måndag 30 mars 2009

Spotify on Ubuntu Netbook Remix

I wanted my Acer Aspire One to be able to run Spotify. I know that it's a proprietary software but it's a good way of showing the music industry that we want alternatives.

So let's begin...

Spotify is aware of the problem that they only got a native client for Windows and Mac OS X but they have a excellent guide to run the Windows version using Wine, and it looks like they are using a Debian based version of GNU/Linux as well.
I pretty much followed the guide but didn't bother to do the part about opening Spotify URIs from Mozilla Firefox.
What I basicly did was to install Wine, configure audio settings under wine, download the Windows client, run the downloaded file.
There were no hickups what so ever. After running the installer a icon for Spotify turned up under the "Wine" menu category and there I stopped.
I added Spotify to my favourites with a right click and "Add to favourites".

There is one issue that I consider big. Since I'v got the SSD version of the AA1 I want to minimize writing to the disk to make it last longer. Spotify is a real beast when it comes to caching and writes alot to the disk which I don't want. So what to do?
I made a somewhat ugly hack that works for now but it will make me loose the "Remember me" feature of spotify. What I did was basicly this...
  1. Identify the username of the user that will be running spotify. In this case he is called "user" so replace that with whatever you are using.
  2. Start Spotify and go to "Edit->Preferences" and note the path for Cache Location. When you are done shutdown the application completely using "File->Exit"

  3. In /etc/rc.local I add a small section that sets up a directory under /tmp (that is already using tmpfs and by that not using the SSD).
    /etc/rc.local
    #spotify cache
    if [ ! -e /tmp/spotify ] ; then
    mkdir /tmp/spotify
    chown user:user /tmp/spotify
    fi
    As I want to be able to do the rest without having to reboot for folder creation to take place I create the folder manually.
    # mkdir /tmp/spotify
  4. In the path for the cache location I remove the "Storage folder and replace with a link to /tmp/spotify called Storage
    # cd [to the cache folder]
    # rm -Rf Storage
    # ln -s /tmp/spotify Storage
  5. Start Spotify and check the contents of /tmp/spotify. There should be some folders and perhaps files now.
As I said before you will loose the "Remember me" for your logins because Spotify uses the cache to store information about logged in user.

söndag 29 mars 2009

Ubuntu Jaunty UNR on Acer Aspire One


Today I did it.
I finally threw out Linpus from my Acer Aspire One 110L and installed Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) Beta using the "Ubuntu Netbook Remix" image.
I have been tired of the Linpus version installed for a long time but since there have been a lot of diskussions about not so good support for Ubuntu on the AA1 earlier I have hesitaded.
Ok Linpus has it's virtues like crazy fast boot time and crazy simple user interface but that's about it.

I downloaded the image that I found following links from www.ubuntu.com then I put it on a USB stick using the USB Image writing guide. I used the dd method described there since I did the process on a server without GUI.
Then I briefly read through the information I found in the Ubuntu Community Documentation about the Aspire One 110L.
I made some misstakes like using ext3 instead of ext2 during the installation and had to go back change back after installation (I have a SSD and not a regular harddrive so it matters)

Since I knew there could be issues with wireless network I did the installation and all updates using a wired connection.
There are still issues with wireless but not that bad.
At first I did the misstake to use the proprietary madwifi driver for the wireless but that didn't work. I had read that blacklisting the acer_wmi module could help so I tried that but still no luck so I disabled the proprietary driver and rebooted. Now I have perfect connection with WPA2 using the free driver but still with blacklisting of the acer_wmi module. I doesn't work with it enabled.

Webcam is detected as it shoud. Sound works, haven't tried the microphone.
I haven't done any proper benchmarks but the system feels snappier at least.