Thursday, August 25, 2016

How to install 10 Band Equalizer for Rhythmbox

I like Rhythmbox on Ubuntu Desktop but it does not come with an equalizer out of the box. Fortunately, there is a 10 band equalizer that you can install as a plugin and it works really well.

Here are the steps to install the 10 band equalizer with Rhythmbox version 3 and later:
  • Create a directory under your home directory for storing the 10 band equalizer plugin
    • mkdir -p ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/plugins/
  • Go to the newly created directory and get the source for the plugin from GitHub
    • cd ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/plugins/
    • git clone git://github.com/luqmana/rhythmbox-plugins
  • Now go to the equalizer plugin directory and install the plugin
    • cd rhythmbox-plugins/equalizer
    • sudo apt-get install gir1.2-gconf-2.0 python-lxml
    • ./install.sh --rb3
  • Open Rhythmbox and go to the Tools → Plugins... menu and enable the equalizer

  • Finally, you can go to Tools → Equalizer and change the settings to suit your music taste

That's it! Happy equalizing!

Sunday, August 21, 2016

How to fix a broken fstab in Ubuntu

I was messing around with my /etc/fstab settings which connect my Ubuntu desktop to my NAS server via Samba and I screwed it up. When I restarted my desktop, Ubuntu would just hang asking for a password and yet I could not provide the password and get to the login screen. Boot failure!

So I found this little nugget of wisdom on "How to fix a broken fstab in Ubuntu" which got my desktop going again:

Fix Broken /etc/fstab

    • Boot into the Ubuntu Live CD
    • Open terminal
    • Run the following commands to mount the partition with the root / directory and edit /etc/fstab:

sudo mkdir /media/mount
sudo mount /dev/sd[a..z][1..n] /media/mount
sudo vi /media/mount/etc/fstab

    • Make your changes, save, and then reboot without the Live CD

In my case, I just placed a comment hash # on the fstab line that defined the Samba share so I could get into my desktop again and fix the problem.