3 with B43

Posted on January 27, 2012 by TK Kocheran

If you’ve been following the blog, you probably noticed that I recently had a lot of issues with Bluetooth on my MacBook Pro running Ubuntu, and then had them resolved by an awesome commenter. Apparently, if you disable Bluetooth coexistence protection in the B43 driver, then Bluetooth will be able to coexist with WiFi. I have no idea how this makes sense, so don’t ask

I demonstrated how to do this with modprobe:

# remove b43
sudo modprobe -r b43
# reinsert b43, with the right settings
sudo modprobe b43 btcoex=0

Unfortunately, this doesn’t work permanently, as whenever you reboot, the B43 driver is loaded with the evil Bluetooth coexistence setting enabled (again, this means that Bluetooth will not work). Thus, we need a permanent solution! Pop open your favorite text editor as root and edit /etc/modprobe.d/options and append the following line:

options b43 btcoex=0

Voila! Go ahead and reboot to test your settings. No more modprobing every time you boot!

Burning ISO images to CD’s and DVD’s in Linux

Posted on February 4, 2010 by TK Kocheran

Since we’ve already covered how to rip a cd or DVD to an ISO file in Linux, the next logical step would be to talk about how to burn an ISO image to a CD or DVD. Again, we’ll be attacking this question from our handy-dandy terminal, so open your favorite terminal and let’s get to work.

Continue reading →

Ripping DVD’s and CD’s to ISO format in Linux

Posted on January 22, 2010 by TK Kocheran

There are many reasons why one would want to rip a disc to an ISO file. The ISO format stores the disc locally on your hard drive in a way that it can be easily and quickly burnt again to removable media. If you’ve ever wanted to keep a backup copy of some software on your computer, or you would like to store entire DVDs locally on your filesystem, Linux can help you out with that. The program “dd,” provided by most Linux distributions by default, allows for quick, simple ripping of CD’s and DVD’s from a terminal. Let’s get ripping. Continue reading →

Music Management in Linux: Ripping CD’s with abcde

Posted on January 20, 2010 by TK Kocheran

When one sets out to rip a CD in Linux, he is confronted by many options. The user can use a graphical music player such as Rhythmbox, Banshee, or Amarok to rip said CD, along with many other dedicated ripping solutions. I recently purchased Rosetta Stone Hebrew Levels 1 – 3 which comes with 12 (read ‘em, TWELVE) discs of audio companion material. Let’s just say I needed a way to rip 12 discs fast, preferably in a terminal. Enter abcde. Continue reading →

Flash Player on Linux – Installing Native 64bit Flash Player

Posted on January 20, 2010 by TK Kocheran

It seems that installing Flash Player on an Ubuntu desktop is getting easier and easier with every release of the popular Linux operating system. However, its still very apparent that there are still problems pairing the two together in some areas. In the past, it has been less-than-easy to install the 64bit Flash Player plugin in Linux. However, Adobe just released refresh to the alpha, so let’s see if it has taken care of some of the ease-of-installation problems. Continue reading →

Music Management in Linux: Using EasyTAG

Posted on January 18, 2010 by TK Kocheran

If you’re like me and you love music, you probably have thousands upon thousands of songs in your library. It’s good to have choices, right? If I want to listen to Led Zeppelin, then I should have that option. If I’m more in the mood for some instrumental folk music like John Fahey, I should be able to play it wherever I’m at. Managing the filenames and ID3 tags of such a library, though, is anything but easy. Enter EasyTAG, literally easy tagging and renaming for your entire music collection.