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Showing posts from 2009

Xorg events repeated twice

I've recently upgraded to xorg-x11 1.6 (it is shipped with several up-to-date Linux distributions like OpenSuSe 11.2) and encountered a problem with my keyboard. All keypresses repeated twice, which made impossible to use xorg-server. After looking through /var/log/Xorg.0.log I found that somehow Xserver decided to add my keyboard twice. So all events from the keyboard were processed two times. I fixed this problem by adding this line to xorg.conf into Section "ServerFlags" block Option "AutoAddDevices" "off"

Alsa Audio Meter

If you need to watch the realtime sound output level on some graphical meter, you might consider difficult to find the program for these needs. After some searching I found nice software called ameter especially for these functions. This program can be used with the most of ALSA and OSS apps. After program installation you should create .asoundrc in your home directory with the following contents: pcm_scope.ameter { type ameter } pcm_scope_type.ameter { lib /usr/local/lib/libameter.so } pcm.ameter { type meter slave.pcm 'hw:0,0' #can be hw or hw:0,1 etc... scopes.0 ameter } pcm.dsp0 ameter The program source can be downloaded from here Also I have created an ebuild for easy installation on Gentoo Linux. Simply add it to your local overlay # Copyright 1999-2009 Gentoo Foundation # Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 # $Header: $ EAPI="2" DESCRIPTION="Alsa meter plugin for audio software with GUI" HOMEPAGE="http://laugeo.free....

Run hddtemp as user

If you want to get temperature of your hard drive, you can simply run # hddtemp /dev/sda This method has one disadvantage - hddtemp must be executed as root, otherwise you will get /dev/sda: open: Permission denied But there is a quick solution to run hddtemp as a normal user. Most Linux distributions have hddtemp daemon. After you run it you should be able to use just telnet or netcat as a normal use to get your hard drive temperature: ~ telnet localhost 7634

Google Custom Search Results per Page

If you are using Google Custom Search on your site, you may wonder how to change the count of search results per page. Okay, if you take a look at the custom search form html code, you will find this line <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/afsonline/show_afs_search.js"></script> Now open this script in browser and look into the code itself. This line does the trick h=(h=b.googleNumSearchResults)?Math.min(h,20):10 It checks if the variable googleNumSearchResults exists and if true, the count of search results per page will be set to minimum value from googleNumSearchResults and 20. If the googleNumSearchResults is not set, the count of search results per page will be set to 10. So you can easily customize the results count by adding this line to your custom search form code (remember you can't get more than 20 results per page) var googleNumSearchResults = 15;

Mythfrontend for Windows

I've been looking for application simular to mythfrontend that can play Live TV from MythTV server (mythbackend) under Windows for a while. Currently there is a windows port of mythfrontend but it needs to be built from source with MinGW/MSys. So I searched for an easier way and found pretty good application called MythTV Player. It doesn't require any additional software or multimedia codecs and simply works out of the box. It is still in development stage so you may experience some issues during video playback, but after almost week of hard usage there was quite few player hangs and no other noticeable bugs. Here is the screenshot and the download link MythTv Player latest version

Increase USB Flash Drive Write Speed

The one of the biggest problems of usb flash drives is a slow data write speed. This article will guide you through the process that can possibly increase your flash stick write speed. Okay, first I bought Transcend 8GB usb flash stick. It had been formatted with FAT32 filesystem initially. So I decided to run data read/write speed test. Mount the filesystem and execute following # hdparm -t /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: Timing buffered disk reads: 102 MB in 3.05 seconds = 33.43 MB/sec $ dd count=100 bs=1M if=/dev/urandom of=/media/disk/test 100+0 records in 100+0 records out 104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 29.5112 s, 3.6 MB/s The disk read speed is good enough, but the write speed is not so good. That's because most of NAND flash drives (the most commonly used flash sticks) have 128k erase block size. Filesystems usually have 4k (4096 bytes) block size. And here we came into problem. If the filesystem blocks are not aligned to flash drive blocks, the performance overhead during disk writ...

Directory Checksum

Recently I found on some of my websites suspicious files. After some research I discovered that most of my custom html and php files were also modified and were containing base64 encoded code. So I decided to make universal script that will allow me to take site fingerprint and then manually check it for any changes in my files weekly. This php script takes md5sums of all files in directory specified (including subdirectories) and save the result in custom data file. The next time you run it it will show you new files, files that were not changed and files that WERE CHANGED. The output and some other options can be customized inside the code itself. Anyway if you have ssh access to your webserver, you can do almost the same by running find test5 -type f | xargs md5sum <?php #comment this if you want to debug the script error_reporting(0); function lookDir($path) {   $handle = @opendir($path);   if (!$handle)   return false;   while ($item = readdi...

Mysqld-bin logs problem

After continuous running of Mysql server, I've noticed that /var/lib/mysql directory uses too much disk space. The reason of that problem was a set of mysqld-bin.xxxxxx files. Each of that file was 1GB in size. First I thought that I can stop the Mysql server and remove that files, but I didn't want to act this way because there was sensitive data in databases that I didn't want to loose. So I found the better way to achieve this. Connect to Mysql server and perform the following mysql> flush logs; mysql> reset master; That's it! After that the all logbin files should be removed. Also you can disable mysqld-bin logging completely by commenting out log-bin line in my.cnf and restarting Mysql server daemon.

VLC Alsa Surround Sound 5.1

The recent versions of VLC require some extra setup for alsa 5.1 surround sound. By default vlc chooses the alsa device 'default'. When you're trying to switch the audio mode to "Surround 5.1", you got the error message VLC Audio output failed: The audio device "surround51" is already in use This can be solved by running vlc from terminal like this vlc --aout alsa --alsa-audio-device surround51 Surround51 is the alsa device you want to play audio with. You can get the list of available alsa audio devices by typing aplay -L in the terminal

Compro VideoMate Vista M5F Linux Setup

If you've recently purchased Compro VideoMate Vista M5F tv tuner card and want to get it working on your linux machine, then you are just in a few steps before you will get this done. I bought this card two weeks ago and finally setup it yesterday. But don't be upset, this will not take so long for you. So lets begin. First check that you card is correctly plugged into the system # lspci -v 04:00.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7131/SAA7133/SAA7135 Video Broadcast Decoder (rev d1) Subsystem: Compro Technology, Inc. VideoMate T750 Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 21 Memory at 90100000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2K] Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2 Kernel driver in use: saa7134 Kernel modules: saa7134 If you see that then the card is connected and you can continue. On my linux distribution (Archlinux) the card is automatically detected as Compro VideoMate T750 and all required saa7134 modules are loaded. This is not right so ...