I have a HUGE music collection that I’ve taken the time to digitize, so it was bugging me that I couldn’t listen to it on my sound system on the first floor.  When I raised the volume on my computer speakers I just ended up hearing a ton of bass.  So I took a look around the net and it seems that mediatomb is the program to use.  It was in the Fedora repos or maybe the RPMFusion repos.  It’s pretty easy.  You run it as your user (not root) and it creates a config file.  All you need to do is tweak that file to have it say:

Whenever you’re working with the file directory structure or with text in general, you can’t do any better than using the command line.  For example, I was recently copying a bunch of files off of some old CDs because I was noticing that they were starting to develop bit-rot.  (I couldn’t access all the files anymore)  For reasons I don’t wish to get into right now, it’s easier to not have spaces in filenames in Linux.  It’s not because Linux can’t handle spaces in filenames - it can.  But if you’re a semi-hacker like me, spaces in filenames can wreak total havoc on your scripts.  So I wanted to remove spaces off of around 200 or so files.

You may wonder what use the command line has? Afterall, why use it when you have a GUI? Well, they are so useful, that Microsoft will be reimplementing it in Windows Vista to allow people to run shell scripts. I’ve blogged about the usefulness of the command line before, but I wanted to demonstrate with some examples.

As I was reading about DSL, I wanted to download the ISO so that I could try it out. But how to do this quickly and without my intervention? Enter the program wget. wget allows you to download from the internet in the commandline. You can download one thing, such as an iso, or you can download an entire website for offline browsing. What makes it better than using your browser to download is that you can set it to retry a number of times so that if the download gets disconnected for some reason, it will continue to try. Also, a good thing to always do when downloading an ISO is to check the md5sum, allowing you to know that your file was not corrupted during a download. No biggie if you are just downloading one thing, but if you are downloading a couple of ISOs, it can get a little tedious. Using the commandline should help you out. So here’s how I started off:

I have recently had yet another paradigm shift involving my use of the GNU/Linux operation system. Up until now I was treating it like a better, more stable version of Windows. At first I even tried to do everything graphically, shunning away from anyone who told me to use the command line. I figured they were just some diehards who felt that mouse users were below them and considered their advice to be one-sided.