Kubuntu up and running

so ive been playing with Kubuntu for few hours now and im very pleased with the speed and stability of the OS.

High definition playback of x264 files did not work right out of box but to tell you the truth I didnt expect it to.

installing codecs was only few clicks away and took only about 2 minutes to download and install them for the default media player.

since I can never leave anything alone I went ahead and downloaded VLC media player to see if it has better capabilities. the player came with all needed codecs just as I expected.

after playing few different movies I noticed huge difference in playback quality compared to watching same videos on Windows.
the picture was clear and sharp and the PC no longer had hick ups that I experienced under Windows.

I only found one problem so far. sometimes I have gotten errors when trying to play files that had DTS audio track instead of AC3 but im not sure why,ill just figure it out when or if I get the error a againg.

Linux Vs. Windows for High Definition Playback

So.. ive had Windows XP Pro SP2 running on my home theater PC for some time now, i think about 8 months or so. Once in a while the PC gets a hick up while playing some x264 encoded video files: the audio and video go out of sync which gets pretty annoying.

Besides those hick ups the video playback freezes when i gry to run large video files ..about 8 GB or more for a about 1 hour and 40 minutes film.
I think those problems are caused not only by the computer hardware not being sufficient enough to handle such high resolution video but I think also because Windows is using a lot of resources which could have been put into the video decoding.

So i decided to install Ubuntu Linux to see if i could get a better performance from my crappy home theater PC.

So now comes the fun part of installing a new OS, yay!
This usually means hours of problems ... and guess what?,i was right.

I tried to install Kubuntu as the secondary OS, so i wanted the PC to be dual booted with Linux & Windows.
Kubuntu ran fine from the Live CD but when i tried to install it as the OS and let it resize the partition well... it kept doing something with the hardive for about an hour untill it poped up with an error saying that there was a problem creating/resizing partition.
My guess.. its a windows NTFS drive so who knows what Windows did to the partition table or the file structure over the last 8 months.
Since that attempt failed, i installed Norton Partition Magic 8.05 to resize the partition, Ive never hadr problems with using Norton's partition software so i figured ill give it a try.
I changed the settings, made the Linux drive to be about 12GB and let Partition Magic reboot my PC and resize the partition. So the PC restarts .. and it attempts to resize the partition, and gives me an error, somethign about user directories or some crap.

At this point i knew that the NTFS partition was screwed, who knows, maybe too many power losses and incorrect shutdowns might have cause the directory structures to be messed up. Ran few other diagnostic softwares but none of them found anything wrong with the drive! (kinda was expecting that)
Since i only have some TV shows on that partition, well ... about 180GB of TV shows in High Definition, and ive seen most of them, i decided to format the whole drive and create one huge Linux partition. I am thinking that after i do that, i will have zero problems at all installing Linux on the drive, plus the PC will be faster cause there is not gonna be any crap on it.

....so time to format.....

Starting Linux Live CD
Letting it reformat the drive
Installing KBuntu
Success...


Just as i thought, windows messed up the drive before and a clean install of Kubuntu worked perfectly fine. Now its time to play with my new OS :)

To Be continued.....

CallWave Visual Voicemail

I stombled onto something pretty cool couple of days ago.
It's called CallWave Voicemail, it is a free service for your cell phone, it pretty much replaces your current voicemail system on your phone (it can be 100% restored back to your old VM system) and when people call you, not only you can listen to the message just like you would with your old voice mail system but you will also receive an email with the attached message so you could listen to it on your PC.

Also another thing that i found which is pretty neat, is that if your phone is off or does not have any reception, CallWave will show you who called you even if no messages were left.

Its very usefull for me since my phone looses reception in my room and sometimes people call me and i dont even know about it. Now there is a solution.

Try it out, its completely free. Add the gadget to your iGoogle homepage and you can sign up through that