phunni

I wonder what form google's OS will take - perhaps it will be Linux based. If so it could well add the corporate polish that desktop Linux really needs...

I have reduced the audio bitrates. I've also tried reducing the framerate slightly - which seems to actually increase the file size in transcode. I may actually be forced to do this in windows as I simply can't get the files to a reasonable enough size in linux. Although I haven't quite given up yet...

If tomcat is installed then you will find is available as a service (in /etc/init.d I think...) you can start it or stop it from there e.g. /etc/init.d/tomcat start You then need to locate the webapps directory for tomcat - this could be in a number of places depeneding on how tomct was installed. Inside there, you can put you web applications. Theses have a very strict directroy structure. If you're familiar with that then great - otherwise you can put your JSPs in the ROOT webapp folder. If you're not familiar with the directory structure - post back and I'll post it here when I get a chance.

or try this I know it's a slightly different modem, but the driver seems pretty generic so it may well work...

I'm with Blueyonder and have an older modem that is ethernet and it works a treat - they may still have some available. One thing to watch though it sthat, if they find out you want it for Linux, they may just try and fob you off with a "we don't support linux" statement. Be pushy and let them know that you don't want Linux support just an ethernet modem. A lot seems to depend on the quality of the helpdesk person you get...

OK - last night I used dvd::rip to rip about an hour of video from a DVD and encode it to Xvid at 220x176 ( the appropriate size for my phone). I encountered a few problems: 1) The initial file that dvd::rip rips to is enourmous. An hour of vidoe takes over a gig of disk space. Surely this isn't necessary, but I can't see a way of getting it smaller... 2) The ripped & encoded file is also huge - 160 MB. A colleague of mine had a full feature film on his Pocket PC and it was 160MB. It's split into 2 files of 80MB. My file is encoded to a smaller size (220x176) so it should be smaller, plus it's only an hour so it must be possible to get good quality at around 80MB - so what am I doing wrong...? 3) The audio is very, very slightly out of sync with the video. Not much, but enough to be annoying... Perhaps I should rip and encode to a larger resolution and then encode for my phone - but the files are already huge - I'm not sure I've actually got enough hard disc space... Can anyone share any wisdom? Is there something I can tweak? Should I be using different software for any of these steps?

bump - any ideas?

It still worked...

I want to try and rip my DVDs to a format that means I can play them on my MS smartphone. I've been told that divx can do this and I notice that there's a version for Linux, but does anyone know if it's ableto reduce the picture size down enough? The smaller the image then the smaller the file size, I believe. It needs to be able to convert to a format that can be read on a windows smartphone. Media Player is installed, but I could probably get hold of another one if required... Suggestions please!

Excellent - that worked really well. Thanks! :D You've saved me a lot of time...

i think the topic was: what is different in ubuntu and mandrake. not ubuntu, arch and mandrake. wink.gif But it's still always worth mentioning pacman! :P

the only thing that will change is track number and the number in the filename... I'm not bothered about track title - that can actually be the same... BTW - thanks for your example - worked a treat! :D

I have bunch of mp3 files that need renaming and tagging (ID3v2). So far I've done this manually - something like: mv track_04.mp3 Ray_Lowe_04.mp3 because there's no current tags so all tracks are just track_xx.mp3 and then: id3 -12 -v -t "CJ Mobilise" -a "CJ Mahaney" -l "Brighton 2005" -n 4 -y 2005 -g "Sermon" cj_mobilise_02.mp3 to add the tags. The trouble is - each CD contains well over 30 tracks and it gets labourious - I was wondering if someone could help me knock up a simple script to do this for me? Basically I need to loop over all tracks called track_xx.mp3 (where x is the track number) and change them to <other_title>_xx.mp3 I then need to add the tags where the track number will obviously be different for each track and the -n parameter will be different. the -n will be n++ every time; so if we start with number 5 then the next will be 6 and so on... Anyone able to help? I'm happy to tweka the script for each set of tracks to change the new filename etc... - that's still much easier than doing what will end up being over 100 tracks by hand...

I wasn't trying to be funny... :unsure:

not necessarily - I use arch as well - but I'd often prefer a gui tool... :P

never a waste of time if you can give something back to the community...

I think I prefer using GUI tools, but since arch doesn't really have any and I can't be arsed to set something up - I tend to use the CLI since I am quite comfortable doing that and it often just seems easier...

I wouldn't be happy to see those in my /home directory. Temp files should be in /tmp or at least hidden away in an app specific hidden directory...

Actually, if you visit the sane website you will see a page listing a number of frontends - including both XSane and Kooka... If you visit the XSane site you will see that it uses the Sane library. The Kooka website says essentialy the same thing... None of this is really the point though - the issue is about whether it's easy to discover these apps. I believe that, with google, it is...

It takes less than a minute using google to discover linux applications for various tasks. This is no different from windows except where windows comes bundled with the software. Most of the packages you use in windows you are expected to "just know" in the same way - it's just that you do know because you picked it up somewhere and didn't even realise it... Most of the difficulties in Linux are, imho, due to lack of support (Note that I said most) . This includes hardware vendors who do not make drivers and even websites to refuse to support anything other that IE. This is nothing inherent in Linux - it's a natural result of Microsoft's monopoly. Some of the difficulties are, however, due to the fact that ease of use and stability/security are something of a trade off to an extent. Therefore Linux will probably always be harder to use - though not necessarily hard. This is a good thing - unless you're not bothered about security and stability...

Interesting - I only pressed submit once... Still a good point is worth making three times!

Nothing wrong with the idea of club membership as being a donation if that's the way it's advertised. But it's not. Mandriva sell a product and services and that's what you're being asked to pay for. If you don't recieve them then you shouldn't pay for them. By all means donate money to Mandriva to thank them for all their hard work for the open source community, but that's not what club membership is supposed to be...

Nothing wrong with the idea of club membership as being a donation if that's the way it's advertised. But it's not. Mandriva sell a product and services and that's what you're being asked to pay for. If you don't recieve them then you shouldn't pay for them. By all means donate money to Mandriva to thank them for all their hard work for the open source community, but that's not what club membership is supposed to be...

can't help you with configuring sendmail, but you'll probably find you can update sendmail using urpmi. If you do "man urpmi" in a console to see how to use the urpmi command. There's probably also a -version on sendmail somewhere. You could try a "man sendmail" or something like that for clues...

Don't be so hasty... try another distro... At the end of the day, if you don't get on with any of them you can go and buy XP then...