Howto's, experiences and more

After tinkering and toying with this Ventrilo program for over a week (and complaining why people dont just use TeamSpeak for pity sake ! It has a native Linux client, come on.) I finally managed to get the thing working on Ubuntu 8.04 with standard ALSA etc.

First thing you need to do, is make sure everything works with the sound system. That means, speakers are configured right, but also confirming that the (built-in if you use a laptop) microphone works as well.

To get this done, you might have to take a look at this page, but obviously i will not cover getting your sound cards to work on every system possible. This entry is about getting Ventrilo to work, and hopefully a comprehensive guide at that. This also means that this guide assumes that you have Wine installed and properly working ! If you haven’t done that yet, get it done first.

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As a reader of this blog has pointed out to me (I have readers, i’m shocked !) there has been changes in the VMWare installation files and simply converting an RPM to DEB is not going to cut it anymore.

VMWare has chosen a new path however, and one that is much much easier too. It’s VMWare’s newest bundle of joy : The bundle installation file. (sorry about the pun, really)

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Some of you might have guessed it already when you arrived at this page and me mentioning yWriter. Yes, I am a writer. That means, I am what i like to call a spare-time writer. As you might guess this implies that I am not a professional writer but someone who writes for his own pleasure in his spare time.

Of course, every profession has it’s own set of dedicated software tools (or at least should have) and the writing profession isn’t much different from that. So next to the obvious programs we have at our disposal, like the Office suite from a particular commercial softwarehouse from Redmond USA, or the more friendly and free Open Office suite, there is also something called yWriter. Read more

If you run either Debian or Ubuntu (which is Debian based) you might have ran into the problem that for some software, there is no .deb package available, only .rpm.

Seeing as they are both similar packages, you might wonder if there is a way to make a .deb from a .rpm. And in fact, this is a very real option by using alien.

This however requires you to use the commandline, so for you people used to your windows, this might be an odd operation, but stick with me for a moment as you are going to love the power of the shell in a while anyway. So first thing you need to to is fire up your shell and try if you have alien installed :

$ alien -V Read more