. Next, right-click on that icon and choose the Unmount Volume option. This may seem counter-intuitive, but it’s what you need to do.
3. Next, open Amarok. If you don’t see the Amarok window after a minute, then look for the howling wolf icon in your task tray. You will need to right-click on it and choose Restore.
   • Note: This process may work with other music players, but I haven’t tested it.
4. After Amarok opens, you should see the following items in Amarok:
   1. An MP3 player icon with a red X and green + next to it.
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   2. Your Zen listed on the left-hand side of the screen.
      • 
   3. If you don’t see it at first, then make sure that you have clicked on the Collection button on the left-hand side of the screen.
   4. Also, If you see the MP3 player icon but your player isn’t listed on the left-hand side of the screen, then click on the green + button.

Now you can copy individual songs from your Local Collection by right-clicking on a song or album and choosing Copy To Collection -> Creative Zen. That should do it. I’ve had pretty good luck with this system as long as I didn’t try to move over 6 albums’ worth of MP3’s at once.

And here are some of the differences that you need to get used to when using the 2.x version of Amarok:

• You can no longer copy playlists over to your Zen. This is a big disappointment to me, and I can’t figure out why the Amarok maintainers took this functionality away.
• You can no longer “queue” up MP3’s that you want to copy to your Zen and then copy them all over at once. Again, another great feature that was taken away for some mysterious reason.
• Album covers are no longer copied to your Zen. This isn’t a huge disappointment, but it was always a nice feature of the pre-2.x version of Amarok.

In the end, I’m very appreciative that Canonical, the Gnome group, and the Amarok maintainers provide such excellent software that makes my life so much more enjoyable. And I’m glad that I finally figured out a somewhat-reliable process for copying MP3’s from my hard drive to my Zen.

It’s unlike me to upgrade my systems very often since it can take so much time, but I was moved recently to upgrade both my “server” (to Ubuntu 9.04) and my EEE PC 900 (to Easy Peasy 1.5). In general, I’m very impressed with how much better Linux-on-the-desktop gets every 6 months, and I look forward to at least another 8 years as a happy desktop Linux user.

One of the great things about Ubuntu is that it really is just painless to set up some pretty sophisticated servers. For example, I use my Ubuntu server to record television shows using MythTv, which can be very difficult to install. However, using the Ubuntu packages, I was able to get my system up-and-running in less than 10 minutes.

I do have one very small criticism of Ubuntu, and it’s that they keep making it harder and harder to install ffmpeg from source. The “stock” version of ffmpeg that comes with Ubuntu can’t do a lot of cool things like convert videos to the H264 format, so one of the first things that I usually do after installing Ubuntu is compile a more robust version of that application. Well, the process I used to compile it in 8.04 definitely did not work with 9.04 for some strange reason. Thank goodness that I found this tutorial, which made things very simple.

One really great thing about the 1.5 version of Easy Peasy is that I can now use some Compiz effects with my EEE PC 900. Previous versions of Easy Peasy didn’t even allow me to turn Compiz on. Hooray for tons tap-dancing sprites on my screen!

Here are some of the resources that I used to set up my Ubuntu 9.04 and Easy Peasy 1.5 systems. Maybe someone else will find them to be useful:

• Installing ffmpeg from source
• NFS Server & Client HOWTO