'Linux'

(EDIT: For the uninitiated, Ubunchu is a free-licensed manga series thematically centered around Ubuntu Linux, and this is a review of the fourth chapter of said series cum my musings on the viability of free licenses when applied to artwork. I apologize if I have previously confused anyone by leaving out this introduction )

(EDIT: I can’t believe I forgot the link to the manga again!! You can find every translated chapter of the free-licensed Ubuntu-oriented manga here)

With every chapter so far thematically alluding to one Ubuntu / free software related idea or another, Ubunchu is starting to feel somewhat like a documentary. Reminds me of one of those “Manga guide to Databases” things. And that’s not a bad thing by the way

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So I sampled a teaser snippet of To Aru “Radio” no Railgun over at Keiri’s place. (for the uninitiated, that’s To Aru Kagaku no Railgun’s web radio show co-hosted by the Seiyuu’s of Saten and Uiharu) Being completely suckered by it, I trotted down to Hibiki Radio hoping to give the real thing a spin… only to find that I couldn’t play it on Linux.

So what else is new

Anyway before I continue my story I should probably state up front here that I didn’t manage to find a “complete”, “elegant” solution, so if you’re a perfectionist you should probably be looking elsewhere. If you’re just desperate to play that damn .asx radio stream though (as I was), read on.

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I haven’t written a proper tech article since before I (re-)started this blog, so I thought it was high time. Besides, I’ve been wanting to write this post ever since I read some articles on Google’s Chrome OS, around the time right after my old blog vaporized. So there’s a couple of buzzwords to hopefully sucker you into clicking the ‘more’ button and actually reading the article – It’s about Google’s upcoming Chrome OS and it’s implications for the web, the desktop and the browser, as well as why desktop evolution can take an alternative path, exemplified by KDE’s budding Project Silk movement.

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FileZilla and other such applications that deal with remote file transfer protocols have all become deprecated on my desktop when I discovered that you could directly browse those files using dolphin and directly edit those files with kwrite/kate, thanks to Kio. (You could do it on Gnome too, for example to browse an ftp location, just type “ftp://your_ftp_host/path” into the location bar on nautilus, dolphin, or konqueror). I’ve been using the fish Kio-slave to browse ssh-secured locations for some time now, but today I needed to access a location secured by ssh key instead of a password. It was not immediately obvious to me how to do this, so I’m gonna quickly pen down my solution.

When you point dolphin to an ssh-secured location (type “fish://your_host/path”), it will attempt to connect and prompt you for a password. There is no way to tell it at this point to use an ssh key file instead to the best of my knowledge. What we’ll need to do is to modify the ssh configurations to look for your ssh key file when authenticating. Simply add a line like the following (or uncomment / copy and modify it, if your config file already has such a line):

IdentityFile path/to/your/key/file

The system-wide config file is typically found at /etc/ssh/ssh_config, and the per-user one at ~/.ssh/config. The latter may not exist by default, you could simply create it as a copy of the system-wide one. With this done, you should be able to connect with fish with no problems.

I have not tried this out on Gnome, but I suspect things are not far different there.

Just a quick note-down. I was mildly surprised to find that the modern Linux environments I use (that’s Ubuntu and OpenSUSE) do not gracefully support MIDI as they do stuff like MP3 and WAV. Too old a file format? Hmmm, come to think of it, I’ve been on Linux for more than two years now and this is the first time I have ever tried to listen to a MIDI file. Oh well.

The answer is Timidity. I won’t claim it is the best answer – I was lazy and wasn’t up to doing detailed research, so I just installed a bunch of programs off the repository that look like they might do the job, and tried them one by one. Disappointingly, most of them wouldn’t work out the box despite promising descriptions. So as it turns out, the first program that Just Worked ™ was Timidity. So here I am telling you about it to save you time You’ll need to install it off the repo in Ubuntu, while OpenSUSE appears to have it installed by default.

To play a MIDI file, simply do

timidity [yourfile.midi]

Command-line haters can get a nice gtk-based GUI too by installing the extras packages for Timidity and doing:

timidity -ig

I know a complete solution should also make it so that click/double-clicking on a MIDI file automatically opens the appropriate player, but I’m too lazy to check for something that gets all that done on installation, especially since I only wanted to play one MIDI file. Just manually configure your system to call timidity or something.

Me to a Tee.

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I guess, given the resonance of the news with the geek-otaku underpinnings of this blog, it’s high time I finally came out and said something about this chick:

Tsundere remark: W.. we have multi-touch support in KDE SC 4.4 too. J-Just so you know!

(Warning: this post may contain an unhealthy dose of nonsense)

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