Saturday, 19 April 2008

LDAP Head Banging

From time to time I need several attempts with a lot of head banging until I get something right on a Linux system. Since a while I have multiple servers and laptops running at home/office and each of them has its own user database. Therefore changing a password is tricky because I have to remember the old and the new password until I went to all boxes and updated them. Some of these boxes I hardly touch and so I can take some time do to so. That is why I started a while ago to see if I could use LDAP in order to centralize the user account management. So far I can remember at least two fai  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 10:26 PM in Linux

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Tuesday, 17 April 2007

Xgl on SuSE Rocks

This weekend I took some time off to see if I could make XGL work on SuSE. The most prominent feature of it is that it would put the virtual desktops on a cube and when one switches from one desktop to another it just turns the cube. A window can be dragged from one desktop to another by dragging it over the right hand edge and the cube will turn to the left so that the next desktop becomes visible. This way one can move a window to any other desktop just by dragging it over the edge. Following the Ope  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 10:20 PM in Linux

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Friday, 1 September 2006

Emprex DVD Recorders Failed Me On Linux

From time to time it is necessary to cut your losses and try meaning here buying something new. Both my web as well as the MythTV server are equipped with Emprex DVD Recorders (16x E-IDE) and from time to time I ran into failed burns or other strange behavior in SuSE. Now when I started to burn DVDs I ran into many failed burns meaning that I could throw away that costar afterwards. Even an firmware upgrade by unplugging it from the Linux box and hooking it into a Windows box to run the firmware upgrade did not do the trick actually it made it even worse. Finally I decided to give up on th  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 11:14 PM in Linux

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Thursday, 31 August 2006

MythTV and DVD III

Yesterday my wife saw the first DVD from a MythTV recording and now she wanted me to also burn the movie Ray onto a DVD. Now this movie is over 2 1/2 hours long and so it would not fit onto a 4.7 GB DVD disk. Then I found a hint that it is possible to compress a MPEG movie and a further search on Google revealed this page explaining a little bit further how to compress an MPEG mo  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 6:12 PM in Linux

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Wednesday, 30 August 2006

MythTV to DVD II

Finally I figured out how to create a DVD from a MythTV recording as discussed lately. After some trial and error I finally could burn and play a movie. Because I could not find an up to date documentation I want to document here what I figured out. Attention: this procedure will produce a DVD that will have no menu and no chapters but otherwise plays like regular DVDs.

First you need to install all the packages mention in the keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 4:19 PM in Linux

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Monday, 28 August 2006

MythTV to DVD

My wife asked me if it would be possible to burn a movie recorded by MythTV onto a DVD. Checking out the MythTV documentation I finally found chapter that shows how to do it. Nothing simpler than that and I started last Sunday right away. Sure enough it should not be that simple.

This is the list of tool to be installed:

  1. dvd+rw-tools
  2. dvdauthor
  3. mjpegtools
  4. avidemux2
  5. transcode
  6. k3b
To install the first, second, third and fifth component  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 2:25 PM in Linux

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Wednesday, 23 August 2006

The Next Desktop?

Is it possible to create a new type of desktop other than Gnome, KDE, Mac OS X or Windows. I saw this movie presentation from YouTube and it really looks cool even though it probably requires monitors with quite a high resolution. But we don't want to be as short sighted as Bill Gates when postulated that nobody would ever need from the 640K memory, would we. So enjoy the show and lets see what the future brings. I guess when the bell labs introduced the mouse for th  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 6:56 PM in Linux

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Tuesday, 22 August 2006

Linux and Disk Defragmantation

As discussed in my previous blog Linux does not need a defragmentation tool but you may ask why. I found this blog entry which gives a pretty good answer. Still I would like to add my 2 cents to it.

First I want to point out that Linux does not defragment their files because it takes care of it on every write to the disk. This mean  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 2:16 PM in Linux

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Wednesday, 16 August 2006

The Choice is Obvious

Today I stumbled over this page called Windows vs. Linux on the Server and the Desktop and had to laugh out loud. It is another example on how FUD is driving some people to complete irrational conclusions. Especially the last part is fun because he actually implies that Microsoft was never suit in the past and on the other hand the suite is completely unfunded as you can check out on the Linux vs. SCO: The Decision Matrixkeep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 1:50 PM in Linux

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Thursday, 10 August 2006

Ubuntu for Machiavellian

Yesterday I stumbled over a website called ubuntu christian edition. First I thought this is a joke, then I thought ubuntu becomes ridiculous and finally I was disgruntled by the Linux for Christians' Logo which is a cross on Tux belly. I did not work on Linux nor do I own the trademark or logo but many, many peopled worked on Linux and they are probably not only christians. Now going ahead and misusing the Linux   keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 1:05 PM in Linux

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Wednesday, 9 August 2006

MythTV Wireless Network Woes

After buying another Wireless Router to deliver a private wireless network for MythTV system the system now works better but still is not completely satisfactory. Most of the time the movies play without any hitch but from time to time a recording stutters on various levels. Especially on Saturday I could not reconnect to the server after the server has bounced due to the fact that it took the wireless network 10 to 20 seconds to establish a connection to the server. Going back to the server and establishing a connection to the client through SSH the network was able to connect to the clie  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 3:31 PM in Linux

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Monday, 31 July 2006

IVTV Framebuffer, Wireless Network and MythTV Wiki

In a previous blog I discussed how one can move X onto the Hauppauge TV Out so that not only the playback of recording is shown on the TV but also X including MythTV. The only thing I forgot to mention was the fact where to load the IVTV framebuffer aka: ivtv-fb module. This shall haunt me later when I tried to apply the same thing on the backend server because the two boxes are equipped nearly the same. The basic problem with keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 3:03 PM in Linux

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Thursday, 20 July 2006

MythTV: Finally I could move the UI to the Hauppauge TV Out

One of the annoying thing on my frontend box was that I had to switch on the TV between two input channels because the video cards S-Video output had to be on another input channel than the Hauppauge TV Tuner card's TV Out. After a while I figured out that one can display the X window output onto the TV Tuner's TV Out but I could not figure out how it works. After a while I finally found a fairly good description on Wikibooks MythTV Installation description (2/3 down the page). After fiddling around with X I final  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 7:24 PM in Linux

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Monday, 17 July 2006

MythTV: Where is my MySQL DB

I rebooted my backend for the first time since I upgraded it to MythTV 0.19 and the box failed to start the backend server. First I had to battle the problem with APT upgrading the kernel without the proper installation of the kernel source. After successfully conquer that issue I faced a far more severe problem with MySQL. Starting the mythbackend server it reported that it could not connect to MySQL. Using the mysql client I knew that the MySQL server was running. Then I tried the -h option with the box' IP address and sure enough it failed with   keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 2:17 PM in Linux

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Tuesday, 11 July 2006

I love, ehh, hate, ehh, love, ehh, hate SuSE

My relationship with SuSE is some sort of a love-hate one. I like how easy it is to install SuSE but still being able to customize it to my needs. Yast is a great help to configure Linux and works mostly without a problem. Now that said SuSE can be a pain in the but with certain graphics cards making installing or even upgrading a difficult task. Yesterday I decided that I am finally going to upgrade my server to SuSE 10.1. After booting from the DVD, selecting the upgrade option and resolving some package conflicts I started the installation of the new packages. That ran fine until SuSE r  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 12:09 PM in Linux

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