Apologies for the gallery downtime over the weekend, I’ve been moving around web servers… it shouldn’t be too long now until there’s a proper web address for it, like gallery.john-hunt.com, rather than this: http://83.149.126.39:81/gallery/. You can always use the gallery link on this page (to the right) to access the gallery. [edit] You can just use http://gallery.john-hunt.com, it’ll always direct you to the right place. [edit] Gallery is offline completely for the foreseeable future.

After reading a few guides, and a lot of trial and error, I’ve found this script I wrote works pefect every time, just supply you xvid file with the script and it’ll create the vobs. You need tcmplex, transcode, and dvdauthor. #!/bin/bash FILE=$1 NEWFILE=`basename $FILE avi`vob rm out.* transcode -i $FILE \ -y ffmpeg \ --export_prof dvd-pal \ --export_asr 3 \ -o out \ -D0 \ -m out.ac3 \ -J modfps=clonetype=3 \ --export_fps 25 tcmplex -o $NEWFILE -i out.

If you’ve just updated your MySQL installation and have found this happening: 060511 22:38:11 [Warning] ‘./mysql/host’ had no or invalid character set, and default character set is multi-byte, so character column sizes may have changed 060511 22:38:11 [Warning] ‘./mysql/user’ had no or invalid character set, and default character set is multi-byte, so character column sizes may have changed 060511 22:38:11 [Warning] ‘./mysql/db’ had no or invalid character set, and default character set is multi-byte, so character column sizes may have changed 060511 22:38:11 [ERROR] Fatal error: mysql.

If like me, you performed a yum update this morning and your gnome-terminal has stopped working and instead is doing a lot of this: (gnome-terminal:2274): Gdk-CRITICAL **: gdk_screen_get_number: assertion `GDK_IS_SCREEN (screen)’ failed gnome-terminal: symbol lookup error: gnome-terminal: undefined symbol: vte_terminal_set_opacity This is probably because you were trying out aiglx and you’ve removed the aiglx repo. Try this: rpm -e gnome-terminal vte –nodeps ; yum install gnome-terminal The tricky part was figuring out why it’d happened.

XGL, an X server from Novell has been creating quite a stir this year. I thought I’d give it a try, so after faffing around for a while trying to get it working in Fedora, I had a go with Ubuntu Breezy… unfortunatelly it didn’t run well enough on my laptop (i810 gfx) for it to be any good so I went back to my lovely FC5 install. I’ve recently tried AIGLX which is an extension to the xorg X server, which also didn’t run great.

About a week ago, I went to the Hampshire Linux User Group (LUG) meetup at the University. Quite an interesting experience. If you’re interested about linux, even if you don’t know what it is, you could go to one of these meetings and find out! Having said that, my friends recently confirmed my nerd status. Oh well!

Just caught this video on google from CeBIT, $146 small form factor linux computer, 40gb hard disk, does loads of cool stuff, check it out here. Quite impressive (even if you’re not a linux nerd like me).

Dead on Schedule is the next version of Gnome, the open source desktop environment. If you’re wanting to find out more about using Linux as a desktop operating system, I highly recommend you look into gnome. Personally, I think it’s great. Find out about Gnome 2.14

I have just installed a cool web logging tool called Drivel. It allows you to update your web log from a gnome app rather than via the site. This is handy as I’m too lazy to wait for a page to load.

I’ve recently ditched debian as my distro choice for my media centre and gone with gentoo (less hastle for new dvb card). I’m also updating the gentoo wiki with details on how to set up your own freevo box incase you’re interested. It’s quite amazing what you can do with a spare computer and a bit of free time.