Geert-Johan aka Squarc

I got a job recently; Java-developer at a mobile applications/communications company. I’m probably going to work together with another Java-dev to create a large web-application.
So, I’m now installing my development computer which contains a AMD Athlon 2800+, and a Ati Radeon 9800 graphics card. Not very high-end, but I assume Linux will perform quite good on the system. I chose the Kubuntu 10.04 distribution, since I run that at home too off-course. The initial setup went quite good, no errors at all. Installing the Ati drivers gave some problems so I skipped that for now, which means I’ll have to do with just one screen (instead of both of the two screens). But installing additional packages works great as always. So I got myself some Yakuake epicness and off-course Firefox and all other default programs one needs for Java-development. Well, everything seems to be up and running now! Lets get to work

When Kubuntu 10.04 launched I decided to upgrade my PC from 9.10 to the new version. However, after finishing upgrading the PC wouldn’t boot anymore. Off-course, I could’ve figured out what was wrong and fixed the problem, but I decided to completely reinstall my PC, since I had been upgrading Kubuntu ever since 8.10 it was kinda old.
After I created backups of all my data – over 900 Gigs in music, movies and project files – I removed my partitions and created a “fake” Raid disk using my motherboards on-board S-ATA controller, which allows fake-raid setups. I created a RAID-10 setup using four 500 Gig Western Digital HDD’s. When all that was done it was time for the Kubuntu alternate installer CD to show it’s quality’s, which turned out to be quite a bit of a problem. The installer does support fake raid (thought not officially), it didn’t recognize my RAID-10 setup and thus it didn’t found any disk’s to install Kubuntu on. So I figured I had to install Kubuntu manually.
In this post I will describe what I did in a tutorial-like way so it can be used by others having the same problem I had.

(continue reading…)

Most of the time when I’m working with my PC, I have VLC playing an internet radio. However, I always had to go to the website to click the stream, or start the player and fill in the url manually. That bored me, so I created this little bash script a few weeks ago. It takes one parameter which refers to a online stream, and then starts VLC media player using the right URL. I’m using the script on a daily basis and it suites quite well…

#!/bin/bash

argument="";
channel="";
channelUrl="";

if [ "$1" = "" ]
then
  echo "usage: 'play channel'
  channels:
    - e, electro
    - h, house
    - t, trance
    - vt, vocaltrance
    - s, slam, slamfm";
else
  argument=$1;
fi                           

if [ "$argument" = "electro" ] ||  [ "$argument" = "e" ]
then
  channel="Digitally Imported Electro channel";
  channelUrl="http://di.fm/mp3/electro.pls";
elif [ "$argument" = "house" ] ||  [ "$argument" = "h" ]
then
  channel="Digitally Imported House channel";
  channelUrl="http://di.fm/mp3/house.pls";
elif [ "$argument" = "trance" ] ||  [ "$argument" = "t" ]
then
  channel="Digitally Imported Trance channel";
  channelUrl="http://di.fm/mp3/trance.pls";
elif [ "$argument" = "vocaltrance" ] || [ "$argument" = "vocal-trance" ] ||  [ "$argument" = "vt" ]
then
  channel="Digitally Imported Vocal-trance channel";
  channelUrl="http://di.fm/mp3/vocaltrance.pls";
elif [ "$argument" = "slamfm" ] || [ "$argument" == "slam" ] || [ "$argument" == "s" ]
then
  channel="Slam FM";
  channelUrl="http://nl.sitestat.com/slamfm/slam/s?slam.luister.itunes_winamp&ns_type=clickin";
elif [ "$argument" = "freshfm" ] || [ "$argument" == "fresh" ] || [ "$argument" == "f" ]
then
  channel="Fresh FM";
  channelUrl="http://fresh.fm/media/audio/ListenHigh.pls";
elif [ "$argument" = "538" ] || [ "$argument" == "radio538" ]
then
  channel="Radio 538";
  channelUrl="http://talpa-asx.streaming.is.nl/streaming.asp?P=20001&Q=R538_HIGH";
elif [ "$argument" = "5d" ] ||[ "$argument" = "538d" ] || [ "$argument" == "538D" ] || [ "$argument" == "538 Dance" ]
then
  channel="Radio 538 Dancedepartment";
  channelUrl="http://talpa-asx.streaming.is.nl/streaming.asp?P=10103&Q=WEB01_HQ";
fi

if [ "$channel" = "" ]
then
  echo "No channel selected";
else
  echo "Starting" $channel;
  (vlc $channelUrl &) 2>/dev/null;
fi

exit 0;