Logitech Squeezeboxes are great little network audio streamers — I have a squeezebox Duet, which is much cooler (IMO) than an Apple TV + iPod.

Squeezeplay is the Squeezebox controller / squeezebox touch user interface, and it can run on any computer. You can use that computer as a controller for your squeezebox receiver, or as a complete squeezebox, playing music. If you can get it running on a portable device, you effectively get a new Squeezebox Controller for free.

Unfortunately, even though the Squeezeboxes are based on a GNU/Linux foundation, Linux users don’t get much love when it comes to releases of SqueezePlay… so we have to compile it ourselves.

Here is how to get SqueezePlay working on Ubuntu karmic amd64, but the instructions should apply to other distros. I’ve also tested it on Karmic 32 bit.

Continue reading

One of the first things I noticed on upgrading to Karmic was that notifications were lower than they were in Jaunty.

Like most people, at first, I thought this was a bug. The short answer is — it isn’t. The devs, in their infinite wisdom, think its better this way — the “top slot” for notifications is reserved for synchronous notifications, such as brightness and volume.

Continue reading

Ubuntu 9.10′s new login screen looks great — brown, black and white. Much improved over the previous version.

However, if you try out the Accessibility options, in particular, the “improve contrast” option, it goes ugly, with a nasty grey bar.

The problem is that, even after you deselect the option, the theme does not revert back, even after restarting again. The problem is that some needed theme files are deleted.

The solution is simple — you need to re-install gdm. Either fire up Synaptic, search for gdm, and then mark it for re-installation, or do sudo aptitude reinstall gdm in a terminal.

There you go — sexy login screen back again.