Gtkpod in Gutsy Got You Groaning?

Posted by sjs
on Monday, October 29

I recently upgraded the Ubuntu installation on my workstation from Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon and for the most part I am happy with the changes. One thing I don’t care much for is the fact that gtkpod-aac is a sham. Ubuntu provides the gtkpod-aac package for one to transfer aac files, and thus mp4 files with aac audio tracks, to their iPod. The version in the Gutsy repos is broken. This shows a weakness in Ubuntu, and though it’s rather small it is one that will piss off a lot of people who expect things to just work. The kind of people who would buy an iPod. The kind of people who use Linux. The kind of Linux users that use Ubuntu. The kicker is that it doesn’t look like they will ship a working version of gtkpod-aac for Gutsy at all. I know it’s only 6 months but that seems like an eternity when you have the same old crap to watch on your iPod for that long.

All is not lost. A kind soul left a helpful comment on the bug report explaining how he got it to work. It’s a pretty simple fix. Just google for libmpeg4ip and find a Debian repo that has the following packages for your architecture:

  • libmpeg4ip-0
  • libmpeg4ip-dev
  • libmp4v2-0
  • libmp4v2-dev

Download those 4 .deb files and install them. You can ignore any advise to use an older version in the official repo. Once you have those installed, download and build the latest version of gtkpod from their Subversion repo.

Now that you know what to do I’ll give you what you probably wanted at the beginning. As long as you have wget, subversion, and use a Bourne-like shell this should work for you.

↓ gtkpod-aac-fix.sh

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mkdir /tmp/gtkpod-fix
cd /tmp/gtkpod-fix
wget http://ftp.uni-kl.de/debian-multimedia/pool/main/libm/libmpeg4ip/libmp4v2-0_1.5.0.1-0.3_amd64.deb
wget http://ftp.uni-kl.de/debian-multimedia/pool/main/libm/libmpeg4ip/libmp4v2-dev_1.5.0.1-0.3_amd64.deb
wget http://ftp.uni-kl.de/debian-multimedia/pool/main/libm/libmpeg4ip/libmpeg4ip-0_1.5.0.1-0.3_amd64.deb
wget http://ftp.uni-kl.de/debian-multimedia/pool/main/libm/libmpeg4ip/libmpeg4ip-dev_1.5.0.1-0.3_amd64.deb
for f in *.deb; do sudo gdebi -n "$f"; done
svn co https://gtkpod.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/gtkpod/gtkpod/trunk gtkpod
cd gtkpod
./autogen.sh --with-mp4v2 && make && sudo make install
cd
rm -rf /tmp/gtkpod-fix

Ubuntu: Linux for Linux users please 0

Posted by sjs
on Thursday, July 13

Ubuntu is a fine Linux distro, which is why it’s popular. I still use Gentoo on my servers but Ubuntu is fast to set up for a desktop. Linux for humans it certainly is, but dammit sometimes I want Linux like I’m used to.

It should ship with build-essentials (gcc & others) installed. It shouldn’t ask me if I’m sure I want to restart at the GDM login screen. I have no session open and already clicked twice to choose Restart.

Other things aren’t quite ready for humans yet. Network config needs some work. It’s very slow to apply changes. Connecting to Windows printers should be easier (ie. let us browse to find them, or just search and present a list). Fonts aren’t amazing yet, though Mac OS X has spoiled me as far as fonts are concerned.

Other than these things I think Ubuntu Dapper is a fine release. It installed on my work laptop without a problem and detected the volume keys and wireless network card flawlessly.