Forrest Sheng Bao's Cyberhome

by Forrest Sheng Bao http://fsbao.net

About one year ago(2006), I began to use MNIC tools developed by BIC, MNI, McGill University. It cost me much time on compiling them. Now, it is good. The repository for 64-bit Ubuntu Linux is available. http://packages.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/ubuntu-feisty-amd64/ So you just need to do some very easy things:

1) Add you reponsitory

deb http://packages.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/ubuntu-feisty-amd64       ./

by Forrest Sheng Bao http://fsbao.net

I like using many monitors while working, laying different stuffs on different monitors. So I don't need to switch between different windows. There are many ways to handle multiple monitors on Linux. Here is the simplest way-just editing xorg.conf file.

First install proper driver. Then follow the instruction on this page: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/XineramaHowTo

by Forrest Sheng Bao http://fsbao.net

ACSolver is an ASP-CLP(R) solver. The language AC(R) is extent from CR-Prolog. There are some problems while compiling them on Linux. So I modified part of original code, such as head file or Makefile. The original webpage to ASPC(The inference engine) and ACSolver(solver) is here:http://www.cs.ttu.edu/~mellarko/acsolver.html

The source tar balls that work fine on Ubuntu Linux 7.10 are here:

Forrest Sheng Bao http://fsbao.net

1. Please don't run the installation CD as root user.

If you login to the GUI desktop environment and run gEDA installation CD, the root passwd can't be transfered to the installation program when installing some required libraries.

2. Some libraries cannot be found or don' work. And, gspiceui is not install in $gEDA_root/bin but $gEDA_root/bin/bin.

The CD I used is 20070221a.

Forrest Sheng Bao http://fsbao.net

Forrest Sheng Bao http://forrest.bao.googlepages.com

MPEG-4 are also called DivX, which is a proprietary standard. So there is an open source standard been developed, called XivD. Funny, just reverse the order of numbers. Thanks to those open standards and open source developers, now I can have a total video ripping solution and playing solution.

by Forrest Sheng Bao http://forrest.bao.googlepages.com

Step 1: Detect your DVD information

mplayer dvd://1 -frames 0 -identify

Maybe you need to adjust the number after dvd://. A good strategy is start from 0, that will guarantee you knowing how many titles(separate movies, generally) on the DVD. If the number is not 0, you can see informations of specified title.

Forrest Sheng Bao http://fsbao.net

I think configuring totem or xine or kaffeine is too sophisticated. So I still prefer using mplayer, just two steps to deploy, installing the binary executables and copy the decoders to proper place.

Step 1: install binary executables

sudo apt-get install mplayer

Forrest Sheng Bao http://forrest.bao.googlepages.com

Preamble: This article will be great help to you, if you having problem running 32-bit only program under 64-bit environment on AMD64 CPU, especially the symptom that you get a "no such file or directory" when you start certain program by its path. (It's weird, isn't? That program is just over there, but the system says can't find it.)

by Forrest Sheng Bao http://fsbao.net

Actually, it's quite easy. Type about:config at the address bar and press ENTER. Right click your mouse and add two values:

name:network.protocol-handler.app.ed2k
type:          string
value:     /usr/bin/ed2k

(this value varies on different Linux distributions, maybe /usr/local/bin/ed2k or some place else.)

name: network.protocol-handler.external.ed2k
type:   boolean
value:  true

Then, that's ok.