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Amazon.com: Installing Linux on a Dead Badger: Lucy A. Snyder: Books

Installing Linux on a Dead Badger (Paperback)

Amazon.com: Installing Linux on a Dead Badger: Lucy A. Snyder: Books.

Installing Linux on a Dead Badger (and Other Oddities) contains a dozen stories to amuse any fan of technology humor or science fictional dark comedy. Many of the stories are what Green Man Review has dubbed “cyberzombie humor”; the title story is one of the most popular features ever posted at the acclaimed science fiction magazine Strange Horizons. The satiric tales are accompanied by 14 black-and-white illustrations from DE Christman and Malcolm McClinton.

Intrepid Ibex aka Ubuntu 8.10

The latest version of Ubuntu was released last month and I finally took the time tonight to install it on my tablet.  I’d tried an upgrade from Hardy but had little luck with that.  To be fair I don’t think it was so much a problem with the upgrade process as it was with my old and crufty tablet.  It had been dist-upgraded all the way from Dapper and I think I’d lost some of the necessary dummy packages along the way.

So far my only problem is with the pen input.  This doesn’t surprise me as it uses the wacom driver on a serial port and attempting to detect it can cause problems.  I’ll poke around to see if there is a gui way to set that yet, but I suspect I’ll have to edit the xorg.conf to make it work.

The wireless worked first try once I entered the correct WEP key.  We’ll see how it does at work Monday with a WPA2 network.  The new system tray icon for networks is very cool and easy to use.

I’ll be sure to post more in the next week when I get a full idea of what has changed and if I like it or not.

How Long Would You Survive?

I could survive for 1 minute, 28 seconds chained to a bunk bed with a velociraptor

Created by Bunk Beds.net

Samsung Instinct, Video, and Ubuntu

I’ve figured out how to transcode videos for the Samsung Instinct using ffmpeg.  The initial problem I had is the standard Ubuntu version of ffmpeg does not include aac support.  Fortunately Medibuntu has an ffmpeg package with everything enabled.  You’ll need to add the medibuntu repositories to your system first.  ffmpeg didn’t want to upgrade, so I used apt-get to remove it and install it.   Be sure you have libfaac installed too.

To verify that you’ve got the right ffmpeg, run ‘ffmpeg -version’ and look for –enable-libfaac.  If you don’t see it in the listed configuration then the following won’t work.

Once you have the right ffmpeg you can transcode a video with something like this:

ffmpeg -i BeerBot.avi -acodec aac -ab 128k -vcodec mpeg4 -b 1200k -qscale 4 -async 100 -s 320×240   BeerBot.mp4

Throw BeerBot.mp4 into the MEDIA directory on the SD card, and it will appear in TV/Video, My Videos, Sideloaded.  You may need to change the scale (-s flag) if your video has a different aspect ratio.  You can go up to 432×240 for wide screen videos.

If you are curious which video I was converting, you can see a version of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDN-OSffLAE

Clusterssh: control serveral ssh sessions via a single interface

Clusterssh: control serveral ssh sessions via a single interface
Clusterssh is a graphical utility that allows you to open several ssh connections and execute commands simultaneously in all of them. I find it powerful in many cases, for example when I’ve to perform a dist-upgrade on many different servers.

Moody Marlin

Moody Marlin is my suggestion for the Ubuntu release that starts with and M, should be sometime in 2010.  Sorry for the quality of the picture.  I took it in low light at about 95 mph.

Ripping a DVD to a single VOB on Linux

I’m documenting this for my own use and hopefully someone else can benefit from this.

Transcode has a useful utility called tccat that can read from a DVD and output a single vob file. I use it to rip the feature title to a single file for later conversion to xvid.

tccat -i <path to dvd mount point> -T <title #>,<chapter #> > output.vob

tccat -i /media/cdrom -T 1,-1 >movieName.vob

Be sure redirect the output or you’ll get a bunch of crap in your terminal.

Once done you can play the vob with mplayer (or whatever) and it should include all languages, angles, and subtitles that the original movie had but none of the extra features.

Linux.com | ESR gives up on Fedora

Linux.com | ESR gives up on Fedora

ESR gives up on Fedora

For the record, I gave up on Fedora for exactly the same reasons about a year ago. Ubuntu rocks, and to date I’ve only had one small dependency issue which occured when I attempted to jump two full versions with one dist-upgrade. The dependency was fixed in less than a minute and the upgrade continued on without a hitch.

To quote Eric: Fedora, you had every advantage, and you had my loyalty, and you blew it. And that is a damn, dirty shame.

Debian Package of the Day » qalculate: the ultimate desktop calculator

Debian Package of the Day » Blog Archive » qalculate: the ultimate desktop calculator

So what is qalculate? First and foremost, its a calculator. Which means that it can do what you typically expect a calculator to do, no surprises there.

A very cool desktop calculator.  Handles polynomials, unit conversions, and much more.

Adobe Labs - Downloads: Flash Player 9 Update

Adobe Labs - Downloads: Flash Player 9 Update

Yipee, the Flash Player beta is out for Linux.

1. Get the Installer for Linux
2. tar xzvf FP9_plugin_beta_101806.tar.gz
3. cd flash-player-plugin-9.0.21.55
4. locate libflashplayer.so (On Ubuntu it’s often in /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/)
5. sudo cp /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/backup.libflashplayer.so
6. sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so
7. restart firefox and you should be good to go.

The audio lag in movies seems to be gone now.  Not certain about stability yet, but it can’t be worse than before.