Getting lyrics in Sonata under Ubuntu

Back in June one of the links I posted was for a HowTo to use the Music Player Daemon (MPD) for enjoying the music files on your computer without the overhead required by Amarok, Exaile and the such. While I didn’t use it at first I have come to love Sonata as my primary audio player. It’s lightweight, loads fast, lets me search through my entire library, even though it’s on two different partitions, and I can search by the artist rather than the location if I want to. There’s even an Info panel that can show you track and album info, as well as the lyrics.

Except Debian and Ubuntu have a glitch and the lyrics tool fails no matter what.

I found a post on the Ubuntu Forums that had a possible solution, but it required rebuilding Sonata and some of us were left in dependency hell. Luckily I’m stubborn enough that I refused to give up so easily. Today I did some more searching and found a post on the sonata-users mailing list that looked promising. It didn’t require require compiling software, just downloading a tar file and extracting it into a specific location. The version of the file they suggested didn’t work for me either, but it gave me a direction to keep checking and I am happy to say that I have a solution for the problem.

The original solution uses the command line but I needed to do an extra step so we’re only going to use the command line for one step.

• Go to the download page for Web Services for Python on SourceForge. Download ZSI-2.1_a1-py2.5.egg and save it to your desktop (or other handy location)
• Launch Nautilus with sudo nautilus and go to
  /usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages
• Extract the downloaded file to that location (you can drag it onto your sudo nautilus window, then right click it and select Extract Here)
• Move the ZSI directory from where it was extracted so that it sits directly in the /usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages directory and not in a folder beyond that on (such as ZSI-2.1_a1-py2.5_FILES)
• Launch Sonata and play an audio file. Go to Sonata’s Info tab and verify that the lyrics are now being fetched. (Requires lyric support to be enabled in Sonata’s Preferences.)

Skinning BOINC on Linux

During a recent trip to the Museum of Science in Boston I was reminded that I used to participate in Seti@home when i was a Windows user and I wanted to start participating again. It turns out it’s easy to do thanks to BOINC, and it’s already in the Ubuntu universe repository (you will need both boinc-manager and boinc-client), although Ubuntu’s repo doesn’t have the current version. Plus the version from the BOINC website (which is just a simple script you don’t even need to run as root) opens web pages in Firefox, not Evolution as the version the Ubuntu repos uses for some odd reason.

The one real problem that I found is that I tried to install some new skins and the instructions provided are only for Windows users. Luckily I found a post in the BOINC forums that had the information I needed. Of course once I switched to the version of BOINC that I download from their website (that simple little script I mentioned) I just had to create a skins subdirectory under /home/<myusername>/BOINC and deposit the skin folders there.

My only problem was with the Pulsar skin, which simply refused to launch for some odd reason. Once I launched BOINC from the Terminal I saw that the skin used a “Graphics” subdirectory rather than the “graphics” that the skin file specified. Once I renamed the folder (and changed the capitalization on some files since Linux is case sensitive, unlike Windows) I was able to use the Pulsar skin. I may stick with the Space Skin, though. Either way I wish I could figure out why the Graphics Available link doesn’t do anything for me.

Peng’s links for Monday, 18 August

• Markus Thielmann: Adobe updates Flash 10 to RC. Flash 10 is a little closer to release, although it seems some new bugs were introduced for x64 users. Markus looks at not only the update but also gives info for possibly dealing with issues in the RC.
• Jonathan Carter: Not blogging enough? No, it’s not a question of where either Nanci nor our buddy Sus has been lately. Jonathan posts a small collection of links, but within the post is a response to Mark Shuttleworth’s challenge to make Ubuntu prettier than OSX. (I meant to blog the challenge to Ubuntu devs but I see that I didn’t. My bad.)
• David Futcher: Announcing Freespeech: Simple Cross-Platform Text To Speech. Some may consider text-to-speech just a toy, but there are a lot of people for whom it’s a must have. And this is truly cross-platform, working on not just on Linux but also Windows and Mac.
• Douglass Clem: Comcast Gives Cold-Shoulder To Non-Profit School Running Linux. I was checking out this week’s issue of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter when I found this story about a Florida school that had to deal with the joy of getting Comcast support for their Linux system. The boys and girls at Comcast really need to support Linux, especially since they already support OSX and Unix, and both Linux and OSX share a basis in Unix. I trust that Comcast tech support guy got enough detention to help him realize that they should support Linux, too.