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% [?]

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% [?]