Wow, been some time and rzip

Wow, forgot how long it's been on here. My little place I keep my hints for myself and any others who get the same issues as me.
Obviously there are less issues with Linux Mint and I've not broken anything enough yet.

Anyway needed to do some compression on files today. Did a search, read a bit and it looks like rzip, from the repository was the one for me. Apparently lrzip is slightly better but I'd started encoding by the time I looked at that and it's just an upgrade to rzip.

So first I install it.

do a : rzip --help   for the info.

 -0            fastest (worst) compression
 -6            default compression
 -9            slowest (best) compression
 -d            decompress
 -o filename   specify the output file name
 -S suffix     specify compressed suffix (default '.rz')
 -f            force overwrite of any existing files
 -k            keep existing files
 -P            show compression progress
 -V            show version

Important notes being without the "-k" it deletes the original file after compression. I may not want that sometimes.

Opening a graphical program from Terminal

One thing I have had to work out myself as it may seem obvious to many or it may be stated somewhere I've never looked is sudo and gksudo

I've come across errors many times in Terminal such as

IBUS-WARNING

Gtk-WARNING

This I now know is because I was trying to open a programme with a graphical front end from within the Terminal.

I now know if I try to open it as root using the sudo command I need to do it as gksudo. This is to warn the system it is opening a graphical programme which may have other environmental variables it needs to set up which would not be otherwise.


So for example in Terminal and wanting to use gedit (the editing programme) I use from the command line:

$ gksudo gedit

and not

$ sudo gedit

Non-existent Drive Mounting on boot

I've had this problem before once and recently it happened again.

When I start the computer it hangs during the Mint load-up screen with the message:
Key: Disk not mounted. Press S to skip or M to manually mount (or something like this anyway)

Sometimes I use software like PhotoRec and GParted to check friends damaged hard drives and recover their files for them. I use my external Hard disk Caddy to do this. I back-up the drive first and then start messing with it sometimes booting to a windows partition to use CHKDSK the windows disk tool along with other things such as Hyrons boot disk etc.

Somehow I seem to on occasion reboot to Linux Mint without removing the damaged drive, I think I've done it when I have been tired or frustrated but the end result is Mint automatically adds the drive to my start up. This is probably the Automount programme (I need to read up more on that one).

Result, on a boot up the computer expects to find a disk that is not there after I have removed it from the caddy.

To fix this, once booted into Mint and after the message (Press S to skip the mounting) I need to go into Terminal and change the fstab script which controls the disks expected to be found.

Terminal
sudo fdisk -l

As Root. This lists the drives. Check the ones available. sda (first physical disc), sda1 (first physical disc, partition 1), sdb2 (second physical disk, partition 2) for examples.

Terminal
gksudo gedit /etc/fstab

As Root. Use "gedit" text editor to view contents of file "fstab" located in folder "etc".

Once this is up and viewable I can see the instructions and options for each partition to be mounted. There is a  description above each instruction with a hash (#) symbol in front of it  which is used like the old REM comment tag in Basic's.

Anyway I use this hash (#) tag to comment out the instruction which loads the now no longer existent drive. I save the file to make the changes and use menu to reboot the machine.

The computer now loads as normal without searching for a non-existent drive.

September: Memes, Music and 2D modelling

September has been quite quiet really. Everything I have wanted to do using Linux Mint I've been able to do easily and quickly.

I've made a few Memes to post for friends. Knocked them up, no problem using "Gimp" and "Pinta" (the Linux equivalent of PaintNet). One thing I didn't realise with "Pinta" though was that you cannot print with it. It just took an extra stage saving the file then opening it with an image viewer and printing it from there.

I've started to use "Clementine" as my music player instead of "Quod Libet" as it seems to be a bit faster, it also has a nice Tag editor built in and a few other options but not too many as to make it bloated and too much. One point with "Quod Libet" also was that it had a few problems associating itself with my various music file types Ogg and MP3. I did fix it but it kept breaking. In the end I just could not be bothered with finding out why as I had discovered "Clementine" by that time and decided to use that.

One other thing I've been messing with over the last month is trying to make 2D plans for some  wooden weathervanes, windmills I wanted to build. Gimp was no good for this so I tried Inkscape the Vector graphics program, thinking it could size things up more accurately. It was too complicated for the casual use I wanted so I moved onto looking at other modelling programs.
Blender the 3D modeller was again just too much as I just wanted a basic 2D plan to print and paste onto wood to be cut out on my bandsaw.
LibraCad hit the sweet spot. Not to over complicated and 2D. It's a bit light on tutorials and help files but I have managed to get some plans drawn on it. Its still a learning curve having done nothing like this since Technical Drawing at school where we had a pencil and a ruler. I think I will improve soon though with a little work. YouTube did have a reasonable set of tutorials but as I said there's a lot missing for the novice like me.

All in one converter

FF Multiconverter

Converts Video, Documents and Images.

Terminal



sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ffmulticonverter/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ffmulticonverter

Supported formats:

Audio/Video formats:

aac, ac3, afc, aiff, amr, asf, au, avi, dvd, flac, flv, mka, mkv, mmf, mov, mp3, mp4, mpg, ogg, ogv, psp, rm, spx, vob, wav, webm, wma, wmv
And any other format supported by ffmpeg.

Image formats:

bmp, cgm, dpx, emf, eps, fpx, gif, jbig, jng, jpeg, mrsid, p7, pdf, picon, png, ppm, psd, rad, tga, tif, webp, xpm

Document file formats:

doc > odt, pdf
html > odt
odp > pdf, ppt
ods > pdf
odt > doc, html, pdf, rtf, sxw, txt, xml
ppt > odp
rtf > odt
sdw > odt
sxw > odt
txt > odt
xls > ods
xml > doc, odt, pdf

ATI Graphics fix for Radeon HD2*** - HD4*** Cards

Well I fixed this once but then after messing about adding a Nvidia external card to my system I broke it and had to go through the painful experience of finding the fix again.
So better write this down.

The Problem.

It seems that ATI Radeon Graphics Cards and built in motherboard Graphics using these chips (such as my ASRock 960GM Motherboard) are a bit problematic when installing the propriety drivers and the open source drivers are a bit crap (up to yet).

It has problems using the Cinnamon desktop and manifests itself by only using software rendering which has meant using 45% of the processors power and the fan runs hot and crazy sometimes. I also noticed no hardware 3D.

The reason.

After some reading and a lot of red herrings from various forums it comes down to ATI no longer supporting the Linux drivers for these cards, series Radeon HD 2*** through to Radeon HD4***. Mine is an onboard Radeon HD3000.
It seems as the x-org server which runs the desktop behind the scenes has been updated this has created incompatibilities with the driver.
The newer versions of the ATI Catalyst propriety installation program for Linux will not work for the older cards / chips and are not supported anymore.

The Solution.

The only way to fix this is to downgrade your x-org server to an older version and then install the legacy (old) driver that last worked fully.
Luckily Tomasz Makarewicz has made a fix for this and a web search for his site shows you how. https://launchpad.net/~makson96/+archive/fglrx

Now I followed his instructions but still had problems with Cinnemon not running. It crashed on start up.
I wasn't the only one and found an interesting fix on the Linux Mint forums. I can't remember the link though and this guy needs some credit too. I did write down his process to do after the makson96 fix was done and this has fixed everything. Even the Catalyst adjustment program works on the menu.
This is it.

Reboot ...... Cinnemon crashes.....

Open terminal

sudo apt-get remove --purge xorg-driver-fglrx fglrx*

sudo apt-get install --reinstall libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-core

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg


He then says delete xorg.conf which is in the ./etc/ folder but I don't think this is necessary.

Anyway then reboot. I did it straight from the terminal with

 sudo reboot

Voila !!! My sytem was working with the ATI drivers.

Next Job getting duel monitors working. that should be fun.

My Music Organisation Process

Well I've been organising and converting my music collection, which is a mixed bag of formats. I've tried tidying it up before with mixed success. It's still a bit of a task but it's coming along.

This post is just about the method I've finally settled on and what seems to be working.

The biggest problems I've previously come across are tagging correctly, unknown albums and multiple formats. I've narrowed down the tools I need to cover all possibilities I've come across and built a handy little set that seems to do the job without installing too much stuff I will never use.

These are:

Sound Converter
MusicBrainz Picard
Quod Libet
and the command line tool BinChunker

By using these four tools I have managed to overcome just about every issue I've had. The only thing I have not sorted out is album art. I've not really looked into it yet as my priority was to sort the actual music out for easy access and cataloguing and so stuff will play to my media players around the house.

My first thought was "How am I going to store the files ?". I will be storing everything on an external Hard disc connected to my PC with Mint Olivia running as its operating system. This made my choice of file system to use wide but limited as well. I did some research.

fat16 / fat32 = too old and newer file systems seemed better at dealing with faults.

exFat = This is the system designed with USB sticks (Pen drives or whatever) in mind. It looked modern and what I was looking for but it has a flaw. Linux support is not so good from what I read and the linux drivers are slow. As I will be using Linux machines mostly I don't want search delays and stuttering music. So this option was out.

ext3 and ext4 = My operating system is formatted in this so I thought, why not ? A lot of info (the bits I understand) seemed outdated saying ext4 was untested and stick to ext3. I decided to go the ext4 way.

 On settling with ext4 I started to format an external drive I had using gparted.
I hit a problem. The drive I had was a Western Digital external drive and it would not allow me to write to it after the ext4 formatting unless i was in ROOT. A little investigation showed me the drive uses WD Elements which seems to be an external piece of software held with the driver chip and not on the Hard disc itself. This is there to do various tasks that work very well on a Windows based machine but the WD forums basically leave you on your own as a Linux user. Not being able to bypass this block without spending too much time I abandoned my choice of ext4 and made a new decision.

NTFS = After my previous choice was made too difficult to proceed with I was left with just the one. I did look at a few other systems such as HFS and Reiser4 but each had their minus points that put me off. And so I was left with NTFS, which seemed to be the best option with the equipment I had.

So the external drive was formatted and ready to go. I could now write to it and all was well.

My second decision was how to organise things while I was going through the process of conversion. I decided to put a folder next to my original music folder to store the originals but after I had processed them, to make it easier to distinguish files converted between conversion sessions (we all need a break eh!). This meant at the end of each session I could just move the files over and it would be easy to see where to start again when I came back.

I then made a folder for the converted files on the external hard disc to store these files in.

I used SoundConverter next setting it up to store the converted files in the root of the external drive. I did this so I could check for errors and multiple albums before storing them in the completed folder. SoundConverter has a bulk process option which is why I chose it.

I decided to use ogg as my format to convert to, so all my files would be the same. There are various qualities and formats so I didn't think it would make too much difference and FLAC would be overkill on most. If I was unhappy with the sound quality I could always go back and re-rip the CD's from my collection although this would not be possible with my own recordings from my friends bands gigs obviously.

Any faulty TAGS were altered in Quod Libet as this has a good tag editor or updated in Picard so the file names and tags were correct.

At one point I found a Bin and Cue file which was quickly converted using BinChunker to a set of Wav files which could then be converted and tagged.

So thats how its been working so far.

File and default application association

OK, today I've been messing with my music collection. I've decided to use "Quod Libet" as my music player. It's much simpler than "banshee" which has just too many options and other rubbish I won't use on it. Quod Libet is much simpler and has the options for any plugins I may want to add in the future..and my favourite thing about it is that is has a nice file viewer which is exactly how I like to choose my music (from the folder it is stored in).

Anyway I set everything up but found under menu / system settings / details / default applications I could not associate Quod Libet with the option to play all music files as the default player. It just was not there. it wasn't under "other applications" either.

After some searching of forums I found the process to add it. Apparently you need to associate the file type to the application, just as you would in Windows, but for some reason I have not discovered on my Linux learning curve Quod Libet is not showing as an application on the list.

So how to do it. Instead of using Nemo (the standard file manager) you need to use "Thunar" an alternative one (maybe a permission thing ?). Luckily I already had that installed so I navigated to it on the menu / system tools and there I opened a music file in the .ogg format, which is the type of music file I want Q L (lets call it that from now on) to play. From within the file manager view that listed the contents of the folder I was in I chose an .ogg file and right clicked on it to bring up the properties dialogue. Here it gave me the option to associate the file type with an application. Scrolling down, Q L was there. I associated it with the file by making sure the check mark was crossed and applied using the button for this. Easy, it associated the file system wide and now everytime I click on an Ogg Vorbis music file type Q L comes up to play it.

It even shows now as linked on the system details screen.

I've come across this situation with other file types and applications and now I have the answer !

Saving a webpage as PDF

Sometimes I want to save a webpage for viewing offline or it has interesting info I want to collate into a package to read all at once with related info. I used to save this as a HTML complete webpage and cut out the info into a word document.
then I used an online service like Evernote but this one didn't want you to sign up (which i didn't want to). That stopped working a while ago.
So now the easiest way to take that page offline is to use the CUPS to PDF printer option.

Terminal

sudo aptitude install cups-pdf

Then its just   FILE > PRINT using PDF option from the web browser.

The PDF will have the webpage title as its filename and is found in your HOME directory.

Gimp Hints

Try holding crtl, alt, and/or shift when you use the shape tools, or when resizing things. Most people know something like hold shift to make a circle/square/keep proportions, but often Alt will let you draw/resize from the centre instead of from the corner.

Google Sets

Open a Google spreadsheet, type any sequence of any words (ex: New-York, Los Angeles, Dallas,..) scroll down while holding control and see Google trying to complete your logic. Its called Google sets.