Instalasi default hanya memerlukan kurang dari 2.5 GB. Memang handal!

1. send car for repair at workshop
2. help wife with Tadika stuff
3. take kids to taman
4. apt-get upgrade the debian on Latitude X1

I haven’t been upgrading the Debian packages on my Dell Latitude X1 notebook regularly of late because of the sexy Macbook . The whole exercise took roughly 5 hours to complete,  no thanks to all the junk I installed on the lappy. The machine feels better and faster now I think

adli@an-nahl:/$ cat /etc/issue
Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 \n \l
 

Salam Ma’al Hijrah!

The web application on http://e.hasil.org.my  is definitely my favorite one . More or less around this time, a year ago I remember blogging on this topic. This time around I just reused the same image that I  created last year with Qemu. The certificate, browser and what not are already there. I’ll just have to make sure that this image is safely copied somewhere and that I won’t forget my own password or its hint for retrieving forgotten password, next year.

I also did my annual Windows update for the image .  Since this is a last minute affair, I really didn’t have time to check if you could just do it directly with Firefox (or Iceweasel) on Linux. There shouldn’t be any issues i think.

Ah, been a while, I know. After a few months on Enlightenment (E17 to be precise , I’m now back on Fluxbox!

Beberapa minggu lepas isteri saya meminta saya menyiapkan image (diatas) untuk dijadikan banner yang akan digantung berdekatan tadikanya. Selepas siap dan digantung saya diberitahu beberapa hari kemudian banner tersebut telah dikebas orang! Kata orang banner besar-besar ini memang sesuai untuk melindungi motor dari hujan/panas/embun.

Walaupun banner tersebut nampak ‘simple’, namun masa yang dihabiskan banyak juga memandang saya bukanlah orang yang artistik! Apapun nasib baik ada GIMP , tak perlulah ‘SME’ atau small medium enterprise isteri saya menggunakan perisian cetak rompak Photoshop.

Orang di kedai banner pun baru pertama kali dengar tentang GIMP. Promote, jangan tak promote.

Saya membuat keputusan untuk menyahut pelawaan saudara Irwan dan menukar windows manager dari Fluxbox ke Enlightenment. Memang tiada sebab tertentu selain gatal tangan hendak mencubanya. Fluxbox memang hebat dan tetap dihatiku haha.

DR17 memang tiada dalam repository rasmit Debian akan tetapi anda boleh mendapatkannya di http://xsm.alphagemini.org/E17/repository/

Alang-alang bertukar ke Enlightenment saya turut menggantikan xdm dengan entranced.

Pada awalnya saya menghadapi masalah untuk mengubah setting dpi untuk xserver (xorg) tetapi akhirnya mendapati bahawa parameter untuk mejalankan X boleh dilakukan dengan arahan entrance_edit  . entrance_edit init akan mengubah file /etc/entrance_config.cfg . Berikut adalah arahan yang lengkap.

sudo entrance_edit --xserver "/usr/bin/X -dpi 75 -quite -nolisten tcp vt7"

English translation of the above:

I decided to switch to Enlightmentment. Thank you Fluxbox (the community and developers of course)!  I also decided to ditch xdm and use the Entranced login manager.

Abdullah Jihad pun pengguna GNU Linux (sekarang Debian) sejak kecil. Kalau tak percaya tanya Irwan.:)

The fastest and it seems to me the easiest way to get this done is using ‘devede‘ . It’s pretty much a front-end for some other applications like mencoder, vcdimager, dvdauthor, etc. Another alternative is ‘tovid‘, but I didn’t have time to check it out.

For those who like the command-line route (or you do stuff remotely on your torrent server ), here’s my own note on making vcd/svcd.

Before that you might want to get the jargons straightened out as you’ll come across them. You can start here.

(1) Convert the .avi to mpeg with ffmpeg
 
$ ffmpeg -i video.avi -target ntsc-vcd video.mpg

Some of the videos I have got are in widescreen format. So to retain the black bars on the top and the bottom, you got to apply some padding to it. If this is not done then you’ll find the video stretched.

$ffmpeg -i video.avi -target ntsc-vcd -s 352×176 -padtop 32 -padbottom 32 video.mpg

Apparently there’s a formula to apply for the values of s, padtop and padbottom depending on your system (ntsc vs pal thingy)

(2) Split the mpg file, if required.

In some cases, the mpg file created will be quite large and may not fit in a single CD. Since vcdimager, will not work with anything above 700MB, you really need to split the mpg.

$mpgtx -2 video.mpg -b  video

This will create  to files – video-1.mpg and video-2.mpg respectively. Now  I’ve encountered some problems with doing the above if you’re producing svcd (-target ntsc-svcd) with ffmpeg. vcdimager seems to have problem reading the 2nd portion of the mpeg even though there is no problem rendering it with mplayer. I’ll just use devede for now if I need to make svcd.

(3) Make the VCD

$vcdimager -t vcd2 -c video.cue -b video.bin video.mpg

This will produce two files of course, video.bin and video.cue . The *.cue file is just a text file containing some information, the *bin file is the video itself. Go ahead and try:  mplayer video.bin and you should be able to watch the video.

(4) Burn the files.

$cdrdao write –device /dev/cdrw video.cue

cdrdao will figure out where to get video.bin from the information extracted from the cue file.

If you have wodim, a cdrecord replacement,  you could also do:

$wodim dev=/dev/cdrw -dao  cuefile=video.cue

I pretty much extracted the steps in 1-4  above from gentoo-wiki.

As I am getting too old for Gentoo , I went ahead with Debian  plus Xfce as the desktop environment. I haven’t used xfce for a while, but its looking good allright.

I was going through some old images using Picasa and found some old desktop screenshots. They definitely bring back good and funny memories.

RedHat days (1999-2000ish)

If you look close enough you can see my nikah video played using Real Player. That was the pre-youtube era. (Shakir pay attention, mmkay). The following screenshots are probably from RedHat 8 (or 7 ish?)

Playing with Gimp here, w00t!

Gentoo
I got Streamyx at home and plenty of time . That was the time when I started to use fluxbox. Gentoo stayed on the desktop until the mid 2006. I’m pretty much on Debian these days.