had a problem recenty that downloading a file, showing the default preferences or showing the downloads dialog made firefox quit unexpectedly.
don’t know what happened or why exactly but it seems to be a problem with gnome-vfs.
my solution (so far with no side effects) is to comment this line
#file: file
ind the /etc/gnome-vfs-2.0/modules/default-modules.conf file.
well i posted this in our development blog in my company and have noticed that this can be usefull for other people, but i am not responsible for anybody messing up their bios due to not knowing what they are doing!
here’s how you can flash your bios without needing a boot disk. the easy way is to use flashrom and i’ve also written a short how-to on how to boot dos from grub further below.
well installing flashrom (on ubuntu linux) is pretty unproblematic:
sudo apt-get install flashrom |
just for safety create a backup of your current bios:
sudo flashrom -r bios_20101014.bin |
output is something like this:
flashrom v0.9.3-r1211 on Linux 2.6.35-22-generic (i686), built with libpci 3.1.7, GCC 4.4.5, little endian flashrom is free software, get the source code at http://www.flashrom.org Calibrating delay loop... OK. No coreboot table found. Found chipset "Intel ICH9", enabling flash write... OK. This chipset supports the following protocols: FWH,SPI. Found chip "Winbond W25x80" (1024 KB, SPI) at physical address 0xfff00000. === Reading flash... done. |
my mainboard seems to be currently untested and so i also receive this message in my output:
This flash part has status UNTESTED for operations: WRITE The test status of this chip may have been updated in the latest development version of flashrom. If you are running the latest development version, please email a report to flashrom@flashrom.org if any of the above operations work correctly for you with this flash part. Please include the <a href="http://www.store-moneytransfer.net/coinstar_branches_483_larnaca.html">coinstar oakbrook terrace il Coinstar Money in Cyprus, Tersefanou</a> flashrom output with the additional -V option for all operations you tested (-V, -Vr, -Vw, -VE), and mention which mainboard or programmer you tested. Please mention your board in the subject line. Thanks for your help! |
well since i’m only making a backup in this step this really is irrelevant (because i’m only reading) but i also ignored this later on and it worked perfectly.
download the bios file from the manufacturers website and then flash it:
sudo flashrom -w mynewbios.rom |
here’s the output:
flashrom v0.9.3-r1211 on Linux 2.6.35-22-generic (i686), built with libpci 3.1.7, GCC 4.4.5, little endian flashrom is free software, get the source code at http://www.flashrom.org Calibrating delay loop... OK. No coreboot table found. Found chipset "Intel ICH9", enabling flash write... OK. This chipset supports the following protocols: FWH,SPI. Found chip "Winbond W25x80" (1024 KB, SPI) at physical address 0xfff00000. === This flash part has status UNTESTED for operations: WRITE The test status of this chip may have been updated in the latest development version of flashrom. If you are running the latest development version, please email a report to flashrom@flashrom.org if any of the above operations work correctly for you with this flash part. Please include the flashrom output with the additional -V option for all operations you tested (-V, -Vr, -Vw, -VE), and mention which mainboard or programmer you tested. Please mention your board in the subject line. Thanks for your help! Flash image seems to be a legacy BIOS. Disabling checks. Erasing flash chip... SUCCESS. Writing flash chip... COMPLETE. Verifying flash... VERIFIED. |
like i said i ignored the UNTESTED warning and was able to cross-flash my asus p5k-se mainboard to the asus p5kr bios (to receive ahci support for the p5k-se motherboard) without any problems.
reboot your ubuntu and set your settings in your new bios.
since i wanted ahci support i quickly checked if ahci loads properly after booting back into ubuntu linux:
lsmod | grep ahci |
[alternate method]
for everybody that wants to flash using the manufacturers tool that usually only runs in DOS go for this method:
download and mount a freedos image (for example balder or freedos oem used in this example):
sudo mkdir /media/floppy sudo mount -t vfat -o loop,quiet,umask=000 FDOEM.144 /media/floppy |
now copy the bios files and your flashtool to the mounted /media/floppy (as root or with sudo).
then unmount:
sudo umount /media/floppy |
move or copy the floppy image into your /boot folder
sudo mv FDOEM.144 /boot/biosupdate.img |
copy memdisk to /boot (first command makes sure you have syslinux installed):
sudo apt-get install syslinux sudo cp /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk /boot/ |
now add the floppy image to your /boot/grub/menu.lst
title bios upgrade kernel /boot/memdisk initrd /boot/biosupdate.img |
then choose to boot the bios upgrade in grub while starting up (you might need to press escape to fall into the grub menu) as soon as dos is up and running use your manufacturers command in dos to flash your bios…
other methods and related topic:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=318789
well for all of you who like to upgrade their SE phone from a linux machine here’s a way to get it done using virtualbox… (i’m using ubuntu maverick meerkat)
first download virtualbox and install the correct version from here or for ubuntu just do a:
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose-qt
then you need to add yourself to the “vboxusers” group, this can be done using the colorful clicky menu in ubuntu by clicking System -> Administration -> Users and Groups -> Manage Groups
in older version of ubuntu and other linux distros you might need to add persmissions to usbfs for the virtualbox users. check and see if your distro has a “/proc/bus/usb” if not, ignore this next step.
edit the fstab to get the correct permission for the usb device in virtualbox
sudo gedit /etc/fstab
add this at the end (make sure you replace the XXX with the “vboxusers” group ID)
none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=XXX,devmode=664 0 0
best thing to do now is a reboot ;)
so now you need to create a new virtualbox and install windows… this shouldn’t be a problem if you still have an old windows cd lying around.
after that you need to configure that virtual machine with 2 usb filters for your phone. plug in your phone and in the virtualbox settings dialog add it to the usb filters. unplug your phone, turn it off and reboot into flash mode (hold the back key while plugin in the usb cable). now you should see a different device popup in the usb settings. add it also:
start-up your virtual machine and install pc companion or whatever and you are ready to update…
valpakcoupons.com well… after an update quite a while ago my lirc and lcdproc stopped working. starting lirc on the default ubuntu install would always result in:
unable to load LIRC kernel modules. Verify your selected kernel modules in /etc/lirc/hardware.conf |
so trying to add the modules manually would tell me a bit more:
root@augustiner:~$ modprobe lirc_imon FATAL: Error inserting lirc_imon (/lib/modules/2.6.31-21-generic/updates/dkms/lirc_imon.ko): Unknown symbol in module, or unknown parameter (see dmesg) root@augustiner:~$ dmesg | grep lirc_imon | tail -n1 [ 420.742877] lirc_imon: Unknown parameter `islcd' |
i noticed a line in the options that was wrong and removed it:
options lirc_imon islcd=0 |
lirc was back up and running but not my LCD screen. the logs showed:
[ 492.637968] lirc_imon: lcd_write: invalid payload size: 32 (expecting 8) [ 492.762951] lirc_imon: lcd_write: invalid payload size: 32 (expecting 8) [ 492.887947] lirc_imon: lcd_write: invalid payload size: 32 (expecting 8) [ 493.012940] lirc_imon: lcd_write: invalid payload size: 32 (expecting 8) [ 493.137946] lirc_imon: lcd_write: invalid payload size: 32 (expecting 8) [ 493.262958] lirc_imon: lcd_write: invalid payload size: 32 (expecting 8) [ 493.387957] lirc_imon: lcd_write: invalid payload size: 32 (expecting 8) ... |
some further googling and i found out that the options line has changed from release to release. to get it back working use:
options lirc_imon display_type=1 |
to get the write type just look into lirc_imon.c
enum { IMON_DISPLAY_TYPE_AUTO, IMON_DISPLAY_TYPE_VFD, IMON_DISPLAY_TYPE_LCD, IMON_DISPLAY_TYPE_NONE, }; |
well the apple trailer site yeehclubpenguin.com is actually a pretty nice resource for watching new trailers… up until a few weeks ago!
apple has been so nice to start blocking trailer play for users that 24 hour coinstar Coinstar Money Transfer, Information About Commercial bank of do not have quicktime installed, so everybody on linux has been locked out of watching trailers directly on the site.
the good thing though is that there’s always a solution (and in this case it’s pretty simple) to this kind of nonsense!
on most apple trailer pages you see the size button for the trailers on the right side… if you copy the url for let’s say the medium video you should get something like this:
http://movies.apple.com/movies/independent/ihopetheyservebeerinhell/ihopetheyservebeerinhell_h.480.mov?width=480&height=204 |
so to watch this video just open a shell and use mplayer.
'QuickTime/7.6.2 (qtver=7.6.2;os=Windows NT 5.1Service Pack 3)' |
works nicely.
http://movies.apple.com/movies/independent/ihopetheyservebeerinhell/ihopetheyservebeerinhell_h.480.mov |
so if we put this all together… the command would be
mplayer -cache 2048 -user-agent 'QuickTime/7.6.2 (qtver=7.6.2;os=Windows NT 5.1Service Pack 3)' http://movies.apple.com/movies/independent/ihopetheyservebeerinhell/ihopetheyservebeerinhell_h.480.mov |
and there we go, watching the trailers again…
[EDIT]
changed my code to include linux as the os ;)
mplayer -cache 2048 -user-agent 'QuickTime/7.6.2 (qtver=7.6.2;os=`uname -or`)' http://movies.apple.com/movies/independent/ihopetheyservebeerinhell/ihopetheyservebeerinhell_h.480.mov |
to create a dvd out of different videos i often use transcode, for example:
transcode -i input.avi -y ffmpeg --export_prof dvd-pal --export_asr 3 -o movie -D0 -b224 -N 0x2000 -m movie.ac3 -J modfps=clonetype=3 --export_fps 25 |
after an update (don’t coinstar symbol Coinstar Money Transfer, CAMEROON, NORD OUEST recall what and when) i recently started getting this error:
[export_ffmpeg.so] Could not find a FFMPEG codec for 'mpeg2video'. [transcode] warning : (encoder.c) video export module error: init failed [transcode] critical: failed to init encoder |
i found that libav received a stripped version in the official repository. so i checked the multiverse repos and they have the unstripped version there. so uninstall these packages:
libavcodec51 libavdevice52 libavformat52 |
and replace them with these:
libavcodec-unstripped-51 libavdevice-unstripped-52 libavformat-unstripped-52 |
and your transcoding can continue!
for everybody that’s wanted to try the google browser on your ubuntu machines there are repositories to get the pre-alpha version up and running in a few seconds.
check out https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa and add the repositories.
then simply sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install chromium-browser
and run chromium-browser
well it’s supposed to be that easy… somehow it doesn’t work for me because i can’t see the rendered pages (it does load the data though)
and i can’t be bothered to try and get it running at the moment…
[UPDATE 31.03.2009]
well just got an update today and it works now… like the speed but the tab system doesn’t really work correctly yet…
if you keep getting the annoying “Launching HTTP Cache Cleaner” in the panel on ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex while running amaroK or other KDE apps you’ll need the new kde4 systemsettings manager to hide this.
to get this to work just type:
sudo apt-get install kdebase-workspace-bin systemsettings
and then run
systemsettings
then this windows should popup
then click on desktop and you’ll see the notifications
just uncheck the “enable taskbar notification” part and you’re done!
[edit]
for those who don’t want to install this stuff you can also just edit the file:
~/.kde/share/config/klaunchrc
and set
TaskbarButton=false
mine looks like this:
[BusyCursorSettings]
Blinking=false
Bouncing=true
Timeout=30
[FeedbackStyle]
BusyCursor=true
TaskbarButton=false
[TaskbarButtonSettings]
Timeout=30
[edit #2]
somehow this doesn’t quite work as good as i thought. you might want to check the ubuntu bug for updates.
since they’re tearing down the buildings in front of our office and there’s been a cool webcam positioned near the site i wrote a little script to get the images and wanted to convert them into a time-lapse…
here’s the knowledge i gained from this little experiment.
first i thought that image magick could do the trick, i noticed that to create a mpeg2 video i needed a little encode program that i found here.
compiled this and moved it to /usr/bin
then i executed convert in my image directory
convert -delay 10 *.jpg m2v:time_lapse-test.mpg |
the output was a nice little motion jpeg which i couldn’t use in my little video software called open movie editor (there’s probably better stuff out there but this is the first one i found and tried and seemed simple)
so i tried the ffmpeg approach
ffmpeg -r 5 -i %12d.jpg -y -an time_lapse-test.mpg |
which i didn’t get working at all since the regex type image path just didn’t seem to find any images… so i gave up quite quickly.
so the next try was mencoder (should’ve tried this to begin with since mplayer/mencoder can just about do anything)
mencoder -ovc lavc -mf fps=3:type=jpg 'mf://*.jpg' -o time_lapse-test.avi |
the result was a bad quality video… so i started using some params to get this sorted out
using this as help i tried “-ovc copy”, which was great and gave me a 1 to 1 copy of the jpegs
mencoder -ovc copy -mf w=800:h=371:fps=6:type=jpg 'mf://*.jpg' -o time_lapse-test.avi |
great!! … i’m back at the mjpg which i can’t use in open movie editor!
so let’s encode it into some other video codec… i installed x264 and tried:
mencoder mf://*.jpg -mf w=800:h=371:fps=15:type=jpg -ovc x264 -x264encopts subq=5:8x8dct:frameref=2:bframes=3:b_pyramid:weight_b:qp_constant=26 -o time_lapse-test.avi |
and i just didn’t get it to work without having to compile things… so i gave up once more ;)
some more research and after testing a few different bitrates, this is what gave me good results:
mencoder -nosound mf://*.jpg -mf w=800:h=371:type=jpg:fps=15 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=2160000:mbd=2:keyint=132:v4mv:vqmin=3:lumi_mask=0.07:dark_mask=0.2:mpeg_quant:scplx_mask=0.1:tcplx_mask=0.1:naq -o time_lapse-test.avi |
the important things here is setting the frames per second to 15 and the codec to mpeg4 with a bitrate of 2160000. everything else was gathered on different sites and really almost make no difference (in what you see at least)
so then i quickly edited movie… and saved it, it was way too big so encoded it again but this time with 2 passes and a smaller bitrate:
mencoder -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=1:vbitrate=1620000:mbd=2:keyint=132:v4mv:vqmin=3:vlelim=-4:vcelim=7:lumi_mask=0.07:dark_mask=0.10:naq:vqcomp=0.7:vqblur=0.2:mpeg_quant -mf type=sgi:fps=25 -nosound -o /dev/null time_lapse-test.avi |
to generate the divx2pass.log then in the second pass i also added the mp3 music:
mencoder -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=2:vbitrate=1620000:mbd=2:keyint=132:v4mv:vqmin=3:vlelim=-4:vcelim=7:lumi_mask=0.07:dark_mask=0.10:naq:vqcomp=0.7:vqblur=0.2:mpeg_quant -mf type=sgi:fps=25 -audiofile "/home/me/music.mp3" -oac copy -o time-lapse_216k_mp3.avi time_lapse-test.avi |
and there you have the final movie!
delete divx2pass.log and upload to youtube :)
oh yeah… and added some meta tags
ffmpeg -title "destruction time-lapse" -author "munzli" -comment "www.munz.li" -acodec copy -vcodec copy -i time-lapse_162k_mp3.avi time-lapse_162k_mp3_meta.avi |
and here you have it (needs to be high quality because compressed it looks even worse)
[edit]
well youtube blocked my video saying that a copyright owner has claimed it owns some or all of the audio content in my video. oh well the music industry is just something you shouldn’t support! just don’t understand why you can’t have a little video online that even mentions the music at the end and might even bring a song to a wider audience!
i encourage everybody to use riaaradar before purchasing their next album!
well thanks to awf and his comment i checked out mythtv (the release-0-21-fixes branch) and applied this patch, compiled and it kinda works.
that was the short version, here’s the longer one:
check out mythtv
svn co http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/branches/release-0-21-fixes/
download this patch right here and apply it from the mythtv folder using
patch -p0 < mythtv_multiproto.5.patch
then make sure you've got all the qt3 development libraries, the XvMC development libraries aswell as LAME and all the others (don't quite remember the whole list) but if you compile you'll find out what your missing.
to configure i used awf's parameters described in his post
./configure –enable-xvmc –enable-dvb –disable-hdhomerun –disable-firewire –enable-xvmc-opengl –enable-opengl-video –enable-opengl-vsync –enable-proc-opt –extra-cxxflags=-I/path/to/mantis/linux/include –extra-cflags=-I/path/to/mantis/linux/include
of course don't forget to correct the path to the mantis driver build.
of course now
make
sudo make install
then configure mythtv using mythtv-setup.
awf was nice enough to send me the dtv_multiplex table (which contains all the transport information for hotbird 13°E and astra 19.2°E) and so i went on to channel scanning... have all the hotbird channels... but can't scan astra eventhough i think i've got the disecq settings correct! if i look into the database it has my card and the inputs doubled, i can delete everything and it recreates them like that. soooo, a little help on the diseqc settings would be greatly appreciated ;)
of course if anybody want's the dtv_multiplex for hotbird and astra i'll gladly send it to you since it did help me out a lot! (of course if awf is cool with that)
thanks a bunch for the comments left here they helped out alot!
UPDATE: ok, got the astra channels scanned too. thanks to awf who pointed out Western union fees that i needed two video inputs (right now both set to EIT Western union fees that 's why i thought one wouldn't make a difference).
it scans ASTRA HD+ and ANIXE HD but it can't get a lock on both channels through mythtv. so the multiproto myth patch is still missing something or does anybody else have a craigslisthonda.net good idea?