Category: Linux

Linux is my primary operating system. I used it on the servers, desktops, laptops, netbooks, and even mobile phones since approximately 1997. I’ve tried a number of distributions over the years, and even created a couple myself. I still look around sometimes to see what others are up to. But most of my machines are running some sort of Red Hat – either a quick and easy Fedora Linux, or a stable and secure Red Hat Enterprise Server, or a cheaper CentOS alternative.

And while by now I am very comfortable in the Linux environment (both graphical and command line), I still discover a lot of new and interesting things about it. When I come across something worthy, I usually share it with the rest of the Open Software world, using this category.

Doing something wrong

I am really doing something wrong. Seriously. I can’t get neigther one of headsets to work. Headphones work just fine, both at home and at work. Microphones don’t. At work I can hear myself talking in the headphones, but I can’t record any sound and, obviously, I can’t use the headset in Skype. At home, I don’t even get the sound in the headphones.

I think I’m getting old… Oh, do I sound like my father now?

Best shell alias ever

I came across the best shell alias ever: 

alias up="cd .."

This is one of those things that make me go “Why didn’t I thought of it earlier? And myself?”.

In order to add some value to this post, here are my two mostly used aliases:

alias pd="perldoc"
alias pdf="perldoc -f"

castogg.sh – make podcasts smaller

As you might know, podcasts are like radio shows recorded and distributed digitally (read: mp3 and RSS). Since pretty much anyone can record a show and distribute it over the Internet – everyone and their brother do that.

The file sizes of some podcasts are huge. There are shows that last for more than an hour and include pieces of music and stereo special effects. I’ve seen this eat up more than 50 MBytes each.

Since I only have a 128 MByte memory card (and about 20 of those MBytes are eaten by software intallations and other data), I was looking at ways to minimize the file sizes of the podcasts that I wanted to listen to.

Continue reading castogg.sh – make podcasts smaller

dvdrip problem on Fedora Linux 4

I said it before and I will say it again – dvdrip is by far the best graphical user interface for ripping and encoding DVDs on Linux.

dvdrip provides a user with simple, but powerful means of controlling a whole bunch of command line utitilies that have a gadzillion options each. Instead of scrolling through the manuals and Googling for examples, one could just click around with the mouse and use many sensible defaults.

I’ve been using dvdrip for a few years now and I never had a problem. That is until I tried to run it on Fedora Linux 4. I have to say that I installed dvdrip with all the requirements using yum. I guess most of the software came from FreshRPMS.net, but I am not very sure.

Anyway, when I tried dvdrip on Fedora Linux 4 I ran into problem. It was ripping DVDs just fine, but it didn’t want to encode them. I was getting all sorts of errors mentioning absense of codecs that I knew I had and segmentation faults that are always not so easy to explain.

With a few Google queries I found out that the problem wasn’t in the dvdrip itself. It was in the transcode utility. You see, yum installs transcode-1.0.0 for Fedora Linux 4. This version of transocde is not very stable yet. The solution to the problem is to downgrade to transcode-0.6.14, which comes packaged for Fedora Core 3. As soon as the old transcode is in place everything works smoothly as always.