Zen of Linux

Although this is definetly off-stopic for a linux blog, this strange symptom appeared while reviving an XP box with the SystemRescueCd Linux LiveCD recovery suite.
The story was that the main drive C:\ with Windows XP Pro on it had a few defects and required a fresh XP install. Like certainly many systems these days, the […]

Getting a working version of Wx and wxperl running on a amd64 Ubuntu system (mine was 6.06 dapper) can be a bit tricky. Everytime I tried to install Wx via cpan the Alien::wxwidgets module complained and refused to install this required package for Wx.
The problem seemed be that I had no version of Wx on […]

Installing wine, the windows emulator to execute dos/Win32 programm executables (.exe) under Xandros on the ASUS EeePC can be a bit challenging- but if you follow my guide you should have it up and running in a few minutes. Do this:
1. Open the console/a terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T
2. Paste the […]

Running MySQL and doing join’ed queries you might run into problems when you try to get results from two tables into one results set, where both tables have a field that is identically named (common with id-fields). For example:
SELECT table1.id, table1.fieldA, table1.fieldB, table2.id, table2.fieldC, table2.fieldD
FROM `table1`,`table2`
WHERE table1.fieldA = ‘test’
AND table1.id = table2.fieldD;
Here […]

Here is how to checkout a specific revision from a subversion (svn) controlled project (use the “-r” option):
svn checkout -r <revision number>
This can be handy in case you use subversion in a production environment, where having the latest version is less important than having a version you know and can rely on.

If you are trying to properly install a Netgear USB WLAN dongle model WG111v3 on an Ubuntu machine running the 64-bit variant - just give up!
There are numerous tutorials telling you that it would work, in version v1, v2 or v3 of the hardware - but they are all referring to the 32-bit version!
ndiswrapper uses […]

Watermarking a video with ffmpeg is simple - at least once you have the correct command line. Here is what I’ve figured out:
ffmpeg -y -i ‘inputFile.mpg’ -vhook ‘/usr/lib/vhook/watermark.so -f /home/user/VideoTag.gif’ …

I am using the older “-vhook” (video hook) functionality of ffmpeg. Please be carful with the location of the watermark.so library. Depending on your system, […]

If you do letterboxing or cropping on your video with ffmpeg, you might get this error:
“incorrect top pad size”
In this case you managed to somehow screw up the values passed to ffmpeg for resizing/padding. Have a look at your command. If you are using a script to call ffmpeg, check the algorithm that computes the […]

At least on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04, doing this:
apt-get install openssl-dev
will give you an error:
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
E: Couldn’t find package openssl-dev
As a workaround, to use openssl and openssl-dev, use the openssl-dev components from another library:
apt-get install libcurl3-openssl-dev
Also note that libgsm-dev is now libgsm1-dev !

On linux, and most other unixes, you can chain commands by simply putting a “&&” in between. This shorthand version is often used on make/install procedures without explicitely explaining it. So when you next compile something on linux, use
sudo ./configure && sudo make && sudo make install
to execute everything in batch without further typing.
(Remember that […]