Posts in category Tips & How-To’s

[How-to] Styled Subs in Linux

Jun30th
2008 3 Comments

Written by Aditya

This is a guest post by Aditya.

Most anime watchers who download anime must be knowing what styled subs are but for those who don’t know styled subs are special type of subtitles which have different fonts. The picture below demonstrates why exactly styled subs are needed.
Here’s a picture to show a particular video with styled subs disabled

Here’s the same one with styled subs enabled

Now in the next to images notice the position of the word [Fail]

In the first one the word[Fail] is at the bottom and is white in color , while in the second one when styled subs are enabled it is displayed right under the Japanese word for fail and is black in color
Here’s the perfect demonstration of styled sub in windows media player classic with vobsub filter

Here is the same picture in Mplayer without styled subs

Here is the same picture of Mplayer with styled subs

Note that it still isn’t completely perfect but it is almost there

Getting Styled subs to work
Now the best player for these kind of files is SMplayer. Even mplayer does the job.
You can get them from the following places
Smplayer
Mplayer
After downloading SMplayer or Mplayer right click at any part of the player and select preferences(or you can hit Ctrl+P for SMplayer). Now go to subtitles settings, for SMplayer select SSA/ASS Library tab and select use SSA/ASS library, for mplayerunser subtitles & OSD tab select SSA/ASS subtitle rendering.
Here the pictures of the preferences of mplayes and smplayer respectively

Now load the file you want to play and enjoy!
Note: For Mplayer each time you load it you have to select channel 0 for subtitles.

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Creating Your Own YUM Repository

Jun22nd
2008 11 Comments

Written by Sathya

This is a guest post by Kunal Gautam. This article is aimed at RHEL and Fedora users.

If you’ve been using Linux for a while, then you’d know how much of a pain it is to install a software which runs into dependency problems. One way of getting around this is to use a repository.

What is YUM?

YUM or Yellowdog Updater Modified is an interactive, automated update program which can be used for maintaining system using rpm. Yum is an automatic updater and package installer/remover for rpm systems. It automatically computes dependencies and figures out what things should occur to install packages.
Yum makes it easier to maintain groups of machines without having to manually update each one using rpm.

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[How To] Chat With Your Facebook Buddies Using Pidgin

Jun19th
2008 6 Comments

Written by Sathya

Recently, Facebook introduced Facebook chat – which allows you to chat with your Facebook friends in realtime similar to IM, as compared to post-message-on-wall-and-wait-for-replies kinda communication that Facebook users endured so far. A slight problem would be that to use this feature, users need to be logged in and be on Facebook’s site.

Not any more. eionrobb and Saturn2888 have coded a plugin for Pidgin which allows you to chat with your facebook buddies using the Facebook Chat IM service. Just grab the plugin (.deb installer for Debian and its derivatives like Ubuntu, .exe installer for Windows, and sources available), copy the the .dll file to your C:\Program Files\Pidgin\plugins\ (or equivalent) directory and restart Pidgin, if you’re on Windows.

For Linux users copy one of the .so files to either /usr/lib/purple-2/ (for 32-bit Linux), /usr/lib64/purple-2/ (for 64-bit Linux), /usr/lib/pidgin/ (for Nokia/Maemo) or ~/.purple/plugins/ (if you don’t have root access) and restart Pidgin.

Don’t forget to grab the icons too. Just Extract the facebook_icons.zip file to the pixmaps/pidgin/protocols folder. On Windows this is generally C:\Program Files\Pidgin\pixmaps\pidgin\protocols and on Linux, /usr/share/pixmaps/pidgin/protocol and enjoy chatting.

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How To: Access ext2/ext3 Formatted Linux Partitions in Windows

Jun1st
2008 7 Comments

Written by Sathya

This is another one of those tips I always wanted to post, but kept forgetting So here goes.
Unlike Linux which can mount and access Windows’ FAT, FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS filesystems, Windows is incapable of even acknowledging and detecting a Linux filesystem. Fear not, here are 3 softwares which can help in detecting your Linux partition under Windows

Ext2fsd- The most capable software of the lot. Has read/write support to your Linux partition. The 0.45 version supports replay of journal of a ext3 filesystem in case of a unclean shutdown of your Linux partition.
Ext2 IFS – Another very good software. Supports read/write, but doesnt replay the journal of a ext3 filesystem. It actually installs a pure kernel mode file system driver, which means all applications can access your Linux partitions, and it appears in file dialogs of all applications.
Linux Reader – Like the name says, this is just a reader. Effectively you can’t write to it, neither is your partition available as a separate drive. You’ll have to open the application, then “extract” the file to your Windows. Personally I use this, since the lack of write access means that I can have a little peace of mind about my partition not getting corrupted due to writes(I’m not saying this WILL happen, but better be safe)

If you guys know of any other software then do drop a comment.

Cheers

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Fedora 9 on a USB Pen Drive

May29th
2008 Leave a Comment

Written by Sathya

I’d posted previously on How to install Fedora 8 on USB pen drive. Now that Fedora 9 is out, Kevin Purdy over at Lifehacker has post how-to do the same for Fedora 9.

A quick excerpt:

Fedora 9 Linux distribution makes putting a full-fledged desktop on a portable USB thumb drive a three-click affair. Even better, you don’t need Linux installed to create it, you can leave the data on your thumb drive untouched, and any files you create or settings you tweak remain in place the next time you boot up. After the jump, let’s create a fully-functional desktop-to-go using a simple Windows program and a 1GB or larger thumb drive.

Head over to Lifehacker for the complete article.

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Enabling And Disabling Root Account in Debian/Ubuntu

May27th
2008 13 Comments

Written by Sathya

Debian and other debian-based distros like Ubuntu have, by default, has the root account disabled as a security measure.(thanks to Subbu and PICCORO for the clarification)

To re-enable the root account, just open the command prompt, and type

sudo passwd root

You’ll get the following set of messages:

sathya@sathya-laptop:~$ sudo passwd root Enter new UNIX password: Retype new UNIX password: passwd: password updated successfully sathya@sathya-laptop:~$

To disable root access, just type

sudo passwd -l root

If you’re weary of using the command line(you shoudn’t ) then there’s another way:
Just head over to System > Administration > Login Window > Security > and check mark the box beside Allow local system administrator login.

DISCLAIMER: Christof Baumann mentions in this post as to why you shouldn’t fiddle with the root account:

Be aware of locking the root account if you once activated it. I activated the root account and skipped the %admin ALL=(ALL) ALL line int /etc/sudoers file because i thought i wouldn’t need it anymore. Then i disabled the root account without thinking and now had no chance to start programs with root rights. Luckily i could restore it using a knoppix live cd. Be aware of changing settings concerning the root account.

Also, read this article in Ubuntu Wiki as to why sudo is preferred over standard root account.

PS: Just incase you guys are wondering why I’ve posted this basic info so late, well I’m just getting the hang of Ubuntu.

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An Easy Way to Transfer Data From A Linux Based Virtual Machine to Windows Host(And Vice Versa)

May18th
2008 1 Comment

Written by Sathya

In my previous post, I’d mentioned about Virtualization – what it is, how useful it is to test new softwares, distros etc. Now while working in your virtual machine, you’d obviously save some data – do some wordprocessing, or compatibility testing of your programs, just to name some, all this would mean that the data would be stored in the virtual machine.

Now you would like to have this data on your physical machine. Or alternatively you may want to transfer data from your physical machine to your VM. Of course, you could always go about using the concept of shared folders, but this would require installation of guest-additions. On a linux-based guest, this would require running scripts, and these scripts most likely require kernel-header or kernel source files. Going by my past experience, in most default installations, the header files would not be installed, or simply be missing in all of Live-CD based distributions, requiring downloading of the packages from the Internet. Is there a simpler way of going about this? Yes! Lets see how. READ MORE »

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Bring Back Deleted Files Using lsof

May7th
2008 Leave a Comment

Written by Sathya

Found this article while going random browsing, the original article is from Linux.com with JC Lima reccreates it, with example. Definitely worth reading

At first it did not make a lot of sense since unless you have the file open, this will not work. How likely are you to have the files you just deleted by mistake still open?

Well, not very likely. BUT…if you own a shared hosting company, (or if you are the system administrator of one), you know that often someone will have poor code along with allow_url_fopen turned on, and in no time you will have hackers injecting and running scripts on your server.

Usually you are able to find the running process and kill it. But if you look at the file descriptors you may find the file that got deleted after it was ran and still in memory.

I will have a similar example to the one in the article:

Continue reading at Linuxzone.org

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A Comprehensive List of Twitter Clients For Linux

May3rd
2008 13 Comments

Written by Sathya

Ever since being introduced to Twitter by Preshit, I’ve been addicted to twitter. While I prefer tweeting via IM or Twitter’s homepage, Few of you would love to use a twitter client. Here’s a list of some twitter clients for Linux

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Compiz Fusion Gets New Effect – Presenting the Cylinder

Apr13th
2008 2 Comments

Written by Sathya

Unless you have been living under a stone, you should be knowing that Compiz Fusion transforms your Linux 2D desktop, with virtual desktops into a 3D one, complete with Cube plugin(amongst others) which transforms the virtual desktops into a cube.

Developer Dennis Kasprzyk has finally finished his idea to implement a cylinder deformation for the cube plugin. The result is that Cubereflex plugin has now been rename to Cubeaddon, and it comes with a new effect, “CYLINDER”. Here’s a screen shot of the plugin in action

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Posts in category Tips & How-To’s

[How-to] Styled Subs in Linux

Creating Your Own YUM Repository

What is YUM?

[How To] Chat With Your Facebook Buddies Using Pidgin

How To: Access ext2/ext3 Formatted Linux Partitions in Windows

Fedora 9 on a USB Pen Drive

An Easy Way to Transfer Data From A Linux Based Virtual Machine to Windows Host(And Vice Versa)

Bring Back Deleted Files Using lsof

A Comprehensive List of Twitter Clients For Linux

Compiz Fusion Gets New Effect – Presenting the Cylinder

Stack Exchange Flair

Games I’ve been playing

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