Boot the speed limit!

I've been almost happy with the Ubuntu boot-time, but being the nature I am, I'd like to tweak a little here and there to get it a little, or should I say -much faster.
I, once again (I always do this) searched the Ubuntu forums, to find an answer to my question "How do I reduce Boot time in Ubuntu?". This was what came up "HOWTO: Reducing boot time in Breezy using InitNG" and I did exactly what was stated, thereby reducing the time from 1min 10sec to 45sec. But that's not enough though... I read about boot times of 30 sec and less, hmm need to do some 'Googling' on this one!
It could be something to do with hardware, but I'll leave that as 'not an issue' for now..

DVD playback, YoPaaa!

I'm not blind...I've read a few things about DVD Jon in the past. Something about him doing a 'terrible' thing with the encrypted DVD's. And just because he wanted to play his own DVD on his Linux machine, he was haunted by some guys at RIAA.... I too, like the story about 'one small guy, and the BIG bad company who just wants to crush him'...
Of course I had to test if my Ubuntu Linux would play my 3 LOTR DVD's, it's just natural!
They wouldn't!!
But as always I searched the Ubuntu Forums ;) lucky me!! Found some question about how the Ubuntu community could allow to have a DeCSS script on the distribution....hmmm a script? Wasn't this installed default??

Edit: Before you try this, you need gawk +gcc installed

Tried the thing
~:sudo sh /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/examples/install-css.sh
It installed some DeCSS files, and now I'm able to play my LOTR DVD's.
Cool! Well, not that I'm actually going to sit down and watch it on my lousy 15" monitor, horrible speakers, and my armchair.... But it's possible :) The only thing I need is, a 500$ big screen monitor and a 200$ soundcard, instead of my 1000$ surround system and my couch....Like that's gonna happen...

Edit 2: As of 2007 you need to go to http://download.videolan.org

Why my [Delete] key doesn't work!

I was doing some video editing, and saving some temp-files on my xternal harddrive, suddenly Kino told me that it didn't have enough space?? Very weird, because I had just deleted a bunch of files. I knew I was going to use a lot of space.
What I didn't know, was that linux don't delete the files right away...ahaa! Nice feature!! But saves them in a folder/directory called '.trash' <- very nice... except, the folder is HIDDEN.... don't laugh! I was going nut's, I deleted more files and no space got released, delete-delete-delete... Damn!

... Later I found the menu [Empty trash] under [File], in the 'File Browser'....

Zippedy zipp...

Once upon a time we had floppies.. You know the 3.5" floppies, that was actually quite hard. Back then you had to span multiple disks when you wanted to take along big files. Back then I was using windows, and WinZip... allthough it seems ages ago.. I can still remember how I managed to bring a complete installation of Windows95 home on floppies, whooping 50 or so, pieces.
Now you don't need the ability to span more floppies, or do you? if you, like me, want to send a small movie to work, to show off you capabilities as a director. And the Gmail that you have is limited to sending 10MB files, then you'd like to span one file over multiple files... and thats just not possible with the ubuntu archiver...maybe I can find the solution somewhere in the Forums, I'll have a look...
....Tried I'll host it instead. Nice online file hosting service... you're only allowed 5MB downloads without paying though..

Install....Never restart!

I keep getting these 'wow's, using Linux. One evening I was installing a bunch of stuff, including telnet (thought I would use this as a remote control to linux) and samba (not default in Ubuntu desktop), configured it, and had it working in no time. Then I uninstalled Telnet(it's a security risk), and installed Kino. 'Fired' up Kino with no problems. Apache2 was installed and started, meantime Ubuntu had some updates installed. All of this I did without restarting a single time. Had this been windows I'm sure I would have had to restart at least once.

I just have a few outstanding issues left(to really quit my Windoze habit):

• Eclipse IDE(Integrated Development Environment) and JDK(Java Development Kit)
• Ant installation
  
• Apache2 configuration
• PHP module for Apache, installation and configuration
• Servlet module for Apache, installation and configuration
• MySQL installation and configuration
  

....a few hours more....and I can leave Windoze for good... <- wishfull thinking, but very close..

Video editing revisited. Again!....

RTFM! thats what I should have done, before I left out Kino as a 'decent' video editor. It's #1!
It does all you want, and does it well. Kino has the features I need and more.
Here are some of them:

• DV-based
• Supports PAL or NTSC
• AVI (type1 or type2)
• Capture/Export by Firewire(IEEE 1394)
• Drag-n-drop from file manager
• Fade in/out transitions
• Gamma correction <- thats what said it lacked in the previous post.
• Export to DVD/Divx and others
• Does not require Tons of memory ;)
  

Now, I just want to fiddle around with it.

Video editing revisited.

I'm still in search of a decent video editing 'package' for Linux.

Found :
Kino, it cannot adjust lighting, which I need.
Mainconcept MainActor, doesn't really work well + it's payware!
Cinelerra, very demanding when it comes to CPU power and Memory.

I'm aware of one fact for this to succeed, I need to upgrade my current hardware.

Current setup:

• Pentium III, 1Ghz
• 256MB SDRAM
• 10GB Linux HDD
• 120GB NTFS windows HDD
• 30GB external USB2 Linux-ext2 HDD
• GeForce2 GTS/Pro
• 10/100MBps Network SMC
• ADSL 2048/512

that's not the configuration, with what, you would expect to do DV editing.
I've decided to buy some new components

• MotherBoard Asus ATX VIA K8T890 Chipset
• ProcessorAMD Athlon 64 / 3200+ 2.0 GHz
• RAM 2x512MB PC3200

Then I'd be more than up to date...Wouldn't I?

Ohh! I'd probably be better off repartitioning the 120GB HDD, to Linux ;)

Compiling... compiling... compiling ...done.

Yep, wanted to try compiling my own kernel, found a nice howto, and yes! It does take time, but it works :) When you have done it once, you can do it again.

But why would I want to do that? Well, I wasn't able to run the NVIDIA display driver install script. It complains about my kernel being compiled with another gcc(GNU Compiler Collection) version, than is installed on my machine? NVIDIA wants 3.4 but I have 4.0...
Well, I thought, then I'll just recompile my kernel using the gcc4.0 that I had installed default.
But this apparently didn't work either. The NVIDIA script still complains.

...I once again, read through these Ubuntu Forums, and once again, I find out I was misguided. You just need to 'unmask' the restricted multiverse repository in the file /etc/apt/sources.list, and voila! You have access to a nvidia-glx driver. Which I intend to try out now :) howto for this.

later....

"Did it work?" you ask. I'm not sure, I have no errors, and no games to test... hmm, I say it works... done √

Safety belt...OFF!

I'm always trying to tweak the system. Of course that means you need to have the right video drivers, and in this process you need to recompile some kernel or whatever.
Apparently I mis-configured the whole damn thing, trying to get this wine and dvddecrypter thing working. It doesn't wanna reinstall or reconfigure Python?? That means I have to remove it alltogether. And for all things 'Python'!!! What the hell does this Programming Language have to do with k3b(which I installed on the way through DVD burn programs) and why does it have to remove both gdm(which I know is the Gnome window manager) and xchat, openOffice, nautilus, GnomeMessenger, Gaim and what have we, damn!

Well, I write this post hoping to be up after my reboot.....Fu.....ed up!

...Getting back from the 'partly dead', I'm in chaos! I was just removing some 'Python programming language' and it was apparently depending on other things that some other things depended on, way out!
It seems it even removed 'Synaptic' and almost every other program under [Administration]??? luckily I knew of 'aptitude' which is almost like 'synaptic'.
I'll try to assemble the things that were left off, from my removing 'Python'.
...Must be more careful next time..

DVD Copy - and hours wasted..

I wanted to do a DVD copy, not the copyrighted ones, but a DVD I made using Video editing software. I found it difficult from Ubuntu, and used hours searching the very nice forums. I stumbled upon a program called wine, a 'windoze emulation' sort of thing. Very handy when you have all kind of programs installed on your winXP, and don't have anything similar on your linux. But every post I read was talking about DVDDecrypter and DVDShrink, being the best to copy a DVD, even the copyrighted ones. But the hell I went through, trying to get this wine/dvddecrypter thing to work, was a lot of wasted hours.
Meanwhile, I was updating my Ubuntu every day. I had to update between 50 and 100 files every day, 'Does it really get updated that quickly?' I must say that's impressive. Every day new things showed up, new programs, new layout, and in the end I got this strange feeling that it was actually starting to look very much like my 'old' winXP... The desktop is now equipped with a [Computer] logo, and the familiar [Trash]. WOW! Is this what the public wants? A Linux that looks like XP? hmm, not me!
Anyway, after all these wasted hours, the only thing I had to do was: clickety click on the [Computer], and mouse-right-click on the DVD logo, to find a menu called 'Copy disc', Whaaat!! I was amazed, if not all this time then at least some, I had this DVD copy right by me.... Damn!!!
Next thing I have to do is format my USB harddisk so that I can write to it, it's Partitioned with NTFS, and Linux doesn't like to write that... I can't use Fat32 because it only supports files of 4GB, and I need more to do a DVD image...And I still need winXp to have access to the drive.... well, more searching in the forums...

Ubuntu - you rock! ...Flawless - not!

It is a breeze to install the Ubuntu 'Breezy badger', and all the problems I had using Debian disappeared, almost :p. As mentioned in an earlier post, 'it might have been the same, did I just install the new kernel 2.6' but I wanted to try Ubuntu.
The problem I have now is : keyboard layout!
As some might have discovered already(by reading), English is not my native language, Danish is. Therefore I need a DK layout, and that's not a tedious affair with Ubuntu either. Even though I choose DK layout, it doesn't give me the keys.

The good part is:

- USB works, attaching my external hdd, gives me a mounted drive automatically.
- I can see all my partitions, and mount them.
- Playing movies work, not too good, but it works.
- Sound is playing well.
- MainActor video editing works, I had to do some tweaking here, installing old GNU C++ compiler libraries.
- CD/DVD burning works well.
- Graphics card(NVidia GeForce II) worked perfectly

The bad part is:

- OpenOffice 2, works but has some problems with M$ Office documents and images
- KDE window manager not preinstalled