Thursday, June 2, 2011

Converting Media in Ubuntu using FFMPEG

Let's say, we have a media in FLV format that we got it somewhere. Ubuntu's default ffmpeg wasn't compile with conversion option into MP3 (at least from what I understood). In order to make use of FFMPEG to the most is by getting FFMPEG straight from it's farm (terbaik dari ladang, so to speak).

The complete HOWTOS is here

The only thing that I could say important is libmp3lame support, which could allow the conversion. After the steps from the website that I linked before being done, we can check the flag of the compiled, installed FFMPEG;


najmi@vostro:~/ffmpeg-git$ ffmpeg
ffmpeg version git-N-30459-g58fd70b, Copyright (c) 2000-2011 the FFmpeg developers
  built on Jun  2 2011 19:52:29 with gcc 4.5.2
  configuration: --enable-gpl --enable-version3 --enable-nonfree --enable-postproc --enable-libfaac --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libopencore-amrnb --enable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-libxvid --enable-x11grab
  libavutil    51.  3. 0 / 51.  3. 0
  libavcodec   53.  6. 1 / 53.  6. 1
  libavformat  53.  2. 0 / 53.  2. 0
  libavdevice  53.  1. 0 / 53.  1. 0
  libavfilter   2. 11. 0 /  2. 11. 0
  libswscale    0. 14. 0 /  0. 14. 0
  libpostproc  51.  2. 0 / 51.  2. 0
Hyper fast Audio and Video encoder
usage: ffmpeg [options] [[infile options] -i infile]... {[outfile options] outfile}...


Use -h to get full help or, even better, run 'man ffmpeg'


As we can see, given the right flag being ENABLED, we can make use FFMPEG to the most. 

Mount Google Documents in Ubuntu

There are several workaround done to have Googledocs in your native directory.

Methood 1:
Add the following PPA in your Ubuntu, I am using 11.04, the deb developed on Lucid, but it worked.
Change the source.list so that it'll use Lucid instead of Natty


root@vostro:/etc/apt/sources.list.d# cat doctormo-ppa-natty.list
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/doctormo/ppa/ubuntu lucid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/doctormo/ppa/ubuntu lucid main

Later, sudo apt-get update && apt-get install gdocs-mount-gtk

Check the installed package;


# dpkg -l |grep gdoc
ii  gdocs-mount-gtk 1.2-0ubuntu2 Mount a Google Docs Directory


Type gdocs-mount-gtk through console or select from drop down menu and it should works!


Method 2:
Use "gmount"

sudo gmount /targetdir


It should work too!

:)

Compile from several resources online.

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Note to myself: Installing NTOP in Ubuntu

Ubuntu is known with its wonderful tool (which actually Debian's); apt-get/aptitude.

I was having trouble to get my RRD plugin shows the network load graph in Ubuntu, although the apt-get should resolve that automatically. The following is the method that I gathered from various online sources, so that I can refer back whenever I need to do a fresh install.


sudo mkdir /var/lib/ntop/rrd
sudo mkdir /var/lib/ntop/rrd/graphics
sudo mkdir /var/lib/ntop/rrd/flows
sudo mkdir /var/lib/ntop/rrd/interfaces
sudo mkdir /var/lib/ntop/rrd/interfaces/eth0

sudo mkdir /var/lib/ntop/rrd/interfaces/eth1
sudo mkdir /var/lib/ntop/rrd/interfaces/ppp0

sudo chmod -R 775 /var/lib/ntop
sudo chown -R nobody:nogroup /var/lib/ntop/rrd


*note, for eth0, eth1, pp0, you may need to replace that with your own preference, some machine, such as Dell Latitude D430 use wlan0 for its Wifi card.

I also could not understand, this problem was let ignored for several releases, and no action being taken so that ntop could work just straight away with RRD.