Monday, October 04, 2010

Ubuntu

I have a multitude of computer choices in this house.  I have a laptop that runs Vista, as does my wife.  My desktop, which is approaching five years old now is running Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx.   I originally installed Linux on this machine just for fun, to try something new.  Now, as this computer has aged, it makes sense to run a system that isn't as much of a resource hog as Vista can be (though, my cheap ass laptop, running on an Intel Celeron, runs smooth as silk, after optimizing it).

I really enjoy Ubuntu, and after a year of using openSUSE with KDE I much prefer Ubuntu and the GNOME desktop.  Not as fancy perhaps but it gets the job done easier and smoother than KDE does, at least on my system (I particularly have problems with Dolphin, mounting of external drives to the same mount point and graphics (older Nvidia) on KDE.  All of these things just work with no fuss on GNOME). 

Two things I can't get used.  One is a CD/DVD burner.  I have tried Gnomebaker and Brasero and several other, smaller, programs for GNOME and I still go back to running K3B, a KDE app.  It does what I want with the options I want and intuitively.  So I run it under GNOME, which is fine but still, minor graphics glitches and no sound (I could probably figure that out but just haven't prioritized it). 

The other is more difficult.  On Windows I always used Mediamonkey, which is for my money the finest audio player and organizer ever.  Now on Ubuntu I use Exaile, which is a nice small player than does what I want for playing audio.  Most other apps want to act like iTunes which I HATE (HATE HATE HATE!).  The only problem on pretty much all of Linux is finding an mp3 tagger with the ease of Mediamonkey.  MM can find tags from Amazon, download AND attach the album art (Linux seems to be averse to this as I can't find a single program that will automatically attach album art.  They either save it as a file with a link to it or you have to download manually and attach).  And then, you can even organize your files by tags automatically.   I realize it is arcane to think in filenames but I guess I am old (and my Cowon A3, my Precioussssss, does not organize by tags either).  The only program I can find to use in Linux that does something similar is mp3tag....a Windows program run with WINE. 

Sadly, Mediamonkey itself won't run very well under WINE.  It's really the only thing I miss from Windows.  I wish they would either port the mighty Mediamokey to Linux or someone would come up with a quality tagger.

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