Don’t get me wrong, iTunes does a great job of keeping track of music, pictures and any app’s that you may have installed from their store…. but it’s the little things that it ignores.

You know, like configuration files!

Here is the set up…

I have an iPad and an iPhone and my machine runs Ubuntu Linux.

It was just recently upgraded to Ubuntu Natty Narwhal.

To “sync” my iDevices with iTunes i run a Windows XP environment inside of Virtualbox ( an emulator program that lets you run a different computer inside your regular computer. )

Here is a long and very painful story made a lot shorter… and if it sounds confusing, it’s because it is…. I’m still scratching my head over much of it.

After quite a few “issues” with the upgrade to Natty ( many things no longer worked as they should have – and this is yet another rant/reason as to why Linux isn’t ready for “regular users”! ) I finally got, or so I thought, everything working together. Or so I thought.

My iPad was due for a backup after putting a lot of new apps and information on it and so I flashed up my iTunes within Windows within Virtualbox within Ubuntu and after a very Very long time. A backup – I use that word lightly now…. was created. Note that the iPad connects to the computer via a USB port, this is important for later….

After which I was notified that a minor update for my iPad was available. So I said “sure”…. such a short word to lead to such a long and painful process….

iTunes does an odd thing when it does an update, it appears to first wipe out what is on the iPad ( the Operating System )before installing the update ( instead of overwriting )…. at least that is what it looks like from my end. Anyways all went well until the time came to install the new and improved “minor” fix.

Virtualbox, although it saw that the iPad was connected, refused to mount it ( make it available ) so that it could be actually used by iTunes…. matter of fact it refused to mount anything via USB at all except for my USB connected printers!

This took hours to track down and fix. From what I was able to discern, Ubuntu in it’s “non-commerical”  wisdom decided to replace the usual Virtualbox with Virtualbox-OSE. I’m still not sure what the difference is, nor do I care, but I stumbled across several other articles about how the OSE version won’t let you use USB connections…..  umm… but….. sigh…

I finally gave up and purged everything Virtualbox from the system ( sudo apt-get remove –purge virtualb* ) after which I went directly to Oracle’s ( used to be Sun for those in the know ) Virtualbox website and downloaded their latest non-OSE version of Virtualbox.

It too complained about not being able to support USB devices unless I added myself to the virtualbox group ( which I had previously done, but it may have been deleted by either the upgrade or the purge… sorry not sure about that one ) AND that I install something called an Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack. Which is a completely new thing for me…. but I did and it worked!

Unfortunately…..

Remember that bit I mentioned about wiping the software before installing the minor upgrade? Well, once I got iTunes back up and running and looking at the iPad it said… and I paraphrase with sarcasm added …. “So sorry, but your iPad has to have it’s original software reinstalled in order to work with iTunes….. sigh.

So I did that, and then it automatically went into a Sync mode  and started reinstalling everything that was missing from my last backup and after several hours….. I had my iPad back….

Well….. sort of. As it would seem that all of the configuration files – like those for connecting to my WiFi. My email logins, all my news feeds that fed all my different programs etc etc etc. Were all MISSING! I have to redo all of that, and remember all my news sites from memory…..

Oh and before I forget, it took ALL of my apps and placed them one by one on the iPad…. All the folders that I had them organized in were gone as well….. It took me three hours just to recreate and shrink down stuff back into folders! All my news feeds….. well I may never get all of them back!

So, I don’t know why I was able to connect with my USB cables “for a while” using something that supposedly wouldn’t let me connect at all. And why Apple in it’s wisdom does updates the way it does boggles my mind.

But I can guaranty that there are a LOT of people out there who will be as “ticked” and as shocked as I am when they one day discover that the SYNC that iTunes does only Syncs what Apple thinks is important – the apps and doesn’t do a thing to protect your system from loss of configuration data! They really gotta fix that!

I’ve also done a fair bit of searching trying to find an app or any other utility that will let one backup EVERYTHING on the iPad/iPhone/etc. And so far, I haven’t found one that I would dare to try – kinda sad isn’t it

I’ll let you know if ever I do, and if you find or are using something that works for you – let me know – PLEASE!

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve fallen down the rabbit-hole vis-a-vis Apple. I thought that I would give their MobileMe feature a try since I now had an iPhone and an iPad. My biggest concern was how I could access their Cloud storage from my Linux/Ubuntu machine…

I also need to say up front, how amazed I am as to how well the MobileMe environment works between Apple devices. It just works. They act like one device, if you update a calendar on one, it updates on the other, if you get a message or delete a message or send a message it looks, acts and does the same thing on the other.

Sure I could have created a work around with Google’s tools and gmail etc etc. But MobileMe acts and looks like it resides on your device, you don’t need to log into anything or do anything, it just works! Very impressive.

I managed to figure out how to transfer all my contacts and calendar from my Ubuntu machine to my MobileMe environment. Alas I have yet to find an easy/sensible/workable way to keep all of that in sync with my main machine. Even Windows doesn’t do that though, so I don’t feel too bad about that. If I do find something ( on either Windows or Linux ) you’ll be the second one to know.

However the MobileMe cloud storage, called iDisk, works very, very well on Windows platforms. Apple of course makes the code for it. But alas they don’t do anything for Linux, so I had to put my Google search skills to work to find a solution. And of course I did…

So the site I found and the guy who came up with the solution have done a great job of putting the info on the solution together, so I’m not going to try and repeat what he has done. He did the work, laid it out better than pretty well anything else I’ve seen ( or would be capable of doing ) so he should be getting all the credit! It works very VERY well.

Here are his directions and he includes a handy little script that will make your life quite easy in future as well….

blog.firehist.org/en/2010/08/28/monter-un-idisk-mobileme-sur-ubuntu-linux/

Yes the link wording is in French, but he offers the solution in French and English and the link points to the English solution…. so don’t sweat it!

His solution and script work flawlessly.

One thing I do have to emphasize is his warning about automounting the iDisk…. DON’T DO IT! The problem is that you need Internet access to mount the disk and  it’s possible that your Internet won’t be up when your reach this stage when booting up, or could even be down for any other reason and you won’t be able to get your computer booted all the way up until you boot up with one of your installation CD’s and do a repair turning off the automatic mounting for iDisk.

Trust me using the  iDisk utility that he has made makes the whole process a lot less painful in the long run ( yeah I had to try it and found out why one shouldn’t…. what can I say…. )

After your machine boots up, just open a terminal and type

$ sudo iDisk -m

Enter your admin password and then your idisk password and voila. An Apple iDisk will reside on your Linux machine!

One of the big things I like about iDisk is that it seems to prioritize the uploads and downloads to Cloud device. As you may, or may not know, I’ve tried and kicked the tires on other similar such devices: DropBox, ZumoDrive, etc and they all pale in comparison to the speed and ease of use of iDisk.

A case in point: We were in Quebec City visiting family ( about a 4 hour drive away ). My wife asked me to show the local family a particular picture of one of our grandsons. Unfortunately, it wasn’t on my iPad. However in less that 5 minutes, I was able to log into my machine at home ( from my iPad ) using TeamViewer ( Hope to talk about that one later. ) I then copied the picture she wanted into the iDisk on my Linux machine and an extremely short time later load up the picture on my iPad from the iDisk icon on my iPad… man did I look good…. ( I wish… )

To be truthful, no one noticed or cared. But I did, and it still blows me away. There is no way I could have done a transfer that fast ( save for direct copying from my Linux machine to my iPad ) using any other tools I have ever looked at or tried.

So again – check out Pierre’s directions and script ( which will make the whole thing much, MUCH easier, ) trust me you’ll be really pleased with the results!

I’m thinking that I should change my graphics card…. it’s an ATI Radeon X700 Pro ( or to be specific – an RV530 Graphics Card from ATI. ) Sure it’s a little dated, but still has 256MB graphics capability and is a highly rated card. Plus if it’s a bit dated it should be “known” – shouldn’t it???

So it all starts with a “simple, little, upgrade” – who knew? I decided it was time to upgrade my Ubuntu from 10.04 ( Maverick Meerkat ) to 11.04 ( Natty Narwhal ). Each upgrade of Ubuntu gets better with certain things, but unfortunately breaks other things in the process. Why they won’t stick with what they liked and decided on in the last version boggles the mind however and can lead to grief. In my case, a lot of grief….. once again .

The first tip off was when the upgrade abruptly announced that it couldn’t handle the new windows manager Unity and reverted to the original Gnome desktop. A bit alarming but okay, I wasn’t sure I wanted Unity anyways, especially since their next upgrade after this is already announced as the latest Gnome 3 version…. so why bother, I wasn’t “overly” concerned…. for the most part things “seemed” to be working…. that is until I tried something a little more graphics intensive…. sigh.

The first thing that tipped me off was my attempt at updating my beta version of Memoir44. A brilliant little board game that they are working on putting on the 3 main computer platforms: Windows, Apple and Linux. It started generating a bunch of graphics error messages and then aborted. So I started digging, and digging and digging and found that all my other graphics intensive programs also no longer ran…. yeah of course they don’t any more!

Running glxinfo (a great test utility to see what is going on behind the scenes showed me an error I hadn’t seen in TWO YEARS – see above )….

Xlib: extension “GLX” missing on display “:0.0″.

I was stunned and started searching to see if anyone else had this problem, and there were a few, and have always been a few out there who run into this for all sorts of reasons. So I started checking all my software, making sure all the right pieces were still in place. Now remember I have an ATI graphics card, that’s important for later…

I even tried installing that temperamental FGLRX software and removing it, and installing the open-source Radeon version and doing the same thing, and nothing, absolutely nothing worked! I was stumped, stymied and greatly frustrated. No matter how I tried to change things and rebuild my Xwindows environment…. nothing really “fixed” my problem! I always got the same stupid error… hundreds of them…

Xlib: extension “GLX” missing on display “:0.0″.

A funny thought eventually hit me,  it really came out of the blue. Is it possible that somehow I’ve gotten Nvidia ( a completely different and incompatible type of graphics card than what I have  – ATI remember ) software installed. I did a quick apropos command ( a quick way to check to see what you have manual pages for ) – i.e. “apropos nvidia” and found a bunch of manuals for all sorts of stuff….. and I thought – What the….??

So I removed them, and guess what? It actually fixed my problem….. but/and strangely the manuals are still there, so I’m not sure what is going on with that….

So here is what I did – in case you have/had the same problem.

• $ sudo apt-get remove –purge nvidia* ( this grabbed all sorts of nvidia “stuff” and deleted it all – save for the manuals…. )
• $ sudo apt-get remove –purge fglrx* ( making sure there wasn’t any of that around after intentionally installing it trying to fix things … )
• $ sudo apt-get install –reinstall libgl1-mesa-dri libgl1-mesa-glx libglu1-mesa mesa-utils ( reintsalled the GL tools just in case they got whacked in all this … )
• $ sudo apt-get install –reinstall xorg xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core ( reinstalled the Xserver portions – making sure all is well… )
• $ sudo apt-get install –reinstall xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-radeon ( reinstalled the open source drivers for my card… )
• $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg ( brought back the default xorg.config… )
• $  spat in my hand and spun around twice…. ( why take chances… )
• Restarted the computer… ( with fingers crossed… )

And Voila Unity popped right up and glxinfo and glxgears ran fine! For that matter so did all my other programs and my upgrade to Memoir44

So, it begs the obvious question. How did nvidia drivers get there in the first place? To be truthful, I really don’t know, but my gut tells me that it happened during the upgrade. So either the upgrade assumes you have nvidia ( I sure hope that’s not the case! ) or for whatever reason it reads my card and says – hey nvidia!! Which again is soooooo wrong! Any other ideas?

Alas, once again however it shows that Ubuntu, for the non computer type, can be a very VERY inhospitable place. Which shows that it still isn’t ready for the average user…. I don’t know, you think they’d focus more on making it work right the first time, instead of adding new bells and whistles and major changes every 6 months.

Wouldn’t you?!

As it should happen, I’m in a position right now to spend some money on a new toy.

To be specific, I’ve been torn between a new laptop, a kayak, and an iPad. Of the three my heart was leaning towards the iPad, but it had a major problem (for me) it came with no hard-drive and expandable storage. Now for most people this shouldn’t be an issue. The iPad is really a consumption device more than a  “work tool”, but I was feeling claustrophobic thinking about how limited my options might be in future.

A laptop can always be expanded easily just by popping on a USB drive, a Kayak…. well it’s got every river, lake, stream, sea, ocean in the world if I want it. It was just the iPad…. could I “live” with a measly 16 or 32 GB knowing that there would be no way to expand it easily for storage purposes? It has no SD slot, nor no easy USB ports…

I decided to see what was out there that would work for what I wanted ( unlimited storage space. ) I first decided to look at Cloud storage services. This is essentially other companies who offer storage space on the Internet that can be accessed by one or more machines. The data is secured by passwords and or encryption and backed up by the company itself. One of these I’ve talked about previously dropbox.

My problem was that while dropbox is great for temporarily sharing data I found it beyond cumbersome when it came to easy access and in most cases to use the data you had to transfer it all over to the machine you were working on before you could use it. This can be a real drag to a limited machine ( in my opinion).

What I wanted was something that looked and acted like a disk drive to the computer and data could be accessed when wanted, but not necessarily stored permanently within the computer itself… and I found such a beast. It’s called ZumoDrive and it works really well with Windows, Mac’s, iPhones, iPads AND Ubuntu! It sounded like a match in heaven…. Watch the video to find out more…

After installing it on 2 windows machines and 2 Ubuntu machines I am able to access any data within the ZumoDrive on any machine and it really does act and work like a normal disk drive! Problem solved!

So now I’ve decided an iPad2…. unfortunately I have to wait until the end of the month to order one (I’m not in the US. ) I just have to try and not buy any other toys until then…. By the way if you like what you see you can sign up for up to 2GB of free storage to check it out, and if you use this link here, and I’ll give you a little a bit more -> Click Here

Well that’s not quite the end of it…. by complete serendipity, I was given another solution by a friend of mine, which will work quite well for sharing media ( like songs, pictures, movies, etc). It’s called AirStash. This is another cool device that goes on my “want” list… The neat thing about this device is that it actually acts like a networked drive using your WiFi connection and SD Cards but you aren’t dependent on the Internet. Some examples on the website show using it in the car while traveling. This video will give you more info on it – the only thing that doesn’t seem clear is whether it can be accessed by other operating systems….. still it’s on my want list for my iPad ….

No deals available that I could find but I’ll let you know if I find one!

So check both of these solutions out! I think you’ll be impressed

Essentially you load your program, then load up the video you want to edit. You can quickly move through or play the video until you get to your first cut point ( where you make your beginning mark). You then quickly move to the end point ( the end of your selected cut ) and mark your end cut. Note you can also move almost frame by frame if you need to.

After you have selected the piece that you want to keep, you then click on the transfer button to put the file into your buffer. The amazing part here is that the process is almost instantaneous! I’ve used other “professional” editors to do this and it takes forever to transfer the selected video from one point to another.

At this point you can save the clip from the buffer ( again extremely fast ) or mark and cut another section from the same original video ( using the same process above ) and instantly  paste it at the end of the video in the buffer, or even load up a different video that you would like to cut a section out of and paste it onto your copy in the buffer.

Digital View, the company who sells this software, makes a lite version available for you to try for free, but the small cost of this software is worth every penny to get the extras available with the full package. It is an amazing piece of software that I cannot live without. It cuts my work down by more than 90%! Anyone who wants to clean up their home video, or post videos on you tube NEEDS THIS SOFTWARE - Trust me on this one!

Linux/Ubuntu has all sorts of amazing free Audio and Video tools available in it’s library. The problem that I have found with most of them is that they are trying to compete with the professional packages. This means that they usually have way too much “stuff” to do in order to do a simple task like cutting out a small section from a larger video for posting to You-Tube.

I’ve downloaded and tried pretty well everything out there, and nothing…. let me repeat that NOTHING came close to doing the job as quickly, easily and smoothly as  EasyMPEG did and it frustrated the heck out of me!

It took a lot of research to find a tool that comes close ( it’s not perfect but it’s pretty close ) to what my favorite software could do. It is called DVBCut ( an odd name I know ) and while it seemed to exist “out there” in the Linux environment, it did not officially exist for Ubuntu.

I originally downloaded the source code ( the pieces that usually let one “make” a program with ) from Sourceforge ( dvbcut.sourceforge.net ) but it compiled ( tried to create the program ) with way too many errors. No matter what I tried I could not get the program to compile let alone run properly.

That is, until a week later I found a German site ( that’s right German…. and no I don’t speak German ) that seemed to detail the similar sorts of problems I was having with it.

Within their pages ( wiki.ubuntuusers.de/dvbcut ) were listed a bunch of programs and libraries ( special extra pieces found in the operating system ) that  were needed, which I added:

• scons
• libqt3-mt-dev
• qt3-dev-tools
• libao-dev
• libmad0-dev
• liba52-0.7.4-dev
• libboost-dev

But before I  tried to recompile the program, a little further down on their page, I found an entry that they recommended for your sources.list ( the list of places/repositories that you authorize your computer to download software from. )

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/fabricesp/ppa/ubuntu lucid main

After adding this line to my sources.list ( you can see how to do all that here ) I was able to install and run DVBCut by just issuing the command

sudo apt-get install dvbcut

And voila I now have a quick little editor that works quite well within my Ubuntu environment. Unfortunately, it still isn’t as easy or as good as my original Windows EasyMPEG utility, but it’s still faster than any of the other tools that I found.  I have hopes that it will get even better and until then, if I need to, I can always reboot back into Windows to use my “old faithful”.

For those who are only running Linux and especially Ubuntu, I hope dvbcut will help in cutting down the amount of time it used to take you to put together your video. If my EasyMPEG experience is any measure to go by, you should be immensely pleased with the results!