Category Archives: Linux - Page 2

How to Mount External Drives Statically on Ubuntu Linux

Posted by on July 1, 2009 No comments

External Drive
The Issue:
You have external USB drives that you want to be mounted the same way every time, but the /dev/sdX device name keeps changing.

The Solution:
First, unmount the drive:
$ sudo umount /media/disk

Then, look in /dev/disk/by-id to find the correct device file:
/dev/disk/by-id/usb-WDC_WD30_00JB-00KFA0_DEF107679C83-0:0-part1

Add this to /etc/fstab:
/dev/disk/by-id/usb-WDC_WD30_00JB-00KFA0_DEF107679C83-0:0-part1 /mnt/data01 ext3 defaults 0 0

Create the mountpoint:
$ sudo mkdir /mnt/data01

Mount the volume:
$ sudo mount /mnt/data01

Now, this device should always be mounted on /mnt/data01.

How to Rip DVDs on Ubuntu Linux 9.04 (Jaunty)

Posted by on June 25, 2009 11 comments

DVDsOne thing that I really enjoy is to be able to watch my DVDs from any computer in the house, or from (almost) any of the TVs, without having to deal with physical media.  The way I do this is to “rip” the movies to my media server, and then transcode them to a smaller format.  This guide will discuss part one of this — ripping a DVD.  I know there are several utilities which will do this for me, but since I have very specific needs, and like things to be as automated as possible, I wrote a script to do this (naturally).
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How To Set Up a Two-Way Mirror Between Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux

Posted by on June 7, 2009 No comments

Mirror to the Sky (aloshbennet CC)After my hard drive crash a few months ago, I’ve been a bit paranoid about losing data.   By “a bit” I mean I’ve been sticking copies of my data on different machines to make sure I have various copies in case another hard drive dies, or a computer gets fried, melting everything inside, or my house burns down… Oh wait, I don’t have that scenario covered….  Time to fix that!  What I want is the ability to copy my data to an offsite location, and keep the backup up to date.  The main thing I care about is my family photos.   I was talking to my cousin Dave, and he had the same issue.  He wanted access to my photos, as well as have an offsite backup copy of his family’s photos.  I thought of a solution.  What if we could set up a two-way mirror between his machine and mine, and keep it updated nightly?  That way if he sticks something in the directory on his machine and vice versa, keeping a live backup.  I began doing some research, and I found the tool — Unison.

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Converting TiVo MPEG2 Videos to H.264

Posted by on May 6, 2009 1 comment

Something I’ve been working on a lot lately (and haven’t been posting until I had things the way I wanted them) was to convert my tivo mpeg2 files that I’ve been copying over from my S3 Tivo to something a little smaller, like h.264.  I have a script to do this, which I’ll provide, but I’d like to go through the process, which consists of:

  1. Getting the dimensions of the video
  2. Cropping letterbox and overscan
  3. Encoding the video

I had a *lot* of issues with AV Sync as well as dropped frames using HandBrake (that no one seemed to know why) so I went with mencoder.  I also left the audio as-is instead of transcoding into AAC.  It’s not a “proper” h.264 file with AC-3, but it works for my purposes.

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Making Songbird work with Ubuntu 8.10 and Nvidia 180 Drivers

Posted by on April 9, 2009 2 comments

So, my friend Chris mentioned that I should check out Songbird for an iTunes alternative.  So, I download it, and a whole bunch of stuff spits out on my screen, and the app doesn’t run.  I see something that looks like:

*** glibc detected *** ././songbird-bin: free(): invalid pointer:
0x00007f203935a8d0 ***

Hrm. after searching around, I find out that the libvisual plugin package is to blame. So, I remove it:

$ sudo apt-get remove libvisual-0.4-plugins

And it works! Just thought I’d pass this along in case someone else runs into this issue.  This is reported as bug 15306 in the Songbird Bugzilla – would be nice if they fix that at some point.

Fixing Xorg with Nvidia Driver ver 180.44

Posted by on April 9, 2009 No comments

So, in order to fix an issue I was having with the Nvidia driver (weird drawing issue of the titlebars), I decided to upgrade to the latest version of the Nvidia driver.  This turned out to be quite an ordeal, because after upgrading, X didn’t want to start, giving me issues like “Failed to initalize GLX extension” and “Ubuntu is running in low graphics mode”.  After fighting with this for a few hours, I finally found the info I needed.  Here’s what I did to solve the issue:

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Ubuntu Apps

Posted by on April 8, 2009 4 comments

So, I’m getting comfortable with my new Ubuntu installation, and have a lot of apps to find equivelants for that I used in Windows, as well as just configuring things.  Eventually I’ll compile a big list, but here’s what I have so far:

  • Pidgin – for IM/chat (supports Gtalk too!)
  • Avant Window Navigator – this is a macosx-like dock – still configuring it, but it looks very nice
  • Gimp – had to change the background, so fired up the gimp to join two images for the background – it has come a long way!  There’s still some things to get used to, but for the amount of actual image editing I do, I think it will be fine.
  • KeePassX – I switched to KeePass for windows, trying out the linux version
  • Picasa – was happy to know that my favorite image organizer is available on linux!
  • Banshee – supposedly a good iTunes replacement – will see

Setting up Dual Monitors with Nvidia on Ubuntu 8.10

Posted by on April 7, 2009 No comments

Upon installing Ubuntu, I noticed that my second monitor wasn’t being used.

On the top panel, I noticed that there was an icon that popped up that said that there were no proprietary drivers installed, and that I should install the nvidia driver for best results.  I installed it, and had to reboot the system, which I did.

I figured that that would have solved the issue, and I would have at least been able to change the setting System->Preferences->Screen Resolution.  No go.  I looked online, and found a guide.  This helped me get the rest of the way.  Here’s what to do, in a nutshell:

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Marvin Is Born

Posted by on April 7, 2009 No comments

I’m currently installing Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop on my main machine, now known as “Marvin” (here’s a hint if you don’t get the reference)  I’ve been running linux boxes as servers for quite a while now, but haven’t run it on the desktop since Linux was new.  I’m going to commit to running it at least 1 month.  I will document what I do, as far as replacing Windows apps with native Linux ones, getting Windows apps to work via crossover, etc.  Who knows?  I might just stick with it, if I can make it do what I need to do.