Normally, DVDs play well on Debian Linux. Never experienced any problem with that. But recently, I tried to play a shop-bought DVD - and it didn’t work out with Kaffeine. The message I got was:

“Your DVD is probably crypted. According to your country laws, you can or can’t use libdvdcss to be able to read this disc…”

OK, the solution is as follows:

First, install the libdvdread3 - package

apt-get install libdvdread3

After this, you need to install the libdvdcss2 library, which can be downloaded on this page. Please, choose the right one, according to your architecture. For example, like that:

wget http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/deb/libdvdcss2_1.2.5-1_i386.deb

And install it:

dpkg -i libdvdcss2_1.2.5-1_i386.deb

After this, the encrypted DVDs play like a charm.

Recently, my cousin was asking me for help with her computer. Traveling for 500 km just to help her, is too expensive. So I was looking for an easy remote access tool. I didn’t want to explain for two hours, how to install VNC-Server.

Second thing: I wanted to make sure, that I can listen under Linux. It’s simply too complicated to always switch between two operating systems.

What I found was:

UltraVNC SC

This tool comes helpful, if you want somebody to just click, and the connection will be established. You have to create a txt-file, upload it, and your personal .exe will be created. There are enough UltraVNC howtos online, so I don’t want to go into detail here.

The interesting thing is. If you want to listen with Linux, you can try several VNC-derivatives. Sometimes, connections have been established, but you didn’t get pictures. So, finally, I used wine and downloaded a ultravnc-viewer only. And ran it under Linux like that:

wine vncviewer.exe -listen

Then I started the created UltraVNC SC program. And: et voila, it was working.

Sometimes, there is the need of changing a dot to a comma and vice versa. This occurs, for example, in measurement data, which are in ASCII-format.

With Linux, this is easy, but how can you achieve that under Windows (what still most professional companies are using)?

Well, use Notepad. But in larger files, this takes a while. (In my particular case, it took 15 minutes for one file.)

So, the easiest way is to use sed. Sed is also available for Windows, it comes with the Gnuwin32-package. With it, you can easily do every modification on text-files, that you can imagine.

For a replacement of a comma by a dot, use sed in this way:

D:\path_to_your_location\sed -i~ “s/\,/\./g” testfile.txt

It does the following:
1. It saves the original file under the same name followed by ~ (in this case: testfile.txt~)
2. it changes the comma by a dot
3. it does this on all occurances of a comma within this file.

You can use k3b to mp3-rip an audio-cd in Linux.

If ripping does not work, and k3b comes up with an error message like:
command failed: lame -h –tt

This can be corrected by editing the settings in k3b:
Settings –> Configure K3B –> Plugins –> K3B external audio encoder –> Configure … –> MP3 (Lame) –> Edit –> Check
“Swap Byte order”
“Write Wave header”

The problem is gone. The command will not fail anymore.

When I recently bought some new CDs I wanted to have them as mp3s. But, which tool is the best, for doing things like that?

First, I tried Amarok. But that was not the best choice. It works, but quite complicated.

So I tried: KAudioCreator. Uuuh. You will need almost half an hour for one CD, although the system is equipped with dual core CPU:
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+

Alright, so I went on through the Internet. And finally I landed at this utility: K3B. Not only does it rip your CDs, it also can burn CDs and DVDs. And easy to handle! So, this is my choice for further digitalizations of Audio-CDs. Just install it with

apt-get install k3b

If it does not work out of the box, you might have to install the codex algorithms. For mp3s I use lame. With debian, you can install it as a package. But first, modify your /etc/apt/sources.list: it should have a line containing

deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org stable main

After this: apt-get update

Now you can do:

apt-get install lame.

And you’re gone.
By doing this, you might run in a problem with apt complaining about “The following signatures couldn’t be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY …”

The solution for this problem is to install the debian-multimedia keyring first:

apt-get install debian-multimedia-keyring

By now, it will be working. The GUI is completely self-explanatory. No more words about it.

Have some fun with ripping your Audio-CDs with KDE and K3B!

Sometimes, you have songs, where you want to have one part cut out. Maybe
a) the lyrics is important, or
b) you like the music or
c) whatever.
Maybe you simply want to combine two songs? This can be achieved by using the command line tools:

mp3cut (for cutting, of course)
and
mp3wrap (for combining several files)

Installing on a Debian-machine like that:
belenus:/home/mrre# apt-get install mp3wrap
belenus:/home/mrre# apt-get install poc-streamer
(mp3cut is part of the poc-streamer package)

Then you can wrap two files to one by:
mp3wrap Electric_Eye_cplt.mp3 The\ Hellion.mp3 Electric\ Eye.mp3

Or you can cut it by:
mp3cut -o dreams.mp3 -t 00:02:14+000-00:02:45+000 Dreams.mp3

That’s it.

Here two examples:
The Cranberries - part of the dreams
Grave Digger-drum-solo of Culloden Muir
© by Grave Digger and The Cranberries