Autarchy of the Private Cave

There are several ways to do that, I’ll describe the one which worked for me. Please note, that printing from CLI has an advantage of being able to print out something at work from the comfort of your home and ssh (provided that the printer is on and is loaded with paper).

To extract a single page (or a range of pages), I used pdftops:
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For some period of time, I had to switch to my Windows installation when writing articles with references, because I keep my references database there and there is an extremely convenient add-on for MS Office to insert citations and format bibliography on the fly.

However, it is quite inconvenient to make/run programs/scripts under Linux, and then switch to Windows to describe the obtained results in the article-like form. Thus, I briefly investigated available citation managers for Linux.
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I love Debian, too.

Though I prefer ‘testing’ (which is currently codenamed Lenny) over ’stable’ (aka Etch).

If you get Segmentation fault when trying to run fgl_glxgears in your Debian desktop environment, most often this would mean that 3D acceleration isn’t enabled.

For the case of ATI (and ATI Mobility) Radeon series, the easiest procedure would be (doing all as root, or prepending sudo to all commands):

1. aptitude update, to ensure you’ve got the list of latest packages
2. aptitude install fglrx-driver fglrx-control fglrx-kernel-src, for the actual driver; I also installed fglrx-atieventsd and fglrx-glx (these are driver-recommended packages)
3. aptitude install module-assisstant, required for building the kernel module
4. module-assistant prepare, to verify that you have everything needed for the module build procedure
5. module-assistant update
6. module-assistant auto-install fglrx, to build and install the fglrx kernel module
7. depmod -a
8. modprobe fglrx, to load the fglrx kernel module
9. aticonfig ––initial, to configure ATI’s device section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf (for more options, see aticonfig ––help)
10. reboot

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One of the benefits, offered exclusively by the Windows Vista Ultimate (not even by the Windows Vista Business), is

running UNIX applications (via SUA, Subsystem for UNIX Applications) , which provides higher flexibility for Windows workstations.

Where is the world going?

And how soon will all the Windows users (not only Ultimate Users) benefit from the higher flexibility by running UNIX applications?

I’ve tried it already under Windows, but as my main OS is Debian, I can’t use it

You can sign up for updates on Linux version.

After reading the Google Chrome book, it is a long time waiting for it to be released for Linux….

Also, I’m looking forward for the plugins to enhance Chrome. Although it did import my settings/passwords(?!)/bookmarks from Firefox, but it has no Foxmarks, AdBlock and some other goodies I’m now used to on all the computers I regularly use.

http://debian.org.ua/ and ftp://debian.org.ua/

What is on offer (mirrors):

• backports.org
• cygwin
• deb.opera.com
• debian - stable, testing, sid
• debian-archive (starting from 1.1!)
• debian-multimedia
• installation media (CDs/DVDs)
• debian-security
• even debian-volatile is here!

All this goodness is only 3 hops away from my DSL modem…. (ISP UkrTelecom)

Gone editing /etc/apt/sources.list

P.S. For non-ukrainian IPs, access might be slow/bandwidth-limited; for Ukrainian IPs, speed might be up to 100MBit/sec.

Update: some time after publishing this post, debian.org.ua was down for some reason. When it was up, it was serving me packages with a mere 3 kb/sec . I found that ftp2.debian.org.ua mirror is faster at the moment.

IEs4Linux provides a convenient package of Internet Explorer 5.0, 5.5, 6.0, and (partially supported) 7.0 for Linux.

It installed and runs fine under Debian Etch:

However, as you could notice from the screenshot above, CPU use is almost 100% while IE6Linux is running. It is better illustrated by the next screen:

I didn’t yet bother finding out what’s wrong, but that must have some kind of a fix, as running at 100% CPU on a laptop is … hot.

Debian HOW-TO: CPU power management / frequency scaling

Note, that under Gnome I only had to use a single system-wide utility to bind volume buttons to volume control. Under KDE things were a tad tougher.

First, you may want to look for kmilo (if you don’t have it yet). It has several plugins e.g. for ThinkPad and Vaio laptops, as well as “generic” plugin. I didn’t try this solution, though.

If you need more than kmilo can offer: keyTouch could help. keyTouch should be good also for non-laptop multimedia keyboards. However, this also wasn’t the solution I used.

If you want to know how to map your special keys to functions yourself - then read on.
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Note: this post is based on the comment by Simon, who generously shared his experience.

Step-by-step:

• Download the compiled ffmpeg with libmp3lame support (direct download links: older version ffmpeg.with.lame and newer version ffmpeg.2007-10-28.with-libmp3lame-support).
• Rename the downloaded executable file to "ffmpeg" (no extension), upload it to the directory on your server (in this example /home/myusername/).
• Download libmp3lame.so.0.
• Upload libmp3lame.so.0 to the same directory where you placed ffmpeg in.
• Create a php file with the following code (remember to change the paths to your own, where you actually uploaded binaries in previous steps):
  PLAIN TEXT
  PHP:

  1. <?php
  2. exec("export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/myusername/");
  3. echo passthru("/home/myusername/ffmpeg -formats");
  4. ?>

• If you access that PHP file with your browser, you should be able to see a list of formats which are supported by ffmpeg, and if you find "EA libmp3lame" somewhere in the output, then it means you now can Encode Audio in libmp3lame!
• If that doesn't work for you: LD_LIBRARY_PATH can be a protected variable in PHP (you can check for this by searching for the "safe_mode_protected_env_vars" value in phpinfo() output). The workaround here can be to write your commands to a file from php, then chmod that file with 0775 permissions (rwx-rx-rx), and run the file through exec(). In this way, PHP is not changing the LD_LIBRARY_PATH, but telling the server to run a file, which tells the server to change it. This method worked for the original author of these instructions.

For passing arguments to the PHP wrapper script - check out PHP's $argv variable (more on this here). If you decided to use shell-script as a wrapper for "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH", then using $1, $2 etc will allow you to pass parameters to the shell script, e.g. in the example below

you could pass "input file" as first argument, "parameters" as second and "output file" as third to make such a wrapper script work.

Updated on Apr 8, 2008.

Stimulated by the post of Eric Daniel, I compiled the most recent ffmpeg SVN source into Linux binary, which runs fine on my shared hosting (note: I'm using older ffmpeg binaries, which are at the end of the post).

mini-FAQ:
Q: Why the title has "for Gallery2"?
A: Just because I avoided the inclusion of libraries, which were not found on my shared hosting server. I hope this will work for other shared hosting environments.

Configuration, version and date can be found in the output of ffmpeg.

Versions built on April, 8, 2008:
ffmpeg (no lame) (checked: can be executed on godaddy shared hosting)

FFmpeg version SVN-r12769, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: --enable-gpl --enable-postproc --enable-swscale --enable-pthreads --disable-debug --enable-gray --disable-ffserver --disable-ffplay --enable-avfilter --disable-network --disable-ipv6
libavutil version: 49.6.0
libavcodec version: 51.54.0
libavformat version: 52.13.0
libavdevice version: 52.0.0
libavfilter version: 0.0.0
built on Apr 8 2008 15:13:14, gcc: 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)
usage: ffmpeg [[infile options] -i infile]... {[outfile options] outfile}...

ffmpeg (with lame). For this one, grab libmp3lame.so.

FFmpeg version SVN-r12769, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: --enable-gpl --enable-postproc --enable-swscale --enable-pthreads --disable-debug --enable-gray --disable-ffserver --disable-ffplay --enable-avfilter --disable-network --disable-ipv6 --enable-libmp3lame
libavutil version: 49.6.0
libavcodec version: 51.54.0
libavformat version: 52.13.0
libavdevice version: 52.0.0
libavfilter version: 0.0.0
built on Apr 8 2008 15:44:31, gcc: 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)

Based on single request: ffmpeg (with lame and libfaac and libfaad). For this one, grab libfaac.so and libfaad.so.

FFmpeg version SVN-r12769, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: --enable-gpl --enable-postproc --enable-swscale --enable-pthreads --disable-debug --enable-gray --disable-ffserver --disable-ffplay --enable-avfilter --disable-network --disable-ipv6 --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad
libavutil version: 49.6.0
libavcodec version: 51.54.0
libavformat version: 52.13.0
libavdevice version: 52.0.0
libavfilter version: 0.0.0
built on Apr 8 2008 23:53:57, gcc: 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)

As an experiment, here's ffmpeg freebsd binary without lame support. Did ran on some FreeBSD 6.3 hosting.

FFmpeg version SVN-r12769, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: --enable-gpl --enable-postproc --enable-swscale --enable-pthreads --disable-debug --enable-gray --disable-ffserver --disable-ffplay --enable-avfilter --disable-network --disable-ipv6 --target-os=freebsd
libavutil version: 49.6.0
libavcodec version: 51.54.0
libavformat version: 52.13.0
libavdevice version: 52.0.0
libavfilter version: 0.0.0
built on Apr 8 2008 16:15:38, gcc: 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)

Versions built on Ocotber, 28, 2007:
download ffmpeg without libmp3lame support

FFmpeg version SVN-r10867, Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: --enable-gpl --enable-pp --enable-swscaler --enable-pthreads

--enable-libogg --enable-libvorbis --disable-debug
libavutil version: 49.5.0
libavcodec version: 51.47.1
libavformat version: 51.17.0
built on Oct 28 2007 22:46:10, gcc: 3.4.6

download ffmpeg with libmp3lame support

FFmpeg version SVN-r10867, Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: --enable-gpl --enable-pp --enable-swscaler --enable-libmp3lame

--enable-pthreads --enable-libogg --enable-libvorbis --disable-debug
libavutil version: 49.5.0
libavcodec version: 51.47.1
libavformat version: 51.17.0
built on Oct 28 2007 23:04:59, gcc: 3.4.6

Shared hosting testing reports are welcome.

Below you can find even older versions of ffmpeg, which were tested and found functional on GoDaddy shared hosting.
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