How to Fix "symbol lookup error: ... /lib/libavcodec.so.52: undefined symbol: av_gcd" after installation of ffmpeg

It's actually quite easy once you know what's causing the problem. There are two different versions of libavcodec in your system. In my case I installed a fresh ffmpeg from SVN, now I first had to remove the package "libavcodec51". Then everything worked just fine.

sudo apt-get remove libavcodec51

If you still have problems there might be stale libraries in here: /usr/lib/libavcodec.*. Try moving them somewhere else and see if that helps. Otherwise, send me a comment. ;)

See here for a more elegant work-around that tells the package manager we've got newer libraries available.

Btrfs' Hot New Features

Check them out at Linux Mag.

Intel Graphics Users: Don't Upgrade Your Ubuntu

As phoronix points out, the intel driver woes in the newest Ubuntu version 9.04 are so bad, you should probably skip this distribution upgrade... and wait for 9.10.

Update: Here is some advice if it's already too late for you. Check the H for more information.

Mount a Partition from inside a Disk Image

You need sfdisk and losetup.

sfdisk -l -uS disk_image.raw
# look for the start sector of the partition, e.g. 2

mount -o loop,offset=$((2 * 512)) disk_image.raw /mnt
#mount the partition to /mnt (replace 2 with the output from sfdisk)

You could of course also use kpartx to create special device files for the partitions.

Some useful CLI Commands

Tuxradar has put up a nice list of useful CLI commands and other tipps. For tip #36 to work in KDE 4, you need to type e.g. =4*5+4. I also recommend tip #49, locate will help you find the file, for me it was /etc/openoffice/sofficerc.

A List of Default Passwords

can be found here:http://www.phenoelit-us.org/dpl/dpl.html

DoS in Linux Server with Boinc

For kernels earlier than 2.6.29 tasks with SCHED_IDLEPRIO creating children such as boinc can freeze the entire system. The bug seems to be in the Linux scheduler: a process with idle priority can block the entire system (with *really* bad latency). It seems to me that if you use ionice, that will make it almost impossible for other tasks to do io (e.g. access the hard drive).

The workaround for boinc is not to use schedtool's SCHED_IDLEPRIO:
Edit /etc/default/boinc-client and set to SCHEDULE="0". E.g.

echo SCHEDULE="0"|sudo tee /etc/default/boinc-client

You can also deinstall schedtool and ionice for now, though that won't fix the security issue. Affected Systems include Ubuntu Server 8.04 with all updates. But many other systems are likely affected if the fix has not yet been backported (fixed in 2.6.29).

Amazon MP3

Amazon's MP3 Service does it right and brings support not only for Windows and Mac OS X, but also for all major Linux distributions including Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora and SUSE. You can try it now and download This Much is True by Amy MacDonals for free. It worked flawlessly for me. The Amazon downloader is about 1 MB and needed roughly 6 MB dependencies on my system. It's not open soured thought and I think it's only available for i386.