Spotify doesn’t yet have a native Linux client, but that doesn’t stop us from using this brilliant program. The developers of Spotify have made sure that the application has close to 100% compatibility with Wine so it can be used on Linux. The best guide to getting this installed is to follow the guide at the official Spotify website. One thing to mention is that if you are using the latest Wine with Karmic, then you will want to use Pulseaudio instead of ALSA in winecfg.

One thing you will want to do is add Spotify to the Gnome menu. By going to System > Preferences > Main Menu and selecting New Item you can make the shortcut to load Spotify. I selected Sound & Video from the left and clicked New Item using these settings:

Type: Application
Name: Spotify
Command: wine "C:\Program Files\Spotify\spotify.exe"
Comment: Spotify

You’ll most likely want to have a nice icon for Spotify. You can download this SVG icon http://kallepersson.se/upl/spotify.svg and place it into /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/ (you’ll need to be superuser to do this):

sudo mv /path/to/spotify.svg /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/

changing /path/to to the location of the spotify.svg file you downloaded. ~/Downloads/spotify.svg if you downloaded using Firefox.

Popularity: 97% [?]

There seems to be a well known bug with HD audio in Ubuntu which causes a loud click to be heard before playback. I was slightly confused initially when searching for fixes as all posts referred to this as Intel HDA and I’m running an AMD system. It turns out that the VIA VT1708S HD Audio chipset is used by both AMD and Intel motherboards and ALSA has support for this in the snd-hda-intel module.

The problem is that the snd-hda-intel module is set to power down the audio chip after 10 minutes. The causes a clicking noise before playback. The easy fix for this is to edit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and look for this line:

# Power down HDA controllers after 10 idle seconds

below this, change the timeout from 10 to 0 like this:

options snd-hda-intel power_save=0 power_save_controller=N

and save the file. You’ll need to do this as superuser so either use “gksu gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf” or do it the hardcore way with nano!

Reboot!

Popularity: 28% [?]

Today I finally decided to get this remote working in Ubuntu. The remote has the model number of RC118 and works exactly like the standard MCE remote. The difficulty is with the receiver which is a Formosa device which emulates the MCE Home receiver. Lirc now has support for this receiver so I just had to make a small change:

install lirc and replace /etc/lirc/hardware.conf with the following:

# /etc/lirc/hardware.conf
#
#Chosen Remote Control
REMOTE="Windows Media Center Remotes (new version Philips et al.)"
REMOTE_MODULES="lirc_dev lirc_mceusb"
REMOTE_DRIVER=""
REMOTE_DEVICE="/dev/lirc0"
REMOTE_LIRCD_CONF="mceusb/lircd.conf.mceusb"
REMOTE_LIRCD_ARGS=""

#Chosen IR Transmitter
TRANSMITTER="None"
TRANSMITTER_MODULES=""
TRANSMITTER_DRIVER=""
TRANSMITTER_DEVICE=""
TRANSMITTER_LIRCD_CONF=""
TRANSMITTER_LIRCD_ARGS=""

#Enable lircd
START_LIRCD="true"

#Don't start lircmd even if there seems to be a good config file
#START_LIRCMD="false"

#Try to load appropriate kernel modules
LOAD_MODULES="true"

# Default configuration files for your hardware if any
LIRCMD_CONF=""

#Forcing noninteractive reconfiguration
#If lirc is to be reconfigured by an external application
#that doesn't have a debconf frontend available, the noninteractive
#frontend can be invoked and set to parse REMOTE and TRANSMITTER
#It will then populate all other variables without any user input
#If you would like to configure lirc via standard methods, be sure
#to leave this set to "false"
FORCE_NONINTERACTIVE_RECONFIGURATION="false"
START_LIRCMD=""

then remove the current loaded module for lirc_mceusb and load the new one:

$ sudo rmmod lirc_mceusb
$ sudo modprobe lirc_mceusb

and running irw should show the module working and recognising keypresses. Boxee is great when using a remote!

Popularity: 64% [?]

Tencent have released preview 3 of the native QQ client for Linux. No release notes have been found but the new version now has working file transfers.

You can get this from http://im.qq.com/qq/linux/

Popularity: 2% [?]