NVIDIA Brings Fast GPU Video Acceleration to Linux

It's been a while. I've sat here on my chair for a long time and thought to myself: Hey, if you want to do it, video acceleration would be really easy to integrate into Linux software: It's mostly open source and the changed would be pretty specific to that part.

Then came XvMC and it was not really convincing, because the impact was not too fast and it only worked during playback Mpeg2 AFAIK, not during transconding.

Now came NVIDIA (admittedly a couple weeks after AMD, but therefore publicly and including patches for mplayer) and finally brought out really nice and efficient video acceleration for linux.

My favorite Linux Performance News Site Phoronix checked it out and you can see quite an improvement (CPU usage with first OpenGL, then XVideo and then Nvidia's "VDPAU"(Video Decode and Presentation API).

I hope AMD and Intel will finally come out with some progress in this area, too. Next I would like to see support for encoding, e.g. in Xvid and then maybe even tasks such as gzip, bzip2 (the latter ones didn't even show multi-core support in my tests).

Customized Linux Message Notification, I Wish I Had

After writing an alias that shows me what's currently going on in my system (tail -f /var/log/..., ~/.xsession-errors, ...) I've wondered:

A. Why the information is not all going through syslog (almost is, but not e.g. the users errors).

B. And more importantly: Why isn't there a nice interface to syslog that shows me what I want to know, e.g. as a plasma applet for kde4, configurable but with low resource consumption nice&pretty on my wallpaper?

That'd be nice, wouldn' it? Maybe I'll write that myself one day...

How to Scroll Back in Screen

Ctrl + a + [ + j/k
Or Ctrl + a then Esc and then use the cursor keys. Esc to leave the mode again.

Google Finds the Flu

Google just released a tool to track the spread of flus by statistical analysis of their search data. And it seems to work, too.

Prepare JPG Files for Fax

This script prepares your scanned Jpgs for using them e.g. with the sipgate fax. Or you can simply join them together in a small (black&white) pdf. Of course you can change it.

#!/bin/bash
# (c) 2008 linux-tipps.blogspot.com
# published under GPL v. 3.0 or later.

which convert || echo Please install ImageMagick && exit 0;
which sam2p || echo Please install sam2p && exit 0;
which pdftk || echo Please install pdftk && exit 0;

mkdir tmp
cd tmp
ln ../*.jpg .
for i in *.jpg; do nice convert $i -unsharp 3x3 -monochrome $i.png; done
for i in *.png; do sam2p -pdf:b2 $i -pdf: $i.pdf; done
pdftk *.pdf cat output output.pdf
mv output ..
cd ..

rm -rI tmp

"Begging the Software Gods"

"Begging the Software Gods" is an interesting read about what choices we make in Software and what they mean. A nice work of open source politics. I think I would not understate to say he is preaching open source ethics.

But I have one point to make: Unless you are (or employ) a mighty programmer, you are not as free as you feel after reading the article from your Linux system. ;-)

Update:
The point he makes is true and good. But in my view having a freedom is worth no more than you have the actual concrete ability to use it and gain direct benefit from it.

Now I think it should be made easier to actually do it, to benefit from that freedom. But e.g. finding a suitable programmer is often still complicated and not every open source project has a place to e.g. offer bounties. As he sais: it is not always an easy choice, but a worthy choice.

You have the freedom, but you can only really use it when you have someone with programming skills. And he did not mention that. (Of course that's not his point.)

The point I'm trying to make is that an infrastructure that enables the average non-programmer user (e.g. through money) to really take advantage of these freedoms (customize software) without much effort would have a positive effect for the open source community. It would give provide money to the programmers and help users in realizing the open source freedoms.

Now the other cool then is that you might actually get a programmer to write a feature for the same money you would have paid for a closed source software (esp. Microsoft Office vs. OpenOffice). And when you do, everybody can profit from that. If more people would see that and act like it, the whole community would profit.

TV International?

I still wonder why TV is not really international yet. We have endless countries with interesting TV channels. Especially US channels would probably get a lot of international viewers, as many people speak English and they often show things earlier than the TV stations in other countries.

But they don't broadcast their channels. At first they always claimed it would not be feasible technically, until Zattoo came along and proved what was clear before: Where there is a will, there is a way.

Now the TV stations claim they don't own the rights. Or they go online for some regions like hulu.com. And I still think: Where there's a will, there's a way. How long do we have to wait, until the Internet tears down the borders of TV stations?

How long until it will be possible to legally and comfortably watch your favorite TV series when it first aired.

Setting up NX

A tutorial how to set up the IMHO best remote desktop connection: NX.

WPA Encryption Cracked

If you haven't already read about it, it seems to be true: The Wifi encryption protocoll WPA has been compromised. The method will probably published pretty soon.

That means many people will need a new router and a new setup for it. And for a long time many networks will remain open again. If you want a long term solution it more and more looks like a VPN solution is the only way to go.

And if I'm not mistaken he who managed it is Erik Tews from the German University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt.

Okay, it turned out the hack is not as bad as thought. It will probably still take some time and combination with other approaches to really become useful. But I think this might help around the current restriction that you can only decypher clients that connected after you were "listening" with WPA.

A Tiny Backup Script with Rsync

This script lets you easily mirror a local directory to foreign computers that have rsync installed - securely via ssh. It assumes you have already set up a public key authentication with those servers. (Have a look at ssh-keygen and ssh-copy-id)

#!/bin/sh
# (c) 2008 linux-tipps.blogspot.com
#

FROM=/home/user
# the base path
DIRS="Desktop Documents"
# you can also use absolute paths

RSYNC="rsync -av --progress -e ssh"
# add -z for compression

ssh-add -l || ssh-add
# this adds ssh private keys if not added already
# for cron scripts use keychain instead:
# source ~/.keychain/*-sh
# see here for more

cd $FROM

$RSYNC -z $DIRS djtm@server1:/some/path/Backup/ &

$RSYNC $DIRS djtm@server2:/some/path/Backup/ &

wait && echo Sync Done. || echo Sync Failed or Aborted.

Find Bots in your LAN with BotHunter

BotHunter is a pretty cool software that helps you detect bots through passive network monitoring.

Their webpage has just gone offline. I'm sure that's because of all my readers visiting their web page right now. ;-)

Apple's Lock-In Syndrome

Apple is locking iPhone users into their rigid software framework through the App Store: They would not let people develop interfaces to Gmail and now they prevent the great Opera Mini from being ported to the iPhone.

Adobe Flash has also been ported, but is kept away from the iPhone by Apple.

So if you've wanted to buy an iPhone, reconsider. It's buggy and Apple won't let you install any software that might "duplicate" available functions. They should be honest and say software that competes with theirs.

Source: Heise Article [german original]

DVB-T in Linux

There are two great program for watching DVB-T in Linux: Kaffeine if you want it really comfortable (including scheduled recording, instant pause and high quality deinterlacing) and VLC if you're a sync freak (it has special syncing algorithms to ensure there is no audio video desynchronisation.

But most people don't notice a few ms desync, so I can recommend kaffeine. If you still want to use vlc, you should know you can open the channels.conf like a playlist so you need not go crazy trying to manually set up the reception.

OpenOffice 3.0 in Ubuntu 8.10

Here's a quick guide. It's all about downloading it and installing the deb files... ;-)

Interesting readme files

Who ever reads those readme files coming with the software? Well, someone did. And he's posted some funny quotes.

Ask a Spammer for Ubuntu!

Someone already did it. Check out what happened.

Fixing Wake On LAN in Ubuntu 8.10

I've already spent a few hours to finally get this working again. There are several problems in Ubuntu 8.10 considering Wake on LAN:

1. The network cards' drivers are unloaded during suspend.

This often deactivates your card's wake on lan feature and completely powers it off.
You have to add your network cards driver module to the MODULES_WHITELIST in /etc/default/acpi-support. Also add the network card's interface(e.g. eth0) to SKIP_INTERFACES.

2. The network is not (properly) restarted after resume.

a. NetworkManager overrides settings in /etc/network/interfaces.

The easy way is to simply remove networkmanager: sudo aptitude remove network-manager.

b. The network setup script is not restarted after resume.

You can add the script (networking) to STOP_SERVICES in /etc/default/acpi-support.

3. Wake on Lan is not enabled by default

You need to issue e.g. sudo ethtool -s eth0 wol g. You can do that in an init script and you will likely have to do it again after resume. (I've put it a script to do that into both /etc/acpi/suspend.d/54-wol.sh and /etc/acpi/resume.d/99-wol.sh )

List of Ubuntu Intrepid Bugs

There's a nice list of issues in Intrepid after upgrading. And there's more from other users in the comments. So read this post before considering the upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10 unless you've got some time on your hands.

Linux Memory Statistics

Find out a lot more detailled how memory is used in your Linux system with these tools.

Introduction to WINE

Here's a nice little intro on what to do with wine. For help with wine, checkout Frank's Corner.