After a long hiatus, I'm back to trying to finish customizing our NAS; life with kid means your extra time doesn't always get spent the way you'd like, and I've migrated to a new laptop running ubuntu en route, I should write about that, too.
Tagged entries: "linux"
Want to get DVDs playing on the laptop that is running gentoo that I'll only have to use for a few more days before I get a new shiny (purple!) one. I know, makes no sense.. but hey, learning is good, right?
- Use xine-ui. It got the farthest first.
- Make sure your region is set
- Go through the few hoops you need to get raw i/o working. I pegged/tanked RAM w/o raw access -- every player segfaulted as a result (mplayer, xine, vlc). Use the raw device.
- If it's an encrypted DVD (and you have libdvdcss installed), I found that I needed to change something in my environment to get it to correctly decrypt the disk:
export DVDCSS_METHOD=disc-- I did it on the command line since I was just testing. Setting this finally let the DVD play.. with dropped frames all over the place.. but still.. progress! - And last, but not least, the simplest instruction from xine's help: change the niceness level of xine..
nice --5 xine
And poof! movie! with menu! rock on
How did I not know about this sooner?
Trying to build a particularly large maven project would consume so much CPU that my poor laptop would quit because it was sweating too much.
I used schedtool to set an affinity to only one of the two CPUs available on my dual-core laptop for the shell I used to launch the build, and voila! Things don't get as hot, and my system stays responsive. *phew!*
Getting networking up and running on the T60p has been a mixed bag. On one hand, the wired connection was easy (expected). The wireless was at first REALLY flaky, then after some fiddling the connection at home (WEP) was functional, and as of now (when I'm finally posting this thing) it still doesn't work at work (LEAP).
ISO, CDR, and CDRW in Linux [cpqlinux.com]
An old page, but full of handy tips (more like quick references) nonetheless.
Just in case, it's also here. [waybackmachine.org]
Also:
What a stroke of genius. ![[ding!]](/images/smilies/idea.gif)
I’m sure some people think it’s obvious, but what a great application of RAMDISK!
Sessions are generally small, and putting them in a RAMDISK eliminates IO activity from storing/retrieving session data without having to change anything in PHP..
Didn’t want to lose it.. 
Additional keyboard stuff:
XftConfig contains scalable fonts only. bitmap fonts can’t possibly be anti-aliased (and anti-aliasing is what XftConfig is there for).
> Can one get ride of one of the files?
If you remove /etc/X11/fs/config, X will stop working.
If you remove /etc/X11/XftConfig, antialiasing will act oddly.
