Giocoso – Page 4 – Absolutely Baching

Installing Giocoso on Debian

1.0 Introduction

Debian has been around for years and doesn't look like it's going away any time soon, so it's a good, reliable choice for a desktop distro. It comes with access to a vast library of software; is generally considered very stable; and can be used with just about every desktop or window manager known to mankind. It has never been my choice of desktop distro for my main PC, it's fair to say: but there's zero reason why it can't run Giocoso effectively.

For the purposes of this article, I built a new VirtualBox virtual machine, using 4GB of vRAM and a 2-thread virtual CPU, plus a 40GB virtual hard disk and proceeded to install Debian 11 using the 'complete installation image' ISO available from the Debian website. During the installation, I chose to install the Gnome desktop, but the specific choice of desktop doesn't really matter: Giocoso will run on all of them equally well. Of note, however, is that I ended up running the Wayland display server, rather than the ancient X11. Giocoso doesn't do a lot with graphics... but it does some, and it is therefore good to know that Giocoso functions equally correctly no matter if you're using Wayland or X11. [...]

Installing Giocoso on Garuda Linux

1.0 Introduction

I don't really know a lot about Garuda Linux, apart from the fact that its logo is pretty neat! Garuda being a Hindu word for 'Eagle, King of Birds', it's quite fitting, too! It is a 'child' distro of Arch, but fits that otherwise quite tricky-to-install distro with a nice graphical installer, making it far more approachable. Logos aside, Garuda using the "dragonised" KDE Plasma desktop is notable for using a completely bonkers desktop theme, involving colours and colour-combos that first went out of fashion in the 1960s (but seem to be back in fashion now!) I don't honestly think I could live with it as a daily driver, but I thought the screenshots would look cool, so decided to run with it for the purposes of this article! Saner -but very beautiful- desktop themes are available, however, when using desktop environments such as Cinnamon, XFCE and so on: the specific choice of desktop doesn't really matter, though: Giocoso will run on all of them equally well.

For the purposes of this article, I built a new VirtualBox virtual machine, using 4GB of vRAM and a 2-thread virtual CPU, plus a 40GB virtual hard disk and proceeded to install Garuda Linux using the full 'dragonised' KDE ISO available from the Garuda Linux website. [...]

Installing Giocoso on EndeavourOS

1.0 Introduction

For many years, though Arch was widely considered a great distro, it was also widely regarded as too hard to install properly! A number of 'derivative' distros were spun up to rectify that problem, perhaps chief amongst them being Antergos: Arch with a GUI installer, basically. Unfortunately, back in 2019, Antergos developers announced they were pulling the plug, and the distro died. Except that, as in most things Linux-y, it didn't really die but was transformed by a group of keen former Antergos enthusiasts, into EndeavourOS... still Arch+a nice GUI.

I can't say I use EndeavourOS myself (I'm more a Manjaro man!), but it certainly has its attractions and as such, deserves to be able to run Giocoso in a supported manner. So, from Version 2.x onwards, Giocoso supports installations on this distro. [...]

Installing Giocoso on Manjaro

1.0 Introduction

Manjaro has been, for many years, my own personal distro of choice (with occasional bouts of infidelity that were swiftly rectified!). It offers all the power of Arch, but presented in a user-friendly manner, with most software packages you could ever want to use being readily and easily available. It makes for a fine platform on which to run Giocoso, basically, and there will be zero issues arising when you attempt to do so!

For the purposes of this article, I built a new VirtualBox virtual machine, using 4GB of vRAM and a 2-thread virtual CPU, plus a 40GB virtual hard disk and proceeded to install Manjaro+KDE and the Plasma desktop, using the full ISO available from the Manjaro website. That said, the choice of desktop is irrelevant from Giocoso's perspective: it will run perfectly fine with any of their other desktop environment options, too. [...]

Installing Giocoso on Arch

1.0 Introduction

By default, of course, Arch doesn't install with any graphical components at all: you're meant to add your own desktop environment 'on top of' a basic, command-line only Arch installation, as I documented quite a while ago in this earlier article. It is accordingly quite hard to document Giocoso running on Arch -because the operating system installation itself can be so unique and non-standard. For the purposes of this article, I built a new VirtualBox virtual machine, using 4GB of vRAM and a 2-thread virtual CPU, plus a 40GB virtual hard disk. After the base OS install, I issued the following command:

sudo pacman -S --needed xfce4 mousepad bc
sudo pacman -S --needed xfce4-goodies file-roller network-manager-applet lightdm lightdm-gtk-greeter lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings
sudo pacman -S --needed virtualbox-guest-utils
sudo systemctl enable lightdm
sudo enable NetworkManager
reboot [...]

Giocoso on Linux

Introduction

Giocoso Version 2 has been tested on most of the Linux distros that were, as of May 2022, in the top 20 of the DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking, so hopefully almost all regular Linux users will be covered! Broadly speaking, anything based on Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSuse and Arch should work without drama, along with some 'outliers' that appear not to be part of a larger distro 'family', such as Solus and Fedora. Giocoso runs happily on distros using PulseAudio and ALSA sound systems, and regardless of whether X11 or Wayland is being used as the graphical server mechanism. Your choice of desktop environment also makes no difference to whether Giocoso works or not: it runs happily on Cinnamon, MATE, XFCE, KDE, Gnome, Budgie, LXDE, LXQt and any number of other desktop environments and window managers.

In general, Giocoso requires installation of ffmpeg, flac, ImageMagick and Sqlite3 and will prompt for those things if they are not already present on your system. Despite my best efforts, it is still possible that Giocoso on a particular distro may prompt for the installation of (say) 'ImageMagick' (that is, in mixed upper/lower case) when that distro's package name is actually 'imagemagick' (i.e., all lower case). Similar case-confusion might arise elsewhere, too, but ImageMagick seems more susceptible to this issue than most other packages I'm aware of! Hopefully, incidents of this will be rare, but be prepared to switch case to achieve a successful prerequisites installation when 'unknown package' errors otherwise arise. [...]

Changing Giocoso's appearance

1.0 Introduction

Giocoso runs in a terminal session and expects the geometry of that terminal session window to be at least 106 characters wide and 26 lines deep. This is usually configured on most Linux distros by editing the 'Profile' associated with terminal sessions. Here, for example, is how Konsole does it within KDE:

You will usually also be able to configure a profile's default text colouring properties in the same general settings area. For example: [...]

Selective Runtime Parameters

In Giocoso version 2, all selective parameters can be used with all the others, simultaneously. If you want to 'play previously-unplayed recordings by Britten that last between 20 and 40 minutes', you can do that now, by constructing a selective filter of --composer=britten --unplayedworks --minduration=20 --maxduration=40. The five principal filters (composer, performer, comment, genre and composition) can each be 'negated' by adding an asterisk to their parameter value. Thus --genre=choral --composer=beethoven* would mean 'play choral works by anyone other than Beethoven'. Unplayed and duration filters cannot be negated, mostly because it doesn't make logical sense to do so!

[Back to Front Page]|[Back to Parameter Front Page]|[Administrative Parameters]|[Appearance Parameters]|[Reporting Parameters] [...]

Reporting Runtime Parameters

[Back to Front Page]|[Back to Parameter Front Page]|[Administrative Parameters]|[Appearance Parameters]|[Selective Parameters]

Appearance/Behaviour Runtime Parameters

[Back to Front Page]|[Back to Parameter Front Page]|[Administrative Parameters]|[Selective Parameters]|[Reporting Parameters]

Administrative Runtime Parameters

[Back to Front Page]|[Back to Parameter Front Page]|[Appearance Parameters]|[Selective Parameters]|[Reporting Parameters]

Summary of Runtime Parameters

1.0 Introduction

Giocoso's behaviour can be altered by invoking it with any of a large number of possible runtime parameters. These take the form of double-hyphen+keyword, sometimes with a value assigned to the keyword, sometimes with no value but merely the keyword alone. These parameters are 'tacked on' to the basic command to run Giocoso, so that Giocoso's default behaviour is modified or changed in some way. For example, the bare command giocoso actually means 'run Giocoso in Database Play Mode, the database name will be 'music', album art should be displayed at medium size, no scrobbling will take place' and so on. However, the command giocoso --dbname=main --artsize=none --scrobble means 'run Giocoso in Database Play Mode, the database name will be 'main', album art should not be displayed at all, scrobbling will take place once play has completed'.

The runtime parameters therefore give Giocoso flexibility and capabilities to exploit that you may not have realised could be exploited! There are, in fact, more than 45 possible runtime parameters at the time of writing: you do not need to be intimately familiar with more than a few of them, fortunately! Giocoso's defaults are such that most of them might never need to be used, unless you have very specific requirements. [...]