Cody Taylor

ahziem writes “Ubuntu’s Intrepid Ibex and Redmond’s Windows XP go head-to-head in an OpenOffice.org 3.0 performance smackdown measuring vanilla OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, Go-oo, and Portable OpenOffice.org 3.0. Each platform and edition does well in different tests. Go-oo is known for its proud slogan “Better, Faster, Freer,” but last time with OpenOffice.org 2.4 on Fedora, Go-oo came in fourth place out of four. Slashdot has previously reported Ubuntu beating Vista and Windows 7 in benchmarks, so either XP is faster or this benchmark carries a different weight.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

olddoc writes “In the days of 512-MB systems, I remember reading about cosmic rays causing memory errors and how errors become more frequent with more RAM. Now, home PCs are stuffed with 6GB or 8GB and no one uses ECC memory in them. Recently I had consistent BSODs with Vista64 on a PC with 4GB; I tried memtest86 and it always failed within hours. Yet when I ran 64bit Ubuntu at 100% load and using all memory, it ran fine for days. I have two questions: 1) Do people trust a memtest86 error to mean a bad memory module or motherboard or CPU? 2) When I check my email on my desktop 16-GB PC next year, should I be running ECC memory?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

My H.264 videos were not really playing well with the regular codecs on my ubuntu 8.04 64 bit desktop box.
It’s my primary workstation so this blew. I looked into getting coreavc on linux. There are apparently a number of ways to do this.
This is how I did it and the issues/problems that I had getting it to work.

CoreAVC is a high performance video codec for the H.264 video format. It is not free. While it would be very easy to find a license in some dark corner of the web that is unethical.

Researching coreavc and linux on google got me this link.
I decided to go the xine way because I’ve already got Kaffiene using xine and it seems to playback smoother than mplayer.
Except for the load times which blow.

Turns out I had to install dshowserver which seems to be a way to use coreavc with all normal media players on Ubuntu.
Dshowserver is also the only supported way to use coreavc with xine.
Since I’m using 64 bit I downloaded the static libraries from here.
Put those binaries in their proper places by typing the following commands at your ubuntu command line:

cd /place/where/I/put/files
sudo cp dshowserver /usr/local/bin
sudo cp ../loader/registercodec /usr/local/bin 

Using Wine I then installed CoreAVC and moved the CoreAVCDecoder.ax from it’s installed directory to /usr/lib/win32.
That directory didn’t exist so I had to create it using

sudo mkdir /usr/lib/win32

I tried to verify that it was working with this command:

dshowserver -c CoreAVCDecoder.ax -s 1280x720 -g 09571a4b-f1fe-4c60-9760de6d310c7c31 -b 12 -f 0x34363248 -o 0x30323449

It errored out on me with this output:

No id specified, assuming test mode
Opening device
Called unk_IsDebuggerPresent
Creating new registry
MSGBOX 'Serial Number Missing!' 'CoreAVC Professional Edition' (327680)
Win32 LoadLibrary failed to load: 
Warning: DS_Filter() could not open DirectShow DLL.  (DLL=CoreAVCDecoder.ax)
Failed to create DirectShow filter
Failed to open win32 codec CoreAVCDecoder.ax

Apparently my license wasn’t found. It would be nice if Wine took care of that but I guess I have to do it manually.
I found some instructions here.

First execute this from the ubuntu command line:

export REGISTRY=$HOME/.mplayer/registry32

Then

registercodec -r $REGISTRY -k "HKLM\\Software\\CoreCodec\\CoreAVC Pro\\Serial" -v "55555-55555-CORE-55555-55555"

where 55555-55555-CORE-55555-55555 is your personal serial number.

To finish up execute :

registercodec -r $REGISTRY -k "HKLM\\Software\\IniFileMapping\\CoreAVC\\Settings\\C:\\coreavc.ini" -v "ilevels=2 olevels=2 di=3 deblock=7 ai=0 crop1088=0 vmr_ar=0" 

Now when I execute the same linux command:

dshowserver -c CoreAVCDecoder.ax -s 1280x720 -g 09571a4b-f1fe-4c60-9760de6d310c7c31 -b 12 -f 0x34363248 -o 0x30323449

I get a this output from dshowserver:

No id specified, assuming test mode
Opening device
Called unk_IsDebuggerPresent
len: 992
ProductVersion: 1.7.0
Decoder supports the following YUV formats: YUY2 UYVY YV12 I420 
Decoder is capable of YUV output (flags 0x2b)
Setting fmt
Starting
Initialization is complete

Which is good.

Now time for the xine patch for coreavc.
The guide said I needed the source files so I go here and download both
xine-lib-1.1.15.tar.bz2 and xine-ui-0.99.5.tar.gz
I extract them both and, back to the terminal, I change my working directory to the path to the xine-lib source directiory that I just downloaded and extracted.
Then I run the patch command:

patch -p1 < <path to coreavc-for-linux>/xine/dshowserver.patch

This is the output I got from the xine patch:

patching file src/libxinevdec/Makefile.am
patching file src/libxinevdec/dshowserver.c
patching file src/libxinevdec/nal_parser.c
patching file src/libxinevdec/nal_parser.h

While still in the xine-lib directory I try to compile xine using:

./configure
make

Which gives me these error messages:

gcc: /usr/lib/libasound.so: No such file or directory
make[2]: *** [xineplug_ao_out_alsa.la] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/thadeus/core_avc/xine-lib-1.1.15/src/audio_out'
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/thadeus/core_avc/xine-lib-1.1.15/src'
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

I check to make sure I have alsa installed properly. I do.
So I look around the /usr/lib folder for something odd.
Turns out libasound.so.2 is in there….Not sure what the 2 is for so I copy the libasound.so.2 to libsound.so:

sudo cp libasound.so.2 libasound.so

I try compile xine again.
After maxing out my CPU for longer than I expected I finally get back to the prompt.
Time to try installing.

sudo make install

All seemed well. Now the H.264 files run relatively well using the coreAVC codec on my primary ubuntu desktop….although not as good as my windows boxes.
Thats the price I pay for using Linux.

-Cody Taylor

Next version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution includes a new notifications system, changes to the start-up process, and the distribution’s first foray into cloud computing. Read this blog post by David Meyer on Business Tech.

Still holding out on the Vista upgrade? Now’s a good time to give Ubuntu Linux a try.

Linux / Unix Command: history

Linux Command Description
This command displays a list of the most recently executed commands on Linux and Unix workstations and servers.

For the impatient here is the proper syntax:

history
history [n]
history -c
history -d offset
history [-anrw] [filename]
history -ps arg

Here are the only real useful options for this very useful linux command.

-c will clear the history list.

history -c

will remove all entries in your history list.

-d will delete the command at the specified offset.

history -d 24

will remove the 24th entry. Each line is labeled so it’s easy to clean up after yourself if you don’t want your boss to easily find your blunder.

There are other arguments available but I’ve never had a use for them and you can always use the man pages to check up on them if you need to.

Sometimes the history file removes some entries in order to keep the list from taking to much space. This can be unpleasant when you’re looking for some nix command that you know you’ve executed but can’t remember the exact syntax of. To increase the size of the list you will need to edit your bash_profile in your home directory (That is, assuming you are using bash like most sane linux users). This can be done very easily :

Add these two lines to your .bash_profile. This will not take effect until your next login.

vi ~/.bash_profile
HISTSIZE=340
HISTFILESIZE=680

It was undoubtedly an awesome release, allowing many to make the switch from other operating systems and plunge into the Linux experience without any regret. But as we all know, all good things eventually come to an end, so here we are today, announcing the end of life for Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) on April 18th, 2009.

After the new themes introduced yesterday, Canonical decided to update the boot splash screen (USplash) theme with a very nice one, which looks more professional than the previous one, and the new loading bar has a futuristic effect. For your viewing pleasure, we’ve also recorded a video of the new boot splash screen in action!

Well, here we go again… it appears the Canonical just uploaded some new and very nice desktop themes for the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) operating system, in order to please their devoted users.

AlienRancher writes “Google launched this morning a new beta version of Chrome 2.0: ‘The best thing about this new beta is speed — it’s 25% faster on our V8 benchmark and 35% faster on the Sunspider benchmark than the current stable channel version and almost twice as fast when compared to our original beta version.’ Other enhancements include user script support (greasemonkey-like) and form auto-fill.” And reader Lee Mathews adds news of the open source version, Chromium, on Linux: “Not only has Chromium gotten easier to take for a test drive thanks to the personal package archive for Ubuntu Chrome daily build team, but development on the browser is also progressing nicely. Despite being a very early build, Chromium on Linux feels solid and boasts the same blazing speed the Windows users have been enjoying for months.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.