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Configuring service startup in Ubuntu

Subhash Chandran — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 11:05:07 +0000

If you are one of the old-timers who has migrated to Ubuntu from RedHat/Fedora distribution in the past, you might be familiar with the ntsysv tool in those Linux versions. I used to use that oddly-named tool to switch-on/off services in my Linux box. I was searching for a similar tool for Ubuntu, and found rcconf:

$ sudo apt-get install rcconf
$ rcconf

Linux: Diff between two folders

Subhash Chandran — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 05:10:36 +0000

To find the files which are in one and not in the other:

$ diff -r folder1/ folder2/

To find the file content differences:

$ diff -r -N folder1/ folder2/

OpenSource Font Manager

Subhash Chandran — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:10:13 +0000

Fontmatrix is an excellent Font organizing Software available for Linux, Windows and MacOS.

To install it in all Debian based systems (including Ubuntu):

$ sudo apt-get install fontmatrix

Screenshot of Fontmatrix running in my system:

Mounting WebDav in Ubuntu

Subhash Chandran — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:03:51 +0000

$ sudo apt-get install davfs2
$ sudo mount -t davfs http://localhost:8080/alfresco/webdav

Finding the width and height of Ogg Theora videos

Subhash Chandran — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 09:43:41 +0000

When placing Ogg Theora video files in your site using HTML5 tags, you can optionally specify the width and height of the videos. But how do you find the width and height? Use the tool ogginfo:

$ ogginfo video.ogg

Text-to-speech in Linux

Subhash Chandran — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 08:55:14 +0000

Festival is an interesting OpenSource project for converting text-to-speech in Linux environment. It has a commandline tool text2wave which converts, guess what, text to voice in wave format. Simple usage:

$ echo "Hello World" | text2wave > a.wav

Wave files are uncompressed, and occupy lot of space. To encode to Ogg Vorbis format:

$ oggenc a.wav

This will create a.ogg in the current directory.

Desktop Video Capture in Linux

Subhash Chandran — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 04:00:27 +0000

recordmydesktop is a powerful screencasting commandline tool for Linux. To capture the screen:

$ recordmydesktop

Press Ctrl+C to quit capturing. The captured video will be encoded in Ogg Theora format and saved as out.ogv (if out.ogv exists, as out-1.ogv and so on). To save the file in another name, say myout.ogv:

$ recordmydesktop myout.ogv

There is also a GTK frontend for recordmydesktop. To launch it:

$ gtk-recordMyDesktop

Video format conversion in Linux

Subhash Chandran — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:13:43 +0000

To stream video content using Video View Portlet, I had to re-encode some videos to flv format. This is pretty simple in Linux:

$ mencoder -oac copy -ovc lavc -o out.flv in.avi

-oac means Output Audio Codec and -ovc means Output Video Codec. The various options for -oac:

`copy`	no encoding, just streamcopy.
`pcm`	Encode to uncompressed PCM.
`mp3lame`	Encode to MP3 (using LAME).
`lavc`	Encode with a libavcodec codec.

The options for -ovc:

`copy`	no encoding, just streamcopy.
`raw`	Encode to an arbitrary uncompressed format (use ’-vf format’ to select).
`lavc`	Encode with a libavcodec codec.

Crontab quickies

Subhash Chandran — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 09:24:21 +0000

When searching the Web for setting hourly cron job, I was pleasantly introduced to a simplified syntax:

@hourly

For understanding the shortcut commands, go through the complete documentation of the crontab syntax by typing man 5 crontab in your command-prompt.

Color Picking in Linux

Subhash Chandran — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 12:17:01 +0000

Which color-picking software do I use? I found out two options (both are GTK based):

gpick: The project also has binaries for popular Linux distros available.
gcolor2: This is part of the Debian repository.