Collection managers

If you’ve ever had the desire to catalogue all of your gear, whether they be DVD’s, games, books or CD’s I can heartily recommend GCstar.

The app Ceemedia was suggested in last month’s Linux Format magazine so I tried it, only to find that many users on its Sourceforge page were complaining of error messages when searching for content – same thing happened to me and the project seems to have gone stale, but never fear, there is always something else.

GCstar fits the bill perfectly. You can create a number of pre-set collections, whether it be books, movies, games, wines or board games or you can create a new collection type.

The “movie collection”, will allow you to type the name of the movie into the search bar – it’ll then scan a pre-defined website like IMDB and populate the other fields with the artwork, cast, release date etc.

You can then sort the movies on year, cast or any other detail supplied.

The games collection is an absolute treat. It’ll search gamespot or Amazon for your games and fetch a couple of screenshots and even game tips & cheats.

When you’re done you can export your collection as a CSV or HTML file (among others…).

To round it off, if like me you have trouble deciding what game to play or movie to watch, it’ll randomly select movies for you.

Best thing is, its available from the apt repository. Simply type:

sudo apt-get install gcstar

Enjoy!

Embed a terminal on your desktop

Great little guide to get a terminal embedded onto your desktop. I don’t know about you, but its always handy to have a terminal session open and ready.

Shell on your desktop – Ubuntu Unleashed

Create your own Live CD

I created my own Ubuntu live DVD yesterday, complete with all the apps & codecs I use and the Ubuntu Studio theme I install each and every time I reinstall. I think I’ll call it GavBuntu (haha)

If anyone else using Ubuntu or Mint would like to do the same, it’s really easy.

Go to “Software Sources” in the admin menu
add a new 3rd party source as follows

deb http://www.remastersys.klikit-linux.com/repository remastersys/

Then, in a terminal type

sudo apt-get install remastersys

Then, if you want to create a full live backup of your system, type

sudo remastersys backup

or, you can create a redistributable live CD with

sudo remastersys dist

When making a redistributable live CD/DVD, for best results, uninstall the restricted display driver if you are using one, or theres a chance you’ll be greeted with an error message when you boot the new disc suggesting it couldn’t set the display settings.

The guide I used is here

Axel Downloader

If you download a lot of files and are frustrated at the slow speeds you get, you may benefit from a download manager.  Whilst there are many around, few are as lightweight and as handy as Axel.  It runs in the Terminal (command line) and downloads from various sources to speed things up.  If you’re young and impressionable and a fan of such movies as Die Hard 4, you will love how it makes your terminal scroll like crazy, making you look like one of those strangely cool hacker types from the movies.

It is available in the apt repositories, so all you need to do is open a terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install axel

To use it, all you have to do is type (in the command line)

axel http://theurlhere

There are other flags too, many infact, but you don’t need to use them.  If you want to find out what they are, just type

man axel

…in the command line.

 

Lyrics in Amarok

I’ve stumbled upon a great little tool that you can download from within Amarok called “wiki-lyrics”.

While you are playing one of your tracks, it’ll search wikipedia for the lyrics and the artist’s info. It’ll also then update the ID3 tag of the track – great for budding bedroom singers.

When running it in gnome I was greeted with a “needs RubyGTK to run”. This is easy to sort out if you have the command line….

sudo apt-get install libgtk2-ruby

If you don’t get any luck with that, you may need to do:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

…before the libgtk2 line.

Enjoy.