Urban Adventures & More

I own an 8 year-old Sony Vaio, PCG-SRX87 (I really cannot believe it’s that old.) It’s got 384 MB of RAM, and PIII 450 MHz processor, 20 GB HDD, wireless, USB 1.1, ethernet, video out, memory card reader, external CD-R/DVD drive (8x write speed!), and a modem. It came with Windows XP, and no small supply of craplets (as Walter Mossberg, Mac enthusiast calls them). Since then, I’ve installed various distros of Linux (Manrake, LFS, and ) on at least four other computers, generally with great success. However, my experience made it clear that most distros are pretty kludgey and don’t deal with hardware very well. It was my impression that laptops generally have proprietary hardware (how mistaken I was!) that wouldn’t be supported, and the system would be fairly unusable.

Since my knowledge of Linux distros is pretty sparse, and is mostly derived from my older brother, I moved from LFS to Gentoo on my desktop machines. I was well-aware that this wouldn’t fly with my laptop (all the compiling, oy!), I held off. Finally, when my girlfriend’s father decided to install Ubuntu on his laptop a couple weeks ago, I figured it was time. I had actually had a brief encounter with Ubuntu in college when a gentleman emailed the Linux list at my school (which generally receives a couple emails a year) about starting a LUG and he went on and on about how great Ubuntu is and how he wanted to support his “clients” and esteem God. That didn’t go over well with the socialists (me included: I was reading the “philosophy” pages on the OSS websites too much), he was flamed, and that was the end of that.

But Holy Cow, installing Ubuntu is probably the easiest thing I’ve ever done. The live CD is extraordinarily slow to use (since it is constantly spinning up the disk) and took more than 5 minutes to load, but you should be pretty well convinced that it’s a good substitute for windows once you get on there. Certainly having low expectations given my past experiences, I was impressed. Wireless works (better than in windows, I might add!), power management works, it’s got a control panel-like thing, and everything is plug-n-play. It’s uncanny how far these things have come. One caveat is that I got a black screen when I started up, because it detected my screen settings wrong. Hit Ctrl-Alt-Minus (where the minus is on the number pad, not next to Backspace) a few times to make it a visible size. Once you log in, go to System->Preferences->Screen Resolution to change it to the native resolution.

Installing was a breeze, although mysteriously I can’t make the boot screen appear when I boot, even though it works fine on the live CD. There are a few kinks, such as the Brightness software not working in the OS, but it works fine if I use the keyboard shortcuts (Fn-F5 and Fn-F6). Hardware acceleration is disabled by default because the video card can’t handle 24 bit color depth and acceleration on this system. I can go on and on about what works, what needs a little effort, and what doesn’t work, but pretty much right out of the box, maybe some assembly required, you have an excellent substitute for that average windows user. I’m also told that if you use their Verified Hardware, you won’t have any of the problems I experienced. (Do you think Windows works on your hardware because the Microsoft people are clever, or because the manufacturers all make sure it does? Until they give Linux attention, it’ll be hit-or-miss like this!)

My impression of the average windows user is that they browse the web, check email, use a word processor, and spreadsheet. In the browser, they have to be able to load flash and java programs, and view other videos. Playing music and connecting to the iPod is crucial for most. You can do those things 100%. (I happen to think Amarok is a better music player than anything you find on Windows, hands down.) Installing software is done by checking the program’s name in a menu. Uninstalling is similarly easy. There is software to do nearly everything, but it becomes iffy. My girlfriend does graphic design, and won’t touch either inkscape or the GIMP with a 10-foot pole, since they compare so unfavorably to the Adobe products they imitate (the former is quite fun to use, and the latter, particularly before version 2.0, was god-awful). Video editing, when I’ve tried it in the past, was quite finicky. There is, of course, Wine, which lets you run windows programs in Linux. I just made a post on that; you can supposedly play many games and run quite a variety of program in it. Just don’t expect 100% polish if they do run. (You can see which ones work by going to their AppDB: you might be pleasantly surprised.)

But if video editing is your thing, just wait a few years. When I started using Linux, firefox was version 0.5 or so. It didn’t load most pages, and it crashed regularly. A few years later, it was 1.0 and mostly usable (with a healthy does of add-ons). As I was describing above, hardware used to be very irritating. Now you have something like Ubuntu that makes hardware support a breeze. Similarly, the other core functions that I described are very, very solid. It’s the fringes that are now being worked on. Video and sound editing, graphic design, and games are just coming into their own. If you really need these things on Linux, you’re probably best advised to wait a few years until they’re mature. Either that, or participate in their development by testing the software, programming, or writing documentation.

Audible sells audiobooks (books read aloud, if you didn’t deduce). Audiobooks are cheaper than print books on the whole because the cost of producing them (beyond the actual writing and editing) is simply the cost of hiring a single voice artist, as opposed to printing each copy. In other words, it has enormous operating leverage. (On the other hand, buying these in disks in the store can be quite pricey.) Therefore, if you commit to one of Audible’s plans, such as the monthly or “all-at-once” plans, you can get an excellent deal on these things. For example, the “24 credits all at once plan” (the most economical if you use it to its full) gets you each book for $7.50. I happen to listen to them on my way to and from work in the car, which is usually about an hour each way. Most audiobooks last a week or so for me. (You can get more bang for your buck with subscriptions to the New Yorker, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.)

While I’m talking about audible, before I get to my Linux experience, I might as well tell you what I think of the site. I think it’s an excellent service, overall, and a huge boon in the modern commuting age. I had previously bought about a month’s worth of audiobooks (it was four all together, I believe) for about $100 at Barnes & Noble’s; through Audible, this would have cost at most $45. Their site leaves something to be desired; it is something of a poor man’s amazon.com. Of course, you can research the books you want on Amazon, and then just check if Audible has them. The files have DRM protection, but it’s no problem using them on an iPod or in iTunes, which is all most people care about. They also force you to use a proprietary download software, which presumably encrypts and tags the files as you retrieve them. My prediction is that both the clunky website and the DRM will go the way of the dodo once Amazon takes over (they’re being bought by Amazon; my prediction is purely speculation, of course).

Which brings me to the purpose of my post. Given that the proprietary, windows (and perhaps Mac) download program, Linux is officially unsupported. However, on my Ubuntu machine (version 7.10 at the moment), I had no problem downloading and installing both their “AudibleManager” (which can organize and play your audiobooks) and “Audible Download Manager” (which downloads the files outside of AudibleManager) using Wine (see Wine’s AppDB for support information). I used Wine straight out of the box, and had to use the short script described on the AppDB page referenced above; now it integrates very nicely with firefox. Make sure you have Audible Download Manager running before you try to download, otherwise the download won’t work. Note that the podcasts page does not work for me in the audible download manager; you have to download the files through the Audible website using the library (since only subscriptions can be downloaded directly through the download manager, this isn’t such a hassle, anyway).

Now that you have these files, what do you do? You can listen to them using the AudibleManager, which plays audio, and recognizes the chapter markers. Amazingly, Amarok not only recognizes the .aa files (although it cannot play them), but can download them to your iPod. I don’t think any other ipod program recognizes the .aa files, so Amarok (which is just an awesome program, by the way) may be the only way to do this. However, on my new 3g iPod nano (supported in Ubuntu 7.10 only by installing a libgpod hack, although it should work officially starting next month with 8.04) these downloaded files play fine, although they lose the chapter information. This isn’t such a big deal, though, since you can fast forward and rewind easily enough by pressing the middle button and then scrolling (a technique that does not seem to work at all when a file has chapters).

So, although Audible has no official plans of supporting linux, the linux community seems to have done a superb job of making things work. To recap, to use audible in linux, you need to:

1. Install Wine and Amarok (if you want to download to an ipod)
3. Install the audible download manager or the AudibleManager (to listen on the computer) using Wine
5. Use the shell script suggested on the AppDB page to integrate the download manager properly with firefox.
6. Start the audible download manager, go to your audible library, download, and enjoy!