So this is a short post on one pestering problem. If youre using Jaunty and find this problem then use the link that follows.

When i installed Jaunty i had problems (as usual). One of them was this. First off, videos wont play in any video player. Codecs are in place, no doubt. But the player would go crashing down. Even vlc, which uses a seperate set of codecs fails

Then, desktop effects wont enable. No matter what. An irritating piece of  thing.

But it was so queer that when rhythmbox (may be others too; i dont know) starts playing (not just open but playing) videos work! But i dont think video players should be dependent on music players.

So what worked for me was I rolledback to intrepid’s version (2.4) version of xserver-xorg-video-intel. Now no problems videos play and compiz is enabled.

Click here to find out how to revert to the 2.4 version.

Hope this helps.

I’ve been using Dropbox pretty extensively ever since its private beta days and just love its simplicity and ease with which I can keep all my files in sync across multiple computers. Even more awesome is its simple web interface – just upload a file and boom, the file you uploaded gets sync’d across all your computers. This coupled with Transmission‘s ability  to start downloading torrents automatically when a torrent file is available in a folder means you can start torrent downloads from anywhere, even if your computer is not accessible. Let me show how you can do this.

[...]

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.

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. [...]

Unlike openSUSE 10.3, Fedora doesnt have the 1-click installers for easy install of codecs ,so you’ll have to rely on Terminal and Yum to get it up and running.

All the below operations require Root privileges, so switch to root first by opening the Terminal and typing

All commands under “code” will have to be entered at the terminal

su root

Step 1. Add Livna repo

wget rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm
rpm -ivh livna-release-8.rpm

Step2. Add the Macromedia Repo

wget linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm

Step 3:  Install Multimedia Applications

yum -y remove totem totem-mozplugin
yum -y install totem-xine totem-xine-mozplugin libdvdcss libdvdread libdvdplay livdvdnav lsdvd xine-lib-extras-nonfree libdvdcss libdvdread libdvdplay flash-plugin libquicktime gstreamer-plugins-ugly gstreamer-plugins-bad


Step 4: Install w32Codecs in order to play everything under the Sun.

wget www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/mplayer-codecs-20061022-1.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh mplayer-codecs-20061022-1.i386.rpm
wget www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/mplayer-codecs-extra-20061022-1.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh mplayer-codecs-extra-20061022-1.i386.rpm

(optional) Install VLC

yum install vlc
yum install python-vlc mozilla-vlc

That’s it! you can use Totem or VLC to play them video/audio files! Have a blast!

Consider this situation. You want to know much space is available on your hard disk. No big deal, du can tell you the stats. For this open the terminal and type du -h. You will get the required details as below

sathya@shaman:~$ du -h /home/sathya/Downloads
35M     /home/sathya/Downloads/kubuntu debs
177M    /home/sathya/Downloads
sathya@shaman:~$ du -h /home/sathya/Downloads/kubuntu\ debs/
35M     /home/sathya/Downloads/kubuntu debs

But this isn’t sufficient, and neither is it very elegant. You want to know how much space each file is occupying, or what’s the max filesize occupied by a file. And you want to achieve this with out any console commands. Sounds tough?

Not really! Konqueror comes with an inbuilt “File Size View” which allows you to do just that. And the neat thing is that this works for all mounted partitons. To open this view, open Konqueror. Right click, choose Preview in and select “File Size View”

Once this is selected, another view comes up, showing the size of each file. It may take a minute or two as the filesystem is scanned and the files begin to show up. In the end you’ll get a view like:

This is really useful if you want to free up some space on your hard disk, or if you don’t know which file is taking up all that space.

PS: I don’t know of a similar utility for GNOME, as I don’t use it. Would appreciate it if any GNOME users can comment on a similar app.

PPS: If you’re using KDE 4.x , then as of now, Dolphin doesn’t have the File Size view, so you can’t check this. There’s another program, KDirStat, which can perform the same utility, but I haven’t tested this. Any comment on this would be much appreciated as well!

Picture this. You’re fascinated by Linux. You always wanted to try it out. Now that you want to try it out, or have tried out the LiveCD but want to know more details, where do you look for? Of course Google and the Internet is always there. But that would require the right set of keywords.

Fear not, my good friend Santosh aka Gigacore has compiled an exhaustive list of Wiki’s, guides and PDF’s which will satiate your appetite & thirst for knowledge.

Some of the  topics include

• Introduction to Linux – A Hands on Guide
• The Easiest Linux Guide You’ll Ever Read – an Introduction to Linux for Windows Users
• Getting Started With Fedora
• Fundamentals
• System Administration
• Network Administration
• Shell Scripting

… and many more! So if you’re interested, head over to Teach Me Linux, and you might learn a new thing or two!

LDP is a loosely knit team of volunteers who provide documentation for many aspects of Linux. There are several forms of documentation: Guides, HOWTOs, man pages, and FAQs.
You can browse it at http://tldp.org/

A member of Mangalore LUG, Dr. Neville has uploaded this and was kind enough allow me to post the links here, so all credits to him.

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Archive type: 7z, spanned, using Peazip

Although Linux had progressed far from being a command-line only OS to a full fledged totally GUI based one, sometimes, the command line is the best way to get something done. Here are 5 of the must-know commands. These commands can b quite useful and handy.

1: mount: Used for mounting Windows/Other partitions, just in case it isn’t automatically mounted.

Usage:

mount <device> <mount-point>

here <device> refers to the special device where your partitions are.
Rather than referring to partitions as drive letters as Windows, every partition in Linux is indicated by a special device. For eg in case if IDE(parallel ATA drives) the Primary master will be /dev/hda and the primary partition will be /dev/hda1(Windows C and the logical partitions will be /dev/hda5, /dev/hda6 and so on(for Windows D:, E:.. so on).

<mount-point> indicates to which directory you want the partition to be available as.

Please note that mount command requires root privileges, so run the command as sudo ie,
sudo mount <device> <mount-point>

Eg: If you wish to mount the Windows C partition to a /windows/C the command will be,sudo mount /dev/hda1 /windows/C

For SATA drives, the “hdx” will be replaced by “sdx” ie, instead of /dev/hda1

it’ll be /dev/sda1

2: tar/bzip2/bunzip2: For extracting archives, this command is useful for extracting to directories other than the home directory, where root privileges are required

Usage:
(i) For GZipped files(.tar.gz extension)

tar xvfz <archive-name>

Eg: If the archive name is some-file.tar.gz, then the command will be

tar xvfz some-file.tar.gz

(ii)For Bzipped files (.tar.bz2 extension)

First, unzip the archive using

bunzip2 <archive-name>

Then untar using the command

tar xvf <archive-name>

Eg: If the archive is some-file.tar.bz2 then first unzip it using

bunzip some-file.tar.bz2

You’ll get the file some-file.tar. Next untar it using

tar xvf some-file.tar

3. rpm/dpkg – Install/Upgrade/Remove RPM/Debian Packages

Usage:

(i) Installing new packages

rpm -ivh <package-name.rpm>

dpkg -i <package-name.deb>

(ii) Upgrade existing packages

rpm -Uvh <package-name.rpm>

dpkg -i <package-name.deb>

(iii) Removing existing packages

rpm -e <package-name>

dpkg -r <package-name>

Note that these commands are suited for individual commands, whose dependencies are met. For complex packages, having many dependencies it’s better to use apt-get/smart.

For smart: smart install <package-name>

For apt-get: apt-get install <package-name>

Again these commands require root privileges, so prefix sudo before each of these commands.

4. cat – Concatenate files and print on the standard output. Useful for viewing short text files, logs without having to open any editors

Usage:

cat /path/to/file

Eg: cat /var/log/syslog

If the text file is lengthy, pipe it via more to scroll ie

cat /path/to/file |more

Eg: cat /var/log/syslog |more

5. dmesg – The program helps users to print out their bootup messages. Instead of copying the messages by hand, the user need only:

dmesg > boot.messages

and mail the boot.messages file to whoever can debug their problem.

dmesg |tail Outputs only the last part of dmesg, and is useful to identify any errors, which occured, say if a removable drive is inserted.