How to get Google Play music in the UK for Ubuntu & Android

Update: Google Play is now available in the UK. Here’s how to use it in Ubuntu. And here’s  a guide to tweaking the desktop app Nuvola.

Google Play, formerly Google Music is only available in the US at the moment presumably for licencing reasons. But it is possible to get it outside the US in a variety of ways. Basically you have to trick the Google Play site into thinking you are actually in the US so you can register with your normal Gmail account. There are numerous tutorial on the web detailing how to do this so I’m not going to repeat everything here, I’m just going to recount what I tried and what eventually worked for me.

I wanted to be able to access my music from my Android mobile with Google Play and upload my music to the cloud from my Ubuntu PC. To do this you’ll need the Play Music app for Android, but since it’s not available outside the US the easiest way to get it is from the xda-developers site, download to your phone then install the apk file following this method. To upload your music you need the Google Music Manager, there was a copy on the xda-developers site  but this was the Windows version so I decided to wait till I’d registerd with play.google.com and download their Ubuntu 64bit version.

The simplest thing I tried first was some free proxy services like Hide My Ass and TunnelBear which effectively allows you to surf anonymously so web services cannot detect your true IP address. I tried a couple of these services but didn’t have any luck. I then followed the tutorial on  Engadget.com which recommended using the Tor Browser Bundle. Tor sets up a secure internet connection for you and by using the browser (a modified version of FireFox) included you should be able to connect with play.google.com. Unfortunately everytime I tried this approach I got suck on the T&C agreement stage and the browser just seemed to hang there.

Finally I found an approach that did work, TunnelBear have just released an Android app to allow you to set up a secure connection and select whether you’re in the UK or US. By selecting US all sites you visit will believe you are actually in the US. next thing to do was open a browser and go to  play.google.com and sign in with my usual Gmail account details, agree to the T&C and bingo I had now registered .

Back on my PC and using my normal WiFi connection I logged into play.google.com and proceeded to download the music manager which you’ll need to upload your music to the cloud.

So now all I have to do is spend ages uploading music to the cloud as it is by all accounts a very slow process.

Download music from Amazon in Ubuntu without using the Amazon Downloder

I’ve bought downloaded MP3s from Amazon on many occasions but was always annoyed to have to use their downloader so I was interested to find an open source alternative called Clamz in the Ubuntu 10.10 repositories. First install Clamz through Synaptic or sudo apt-get install Clamz if you prefer in a terminal.

Next, buy your MP3s on Amazon as you would normally, you will then be directed to a page telling you to download and install their downloader, assuming you don’t have it. Skip to the bottom of the page and look for the phrase “If you have already installed the latest Amazon MP3 Downloader, click here to enable it for use with this browser.” Click the link and now your browser should save the Amazon file in your Downloads directory.

As Clamz is a command line program you need to open a terminal and run the following command where ****** is the number sequence of the Amazon file.

clamz -d ~/Desktop AmazonMP3-******.amz
This will unzip the MP3s in the download to your Desktop.

Synchronising Google Calendar with Thunderbird Calendar

For some time now I have been running exclusively in Ubuntu on my corporate LAN with very few problems. Initially I used Evolution as my mail client as it could directly link up to MS-Exchange server so I got all my mail, global address book and calendar. But when my company updated to MS-Exchange server 2007 Evolution was no longer able to do this so I went over to Thunderbird. This was fine as far as mail and contacts were concerned but I could not get the Lightening calendar addon to synchronise with Outlook. I tried the method suggested by Ryan Hadley but I just couldn’t get it, so I gave up on Outlook altogether and just used Thunderbird/Lightening. Then I read over at Lifehacker about synchronising any desktop calendar with Google Calendar. I followed the very clear instructions and in seconds I had my desktop calendar sychronising with my Google Calendar. This was great as I could now access all my events etc. from any PC, but it got me thinking of synchronising with Outlook again so I had another crack at it, but with no luck. It then it dawned on me after looking at the image above from the Lifehacker article If I synchronised Thunderbird with Google and Outlook with Google then in effect all three would be the synchronised, obvious really.

Eye Candy in Ubuntu 8.04 – Hardy Heron

I’ve been using Ubuntu since version 5.04 the second ever release and love it. The version numbering is based on the year and the month so 8.04 is 2008/April (see table)

ubuntutable

I use it primarily to recycle older PCs usually Pentium III so eye candy and effects provided by Compiz Fusion are not really an option on these systems. But since moving all the computers on my home network to Ubuntu I have been playing around with a few things. I particularly like the Avant-Window-Navigator (AWN) which is a dock app-launcher similar to that in Mac OSX. First you’ll need to find out if your system can handle the effects, Compiz Fusion is already installed in Ubuntu 8.04. Go to System>Preferences>Appearance>Visual Effects. There are three settings try them, if you can’t get normal or extra to work then your system and video card can’t handle the effects so I’d stop here. If you can get normal at least to work great.

Visual Effects

To install AWN open Synaptic  (System>Administration>Synaptic Package Manager) and search for Avant then mark it for installation and install. You will also need to update your Sources List, you can do this by opening a terminal window and typing sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list this will bring up your sources list in a text editor. Then add these lines

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/awn-testing/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/awn-testing/ubuntu hardy main

or in Hardy just go System>Administration>Software Sources click Third Party Sources and add these two to the list, then reload the list. You will find AWN under Applications>Accessories but if you want AWN to run at start up you’ll need to add it to your session. Go to System>Preferences>Sessions click the Start up tab and then +Add, type Avant in the name field and avant-window-navigator in the command

sessions

field, AWN should now start automatically the next time you reboot. You can find out about AWN settings etc. in System>Preferences>Awn Manager. There are other dock app-launchers such as Cairo-dock and Kiba-dock, full details of how to install Cairo-dock in Ubuntu can be found here.

Now if the basic Compiz Fusion functions are not enough for you you can install the Simple Compizconfig settings manager (simple-ccsm) via Synaptic as before. This will give you and added choice of Custom on the Appearance-Visual Effects window where you can modify things the way you want. If this is still not enough then you can install the full blown Compiz configuration settings manager via Synaptic, this will give you access to all the possibilities available in Compiz Fusion in Settings>Preferences>Advanced Desktop Effects Settings.

The window manager or theme manager in Gnome is called Metacity and there are lots of themes available for it. If you are playing around with Compiz Fusion then you might also want to have a go with another theme manager or window decorator called Emerald. You can once again install this through Synaptic and have it run at startup by adding it to your session as before with the command emerald –replace, which will ensure the next time you log on Emerald will replace Metacity. The Emerald Theme Manager can be found in System>Preferences. Again there are a huge number of themes available here for Emerald.

I made a couple of screen casts using Compiz Fusion but quite frankly they were rubbish. There are loads of demonstrations on You Tube, here’s a particularly nice one.

[youtube]E4Fbk52Mk1w&NR=1[/youtube]

Another thing you might want to try is using other Window Managers. Ubuntu ships with Gnome as the window manager and there are other flavours of Ubuntu such as Kubuntu which uses KDE. There are a few others such as Enlightenment, Open Box, Icewm and Fluxbox, do a search in Synaptic for Window Managers. If you install any of these it’s fairly easy to switch between them, just log out of Ubuntu as normal then log in again. Before you type your username and password click on the Options button on the bottom left of the screen. Here you’ll see a number of options, one of which is Select a Session, click this and select the Window Manager you want to try and that’s it…have fun.

How to: Get Thunderbird to work with MS-Exchange server in Ububtu

Ever since Ubuntu 7.06 I’ve been using it on my companies corporate LAN and managed, after some digging around to get Evolution to connect to MS-Exchange server and manage all my mail, calendar and contacts. I am now using Ubuntu 8.04 and all was well until a couple of days ago, all of a sudden Evolution started crashing and even crashed X-server. Next thing I knew I could not get Evolution to connect to MS-Exchange at all it kept returning an error Could not authenticate to server (password incorrect?)“. At first I put this down to a recent update for Evolution and did some digging around the forums, I found that many others had the same problem but there were no apparent solutions. I then read a few posts which suggested that Evolution did not work with Exchange server 2007, a quick check via web access to my mail and it certainly appeared that my company had updated from Exchange 2003 to 2007.

I had tried to use Thunderbird in the past but it connects to MS-Exchange server using IMAP and this was not available, so I was left with Evolution which connects using Outlook Web Access (OWA) and this was working fine…till now.

I tried everything with Evolution but eventually gave up, I did however discover an open source alternative in development called OpenChange which has an Evolution plug-in due for release in Gnome 2.24 so I might go back to this.

I thought it was a long shot to try Thunderbird again but if the Exchange server had been upgraded then perhaps IMAP connections were now possible, so here’s what I did.

There is a good explanations of the basics at downloadsquad.com, blog.indigio.com and McGill university. some of which I’d followed the last time I tried to use Thunderbird.

In Thunderbird select File>New>Account (if it hasn’t already prompted you to do so) and select new Email account, fill in your name (I used my LAN user name here) and email address. Next select IMAP as the server typeserver type, you only have the choice of POP or IMAP anyway. That’s the basic account set up, now you have to configure the server settings etc. Click on the account name in the left pane then select view settings for this account in the right pane. This gives you a whole load of things you can configure for your mail account but first thing to do is select server settings. Here make sure your server name is correct, usually something like mail.company.com. Under security settings the settingsguides I’d read previously recommended setting this to ‘Never‘ but this just didn’t work for me so I tried ‘TLS, if available‘ and bingo, it worked. All the other settings are up to you. You’ll also need to input the correct address for the outgoing SMTP server. In my case I got this by going back into MS-Outlook and in the mail account properties you’ll see the server name. Also in my case this requires a user name in the security and authentication section and again I chose ‘TLS, if available‘. That is the basics of the account set up now I had to select which folders on my Exchange account I wanted to view. I did this by right clicking on the account name in the left pane of Thunderbird  and selecting ‘subscribe‘ all being well this should open up a window showing all the folders available, just check those you want and click OK. I now had access to my Exchange inbox, sent and deleted folders.

The next stage was to get the global address book connection. In Thunderbird click on Address book then select File>New>LDAP Directory. global address bookThen fill in the details, I called mine ‘global address list’ the host name is usually the server name where your global address book (gab) is located, again this can be found out by going back to Outlook in Windows and looking at the properties of the global address book. So for example if the address was gabserver.ad.company.com then put gabserver in the Hostname box. In the Base DN box the rest of the address is added in the following format dc=ad, dc=company, dc=com The Bind DN is your DOMAIN\username and the port number defaults to 389 but this did not work for me, on blog.indigio.com they suggest port 3268 which did work for me. You should now be able to search the global address book and you’ll be asked for your password. You should also set up the global address book in the auto complete section in Edit>Prefernces>Addressing check the Directory Server box and you should see the address book you created before in the list. This means that as soon as you start to type a name in an email address bar Thunderbird will search your global address book for possible matches to auto complete.

Because I’d been using Evolution for some time I’d backed up a lot of email locally (~8000) as we have mailbox limits here so now I needed to get those into Thunderbird. I thought I’d just have to import but it wasn’t quite that simple. Thunderbird needs a plugin called MboxImport to be able to import emails in the Mbox format. Once this is installed it’s fairly simple though, select Tools>Import/Export in Mbox/eml format then point to the local directory where Evolution stores your mail (usually Home/Name/.evolution/mail/local), that’s it.

But what about the calendar? I here you ask, good question and so far it has me stumped. Thunderbird has a good calendar available as an Add-on called Lightning lightningbut getting this to connect to the calendar on MS-Exchange is another matter and one I’m still struggling with. There is a solution posted at blog.indigio.com but this involves direct access to the mail server which I don’t have. I tried a few things like logging onto my mail through Firefox (OWA) right clicking on the link for the calendar looking at properties and using this address to set up a new calendar in Thunderbird. Click the Calendar icon in the bottom left then right click in the left pane and select New Calendar>On My Network>Next. There are three options ICS, CalDav and WCAP, none of which worked for me at all, but  you may have more luck. I’ll keep looking and maybe I’ll find a solution or maybe if the Evolution plug-in is finished soon I may go back to Evolution. I have to say that given a choice I’d go for Thunderbird over Evolution but the fact is whichever one I can get to work with MS-Exchange is the one I’ll go for and for the time being that is Thunderbird, albeit without a calendar connection.

Loading image

Click anywhere to cancel

Image unavailable

How to Transfer Thunderbird Profile from Windows to Ubuntu

One of the tasks I faced in moving completely from Windows to Ubuntu was to transfer all my saved emails and my profile from Thunderbird. In Windows locate your Thunderbird profile, this will usually be in Documents and Settings>YourName>Application Data>Thunderbird>Profiles. The profile folder will be named with a random 8 character name and a .default extension (e.g. htg34gtd.default). You should be able to access your Windows partition from Ubuntu so once you’ve located the profile folder just copy it across to your Ubuntu partition.

Now go to your home folder in Ubuntu and select View>Show Hidden Files look for a folder named .mozilla-thunderbird. This may already have a .default folder in it, if it has then delete it then move the folder you copied from Windows here. Last thing you have to do is create a profiles.ini file in the .mozilla-thunderbird folder, in my case Thunderbird had already created this file so all I had to do was replace the text with below with the correct .default name;

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1
[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=oooooooo.default

Where oooooooo = the 8 character name of your folder.
Now run Thunderbird, all being well you should now see all your emails etc as they were in Windows. This was not the case for me however, Thunderbird decided to create a new profile .default folder but all I had to do was delete it and rename the one I copied across to the one Thunderbird created…voila!

How to record streaming audio with Audacity in Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron)

I’ve been transferring everything I do with computers both at home and at work from Windows to Ubuntu Linux. Volume ControlOne of the things I did regularly in Windows was to record either streaming audio or audio from a device plugged directly into my sound card. I have a long term project to get all my old cassette tapes digitized. In Ubuntu 8.04 I installed Audacity from Synaptic, then selected each input device in turn under Edit>Preferences>Recording but none of them worked or produced an error.
The solution was however quite simple and not with Audacity at all. I opened up the master volume control on the Ubuntu panel by right clicking on the icon and selecting Open Volume Control then selected Edit>Preferences.Volume Control Preferences Next make sure the boxes marked Mix and Mix Mono are checked then Close. SwitchesClose the Volume Control and then re-open it and select the Switches tab and check the box for Mix and close again. Finally in Audacity in Edit>Preferences set the Playback and Recording devices to ALSA:default. That’s it, now anything playing through the sound card be it streaming music or from an external device such as a tape player can be recorded.

Ubuntu Linux on an Ageing IBM Thinkpad

A couple of years ago I put Ubuntu 5.04 on my old IBM Thinkpad 390X, it worked sort of OK but the sound was all messed up amongst other things so I gave up and went back to Win 2K. Recently I decided to have another go with Feisty (7.04), I had to use the alternative CD as the live CD required more RAM than the system could provide. As in most cases the installation went without a hitch and the poor sound, as well as some other other previous problems were now OK. Since the last try I had installed a wireless network and I really didn’t have any expectations of getting this to work. As expected Ubuntu didn’t even ‘see’ the installed PCMCIA wireless card that Win 2K worked with. But, I also had an old 3Com USB wireless stick (3CRUSB10075) lying around which I hadn’t been able to get to work on any PC or laptop running Win XP or Win 2K, so I assumed it was knackered, but what the hell I thought give it a go. Plugged it in and ‘bingo’ Ubuntu network manager popped up, saw the stick and promptly asked if I wanted to connect to my wireless network, success! I was even more surprised that this was a bog standard installation of Ubuntu with the included network manager plus I was using a previously useless USB wireless stick. This time I think Ubuntu is going to stay on my old Thinkpad 390X

Using Ubuntu Linux on a Corporate LAN

Like so many people I have to use Windows at work because that’s what we’re supplied with and our IT support refuse to support anything other than Windows and MS Office. But like many other people I find Windows a real pain at times and I’d really like to use Ubuntu…but how? Well the answer was even simpler that I could imagine. The first stage was to create a dual boot system. It was important to defragment the HDD before going any further as I have read of many problems encountered by not doing this. Then simply boot from the Ubuntu (Feisty 7.04) live CD and hit Install. The process is fairly straightforward, the only complicated part being the creation of the partition for Ubuntu to reside on. That done you can re-boot and choose to boot to Ubuntu . So far so good. Now, how about my email (MS Outlook), calender and contacts? At first I wanted to use Thunderbird as this is my email client of choice, but it doesn’t interface with MS Exchange server. The solution was staring me in the face, Ubuntu installs Evolution as the default email client and amazingly it can interface with MS Exchange server using the Outlook Web Access (OWA), which is usually something like https://mail.yourcompany.com. Evolution is very easy to set up and if you choose MS Exchange Server then you’ll need to input your OWA URL. The last thing to set up with Evolution is your MS Outlook Global Address list (if you use it). To find the address for this list (from Windows) open your Address book in MS Outlook, right click on global address list and click properties, this should give you the server address for the list. You can then set this up in Evolution by going: Edit>Preferences>Mail Accounts then click on your mail account and click edit, under receiving options there’s text box for you to add the URL of your global address list. Job done, you should now be up and running on your corporate LAN with access to your Email, Contacts and Calender. There’s lot’s more functionality you can add like accessing shared folders on servers etc. but most are fairly obvious.