Juan RianoRemote & On-Site Computer Support

Streamtuner was one of my favorite apps in Ubuntu, until it stopped working!

Streamtuner2 is Streamtuner new reincarnation: It is a directory of on-line radio stations organized by provider (Shoutcast, Google, Live365…). It is really comprehensive and lightweight. Combined with a lightweight player like Audacious makes a responsive duo.

I personally don’t listen to cds or mp3 player’s music in my computer, I always stream. If you are like me, you’ll be happy with Streamtuner2.

Amarok has a Shoutcast plugin, but I find Amarok to be too heavy, in my old computer it slows me down; on the other hand Streamtuner + Audacious deliver great music, great sound and my computer works fast.

You can download Streamtuner2 from SourceForge

I am not sure if this happens in other versions of Ubuntu, but in 10.10 you cannot disable that annoying drums sound right before you get to the login screen. This is bad, because there is no way for you to login silently. 

I use my computer for school, and these drums would always disturb people around me. Anyway, I could not find how to disable this sounds using the GUI, I tried these two settings first:

System > Administration > Login Screen > Accessibility > Play Login Sound (disabled it)
as well as
System > Preferences > Sound > Sound Effects > Sound Theme > No Sounds

Every other system sound was gone, but the drums stayed, after looking online I found the solution, using the terminal do this:

I love Ubuntu, but one thing that I miss from Windows is a graphic equalizer for music players. For some reason Linux players for the most part lack this important feature (at least for me). Some players like Amarok have it, but most don’t. So what can you do to take care of this? Install a system wide equalizer of course!

All you need to do is the following:

This is thanks to Andrew from webupd8.org.

If you are like me, you keep hacking your Ubuntu until you break it. My Ubuntu sound is having this issue in that the sound is working fine and then it suddenly degrades and starts breaking up.

I am not sure if it is my fault or a bug, but I have no time right now to dig out the reason, I have more important things to do, so to keep my music playing while I work, this is what I do: kill and restart sound – hi-tech solution isn’t it?

If you have the same issue don’t be shy, open your shell terminal:

You are welcome

There are opposed opinions regarding the need of antivirus if you are using a Linux distro. My opinion is that if you use your pc with care you probably don’t need it.

Now, I have 3 different antivirus programs installed in my Ubuntu 10.10. The reason is I use them to scan hard drives and USB drives from work. I rather scan them from Linux than from Windows. Sometimes I also run them on my system, but I have never found anything.

The three antivirus programs I use are:

• Avast free for Linux
• AVG free for Linux
• Clam AV

The three of them are only scanners, they do not have all the different tools that their windows versions have, but again, you don’t really need all that in your Linux box, do you?

Download Avast free for Linux and you’ll get a simple but sufficient GUI that allows you to update, and scan your whole system or specific folders.

AVG free for Linux gives you the same options, but it is a command line version only, no GUI there. Here are the basic commands:

• sudo avgctl --start

• sudo avgupdate

• sudo avgscan "/folder/to scan"

• man avgscan

Lastly ClamAV provides mostly the same features with a GUI. Ubuntu provides an installer for this one.

I have have also heard good comments of F-Prot but have never gotten to use it.

I’d appreciate your comments about this article, do you now other tools? Follow me on twitter or “Like” this article using the red bar bellow.