My search for an open source, Ubuntu alternative for EyeTV on OS X is nearly over. I stumbled across ‘Me TV‘ a few days ago–and I’ve left it as long before writing up a post about it so that I could have a good play with it.

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As a follow up to yesterday’s post, here is a quick run through of how to use Mplayer to view DVB channels.

Basically, you just need to generate a channels.conf file (see this article) and place it inside ~/.mplayer/. Then run mplayer dvb:// in a terminal window. You’ll get a video window appear, and the first channel within your channels.conf file will start playing. To switch up and down between channels, you can press h and k. There’s a bunch of other helpful keyboard commands though not all of them will work with DVB.

While using Mplayer this way isn’t very user friendly, it may be helpful for some.

Watching TV on my desktop. What do I want to be able to do?

• Watch all Freeview (DVB-T) channels.
• Be able to pause, rewind, and forward to live TV.
• Schedule programs to record.
• See the TV listings for the channels I have.
• Fullscreen or windowed viewing.

I was able to do all of the above using EyeTV on my Mac. However, I’m trying to make the complete switch to Ubuntu, and an open-source alternative is needed.

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Just reinstalled Ubuntu Feisty, but my resolution wasn’t automatically detected. Bummer.

sudo nvidia-settings

Go to ‘X Server Display Configuration’ and then select the resolution for your monitor. Click ‘Apply’ to ensure it works correctly, then ‘Save to X Configuration File’.

I just bought a new Linksys router for my home network and wanted to set-up my Ubuntu Web Server with a static IP address so that I could port-forward a few things. Trouble is, with only the command line it’s a little tricky to figure out exactly how to do it. Following are the steps I used.

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

Inside the file, you’ll see the following line:

iface eth1 inet dhcp

We want to switch from dhcp to a static IP address. Comment or delete that line, and then add the following to the file:

iface eth1 inet static
address 192.168.1.200
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.1

1. This line states we want to use a static IP address.
2. The static IP address you want to use.
3. The subnet mask.
4. This is the IP address of my router which connects to the Internet.

Save the file and then restart the network settings:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Job done.

A very handy command to see the total size of a directory on a Unix-based computer.

du -sh *

This will show the total size of files and directories in your current working directory. The s flag means to show a summary–which basically just shows the top level directory only, instead of the contents of each and every folder down the file system hierarchy. The h flag shows a human readable file size.

For my home directory, I get the following output:

404M    Desktop
 30G    Documents
6.0G    Library
 32G    Movies
 18G    Music
 11G    Pictures
2.7G    Projects
 16K    Public
166M    Sites

I’ve had a bit more time recently to play around with Ubuntu and am finding the ‘Ubuntu versions’ of apps that I’ve grown to love on Mac OS X. One of which being Hot Corners which I always use to lock my screen when moving away from it.

Brightside is the Ubuntu app to do the job.

sudo apt-get install brightside

Once installed, go to System, Preferences, Screen Actions. I then checked the “Bottom right corner” and then chose “Start screensaver”. Works a charm.

Be sure that in your Screensaver settings to check the “Lock screen when screensaver is active” option.