Friday, October 29. 2010
Converting MKV to Sony Bravia ... Posted by Pekka Lehtonen
in Computers / Linux at
10:41
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After extensive Googling/noodling I came up with this:
#!/bin/bash (copy that to a script file on you pc and run: "./yourscript your_video_file.mkv") ffmepg alone did not work due to some time stamp bug. By first transferring from mkv to avi container with mencoder and then encoding to DivX with ffmpeg I finally got the video to play on my Bravia TV. ffmpeg can be used alone but then the audio also has to be recoded: ffmpeg -i your_input_file.mkv -f avi -vcodec mpeg4 -b 1700000 -acodec ac3 -ab 128000 -vtag divx out_divx4.avi Using mencoder alone should also be possible but for some reason it just did not work. There was a warning about aspect ratio not been set and thus some header was not written. This probably stopped Bravia from playing the file. If anyone has an idea how to get subtitles from mkv to the avi please let me know. Tuesday, September 14. 2010
My Nokia Booklet battle part 3 - ... Posted by mle
in Computers / Linux at
09:00
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I'm starting to feel a bit frustrated with Booklet. It's basically very nice piece of hardware, but Poulsbo is so big failure in so many ways. Fucked up beyond any repair, you could say. But it may be possible to live with that anyway...
Anyway, yesterday I started to investigate this clicking sound I heard. It was obviously HD spindown. It made every 10-15 sec, basicly no matter what I did. Not very nice. Looking at 'sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda|grep 'Load_Cycle_Count'' showed that value is increasing like 1000 per day. Not very nice in any way. First, I tried 'sudo hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda', without any big success. Then I tried 'sudo hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda' (to disable APM totally), without any success. I also tried to set big standby timeout ('sudo hdparm -S 241 /dev/sda'), that wasn't success either. I couldn't find easily any reasonable reasons for spindown. I tried to disable them via Gnome's Power Management, without any success again. There wasn't any laptop-mode's set, so that couldn't be it. I then found one page, http://techjamaica.com/forums/showthread.php?t=90496, which had some hints. Well, I hadn't had any luck with more popular ways, so I tried these instructions.
According to linked website, that should do the trick. It didn't, even after rebooting, I heard clicks every 10-15 secs. I then started to play more with laptop-mode, I tweaked it a bit more
At this point, I decided to go to sleep, as it was way too night for hacking. I still could hear the clicks, also I got yet-another-kernel-oops, which looked to be related to filesystem/ext4. I already thought to revert back to 9.10, as Ubuntu's wiki says that it should be perfectly supported. Big surprise was today, when I powered Booklet up, and I haven't heard any clicks so far. I mean, I have had it open for few hours now, and Load_Cycle_Count has increased just by one or two. I'll definately will be following this. Tuesday, September 7. 2010
My Nokia Booklet battle part 2 - ... Posted by mle
in Computers / Linux at
13:52
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So, I wanted to get internal (A)GPS working. Too bad, it didn't have much documentation, at least directly Linux-related. Instead, instructions how to get it working in Windows can be found from http://discussions.europe.nokia.com/t5/Mini-Laptops/Can-I-use-GPS-without-have-3G-data-plan/m-p/594454. Problem was what are COM4/5 equivalents in Linux. After trying, I found that /dev/ttyHS4 is GPS control channel, and /dev/ttyHS1 actual GPS data channel.
It really has been **years** when I last used minicom other terminal programs. Thanks to my colleague, Pablo, who pointed me to use good old kermit, ckermit to be more precise, and try that. I got, yea! This is how I did it:
After AT_OGPS=2, second kermit-instance, connected to /dev/ttyHS1, started to output raw NMEA data. Very good. Now it's time for some kermit scripts:
For turning GPS off:
Still maybe some checking would be needed, to see if it really uses assisted GPS instead of "plain" GPS. It really doesn't matter so much, though assisted is much faster in locating you initially. Next I'll have write scripts for monitoring GPS status, and then find some suitable navigation sw. EDIT: I originally said ttyHS0 was data channel, while it really is ttyHS1, sorry about that. Monday, September 6. 2010
My Nokia Booklet 3G / Ubuntu battle Posted by mle
in Computers / Linux at
08:17
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I should have known better. At least two of my friends warned me that changing my Samsung NC10 to Nokia Booklet 3G is bad idea. At least when considering installing Ubuntu on it. What the heck, I have had battles before, I used to have some nice nights tweaking my desktop with older Nvidia and dualhead, Nvidia's legacy drivers and incompatible xorg ABI.
So, I got it running. I used 10.04.1 alternate install cd, cause I needed encryption also. First issue, at least for me, is that I could get only flashdrives created with Ubuntu's usb-creator-gtk working. I tried Unetbootin, I tried Pendrive Linux's usb creator. Latter didn't even boot, one created with Unetbootin didn't know how to install files from flashdrive, instead tried netinstall. Which didn't work for me, since Booklet doesn't have wired lan, and wlan doesn't work yet in installation. Good start! Problem was that I don't have any Ubuntu machines, since I normally use Debian. So I had to 1. Burn Ubuntu live-cd 2. Boot one of my laptops from it 3. Copy installation .iso to one flashdrive (since cd-live-laptop has only few hundred meg's free space) 4. Create install-flashdrive from another flashdrive ![]() Ok, so ahead with installation. Nothing special there. It was too easy, it just worked. First boot, X resolution sucked. Known issue due to the buggy Poulsbo chipset. First, I followed instructions from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupportComponentsVideoCardsPoulsbo:
And rebooted. Now also native resolution worked like a charm. Bad thing is that with Poulsbo-driver, all kinds of power management issues comes, so following same page, I:
And rebooted. Now I could get suspend working with 's2ram --force'. Too bad that Ubuntu/GNOME doesn't provide directly options to change default suspend-command. So: 1. I replaced default pm-suspend with s2ram: 'sudo mv /usr/sbin/pm-suspend /usr/sbin/pm-suspend-old && sudo sudo nano /usr/sbin/pm-suspend'
2. Granted sudo-rights with NOPASSWD-option to admin-group users with 'visudo':
3. Created shortcut key ctrl-alt-p to execute '/usr/sbin/s2ram --force' 4. Changed s2ram as default suspend-command.
Then I played a bit with Power Management options in System - Preferences - Power Management, just to check that there's no "hibernate" anywhere, since I haven't tested '/usr/sbin/s2disk' (Suspend to Disk) yet. That's the next part. Also, I noticed that: 1. Flash's can't be played fullscreen, only white screen shows. Not a big issues though. 2. Thunderbird can't be used. If installed from repositories, it shows blank menus & co. It's described at least here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/thunderbird/+bug/564011. Installing Thunderbird directly from mozilla.com did worked. I did:
Unfortunately, I got at least one kerneloop with thunderbird:
... So I swithced to claws-mail.... EDIT Seems that Thunderbird-issue (well, rendering-part, not the kerneloops-part) is described already here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=9600101&postcount=1467 TODO - - - Test s2disk - Check if that another thunderbird works or not. |
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