Mildly techy stuff follows. No pictures of elephants. If your interest in Linux networking rates less than 4/10, I wouldn’t bother.
Having killed my second Kindle in the space of a year (I maintain it’s the hot, salty air of Thai dive centres that does it), I was in need of a replacement to get my fix. As a short-term measure I did find a shop which sold ebooks printed onto chopped-up paper (‘books’, they called them), but carrying more than three or four of those around is tricky.
Plan A was to get a new Kindle when we passed through Bangkok, but I had reckoned without the fact that Thais don’t read. No reading, no market for ereaders, no ereaders. Fortunately, Thais do love to play games and surf the net, so tablets are everywhere.
A bit of research led me to the conclusion that if you don’t want to sell your soul to Apple, and you want something lighter than your laptop, the Samsung Galaxy Tab is your friend. So in Bangkok, I made a new friend.
The slight hitch I discovered later is that although the Tab uses Android, which is a version of Linux, Google and/or Samsung have for their own reasons decided to use a Microsoft system called MPT to connect the tablet to a PC. This apparently causes problems for Windows and Mac users too, who are locked in to using Samsung’s own horrible software for transferring files to the tablet, but leaves Linux users even further out in the cold, because they don’t even get the horrible software.
Fortunately, there are solutions. Although the tablet and the computer can’t talk to each other directly, they can still communicate so long as they are both connected to a wireless router (probably any Internet connection, but I haven’t felt the need to transfer files long distance yet). For transferring files onto the tablet (the most common scenario), all you need is an ftp server app on the tablet (I use swiftp), and an ftp client (filezilla is easy to use) on the PC. Once swiftp is running, it shows the details you need to tell the client in order to connect to the tablet. You can then send files to and from the tablet. In theory one could set up an ftp server on the PC and have the client on the tablet, but a) Linux ftp servers are a pain (there’s no equivalent of filezilla), and b) if the devices are in the same location, it doesn’t matter which one you use to control the transfer anyway.
What I do want, however, is to play music from my computer (connected to the speakers) without dragging myself the several feet from where I’m sitting to the PC. Fortunately I use mpd to play music on Linux, and mpd is made for client-server interaction. Droid MPD Client is good, but I’ve now switched to MPDroid, because it allows streaming of the mpd output from the computer to the tablet: details are at http://www.webupd8.org/2011/02/stream-music-to-your-android-device.html .
The only issue I came across was finding out my computer’s IP address: there are many possible ways, but the simplest for me is to use the ifconfig command in the terminal. This gives results for each different network interface, but the important one is the address after inet in the wlan0 section (on a wifi network). As long as mpd is not password protected, nothing else should need to be set up, but I did find it helpful to activate the mpd volume control so I don’t need to stretch over to the computer or the speakers: adding mixer_type "software" to the mpd.conf file should enable this.
Without mpd, another possible way is gmote, which uses vlc as its player. I had two problems with this one: firstly the interface is designed for Android phones rather than tablets, so you get huge buttons and a tiny amount of information on the screen; secondly, gmote crashed (on the computer) when I tried to use it to play files on the computer; it does work for playing files on the tablet, so I can access my music library on the computer from the Tab.
And if you got through all that, your reward is a completely unconnected picture of a snake:
Apparently extremely venomous, but definitely pretty.