r3dux.org

Backstory

I’d had enough of fighting with OpenOffice 3.2 today and finally cracked: I bought a copy of Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Academic edition for $49AUD through Microsoft’s It’s Not Cheating program.

However, since I run Linux I thought I’d just get a copy of CrossOver and I’d be laughing, but this was not to be. I ponied up for Office, set it downloading, then went to get CrossOver only to find it only supports up to Office 2007 – and I don’t mean that Office 2010 won’t work 100%, or will be a little eratic – it won’t work at all. Feck!

Okay, so I can always run it through virtualisation (i.e. a VirtualBox or VMWare instance running some variety of Windows), but I didn’t fancy running the latest, greatest Office on a shonky old copy of XP, so I ponied up (again) for a copy of Windows 7 64-Bit Upgrade (that’s another $49AUD through It’s Not Cheating) and created a new virtual machine, installed Windows 7, entered the key at the end of the install, and it told me it wasn’t valid! Double feck!

At this point I’m $150AUD out of pocket with nothing to show for it, and am starting to furrow my brow.

Trying to deal with the key issue later – I just left the key out to get 7 up and running (it’ll go for 30 days without activation) and tried the key again from within the OS rather than from the installer; this time instead of just key invalid I got an error message stating that this key is not valid for a clean install of Windows… Okay.. now we’re getting somewhere – let’s fix this bad boy.

The Fix

There’s a bunch of stuff on the Web about forcing Windows 7 to accept a clean install from an upgrade disc by creating registry keys, running arcane commands (slmgr -rearm etc.), removing config files from the ISO before install etc. – and to be perfectly honest I didn’t fancy re-installing so I had a quick whirl at all of ‘em. And guess what? They didn’t work, so I’m not going to post them here. Instead I’ll tell you what worked for me [drumroll please....]:

Installing another version of Windows first.

No, really.

It doesn’t have to be 64-bit if you’re migrating 32-bit to 64, it doesn’t have to be one step below Windows 7 (i.e. Vista), it doesn’t even have to be a legal, valid version of Windows! It just has to be some incarnation of Bill’s Marvelous Blue-Screen Machine, and then when you install Windows 7 on top of the existing install, it’ll recognise a prior version of Windows existed, and your “upgrade” key will work perfectly.

Ba-da-bing Ba-da-BOOM! Shamone! =P

So in my case, this just meant slapping a copy of XP onto a new virtual machine, then the instant that’s finished installing, just changing over the ISO image mounted on the virtual DVD drive from XP to 7, rebooting, and letting this second version of Windows install.

Once you’ve got Windows 7 up and running, your “old” copy of windows will be sitting in C:\Windows.old, and you can either use the built-in Disk Cleanup tool to remove it or just delete that folder and you’re as good as new*.

* = If you’re doing a native Windows 7 install, once you’ve removed the old install then you’re quite literally good as new. If you’re installing on a virtual box using a hard drive which uses dynamic storage (i.e. you allocate, say, 60GB for the HD, but it doesn’t take up any space to begin with, it only takes up space when data is added to the drive) then the space allocated for the old Windows install can’t be fully recovered because dynamic disks can take up more space, but do not resize back down to take up less space when you remove data! But you’re going to put more than 700MB of additional stuff on it anyway, right? So just remove the old Windows install before installing new apps and the like and you’ll break even!

It’s not a glamorous hack or sneaky workaround, but it does work, and who doesn’t have an old copy of Windows sitting around somewhere? If you’re feeling particularly cheeky you could try it with a copy of Windows 3.1 or 95 installed and see if it still upgrades clean

Cheers!

WordPress is a really nice WCMS and I’ve been really happy with it ever since I first migrated over back in February ’09, but it definitely has some limitations with regard to how you can structure your site.

Let’s take an example: Joe Blow has a site on hunting, camping and fishing – he writes regular articles on each of these specific categories, and he wants these posts to turn up either just in the specific Hunting/Camping/Fishing pages he’s created, or he wants them to turn up on the home page and also in the category specific pages.

I came up against this problem when I wanted to import a bunch of articles from back when I ran r3dux.org on PHP-Nuke – I didn’t want the “new” (i.e. imported from Nuke) posts cluttering up the home page of the site, I wasn’t going to run the old Nuke portal because it’s full of deprecated code & security flaws – but I wanted the old posts added and available from an “Old Site” page which I could put in the header – so how do we go about this? Easily – via a couple of useful plugins!

Definitions

Before we continue, it’s worth spelling out exactly how WordPress defines Posts, Pages and Categories so we don’t get our terminology all mixed up and make things harder than they have to be:

• A Post is a single article entry, with at least one category (even if that category is the “uncategorised” category!) and may optionally contain some some tags which are keywords for the article.
• A Page is a static, single post which can be easily be linked into the header of your site. It does not contain other posts – it is simply a single post with a special tag that makes it easy to link in the header, and is commonly used to put information about the website author, FAQs, contact pages etc.
• A Category is a database field associated with an article to categorise it, such “Hunting”, “Fishing”, “Humour”, “Politics” etc. You usually set up a bunch of categories, and then select one or more of them to categorise your article, so for a funny joke about fishing, you might have the post categorised with both the “Fishing” and “Humour” categories, and you can then select to view all posts which are classified as this category or that category in a single page (or all posts of some category, showing 5/10/20 posts at a time etc.).

The Fix

This is all well and good – but it’s this static, single post nature of Pages that what’s so unintuitive and can easily trip us up – we can’t link to categories from a page (well, you can, but you have to link from inside the static page, and then you just get a list of article links – which sucks), so we need something to be able to do that for us – and this is where the plugins come in. Specifically we’re going to be using:

• Mark Jaquith’s Page Links To plugin, and
• The RYO Category Visibility plugin [optional - get the beta version from the bottom of the post to use with WordPress 3.01 and higher!]

In combination these two plugins will set a page (i.e. header link) so that instead of it going to a single static “Page”, it instead links to a category list of posts of a given category, and (if you want to) additionally stop posts assigned to specific category from turning up on the main “home” page…

Installing and Configuring

1. Go to both of the above links and download the WordPress plugin .zip file from each (you don’t need the category visibility plugin if you don’t want to hide posts from the main “home” page)
2. Log in to your WordPress dashboard and click on the Plugins link in the left administration bar, then click the Add New button at the top and point it at a plugin .zip file and click upload. Once it’s uploaded and installed, don’t forget to activate each plugin. Do both plugins if you want them…
3. To use the Page Links To plugin you just create a new page (or edit an existing one) and right at the bottom of the WordPress page where you enter the “Page” details, you’ll see this section:

   

   You can fill in the URL to be anything you like, so in my case I’m linking to a list of all posts in the “Old-Site” category – you can link any category or specific post on your site, or link to http://www.google.com or http://news.bbc.co.uk – it’s entirely up to you!

4. Next, if you want to hide posts from the main page, go back to the Dashboard and look for the RYO Plugins button right at the bottom on the left (underneath Settings) and click it!

   

   From here you can see the list of categories along with their numeric IDs, and you can see that I’ve unticked the boxes on the Old-Site category for the Front and Feed options – which will ensure that any posts I put under the category Old-Site don’t appear on my home page or in the RSS Feed!

Conclusion

WordPress can be a little counter-intuitive and inflexible on its own, but because of its fantastic plugin architecture, and due to the great work of so many plugin authors, you have an incredible range of tools and techniques at your disposal to make your site work the way you want it to! So if you want to put posts about Gaming or Music or Films or anything into its own page, you can work around the architecture and get it done with just a couple of clicks. Good stuff

Update: The below process definitely works, but I understand that there’s now a much simpler way of rooting your Android phone by using a piece of software called Unrevoked which’ll work on an Evo, Hero, Aria and Incredible as well as the HTC Desire – so it might well be worth you checking that out before going to all the effort of rooting the phone through this method!

The HTC Desire is a beautiful phone that, at the time of writing, only has official firmware going up to Android 2.1 – which is a great OS, but it’s not the latest and greatest bleeding-edge Android 2.2 which comes with the ability to make your phone act as a wireless hotspot and lets you install apps to your SD card rather than the phone memory (hence, more apps can be installed) amongst other neat features – so, why not root your Desire and install newer, unofficial 2.2 stuff? Well, because you might not really need it, and you might brick your phone in the process for starters – but that’s no fun! Have at it and don’t settle for the easiest route of just making do! Sweet, sweet Android 2.2 goodness is a mere hour or two away! So let’s get it on!

Tools needed:

• A non-64 bit Windows PC, or Linux PC with a copy of VirtualBox running a non-64 bit version of Windows XP or later (Note: 64-bit Windows not recommended for reasons I’ll describe later on. 64-bit Linux host for the VirtualBox side of things is fine if that’s the route you’re taking.)
• An Internet connection
• A HTC Desire with a bootloader at version 0.80 or earlier (you can check this by turning off your phone, then turning it back on whilst holding down the Back button – the second line will say HBOOT-x.xx.xxxx – this needs be 0.80.0000 or lower for the process to work)
  
• A spare (i.e. not the one you intend using with the phone), small microSD card (512MB or larger is fine, Kingston brand preferred for reasons I’ll also go into later, but I used a Samsung brand 2GB microSD with no problems)
• A microSD to normal-SD adapter card or some other way to access the microSD card in your PC
• The ability to follow instructions to the letter.

Once you’ve got all this together, it’s just a case of following the instructions step-by-step, and in less than an hour (assuming everything goes smoothly – to figure all this out and get it working properly took me several hours!) you’ll have a de-branded, fully rooted HTC Desire running Android 2.1, but from which you can install Android 2.2, which I’ll write up in a separate article shortly.

Final Warning: It’s very, very unlikely that anything bad will happen during this rooting process, and the phone can always be restored to normal, un-rooted status should you wish – but the final responsibility for this lies with you. If you turn your phone into a paper-weight, it’s not my fault, okay? But saying that – I’ve successfully managed to root my phone and it all works perfectly, so if you follow these instructions carefully you can do the exact same thing.

Okay, enough preamble – let’s get on with the show!

Step 1 – Get the Android SDK

We’re going to be creating what’s called a Goldcard, which is just a specially modified microSD card which can be used to gain root access to the phone. Each Goldcard is unique to the phone you’re using it with, so for example, I’ve created a Goldcard for when I rooted my phone, but this card wouldn’t work to root your phone, because it has to be individually tailored to match up with the unique ID of your phone.

To get the details we need to kick off the Goldcard process, we need the Android SDK (Software Development Kit), so click this link and get the SDK for your platform of choice: Android SDK Download

Note: I did this section of the process using Windows 7 64-bit without issues.

Once that’s downloaded, extract it to a location of your choice, I’d suggest something like C:\HTC so the full path to it once extracted would be C:\HTC\android-sdk-windows.

We’ll come back to using the SDK in a little bit, but for now we need to set up some USB drivers, so lets get that out of the way.

Step 2 – Install Proper USB Drivers

You can connect to your phone as a hard drive just by connecting it to your PC, but we need to be able to access the phone in a kind of special way through the Android adb service, so to do this we need better drivers than just the standard ones.

Thankfully, these drivers come as part of the HTC Sync application, so head on over to this link and get yourself a copy of HTC Sync for Windows: HTC Sync Download

Note: I haven’t been able to find a Linux version of HTC Sync, so you really do seem to need a copy of Windows for this bit. Again, Windows 7 64-bit worked fine for me.

Once you’ve downloaded the application, double click on it to install it and follow the standard Next | Next | Finish prompts.

Step 3 – Enable USB Debugging Mode on your Phone

For this to all work properly, we need to have our phone connect via USB in USB debugging mode, which can be accomplished by simply going to Settings | Applications | Development | USB debugging

Step 4 – Get the Phone ID Details

With the Android SDK in place, HTC Sync installed, and the phone in USB debugging mode, it’s time to get the phone details, so using a USB cable connect your phone to your Windows PC – if the phone asks, it wants to connect in hard drive mode, and not Charge only or anything.

Once you’ve connected your phone, Windows will thrash around a bit setting up drivers, and bring up a window showing that you can connect to the phone which should show four ways of connecting, one of which should be ADB service or such, and all four options should have a green tick after them.

With the phone connected, on your Windows PC go to Start | Run and enter cmd followed by the enter key to open up a command-line window (if you don’t have Run enabled as a Start-menu option, just go Start | All Programs | Accessories | Command Prompt).

In the command line window, navigate to the android sdk by entering:

cd \HTC\android-windows-sdk\tools

Then, check that the SDK can see your phone by entering:

adb devices

If everything’s going according to plan, you should see the HTC detected and showing your phone’s serial number in output similar to the following (Note: This is not my real HTC serial number in case you were planning any shenanigans ):

C:\HTC\android-sdk-windows\tools>adb devices
adb server is out of date.  killing...
* daemon started successfully *
List of devices attached
HT076R317015    device

If you get “no devices found” type output at this stage then head on over to this post on setting up adb connectivity for assistance.

Assuming you can see your phone, the next step is to get (what I think is) the microSD card ID by typing the following at the command prompt:

C:\HTC\android-sdk-windows\tools>adb shell
$

When you see the $ prompt like above, enter the following:

cat /sys/class/mmc_host/mmc1/mmc1:*/cid

You should then see output like this:

cat /sys/class/mmc_host/mmc1/mmc1:*/cid
1d254d3040404030102a80143440a2a0

If you get an error at this point I’ve read that some people have changed the 1′s to 0′s to have it work, which would make the line:

$ cat /sys/class/mmc_host/mmc0/mmc0:*/cid

Once you’ve got the number, either write it down carefully or copy and paste it into a text file, notepad or such will do just fine.

Step 5 – Reverse the MicroSD Hex ID

We need to perform some voodoo on the number we generated on the last step, which is as simple as going to a web page, entering number or pasting it in, then clicking submit. I’d imagine they’re doing something like this – but I’ve not tested it at the time of writing – all I know is that it works!

Reverse yer number here: Soaa’s Hex Reverse for Goldcard Creation (Thanks, Soaa!)

Once you have your reversed hexadecimal ID number, copy and paste it into a text file for later use!

Step 6 – Get your Goldcard image

The Goldcard image is just a tiny (a few hundred bytes) disk image file (think like an ISO image) that contains some voodoo generated from your reversed hexadecimal ID. To get this image file emailed to you, head over to this link and fill in all the details: http://psas.revskills.de/?q=goldcard

Step 7 – Format your Spare microSD Card

In this stage we’re going to be wiping all data from the microSD card, so make sure there’s nothing on it you want to keep.

The easiest way to format the card in the correct format is via your phone, so turn it off, take off the back casing, remove the battery (so the microSD card can be inserted), put the card in the phone, then boot the phone and select Settings | SD & phone storage followed first by Unmount SD card and then Format SD card.

Once this is done, turn off your phone, remove the microSD card and place it into a microSD to normal SD card adapter or whatever adapter you’re using and plug it into your Windows PC.

Step 8 – Make your microSD card into a Goldcard

For this step we need a hex editor, the one recommended in the guides I read is called HxD and is available here: http://mh-nexus.de/en/downloads.php?product=HxD (the english version is about half-way down the page).

Once you’ve downloaded a version, extract the zip file and fire up HxD.exe, remembering to Right Click on it and choose Open as Administrator if using Vista or Windows 7.

Now, from the file menu in HxD, select Extra | Open Disk, then from the disk selection window that comes up first untick the Open Read-Only checkbox, and then click on your SD card under Physical Disk (this is important!) to select it followed by hitting the [OK] button.

In HxD, Open the SD card as a Physical Disk with Write access allowed

HxD is an editor that uses tabs, so we’re now going to open the goldcard.img file that you were emailed in Step 6 by selecting Extra | Open Disk Image and then navigating to and opening your goldcard.img file. At this point you’ll have two tabs open, and the next thing we need to do is simply copy all the data from the goldcard image directly to the SD card in a kind of raw mode, so we’re not copying files – just some data.

To do this:

1. With the goldcard.img tab selected, go to the menu and choose Edit | Select All followed by Edit | Copy
   
   

   Open a second HxD tab, this time opening the goldcard.img Disk Image

   

   From the Goldcard tab, select all the data and copy it to the clipboard like you'd copy some text

2. Click on the Removable Disk 1 tab, and look at the first column of data which says Offset(h) – what you need to do is Highlight (i.e. Select – just like you would use to copy and paste text) ALL THE DATA from offset 00000000 to 00000170, and once you’ve got all that selected (I found it easier to find the 00000170 row, go to the far right of it, then Left-click and hold and drag up and to the far left of the very first 00000000 row) go to the menu and choose Edit | Paste write.
   
   

   This is important - select the 00000000 to 00000170 region of your SD card, and then paste the goldcard data OVER this selected region (i.e. the data from the goldcard replaces whatever was in the region you've now selected on the SD card)

3. Now you can save the changes to your SD card by hitting Ctrl+S or File | Save or whatever you want and close down HxD.

At this point you want to be able to eject the SD card and put it back in without Windows moaning. If Windows pops up a message saying that the card isn’t formatted correctly and would you like to format it now, you’ve either done one of the above steps wrong, or you’ve got an incompatible microSD card. If it were me (and believe me, from the less than crystal clear instructions I read it was me – three times!), I’d reformat the card and go again, slowly and carefully. When you’ve done it right and you eject then re-insert the card without Windows saying anything other than just mounting the card, then you’ve got yourself a Goldcard! Phew!

If you have any problems, I got my set of instructions from here: http://android.modaco.com/content/general-discussion/305672/creating-a-goldcard/

Step 9 – Get the Rooted Firmware and Install It

Okay – we’re nearly there! This is the stage that I DO NOT recommend using 64-bit Windows for, as when I tried it, it simply didn’t work, and I gave myself a minor panic when my phone wouldn’t boot and was stuck halfway between flashing it – BUT this could well have been because I got the wrong firmware for the phone! I got the normal firmware, whilst the Telstra A8183 models need the alt firmware (second link below).

Either way, I ended up using Linux 64-bit (Ubuntu 10.04) to do this final bit – so just be aware that you might run into problems on 64-bit Windows, and consider using something else – probably even a Linux live CD would do the job if you don’t have multiple OS’s available to you.

So to get the rooted firmware:
- If you have a bootloader version 0.75.xxxx or below AND a current ROM of 1.15.xxx.x or below – DOWNLOAD (MediaFire) / MIRROR (ROMraid / CoBlitz) – MD5: 28dd5acc4104bb49bd4b292cc8e8437c

- ONLY if the above download is not suitable – if you have a bootloader version 0.80.xxxx or below AND a current ROM of 1.21.xxx.x or below – DOWNLOAD (MediaFire) / MIRROR (ROMraid / CoBlitz) – MD5: eb2ed5bca1334cacd70e4720f5b29960

For my phone model (Telstra branded A8183 model HTC Desire – even though it showed bootloader version 0.75.xxxx before being rooted) I went with the the second set of firmware above (r6-desire-root-alt.zip).

Now, once the firmware is downloaded:

• Unzip the file you downloaded to a directory, then open a command prompt / terminal window at that directory.
• Copy the ‘update.zip’ file (which is part of the firmware download zip) to your microSD. Do NOT rename it.
• Turn off your HTC Desire, then turn it back on with the Back button held down. You’ll see FASTBOOT written on the screen in a red box. Connect the phone to the computer.
• In the terminal window, enter either ‘step1-windows.bat’, ‘./step1-mac.sh’ or ‘./step1-linux.sh’ as appropriate.
• Navigate to the BOOTLOADER and then the RECOVERY option on the menu, using the volume buttons to move and the power button to select.
• When a black screen appears with a red triangle (don’t worry, you’ll know it when you see it), press and hold the Volume Up button on your phone and then tap the Power button.
• Your device should now be at the ‘recovery’ screen. Select the wipe data/factory reset option, then select the option to Apply sdcard:update.zip. This will take a little while, so go make a nice cup of tea. When the flash has finished, reboot, and you are DONE!

My information for this section came from this guide should you run into any trouble: r6 riskfreeroot – HTC Desire Rooting Guide

Conclusion

With all this done, you will be the proud owner of a de-branded, rooted HTC Desire with no more branded unremovable bloatware apps hogging up your application list, a new Superuser Permissions application (which I have, as yet, no idea what it does – but it proves the phone’s rooted!), and the ability to flash custom firmware to the phone like DeFroST or DJ DROID Android 2.2 (froyo) stuff, with all the lovely, bleeding edge goodness that provides, as well as over-clocked and under-volted kernels so speed up your phone and lower the power consumption!

To be perfectly honest, I haven’t as yet installed any of that cool stuff – but I’m pretty sure that I’ve done the hard part with the rooting process, and when I get the time to install some 2.2 goodness, I’ll document it to the hilt, too.

Cheers!

Thanks: Shouts out to the Android community for all their good work, from the devs and hackers to the pioneers and bit-players, without whom none of this would be possible! And of course many thanks to the people writing guides whose work I based this guide on in an effort to plainly state and illustrate the process with minimal ambiguity.

I found this trick the other day whilst stumbling the Interwebs and thought I’d do a quick-write up w/ pictures to make it as easy as possible… For this exercise we’re going to be using a piece of free audio software called Audacity, which you can get for Linux, Windows and Mac.

The track I’m using in this example is the first 50 seconds of Ben Folds – Zak and Sara, where the voice kicks in at the 11 second mark, and the original sounds like this:

Once you’ve got a copy of Audacity for your platform of choice, fire it up and follow these simple steps to get rid of the vocals from most songs:

1.) Import Some Audio

From the menu in Audacity, choose File | Import | Audio and then select an mp3 (or any audio format Audacity understands) to work with.

2.) Duplicate The Tracks

We’re going to come back later and use the bass from this to give it a nice, full sound – but for now just duplicate your imported audio by going to Edit | Duplicate:

Once you’ve duplicated the tracks, we’ll mute our copy for now by clicking on the Mute button to the left of the waveform as shown:

3.) Separate Our Original Tracks, Convert To Mono and Invert One Of Them

This is the key part of the process: because vocal tracks on songs are commonly recorded as mono and then mixed into stereo – by separating the tracks and making them act as separate mono tracks, we can then invert one of them to have them cancel each other out! And since usually only the vocal waveform is identical (i.e. mono mixed to stereo) it’s only the vocals that magically disappear from the sound! Ha!

So, to start off we need to click on the little down-arrow to the left of our original wave form and select Split Stereo Track:

Once the waveform’s been split (so we can mess with both channels individually) double click in the lower of the two waveforms (the right channel) to select it all, and then from the menu choose Effect | Invert as shown:

Now for the last really important step – simply set both left and right channels to output as mono by clicking on the little down-arrow to the left of each waveform and selecting Mono. Don’t forget to set both of them to Mono or the magic won’t happen!

With that done, give it a play and see what happens! With any luck, there won’t be any vocals in the track – so with my example, it now sounds like this:

You’ll notice at the end that the vocals come back (the backing singing etc.) – why? Because it wasn’t recorded as a mono source, and hence doesn’t get cancelled out by the inversion we did earlier – so this technique won’t work for all songs – only ones where the voice is recorded in mono and then mixed into stereo, which to be fair, I think it a pretty large swathe of ‘em, and it’d be perfect for karaoke or something like this anyway because you’d want the backing vocals there!

If you wanted to know more about how this wave-form cancellation works, you can always look up Superposition of Waves, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the curious =D

4.) Filter Our Original To Add Back The Bass

The voice cancelled audio above sounds pretty good, and the vocals are definitely gone, but in the process we’ve stripped out a lot of the lower frequency sounds (i.e. the bass). So remember when we duplicated our waveform and muted it right at the beginning? This is where it fits in…

Un-mute our duplicated (and still stereo) audio copy by clicking on the Mute button to the left of the waveform, double click on the waveform to select it all, and then from the menu choose Effect | Equalization as shown:

When the equalisation window pops up, we’re going to filter it so that all sounds above 200Hz are stripped out. To do this, just click somewhere on the main part of the window and a white dot will appear, click again and another will – then click on them to drag them around until you get a shape that looks kinda like this:

Notice that I’ve dragged the bottom-left slider all the way down to get access to the full 120Db and not just the 30Db on the scale by default.

You might have to have a bit of a play to get it right, but all we’re really doing is saying “Leave anything with a frequency of 200Hz or less alone, but drop the volume of anything over that frequency by around 120Db” (i.e. remove it entirely!).

If you mute our top two mono tracks and play it back, you should get the filtered version of the stereo track with only the bass remaining, which for my example sounds like this:

5.) Un-mute Our Original Voice Cancelled Tracks

With the vocal-free (but a bit tinny) audio playing at the same time as our bass-only version, we get a pretty neat sound with good bass and no vocals! Result! =D

You can then just go to File | Export to save the finished vocal-free version to an mp3 or such, if you wanted to keep it.

Wrap Up

I’ve read that some people like to cut out the sections between 200Hz and 1000Hz or so (1KHz, although I’ve also seen people push it up to 6KHz) to keep the low-end and high-end sounds, but when I was playing with this I kept getting some voice creeping back into the mix. This could well have been because I was only dropping 30Db when I was messing around with it though – so go nuts and experiment if ya wanna!

The shape I used for that EQ setting was:

With that all said and done, I hope you found this guide useful – I didn’t come up with the technique or anything like that, I just saw a 10 line how-to and had to mess around for half an hour to get it to work, so thought I could knock up a quick guide that shows how it’s done really clearly, and I hope you have fun with the technique!

Cheers!

The default java solution for Ubuntu 10.04 is the OpenJDK virtual machine and the IcedTea plugin for firefox – but I’ve been having serious issues with it locking up, taking up 100% CPU and other such craziness – so I’ve switched over to the (proprietary) official Sun JDK, and things are working much better. Here’s how I did it, and how you can too…

1.) Add the Lucid Partner repository to your Sources list

We’re going to be installing the Sun JDK through the repos, and it just so happens that we need the partner repo enabled, so you can either add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list, or you can check the box in System | Administration | Software Sources (assuming you’re using Gnome – pick whatever source managing front-end KDE uses if that’s your poison):

deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner

or..

2.) Install the Sun JDK and Plugin

Before you install the good stuff, it’s an idea to check your current version so you can see the changeover’s worked. To do this, just run java -version from bash and you should see something like this:

java version "1.6.0_18"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.8) (6b18-1.8-0ubuntu1)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 14.0-b16, mixed mode)

Once you know what you’ve currently got, again from the shell, enter the following to install the official Sun JDK (don’t worry about multiple JDKs being installed – we deal with that later):

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts

During this process you’ll have to agree to the license agreement – just hit Tab to switch focus in the text window onto the Yes button (assuming you do agree), and hit Enter to accept.

The JRE EULA - Slap the Tab key followed by Enter to ensure swift installation and that Oracle (they bought Sun, remember?) now own your first born child...

3.) Remove the old OpenJDK stuff

In Synaptic, you want to fully remove the following packages:

default-jdk
default-jre 
default-jre-headless
icedtea-6-jre-cacao
icedtea6-plugin
openjdk-6-jdk
openjdk-6-jre
openjdk-6-jre-headless
openjdk-6-jre-lib

If you do this before installing the Sun JDK, all packages depending on Java will be removed as well – so in this rare instance, later is better, and any packages depending on Java can now stay on the system.

4.) Check it all works

From the command line enter: java -version and you should see the new details:

java version "1.6.0_20"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_20-b02)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 16.3-b01, mixed mode)

If you want the new plug-in to take effect in Firefox or such you need to restart the browser, then you should be all good to go! Maybe test it out at sodaplay for kicks too

Cheers!