Thomas' blog: December 2008

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Convert ogg to mp3

My sister is here for the holidays. Unfortunately her mp3 player only supports mp3 and no ogg. :-(
I helped her to convert their ripped ogg files from her kubuntu system into mp3 files. The following command transforms the whole directory from ogg in mp3.

for i in *.ogg; do sox "$i" "${i/.ogg}".mp3; done

(sox old.ogg neu.mp3 is the basic command to transform ogg to mp3.)

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Microwaves playing "Jingle Bells"

If you thought the purpose of microwaves is to heat meals, you might be wrong. Watch this little video from a PR-company.

Marry Christmas!

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Unison: Permission error with FAT32 USB-drive

Syncing my Linux (etx3) directory with a Windows USB-stick (FAT32) unison produced the following error:

Error in setting permissions:
Operation not permitted [chmod(/media/storage...

The permissions were set correctly. Here I found the solution.

Unison stores sync profiles in ~/.unison/*.prf. Edit the relevant prf file, and add a line 'perms = 0' and it will always ignore permissions for that profile.

See also the unison documentation: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/u....html#profiles

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Installing Linux with KDE 4 on a Thinkpad R61

After removing Vista from my new Thinkpad R61 I decided this time to install OpenSUSE 11.0 with KDE 4.1 (I run Kubuntu at the office, and I wanted to try another distribution.)
It took about 15 minutes until it was finished. Then I downloaded the online updates, added some programs and adjusted the desktop (plamoids and KDE4 composit desktop effects).
Network, WLAN, 3D-effects, sound (in and out), suspend to disk when the battery is low, ... worked fine out of the box. Congratulations to the whole open source community! Excellent work!

Only a few things don't work properly.

The fingerprint reader is not recogniced (but I don't need it).
I could aktivate bluetooth (after installing some bluetooth packages and the activation of bluetooth in YAST) but it is not possible to connect with my mobil phone (Nokia) longer than 3 seconds. I will work on that later.
Sun Presenter screen couldn't be installed. I will post on that later.
WLAN is connecting only in one out of 10 times. (Works pretty good now.)
Highspeed USB-stick is not recognized. (I have to deactivate ehci with "sudo /sbin/modprobe -r ehci_hcd")