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Posts Tagged Linux / Freebsd

11.04 proves to be a little bit of a headache

Apr 30

Posted by admin in Linux / Freebsd | No Comments

Update: After a couple more hours my little bit of a headache turned into a full blown apocalypse.  This new released is absolute garbage and the end result is me being forced to format my entire partition and reinstall a fresh copy of 10.04.  Unbelievable that this release would even see the light of day in its current state.  To repeat  DO NOT updated to 11.04 for so many reasons.

 

Two major problems with the upgrade, well besides the hideous GUI that greeted me as soon as I logged in for the first time.  A gui that literally gave me a headache at the thought of twisting my mind around it.  Still gives me the heeby jeebies thinking about it.

So the other issues were that my touchpad would just give up and stop working after about 30 seconds.. Great fun

 

This thread is a boon for people with this problem: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/+bug/549727?comments=all

In the end my solution was running these two commands:

sudo modprobe -r psmouse
sudo modprobe psmouse proto=imps

But there are a ton more solutions in there to try if that doesn’t work.

 

Lastly Emerald doesn’t seem to work with 11.04 and this has been a known issue since alpha apparently with the emerald guys still not releasing a stable fix.  There are a few solutions out there, mainly to git the latest repo of emerald but when I try to compile it I think what it tells me is that I need GTK 3.  For some reason I remember trying to install gtk3 in the past and it ending bad, so I’ll tough it out without emerald for now.

Hope that helps, if I could have stayed with 10.04 instead of upgrading I would have and if you are contemplating upgrading to natty I would strongly recommend you give it 4-6 months and save yourself the headache

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Getting your touchpad to behave nice in Ubuntu 10.10

Mar 4

Posted by admin in Linux / Freebsd | No Comments

Bad Laptop, Bad!

Alright so easily one of the most frustrating things about having a laptop is the god damn touch pad.  Either it’s jumping all over the place while you are typing, or misinterpreting a middle click and pasting junk everywhere or any number of other frustrating things it can do to make your life miserable.  Lucky for us Ubuntu allows you to dig around and reconfigure just about every aspect of the way it interacts with your hardware, touchpad included.

So today I sat down and put in the time to finally get my touch pad working the way I want it to work and this is what I came up with:

1.) Enabling 2 finger scrolling(the right way)

There are a few ways to handle this.  On the Ubuntu wiki they suggest that you Install the DKMS driver package provided in https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/308191 (comment #115, #116). Reboot, and go to System > Preferences > Mouse > Touchpad and select “Two-finger scrolling”.

But to be honest this just isn’t precise enough for me and I feel much more comfortable editing system files than going through the GUI so this is how I take care of that:

  • Create a file in /etc/init.d and paste the following in:

#!/bin/bash
synclient VertTwoFingerScroll=1
synclient HorizTwoFingerScroll=0
synclient EmulateTwoFingerMinW=5
synclient EmulateTwoFingerMinZ=48

It should be pretty self-explanatory what those values mean.  The only thing left to do with this is to make this program start at boot time.  You need to chmod this program to 755 or r+x and then you can go into system->preferences->startup applications and add it or type update-rc.d FILENAME defaults , obviously replacing FILENAME with whatever you called it.

2.) Automatically disabling the touchpad while typing(The right way)

So again you can go into system/prefs/mouse and set this to off, but once again it’s a limited shitty way to accomplish what you want accomplished here.  There is a little program called syndaemon that controls this sort of thing and it will allow you to fine tune it a lot more.  The main problem with doing it through the gui is that you can’t control the delay that occurs between finishing typing and when the touchpad is activated again.  By default it is .5 seconds or aruond there which is way to short and will result in the touch pad coming back to life and wreaking havoc on you after the smallest pause in typing.  We want this to be between 1-2 seconds and so for that we can create the following little script, again placing it in /etc/init.d that contains the following:

#!/bin/bash

syndaemon -i 2 -d

If you want to adjust that delay time just change the 2 to something smaller or larger, whatever suits your needs.  Follow the rest of the instructions above to make it a startup script and you are good to go

3.) Create a shortcut toggle to disable/enable your touchpad completely.

Now all of the above stuff is great but to be honest even then it doesn’t get the touchpad out of the way 100% of the time while you are typing and especially if you have a usb mouse plugged in you probably want to just turn the whole damned thing off to save yourself the headache.  But if the headache of turning it on and off is greater than it is causing in the first place then what’s the point right?  Well I did a little bit of simple bash scripting today and came up with the following script that will allow you to toggle the damned thing at the touch of a button.

If you don’t have a ~/.local/bin directory now then go ahead and make one, it’s a real handy place to have for custom scripts.  You are also going to have to add that path to your environment, I do that by simply putting the following in my ~/.bashrc:

PATH=”$HOME/.local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games”

Before we can properly make our script we need to find the ID number for your touchpad.  You do this by typing xinput -list in shell and looking for the touchpad.   It should have an ID= next to it with your ID number.  My touchpad is device #14 so I use 14 in the script below but if yours is different you will need to change that number to correspond with your touchpad’s ID.

Inside your ~/.local/bin/ directory you are going to create a file, I call mine toggle_touchpad and insert the following code:

#!/bin/bash

idNum=$(xinput -list | awk /Synaptics/ | grep -o “id=..” | sed ‘s/id=//’)
state=$(/usr/bin/xinput -list $idNum | grep “disabled”)

if [[ $state ]]
then
/usr/bin/xinput set-prop $idNum “Device Enabled” 1
else
/usr/bin/xinput set-prop $idNum “Device Enabled” 0
fi

This guy just looks up the state of your touchpad, greps it for the word disabled and if it finds that word it assumed the touchpad is off and turns it on, if it doesn’t find that word it assumes the touchpad is on and turns it off.  Easy Peasy.  Now just go to system –>Preferences –> Keyboard Shortcuts and create a shortcut for that command and you’re done.

Now, finally your touchpad nightmares should be over and you can live a laptop life without fear and dread of it destroying data, pasting garbage everywhere or moving your cursor where it doesn’t belong.

Huzzah!

[ERROR] /usr/local/libexec/mysqld: unknown option ‘–~’

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All Time High-Score for Overgod’s Time Trial

Feb 9

Posted by admin in Games | No Comments

Well googling ‘Overgod’ and ‘time trial’ and ‘high school’ come up with absolutely zero results, so here’s hoping that there’s actually someone else out there that plays this game as much as I do and will stumble upon this.  Better yet, here’s to hoping there are a few hundred people out there like that :)

Seeing as there isn’t a world-wide top score list anywhere for what might be one of the funnest most addicting games I’ve ever played I figured I’d start one.  Especially in celebration of my new high-score yesterday which completely blew anything I’ve done previously so far out of the water it’s not even funny.  In fact the only reason it wasn’t higher was because I was dealt an indestructible enemy at the end, boooerns!

So leave a comment below with a link to a screenshot of your high-score table and I’ll add it to the list, for now this looks horribly narcissistic but it’s gotta start somewhere:

  1. 1 Hour+: Josh Triplett (No screenshot but this bug report)
  2. 1:00:36 – Ryanw

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I now have the quietest laptop around, and coincidentally the hottest

Jan 28

Posted by admin in Linux / Freebsd, Random Musings, Technology | No Comments

Well the inevitable decline of this LG R405 laptop is finally upon me as today the main cooling fan gave out.  I’m hoping that this might be a simple loose wire that I can soder or reattach but alas I left my tiny screw driver in Canada and so I can’t open this old girl up to check :(   But she started overheating something fierce today so I went into the bios and changed the cooling fan settings from normal to loud/cool and upon reboot the laptop switched to silent/off/hot mode as the fan just stopped spinning.  I was able to last about 15 seconds booting into linux before it overheated and shutdown but fortunately due to some overheating problems while in Colombia I had an undervolting utility setup in XP so I could boot into that and with the clock running switch it on quick and throttle my Cpu from 1.6GHZ down to 450mhz or so to prevent it from heating up.

But for me, stability in XP is still worth less to me than 15 seconds of instability in linux so I rebooted and performed mouth to mouth on the old girl, blowing into the exhaust port to offset the lack of a fan, keeping her cool enough to get through the boot cycle and allow the cpu to go idle and cool back down again.

Very fortunately for me in my latest foray in system customization I installed CairoDock, and very very fortunately for me Cairo dock has a CPU frequency monitor and adjuster called ‘CPU Frequency Monitor’.  All I really wanted to do was to put up a cpu temperature gauge so I could monitor the heat and keep my activity to a min but when I saw that frequency applet my heart soared.  Loaded that up and now my cpu is permanently throttled down 66% to 1Ghz, I also disabled one of my cores so I’m only running a single core on the chip, Ive turned off all graphic effects and dimmed my monitor by 60% to lessen the voltage flowing through the system and finally I removed the battery to get any heat from that away from my CPU.  In the end I’m able to work fairly uninhibited and even play a game of overgod without the CPU rising above 50 degrees.  I’m not going to be doing any Audio Visual work anytime soon and if worse comes to worse I’ll have to switch off wifi(the R405′s wifi nic is notorious for heat) and work in the coldest room in the apartment but I have a working machine for a little while longer until my long awaited AMD Fusion chips come out.

How ironic is it that this morning my power supply on my quad-core xeon server blew, frying the hard drives and forcing me to do a fresh OS install and emergency transplant the server to an older P4 2.8Ghz box and then just when I have that all squared away my CPU fan on this machine blows forcing me to underclock it by 66% and shut down one of the cores.

Oh well, even gimped and limping along you still have to marvel at what these machines can do.

So moral of the story, if your laptop starts overheating on you or worse yet your CPU dies and you can get it fixed immediately a short term solution is to do the following:

In Ubuntu:

  • Go into your Bios and shutdown one of your cores to cut your heat
  • Boot into linux, performing CPR to get your machine over that big boot time hurdle
  • Install Cairo Dock, it’s pretty spiffy anyways
  • Install the CPU Temp monitor applet to keep an eye on your heat levels
  • Install the CPU Frequency Monitor and clock it down to the lowest frequency.  I tried setting it to ‘conservative’ first but it still jumped up to 1.4 ghz so I just perma throttled it to 1ghz
  • Now that your system is stabalized you can go one step further and undervolt your machine and see up to 7 degrees less heat by following this guide: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UndervoltingHowto

In XP:

  • Boot into XP, performing CPR if necessary to buy yourself enough time and follow this guide: http://www.clunk.org.uk/forums/guides/12900-guide-undervolting-your-processor.html .  I use RMclock personally as I find it’s options the most use friendly for getting the job done

This is all assuming you are running an intel chip and don’t have the handy bios options to adjust your frequency there, if so do it there first and go as low as you can while remaining stable and then dink around with the stuff above.

Right now I’m working normally and my cpu temp is sitting at 50 degrees, compare this to the 80 degrees it was at before and I’m a happy camper.  It’s also sitting on my lap and if I were to work on the table in a colder room it sits around 40

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Public Key not working with user@server but does work with root@server

Aug 23

Posted by admin in Technology | No Comments

Weirdest thing about my FreeBSD server that’s been bugging me for a long time.. I’m able to create rsa/dsa keys for passwordless logins but the catch was that it would only work if I was root on the client machine loggin in as root on the server.  After 6 hours of trouble shooting and mostly relying on the geniuses over at #freebsdhelp on efnet, running sshd in debug mode, running ssh in -vvv mode it came down to a stupid little error in the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file.

The line in question was:

AuthorizedKeysFile      ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2

and whoever set it up originally bunged it up because it needs to be

AuthorizedKeysFile      %h/.ssh/authorized_keys2

to work properly or else sshd will always refer to /root/.ssh/authorized_keys2 no matter who’s loggin in..

Hopefully this will help someone else save the nearly full work day of time to narrow this mother trucker down

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The Soundblaster Arena Gaming Headset (and linux)

Jul 20

Posted by admin in Linux / Freebsd, Technology | 2 Comments

As any of you who are following me on twitter know I ordered the beautiful, sleek and very white Soundblaster Arena headset last week from newegg and today I moseyed my way down to Puralator to pick em up!  Happy happy joy joy.

Seeing as there are little no reviews of these kind of things specific to linux I thought I would share my thoughts on the first day with my new lover and how they react to my other lover: Ubuntu.  I’m not going to go over packaging and all the other nitty gritty details that most reviews dive into, I’ll just let you know the one thing you care about: How do they sound?

Well up until now I’ve been using  a pair of Panasonic earbuds (Best pair of ear buds I have ever owned for bass which is saying a lot as these cost me 30,000 pesos – 15$ – in Colombia and they out perform my $200.00 Bose buds sitting in my room) and the sound has been fairly impressive up until this point so it would take something pretty special to really make me say ‘wow’.  Obviously an over ear headset is going to outperform buds but the quality of those buds was so high with the music I listen to that I wasn’t sure at how much to expect.

If you want to skip the review and just get to the goods I’ll lay it out right here: If properly setup these headphones will absolutely blow your mind.  The key to remember is that the proprietary drivers that make them sound so god damn good in windows dont’ exist in linux so you have to make sure you use a program with a good equalizer and open up alsa-mixer in terminal to make sure that your levels for this USB device are cranked.  By default they will stay at 80% everytime you plug em in, leading to some disappointing results.

First Impressions

My first impressions were pure disappointment and this disappointment lasted for months and months until I went into Alsa-mixer.  For some reason I figured that it wouldn’t make a difference and avoided alsa-mixer completely, living in sadness for the lack of volume and bass I was experiencing in linux.  All that changed when I saw that by default, upon being plugged in every time, alsa-mixer set the volume levels to 80%.  You have no idea the difference that makes to deep low level bass.  I would say that the quality and depth of the bass tripled when those levels from from 80% to 100%.   So my first impressions sucked, but only because of my ignorance.  My impressions now are that these are the best god damn headphones that have ever graced my head

Volume

After levels were tweaked in Alsa mixer these things rock the house.  Combine Alsa mixer with pushing the levels over 100% in pulse manager and I think I can get more out of these in linux without proper drivers than I could in windows.  The key is to open alsa-mixer in terminal as Ubuntu wants to set these to 80% or so when they are plugged in.

The Microphone:

Truth be told one of the main reasons I’m buying this is the mic.  I haven’t done an IndustryBroadcast in months and months and month because my old usb mic kicked the bucket.  So a critical criteria was mic quality and most of the reviews had nothing but good things to say about the mic.

First thing that rocks about it is that it is detachable.  So if I’m out or whatever and don’t need it, I don’t need to have it sticking off my head.  Definitely like that.  The quality of the sound is decent.  It’s nothing amazing by any stretch, and this has nothing to do with the software as it sounds the same in windows.  My voice comes across as really damn deep, almost unnaturally so for those who are used to hearing me through my built in lappy mic, and while they claim this is a noise canceling mic, when I was in windows with the proper drivers loaded and software running I really didn’t pick up a crystal clean sound even though all windows were closed and appliances off in my surrounding area.  It was dead quiet in my apartment and i was still getting a bit of noise that I had to clean up with Audacity.  So overall the mic works decently but I wouldn’t buy these just for that.. If you’re doing podcasting you’re better off getting a proper mic and a proper pair of headphones.  If you’re gaming then these will definitely do the trick and make you sound like a manly man while you’re at it.

Size, Shape, Comfort

My ears are totally covered, I picked these up at 2pm today, and outside of a workout and dinner I’ve had them on ever since.  Totally comfortable, no pinching or anything anywhere.  Cushioning is soft and fluffy and I have lots of room inside for my ears

The Design:

See picture above, these things are badass!  I bought these because they received the best overall review of any gaming headset around and they were under $100.00 at New Egg.  I also haven’t bought a SoundBlaster product in 15 years so it felt awesome to support a company that’s done so much to change the audio landscape of the digital world.  But I am not going to lie and say I wasn’t super super stoked to have this gorgeously designed throw-back to 1980′s sci-fi on my head.  I mean if storm troopers are grooving to good tunes they are doing it with the SoundBlaster Arena on their head, and dammit so am I!  This goes for the color and general shape, but these bad boys are sleek and not bulky by any stretch.. I was actually surprised at the small size of the box when I picked them up.  I was expecting, from the pictures, that these things would be much more obtuse and large but they are the perfect size.  That and the black on a white body is brilliant.  Best looking headset on the market in my mind.

So there you have it!  If you want something that just cranks the sound out and you are using linux only I would go for a Senheisser or something else that goes into your audio jacks.

  • The sound quality is good in these,  overall decent but nothign to write home about and my ears certainly aren’t going to be bleeding(in the best way possible) anytime soon.  I’m almost considering running VMware all the time just for music because these things absolutely rock in Windows.  So if you’re a windows user put your money into these bad boys, they will rock your world like nothing else.
  • Mic is decent, good for gaming, decent enough for podcasting but nothing to write home about at all.  If you’re serious about casting go and buy a professional mic for $70.00 and use a cheaper $30.00 headset.  If you are gaming this is the way to go.  The mic detaches which is a huge plus
  • Design rocks the cock, these are wicked looking phones that set your head apart from the rest
  • Comfortable as anything else.  But phat padding around the ears with plenty of room will keep the tunes coming for hours and hours without discomfort.

Bottom Line:

Until I figured out that it was alsa-mixer limiting the levels on these things I was so against them, but now that I enjoy 100% volume levels these things deliver the best bass I have ever heard out of a headset.  I’ve traded my friend a pair of 200$ phones and they didn’t even remotely come close to touching these babies.. House music has never sounded so good

http://www2.panasonic.com/consumer-electronics/shop/Audio/Headphones/Earbuds/model.RP-HJE120-A_11002_7000000000000005702

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Creating a custom slideshow for your wallpaper in ubuntu

Jul 12

Posted by admin in Linux / Freebsd | No Comments

So it seems that I’ve had a similar experience to a lot of people changing their wallpapers in ubuntu.  You’re scrolling through a bunch and in the list you notice this one called cosmos that doesn’t quite looks like the rest.  “Hmmm, what’s this?’ you think.  This looks like a bunch of images stacked on top of each other.  Could it be?  And yes, it is, it’s a multi-image slideshow that can have as your background that rotates on a schedule that you choose.  I immediately sat down and started figuring out how this thing works and in the end it was pretty simple, time consuming to setup as you have to input a ton of values into an xml file but simple.  I’m not going to go into huge detail about how it works if you want to read more head over to http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/create-custom-transitioning-background-your-gnome-228-desktop

So today I stumbled upon a motherload of amazing 3D space art at http://joejesus.deviantart.com and I go completely gaga over space art.. My wallpapers are all sci-fi scenes, I just can’t get over how breath taking some of these are.  So I raided the guys stash and ended up with around 30-40 new pieces for my wallpaper slideshow and like hell was I going to enter all of these in by hand so off I went searching for a nice little script that would do it for me.  I mean come on, one of the reasons I’m a linux user because I gave up the notion that time consuming repetitive tasks were something that you had to do by hand and sure enough I found a wonderful gentlemen over at the ubuntu forums who coded up a beauty of a script that worked like a charm.  So make sure to head over to : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9578962 and give the guy a big thank you hug for saving you hours of work, and read the instructions on how to use it.

Here’s the script, just copy and paste this into a file, chmod it to 755 and you’re off to the races:

#!/bin/sh
#This script creates xml files that can act as dynamic wallpapers for Gnome by referring to multiple wallpapers
#Coded by David J Krajnik
if [ "$*" = "" ]; then
  echo "This script creates xml files that can act as dynamic backgrounds for Gnome by referring to multiple wallpapers";
  echo "Usage: mkwlppr.sh target-file.xml [duration] pic1 pic2 [pic3 .. picN]";
else
  files=$*;
  #Grab the name of the target xml file
  xmlfile=`echo $files | cut -d " " -f 1`;
  #remove the first item from $files
  files=`echo $files | sed 's/^\<[^ ]*\>//'`;
  if [ "`echo $xmlfile | grep '\.xml$'`" = "" ]; then
    echo "Your target file must be an XML file";
  else
    inputIsValid="true";
    firstItem=`echo $files | cut -d " " -f 1`;
    duration="1795.0";#set the default duration
    if [ "`echo $firstItem | grep '^[0-9]\+\.[0-9]\+$'`" != "" ]; then
      echo "The duration must be an integer";
      files=`echo $files | sed 's/^\<[^ ]*\>//'`;
      inputIsValid="";
    elif [ "`echo $firstItem | grep '^[0-9]\+$'`" != "" ]; then
      #If the item is a number, then use it as the duration for each wallpaper image
      duration="`expr $firstItem - 5`.0";
      #remove the duration from the list of files
      files=`echo $files | sed 's/^\<[^ ]*\>//'`;
    fi
    if [ "$files" = "" ]; then
      echo "You must enter image files to associate with the XML file";
    else
      for file in $files
      do
        if [ ! -f $file ]; then
	  echo "\"$file\" does not exist";
	  inputIsValid="";
        elif [ "`echo $file | sed 's/^.*\.\(jpg\|jpeg\|bmp\|png\|gif\|tif\|tiff\|jif\|jfif\|jp2\|jpx\|j2k\|j2c\)$//'`" != "" ]; then
	  echo "\"$file\" is not an image file";
	  inputIsValid="";
	fi
      done
      if [ $inputIsValid ]; then
        currDir=`pwd`;
        echo "<background>" >> $xmlfile
        echo "  <starttime>\n    <year>2009</year>\n    <month>08</month>\n    <day>04</day>" >> $xmlfile;
        echo "    <hour>00</hour>\n    <minute>00</minute>\n    <second>00</second>\n  </starttime>" >> $xmlfile;
        echo "  <!-- This animation will start at midnight. -->" >> $xmlfile;
        firstFile=`echo $files | cut -d " " -f 1`;#grab the first item
        if [ "`echo $firstFile | sed 's/\(.\).*/\1/'`" != "/" ]; then
          #If the first character in the filename is not '/', then it is a relative path and must have the current directory's path appended
          firstFile="$currDir/$firstFile";
        fi
        firstFile=`echo $firstFile | sed 's/[^/]\+\/\.\.\/\?//g'`;#Remove occurrences of ".." from the filepath
        files=`echo $files | sed 's/^\<[^ ]*\>//'`;#remove the first item
        prevFile=$firstFile;
        currFile="";
        #TODO add absolute path to the filenames
        #if $currFile =~ "^/.*" then the file needs to path appended
        echo "  <static>\n    <duration>$duration</duration>\n    <file>$firstFile</file>\n  </static>" >> $xmlfile;
        for currFile in $files
        do
          if [ "`echo $currFile | sed 's/\(.\).*/\1/'`" != "/" ]; then
            #If the first character in the filename is not '/', then it is a relative path and must have the current directory's path appended
            currFile="$currDir/$currFile";
          fi
          currFile=`echo $currFile | sed 's/[^/]\+\/\.\.\/\?//g'`;#Remove occurrences of ".." from the filepath
          echo "  <transition>\n    <duration>5.0</duration>\n    <from>$prevFile</from>\n    <to>$currFile</to>\n  </transition>" >> $xmlfile;
          echo "  <static>\n    <duration>$duration</duration>\n    <file>$currFile</file>\n  </static>" >> $xmlfile;
          prevFile=$currFile;
        done
        echo "  <transition>\n    <duration>5.0</duration>\n    <from>$currFile</from>\n    <to>$firstFile</to>\n  </transition>" >> $xmlfile;
        echo "</background>" >> $xmlfile;
      fi
    fi
  fi
fi

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Volume Control icon/applet is missing from notification area

May 4

Posted by admin in Links | No Comments

Can’t remember when this happened to me but after some upgrade in the past my gnome-volume-control-applet just stop appearing in my notification area.  From what I understand this is due to the full integration of Pulse Audio in the last linux builds, but either way it was a pain in the arse as this little tool is the easiest way to be adjusting your volume.   After some searching I found a quick fix and that was to simple go into System > Preferences and add the following to the Startup Applications list:

gnome-volume-control-applet

That should do it, upon bootup you should have it back and if you don’t want to wait till you reboot just press alt-f2 and run it there.   Viola! Problem solved

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How to mount a USB External NTFS Hard Drive that won’t mount in Ubuntu

Feb 19

Posted by admin in Linux / Freebsd | No Comments

So I was having a problem with my external USB hard drive lately.  The USB connectors on this LG laptop are a bit shady so things get disconnected if you bump them and this would happen with my hard drive.. The problem being that if the Hard drive was disconnected like this and not properlyy unmounted that it wouldn’t come back up 50% of the time when I plugged it back in.

It would show up when I run fdisk -l and in dmesg but when I try to mount the drive it would return with the error ‘special device does not exist’.  The only way I could get it back online was to reboot the machine, until now! :)

I tried installed usbmount and pmount but neither fixed the problem.

After some research I discovered the MAKEDEV command.  So what I tried was to run MAKEDEV from inside of /dev/ and it would give me an error: “.udevdb or .udev presence implies active udev.  Aborting MAKEDEV invocation.”

So I went on and looked into /dev/.udev/ and found a /failed/ directory which had a blocked file in there referring to the hard drive that wasn’t mounting.  For some reason I ran the MAKEDEV [device] command here and VIOLA, it worked.  Apparently it just needs to be run in a directory that doesn’t have a .udev subdirectory in it

So for me the command was MAKEDEV /dev/sdd and it created sdd1 through sdd10.  Not sure what the other ones are for but I was able to mount sdd1 properly and access my hard drive.  I mean this is a pretty backwards work around but I can access my hard drive without rebooting, so I’m good to go!

So to sum it up, if you have a device that isn’t mounting properly but you can see the device with #sudo fdisk -l then:

  1. try creating a temporary directory for your new mount points
  2. Then run MAKEDEV [device] inside of that directory.  So if the partition your trying to mount is say /dev/sda1 then you’ll want to run MAKEDEV /dev/sda and hopefully that gives you access without needing to reboot.

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Open Source Alternatives to Commercial Software

Jan 24

Posted by admin in Links, Technology | 2 Comments

I found this article today and wanted to reproduce it and share it around even more as it is such a wicked list.  More and more we are getting to a place where there are so many great alternatives to commercial software that you can almost see the business model starting to collapse.

Enjoy

Graphic Applications

ACDSee 9

Image:Imgv.png

Imgv is a unique and feature rich Image Viewer. It is released as free software with full source code. Imgv is portable and can run on Windows, Linux, BSD, OSX, and other operating systems. Features include a GUI that doesn’t get in the way of viewing your images, a file browser, slideshows, zooming, rotating, on-the-fly Exif viewing, histograms, fullscreen support, wallpaper setting, the ability to view 4 images on the screen at once, adjustable thumbnail sizes, playlists, view and download images from Web sites, movie playing, file searching/filtering, multiple directory loading, transitional effects, image hiding and more.

Cornice is a cross-platform image viewer written in Python + wxPython + PIL. It doesn’t pretend to be complete, fast, or even useful, but I like it and it is the viewer I use on both Linux and Windows. It has been inspired by the famous Windows-only ACDSee.
Adobe After Effects

Jahshaka is an editing and effects system. It allows to edit with flexibility and speed, create effects in real time, animate with unlimited features, paint and design on moving video, create music with all the tools the pros use, work in any format at any resolution.
Adobe FrameMaker and QuarkXPress

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Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of “press-ready” output and new approaches to page layout. Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.
KWord is a frame-based word-processing and desktop publishing application. KWord is capable of creating demanding and professional looking documents. Whether you are a corporate or home user, production artist or student, KWord will prove a valuable and easy to use tool for all your word processing and layout needs. KWord is a wordprocessor based on frames. This can be used to place components in precise locations, as with many professional DTP applications. KWord can also handle huge amounts of texts and allows you to do professional markup with ease.
Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw

Xara Xtreme for Linuxis a powerful, general purpose graphics program for Unix platforms including Linux, FreeBSD and (in development) OS-X.

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more.

Skencil is an interactive vector drawing appliction. Known to run on GNU/Linux and other UNIX-compatible systems, it is a flexible and powerful tool for illustrations, diagrams and other purposes. A somewhat unique (for a drawing program) feature of Skencil is that it is implemented almost completely in a very high-level, interpreted language, Python. Python is powerful, object-oriented and yet easy to use.
Adobe Photoshop and Corel Paint Shop Pro

Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

CinePaint is a collection of free open source software tools for deep paint manipulation and image processing. CinePaint is used for motion picture frame-by-frame retouching, dirt removal, wire rig removal, render repair, background plates, and 3d model textures. It’s been used on many feature films, including The Last Samurai where it was used to add flying arrows. It’s also being used by pro photographers who need greater color fidelity than is available in other tools.

Krita is a painting and image editing application for KOffice. Krita is part of KOffice since version 1.4. It contains both ease-of-use and fun features like guided painting (never before has it been so easy to airbrush a straight line!) and high-end features like support for 16 bit images, CMYK, L*a*b and even OpenEXR HDR images. Krita supports many managed colorspaces, like rgb, grayscale, cmyk, lab, ycbcr and lms, in 8 and 16 bits per channel. Some colorspaces even support 32 bits per channel.

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

Gimpshop is a free graphics editor for Mac OS X 10.3/10.4, Linux, Solaris/SPARC and Windows. GIMPShop is a Gimp modification that features menu layouts, dialogs and naming conventions similar to those found in Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop users should feel right at home using Gimpshop. (This is a better alternative to GIMP if you are used to using PhotoShop.)
Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw

Unidentified Flying Raw (UFRaw) is a utility to read and manipulate raw images from digital cameras. It can be used on its own or as a Gimp plug-in. It reads raw images using Dave Coffin’s raw conversion utility – DCRaw. UFRaw supports color management workflow based on Little CMS, allowing the user to apply ICC color profiles. For Nikon users UFRaw has the advantage that it can read the camera’s tone curves.
Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro and Microsoft Movie Maker

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Kino is a non-linear DV editor for GNU/Linux. It features excellent integration with IEEE-1394 for capture, VTR control, and recording back to the camera. It captures video to disk in Raw DV and AVI format, in both type-1 DV and type-2 DV (separate audio stream) encodings. You can load multiple video clips, cut and paste portions of video/audio, and save it to an edit decision list (SMIL XML format). Most edit and navigation commands are mapped to equivalent vi key commands. Kino can export the composite movie in a number of formats: DV over IEEE 1394, Raw DV, DV AVI, still frames, WAV, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4. Still frame import and export uses gdk-pixbuf, which has support for BMG, GIF, JPEG, PNG, PPM, SVG, Targa, TIFF, and XPM. MP3 requires lame. Ogg Vorbis requires oggenc. MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 require mjpegtools or ffmpeg. MPEG-4 requires ffmpeg.
Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. It supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs. Tasks can be automated using projects, job queue and powerful scripting capabilities. Avidemux is available for Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows under the GNU GPL license.
VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit Windows platforms (95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters. VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images.
Cinelerra is a free and open source software non-linear video editing system for the Linux operating system. (However, it has also been successfully ported to Mac OS X.) It is produced by Heroine Virtual, and is distributed under the GNU General Public License. Cinelerra also includes a video compositing engine, allowing the user to perform common compositing operations such as keying and mattes.

Anime Studio and Toon Boom Studio

KToon is a 2D Animation Toolkit designed by animators (Toonka Films ) for animators, focused to the Cartoon Industry. This project is covered by the GPL License using G++, OpenGL and QT as programming resources from KDevelop as the development platform. By now, KToon is only available for Unix systems but we expect to make it works on Windows systems too someday.

Synfig is a powerful, industrial-strength vector-based 2D animation software package, designed from the ground-up for producing feature-film quality animation with fewer people and resources.
Autodesk 3ds Max

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Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.
Autodesk AutoCAD

QCad is an application for computer aided drafting in two dimensions (2d). With QCad you can create technical drawings such as plans for buildings, interiors, mechanical parts or schemas and diagrams. QCad works on Windows, Mac OS X and many Linux and Unix Systems. The source code of the QCad community edition is released under the GPL.

BRL-CAD package is a powerful Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) solid modeling system with over 20 years development and production use by the U.S. military. BRL-CAD includes an interactive geometry editor, parallel ray-tracing support for rendering and geometric analysis, path-tracing for realistic image synthesis, network distributed framebuffer support, image-processing and signal-processing tools. The entire package is distributed in source code form.
Autodesk Maya

Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.
Corel Trace

Potrace is a utility for tracing a bitmap, which means, transforming a bitmap into a smooth, scalable image. The input is a bitmap (PBM, PGM, PPM, or BMP format), and the default output is an encapsulated PostScript file (EPS). A typical use is to create EPS files from scanned data, such as company or university logos, handwritten notes, etc. The resulting image is not “jaggy” like a bitmap, but smooth. It can then be rendered at any resolution. Potrace can currently produce the following output formats: EPS, PostScript, PDF, SVG (scalable vector graphics), Xfig, Gimppath, and PGM (for easy antialiasing).
Adobe Flash Professional (formerly Macromedia)

OpenLaszlo is an open source platform for creating zero-install web applications with the user interface capabilities of desktop client software. OpenLaszlo programs are written in XML and JavaScript and transparently compiled to Flash and, with OpenLaszlo 4, DHTML. The OpenLaszlo APIs provide animation, layout, data binding, server communication, and declarative UI. An OpenLaszlo application can be as short as a single source file, or factored into multiple files that define reusable classes and libraries.

IMPRESS is a truly outstanding tool for creating effective multimedia presentations. Your presentations will stand out with 2D and 3D clip art, special effects, animation, and high-impact drawing tools. IMPRESS has a complete range of easy-to-use drawing and diagramming tools to spice up your presentation. Slide show Animation and Effects bring your presentation to life. Fontworks provides stunning 2D and 3D images from text. Create lifelike 3D images with astounding speed and response.
Macromedia Freehand MX

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more.

Karbon is a vector-based drawing application for KOffice. It allows artists to create complex drawings without losing image quality when zooming in on, or resizing the drawing. You can use Karbon to add finishing touches to diagrams created using Kivio or charts created using KChart.

Skencil is an interactive vector drawing appliction. Known to run on GNU/Linux and other UNIX-compatible systems, it is a flexible and powerful tool for illustrations, diagrams and other purposes. A somewhat unique (for a drawing program) feature of Skencil is that it is implemented almost completely in a very high-level, interpreted language, Python. Python is powerful, object-oriented and yet easy to use.

Xara Xtreme for Linuxis a powerful, general purpose graphics program for Unix platforms including Linux, FreeBSD and (in development) OS-X.
Microsoft Publisher

DRAW – from a quick sketch to a complex plan, DRAW gives you the tools to communicate with graphics and diagrams. You can manipulate objects, rotate in two or three dimensions; the 3D controller puts spheres, rings, cubes, etc. at your disposal. Arrange objects: group, ungroup, regroup, and edit objects while grouped. Sophisticated rendering let you create photorealistic images with your own texture, lighting effects, transparency, perspective, and so on. Smart connectors make short work of flowcharts, organisation charts, network diagrams, etc. Define your own ‘glue points’ for connectors to ‘stick’ to.

Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of “press-ready” output and new approaches to page layout. Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.
Microsoft Visio

ArgoUML is the leading open source UML modeling tool and includes support for all standard UML 1.4 diagrams. It runs on any Java platform and is available in ten languages. ArgoUML provides constraint modeling support on UML Classes and Features. The Dresden OCL toolkit enables ArgoUML to perform syntax and type checking on those constraints. Diagrams can be saved as GIF, PNG, PostScript, Encapsulated PS, PGML and SVG.

Dia can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It currently has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams. It is also possible to add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files, using a subset of SVG to draw the shape. It can load and save diagrams to a custom XML format (gzipped by default, to save space), can export diagrams to a number of formats, including EPS, SVG, XFIG, WMF and PNG, and can print diagrams (including ones that span multiple pages).

DRAW – from a quick sketch to a complex plan, DRAW gives you the tools to communicate with graphics and diagrams. You can manipulate objects, rotate in two or three dimensions; the 3D controller puts spheres, rings, cubes, etc. at your disposal. Arrange objects: group, ungroup, regroup, and edit objects while grouped. Sophisticated rendering let you create photorealistic images with your own texture, lighting effects, transparency, perspective, and so on. Smart connectors make short work of flowcharts, organisation charts, network diagrams, etc. Define your own ‘glue points’ for connectors to ‘stick’ to.

Kivio is an easy to use diagramming and flowcharting application with tight integration to the other KOffice applications. It enables you to create network diagrams, organisation charts, flowcharts and more. Features: scriptable stencils using Python, support for Dia stencils, plugin framework for adding more functionality.

StarUML is an open source project to develop fast, flexible, extensible, featureful, and freely-available UML/MDA platform running on Win32 platform. The goal of the StarUML project is to build a software modeling tool and also platform that is a compelling replacement of commercial UML tools such as Rational Rose, Together and so on.
Pixar RenderMan

Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.

Pixie is an open source RenderMan renderer for generating photorealistic images. You can compile Pixie on Windows (using Visual Studio 2005), Linux and on OSX (using XCode or unix style configure script). Pixie now has a new raytracing engine that automatically tesselates surfaces on the fly to a desired accuracy determined using the ray differentials. This means rays tracing blurry reflections or computing global illumination are faster to trace and sharp reflections and shadows are more accurate. Pixie also contains a memory manager that keeps the memory that is used to keep these tesselations around under control. Similar to texture caching, Pixie will maintain a set of active surfaces and only those surfaces will consume raytracing memory.

Ayam is a free 3D modeling environment for the RenderMan interface, distributed under the BSD license. This means that neither the author nor any contributors make money out of this software. We need your (yes your!) feedback to keep this project alive. If you use Ayam, please submit your pictures, bug reports, or comments.

The current stable version is 1.14, released 4. Apr 2008.

Ayam currently runs on Unix (Linux, IRIX, FreeBSD tested), Win32 (Win95-Win2000, XP), and Mac OS X (Aqua and X11).

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