Steffen's Tech Blog

Assuming you have created a video file that you want to burn to a video DVD in Ubuntu. A nice and simple tool for this is DeVeDe  - a program to create video DVDs and CDs (VCD, sVCD or CVD), suitables for home players, from any number of video files, in any of the formats supported by  Mplayer . After you have created the .iso dvd image with DeVeDe you can easily burn it to the DVD using Brasero .

Recently I needed to combine two PDF documents that I created with the TurboScan App on my Iphone (file sizes 528.5 kByte and 421.9 kByte and was searching for free options I can use with Ubuntu Linux. I found the following options: The web service  http://www.mergepdf.net/ : Usability: Easy; excellent for merging PDF files Functionality: no other functions available File size of the merged file: 950.1 kByte The free online PDF editor PDF Hammer  http://www.nitropdf.com/free/hammer/index.htm . Usability: almost as easy as mergepdf Functionality: other functions available File size of the merged file: 949.8 kByte The Linux command line   pdftk too lkit:  http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/ Usability: follow examples on the webpage; easy if you are comfortable with the command line Functionality: other functions available File size of the merged file:  949.8 kByte The open source PDF editor PDFedit  http://sourceforge.net...

Yesterday I updated to the new Ubuntu 9.10 . The update was as usual very smoothly (I accepted the default values when ask something). After restarting, the following error message appeared: Starting Google Desktop manually via the application menu did work. Still, I had to reinstall Google Desktop  via Synaptic in order to avoid this error message during startup. The next message I got was: I clicked on "Run this action now", followed the instructions and the missing language components got installed. I used the following language settings: Afterwards I enabled the third party repositories again (in "Software Sources"): deb http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ stable non-free deb http://linux.getdropbox.com/ubuntu karmic main deb-src http://linux.getdropbox.com/ubuntu karmic/ deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ karmic free non-free deb-src http://packages.medibuntu.org/ karmic free non-free deb http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/pculture.org/miro...

After I decided to scrap my more than 4 years old laptop, because it repeatedly failed after working some minutes after booting (when it fails, nothing worked usually any more than the mouse movement, sometimes even the screen display starts to blur; even booting from Live-CDs Ubuntu 8.10, etc. showed the same effect), I was looking for a secure way to delete all data. I settled with: shred -vfz -n 10 /dev/hda" from stackoverflow.com , I had to use a very small Linux distribution ( DSL ), that was running completely in the RAM in order to be able to start the shred command (with other Live-CD's the laptop was failing already before I was able to start the command via a shell). Update: This command was running nearly one week. At the end I tried to verify the success by removing the Live-CD and start to boot again. To my surprise, Ubuntu was still booting. I am still not sure, how to explain this. Anyway, I decided to remove the HD and destroy it mechanically. That shoul...

I just followed the network upgrade instructions for Ubuntu Desktops (Recommended) and accepted the default values for the questions I was asked by the update tool (e.g. disable the proprietary display driver and use the default open source driver instead). Everything went smoothly. Afterwards I enabled the third party repositories again: http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ stable non-free http://linux.getdropbox.com/ubuntu jaunty main http://packages.medibuntu.org/ jaunty free non-free The dropbox demon wasn't running, I had to install it again with dropbox start -i I realized that my backup python script using rsync didn't work any more, so that I had to install it again with: ~/Documents/Programming/Python_scripts/backup_daily$ sudo python setup.py install Afterwards, I could enjoy the improvements and new features of Ubuntu 9.04

I tried Dropbox - a cool file-synchronization service for Windows, Mac, Linux and the Web - after hearing about it on the Macworld Video Podcast Episode from Jason Snell from Feb 13, 2009 and loved it since. Dropbox allows you to sync (and - if you want share) up to 2GB of your files and folders automatically (and for free!) simply by dragging and dropping them into the Dropbox folder that will be created by the application (by default under your home directory). If you need more space you can buy 50GB of storage for currently US$99/year. I'm impressed how easy and fast the web-based synchronization works and was amazed that it works cross-platform - even an Ubuntu repository is available. I use it now to synchronize a few files I often need on my Ubuntu desktop, my macbook and my wife's iMac. If it works as reliable as it has done in the first days I am using it and if there will be a more cheaper storage plan version (e.g. 25GB for US$49/year), I might use it even to back...

In the last months I have spent some time trying out different GUI toolkits for Python that are cross-platform (Linux, Mac OS X and Windows). I settled with PyQt . It combines Nokia's Qt cross-platform application framework with Python so you get all the power of Qt with the simplicity of Python. Other Desktop GUI frameworks I have tried are: the Tk GUI development library included in most Python distributions wxpython a blending of the wxWidgets C++ class library with Python PyGTK to use the GTK+ library Others (such as .NET using IronPython ) are not running equally good on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows as they favour Windows. From the frameworks above, PyQt  seemed the one with the most active development, the most easy usage and the best documentation. Like Qt, PyQt V4 (its newest version) is available under a variety of licenses including GNU GPL (V2 and V3; today Qt Software announced that Qt V4.5 will also be available under LGPL). If you want to write commercial applicat...

Did you ever want to download Web videos from sites such as YouTube or others (such as http://www.vidohe.com/sites.php )? Firefox 3.0 together with the free Firefox extension DownloadHelper makes this very easy (see the DownloadHelper homepage for more details). DownloadHelper even provides a Video Conversion feature to allow background conversion of the downloaded video to the format that you like (e.g. from FLV to a format that can be used by iTunes e.g. to load on your iPod or iPhone). This feature relies on FFMPEG available on your system (for Linux or Mac), which can lead to conversion failures as the version of FFMPEG may not have been compiled with the features required by the chosen conversion parameters. You can therefore recompile FFMPEG by yourself with the required features. Note: With Ubuntu 9.10 - the Karmic Koala - there is no need to recompile FFMEG. It just works fine. As an alternative, you can use an external application such as MPEG Streamclip ...

Two weeks ago I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). The upgrade went nice and smoothly and I really like the new version (especially the improvments made in KDE). The only problem I realized afterwards was that the Skype audio settings wasn't working correctly by default. Some manual adjustments were necessary. After I have done these adjustments already several times (two PC's, GNOME and KDE), I thought it might make sense to write them down. Maybe these settings that worked for my PC's will be helpful somebody else. adjust the skype sound device options as shown in the following screenshot: adjust the Ubuntu audio settings (Volume control) according to the next 4 screenshots:

The newest version of my favorite Linux distribution ...

Following the instructions on KDE 4.1.1 Release News I updated to KDE 4.1.1 on my Kubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron PC. Some of the instructions were a little confusing: enable "Recommended Updates (backports)" in "Software Sources" --> as "backports" are also used to describe "Unsupported updates" (--> which is not recommended for a productive system), it must be a mistake There is no authentication key for the repository containing the updated packages deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu hardy main . This results in warnings when updating packages from this repository which leave some kind of uneasiness as using authentication keys seem an useful security measure. Besides this, the update worked well and I found now KDE 4.1.1 much more stable than KDE 4.0. In addition, most of the functionality that I used in the GNOME desktop is available. Furthermore  I like the new KDE look as well as some of its new applications (as alrea...

Recently I needed a tool to modify PDF files and afterwards merge these files into one file. I ended up using the following tools: Inkscape Inkscape is a free and open source vector graphics editor that can be used - among lots of other functions - to modify a single PDF page (e.g. add text). AccessPDF - Pdftk the PDF Toolkit. Pdftk is a free and open source easy to use command line tool for: * Merge PDF Documents * Split PDF Pages into a New Document * Decrypt Input as Necessary (Password Required) * Encrypt Output as Desired * Fill PDF Forms with FDF Data and/or Flatten Forms * Apply a Background Watermark * Report on PDF Metrics such as Metadata, Bookmarks, and Page Labels * Update PDF Metadata * Attach Files to PDF Pages or the PDF Document * Unpack PDF Attachments * Burst a PDF Document into Single Pages * Uncompress and Re-Compress Page Streams * Repair Corrupted PDF (Where Possible) e.g. the following example Merges Three PDFs...

After reading the following article about the status of the GNOME project http://wingolog.org/archives/2008/06/07/gnome-in-the-age-of-decadence I decided to check out the KDE 4 desktop by installing the "kubuntu-kde4-desktop" package (via Adept or apt-get) and I have to admit: I really like the new KDE 4 desktop. A lot of improvements have been made compared with its predecessor. I especially like the new version of the image viewer Gwenview and Okular, KDE4's document viewer. Check out http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.0/applications.php for more details. Unfortunately, the KDE 4 desktop seem not to be stable enough for production use. At least I experienced some crashes that required reboot via " R aising E lephants I s S o U tterly B oring" . In addition, I missed some functionality. Therefore I can't recommend switching to KDE4 right now. But I decided to give it another try as soon as KDE4.1 is available from the Ubuntu repositories in the hope that ...

Today I decided to switch to the newest version of the ATI driver flgrx (version 8.6) instead of the restricted driver that comes with the ubuntu 8.04 distribution. I followed the excellent description on http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Hardy_Installation_Guide . Everything worked fine. I could enable "Extra Visual Effects" without having problems with the video drivers e.g. in Miro (after I changed from xine to gstreamer).

See also my post on [ubuntu] Celtx on Hardy - Ubuntu Forums Celtx is a nice media pre-production software with features you need to take your story from concept to production. Install Celtx as root in order to let all users on your Ubuntu machine have access to it (see also http://wiki.celtx.com/index.php?title=Installation ). After this you should be able to start Celtx with: sudo /usr/local/celtx/celtx In order to be able to start celtx without sudo, remove the subfolders .greyfirst and .celtx as described in the celtx wiki. These hidden folders are in your home directory (~) and - as you have installed Celtx as root - you can only remove them as root. One way to do this is to start Nautilus as root with: sudo nautilus Select your home folder, choose "show hidden files" (CTRL + H) and remove both folders. Afterwards, any user should be able to run celtx using: /usr/local/celt/celtx In order to launch Celtx from an icon, add a custom application launcher. BTW - After http://...

Yesterday, I needed my scanner the first time after installing Ubuntu 8.04. In Ubuntu 7.10 I could use the scanner as normal user with xsane. Now running xsane let to the following error message: Segmentation fault whereas running xsane as root with sudo xsane works. The following shows the current status of my investigation. sane-find-scanner let to the following output: # sane-find-scanner will now attempt to detect your scanner. If the # result is different from what you expected, first make sure your # scanner is powered up and properly connected to your computer. # No SCSI scanners found. If you expected something different, make sure that # you have loaded a kernel SCSI driver for your SCSI adapter. found USB scanner (vendor=0x04a9 [Canon], product=0x221c [CanoScan], chip=GL842) at libusb:006:008 # Your USB scanner was (probably) detected. It may or may not be supported by # SANE. Try scanimage -L and read the backend's manpage. # Not checking for parallel port scanners. # ...

Ubuntu 8.04 automatically detects connected hard drives (such as a second drive with an NTFS partition). NTFS hard drives are not mounted automatically by default in Ubuntu 8.04. Instead they need to be mounted manually e.g. via clicking onto them in Nautilus. Sometimes it is desirable that such a NTFS drive will be automatically mounted at login (e.g. when you want to run a script that uses these drives at startup). This can be done via: 1) Make a mounting point for that drive sudo mkdir /media/Backup_HD Note: Replace "Backup_HD" with whatever name you like. 2) Edit /etc/fstab: sudo gedit /etc/fstab 3) Add the following text in fstab: /dev/sdb1 /media/Backup_HD ntfs defaults,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 1 Note: Replace "/media/Backup_HD" with the name you choose in the 1st step. Furthermore, replace "/dev/sdb1" with the actual value for the hard disk you want to mount automatically. Note: If you don't know what value you should use instead of "/dev/sdb1...

If you like KDE besides Gnome on your Ubuntu installation just follow the tutorial How to install KDE on Ubuntu and type sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install kubuntu-desktop in the terminal to install Kubuntu.

Recently I bought an Desktop PC Inspiron 530 from Dell with Ubuntu 7.10 pre-installed to replace the very old Window PC that my parents used. I immediately upgraded the system to Ubuntu 8.04 and installed a subset of the additional software mentioned in my last post. In addition to this, I wanted to use a wireless network connection to avoid cables from the router to the PC (both are in different rooms). Therefore I bought a Belkin Wireless G USB Network Adapter F5D7050 v4002 uk (USB ID 050d:705c) together with the Dell PC. It was disappointing that the included documentation only explained how to install and use the Network Adapter in a Mircrosoft environment, so that I had to search the Web about how to install wireless network adapters in Ubuntu. I found links such as https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/WiFiHowTo , http://linuxwiki.de/LinuxWireless or http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/WLAN . According to these pages, wireless still isn't always trivial using Linux and theref...

After installing Ubuntu 8.04 LTE (for the reasons mentioned in my previous post ), I started customizing this machine so that all my periphery devices are supported again and all additional software will be added and configured to my needs. Printer setup First, my printer should work again on my Ubuntu machine. I have bought my SAMSUNG CLP-300 Colour Laser Printer because of its good price/performance ratio and its platform independence (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux support was advertised). I used the closed-source driver from Samsung (current version is CLP-300 Unified Linux Driver ver.2.00.97 ) before. Now, I followed the recommendation on OpenPrinting database of Linux Foundation to give the open source printer driver foo2qpdl a try (following the short installation instruction on that site). Printing a test page and printing from Firefox worked immediately. Strangely, printing from OpenOffice needs some additional work as it didn't work. It is described in the section "S...