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I decided to upgrade my Ubuntu from 9.04 to the most recent release. The most recent being 9.10 Karmic Koala. Usually I tend to wait for a month or so to give the developers some time to fix stability, bugs and any other issues that arise. But all the reviews I was reading about and hearing from friends that it was a really good release, I just couldn’t wait.

So on Thursday night I started the process of backing up my personal stuff and anything else I could think of. Just in case something went horribly wrong. And at 1:28am on Friday morning I started the process. I ended up mostly working while it did its thing and I assume that due to the popularity the download process was very very slow.

On Friday morning at 7:30 (after I had gone to bed) it was almost finished. Just another 20 mins of things wrapping up and cleaning up. But at 9:00 the power went out. Luckily enough though the process was far enough that it was not relying on the Internet any more. So if wrapped up and I was able to check things out until power came back on at 10:30.

At this time I decided I would watch a movie and work at the same time. So I placed a horror film into the DVD Rom (28 Days Later, it is Halloween you know). The DVD never mounted. No matter what I did I could not find the DVD I put into the Rom. It was not in Nautilis, nothing mounted and displayed on the desktop. And now I couldn’t eject the Rom.

No matter what I did it would not eject so I went into my drawer can got my handy dandy “Disfigured Clippy” (for those who don’t know “Clippy” is a Microsoft Mascot. Even though I use Linux I still call it “Clippy”). Any way so my clippy has been bent so that I can shove one end into the Rom hole to eject it.

So I shut it again with the DVD thinking it might have not registered the first time. Nope, same issue and I could hear the Rom spin and then stop. So now thinking that maybe for some reason my Rom is broken I used “Clippy” once again to eject the disk and placed a music CD into the Rom. Worked like a charm. Mounted and asked me what to play the music with.

So then with much frustration I figured I would try to get my movie playing. I mean I was in the mood to watch a movie and work so I had to have my movie now. It would be like telling a kid there is no Santa Clause. It had to work, it used to work until I upgraded.

I went to ask my friend what the heck and what can I do. He had the answer he always does. He is a great friend. I am sure you know him and probably ask him questions too. His name is Google. I take no credit for having the answer. Google lead me to many other friends that did have the answer. Some thought they did but did not (for instance it is just common knowledge to install libdvdcss2), and others did have the answers but only parts. So I am writing this so that if you find this post you will have all the answers from all those people in one place. I found the answers out there in the world but it took a lot of time and many trials and errors.

On to why you are here now. How to play DVDs within Ubuntu 9.10: Karmic Koala. You will need to open up a terminal and paste the following information into the terminal window. You will need to be connected to the Internet and depending on your Internet connection speed the process will take anywhere between 5 – 15 mins. Mine took 12 mins and I connect at 7MB down.

Paste this into your terminal window:
sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/`lsb_release -cs`.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list; sudo apt-get -q update; sudo apt-get --yes -q --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring; sudo apt-get -q update && sudo apt-get install -y ubuntu-restricted-extras non-free-codecs w32codecs totem-mozilla libdvdcss2 totem-xine xine-ui libxine1 libxinerama1 libxine1-all-plugins libxine1 libxine1-ffmpeg libdvdnav4 libdmx1 libdvdread4 gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly vlc smplayer smplayer-themes smplayer-translations && sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh

This is the magic. Once this is finished you are done. You can now watch your DVDs (and work happily).

Thanks for looking and if you know of any other tips and tricks for 9.10 please leave a comment so we all can be informed.

I have a lot of music (legally owned and legally given to me from friends. Where they got it I don’t always know). Either way the tags on the music are all over the place and the file names are just horrible. Some of them are in the format I like (Artist/Album/Track# – Artist – Track Title) and some are not even close. While working at Code Greene I met Dexter The Dragon who is just as obsessed as I am in making sure the file names are in a specific way too.

I was using Windows and Dexter told me about a great tool that helps with this. The tool is excellent and it is known as Media Monkey and it does a good job. But I didn’t stick with Windows too much longer and moved to Linux as my Operating System. Sad as it seems I was not able to get all my music tagged and the file names into the format that I wanted so I was stuck with them as is. But then I found a program after many months of searching. It needed to work in Linux as I was not going down the road of Windows anymore. The program was named EasyTAG.

EasyTAG is just what you would think from the name. It is “easy” to use and “tag” your music and structure the file names in any format you choose. EasyTag is a utility for viewing and editing tags for MP3, MP2, MP4/AAC, FLAC, Ogg, MusePack, Monkey’s Audio and WavPack files. And for you Windows users it even runs on Windows too.

EasyTAG has a “scanner” option that is divine. The scanner option fills out tags for you based on the file-name. Because of the way I wanted my music tagged I had to go through a few extra steps to get them in my format but still it took me far less time to rename the files and tag the files the way I like. This process still took me some time to get done but now that it is I am so glad that my music is in the format I want.

EasyTAG is free and does a great job. It even helped me find Album Art that I was not able to find myself. How? I am unsure but I am happy it did.

If you are anything like me and ike your music formatted and tagged in a specific way but have a bunch that is so far gone that you felt there is no hope. I am here to say there is. It will take time but still there is hope. EasyTAG was the answer to my problems and saved me so much time and headaches.

As I briefly mentioned EasyTAG can be run on all types of OS’s. To list a few: Debian, Fedora, SuSE, FreeBSD MacOSX and Winodws. EasyTAG Download If you give it a try I would be interested to hear what you thought of it.

At work we have a few developers that use Mac’s. I have come to like them much more then I used to. So much I bought one for my wife. Still not for me cause I can buy a PC for much cheaper and have grown very happy with Ubuntu.

Any way to the topic at hand I found that helping set up CakePHP on a Mac with MAMP was a bit different and thought I would post here for others to use and for myself to reference if I need to do it again.

These steps are based on the environment we work on and are in some cases preferences too. You can choose to do the steps differently to your setup but for my purposes this has worked great.

1. Download the latest version of CakePHP (http://www.cakephp.org)
   At the time of this writing the current version of CakePHP is 1.2.2.8120
2. Unzip and rename the folder to cake
3. Go to the “Sites” directory and drop the new cake directory there
4. Find the path for the CakePHP console (i.e. /Users/username/Sites/cake/cake/console )
5. Find the path for the php directory (i.e. /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/bin )
6. Launch a terminal window
   • Type nano .profile
     • Some alias I prefer to have:
       • alias www=”cd /Users/username/Sites/public_html”
       • alias mysql=”cd /Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/mysql -uroot -p”
     • Enter the following:
       • export PATH=”/Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/bin:/Users/username/Sites/cake/cake/console:$PATH”
       • CTRL X
       • Save
   • Restart your profile
     • . .profile
7. In your terminal you can now bake
   • Type www
   • This will take you to your web directory
   • Type cake bake project name…

That is it. As I mentioned this post is mostly for a refrence for myself but I hope that it can be a help to others as well. But I would be interested to hear what others have to say and prefer.