Software Choices

I switched to Xubuntu a few days ago, and I've been trying a few changes in some of the other software that I use, too.

Audio Player

After using rhythmbox for a couple of years, I really tried to like gmusicbrowser, but I just couldn't. Even with the rhythmbox skin, I just didn't like the way the browser worked. I like to click on an artist and see the albums, and then click on an album and see the songs. gmusicbrowser didn't seem to do that (or I couldn't make it do that, anyway).

So I looked at the Best Audio Player page of the recent readers' choice awards from Linux Journal to see what other people are using.

I tried VLC, but it seems like more of a file player. I didn't see a way to import and browse my music library. I may not have given it enough of a chance, but I was disappointed with it.

I rejected Amarok, because I'm not running KDE. I looked at installing banshee, but I was turned off by the long list of mono-related dependencies.

So I gave up and went back to rhythmbox. To my pleasant surprise, the list of dependencies didn't look too long (no longer than banshee's, anyway), so I decided to stick with what I know.

CD Ripper

I got a couple of CDs as gifts last week, and I wanted to rip and encode them, so I tried ripperX (which I'd used previously). For ripperX to work correctly, you need cdparanoia (to rip the CD to WAV files) and lame (to encode the WAV files to MP3 files). I'd installed cdparanoia, but had overlooked lame. When I tried ripping a CD with ripperX, it dutifully created MP3 files without a word of complaint. But then the audio player refused to import them. It took me a while to figure out that lame was missing, and it's disappointing that ripperX couldn't give me an error message about it. Even after installing lame, ripperX wasn't adding the ID3 tags: the CDDB lookup worked, but the generated MP3 files had no ID3 tags. That's important, because audio players use the ID3 tags to organize the music files.

Next I tried asunder (which I'd also used previously), and it worked on the first try, ID3 tags and all.

BTW, easytag is good at fixing problems with ID3 tags (and so is id3).

Personal Financial Manager

I've used grisbi for years, but I've never much liked it. I looked at GnuCash a year ago. I even exported a QIF file from grisbi and imported into GnuCash. But despite the excellent documentation from GnuCash, I was overwhelmed by the transition, so I stuck with grisbi for another year.

A couple of the gripes I had with grisbi (I was running v0.5.9 in Ubuntu 10.04) were minor, but annoying. The transaction dates are formatted for Europeans, and I just couldn't get used to that (in fairness, it looks like that has changed in the meantime). And I never had much success with the reporting feature. I typically ended up exporting the data in CSV format and then getting what I needed from a spreadsheet.

A more significant problem involved what is for me a common practice. When I go grocery shopping, I typically buy groceries and beer or wine and get cash back at the register. The credit union sees that all as one transaction, but I like to track groceries, booze, and cash separately. In grisbi I'd have to make three separate transactions and then remember to put them together when reconciling with the bank statement.

So this year I started a little earlier and read through the sections of the GnuCash documentation in time to make the transition at the new year. GnuCash has "split transactions" which should address my gripe about what to do with my grocery bill. I'll still have to do arithmetic to figure out how much is booze and how much is other stuff, but it may make it easier to reconcile when the end-of-month statement arrives. Dates look the way they "ought to," and the documentation makes the reports look easy and helpful. This one is a pretty big experiment, so we'll see how it goes.

Other Stuff

I think I'll try LibreOffice this time, rather than OpenOffice. I don't use either enough to feel strongly one way or the other, but it seems like I've read that LibreOffice may be getting more active development. *shrug*

In the past I've used XEphem for my virtual stargazing, but I've recently discovered Stellarium. I like Stellarium, and you don't have to build it, so I'll give it a try.

added READONLY option to password wallet

Made an update to my password wallet. You can now have the READONLY attribute in your .walletrc file: this disables updates to the wallet (w/ the -e option). I keep my wallet in two places (work and home), and a cron job copies from work to home daily. So I need to make sure that I only update the wallet at work. I once updated it at home, and the next run of that cron job overwrote the update (a new password).

pager in wallet program

I recently got an email from someone who has been using the password wallet program. The reader asked about the possibility of using a different pager when viewing the password file (the "less" pager is hard-coded into the program).

I thought this was a good idea, so I've changed the wallet program to allow the user to specify the pager using the WALLET_PAGER environment variable (which defaults to "less"). You can also put this in the .walletrc file. The reader wants to use w3m, so this should now work in .walletrc:

WALLET_PAGER="w3m -o bg_color=blue"

I've updated the program in the google code repository.

mod_security

mod_security is an open source Web application firewall which operates as an Apache module. mod_security inspects incoming requests (and, I believe, can also inspect outgoing responses) and take certain actions if a request (or response) matches a pattern. These actions can include logging and/or blocking the request. mod_security works sort of like anti-virus software, in that it comes with a ruleset which can identify common malicious activity (like cross-site scripting and SQL injection attempts). Like anti-virus software, it's necessary to update the ruleset from time to time.

I installed mod_security on a couple of production RHEL5 Web servers lately, and here are a few of my observations.

Installing mod_security is pretty easy and is documented in the mod_security download. I found that I needed to install the following packages to meet some dependencies and to build mod_security:

• apr-devel
• gcc-c++
• httpd-devel
• pcre and pcre-devel
• libxml2-devel
  

I had the support of my managers to put mod_security in full blocking mode, so after copying the rules directory to /etc/httpd/modsecurity.d, I saved the following in /etc/httpd/conf.d/modsecurity.conf:

LoadFile /usr/lib/libxml2.so.2

LoadModule security2_module modules/mod_security2.so
LoadModule unique_id_module modules/mod_unique_id.so

<IfModule mod_security2.c>
Include modsecurity.d/*.conf
Include modsecurity.d/optional_rules/*.conf
</Ifmodule>

The Web servers run a variety of custom Web applications as well as some canned software like Webcalendar and Wordpress. I didn't experience any problems with the custom applications or Webcalendar, but mod_security took issue when someone tried to edit an existing blog post in Wordpress (curiously, there wasn't any trouble when submitting a new post). So I put the following in /etc/httpd/modsecurity.d/modsecurity_crs_15_customrules.conf:

<Directory /path/to/wordpress/wp-admin>
SecRuleEngine Off
</Directory>

I'm in the fortunate (and perhaps unusual) situation of being able to restrict access to the wp-admin directory by IP address, so I don't have the entire Internet hammering at the thing. Looks like blogsecurity.net has a custom mod_security configuration for Wordpress which I just haven't had time to try yet.

Another wrinkle I had was that some command-line Perl programs I run would be blocked because they weren't providing "accept" and "user-agent" request headers. One of these programs looked something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use HTTP::Request::Common;
use LWP::UserAgent;

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();
my $uri = shift @ARGV;
my $res = $ua->request( GET $uri );
print $res->content();

I had to make the following two changes/addition:

$ua->agent('whinerack');
my $res = $ua->request( GET $uri, accept => 'text/html' );

(Looks like just about any non-blank user-agent will do.)

Another trick I've learned is that instead of using SecRuleEngine Off (like I did for the Wordpress wp-admin directory, which makes mod_security totally ignore that directory), you can use SecRuleEngine DetectionOnly, which makes mod_security log what it would do without actually blocking requests. This can be good for debugging.

And although I haven't needed it, the mod_security documentation suggests a way to whitelist requests from a specific host:

SecRule REMOTE_ADDR "^192\.168\.1\.100$" nolog,phase:1,allow

All in all, installing mod_security has been a fairly easy transition, and it's nice having another layer of protection.

GPG wallet in cygwin

The other day it occurred to me try my password wallet in cygwin. The wallet requires dialog, but cygwin doesn't seem to have a dialog package. So I figured I'd try building it.

dialog requires ncurses, which meant that I needed to install the ncurses-devel cygwin package (using the cygwin setup tool). Then I downloaded the dialog source and did configure && make && make install, and that "just worked" to get dialog in cygwin. And then the wallet "just worked," too.

So if you're running Windows and want to try the password wallet, install cygwin and give a wallet a try.

IntranetAddress PHP class

I've added another Google code project. This one is called IntranetAddress, and it's a PHP class which you can use to determine whether or not an IPv4 address belongs to a set of network ranges (specified in CIDR notation in a configuration file). The class requires the Net::IPv4 PEAR package, and a PHPUnit test suite in included.

password wallet in google code

I put my password wallet in a google code project.

google code, trac-backup

In the current episode (season 5, episode 9) of LugRadio, Stuart Langridge says that his new year resolution is to start releasing some of the little scripts and programs he writes. He says that he writes lots of these things, but tends not to release them, because he thinks that they're not very user-friendly. I really identified with him when he said that, and it's inspired me to try doing the same.

So I created a project in Google Code for the trac backup script I described in a previous post. Creating the Google Code project was pretty easy (although someone unfamiliar with subversion might have a hard time). I've updated the script according to a comment on the previous post about a problem with a new version of trac. If you are interested, please have a look at trac-backup.

I'll probably add more projects in the coming weeks:

• a versioned backup system based on subversion, which is pretty good for backing up configuration data
• maybe some other backup programs I've written
• the password wallet I wrote about in the January issue of Linux Journal
  

Lame OpenDocument Foundation Blathering

I recently wrote about some strange announcements from the OpenDocument Foundation (which has since totally dissolved), and I said I didn't know what that meant for the OpenDocument format (ODF).

Not much, it seems. An Antic Disposition post has clarified the matter somewhat:

The adoption of the ODF standard is promoted by several organizations, most prominently the ODF Alliance (with over 400 organizational members in 52 countries), the OpenDocument Fellowship (around 100 individual members) and the OpenDoc Society (a new group with a Northern European focus, with around 50 organizational members). To put this in perspective, the OpenDocument Foundation, before it changed its mission and dissolved, had only 3 members.

trac: backups, Gantt plugin, concluding remarks

This is the third installment of a series on trac, Web-based pr0ject management software. The previous segments talked about installing and using trac.

trac comes with a command-line utility called trac-admin, which can (among other things) perform backups of individual trac projects. The following is a shell script you could put in /etc/cron.daily to back up all your trac projects each night:

#!/bin/bash

TRAC_ROOT=/var/www/trac/tracroot
TRAC_BAC_ROOT=/var/trac_bac

TODAY=$( date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S )
mkdir -p $TRAC_BAC_ROOT/$TODAY
for i in $TRAC_ROOT/*
do
 DEST=$TRAC_BAC_ROOT/$TODAY/$( basename $i )
 DEST_TARGZ=${DEST}.tar.gz
 /usr/bin/trac-admin $i hotcopy $DEST
 tar czf $DEST_TARGZ $DEST
 rm -rf $DEST
done

This uses the trac-admin hotcopy feature to make a compressed archive of each individual project (putting them in time/date-labeled directories in /var/trac_bac).

This series discussed the WebAdmin plugin. I also tried the TracGantt plugin, which makes Gantt charts of your project. I found that I didn't much care for this plugin. You have to enter an extra four data fields for each ticket, one of which is a list of ticket dependencies (e.g., completion of this ticket is dependent on completion of that ticket). The Gantt charts don't clearly display these ticket dependencies, so it seems like a wasted effort. And for a large project, the chart becomes too big for useful printouts, and the plugin doesn't offer exports in other formats. So TracGantt didn't really do it for me. shrug

In closing, I really like trac, and it's been very helpful to me in my work. Clearly, trac is designed to manage software development projects. But with a little imagination, I think it could be used quite effectively to manage just about any kind of project, even something as simple as a running 'to-do' list.

Using trac

In a previous post, I described installing trac, a Web-based project management system.

Now you can go to http://myserver.org/trac/ (substituting your server's hostname, of course), and you should see a link for your project. Clicking the link takes you to that project's homepage, which is a wiki. You can use this to provide as much or as little documentation as you like for your project.

One of the first things you'll want to do is to click the Admin link (upper-right, which would not be present without the WebAdmin plugin). The main admin page lets you set the name, URL, and description of your project. Clicking the Permissions link (left-hand side) lets you change who has what permissions to the project. By default, anonymous users have just about every right--you will probably want to revoke these rights, and then just dole them out on a per-user as-needed basis (for example, you may want to give people testing your project permission to create tickets). The WebAdmin plugin also lets you manage components, versions, milestones, and other items through the Web interface (you'd otherwise have to use the trac-admin command-line tool for all that).

The Browse Source link lets you poke around in your repository, even looking at the different revisions.

But my favorite feature is the ability to create and manage tickets. Clicking the New Ticket link lets you create a new ticket, in which you can enter a description of a problem with your project, the affected version, the relevant component, etc. (most of these fields are optional). And the View Tickets link lets you run pre-configured queries to display your tickets (you can also create your own custom ticket queries, but I've found the default set perfectly adequate).

Installing trac

I started using trac a few weeks ago, and now I don't know what I did without it. It's great for project management. trac is a multi-user Web-based ticket-tracking system which has a built-in wiki, integrates with Subversion, and offers a wide array of plugins.

It's written in python. Oh, well. Nothing is perfect.

Here I'll be describing how to install trac v0.10 with the WebAdmin plugin on CentOS 5. We'll pretend to be installing it at http://myserver.org/trac/ (upcoming posts will talk about using and maintaining trac).

Start by installing the trac and python-clearsilver RPMs from the EPEL repositories. This will add the /etc/httpd/conf.d/trac.conf file to your Apache configuration. I suggest replacing the default contents of that file with the following:

<LocationMatch /trac>
SetHandler mod_python
PythonInterpreter main_interpreter
PythonHandler trac.web.modpython_frontend
PythonOption TracEnvParentDir /var/www/trac/tracroot
PythonOption TracUriRoot /trac
SetEnv PYTHON_EGG_CACHE /var/www/trac/egg_cache
AuthType Basic
AuthName trac
AuthUserFile /var/www/trac/htpasswd
Require valid-user
</LocationMatch>

(Don't forget to restart Apache to make the new configuration take effect.)

I'll be putting all the trac files in /var/www/trac (outside the Apache docroot at /var/www/html). Each trac project will have its own directory in /var/www/trac/tracroot, and the subversion repository will be at /var/www/trac/svn.

The 'egg cache' (I guess that's some wierd Python drivel) will be at /var/www/trac/egg_cache. The egg cache is for plugins. It's actually not necessary for the WebAdmin plugin, but you may as well set it up, anyway, in case you want to add other plugins. It needs to be Apache-writeable: chown -R apache.apache /var/www/trac/egg_cache.

You'll notice that I've set up Basic Apache authentication. Use the command-line htpasswd command (part of the httpd package) to create and maintain the /var/www/trac/htpasswd. In my case, I created a user called carl: htpasswd -c /var/www/trac/htpasswd carl

If you want to use the Subversion integration, put your repository at /var/www/trac/svn (either drop in a hotcopy or use svnadmin load /var/www/trac/svn). Remember to make it Apache-writeable: chown -R apache.apache /var/www/trac/svn.

To install the WebAdmin plugin, you'll need setuptools. Download ez_setup.py and run
python ez_setup.py (this is all described on the TracPlugins node of the trac wiki). This installs the easy_install utility. Running easy_install http://svn.edgewall.com/repos/trac/sandbox/webadmin should install the plugin (verify the URL on the WebAdmin wiki node). Now you'll need to enable the plugin by adding the following text to /usr/share/trac/conf/trac.ini (this file probably doesn't exist yet, so you'll be creating it):

[components]
webadmin.* = enabled

You'll probably need another Apache restart at this point (editing /usr/share/trac/conf/trac.ini seems to require an Apache restart).

And now we can actually create a trac project. We'll call it foo, for laughs:

trac-admin /var/www/trac/tracroot/foo initenv

This will ask you a few questions (I'm assuming that your Subversion repository is set up such that there's a foo item just under the repository root, and that it corresponds to this trac project):

• project name: keep this short but descriptive
• DB connection string: just use the default (SQLite)
• repository type: use the default if you're doing the Subversion integration
• repository path: /var/www/trac/svn/foo
• templates: use the default

Your answers are used to create a project configuration file at /var/www/trac/tracroot/foo/conf/trac.ini. You can later edit this file by hand, but if you change the repository location (the repository_dir item), you'll need to run the following command:

trac-admin /var/www/trac/tracroot/foo resync

Now give yourself administrative rights to the project (using the same username you used with the htpasswd command, above):

trac-admin /var/www/trac/tracroot/foo permission add carl TRAC_ADMIN

Well, this has already run pretty long, so I'll break for now. In the next exciting episode, I'll talk a bit about actually using trac.

OpenDocument Foundation reversal

At times on this blog I've discussed the open document format (ODF), an XML-based file format intended to be used in office productivity software (word processors, spreadsheets, and the like). This file format would be a completely open standard, and would compete with proprietary file format like those used in Microsoft Office.

A major proponent of this format, the OpenDocument Foundation, has evidently recently decided to dump ODF in favor of an obscure alternative called the Compound Document Format, developed by the World Wide Web Consortium. So now I really don't know what to think. I wonder if the foundation will change its name.

Microsoft (with their OOXML format) must be having a good laugh about this.

gpg-based password wallet

I've been using the following script for a while to store passwords in an encrypted file. As you can see from the comments, it's based on a script from a linux.com article, but I've added several features which make it more agreeable to me. To use, save it as an executable file somewhere in your path (I've saved it as ~/bin/wallet).

You'll need to specify the location of the encrypted wallet file. You can do that in one of three ways:

1. with the PASSWD_LIST environment variable
2. having something like 'PASSWD_LIST=/path/to/wallet.gpg' in ~/.walletrc
3. on the command line: wallet -c /path/to/wallet.gpg
   

Then just type wallet to view your password wallet in less, or type wallet -e to edit your wallet (set your VISUAL environment variable to your favorite editor, or wallet will default to vi).

And here's the script...

#!/bin/bash

# alteration of script described at
# http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/03/06/1640216
# changes from original:
# 1. use of VISUAL envariable for editor
# 2. storage of password in variable, rather than file
# 3. view-only mode (rather than always opening in text editor)
# 4. symmetric encryption
# 5. saving backup copy of encrypted password file prior to editing
# 6. creates password wallet if it doesn't exist
# 7. encrypted file can be specified by -c option, by PASSWD_LIST
#    envariable, or in ~/.walletrc

if [ -f ~/.walletrc ]; then
. ~/.walletrc
fi

if [ -z ${VISUAL} ]; then
VISUAL=vi
fi

EDIT_PWFILE=0
while getopts 'ec:' OPTION
do
case $OPTION in
e) EDIT_PWFILE=1;;
c) PASSWD_LIST="$OPTARG";;
?) printf "usage: %s [ -e ] [ -c encrypted file ]\n" $( basename $0 ) >&2
 exit 2
 ;;
esac
done
shift $(($OPTIND - 1))

if [ -z "${PASSWD_LIST}" ]; then
echo "need the encrypted file specified by PASSWD_LIST (in ~/.walletrc"
echo "or the envariable) or with the -c option"
exit 2
fi

if [ ! -f $PASSWD_LIST ]; then
echo "$PASSWD_LIST doesn't exist--attempting to create..."
echo "(you'll need to give gpg a master password in a moment)"
mkdir -p $( dirname ${PASSWD_LIST} )
TEMPFILE=$( mktemp /tmp/wallet.XXXXXX )
gpg -c -o ${PASSWD_LIST} ${TEMPFILE}
rm -f ${TEMPFILE}
EDIT_PWFILE=1
fi

# prompt the user for the password
PASSWORD=$( dialog --stdout --backtitle "Password Locker" \
--title "Master Password" --clear --passwordbox \
"Enter the Password Locker master password." 10 51 )
RETVAL=$?

case $RETVAL in
1)
  echo "Authentication Required!"
  exit 1;;
255)
  echo "Authentication Required!"
  exit 1;;
esac

# if we're not editing the file, just display it and quit
if [ $EDIT_PWFILE -eq 0 ]; then
echo $PASSWORD | gpg --decrypt --passphrase-fd 0 $PASSWD_LIST | less
clear
exit
fi

TMPDIR=$( mktemp -d /tmp/wallet.XXXXXX )
chmod 700 ${TMPDIR}
PASSWD_LIST_UNENCRYPTED=${TMPDIR}/wallet
# decrypt the password list
echo $PASSWORD | gpg -o $PASSWD_LIST_UNENCRYPTED --passphrase-fd 0 \
$PASSWD_LIST &> /dev/null
RETVAL=$?

# if decryption succeeded, open the password list in the editor
# and then re-encrypt it after the editor closes
case $RETVAL in
0)
  mv $PASSWD_LIST ${PASSWD_LIST}.bak
  ${VISUAL} $PASSWD_LIST_UNENCRYPTED 2> /dev/null;
  echo $PASSWORD | gpg -c -o $PASSWD_LIST --passphrase-fd 0 \
      $PASSWD_LIST_UNENCRYPTED &> /dev/null
  CRYPT_RETVAL=$?
  if [ $CRYPT_RETVAL -eq 0 ]; then
      rm -rf ${TMPDIR}
      clear
  else
      echo -n "gpg failed to encrypt your password file! "
      echo "Please fix the problem manually!"
      echo "unencrypted file at $PASSWD_LIST_UNENCRYPTED"
      exit 1
  fi;;
?)
  echo "error condition detected (invalid password?)"
  rm -rf ${TMPDIR}
  exit 1;;
esac

GPLv3

You can't swing a dead cat over your head lately without hitting a blog post which mentions version 3 of the GNU Public License (an appropriately cynical reader would correctly point out that this would require swinging a dead cat at a fairly narrowly-focused RSS reader). I don't really know a lot about the GPL, but here are a couple of resources which look useful:

1. a post on Luis Villa's blog (some poor bastard in law school)
2. the GPL FAQ on the GNU Web site
3. a critical view of GPLv3
4. speculation about Microsoft's reaction
   

CentOS 5 follow-up II

I was able to build gtkpod on CentOS 5 today. Wasn't all that hard, really. Leave a comment if you'd like the SRPM. (For some context, you may want to see my previous posts on gtkpod and CentOS 5.)

And yesterday when I ran yum, I found out why there's no xpdf in CentOS 5: it's been obsoleted by a package called poppler-utils. poppler is an xpdf fork, and the poppler-utils package includes the extra utilities like pdftotext and pdfimages. Apparently evince uses the poppler libraries. And if you prefer xpdf to evince (like I do), just compile xpdf (using the --with-freetype2-includes=/usr/include/freetype2 option to 'configure') and copy it into your path.

ODF v. OOXML

ONLamp has a pretty good article about the differences between ODF and OOXML. ODF (Open Document Format) and OOXML (Office Open XML) are both XML-based file formats which can be used to store word-processing documents, spreadsheets, etc. There is fierce competition for adoption between these two formats, notably in the arena of long-term government document storage. This competition is controversial for a number of reasons, including the fact that OOXML is a Microsoft product.

A google search for 'OOXML "men in black"' turns up quite a few hits regarding allegations of Microsoft lobbyists and lawyers trying to sway state legistatures (like Florida) toward OOXML.

easytag

On a recent episode (#51) of The Linux Action Show (a weekly podcast about Linux), one of the hosts (Chris) was responding to a listener question about editing ID3 tags (that's the metadata attached to media files, like MP3 and OGG files).

This is interesting to me, because I've had sort of mixed results in editing ID3 tags (I've yammered about this before). I've tried the ID3-editing feature in gtkpod, but it consistently crashes gtkpod (ick). So I've been using the command-line utilities from id3lib. That works, but it's a command-line interface, and it's typically a file-at-a-time kind of thing.

Chris suggested easytag, and it's really cool. It's a graphical interface, and it makes it easy to edit the ID3 tags of multiple media files. There are RPMs for CentOS (v4 and v5) on the extras site. Good stuff. Thanks, Chris.

grip, gtkpod, id3lib, grisbi

This is a post about some useful GNU/Linux programs I've recently discovered. I use CentOS, and RPMs for these packages are available from karan and/or DAG.

I bought a Sandisk Sansa MP3 player in late 2005. I don't know how I got through the workday before I did that. I've bought two more since then (a larger storage capacity each time). Sansas basically work like external USB hard drives, making them Linux-friendly: you can just drag-and-drop MP3 files onto them. The Sansa's firmware then reads the files' ID3 tags to display a list of available music (ID3 tags are bits of data in an MP3 file which give the artist name, album name, track title, etc.).

Sansas are not compatible with iTunes, and I haven't tried any of the other online music services--I just rip my own CDs to MP3 files. I use grip to rip the CDs. grip is basically a nice, feature-rich graphical interface to cdparanoia and LAME. It'll connect to a CDDB site (like freedb.org) to download album and artist names and track titles, rip the CD tracks to WAV files, then encode the WAV files as MP3s.

Although I can then just plug in my Sansa and start moving files around, it's nicer to have something to keep my music more organized. I use gtkpod for this. I keep all my music files on my PC, and then periodically change what I've got on the Sansa (the Sansa is 4GB, not large enough to hold my entire library). gtkpod is a nice program for displaying what's on my PC, what's on my Sansa, and changing out files on the MP3 player.

Although grip is pretty good about setting the ID3 tags on the MP3 files, it's not foolproof. The ID3 tags will occasionally have errors or be missing altogether. gtkpod has a feature for changing ID3 tags, but I haven't had much luck with this--it sometimes even causes gtkpod to crash. So I usually just use the command-line utilities in the id3lib package. id3info lists a file's ID3 tags, and id3tag and id3cp can be used to change them.

The last software package I want to mention has nothing to do with music. It's called grisbi, and it's a pretty good personal finance program. Although I've never tried Quicken or Microsoft Money, grisbi is probably pretty comparable. I use it to track my checking account. grisbi lets me define a list of transaction categories, and I can tag a transaction when I enter it. grisbi keeps up with my account balance and has features for bank statement reconciliation. It can also run reports, handle scheduled transactions (for things like automated drafts and deposits), and track multiple accounts. I've found it to be a convenient way of balancing my checkbook (much less error-prone than scribbling in the check register).

Media collection software

linux.com has had articles about a couple of media collection programs called gcstar and data crow. They're similar in concept: both are databases for your CDs, DVDs, books and such. Each allows you to enter your collections with searches of amazon.com, imdb.com, etc. So if you have a copy of X2 on DVD, you can type 'X2' in the search field and it'll retrieve the cast list, cover art, plot summary, and other stuff.

gcstar is built on Perl and gtk2, and data crow is built on Java. So both are more-or-less cross-platform (they run on Linux, Windows, and probably OS X).

Both also allow the user to add loaning information to records. If you loan your copy of X2 to someone, you can make a notation of that as part of the X2 record. And both let you import and export your data (gcstar seems more flexible in this regard, in that it supports a fairly wide variety of formats).

I've tried both, and I'm finding gcstar to be more reliable. data crow is pretty crashy, and I gave up on it.

Some drawbacks to gcstar are that you can only select one item from the results of a search. If you have several Star Trek DVDs and you run a search for 'star trek', you can only select one of the search results to add it to your collection (you have to run a separate search for each Star Trek DVD you own). It would be nice if you could do Ctrl-click to pick Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country if they both show up in the search results (data crow actually lets you do this).

And gcstar also has gtk tooltips which pop up when you mouse over the items in your search results. These tooltips sometimes make it hard to click on the search result that you want.

And it seems that the current version of gcstar (v1.1.1) is less than completely compatible with the version of the Gtk2 Perl module currently available in CPAN (v1.142, 21 January 2007). To make it work, you have to comment out the set_row_separator_func() and set_focus_on_click() calls in a couple of gcstar modules. Lame.

I actually prefer the data crow interface, but it kept hitting out-of-memory errors. I had to restart the application pretty frequently. That was beyond annoying. So for now I'm using gcstar.