(Phaysis)

Now that my CD collection’s ripped to FLAC, I had to filter through my entire MP3 collection and pull out all of the MP3 rips of said albums. That took a few hours, to say the least. Still have those copies, just in case, but after symlinking my FLAC folder into my music folder so my player software can pick up the new files, I really don’t need the old MP3 rips. But they’re there, y’know, just in case.

I use Rhythmbox for my music listening. It’s OK as a player, and it’s got some…idiosyncrasies, but it’s usable. Usually. In my early phase of ripping my collection, I examined Rhythmbox’s handling of FLAC content. It plays fine, edits tags fine. It will even transcode the FLAC if you transfer it to a portable media device. The selection of file format is automatic based on the player, but will default to MP3. In your preferences, under “Music” tab, use the dropdown to select your preferred format — this is usually for ripping CDs with Rhythmbox (ugh, use Sound Juicer instead), but also applies to transcoding for media players. I edited my MP3 profile to encode at 256KB instead of my old 192KB.

That leaves the final piece of the puzzle: sharing this collection with portable thumbdrives. According to some docs out there, you can have Rhythmbox automatically transcode when copying media to a flash thumbdrive by placing an empty file called .is_audio_player in the root folder of the device. Then, when you insert the thumbdrive, Rhythmbox will notice, check for the file, and act like it’s a portable media device if it sees the file. Then you can drag-drop the files to the drive, and everything will be automatically transcoded. It’s a cludge, but what the hell.

As an aside: I know the latest version of Ubuntu desktop ejected Rhythmbox and is now using Banshee as the default player. I assume it’s got similar functionality, but I’ve not tested it myself. I’m just not ready to jump into “Natty Narwhal” or whatever they’re calling it. Progress comes with clenched fists.

(Just for the sake of remembering my own damn self — and maybe helping someone else.)

Earlier, I attempted to hibernate my desktop. Never done it in the 15 months I’ve had Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on here, so I figured “Hell, why not?” I hit the dropdown, and the system commenced its hibernating shutdown action. But it neither shut off nor came back to life. I ssh’d into it to discover via the system logfile that the hibernate was halfway through its operations when the power daemon discovered “Oh Hell! There’s no resume device on this machine!” at which point it ceased and attempted to raise the machine from the dead.

After manually power-cycling the system, I did some digging. Turns out the UUID of the swap/resume partition had been changed somewhere along the way, so both /etc/fstab and /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume were stuck with the old UUID from way back when the system was installed. That UUID no longer exists.

I’m not sure what caused it to change; such an idea is disturbing, considering this is supposed to be the super-stable, LTS build of Ubuntu. The UUID of the swap partition is usually set with the mkswap -U command, and can be set on an ext2/ext3 partition with the tune2fs command. But anything can go wrong.

So. How to make fix? A quick check with sudo blkid will list the block devices on the system:

oldman@Deskie:~$ sudo blkid
/dev/sda1: UUID="c97b2e80-a5b2-4371-a60e-126a8d1402a5" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/sda5: TYPE="swap" UUID="f3a3cd16-f0c8-40a1-8a7d-578c57296c6b"
/dev/sda6: UUID="775a56e3-0244-453f-8d8a-fd1eb42a82f6" /
SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"

The swap partition has the UUID f3a3cd16-f0c8-40a1-8a7d-578c57296c6b and is the device /dev/sda5. Copy and paste the UUID into the fstab and resume config files to replace the UUID that was there. Execute sudo swapon -a to mount your swap partition, and you should be golden. Verify with free -m to check for a nonzero swap size.

oldman@Deskie:~$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3962       1784       2178          0        154        660
-/+ buffers/cache:        969       2993
Swap:        11601          0      11601

The value 11601 tells me I’m gettin’ my swap on. Aw yeah.