Into.the.Void.

In search for a proper dvd player for linux I stumbled upon vlc.
It’s a great player with great features combining the functionalities of progs like mplayer, xine, etc. I don’t want to use mplayer to play dvds because it does not support dvd menu browsing. Xine from the other hand worked fine…until I pressed the fullscreen button. CRASH!… Oggle is another dvd player I tried using. There’s no gui and one has to learn the keyboard shortcuts. The basic drawback of oggle though is the lack of deinterlace option.
VLC has it all. Great gui, plays dvd menus, great sound and video drivers support, streaming support if you want…just everything. The prob with it is that it has a lot of library dependancies..but it’s worth it 🙂

vlc 0.6.2 and 0.8.1 had trouble compiling on my gentoo so I decided to go for 0.8.0.

To install vlc-0.8.0 it in gentoo I had to unmask some packages though:

echo “media-libs/libdvbpsi ~x86” >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
echo “media-video/ffmpeg ~x86” >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

and then:

emerge /usr/portage/media-video/vlc/vlc-0.8.0.ebuild

don’t forget to have the wxwindows use flag enabled in your /etc/make.conf…else you’ll get no gui 🙂

I’ve also found a very nice beta of acrobat7 for linux around the net. It’s great! Very fast…and with very nice rendering. It opens up pdfs faster than gpdf and it has a feature that’s trully lacking from gpdf: Text searching. I’ll wait for acrobat’s final release of acroread for linux 🙂

I’ve also changed my firefox theme from the default to Qute 3 (sample1, sample2)

Filed by kargig at 18:34 under General,Linux
No Comments | 2,564 views

athcool is a VERY nice utility that enables AMD’s athlons to enter powersaving mode. It’s just great. Less heat, less noise from fans that don’t need to run on 4000rpms any more 🙂

Just a part from the Athlon Powersaving HOWTO.

The HLT signal which is used by the normal idle-loop of the Linux kernel doesn’t normaly bring any significant power-saving on processors of the Athlon/Duron family (hereafter referred to as Athlon processors). To get real power-saving on an Athlon processor, you have to put the processor in the STPGNT-Mode (Stop Grant Mode). In this mode, the processor is disconnected from the front-side bus (FSB), and can turn off parts of the CPU as well as reduce the clock to save power.

just emerge athcool and start using it.

Filed by kargig at 12:55 under General,Linux
3 Comments | 3,424 views