meh.

For a little while I had a painful time in getting the text editor scribes to run as root. You are probably wondering why i would want to run the text editor as root, but when you cant be bothered using vi or gedit and would like some pretty code highlighting then that is what you need to do. Anyway, as you may know I am running Ubuntu 7.10 Gusty and it is going “pretty” well for the most part. So the objective i wanted was to be able to launch scribes from the shell then have it edit my “whatever” configuration files. The problem that i was having looked somthing like the following :

binneyd@HAL:~$ sudo scribes /etc/fstab[sudo] password for binneyd:Traceback (most recent call last):  File "/usr/bin/scribes", line 38, in    main(argv[1:])  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/SCRIBES/Main.py", line 45, in main    __open(uris)  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/SCRIBES/Main.py", line 58, in __open    __open_via_dbus(uris)  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/SCRIBES/Main.py", line 76, in __open_via_dbus    dbus_service = __get_dbus_service()  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/SCRIBES/Main.py", line 109, in __get_dbus_service    from info import dbus_iface, session_bus  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/SCRIBES/info.py", line 34, in    session_bus = SessionBus()  File "/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/dbus/_dbus.py", line 218, in __new__    mainloop=mainloop)  File "/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/dbus/_dbus.py", line 107, in __new__    bus = BusConnection.__new__(subclass, bus_type, mainloop=mainloop)  File "/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/dbus/bus.py", line 121, in __new__    bus = cls._new_for_bus(address_or_type, mainloop=mainloop)dbus.exceptions.DBusException: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.

After quite a bit of searching i found out that the Scribes application does not like to be run as root and will, not very gracefully, fail if you try to do it. So, you need to bypass this problem by using the dbus launch and away you go eg. :sudo dbus-launch scribes /etc/fstabThis was a little ugly of a solution so i just cleaned it up with an alias and that is about it.alias suscribes=’sudo dbus-launch scribes’So hope this helps and saves you some time as well

At the moment i am attempting to rip a cd to mp3 format. As a new user of Ubuntu i am not that familiar with all of the apps and packages that you need to effectively use this system but for some simple tasks like this, it does seem a little more difficult than it should be.

Anyway, i have tried a few apps so far like soundjuicer, songbird and amarok. i am trying to make it work with amarok because i would like to not have to use multiple apps to do common tasks like audio. When using amarok and trying to import the cd tracks into the library via right click, all i get is some grayed out options which is not much help. However, I will keep looking for a solution to the amarok problem and will provide an update when i find one??

Well after some messing around with packages and other crap like that, i have given up on the idea of using amaroK to do the ripping and moved to soundjuicer. It does seem to do the job but is extremely slow to the point of sleep, and does not seem to have even gotten track names or any of the correct information. Uuuumm, it turns out that there is more to track information than i originally thought.

What seems to happen when you insert a disk, is that the track lengths and number of tracks are sent to one of many online directories eg. cdda and there the cd information is compared against a database to see if there is a similar cd available. Now, considering that there will not be a similar cd, because this is a custom one, it will find no results. This will leave you with a cd full of songs and no associated information, which sucks. Anyway, it turns out that you can upload the newly created cd, using iTunes to the appropriate online directory and then move to the new computer where the track information will be grabbed. Definitely, not an ideal solution but it is late and i am getting annoyed. Another alternative is: If you have a friend who has a mac, you can use a script CD Text to CD Info v1.2″ to apply the tag information to the songs before they are burnt or imported. This means that when you go to import/record the disk you will be able to grab the track information automatically which is a lot better of a solution.I know that this is not a solution for ubuntu but i have given up for the moment in hope that someone else can shed some light on a better alternative.