play youtube with mplayer in firefox using greasemonkey

flash player on linux has some problems, is slow and sometimes makes firefox crash. youtube has been updated and this greasemonkey script don’t work anymore. I’ve modified it a little to get it to work again.

http://pastebin.com/f22bb3951

create a new script in grasemonkey, delete the lines that are there and insert the script.

Fixing big fonts bug with Ubuntu Gutsy and Intel gma 900

There’s an annoying bug that don’t permit to make a fresh install of gutsy on some machines without having really big fonts, that makes the system unusable. it seems that’s a bug in the dpi detection and there are a few ways to resolve this, for example copy your monitor characteristics from xorg.conf from feisty, and forcing dpi for the gdm, this might solve every problem.

but there’s a much simpler way to get it to work well at least on my intel gma…
first of all make a backup copy of your xorg.conf, this way you can get it back if something goes wrong

cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

and find these lines:

Section “Device”
Identifier “Intel Corporation … Express Graphics Controller”
Driver “intel”

change the Driver “Intel” line to

Driver “i810″

save and reboot. if everything’s fine and i810 is the right driver for your intel gma, you should have a good resolution for your fonts.

FreeBSD 7.0 RELEASE is out!

After long time here it is! FreeBSD 7.0 is out!
It’s a major release and comes with lot improvements. native support to linux 2.6 binaries, a new scheduler, better networking performances…

You can read the official announcement by Ken Smith at freebsd.org here: http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.0R/announce.html

How To: Fix a little Qt font “bug” in Ubuntu Gutsy (VirtualBox 1.5.2) and Qt integration with Gnome

Installed Virtual Box 1.5.2, I immediately noticed that the fonts of the window were too big, if you experienced the same problem or you just want to get a better integration of Qt applications with Gnome here are some simple steps to follow.

First let’s install Qt3 configuration editor and polymer, a port of the “Plastik” KDE theme which doesn’t depend on KDE libraries.

sudo apt-get install qt3-qtconfig polymer

Ok now open Qt3 Configuration from System menu (qtconfig-qt3 from bash) and select Polymer style.

Now open the font tab and select a Sans font like this:

Save from menu and close Qt3 Configuration. Give a look to your Qt3 applications, they’ll look very different ;)

Linux power saving with Powertop

Powertop is an utility from Intel that finds software components that use more power than necessary and provides some tips to make battery life lasts longer.

On Ubuntu you can install it from synaptic sudo apt-get install powertop
On other linux systems you’ll have to compile it.

http://www.linuxpowertop.org/

VirtualBox 1.5.2 a lot of improvements… let’s install it on Ubuntu Gutsy!

There are a lot of improvements since the last version this software is growing really fast, that’s the power of open source ;)

From prompt:
wget -q http://www.virtualbox.org/debian/innotek.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -

You should see “OK“

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

and put at the end of the file

deb http://www.virtualbox.org/debian gutsy non-free

then:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install virtualbox

remember to add your user to vboxusers group, and now happy virtualization to everyone ;)

How-To Update IPW2200 on Ubuntu Gutsy

*updating drivers should be done only by experts who knows exactly what they are doing. everything you do with this is your own responsibility*

this only works for kernels prior to 2.6.24. with 2.6.24 kernels and later there are lot of changes that don’t permit to compile and install the drivers.

I experienced a lot of problems with an Intel 2200bg wireless card, on Ubuntu 7.04, and got tons of log messages like “Firmware error detected” and everytime connection was restarted, when i tried to update ieee802.11 and ipw2200 modules I got a kernel panic… now that Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon is out i wanted to give it a try to update them to solve the problems with the wifi card :)

First time i don’t know why i got a lot of problems, because make wasn’t finding kernel-headers and ieee802.11 modules won’t compile, then i tried to get a new ubuntu 7.04 installation on and doing a network update to Gutsy (to avoid the dpi bug).

Then i followed this simple steps to get it to work:

sudo apt-get install build-essential ieee80211-source

(the last one resolves some probable dependencies that are needed to compile latest drivers)

download ieee802.11 1.2.18 (www.ieee80211.sourceforge.net) and ipw2200 drivers 1.2.2 and firmware 3.0 (www.ipw2200.sourceforge.net) put the archives you downloaded in your home directory.

and now some simple steps:

tar xvf ieee80211-1.2.18.tgz
tar xvf ipw2200-1.2.2.tgz
tar xvf ipw2200-fw-3.0.tgz
cd ieee80211-1.2.18/
sudo make #hit enter (y), it asks to remove old files/comment definitions
sudo make install
cd ./../ipw2200-1.2.2/
sudo sh remove-old #hit enter (y) to all quesitons
sudo make
sudo make install
cd ./../ipw2200-fw-3.0/
sudo cp *.* /lib/firmware/

now restart linux… open a prompt:

dmesg | grep ipw2200

you should get something like this: ipw2200: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver, 1.2.2

dmesg | grep ieee80211

and get something like this: 802.11 data/management/control stack, 1.2.18

if everything is fine you should finally have your wireless connection up and running (and working ;) )

Create mount and copy floppy disks images under linux

Yesterday I was searching a way to create and use img files using linux, and found a few simple commands that do the job.

Create a disk image from the phisical drive:
cat /dev/fd0 > imagefile.img

Copy image to the phisical drive:
cat imagefile.img > /dev/fd0

Simple isn’t it? And now the fun part :P
If we need it we can create an empty image and mount it using linux’s loop devices.

Creating the image:
$ dd bs=512 count=2880 if=/dev/zero of=imagefile.img
$ mkfs.msdos imagefile.img

Mounting it:
$ sudo mkdir /media/floppy1/
$ sudo mount -o loop floppy.img /media/floppy1/

Alternatively with a path as suggested by Anders Lennqvist in a comment to this post

Create a disk image from a physical diskette:
cat /dev/fd0 > /path/imagefile.img

Copy the image to a diskette:
cat /path/imagefile.img > /dev/fd0

There’s an even easier way to do this using mkfs.msdos, skipping the need for the dd command. Also, on my system, mkfs.msdos is in the /sbin directory, which is not usually in a user’s path. So, the new command is

Create an empty floppy image of 1.44 MB:
$ /sbin/mkfs.msdos -C /path/imagefile.img 1440

Simple isn’t it? And now the fun part :P
If we need it we can create an empty image-file and mount it using linux’s loop devices.
Creating an empty floppy image: (here 1.44MB)
$ dd bs=512 count=2880 if=/dev/zero of= /path/imagefile.img
Format it:
$ mkfs.msdos /path/imagefile.img

Mounting it:
$ sudo mkdir /media/floppy1/
$ sudo mount -o loop /path/imagefile.img /media/floppy1/

Thank you Anders!

Salena Vorik pointed out here a disk image can be created in an easier way:

There’s an even easier way to do this using mkfs.msdos, skipping the need for the dd command. Also, on my system, mkfs.msdos is in the /sbin directory, which is not usually in a user’s path. So, the new command is

Create an empty floppy image of 1.44 MB:
$ /sbin/mkfs.msdos -C /path/imagefile.img 1440

Thank you Salena!

RocketDock, a mac like dockbar on windows

Got tired of desktop full of links to softwares that you probably never use and to open every time your start bar to search a program? You want a dockbar like the one in mac in windows? RocketDock is the right software that can do it :)

This little dockbar runs really good on new computers, and let you organize the programs you use. It also has docklets (compatible with docklets created for ObjectDock) and skins, and uses icons in ICO and PNG formats.

Minimum requirements are actually really low, Windows 2000/XP/Vista, 500 mhz or faster CPU and 10 MB of free RAM.

After having installed it you can drag and drop files link or directory on it and then personalize further the look choosing from the presets icons or downloading more icons. Then you can right click on your desktop and hide every icon on your desktop

http://rocketdock.com/

And here’s a little preview that’s on youtube:

Media Coder the solution for your conversion needs! :)

I was searching for a good open source media converter, and found one of the best media trancoder out there, Media Coder. This nice tool integrates a lot of codecs, plugins and tools to convert media to popular formats, how many of you have ever wanted to convert those odious .3gp videos ;)

taken from it’s website here is a brief list of features:

Features In Breif

• Convert to and from many audio and video compression formats and re-multiplex into various container formats in batches
• Full control over transcoding parameters, you can learn about audio/video encoding and play with various codecs
• Strong decoding capability for partial or corrupted contents
• Simplified UI for popular mobile devices (e.g. PSP, iPod)
• Fully standalone, no dependance on system codecs/splitters
• Extension (scripting language) infrastructure to expand user interfaces and improve user experience

Typical Applications

• Improving compression / reducing size for audio/video files
• Converting for audio/video playback devices (digital audio player, MP4 player, mobile phone, PDA, PSP, VCD/DVD player etc.)
• Extracting audio tracks from video files
• Ripping audio/video discs
• Reparing corrupted or partial downloaded video files

Supported Fomats

• MP3, Vorbis, AAC, AAC+, AAC+v2, MusePack, Speex, AMR, WMA, RealAudio, mp3PRO*
• FLAC, WavPack, Monkey’s Audio, OptimFrog, AAC Lossless, WMA Lossless, WAV/PCM
• H.264, Xvid, MPEG 1/2/4, Theora, Flash Video, Dirac, 3ivx*, RealVideo*, Windows Media Video
• AVI, MPEG/VOB, Matroska, MP4, RealMedia*, ASF, Quicktime*, OGM*
• CD, VCD, DVD, CUE Sheet*

* supported as input only

I’ve used this program to convert some media including flv (the flash videos from youtube), various video formats, and music, and it is working really well, and found only a little bug that crashes the application when you play some media in the main window.

It’s definitely worth a try.

Download it from here http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/download.htm