A few minutes ago, I posted a question over on Google+. Basically, I’ve been reading about how some folks have made Google+ their blog, and I wondered if that might be a good idea for me. I could see upsides and downsides, but I couldn’t really make a clear distinction between “should I or shouldn’t I?”.

So I just asked the question. (Not only on Google+ but also Twitter and FriendFeed.)

The response I got back was a solid “meh.” People could see why folks move their blogging to Google+, but they didn’t think it was a particularly great idea. In the end, my blog stays here. Yet it’s questions like that which make an online community so valuable. I seriously had no idea whether or not taking Bibrarian over to Google was a good and useful thing. I could see why it might be, I could see why it might not. I’m only some guy with a bit of a writing habit and I’m not the smartest person around, so I’ll go ask a few people who are smarter than I am.

Indeed, I’ll go ask a couple hundred of them and see what they say.

Thanks, y’all. Now I have some idea where to focus my attention!

Then today, while running and listening to music, my Android phone spontaneously rebooted, much like it’s been doing whenever I listen to music in the last few months. Later, while standing at the pizza shack waiting for my food, I handed it to my daughter so she could play with an app — and it hard-locked, forcing me to pull the battery.

Then, just after that, I tried to call my wife, and it took, oh, about 45 seconds to actually make the call after I hit the big green call button. In that time, I figured my command hadn’t gone through so I tried calling again to no avail.

Well, since I technically called twice, about half way through the conversation, my second attempt fired off and turned my call into a conference call with someone I already had on the phone.

Well, that made the decision pretty damned easy.

Now then, I want you to watch this. Not only is this musician talented, but she’s beautiful and rocks the damn tech like no one’s business. As a guy who does a bit of computer music, fiddling with sequencers and loops and stuff, I have an idea how challenging her task is here. Not only that, she’s the only one working the tech, the instruments, and the voice.

“Feel Good Inc” – Gorillaz Live Looped Cover

Unfortunately, I’m not sure who she is. But whoever she is, she needs to start selling music fucking now.

Anyway, so what’s one of the comments on the site? Well, I quote:

“I have seen this before and it’s really good. One suggestion. Clothing..looks like my grandmothers. She would look as good as he sounds with something more current. No makeup needed.”

Who in the fuck are you? Unless you’re the wardrobe design director for Lady Gaga or Cher, shut your goddamn mouth you know-nothing fuckwit. You’re not an expert on music and you’re not an expert on clothing and you’re certainly not an expert on how to tie a wardrobe to a performer and how those things interrelate with a given song. You are a schmuck commenting on a video site just as I am a schmuck with a blog commenting on your bullshit.

For the record, I know of another woman who does something very similar and wears a similar style of “grandmothers” clothing. Her name is Imogen Heap, and she too is awesome. The wardrobe doesn’t matter. Both of these ladies could do their thing wearing a burlap sack and it’d be just as amazing.

And so I did.

When I decided to try switching to Linux, I really didn’t want to lose all of my Windows stuff. I don’t hate Windows at all. I really like Windows 7 and I’m pretty excited to see Windows 8, especially running on a tablet. Besides, I’ve worked in Windows for years and I have a lot of stuff on the Windows side of my computer. So there’s an option you can try for giving Linux a spin and it’s called Wubi. I’ve spoken about it before, but there’s a bit that I left out that, on this final day of a week of Linux, I wanted to bring up.

All of my music, all of my art, all of my creative projects are on the Windows side of my computer. I got a message from a few people that I could just mount the Windows partition and I’d never have to boot into Windows again.

Oh look! There's all my Windows stuff!

Well sure, but why would I want to do that when Wubi doesn’t even really work that way? See, Wubi works like any other Windows programme. It just so happens that it boots you into Ubuntu whenever you care to have it. It doesn’t take anything away from your Windows install except the disk space you used to install it. And it’s the same disk space, no partitions or anything. So would you like to access your Windows files in Linux? Sure you would. So navigate your Gnome or Unity file browser to /host

To answer the next question, yes, you can pretty much launch and use any file on the Windows side in Ubuntu. I’ve already added my music library (Windows side) to Clementine (Linux side). I’ve been watching movies from the Windows side in SMplayer and the whole bit.

Now, you’re not going to be able to easily run Windows apps in Linux. It’s not impossible, but it’s far beyond the scope of this little series for me to get into how to do it. But really, at the end of the week, do you know what Windows app I miss the most?

There isn’t one.

No no no. The other Chromium.

Probably 80% of my computer life goes through a browser, Chrome being my preference. Yup, got Chromium in Linux, it was probably the third thing I installed after firing up Ubuntu via Wubi. I use Windows Media Player to watch videos, and SMPlayer does that too. I use Winamp for music, and I like Clementine so much that I’m going to install the Windows version of it and remove Winamp.

After seven days of not using Windows at all on my laptop, I can tell you this. I still enjoy and need Windows for certain things, especially work related items and stuff. But for almost everything else, I’ve made the switch. I’ve always been a fan of open source software and I’m now a solid fan and user of Linux.

OMG! Doesn't this just look FREAKIN' AWESOME, GUYS?!

CLI is short for command line interface and you use the CLI through a little programme called a terminal. Ubuntu comes built in with a terminal called Terminal and other versions of Linux have something similar and probably call their terminals Terminal too. This harkens back to a bygone day when you really didn’t control the computer directly, you were connected to dumb client accessing a mainframe. The terminal was basically a phone call from one computer to the next and allowed you to talk to the mainframe and do stuff. These days, you use the terminal for a lot of things, but most of them involve the very computer you’re sitting at.

Now the Linux command line stuff tends to scare off the new folks because, well, look at this mess:

tar czf archive.tar.gz *.jpg

What in the hell does that do? Well actually it launches a compression programme (kind of like a ZIP file) called TAR which is short for Tape ARchive. That app creates a TAR file and then re-compresses it again using another app called Gzip. And finally it places all the JPG files in that archive file which is called archive.tar.gz. Got that?

Of course you don’t. Jesus, it’s worse than alphabet soup.

So let’s just talk about some really useful stuff to do on the command line side of things and, you can always learn more on your own. Believe me, there are plenty of websites devoted to nothing but how to make the most of the CLI.

The first thing I want to tell you about is top. Top is a little app that shows you what’s running, right now, and how much memory it’s using. It’s kind of like the Windows Task Manager. Type k, and then the process ID (usually abbreviated as PID) and you can kill a task. That’s useful for things that get locked up, stop working or, as they say in westerns, just need killin’.

Man or man as you’d actually type it, is a manual for a command or an app that you can access on the terminal side of things. If you want to see what the manual offers on the ls command (which is like dir in the Windows Command Line) you’d simply type:

man ls

And then you will learn more about the ls command than you ever wanted to know. All the switches, options, doo-dads, and things that even seasons geeks wonder “Why is that there? Whoever needed to do that?”. The man command works for almost anything command line related and it’s a one stop quick reference for CLI stuff. And yes, because Linux geeks are nothing if not complete, there is a manual for man, just type man man.

If you need a quick look at how much space you have on your hard disk(s) then you need the df command. Short for disk free, df is a simple little thing that displays everything on how much space you’re using and what’s left over.

sudo is like this, except for all the ways in which it's not.

If you’re using Ubuntu, and I am, then we can’t leave out sudo. Now, Phil Collins and Sussudio jokes aside, sudo is short for Super User Do. Super user is a fancy term for root, which is the account on your system that can do anything to your system. It’ll install software, remove software, mount disks, and even kill your system. Linux gives you such control over your system that a badly formed sudo command can ruin your day. At least it will ask for your password before doing anything. The sudo command basically runs programmes as if they were run by the root user.  At least with Ubuntu, you’ll find yourself using it most often with another little app called…

APT, better known as apt and not so well known as the Advanced Packaging Tool. Apt is a programme you use to install things on your system. Programmes, updates, and so on. I could write a whole article on apt, but it’d be boring as hell. The important thing is the combination of the sudo and apt command, which you typically see as:

sudo apt-get install inkscape

What this means is, as a super user, do the apt thing and have it get and install the InkScape programme. Sudo will ask for your password and then apt will take over from there.

The funny thing? Almost all of this can be done from the desktop. A normal, non-geeky user can go days, if not weeks in Linux without ever opening a terminal programme. Want to see the contents of a directory? Sure, you can use ls, but isn’t it easier to just double click that folder icon and open it up to take a look? Want to install software? Sure, apt will do it and do it fine, but the Ubuntu Software Centre is much friendlier to use. Compressing files? Select a bunch of them in a window using your mouse, then right click on them and click Compress.

It used to be you absolutely needed the terminal to run desktop Linux just like you needed a DOS window to get the most out of Windows. While you certainly can get a lot more out of your Linux install by learning some basic CLI stuff, you don’t have to become an expert. I’m certainly not, and I get along just fine, thank you!

I’m not your usual artist. I will go through streaks where I draw and paint and colour and all kinds of stuff and then go through streaks where I’m not even sure where my good pencils are. That’s okay, because that’s just how I roll. I’m not a photographer, but I take pictures. I’m not a colourist, but sometimes I want to digitally colour my drawings. To do this in the proprietary world, you need apps like Photoshop or Illustrator or Painter. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve used Photoshop and I’m kinda sorta good at it.

Photoshop also costs over US$600 for a new install.

Let me take a look around here. Pull open some drawers. Check under the couch and in the cushions. Let me look in my purse. Nope, no I don’t have $600. And even worse, when I was using Photoshop, I felt like I was probably getting $86 worth of a $600 programme. I’d use it for colouring, some photo enhancement and manipulation, and that stuff. So after the version I was using ceased to work on the newer versions of Windows, I sought out something that was within my price range.

What? You were expected some leather bondage guy?

As it happens, free is absolutely right there in realm of my wallet. I can handle free. And for free, you can have the GNU Image Manipulation Programme, more lovingly known as the GIMP. The GIMP is a free, open source image manipulation programme that does pretty much everything Photoshop does. Now, if you’re some big time artist or photographic expert who desires things that Photoshop dishes out, then yeah, the GIMP may not be for you.

But if you do happen to be part of the other 99% who probably doesn’t need professional, industry grade features, then by all means, occupy the GIMP.

From everything I’ve done with Photoshop, I’ve found I can do the same in GIMP. At worst, there is a little hunting around to see what they decided to name something that had a specific name in Photoshop. For me, the biggest challenge was the keyboard shortcuts, which may not matter to you at all. However, when you’re using a graphics tablet, knowing keyboard shortcuts to get to things like paintbrush or magic wand select or eraser saves a lot of time and hassle. Sure you can click on them using the stylus, but that takes your brush away from your drawing when you don’t have to.

Beyond the GIMP you’ll find some other useful artistic stuff at your disposal. Today I used a vector graphics programme called InkScape to render something into a scalable vector graphic so I could enlarge it without losing fidelity. In other words, I converted a JPG to an image format that works on math rather than pixels. Then I blew it up and saved it to another image format that works on pixels instead of math. Then I used an app called Posterazor to set it up as a multi-page print out one can paste together like a big ol’ puzzle. The result? This:

Let me just fully explain what you’re looking at there, besides an awesome friend of mine who posed for this drawing. I used a photo to draw her with her bass guitar. Then I scanned and imported the drawing into GIMP where I outlined and coloured it. Then I opened it in InkScape where I was able to make it really big without losing any clarity. After that, I saved it and set it up in Posterazor to print out on a 7×7 grid of papers which I taped together to make a big-ass banner for our library band.

In every way, from the original photo to the final product, that big poster was created using nothing but free, open source software and Linux.

Finally, before I get out of here, there’s one more programme you should know about. Krita is an app that’s specifically for digital drawing and painting . Much like Painter, it’s geared towards artists looking to take their work into the digital realm, whether it’s scanning a pencil or starting from scratch right on screen. I’ve only used it a little, so I can’t say much about it other than it did what I expected and I had no issues. Thing is, I’ve used GIMP for so long now, I prefer it because I know where everything is. Still, if you’re new to the artistic scene in Linux, give it a shot. I think you’ll like it.

Once again, it almost goes without saying that you’d find all of these programmes in your Ubuntu Software Centre. All of them are free!

Here are but a few reasons why I don't watch TV.

Listen. For the most part, I don’t watch TV. There are a couple of shows I like, but I tend to glean probably 95% of my entertainment from the Internet. I watch YouTube, listen to various online radio stations, read news and articles… the whole bit really. It’s just that I’ve long found myself to be a niche audience of one, and it just so happens that there are people out there who are willing to provide entertainment for my niche — they’re just not on television.

So naturally, when some folks look into Linux, they’re worried about losing access to their entertainment. They ask questions like “Will I be able to play my music? Can I watch my movies? What about YouTube? Can I still listen to Pandora? I just got a Spotify account can I use that?”

Yes.

Yes, that’s a yes, full stop. Granted, you will need to download the proper apps to do some of these things. Then again, you have to download apps on any OS to make things work. Let’s have a look at what I’ve been playing with recently.

Clementine is a music and media player based off Amarok, which is another media player for Linux. However Clementine excels in the “ooo pretty!” department and in the “damn, now that’s useful” department. As things go, it’ll play and arrange you MP3s and what not. It will also enable you to listen to internet radio like Soma.fm, Magnatune, SKY.fm, Digitally Imported, and yes, even Spotify. It’ll play audio CDs, edit MP3 tags, and so much more. It’s beautiful, and it works extremely well.  The best part is, if you don’t want to use Linux, you can get it for Mac and Windows too. Check it out, because it’s freakin’ sweet.

I’ve got videos of all kinds from your run of the mill home vids of my kiddos to movies to cartoons to hardcore pornography. I can watch all of them on the standard Linux media player, but there’s so much better than that. What you do is, you go snag yourself SMPlayer and then you watch a video using that and then you can come back and thank me. SMPlayer is a front end overhaul for Mplayer, which is sort of your garden variety standard Linux media player. The problem is, Mplayer isn’t pretty. It looks old, feels kinda clunky, and it’s just not impressive to use. But, in true open source fashion, the people who make Mplayer made it so you can install front ends, customizations, new extensions, and all sorts of awesomeness onto it and make it better! It’s like that big, flat green Lego base that kids use as a grassy foundation for their Lego builds. On its own, the big, flat green Lego base isn’t much. It’s what you can do with it that makes it so good.

Minin' coal and iron and gold and what can be found!

Do you watch YouTube? I do. I watch a shitload of YouTube, people. I’m addicted to Coe’s Quest which you need to go check out right now if you’re into Minecraft or Bob Ross’s The Joy of Painting. You’ll understand what I mean by the latter when you hear Coe speak. Anyway, there’s a vicious rumour that goes around stating that you can’t play Flash on Linux, or you can’t watch YouTube or Vimeo on Linux. Well, for Ubuntu, you might actually have that problem. Fortunately, it’s a problem easily rectified by installing the  Ubuntu Restricted Formats package. (Available free in your handy, dandy Ubuntu Software Centre.) These restricted formats may be burdened by some extra licensing deals that don’t seat well with Ubuntu’s distribution philosophies. That’s why they don’t distribute these formats with Ubuntu and just have you simply download them later. Seriously, for anyone installing Ubuntu, the first thing you do after the installation is complete is log in and install the Restricted Formats package. Takes care of everything, so go watch so damn Internet videos!

When Spotify came to the States, I was kind of curious about it. After all, I’d heard on various tech blogs and podcasts that, when it came to online music, Spotify was the bee’s knees, the cat’s ass, and the mutt’s nuts. Like a little pug dog, barking away, all I heard was “HYPE! HYPE! HYPE!” and so, fine, it’s here, let me try it. And I downloaded and set it up…

…..

So everything they said about Spotify was correct. It’s insane how awesome that app is. Too bad they don’t have a client for Linux.

Oh wait, no. They absolutely have a client for Linux!

If you’ve got worries about losing out on some form of digital entertainment in the Linux realm, you can safely drop them. In the last couple of days, I’ve done absolutely everything in Linux for entertainment that I do in Windows for entertainment. I’ve listened to music and watched movies. I’ve dug on Coe’s Quest and listened to podcasts. If you’re brand new to Linux, you may need to Google for an app to do something, but this is usually satisfied by Googleing for ”best linux X” where X is what you want to do. Here’s the search for “best linux music player.” As you can see, you’ll have no shortage of ideas and 99% of them are free!

Usually I'm the construction guy. I don't have all the gear to dress as the biker.

I love Ubuntu Linux, there are many like it but this one is mine.

Yet  I have a filthy little secret, which doesn’t concern dressing up as a member of the Village People and going barhopping on Friday nights. That behaviour is well documented both in my medical records and in the archives of the Phoenix Police Department. No, my filthy little secret is that I love Ubuntu…

But I really don’t like the Unity desktop.

It’s not bad, mind you, but lord it sure isn’t good either. I don’t like how the damn sidebar keeps popping up every time I mouse over the back button on a web browser and, given that I live on line, that gets old really quick. I know, I could shrink the browser a bit so it’s not full screen, but that’s not right either. I want the browser to be full screen because I’m using it. In that instance the desktop environment needs to stay the hell out of my way, not keep popping up because I went just a little too far.

On Windows, I have my taskbar set to auto hide and it’s never (or rarely) a problem because most everything you do in an app resides on the upper part of the screen. Look at your web browser. Where are the controls? At the top. Where are your menus? At the top. Where’s your bookmark bar? At the top. So having an auto-hiding taskbar in Windows works really well. If my mouse in on the bottom of the screen, it because I need it to be there to do something. Meanwhile, if my  mouse is on the top left of the screen, it’s because I’m hitting a back button, or accessing something in the File menu or clicking on a bookmark folder on my browser, or something like that.

It’s not there because I want to access some other app.

Now, the other kicker. In Windows, you can move your taskbar to any side of the screen. Want it on top? Fine. On the left or right? Sure. No problem. You can move it around and put it where it works best for you. Not so easy to do that with Unity. Sure, you can download a small app that will help you do that, but should I really have to download an app to move a freakin’ taskbar to another part of my screen? Really?

Thanks, no.

There were other problems too. Weird system freezes, which would eventually unlock, but things would just hang for a while. Some apps behaved oddly. Chrome would sometimes just crash right out in the middle of something banal. I mean, say what you want about hardcore websites, Reddit is mostly text. If a browser is choking on Reddit, them something went sideways.

After six dozen times of doing something I didn’t want to do simply because I had the audacity to have my mouse on the left side of the screen, or watching an app fade to that sickly grey to let you know that it’s hanging up on god knows what, I decided to do something about it. I went back to my roots and downloaded Gnome 3. Once again, this is the beauty of Linux. I don’t like my desktop environment. I think it sucks.

So I’ll download a new one, dammit.

I love Gnome, always have, and the Gnome 3 desktop environment is a brand new version of my favourite. So a few clicks, maybe fifteen minutes of wait time while it downloaded and installed everything and then I logged out of Unity for the last time. I made a selection on the login screen and brought myself back into Gnome.

Holy crap, now that’s what I’m talkin’ about.

I gotcher Unity right here, ya bastard!

Now, I grant you. Gnome has an Activities “button” up in the upper left hand corner which basically functions like a Start Menu in Windows. But it’s in the far upper left corner. It’s removed from the desktop environment both by that little bit of distance and also by a black bar which is an obvious divider between your desktop real estate and your task bar. The Unity task bar isn’t removed from your desktop environment at all, it’s always there, and it’s always on and, for me at least, it’s always in the way.

The hang ups and freezing disappeared. I’ve had one since then and I know it was the app doing it. I can be a tab whore sometimes and I think I may have had a wee too many tabs open in Chrome. If it’s not the app’s fault, it’s mine. Even then, Chrome thawed out and I was able to finish up and close down some tabs. I like Gnome’s launcher better too. It’s clean and it’s not in the way.

It’s hard to explain. The difference between Unity and Gnome 3 on the same distribution of Linux is much like the difference between plush felt and padded leather seats in a really killer sports car. Really, you’re more interested in the sports car and, while the seats are important, they’re seats in a sports car. It all comes down to whether or not you prefer felt or leather because everything else is fairly awesome. Some people really like Unity and I don’t begrudge them that, but Linux users have choices.

And I choose you, Pikachu! Gnome!

TAKE. THE. PIE.

Sometimes, Linux overdoes things. That’s not bad in the same way that it’s not bad when a host sends you home with an entire pie. You politely refuse the delicious pie. You don’t need it. You’re full. The pie, while good, isn’t good for you. So you demure and they insist and you find yourself driving home with a banana cream pie occupying your passenger seat.

You even took the time to buckle it in because, hey, accidents happen and wasting pie is a sin.

Besides, you know that even though you’re not going to eat all that pie now, at least pie will be available when you do want some.

That’s kind of how Linux does music production and recording.

See, my foray into this one week experiment began with Rosegarden, a MIDI sequencer that is pretty damn awesome. I downloaded it, installed it, and fired it up, loading a MIDI into it and hitting play. Aaaaand nothing happened.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Things were moving. The MIDI file was definitely playing but there wasn’t a peep from my speakers. Seeing as how we’re talking music here, silence is usually (but not always) an undesirable result. I tried a few things, clicked that, fixed this and nothing changed. Everything looked good, but there was no sound.

So you do what any good Linux geek does when they have a problem; they ask the Internet a question. Some Googling brought me a few answers. Turns out one of my problems was that I needed some other software to go wtih Rosegarden. Indeed, what I really needed was the audio suite of programmes normally installed with Ubuntu Studio, a version of Ubuntu specifically directed towards creatives with an open source bent. Easy enough, that’s a separate package so I downloaded and installed that too.

(You will find a running theme in modern Linux distros is that, while Apple and Microsoft are just now introducing their own “App Stores,” Ubuntu has had the Ubuntu Software Centre for some time now. When you’re using Linux, there are many times where you say things like “Crap, I need an X.” Then you Google for the best kind of X, and then you hit the Ubuntu Software Centre and download X for free or for a small cost. So as I said above, I needed a package. I didn’t have to order it or buy it or have some kind of processing thing over the web, I just fired up the Ubuntu version of an App Store and got it now.)

Just the thing you need to record that acoustic folk instrumental.

I opened up the second website with the Rosegarden fix and read through it. Turns out, fixing things was easy… if you happen to like (metaphorical) pie. Turns out, music and audio production in Linux means you get the full studio experience. There is a patch bay that allows you to plug programmes into one another for recording and routing and then send all of that to the speakers (QJackCtl). There is also a synth bay that allows you to load and serve voices for MIDI and synths for any app that might need them (QSynth). All of that passes through a big ass audio mixing board (virtualized of course) and then you use that aforementioned patch panel to plug everything together and route it all to the speakers, which is what Rosegarden wasn’t doing.

This is much like someone saying “You know, I have a couple of guitar songs I’d like to record. I’ll snag a USB mic and just record it to my computer.”

Then the Kool-Aid Man explodes through the wall and says “OH YEAH! Why stop there? I’ve got an entire damn studio you can use for recording! Then you can mix in some drums, master it, produce it, publish it, and then sell it online!”

“But,” you say “all I need is a mic and my guitar and…”

And then the open source Kool-Aid man asks you if his handkerchief smells like chloroform and you find yourself waking up in a professional studio. Your simple accoustic guitar is gone and has been replaced by a Fender Telecaster. Except for the chloroform headache, you can’t complain too much. Just look at all this neat stuff you didn’t think you needed!

So after a crash course in open source music production, I was playing along with a MIDI on my keyboard and keytar and just as happy as ever. And you’d think that, after looking at all this, all it took for me to get things working, all the things I had to install and click through and read — it must’ve been an hour before I got things up and running.

Total elapsed time from Googling the problem to resolution: ~35 minutes.

Total elapsed time from Googling the problem to resolution, minus the time spent downloading the various things I needed to fix the problem, a period of time I was so idle that I went and showered and made coffee: ~15 minutes.

The Linux adventure continues.