Considering Linux, need some info

[wmansir]

I've dabbled in Linux before and I was moderately competent 8 years ago when I used Unix regularly in college and took a sys admin class. Since then I haven't done much more than play around with few live CD distros.

I installed Kubuntu 6.06 yesterday and I'm considering moving over to it, but after it took me 60 minutes to get MP3's playing in Amarok, I'm getting cold feet. So, before I really get started I was hoping to get some answers from people who use Linux for some of the same stuff I do.

Thanks in advanced for any replies, and I hope I'm not overwhelming anyone, please feel free to just address the topic(s) you want to.

Here are some of the tools I need. I would really appreciate any up to date info on alternatives or Wine compatibility:

DVD-Rebuilder - as the forum moderator I need to have this run. From what I've read here it works under Wine with a little work, but those threads are dated. How about the latest versions with the Preview/Edit window?

DVD-RB supported Encoders - I prefer ProCoder, but I'm betting I'll have to cross that bridge on my own. How about HCEncoder and CCE?

VOBBlanker w/ Muxman support - One of the things I really enjoy doing with my backups is editing/replacing menu stills with custom pics via VobBlanker (which requires Muxman), plus general DVD stripping.

ImgBurn/ImgTool - Easy to use tools for DVD iso creation and burning (and/or direct DVD file burning)

Daemon Tools - I know linux has native .iso mounting. Is there a script, program or setting that will let me right click a DVD/CD .iso in Konqueror and mount it on the desktop?

Basic AVI tools - something like Vdub for quick viewing/edit (doesn't have to be as advanced, just basic cut/crop/resize stuff) and anything to easily encode to Xvid/Divx. I rarely do this, but am just wondering what's available.

Also, there is the general problem of data access. Right now I have four NTFS partitions. Two of them are large data drives that I would like to r/w access in both Linux and XP, and the 4gb limit on FAT32 is problematic. How stable/risky is NTFS write support under Linux? Alternatively, is there a driver to give XP r/w access to ext3? I found a program, but I was hoping for something that would let me mount them as a drive so other programs could transparently access them.

And finally, if Wine fails me, what about full VM machines? I recall that MS and VMWare released free VM software recently, did that include Linux releases or is there an existing free VM solution to run XP?

[Quikee]

NTFS write support in linux is quite stable with ntfs-3g driver - however it may fail in some cases, but should fail without damaging the partition itself. For ext3 in windows you can use this driver (http://www.fs-driver.org/ScreenExplorer.html). I had no problem with this driver on my ext3 partiton however problems are possible (it was build for ext2 which means no journaling is supported with this driver - ext3 is acutally ext2 with journaling ability).

VMWare Player is available in Ubuntu/Kubuntu (enable universe/multiverse repositories). You can grab on net a empty hard drive image and can install XP on that drive - no commercial VMWare Server/Client should be needed for this. There are also other VM programs on linux like Xen for example, but would be harder to install (or maybe not - I have no experience with them).

for basic AVI tool you could use AVIdemux (also in universe repository).

for ImgBurn/ImgTool like tool you can try K3B.

Auto-mounting .iso files can also be easily done with a script and integrate it into Konqueror (I know it could be done in Nautilus as I use Gnome).

I can't help you with other things as I don't know the answer. I hope I have helped you just a bit. Linux is great (for me) but it somehow lacks some good video editing tools (or I just haven't found them yet).

[Amnon82]

I did a list, but it is till now not sticky >> Living Linux tools list. (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=114966)

Most programs you use have equals on linux. Why amarok not work for you in 20 Sek I don't know. I'm doing realy well on Ubuntu 6.06 what is the same Distro U use only with Gnome-Desk.

For the native ISO-mounting you can use this: Unmount ISOs (http://www.grumz.net/?q=node/208) - Mount ISOs (http://www.grumz.net/?q=node/207)

[Quikee]

If it is Ubuntu or Kubuntu it doesn't really matter - you can go from one to another with use of repositories. You can also have both KDE and GNome installed and also use programs written for KDE in GNome (however with a little different look and feel) and the other way around. This is kind of necessary sometimes because there are some very good programs written for one desktop environment that are non existent or poor in the other environment (for example I use Kaffeine and Ktorrent in GNome because I don't like other implementations written for GNome).

The problem with Amarok and mp3 playing might be because Ubuntu/Kubuntu doesn't ship with a mp3 decoder out of the box (patent issues - only ogg vorbis is supported out of the box in Ubuntu/Kubuntu) and you have to enable universe/multiverse repositories to be able to get the decoders. However this should still be very easy to do (in Synaptic you can easily enable the repositories and search for the necessary programs - amarok-xine I belive).

[wmansir]

Thanks for the replies.

@Quikee,
Yes you did help me quite a bit. The native Ext2 driver in particular looks very promising.

ps. Your second post came as I was typing this, see below for the Amarok explanation.


@Amnon82,

I found your very informative post earlier. Thanks for puting it together. Some of the software I asked about is on the list, but it's a bit overwhelming, with so many options, and I was hoping to get some suggestions from what people are personally using.

Also, Amarok worked fine, but it was missing MP3 support. Which was very odd because I could swear I played some MP3s using the liveCD before I did a full install. The reason it took so long to fix was because the xine-extracodecs package was greyed out in Adept Installer (for reasons I still don't understand) and even after allowing universe/multiverse ubuntu packages I couldn't get it to install. I even added a 3rd party repository, which didn't help. Eventually I launched Amarok (for the 3rd or 4th time) and it prompted me to install MP3 support with a button to install the package with Adept. If that would have happened the first time I tried to play an MP3 I would have been impressed, but the whole ordeal was really a frustrating episode, especially because I still don't know why the package was greyed out in Adept Installer.

[echo]

The grey thing in Adept might be because you don't have the respective repository enabled. Take a look here (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Ubuntu) for more info.

For all my encoding and resizing needs I use mencoder. Yes it is a CLI program but I can't possibly use a gui for that now that I know how mencoder works.

[Amnon82]

U can also search for EasyUbuntu or Automatix. These are tools to get it in 2 min also dvdlibcss, thats why I don't link it here.

[virus]

Daemon Tools - I know linux has native .iso mounting. Is there a script, program or setting that will let me right click a DVD/CD .iso in Konqueror and mount it on the desktop?
Not natively, though I've heard of a MountISO script that should exactly do that job. And God knows what happens in the galaxy of KIO slaves and/or Konqueror plugins... ;)
However, if the point is just to browse an ISO on the fly there's KIso which should do the job fine - IIRC it can edit the contents, too, and supports NRG files. As for full-blown transparent access, making a link to /mnt/iso - or whatever mount point you want to use - on your desktop and just mount there from commandline won't take too much effort, either: the command is "mount /path/to/file.iso /mnt/iso -o loop".

Basic AVI tools - something like Vdub for quick viewing/edit (doesn't have to be as advanced, just basic cut/crop/resize stuff) and anything to easily encode to Xvid/Divx. I rarely do this, but am just wondering what's available.

The first thing to check is whether Wine runs enough of VDub for your needs. Here I can decode AVIs (DivX/XviD) pretty nicely and take screenshots from them using Wine 0.9.19 and VDub 1.4.10. Avisynth works too, and I think I successfully opened AVSes in VDub too.

Otherwise, Avidemux is probably worth a look, though it's still maturing (especially for MP4 support AFAIK).


Also, there is the general problem of data access. Right now I have four NTFS partitions. Two of them are large data drives that I would like to r/w access in both Linux and XP, and the 4gb limit on FAT32 is problematic.

I'm a commandline freak, so I'd say that saving the big files under Linux and then using "split" to create <4 GB parts on FAT32 is doable. Then joining them with copy /B (or a port of "cat" if you have MSYS or Cygwin) under Win should be easy. But I reckon you may want a more hassle-free solution, given that you don't have a FAT32 partition ready for use.

[wmansir]

I have a few non-A/V issues I have to resolve before I can tackle the stuff here. I have to get my ATI video driver installed, get Linux to recognize my Raid array (now sees it as 2 drives), setting up network shares, get the extra buttons on my MX700 working, etc

It looks like I'm going to be busy for a while before I can take any action on the info you all have kindly provided.

@echo
I did that, even added a 3rd repository that specialized in legally questionable stuff like codecs and decss that many distros won't host, but nothing worked. I'm back in kubuntu now (was in XP) and I see that packages are no longer greyed out in Adept Installer. So I'm still scratching my head.

@virus
By native I meant you don't need a program like Daemon Tools to mount .iso files, like in Windows. Kiso looks very useful, but I mostly need file access for applications.

I'll try out Vdub under Wine. That version of Vdub is a little dated, are you using it because later versions have known issues, or have you just stuck with it because you know it works?

I really don't see FAT32 working for me because I use DVD .iso files a lot, and they are mostly stored on these two large data drives and need to be intact.

[Amnon82]

I played around with Mandriva 2007 One which is released at 03.10.06 for free download. I was impressed that the live-cd get all of my hardware, even the Nvida 7800GT with accrelated driver support. I think I'll install it on my laptop to get into it. I know now how ubuntu and suse linux works. Maybe Mandriva will do it better. I'll keep you posted. If you want you can download it here: http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/MandrivaLinux2007Official

[Blue_MiSfit]

If you've got a hot nVidia card, give Beryl a whirl. It's a totally 3d compositing window manager.

It's like Mac OS X and Vista smashed together, only free :D

Still buggy but OMG its pretty..

~MiSfit

[Amnon82]

To configure your mouse look here: new guide (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=219894&page=1) - advanced guide (http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=188302)

There are also some german Wikis:

http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/evdev
http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Extratasten

die Mouse konfigurieren. imwheel will do the magic.

[wmansir]

I may have made a mistake in trying to install ATI's proprietary Radeon driver, it semi-hosed my display settings, but I was able to fix it by editing xorg.config, but I'm stuck at 1280x960, even though I commented that option out in xorg.config. Resolutions are kind of weird in X. Text seems bigger, so larger resolutions are more usable than XP, but there's something throwing me I haven't nailed down yet.

@Amnon82
I think I am going to give a few more distros a try. I had a SUSE on a VM last year and it seemed to be a little less simplified, which may fit my needs better. I went with Kubuntu because Ubuntu is popular and has a reputation for ease of use and I've used KDE in the past and been impressed.

This will also give me a chance to play around with CD/DVD burning under linux.


EDIT: Also, regarding the mouse. It's odd because the mouse control panel acutally has a tab for labeled "MX700 Optical Mouse" and gives a battery power bar, which is more than windows 2-state Good/Low battery display, and allows me to change the RF channel. It seems odd that the user has to do so much work to get the extra buttons working when it has apparently been detected and has some pretty advanced functionatlity availible out of the box.

[virus]

By native I meant you don't need a program like Daemon Tools to mount .iso files, like in Windows. Kiso looks very useful, but I mostly need file access for applications.
Yes, the kernel has native support, but Konqueror doesn't have native (built-in) support for ISO files. However, it allows you to use custom applications to open a given file type, and that means that probably a simple script would do... you just have to know the syntax to tell Konq how to invoke your script. Keeping the mount point fixed (e.g. /mnt/iso) simplifies things a lot in that respect I think.
Alternatively, third party plugins/scripts for Konq should be available somewhere.


I'll try out Vdub under Wine. That version of Vdub is a little dated, are you using it because later versions have known issues, or have you just stuck with it because you know it works?
I've always stuck with VDub(/Mod) 1.4.10 because they worked for my needs. Both run under Wine directly from the windows partition, without installing them under Wine itself. One nice thing about them is that I can copy a screenshot to the "clipboard", and then paste it into Linux apps (not all work too - IIRC KolourPaint does, Gimp doesn't).
Maybe I should also mention that I have XviD 1.0.3 installed under Wine, that probably helps in the decoding part :)

I really don't see FAT32 working for me because I use DVD .iso files a lot, and they are mostly stored on these two large data drives and need to be intact.
Then, you seem the right guy for trying out ntfs-3g. According to opinions I've read, it's much more complete than previous solutions such as captive-ntfs. It's also much newer, so be careful ;)

[Quikee]

EDIT: Also, regarding the mouse. It's odd because the mouse control panel acutally has a tab for labeled "MX700 Optical Mouse" and gives a battery power bar, which is more than windows 2-state Good/Low battery display, and allows me to change the RF channel. It seems odd that the user has to do so much work to get the extra buttons working when it has apparently been detected and has some pretty advanced functionatlity availible out of the box.

Yeah.. that's because KDE detects the mouse and allow you to modify some extra mouse functionality.. however (extra) buttons are handled by X server and not KDE. Extra buttons can not be assigned using default mouse module (driver) and evdev must be used and also X server must be restarted. X server configuration is pain in the ass but as far as I know they are working on some functionallity that will simplify X configuration and support changing things without restart of the server.

Still once you have the configuration figured and everything working as you wish, you won't have to change it for a long time (depends on how much you upgrade).

Linux need some time to get used to but it's worth it because it's very flexible and you can actually modify anything to suit your needs. You also have to accept that some things sometimes just don't work as easy as they should (that's just how linux is) instead to say linux is junk because I can't do this or that in just 3 mouse clicks.

[wmansir]

I've spent the past few hours installing and tinkering with Mandriva 2007. Based on what I saw with the liveCD it fit my needs much better. The Mandriva control center has some very useful apps, like a gui disc partition/mount manager that made mounting my NTFS partitions a snap compared to Kubuntu where I had to manually edit fstab.

Hardware detection was a lot better. I have 3 HD controllers (onboard IDE and SATA plus an ATA raid PCI card), and it took quite a bit of manual GRUB configuration to get it to work with Kubuntu, but Mandriva nailed it.

It also spotted my TV tuner, but it's a bit flakey. The picture is a bit scrambled. It started out a lot scrambled but some tweaking got it almost works.

On the other issues, It seems my cheap Sil0680 is a bit of a faker. It doesn't do real RAID, but just fakes it enough to have the Windows driver make it look like it does. So under Linux I see the two drives instead of one. I have to look into geting ATAraid to perhaps see the array as it should be. (EDIT: Mandriva comes thru again, "dmraid -ay sil" and I have my Raid drive back. With Kubuntu I had to install dmraid myself and it only found one of the drives in the array)

I got easy .iso mounting working with this script (http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=11577&forummode=2&forumpage=15&forumexplevel=0&forumthread=162162#c162166) and the fix posted in the comments.

One place Kubuntu really seems to have Mandriva beat is Adept/deb vs. Mandriva's rpm based installer. Adept was much easier to setup and use.

I got imwheel installed, but still have to tweak it to get the buttons right. I thought I was in luck with this article (http://www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr/configuration2006.html), but it caused the scroll wheel to control back/fwd in Firefox.

The adventure continues...

[virus]

Well, at this point, given that you liked Mandriva as well as Adept, which is the counterpart of Synaptic AFAIK, it's time for me to enter spam mode ;) and recommend that you give a try to PCLOS (www.pclinuxos.com).

Being a LiveCD, you can try it without installing anything. You can later install it by clicking on the icon on your desktop and it becomes a full-blown desktop-oriented, KDE-based distro, updated via Synaptic/apt (apt4rpm, actually). It forked 3 years ago from Mandrake 9.2, and they still use pretty much the same tools (installer, Control Center, hwdetect, ...).

Comes with some stuff preconfigured (e.g. MP3 and other media formats work out-of-the-box) and has gained a reputation for being very easy to use and friendly towards Windows switchers. I see a lot of people on PCLOS' forums saying they were former Mandriva users... the #6 spot gained on distrowatch.com probably suggests something, too :)

The LiveCD comes in 3 versions, just pick the bigger one (named "BigDaddy"); the other 2 are more basic versions that allow more customization.
After you've installed it, you can actually tweak it and then remaster it to CD/DVD with a single command ("mklivecd filename.iso"), building your own version - your settings and installed applications will all be kept.
Among the publicly available remasters of PCLOS, VideoLinux is maybe worth a look for you, too... it comes with several video-related apps installed.

[wmansir]

Thanks, I'll take a look. i'm really getting frustrated with mandriva's software installer, it's keeping me from installing ntfs-3g now because there's a problem with a dependency package or something.

the PCLinOS website is down now, but I'm not going to give it a go for another day or so anyway. If it can match Mandriva's hardware support I may give it serious consideration. I thought getting my RAID to work under LInux and XP was going to be either impossible or a major pain, but one cmd and it was ready to mount.

Videolinux looks promisng too, the screenshot I saw had DVD-RB and VOBBlanker right on the desktop of the liveCD.

[Teegedeck]

I think I am going to give a few more distros a try. I had a SUSE on a VM last year and it seemed to be a little less simplified, which may fit my needs better.If eventually you want to try SUSE, too, a good idea would be to wait till December when openSUSE 10.2 will come out with fake-RAID support.

If you don't want to wait I'd recommend SLED 10 because SUSE 10.1 isn't quite the bee's knee. SLED's GNOME desktop is very ergonomic as far as I'm concerned. SLED 10 is compatible with SUSE 10.1 packages. Package management in SUSE is terribly slow with its native package manager; smartpm is the solution. (I would think you can use smartpm with Mandriva, too. It's better at handling dependencies IMHO.)

On the other hand Mandriva seems to be quite nice, doesn't it?

[shoarthing]

Mandriva is IME really easy to use, & the extra effort required to get at legally iffy packages is relatively small.

If you want to go bleedin' edge, can recommend Sabayon - a Gentoo-based liveCD [get v 3.05] thing with all the latest eye-candy & comprehensive access to the very latest source [this is, being Gentoo-based, a compilation-centric distro] via the splendid Portage system Gentoo use. . . but it is a bit of a sod to set up . . . days 'n days.

Vmware Server is apparently now a free d/l - if you really, really need to run DVDRB would suggest running a stripped-down W2K install therein - v much doubt you'd get DVDRB/Procoder working via wine . . .

[Amnon82]

The fun thing is. There are so many distros. One will bring this new thing out, the other distro that. After a while you'll see good things in every distro (like K3B - the burning app).

Some distros are for freaks, other for windoof-user and changer (like linspire / freespire) and other for video-geeks.

Distrowatch (www.distrowatch.com) give you the news, what is new on the market.

A new version of dyne:bolic, a specialist multimedia distribution targetting media activists, artists and creative individuals, is out (http://distrowatch.com/3759)

[wmansir]

DISCLAIMER: I've been awake for about 22 hours strait now, not because of this topic, thank god. Before I crash I thought I would give an update, but I'm feeling a bit loopy so I apologize if this post rambles a bit.

--------

Yesterday I tried VideoLinux and PCLinuxOS via LiveCD. The latest VideoLinux release is several months old at this point, so some of the software was dated. Normally that isn't a problem, except Synaptic couldn't open the package database. Which was my first hint that it also wasn't very stable. I had a lengthy post on my impressions typed up while using it, but when I went to submit the forum asked me to log in (again) and the post was lost, then I noticed strange characters appearing on pages. DVD-RB, Vdubmod, DVDShrink and VOBBlanker were installed, but I couldn't get the file open dialog to work in any of them.

PCLinuxOS was much more promising. It wasn't until using Synaptic that I realized how much it and DrakeRPM (Mandriva's package manager) are alike. The key difference being Synaptic worked, although I think that may be due to having better repositories than the program itself. I imagine that is due to the nature of the distros. Mandriva being commercial in nature and therefor the free version derived by hacking away commercial resources from the original. PCLOS on the other hand is designed to be what it is.

My fake-raid is another sore issue, but this time I think I have it licked. It didn't work in PCLOS, just like Kubuntu I had to install dmraid and even then it only found one of the stripe drives and so it couldn't complete the array. Knowing that it worked in Mandriva I did a little detective work and found Md was using dmraid v1.0.0.rc11, where as PCLOS had rc9, and the changelog for rc10 has a fix for my issue.

I was impressed enough with PCLOS to try it as a real install, or at least I started to. I cleared out some freespace for a partition on my test drive and when going thru the install process I picked "use free space". That's when I had my first minor heart attack because I saw that the installer saw my raid array as 2 drives, one with a NTFS partition and the other as free space. So it automatically partitioned the "empty" drive with ext2 and swap and apparently wrote it to the disc, because it's showing up that way even in Mandriva. Luckily I panicked wildly and stopped it before it actually formatted the partitions. The array still works, but I'm not sure if the partitioning caused any file corruption.

Now, I'm too timid to actually trust the PCLOS installer without first getting the raid working on the liveCD. That way the installer will see it as just another NTFS partition. I don't want to take any chances that it will actually try to use one of the partitions it thinks is on that drive.

@Teegedeck

Thanks for the suggestion. I think I'm going to going see if I can get PCLOS installed and if it is everything Mandriva is with better package management then I'll stick with it. Although, who knows after I get some sleep maybe I'll try one more liveCD.

@shoarthing

I'm not really looking for bleeding edge, but it seems some of my needs are pushing me in that direction. I turned off Compiz/Xgl because the performance was sluggish at points (like restoring a minimized window) and it was a little buggy. For the most part it worked great, when it worked at all. A couple of time when I logged in the system ran like molasses and Compiz was nowhere to be seen, including the stuff it was responsible for, like window titlebars. Once the kinks are worked out, this is a very cool package. I already miss the expose-like feature.

re:gentoo, I think I'm going to stick with an easier distro until I get my feet under me.

Regarding, DVD-RB. I have a feeling you are right about ProCoder, but 'm not really married to it, I could live with HCenc.

[virus]

PCLinuxOS was much more promising.
...
Knowing that it worked in Mandriva I did a little detective work and found Md was using dmraid v1.0.0.rc11, where as PCLOS had rc9, and the changelog for rc10 has a fix for my issue.
That's very unfortunate I'd say. But that's understandable, given that PCLOS 0.93a BigDaddy has been released in August while MD2007 is just a few days old. Lot of stuff usually gets updated *before* producing a new release.
I guess I may request an updated package on your behalf (users active in the forums can request packages), but that would require a few days before the update hits the public servers.

Two quick notes: 1) make sure to create a separate /home partition. That's good for any distro, but especially needed for PCLOS since the next version will be rebuilt with completely new base libraries - that will require a complete reinstall, for the first time in PCLOS' history.
Having /home separated from / allows you to reformat / while keeping your stuff and settings intact.
2) you can turn a normal PCLOS install into a VideoLinux just by installing from Synaptic and configuring some video-related applications. The configuration part is something you would have done anyway I guess, so you wouldn't be losing much time starting with the "normal" PCLOS.

Hope you can get your RAID troubles sorted :)

[wmansir]

I'm not really up to speed with all these package management tools, would it break anything if I download the source and compile it myself? That was going to be my next step.

[Teegedeck]

Oooh, that was a very important remark about having a separate /home partition up there! Right. :)

About package management and compiling: No, it won't break anything but it's better to deinstall a package before you install a self-compiled version. Otherwise the package manager might want to 'update' that package at some time and overwrite your self-compiled stuff.

Generally there's two very common package management applications: APT with its popular frontend Synaptic and SmartPM which was designed to be the sucessor of APT. They work with both DEB files and the RPM system, so just get them for your platform if you miss good package management with it.

I forgot: Fedora supports fake-RAID, so you might want to try it.

[virus]

I'm not really up to speed with all these package management tools, would it break anything if I download the source and compile it myself? That was going to be my next step.
As Teegedeck said, it's better to uninstall from Synaptic before using a self-compiled version. Otherwise the package might be signalled as "broken" in Synaptic and that generates troubles when updating.

I run several self-compiled things (x264, mplayer, EciAdsl, ...) and sometimes I need to "get over" Synaptic, but stuff generally works OK. The only drawback is that sometimes the stuff you compile is overwritten by Synapticwhen it downloads dependencies for a package and thus you have to reinstall your copy over the "official" one - not a big problem, since Synaptic always notifies of all packages it installs.

[wmansir]

I'm in the PSLOS live CD now, and the installer is copying files. I got dmraid built in about 15 minutes, the only snag was having to install a lib-dev package via synaptic.

Right now everything is going on 1 partition, but once I get settled I will make a /home partition.

[garbii]

If u compile anything I suggest that instead of
"make install" u should use checkinstall (download checkinstall from your repo first)

'checkinstall -D make install " --- this command for debian besed distro will create a deb package from your compile and install it ...

big advantage of checkinstall is that u can easily uninstall your compiled prog through synaptic, apr-get or other package menager ...

[wmansir]

Well, I lost a partition, but it wasn't the one on the raid. I have no solid evidence of how it happened, I hadn't even mounted it. Luckily it was my least important drive and I honestly can't think of anything I'll miss except for a few Dr Who episodes.The only annoying thing was it was my boot partition (but not my system drive). So I had to get ntfs-3g working in linux so I could write the XP boot files to another NTFS partition in order to boot.

Which reminds me, how do I get a module to load into the kernel at boot time. I've added it to /etc/modules but it didn't appear to work.

[virus]

Which reminds me, how do I get a module to load into the kernel at boot time. I've added it to /etc/modules but it didn't appear to work.
In PCLOS, the relevant file is /etc/modprobe.preload. Other distros have something similar. The /etc/modules is a leftover from 2.4 kernels. Everything related to modules in Linux 2.6 is handled via modprobe.

While I'm at it, a couple packages you'll want to make sure they're installed in any Linux distro you use: win32-codecs (DLLs that mplayer uses to decode VC-1, WMV, VP6/7 and other stuff) and msfonts (Windows-like fonts to be used by Wine - which should pick them automatically after you've installed them).

[Amnon82]

@wmansir: I tried today the Mandriva 2007 One livecd. Guess what. I also don't like the umpri-installer rpmDrake2. It sucks. So I played a little with Ubuntu 6.10 and decided to upgrade my Ubuntu 6.06 to that version, even in his beta stage of 6.10.

[wmansir]

I finally moved on to what the is thread is suppose to be about: A/V Tools.

Installed PGCedit as a standalone linux app. The default font was almost unreadable, but it's a program options so all is good.

Setup VOBBlanker under wine. It had a problem of popup windows coming in behind the current window, so I had uncheck "allow windows manager to control windows". It makes it a bit akward on the desktop, but it works great. Including muxman for menu still encoding. One small bug is that the 'log' that is generated as it processes has several lines of junk characters before the cursor. It doesn't seem to effect the output though.

DVD-RB is another story. First, the Key creation/fetching program gets an error right away, so I decided to just try the free version. In there I'm getting a "runtime error 5 Illegal predure call" as soon as it tries to run the d2v creation step.


Does anyone know a program/method of just clicking on a .ifo and getting full dvd playback (with working menus, etc)?

[nm]

Does anyone know a program/method of just clicking on a .ifo and getting full dvd playback (with working menus, etc)?
Try opening the directory with VLC. MPlayer should also work (menu support is available only in SVN versions and probably not compiled in to most builds). Without menu support, run "mplayer -dvd-device /path/to/your/DVD/image dvd://TITLE", where TITLE is the title to play, starting from 1. With menu support compiled in, it would be easy to create an icon on the desktop (for example), where you can drag the DVD image directory to start playback.

[virus]

/me wonders if Xine can open IFO files directly.

[wmansir]

I've been using Linux almost exclusively for the last few days, but my fake-raid performance issues have kept me from doing any serious A/V work. I plan on busting my raid up into two drives and formating them ext3. I just need to clear enough data and then boot into XP to Xfer the remaining files.

Speaking of which, after booting into XP I found one of the DIRs crated by linux (via ntfs-3g) was not valid under XP. A standard chkdsk -F fixed the issue though and no data was lost.

I hosed my Wine install by trying to use WineTools, one of the websites it uses for it's base setup files changed the URL and it kind of borked the whole thing. I started over, used ie4linux (http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page) and it worked great. I also reinstalled VOBBlanker under Wine. Most importantly FreeCell Pro (http://www.rrhistorical.com/rrdata/Fcpro65/) works great under Wine. Unfortunately DVD Profiler does not, and I doubted I would ever get the Pro version of DVD-RB working so...

I also setup a win2k machine in vmplayer. The free version only allows you to use existing virtual macine images, but the site easyVMX (http://www.easyvmx.com/easyvmx.shtml) lets you created an empty VM for the OS of your choice and install it yourself. I found a post explaing you can extract "windows.iso" from the free vmware server edition to install vmtools on vmplayer, which makes it a lot more easy to use. It's not exactly suprising that this virtual win2k install is more reponsive than my bloated XP system. I setup a samba server on my host system and mapped the network drives in Win2k.

The upside of using vmplayer is everything works pretty effortlessly and performance seems to be pretty good. The downside is that it takes up about 2GB of disk space for maybe 30mb of programs.

I don't think I've mentioned it earlier, but PCLOS did beat Mandriva in one HW recogintion area. It didn't auto detect my TV card and install KdeTV on the desktop, but adding it via the PCLOS Control Center was very easy and unlike Mandriva, it actually worked. Instead of KdeTV I'm using TVTime. It's the only program close to a Dscaler rival I've found. Very nice.

I ran into a problem with Firefox loosing sound when I tried to watch dl.tv. It turns out sometimes using Amarok or other sound programs can cause this issue in FF. The solution was to install the aoss package from Synaptic and change the FF shortcut to "aoss /usr/bin/mozilla-firefox".

I also got at least my fwd/back thumb buttons on my MX700 working in FF. I still have todo some tweaking to get the rest working and I think button 8 never will, since X sees it as a button 1 click. Yet again I resorted to compling the latest version myself, not so much because the repositories older version wasn't capable, but I just couldn't find instructions that worked with that version. This page (http://www.glaurung.demon.co.uk/info/linux.mx500.howto.html) is a valuable resource on MX500 or MX700 issues.

[virus]

So, are you a happy Linux user or do you think it still doesn't fit you as primary OS? :)

By the way, given your experience in the A/V field, you could actually be an asset to PCLOS' community. If you choose to stick with it, I'd encourage you to join the forums (http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php) and post some comments/questions/tips there.

It's usually a friendly place, and if you become an "active user" (no idea what the definition actually means, but I guess you need to make some posts) you have access to the Package Request section, where you may ask for updates or new packages not available in Synaptic.
And you usually get an answer directly from Texstar, which is the founder and the man behind most of the packaging in PCLOS. You won't find many major distros where the boss often answers to - and even jokes with - casual users in the forums. I think you might contribute something in terms of suggestions about A/V-related issues and tools.

[shoarthing]

wmansir - Hi - thanks for keeping us up-to-date with the great migration . . . . . you are not alone.

vmware-server is now free, BTW - you just mail 'em for some serials.

. . & I must say that this application is a boon: like you I'm running [strippped] W2K via vmware & found it genuinely impressive & funny at the same time - this is inside a Dual-Opteron box on an NF4 Pro chipset - to be able to enable DMA in vmware's virtual Intel chipset & have Nero burn happily away at full chat. I don't like or entirely trust the current 'stable' versions of K3b.

As regards abandoning your firmware RAID, well, it will probably be faster anyway: simultaneous streaming read/write within a firmware array is in my experience quite a lot slower than the same transfer between two indedendent HDDs.

I'm investigating [have the bits in the post] using a firewireB Initio 2430L bridgeboard connected to either 2 or 4 PATA HDDs in a stripped or mirrored array: this is apparently seen by linux [post-2.6.12 kernel (http://www.linux1394.org/index.php)] as hardware RAID - snagette is setup is only via Win32. If it works stably will set up a couple of these bridgeboards with their HDDs in an external box, controlled from a couple of firewireB PCI-X hosts.

BTW - the distro I'm using has a brilliant means of system-wide updating: they issue *.iso updates using 'xdelta' patches . . . this means you can take the old *.iso you installed from, patch the thing using xdelta [in about two minutes] to the current *.iso; check this against its MD5 & burn to disk, then reinstall the whole distro as an update. Saves a lot of downloading & [from a single experience] works seamlessly.

This update-process is not yet perfect - you keep whatever you stuffed in your /home partition [if you made one]; but lose all your custom system-settings & custom installations . . but of course vmware does have its 'clone' system so at least that is painless. The process is similar to [tho' much slower than] a Win32 re-install; with the considerable advantage that you update at the same time.

[wmansir]

@virus
To be honest I'm still on the fence about a permanent switch. There are a lot of teething pains getting the system set up and just getting use to the way things work, and I want to be sure I'm past that before I make a final judgement.

@shoarthing

I was not using my old RAID for simultanious R/W before, so while I don't expect a performance boost (vs windows), I also don't think it will hurt very much either. The RAID card I'm using is really cheap and didn't boost drive performance that much, but it was nice to have one less 'drive' to manage.

RE: DVD-Rebuilder under vmware

Here's something weird I just noticed when attempting to do my first full DVD-RB job. Right now I have my data drives shared with my virtual W2k machine via Samba shares. On one of those drives I have a DVD9 .iso file, lets call it movie.iso . If I:

mount -o loop -t iso9660 movie.iso Movie_DIR

then use X:\Movie_DIR\VIDEO_TS as my "source" in DVD-RB it takes 40 minutes to run the prepare step (something that takes about 6-8 in XP).

But, if I use Daemon Tools inside vW2k to mount X:\movie.iso , and use E:\VIDEO_TS as DVD-RB's source, it only takes 9 minutes to run the prepare step.

Once the encoding starts the difference isn't that dramatic with the 'mount' method encoding at about 22fps and DT giving about 24fps in HC. I haven't used HC with this disc configuration under XP enough to know how it performs.

[echo]

Samba is really slow. That's the reason it's taking 40 minutes for the prepare step. On tests I've made samba was something like 20 times slower than nfs when connecting two linux PCs. But, then again I don't think there is another way to transfer files from linux<->windows. Maybe using an external HD which you could switch from the virtual machine to the host os would be easier.

[dragongodz]

wmansir - if you ever try DVD-RB under wine again this may help ... or not.
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=97751

ye a bit old but maybe could help point you in the direction of getting it working.