Ripping VCD in Linux

I've got some old VCD discs so I've spent some time on studying how to rip them for backing up.

There are two methods available:

1. To make a perfect ripping, use cdrdao read-cd:
   
   cdrdao read-cd --device ATA:1,1,0 --driver generic-mmc-raw --read-raw image.toc
   
   the --device is optional. By using this you got a TOC/BIN file pair that contains all the tracks from VCD which can be used to produce exact 1:1 copies. You can also generate a CUE/BIN pair by passing a filename with .cue extension. Although it is said that mplayer and totem can play the BIN file if proper decoding plugins are installed, I have never been able to do that, which is a big problem for me.
   
   Credit goes to manmath: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-217997.html


2. For easy playing back, you can extract MPG files by using GNU VCDImager, which is included in many popular distros. Using the vcdxrip program:
   
   vcdxrip -C=/dev/cdrom
   
   By this you got all videos in usable MPG files.

Though you may be able to copy DAT files from VCD to your hard drive directly in Windows, this is not the case in Linux systems, you'll get I/O errors. The reason is that the file system of VCD disc is not valid ISO-9660 and never meant to support direct copying video data as plain files. Windows must be doing some conversion behind the hood.

mplayer and ASS subtitles in UTF-16 with BOM

Tina got a piece of .mkv video with ASS subtitles, which was in UTF-16 and began with BOM (0xFF 0xFE), perhaps generated by using some programs from Windows kingdom. mplayer can't load ASS that begins with BOM and produces the following error message:

Matroska file format detected.
VIDEO:  [avc1]  864x480  24bpp  23.976 fps    0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s)
SUB: Could not determine file format
Cannot load subtitles: file.ass

The remedy:

1. Convert the ASS file to UTF-8 (or whatever encoding you are comfortable with). I used iconv: iconv -f utf16 -t utf8 < file.ass > result.ass


2. Play it by using the "-utf8" switch of mplayer: mplayer -ass -utf8 file.mkv. If the ASS contains special characters (such as CJK chars), use a good font by "-font /usr/share/font/cjk.ttf"

Fix nVidia's Proprietary Driver's Poor 2D Performance on Linux

Call me a fool. I bought an XFX GeForce FX 5200 PCI for my workstation (which is actually a Dell SC440 tower server who has no AGP slot). And nVidia's poor proprietary driver is notorious slow of 2D on Linux. The CPU usage of the Xorg process easily goes up to around 70% on my Xeon Core 2 @ 1.86GHz even when scrolling the text in gnome-terminal, not to say reading web pages in Firefox, which slows down everything else. And I've been sticking to a years old pristine GNOME (2.14 shipped with Debian 4.0 Etch) with nothing eye-candy here.

Finally I've found a workaround: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=1704073&postcount=1: Update (2008-07-18) worked for me. In courtesy of xsolarwindx.

The improvement: now with this little fix the time used to build an Linux kernel on my workstation is only half as before just because the little baby likes writing its progress onto the terminal and old nVidia hates this so it made the displaying of text even more time-consuming than compiling the multi-million-line kernel itself!

I've been running nVidia's driver 173.14.12 x86_64 on a stock Debian 4.0 Etchnhalf kernel (2.6.24-etchnhalf.1-amd64).

I'll never buy an nVidia unless they released full GPL drivers.

Install ATI's fglrx Catalyst 8.8 Driver (v 8.522) on Linux 2.6.27

The Linux kernel 2.6.27 has changed an API (smp_call_function()) that breaks compilation of ATI's Catalyst 8.8 fglrx driver. You get error like this:

/usr/src/fglrx-8.522/firegl_public.c:3080:50: error: macro "smp_call_function" passed 4 arguments, but takes just 3
/usr/src/fglrx-8.522/firegl_public.c: In function ‘__ke_flush_cache’:
/usr/src/fglrx-8.522/firegl_public.c:3080: error: ‘smp_call_function’ undeclared (first use in this function)
/usr/src/fglrx-8.522/firegl_public.c:3080: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
/usr/src/fglrx-8.522/firegl_public.c:3080: error: for each function it appears in.)
...

Loïc Minier has made a patch for Catalyst 8.7, and I've adapted it to Catalyst 8.8:

From 42a6390f599294c60a4960b0a6cd4e399b1a81ee Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Yan Li 
Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2008 17:45:48 +0800
Subject: [PATCH] patch for building on 2.6.27

ref: http://groups.google.com/group/linux.debian.bugs.dist/browse_thread/thread/6086b1cb7674fc43
---
 firegl_public.c |   15 +++++++++++----
 1 files changed, 11 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

diff --git a/firegl_public.c b/firegl_public.c
index bdc94b2..d85a567 100644
--- a/firegl_public.c
+++ b/firegl_public.c
@@ -202,6 +202,13 @@
 #define preempt_enable()
 #endif
 
+/* Since 2.6.27 smp_call_function doesn't have a nonatomic/retry argument */
+#if LINUX_VERSION_CODE >= KERNEL_VERSION(2,6,27)
+#define SMP_CALL_FUNCTION(func, info, retry, wait) smp_call_function(func, info, wait)
+#else
+#define SMP_CALL_FUNCTION(func, info, retry, wait) smp_call_function(func, info, retry, wait)
+#endif
+
 // ============================================================
 /* globals */
 
@@ -3077,7 +3084,7 @@ int ATI_API_CALL __ke_flush_cache(void)
 {
 #ifdef __SMP__
     /* write back invalidate all other CPUs (exported by kernel) */
- if (smp_call_function(deferred_flush, NULL, 1, 0) != 0)
+ if (SMP_CALL_FUNCTION(deferred_flush, NULL, 1, 0) != 0)
   panic("timed out waiting for the other CPUs!\n");
 
     /* invalidate this CPU */
@@ -4796,7 +4803,7 @@ struct _agp_memory* ATI_API_CALL __ke_agp_allocate_memory_phys_list(
 void ATI_API_CALL KCL_CallFuncOnOtherCpus(firegl_void_routine_t func_to_call) 
 {
 #ifdef CONFIG_SMP
- smp_call_function( firegl_smp_func_parameter_wrap, (void*)func_to_call, 0, 1 );
+ SMP_CALL_FUNCTION( firegl_smp_func_parameter_wrap, (void*)func_to_call, 0, 1 );
 #endif
 }
 
@@ -4910,7 +4917,7 @@ static int ATI_API_CALL KCL_enable_pat(unsigned int save_orig_pat)
    }
 
 #ifdef CONFIG_SMP
-   if (smp_call_function(KCL_setup_pat, NULL, 0, 1) != 0)
+   if (SMP_CALL_FUNCTION(KCL_setup_pat, NULL, 0, 1) != 0)
        return 0;
 #endif
    KCL_setup_pat(NULL);
@@ -4929,7 +4936,7 @@ static void ATI_API_CALL KCL_disable_pat(void)
     }
 
 #ifdef CONFIG_SMP
-    if (smp_call_function(KCL_restore_pat, NULL, 0, 1) != 0)
+    if (SMP_CALL_FUNCTION(KCL_restore_pat, NULL, 0, 1) != 0)
        return;
 #endif
     KCL_restore_pat(NULL);
-- 
1.5.4.3

I suggest use the --buildpkg function of the ATI driver to build packages for your system. Those packages use dkms to build the kernel module needed. (For Debian/Ubuntu flavor Linux, I suggest use the way as described in https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/ATI.) Apply the above patch after installed the fglrx-kernel-source.*.deb to /var/lib/dkms/fglrx/8.522/source, then run "sudo dkms build -m fglrx -v 8.522" to build the kernel module.

Reference:
http://groups.google.com/group/linux.debian.bugs.dist/browse_thread/thread/6086b1cb7674fc43

Generating Gantt from Bugzilla Tasks by Using TaskJuggler

We've been using Bugzilla in various projects to track tasks' status and it turned out to be an excellent tool for collaboration and project management. Gantt is useful in various ways for project status checking and planning. Today I've spent some time to set up automatically generation of Gantt from Bugzilla tasks by using a combination of various tools.

• TaskJuggler: excellent free software on task scheduling and report generation, with beautiful GUI and powerful command-line interface.


• Bugzilla:TaskJugglerIntegration: export Bugzilla tasks to TaskJuggler project file.

The script bztotj.py from Bugzilla:TaskJugglerIntegration is easy to understand, and by changing the SQL in it you can export tasks from Bugzilla by arbitrary filters.

TaskJuggler's task is written in plain text so it's good for change management. It also features a nice GUI editor. You may need some time to learn to write project files but once you get it you can write versatile project files and, by writing scripts to manipulate them, implement complex project scheduling schema.

If you want to generate Gantt from TaskJuggler tasks without human interference, you can use this tool: http://blog.gustavobarbieri.com.br/2007/04/19/generating-gantt-graphs-from-taskjuggler-projects-without-using-its-ui/

My Home Storage Reached 2 TB

Today I bought and installed a 750GB hard drive to my backup server. This made my total storage at home reached 2.11 TB. The usable storage is more than 500 GB (others are used for backup).

OpenStreetMap is an Interesting Project

www.openstreetmap.org is an really interesting project, I've been contributing to it for some time, mainly covers Beijing urban and rural area.

My HD High Load/unload Cycle Problem Fix

I've just applied http://en.opensuse.org/Disk_Power_Management to fix the high load/unload cycle problem of my IBM ThinkPad T43p laptop. My Load_Cycle_Count grows at around 30 per hour, which is not very high, but theoratically limit my HD's life to around 4 years.

PS. though I dislike SuSE due to their pact with Microsoft, they are doing really well in some fields. The article mentioned above is well written, neat and clean, and the script is in good quality. I was told that openSUSE has already included patches to fix this problem, while Ubuntu's users are still struggling to either fix it by themselves or talking in the forums, trying to understand what to do.

IBM/Lenove ThinkPad Battery Maintenance in Linux

I felt the deteriorate of the lifetime of the battery on my IBM ThinkPad T43p. This article has a good discussion on best practices. I also installed the tm_smapi driver and set charge threshold for my laptop.

Save battery, no waste. :)

China Earthquake Relief, Sichuan, 2008

The 2008 Sichuan earthquake occurred at 14:28:04.1 CST (06:28:04.1 UTC) on 12 May 2008, with its epicenter in Wenchuan County, Sichuan province of the People's Republic of China. It had a magnitude of 7.8 Ms according to the State Seismological Bureau of China and 7.9 Mw according to the United States Geological Survey.

With more than 60,000 recently confirmed dead so far, it was the deadliest and strongest earthquake to hit China since the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, which killed approximately 250,000 people.

Please consider donation to China Red Cross! Thank you!

Qt Problem of Google Earth 4.3 Beta for Linux

On some systems (as Ubuntu Hardy 8.04) the Google Earth 4.3 Beta doesn't work very well, the fonts are ugly and tiny. You may try this workaround:
http://groups.google.fr/group/earth-linux/browse_thread/thread/e10a5337b0b47ba1#

On other systems (as CentOS 5.1) it may work very well out-of-box.

HOWTO: vsftpd's Virtual User Use Local Privileges

If you are using vsftpd with virtual users, as described in official example, and are suffering problems like this:

226 Transfer done (but failed to open directory).

(you may see above text in client or server log), you may consider using "virtual_use_local_privs".

Per study of cpdohert, if you want vsftpd's virtual user follow local privileges, you have to use:

virtual_use_local_privs=YES

FTP Ascii Mode in KDE (kioslave)

Write a ~/.kde/share/config/kio_ftprc, with

[hostname]
textmode=true

Or use [] instead of [hostname] to make it used everywhere.

Warning: this will likely mess up any transfers of binary files.

In courtesy of David Faure.

Steps to Upgrade MoinMoin Wiki from 1.5.* to 1.6.*

I've been using the MoinMoin Wiki from Debian Testing for some time and this morning I found it was upgraded from 1.5.8 to 1.6.2, and unsurprisingly, my Wiki installation stopped working, very obviously some data migration may be necessary.

After wasted some time, I found a good article: Thomas Waldmann's AnotherWayToMigrateFrom1.5To1.6. I couldn't find a good official migration guide like this, which told you that you must run cache cleaning and data migration.

Hope this is useful to other MoinMoin users.

Use pdftk to Update PDF File's Meta Data

A good tool, pdftk, can be used to manipulate PDF files, changing meta-data, page-juggling, etc., you name it! And it's GPLed.

Easy, peasy, japanesey.

Error of Running VMware Server 1.0.5 on Debian 4.0 Etch

I installed VMware Server 1.0.5 on Debian 4.0 Etch (i686) today and couldn't start vmware-console due to this error:

(vmware:20921): libgnomevfs-WARNING **: Cannot load module `/usr/lib/gnome-vfs-2.0/modules/libfile.so' (/usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6))

To fix this problem, start VMware by running:

VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK=yes vmware

For more information on this please click the title, which leads to a post on VMware community website.

RPM Spec: conditional build based on host distro

When writing spec of RPM, often you need to write some special instructions that are needed only on some distros or versions, but not all. You can use this:

# Do something for FC4 and beyond.
%if 0%{?fedora} >= 4
    # ...
%endif

Tweak GNOME Auto Mount Options

Use gconf-editor to edit the key:

/system/storage/default_options/vfat/mount_options

The most useful one for me to add is "iocharset=utf8".

Ignoring .svn directories with grep

Have lived with Subversion for many years and finally I found this (link to outside my blog) simple little trick. :)

Wikipedia Unblocked (temp) in China

Now I can access Wikipedia in China without using a proxy, not all contents, only a large part. This is a big step forward.

As well as blogspot.com, wow!

May His Holiness let this last.