Written by They say a picture is worth a thousand words. This picture speaks for itself. Yes, its fugly. What the heck are those 3 bloody orbs ?
Posts tagged repo
4096-Byte Sector Hard Drives & Linux
Recently, I bought a pair of those new Western Digital Caviar Green drives. These new drives represent a transitional point from 512-byte sectors to 4096-byte sectors. A number of articles have been published recently about this, explaining the benefits and some of the challenges that we’ll be facing during this transition. Reportedly, Linux should unaffected by some of the pitfalls of this transition, but my own experimentation has shown that Linux is just as vulnerable to the potential performance impact as Windows XP. Despite this issue being known about for a long time, basic Linux tools for partitioning and formatting drives have not caught up.
The problem most likely to hit you with one of these drives is very slow write performance. This is caused by improper logical-to-physical sector alignment.
via Linux Not Fully Prepared for 4096-Byte Sector Hard Drives | OS News.
If you’re going to grab some new hard drives, the above article is worth reading. The article dates to Feb, 2010 – so I’m not sure if this situation still exists. Further more,
These drives are on the market now. We’ve known about this issue for a LONG time, and now it’s here, and we haven’t fully prepared. Some distros, like Ubuntu, use “parted”, which has a very nice “–align optimal” option that will do the right thing. But parted is incomplete, and we must rely on tools like fdisk for everything else. But anyone manually formatting drives based on popular how-tos that pop up at the top of Google searches is going to cause themselves a major performance hit, because mention of this alignment issue and how to fix it is conspicuously absent.
Amarok 2.2.90 Most Irritating Bug #228014: File metadata not displayed If File Is Not Present In Collection
Well it’s no secret that I’m a music fan and love to keep my music organized, and neatly tagged. ( Well, if you didn’t – now you do ). I’d posted quite sometime ago on how to keep your music well tagged and organized, so there’s pretty much no way that my files wouldn’t be tagged.
Of course, there exceptions here and there but majority are tagged. So I was rather surpised today when Amarok , during playback wasn’t showing any metadata. To verify – I installed id3v2, a CLI tool to view/edit ID3 tags for mp3 files using zypper and – guess what- it showed the meta data correctly.
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Updating to openSUSE 11.2
As mentioned openSUSE 11.2 is now available. If you’re on previous versions of openSUSE you can do an inplace upgrade to 11.2 by using zypper.
openSUSE 11.0/openSUSE 11.1
Just change the repos to mention 11.2 instead of 11.0/11.1, as shown in the pic:
Links of the week
Saw this question on SuperUser :
How can I add menu items to the Gnome “Applications” menu from the command line?
Yet another SuperUser Q
Seems Canonical will set limits to those who can order free CD’s via Shipit.
The discs will still be made available to Local Community team members and Ubuntu contributors. And new Ubuntu users will be able to request a CD. But you need to create an account and sign in to request that CD. In other words, Canonical will be tracking you and will only send you a free CD the first time you ask for one.
FOSS.IN is dawning upon us, check out the FOSS.in speaker guide.
Some tips on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala
The openSUSE Project is pleased to announce the release of openSUSE 11.2. openSUSE 11.2 includes new versions of GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, the Linux kernel, and many, many more updates and improvements. In 11.2 you’ll find more than 1,000 open source desktop applications. openSUSE also includes a full suite of server software and a rich selection of open source development tools.
Something about Microsoft patenting sudo
Here it is, patent number7617530. Thanks, USPTO, for giving Microsoft, which is already a monopoly, a monopoly on something that’s been in use since 1980 and wasn’t invented by Microsoft. Here’s Wikipedia’s description of sudo, which you can meaningfully compare to Microsoft’s description of its “invention”.
MPlayer Now Supports Most HD-DVD/Blu-Ray Codecs.
The latest MPlayer code in their SVN trunk now supports most HD-DVD and Blu-ray codecs. Earlier this year we talked about possible Blu-ray support for FFmpeg and developers becoming more interested after we interviewed the FFmpeg developers and there ended up being an outpouring of support by our readers offering up Blu-ray drives and other forms of help. The latest MPlayer code in their Subversion repository now supports most Blu-ray and HD-DVD codecs.
Free and Open Source Screencasting Software Applications for Linux
If you are using Linux and are looking for a screencasting tool that would suit you needs, then here are some of most widely used free and open source screencasting software applications that you should check out.
Presenting 915resolution — Fix for Intel Drivers
Written by This article appears too late i suppose in this site. Many know about it already. Just in case, i am posting it.
So if your xserser-xorg-video-intel is not that satisfactory to you, or if it doesn’t give the right screen resolution, just use this. If available in repos use it, if not use this link. You will have to remove xserver-xorg-video-intel either manually or through package manager. Then after installation restart Xserver (Ctrl+Alt+Backspace; Enable it thus in Karmic)
That should bring the resolution right or at least make it better.
Thanks to these articles and in case of problems please follow the links:
The PAINLESS way to set Screen Resolution for Intel Chipsets
Can’t change resolution with 915resolution
Finally got desktop effects working (915resolution + xorg.conf)
[How-to] Fix “E: Unable to parse package file /var/lib/apt/extended_states (1)” error in Synaptic or apt-get
This is just a quick tip. If you are getting this error message in Synaptic:
E: Unable to parse package file /var/lib/apt/extended_states (1)
E: _cache->open() failed, please report
or this error in apt-get in command line:
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Error!
E: Unable to parse package file /var/lib/apt/extended_states (1)
and both just fail to open or install, then just execute this in command line (terminal):
sudo mv /var/lib/apt/extended_states /var/lib/apt/extended_states_tmp
You are done. Thanks to this post
NetworkManager 0.70 breaks wireless for Intel 3945 users on Sabayon, here’s how to fix it
Well like I mentioned in my previous post, as I upgraded my system to KDE 4.2, NetworkManager 0.70 was also pushed in the update, and that broke my wireless. NetworkManager didn’t detect *any* of my network devices(yup, not even the ethernet port). A small post on Sabayon forums and I got the confirmation that I wasn’t the only one facing this, and the only way (atleast for now) is to downgrade to NetworkManager 0.6.6-r1.
So incase you aren’t able to connect via wireless, fire up your package manager and downgrade to NetworkManager 0.6.6-r1.
In Sabayon, you can do so by first switching to root.
su root
Next install NetworkManager 6.6-r1
equo install networkmanager-0.6.6-r1
In case this version is not present in Sabayon repos (like for me) emerge it from Gentoo sources.
Here’s how. Type
emerge --sync && layman -S
and followed by
emerge =net-misc/networkmanager-0.6.6-r1
That should bring up wireless. Will post if any update fixes this.
Thanks to wolfden from Sabayon forums for helping me out with this
Upgrading to KDE 4.2 in your favorite Linux distro
Couple of days ago I’d posted about KDE 4.2 being released. As much as I wanted to upgrade KDE 4.2, I couldn’t do so immediately as it was not available in official Repos, the community repos had the RC version. Everyday I would do a equo search kde-meta hoping that I’d see the KDE 4.2 branch, and guess what it was available today 
Drum Roll please, KDE 4.2 is released!
After nearly a year, the fantastic guys developing KDE have released the much anticipated KDE 4.2 version. The 4.2 version comes after about a year after a (disastrous) KDE 4.0 release. Linus might’ve switched to Gnome [no link bait here, go Digg it if need the info] but I’m still hooked on to KDE and especially love the KDE 4 series. KDE 4.1.3 was pretty awesome, and I can’t wait to try out it out, but the official Sabayon repositories don’t have KDE 4.2 yet.
You can install the RC version from Naendo repo, I recommend that you wait for the packages to be available in repos.
