Posts Tagged ‘Ubuntu’

How to play m2ts files smoothly using VLC

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Posted 02 Mar 2010 — by Arun
Category Technology, Ubuntu

I recently bought a Panasonic HD camcorder which records the videos in m2ts format. m2ts is a high definition MPEG format used in Blu-ray discs and AVCHD. After I copied the files to my desktop, when I tried to play the video using VLC, it was jerky. It wasn’t smooth at all. When I played the video using the Panasonic supplied HDWRITER software, it was smooth. After Googling, I got VLC to play the video smooth. All you have to do is, go to Tools – Preferences in VLC, select Input & Codecs option and select ALL from the drop down menu for Skip the loop filter for H.264 decoding (picture below). Save the preference and play the video. The video should be smooth and perfect. I tried this in Ubuntu 9.10, but it should work with all OSes.

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Use your Android phone as remote control for Ubuntu Linux PCs

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Posted 18 Feb 2010 — by Arun
Category Droid, Ubuntu

Tesla is a open source media player remote control App for Android phones that can interact and control  music and video players on Linux distributions like Ubuntu. Tesla needs wifi connection to work. It currently supports Rythmbox, Totem, VLC and Banshee. With Tesla you can

  • Control the volume for just the media player, or the whole system
  • Ability to shut-down your PC by remote control
  • Pause your music/video automatically for incoming calls

Tesla requires OpenSSH server installed on your PC. The remote control apps uses the SSH to interact with the PC over the wifi connection.

Tesla is currently not available in Android Market, but the developer is planning to add it to Android Market once version 1.0 is released. The program is also not compatible with Windows or Apple.

Follow the instructions here to install Tesla. You have to enable “installing apps from unknown sources” on your phone. You can disable this once you install Tesla. You also need to have OpenSSH server installed in your PC and started.

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Ubuntu launches single sign on service

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Posted 18 Feb 2010 — by Arun
Category News, Ubuntu

Canonical has announced the launch of Ubuntu single sign on service last Tuesday. According to Canonical, The goal of this service is to provide a single, central login service for all Ubuntu-related sites, thus making it more convenient for Ubuntu users and community members to access information, communicate, and contribute.  This service will replace the existing Launchpad login service that is currently in use for many Ubuntu-related sites, although existing Launchpad accounts will continue to work in the new service.

Canonical is in the process of moving services that use launchpad, starting with the sites Canonical directly owns and will later work with the community managed sites. For more information, check Canonical’s announcement.

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NZ school ditches Microsoft and goes with Ubuntu and Open Source

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Posted 25 Jan 2010 — by Arun
Category Linux, News, Ubuntu

A New Zealand high school running entirely on open source software has slashed its server requirements by a factor of almost 50, despite a government deal mandating the use of Microsoft software in all schools.New Zealand government is a sucker to Microsoft. Microsoft has a long-standing contract with the national government and most planning documents for education presume an Microsoft infrastructure.

“The education space is Microsoft-focused and heavily subsidised by government,” said Patrick Brennan, lead engineer from Open Systems Specialists, which led the IT project at the school, during a presentation at Linux.conf.au in Wellington. “Every reference plan is based on Microsoft technology.”

The school’s open source implementation uses Ubuntu on the desktop and Mandriva for four key servers (one firewall, one storage and two KVM hypervisors). Mandriva was selected because of the ease of using Mandriva Directory Server to manage the school’s LDAP directory, but Brennan said either desktop or server OS could easily be replaced.

NFSv4 is used to connect users into the system, allowing them to remotely mount into their home directory on the server via Kerberos.  Applications used within the school include OpenOffice, Google Docs, Moodle for managing education content, and Mahara for student portfolios. The Koha software used by the school library was also customised to integrate more closely with the LDAP security system and to allow book recommendations. While Koha was paid to make those changes, the resulting code will be freely available to all New Zealand schools.

The school doesn’t get any credit for the reduced spending. “The brilliance of Microsoft’s business model is they get the same amount of money regardless of who uses it,” Osborne said. However, the school has saved significantly in other areas, such as not needing specialised routers to handle connections to the Watchdog system used to filter school internet connections.

It’s a wonderful move by Albany Senior High School. I hope the government will take a notice of that and the cost savings and won’t renew the contract with Microsoft when it expires. Great job Albany Senior High School.

Source: CIO.
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Logitech Quickcam Chat with Skype 2.1 in Ubuntu Linux

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Posted 21 Jan 2010 — by Arun
Category Linux, Ubuntu

As you may be aware of, Skype released their 2nd beta of Skype 2.1 for Linux. I have Logitech Quickcam Chat I use with my desktop and it didn’t work with official Skype before. I was using the one from Medibuntu repository and it worked well. Medibuntu removed Skype from their list.

Before you install the new beta of Skype, if you have already installed Skype through Medibuntu, you may have to uninstall Skype and Skype-common before you install the new Skype. You’ll get an error otherwise. Once installed, the video didn’t work. I could then get the video work by loading Skype using the following command I issued in a terminal.

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype

Make sure you have libv4l-0 installed. If not, install it before you try the above command. I now have to put this command as a file and run it as an executable to run Skype. It’s a pain, but it works atleast. I hope Skype team will fix this before they release the final version.

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Skype 2.1 beta 2 released

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Posted 20 Jan 2010 — by Arun
Category Linux, Ubuntu

Skype team has released the 2nd beta of Skype 2.1 for Linux, 5 months after the 1st beta release. This release brings the following new features along with several bug fixes.

  • Screen sharing.
  • Report abuse.
  • Support for UI styles.
  • Possibility to quote a message.
  • Localized time formats.

Here are some improvements in the new version.

  • performance improvements.
  • Possibility to add more email addresses to profile.
  • Load all historical group conversations into event history.
  • PulseAudio: Possibility to choose different audio device for ringing and notifications.
  • A message is displayed when the user tries to add contacts that already are his/her buddies.
  • Incoming contact request dialog.

I couldn’t get the video working in both my desktop and laptop with Skype 2.1, but the package that was offered by Medibuntu worked fine. They stopped offering Skype. Skype now says that if you have Video issues in Ubuntu 32 bits, then use the following command to start Skype.

install “libv4l-0″ package and launch Skype with: LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype

You can download Skype 2.1 beta 2 from here.

Here is the list of known issues with the new beta.
General

  • Logging out and in may cause Skype to crash.
  • Using Oxygen Style might lead to graphical issues.
  • On Debian amd64 version Skype crashes on startup with the message: “Inconsistency detected by ld.so: dl-open.c: 623: _dl_open: Assertion `_dl_debug_initialize (0, args.nsid)->r_state == RT_CONSISTENT’ failed!”. This seems to be Debian only issue with 32 bit PulseAudio libraries being installed even if PulseAudio is not active, a workaround can be: – Debian Lenny: sudo chmod a-r /usr/lib32/libpulse{-simple.so.0.0.1,.so.0.4.1} – Debian Squeeze: sudo chmod a-r /usr/lib32/libpulse{-simple.so.0.0.2,.so.0.8.0,common-0.9.15.so}
  • On some amd64 distributions avatars are not showing, this is a problem with 32-bits emulation Qt library. Qt tries to find its image format plugins, but finds a 64-bits version instead and fails to load it.A workaround is to specify a plugin path when launching skype like this:

– Ubuntu 64 bit: install “ia32-libs” package and launch Skype with: QT_PLUGIN_PATH=/usr/lib32/qt4/plugins skype
– Arch 64 bit (with 32 bit chroot installed in /opt/arch32): QT_PLUGIN_PATH=/opt/arch32/usr/lib/qt/plugins skype
– Other distributions might have a different path.

Options

  • When PulseAudio is enabled in the audio settings, only that specific entry will be available; to change the settings, use the PulseAudio manager tool that is bundled with your distribution.

Contact list

  • Newly added contacts are not found by QuickFilter until Skype restart.
  • It is not possible to drag multiple contacts to a group.

Instant Messaging

  • Sometimes Instant Messages are not ordered correctly.

Video

  • Sometimes receiving video shows a white square on top-left part of the window.
  • Skype does not work well with newer version of GSPCA Webcams driver (Linux Kernel >=2.6.27), possible workaround:

– Ubuntu 32 bit: install “libv4l-0″ package and launch Skype with: LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype
– Ubuntu 64 bit: install “lib32v4l-0″ package and launch Skype with: LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib32/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype
– Other distributions might have the same library, but may have a different path.
How to make video working on Logitech Quickcam Messenger [0x046d:0x08f0]
  http://www.kuhrti.de/index.php/linux/logitech-quickcam-messenger-on-linux/
 http://www.kuhrti.de/index.php/article/logitech-quickcam-messenger-on-ubuntu-9-04/

For more information, read the release note.

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Integrate Firefox notification with Ubuntu notification system

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Posted 04 Jan 2010 — by Arun
Category Linux, Ubuntu

FirefoxNotify is a Firefox addon which integrates Firefox notifications with Linux notification system, which allows Firefox to integrate better with Linux OSes. The addon needs Galago compatible notification server which can be enabled by installing libnotify (if it’s not installed already). Here are the list of dependencies.

  • Python
  • DBus
  • Galago compliant notification daemon (libnotify)
  • python’s pynotify package. The debian package should be apt://python-notify
  • xdg-utils (for opening files from the notification)

According to the author, If you’re on Ubuntu, you may or may not need the package python-dbus. One bug with the addon is that, if there there are multiple windows open, you will get multiple notifications. It will be fixed in the future.

Source: OMG!Ubuntu.
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Mark Shuttleworth steps down as Canonical CEO

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Posted 17 Dec 2009 — by Arun
Category Ubuntu

Mark Shuttleworth, the CEO of Canonical, the man behind Ubuntu, is stepping down by end of February next year. Jane Silber, the current Canonical COO and Director of Online Services will take over the CEO duties starting next March. I’m not sure what would be the impact of this, but Mark wants to focus his energy on product design, partnerships and customers for Canonical and Ubuntu. Jane Silber was a former VP at General Dynamics. She joined Canonical in 2004.

Canonical will be hiring a new COO and a new lead for Ubuntu One. Mark said the move won’t change the direction of the company. Mark will continue his role on the Ubuntu Community Council and Ubuntu Technical Board. Mark will continue to fund the Ubuntu project as he’s doing now. We have to wait and watch if this is going to have a positive change for Ubuntu or not.

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Linux in netbooks surge globally

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Posted 05 Nov 2009 — by Arun
Category Linux, News

LinuxWorld reports:

Nearly one-third of the 35 million netbooks on track to ship this year will come with some variant of the free, open-source operating system, ABI Research said. The exact split is 32% Linux versus 68% Windows, said Jeff Orr, an analyst at ABI, which works out to about 11 million Linux netbooks this year.

“Just because you live in the United States, don’t assume that everything is on Windows,” Orr said. Orr said Ubuntu is a popular choice on netbooks, though he declined to confirm that with any hard statistics.

As netbooks running the ARM processor become a major factor, Orr predicted Linux will overtake Windows on netbooks by 2013. That will be driven by consumers in less-developed countries buying Linux netbooks as their primary PCs, rather than North American consumers buying netbooks as secondary machines as predominates today.

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Dual monitor in Ubuntu Linux

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Posted 21 Oct 2009 — by Arun
Category Linux, Ubuntu

Yippee!!! I got dual monitor working with Ubuntu 9.04. Check the screenshot at the bottom of the post.

I bought NVidia GeForce 9800 GT 2 months back. Newegg had a good deal on it (I think they still have). The card is energy efficient and quiet. I don’t play lots of games, so I don’t know how high the temperature goes. For normal operation in Ubuntu, the temperature stays anywhere between 46C to 54C. Installing the card in Ubuntu was smooth and Ubuntu automatically detected the card and asked me to enable the NVidia proprietary driver. I’m not sure how to increase the fan speed of the card in Ubuntu.

I also bought an ASUS VH236H 23″ widescreen 1080p monitor from Buy.com. They had a good deal on that monitor. I wanted to buy a glossy monitor since my laptop, HDTV etc. are matte finish (for better reason), but this monitor is also matte. It has glossy bezel, but the screen is matte. I don’t regret buying this monitor after using it for a month. The pictures are crisp clear. It has 2ms response time, 1920*1080 resolution (1080p), 5 preset modes, It’s energy star rated. It has HDMI, DVI and VGA inputs, so I can use this as HDTV. It also has built in speakers, but I don’t use that. The only negative thing is, the stand is not height adjustable.

I connected my old 19″ Samsung monitor and the new one to the NVidia GeForce 9800 GT video card using the VGA to DVI connector (old monitor) and DVI (new one) cables. After I started Ubuntu, I went to NVidia settings manager and saw the 2 monitors under X Server display configuration. The 2nd monitor (old one) was disabled by default. I clicked on the 2nd monitor picture and clicked on Configure button. I was then presented with 3 options (shown below).

I first selected Seperate X screen, thinking I would use them as 2 different monitor, but that didn’t work. When I selected that, only the 2nd monitor worked. I then selected the TwinView option which then spreaded my desktop across both monitors. In Twinview, you’ll see the taskbar, menu etc in only one monitor. You can move the application across both monitors. When I enabled TwinView, I believe, due to the way I connected the monitors to the dual DVI outputs in the video card, my old 19″ monitor was taken as default with menus and taskbars and the new 23″ was used as an extended monitor. All I have to do then was to click on my primary 23″ monitor and put +0+0 under position and on my secondary monitor, added +1920+0 where 1920 is the primary 23″ monitor resolution. Doing that made my new monitor as primary and the old one as secondary.


(Primary 23# monitor)


(Secondary 19″ monitor)

Another major problem I encountered was trying to save the configuration. I tried to save the settings by clicking Save to X Configuration File button, but it said I didn’t have permission to write to Xorg.conf file. I then tried starting the NVidia settings manager under super user (sudo) mode and tried the same. It still didn’t work. What I then did was, I made a backup of xorg.conf file, opened a terminal and opened the xorg.conf file using sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf, deleted everything in that file, then went back to NVidia control panel, set the monitors as I explained above, clicked the save to X configuration button in the NVidia control panel (under X Server display configuration) . When you click the save button, I think you will see a preview button to see the new xorg code. Click the preview button, copy the code and paste that code in xorg.conf file, save and close it. Restart Ubuntu and it should work.

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