Amarok - composer vs. artist tag

It is always a bit frustrating for classical music lovers when audio players don't distinguish properly between artist and composer or insist on sorting by artist, so that one tends to specify the composer as the artist.
Amarok is quite good there. The tag editor (right click on file or album, ->Edit track information) distinguishes between artist and composer. The collection can be browsed by any criterion by clicking on "Group by" in the top toolbar. On-screen display ("%composer" placeholder) and the track list (edit columns) can also display composer info. Only the Wikipedia context browser still has only the "Artist" option. Someone wrote a wishlist entry (Bug 147552) on bugs.kde.org - so vote for it ;-)

Note (amarok2 on KDE4.2): check the output of qdbus org.kde.amarok /Player GetMetadata. And I wondered why my Karamba edits had no effect…
Moreover, they dropped the OSD text configuration option - so no composer there either.

Automating the pdf movie workaround

These ought to make the PDF-embedded movie workaround a bit less cumbersome.

Embedded movies in LaTeX PDF - the workaround

Not very elegant, but it works. Als o slightly historic: okular and acroread/flash can be made to play back movies to a certain extent, and lately I defected to exporting the PDF presentation to Impress, because it has a gorgeous presenter console (summary here).
Prerequisites: mplayer, acroread and a window manager capable of window rules: KWin, Compiz with CCSM or Gnome with Devil's Pie (I'm not a Gnome user, so no experience with the latter)
You can automate most of this with a shell script, but that's going to be another post (this is over-long already).

lshw: a pretty useful system analysis tool...

...which is not included in the openSuSE distribution. Get the sources from ezix.org.
Untar, run make, if you want the GUI, run also make gui (cf. the README file).
The lshw command-line tool is in the src subdir, the GUI (gtk-lshw) in src/gui. If you want to use both systemwide, copy lshw to /usr/bin and create a shell script in /usr/bin:

#!/bin/bash
kdesu <location of gtk-lshw>

Make it executable.
There is even a 10.3 rpm here. In case the sources don't compile - it also seems to work OK on 11.0.

Talking of compile bugs - I got a compile error on 11.0 with lshw-B.02.13 (apparenty yet again caused by the switch to GCC 4.3)
abi.cc: In function ‘bool scan_abi(hwNode&)’:
abi.cc:39: error: ‘free’ was not declared in this scope

Just add a #include <cstdlib> statement in <lshw source dir>/src/core/abi.cc.
dev.ezix.org had the solution and also a diff file.

HowTo configure an SSH tunnel via PuTTY

Not really OpenSuSE-related, well somewhat: how to tunnel to a ssh box from a Windows Machine using PuTTY

1. Start PuTTY
2. Enter the Host Name or IP address of the machine you want to connect in the appropriate field
3. Change to Connection --> SSH --> Tunnel
4. Enter the LOCAL Port Number in "Source Port"
5. Enter the REMOTE host and port in the form: remotehost.tld:PortNumber in "Destination"
6. Double Check whether "Local" and "Auto" is marked in the settings
7. Click "Add"
8. Something like "L12345 remotehost.tdl:23456" should appear in the "Forwarded Ports" box
   
9. Go back to "Session" and save the session in order to keep the settings for the next start of PuTTY
10. Connect to your machine - the terminal needs to stay open as long as you want to use the SSH-Tunnel
    

BTW: if you want to start PuTTY from the command line easily, just copy putty.exe into the /Windows/system32/ folder and rename it to ssh.exe, then you can start it by commanding ssh on a console or in the "run" dialog.

When Amarok doesn't play audio CDs…

Amarok 1.x is quite unreliable with audio CDs. Apparently this has to do partly with configuration bugs, so the following tricks might help - or not. Depending on the engine you use, you get different error messages - "No suitable input plugin" (xine) or "could not open cd device for reading" (yauap). On the other hand, Amarok2 does not play audio CDs at all.
BTW, Amarok comes without xine plugin in openSuSE 11.0, so install the amarok-xine package to use the engine.
Possible solutions:

OpenSuSE 11, kdesu and sudo ;-)

Hardly more than a quick comment to daWuzzzz's last post:
Note that in 11.0 they switched from sudo to su behind kdesu. Starting YaST or KControl, you will still be prompted for the root password, even if you are a sudoer. Ben Kevan's blog has some recipe for that.
E.g. for KDE3, edit ~/.kde/share/config/kdesurc (or create that file).

[Passwords]
Keep=false

[super-user-command]
super-user-command=sudo

For KDE4, take the ~/.kde4/... equivalent (did it only on KDE3 myself). Of course, you can also switch kdesu to su on openSuSE 10.3 with the same method.

OpenSuSE 11 and Sudo

Just to let you know again: in order to add a user to the sudoers, adding the user to the group "trusted" and configuring it in the Yast Module Sudo is NOT sufficient. What avocadohead has already pointed out in this article posted in this blog is valid as well for OpenSUSE 11, i.e. manually configuring the /etc/sudoers file and commenting out the lines indicated in the commented file.