Mpd can work with icecast for streaming music, but the current statble version doesn't include this feature yet, so you have to check out the latest code from svn, here are the commands I used to build it.

sudo apt-get install icecast2

sudo apt-get install autoconf automake1.9 libtool make

sudo apt-get install libshout3-dev liblame-dev libmad0-dev libao-dev libflac-dev libasound2-dev

svn co https://svn.musicpd.org/mpd/trunk mpd

cd mpd

./autogen.sh

./configure

#make sure the shout is enable

make

sudo make install

Or if you are lazy can download the binary I built, but make sure to install the needed libs

wget http://yjpark.googlepages.com/mpd

sudo mv mpd /usr/bin

In your mpd configuration (/etc/mpd.conf or ~/.mpdconf), add these lines

audio_output {

        type              "alsa"

        name              "local playback"

}

################# SHOUT STREAMING ########################

#

# Set this to allow mpd to stream its output to icecast2

# (i.e. mpd is a icecast2 source)

#

audio_output {

        type              "shout"

        name              "yjpark's stream"

        host              "localhost"

        port              "8000"

        mount             "/yjpark"

        password          "******"

        quality           "10.0"  

#       bitrate           "64"

        format            "44100:16:2"

# Optional Paramters

        user            "source"

#       description     "here's my long description"

#       genre           "jazz"

} # end of audio_output

##########################################################

If you don't want to hear the music from the computer's local speaker, can remove the first audio_output section.

You need to change the name and mount point and password, and can change the quality or bitrate and format if you want, for more detail please check icecast2's documents.

And you need to edit /etc/icecast2/icecast.xml, the only things I changed are source-password(same as the one in mpd configuration), and admin-user, admin-password(can use this to admin through web interface)

then restart icecast2 and mpd, play some songs, then you can use a browser to connect to http://localhost:8000, you should see the source played by mpd, then can listen to it using an radio player(amarok, rhythembox, xmms...)

For the guys in ExoWeb, you can listen to the same songs I am listenning with http://yjpark:8000/yjpark.m3u (Hope this will not slow down my machine too bad :) )

Links:

    * http://my.opera.com/chongmeng/blog/show.dml/362421
    * http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Configuration
    * http://etnoy.broach.se/2006/06/your-own-internet-radio-station-with-mpdicecast.html

Ncmpc is a command line mpd client, it's very good, but the chinese support has some problem, in the song list window, chinese names are truncated.

At first I thought might be some unicode bug in it, after read some source code, here is what I found: it deal with unicode correctly, the problem is it didn't consider the wide-charactors like chinese charactors, so in the list window, it just show the correct chinese charactors then erase some of them later. change two lines this is ok.

the patch is

Index: src/list_window.c

===================================================================

--- src/list_window.c (revision 4813)

+++ src/list_window.c (working copy)

@@ -203,10 +203,10 @@

if( show_cursor && selected )

wattron(lw->w, A_REVERSE);

+ if( fill )

+ mvwhline(lw->w, i, 0, ' ', lw->cols);

//waddnstr(lw->w, label, lw->cols);

waddstr(lw->w, label);

- if( fill && len<lw->cols )

- mvwhline(lw->w, i, len, ' ', lw->cols-len);

if( selected )

wattroff(lw->w, A_REVERSE);

Using the following commands, you can build ncmpc automatically.

sudo apt-get install build-essential

svn checkout https://svn.musicpd.org/ncmpc/trunk@4813 ncmpc

cd ncmpc

wget http://yjpark.googlepages.com/ncmpc_chinese_patch

patch -p0 < ncmpc_chinese_patch

./autogen.sh

./configure --enable-artist-screen

make

sudo cp src/ncmpc /usr/bin/

Or if you are lazy, can just download the binary I build and try it

wget http://yjpark.googlepages.com/ncmpc

sudo mv ncmpc /usr/bin/

Can edit ~/.ncmpc/config to setup ncmpc, here is my settings

auto-center = yes

wide-cursor = yes

enable-colors = yes

set-xterm-title = yes

xterm-title-format = "[[%artist% - ]%title%]|[%file%]"

And if you want to run ncmpc in real console(not gnome-terminal or xterm), you can use zhcon(just apt-get), I cannot run zhcon with fb driver, here is how I start it

zhcon --utf8 --drv=vga

the --utf8 is needed for ncmpc to working correctly, and you can edit .zhconrc to change defaultencoding to GBK for better compatibility.

It's still not perfectly running ncmpc in zhcon, especially there are some bad encoding strings in your songs' tags.

Lately I moved to use mpd for my music playing, mpd is "Music Player Daemon", as its name says, it's a daemon to play music, not like amarok or rhythembox, it do not need X windows at all, so the music will not stop even if you restart X, this is one advantage of it, others includes multiple clients to control it, from command line tools, scriptable tool, web pages, X clients; very easy remote control; low resource requirement. And it's easy to stream as internet radio(will talk about this later in another post)

mpd's website: http://www.musicpd.org/ there you can find kinds of clients for it, Personally I like ncmpc and pympd(not listed there) most, ncmpc base on ncurses lib, so console base, it's very easy to use with keyboard. pymod is a python client looks like rhythembox.

To install mpd, under Debian or Ubuntu


ncmpc is in both Debian and Ubuntu too, but pympd is not avaliable to Ubuntu yet, you can install it by


Ncmpc does not support chinese well, it support unicode, but for chinese like double byte, it will not show the song list correctly, some part is cutted, after some research in ncmpc source code, I finally resolve this problem. (Again, will talk about this in another post)

We need to test our site under Internet Explorer, to me this is the only reason I need to install vmplayer on my Debian machine, it works fine, but a little bit slow and complicate, the Wine project is used to provide windows api on linux, so it's possible to use it to run IE without a virtual machine, but the setup is not very easy for it, I did try once, didn't get it.

Recently I know that there is an open source project for this, the name is ies4linux. It's objective is download IE's installer and setup wine then install it automatically for you, it works great, The only problem I met is the download process is not very reliable, I need to run it several times to get it installed successfully, so I include the files I downloaded, it only has IE6 in it, if you want to install other version, you need to download them by yourself.

For the ExoMates with exosetup installed, you can do:


If you do not have exosetup, you can just run the following scripts:


ies4linux: http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/index-en.html

svn is very easy to use, but if you want to browse the files in it, and tired of typing commands, you can use some gui svn tools for it.
I tried esvn and kdesvn, think kdesvn is very useful, and it can use kompare to show the diff.

If you are using debian, just 'apt-get install kdesvn'

Tip: 'diff revisions' is under 'Subversion' -> 'General', and its result depends on the current selected files/folders, so if you want to see the whole diff, you need to select the root folder or just select nothing

As a programmer, diff is an everyday tool for me, but the text only output of diff is quite hard to read, comparing to Trac's colorful source browser.
Spend little time to try some graphic diff tools, I like kompare most, it's very easy to use, and the output is very nice.
You can just 'apt-get install kompare' if you're under Debian.
Tip: for use it with svn, you can do 'svn diff | kompare -'

Today I did a apt-get upgrade, everything goes well, but when I try to reboot, it just stuck, waiting for mounting root filesystem for ever.
It's good that I have a system rescue cd with me, seems the file system is very well, not know what's wrong, but after restore my /boot folder, it just works fine again.

For thost that don't know that yet.
If you want to remotely run a x program, it's very easy and secure with ssh.
run 'ssh -X user@host' in xterm or gnome-terminal, that's all, then you can start program in it, the window will just pop up to your screen.

I am using Debian testing now, after the default installation, the smb:// is not working in nautilus, there are two packages need to be installed
After that, the samba access in nautilus just works fine for me.

Under Linux, we use ssh and scp a lot, just tired of input password all the time, I know there is some way to do it, but always too lasy to check it out.

Thanks Vincent for telling me how to do this. I think most of you should already know how to do it, if you still type in password all the time, this is very simple and useful.

First you need to generate a public/private key pair to identify yourself, use 'ssh-keygen -t dsa'

Then you need to add the generated public key to the remote host, here is how I do it

At Local Machine

scp id_dsa.pub yjpark@exobox:
ssh-add

At Remote Machine:

mkdir .ssh
chmod 600 .ssh
cd .ssh
cat ../id_dsa.pub >> authorized_keys
chmod 600 authorized_keys

That's all

make sure that .ssh and authorized_keys is not accessed by anyone except the owner, otherwise it will not work

In current version of gnome, there is no tools for setting up background color of window, it's background setting only change desktop's background.

I really don't like white background, I want the background gray, so I setup some applications's background manually, but some application do not have background color setting(e.g. some versions of Eclipse), and it's not a good way to do that, so I spent little time on it.

First I tried some themes, some of them has gray background, while I don't like there colors setting, so what I need to do is to modify some themes to fit my requirement.

In gnome's theme setting -> Theme Details, you can choose different setting of Controls, window Border or Icons, window's background belongs to Controls, I picked up !LighthouseBlue as a base setting.

The themes file are under /usr/share/themes, I only modified gtk-2.0/gtkrc

bg[NORMAL]       = "#D0D0D0"	//background color of window
base[NORMAL]     = "#CCCCC0"	//background color or controls

That make me quite happy. I didn't find good tool for editing theme, there is a definition of the values