Amarok Blog - oggb4mp3

Roktober Update

nospam@example.com (Greg Meyer) — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 16:18:00 +0000

A few thoughts from the treasurer as roKtober draws to a close. I hope I haven't posted this too late to have a positive impact on our overall fund drive. We are way off our goal for this year and I am not sure if that is the result of the uncertainty in the economy or people are just sick of us

We have seen a huge fall-off in donations from the US, and I wonder whether it is because we expressed the goal in Euros and somehow offended our friends outside of Europe. Last year, because of the strength of the Euro against the other world currencies, we made a decision to express our goal in Euros because many of our expenses are in Euros. This is not because we are a Euro centric project. In fact, we have just as many US based devs as Europe, and we also have people in Australia, China and South America. We need support from around the world, not just Europe, so if we somehow put you off, or you think your currency isn't as valuable, please reconsider.

Speaking of which, we are planning on giving two prizes this year so I think it is fair to give an entry for local currency, because even though a Euro buys more Canadian or US Dollars, 10 Dollars buys the same amount of bread in North American as 10 Euros does in Europe. So if you live outside of Europe and 10 Euros is a lot more than 10 Dollars, fear not, you will get an entry in our giveaway based on local currencies.

Continue reading "Roktober Update"

amaroK Live a Huge Success - Over 9,000 Downloads

nospam@example.com (Greg Meyer) — Fri, 13 May 2005 03:33:53 +0000

Well, I am totally blown away by the fact that we have had 9,118 downloads of amaroK Live from all sources, ftp, http and bittorrent. This is far more than i was expecting, and it is very exciting.

So, with the first one being so successful, planning must begin on how to top it for the 1.3 release of amaroK. Several ideas have been discussed with regard to acquiring music to include, and I have settled on approaching Magnatune first about sponsoring it by providing 16 tracks that we would have permission to distribute. I have sent them a letter and we await their response.

Other ideas included putting out a general call for music, kind of like how the last icon was developed, or doing a friends and family edition, where musicians that the amaroK devs know would get featured. Ultimately, I think doing a joint promotion with another group that would have an interest in success is the way to go.

As far as features go, I'd love to hear all your ideas, either in the amaroK Live forum, here in the comments, posted to the amaroK-devel mailing list or brought up in #amarok on freenode.

Yaaayyyy!!!!! It's Done.

nospam@example.com (Greg Meyer) — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 05:54:30 +0000

Well, 9 more images and a lot of tweaking (mostly to make the LiveCD regress properly if the target machine has no net connection) and adding a lot of polish and details, it is done. Build 44 is the offical amaroK LiveCD v1.2.1. Enjoy.

A torrent should be up by 5:00PM EST on March 3, once I get the image distributed to some seeders.

I am sad ....

nospam@example.com (Greg Meyer) — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 14:00:05 +0000

I am sad since there will be a delay in getting a final iso out for amaroK LiveCD. The final tweaking is taking a lot of time, and I am trying to resolve a few minor issues to make this thing work on as many machines as possible. The last I want to happen is for this thing to suck and have people blast amaroK because it doesn't work right.

I received some late feedback from a couple of the testers that made me want to do one more revision. Most of the problem are little details (polish, if you will) that make the cd regress properly if things like the network are unavailable, etc.

I will post more later, but it will be out soon.

amaroK LiveCD

nospam@example.com (Greg Meyer) — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 04:47:43 +0000

Well, after 35 iso images, amaroK LiveCD version 1.2.1 looks done. I am doing some final testing but I should be able to get it distributed tomorrow. This has been quite an interesting project for me, mostly because it is the first contribution other than bug reporting and documentation I have made to an OSS project. I am not a coder, so the most I can usually contribute is bug testing, money and encouragement (complaints). I learned a lot, made some friends and had a lot of fun.

Thanks to Mark, Max and Chris for making this such an easy thing to contribute, to Kobsession and Tightcode for your assistance with artwork (why do graphic artists never use their real names), to all the people that tested this, to Texstar for making PCLinuxOS so easy to work with and packaging so many things upon request, to Tom Kelly for maintaining the mklivecd scripts and to everyone else that I annoyed over the last three weeks.

Things I learned:

- How to remove too many packages from a linux installation and end up with an unbootable system
- How to make a syslinux bootscreen with gif2lss
- How to make a bootsplash theme
- Why the Creative Commons licenses are really cool
- How to use cd-rw's instead of cdr's when working on a Live CD project
- How to use scp (never heard of it, but it is cool)
- How to make a torrent and get a tracker running

and I got a much better understanding of how ALSA works.

Check it out at http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/index.php/AmaroK_Live

Now, what do I do with all these iso images?