Since yesterday, I’ve been looking for a collection manager for my videos. I want something similar to Amarok’s functionality… for video. I’ve tried a few so-called ‘collection managers’ but they simply did not fit my designs. Tellico. GcStar, Elisa… nope. All of these require you to manually enter entries for each video file and only GcStar came close to allowing you to play the video from within the manager (technically, it called up mplayer but that’s okay). I have tons of music videos, tv shows, movies… and I want to just tell the app “this is the folder in which all my videos live” and let it handle the rest. Yeah I know, I’m, lazy.

I especially want playlists for my music videos and I also want a ratings system… sigh. I guess I’ll just have to keep looking. I’d really appreciate a few hints though.

First, I am annoyed… very annoyed. Now on to why I am annoyed. I tried out the piece of crap encryption software called Conceal or something like that. It was supposed to provide one-click encryption. When I tried to encrypt something on Friday, it just showed me a progress bar for four hours and deleted almost all the files in my home folder. Luckily, I’d done a backup the night before so no real damage was done. But enough damage was done to annoy me. I’d mirrored about 8gb of the hardy repositories… I lost that. So now I’m gonna have to stay here in Winneba for another two weeks to re-download all those packages.

Synaptic gave me at least 15 minutes of pure unmitigated frustration this afternoon when it started choking with this piece of gibberish:

407 Proxy Authentication Required

I’d already configured my proxy settings in apt.conf and my bashrc file, and had assigned the right values to the http_proxy and ftp_proxy variables, not to mention the fact that synaptic had been working okay earlier in the day with no problems so this came as a surprise. Just to make pin-point the problem, I dropped into the terminal and did a sudo apt-get update… worked fine. Tried installing something with apt-get… worked. Tried downloading something with wget… worked fine. Yet synaptic would still not work.

In the end, I tracked down the problem to gksu. When I launched synaptic like so

gksudo synaptic

The problem just disappears and synaptic works… weird. So I used the Alacarte menu editor (right-click on the menu icon and select ‘Edit Menus’) to change the entry for synaptic package manager from

gksu /usr/sbin/synaptic

to

gksudo /usr/sbin/synaptic

I don’t know what caused this problem and I probably should file a bug report somewhere…

Disclaimer: This how-to details procedures for gaining root access to linux boxes. If the linux box is not yours, get the (written) permission of the owner… it’ll save you a lot of trouble. I will not be responsible for anything illegal you do with the stuff you learn on this page.

Okay, so you lost your password? It’s not the end of the world. But first you need physical access to the box.

1. Boot the machine (and press escape at the GRUB menu loading stage if the menu is hidden).

2. Select the correct entry for booting into your linux system - it usually is the first item and is probably already selected - and press “e” on your keyboard.

3. Select the line that begins with root and press “e”on your keyboard to edit it.

4. Now navigate to the end of this line, leave a space and type:

rw single init=/bin/bash.

5. Press “enter” then “b” on your keyboard and wait for the system to boot and give you a command prompt.

6. Now you need to use the passwd command to change your password. Do:

passwd $user

Replace $user with your username

7. Enter and confirm a new password when prompted, and reboot the machine with the reboot command. I sometimes get an error message when I try to reboot; if you run into the same problem, just turn the pc off and back on.

8. That’s it, you’re good.

Hardy Heron was released about a month ago and I’m still going through the painful process of mirroring the ubuntu servers. It’s been slow going here and it might take me another month to get the major stuff on my hard disk. Then I’ll make to full transitition to Ubuntu 8.04.

I finally got some free time over on Sunday to compile the 2.6.25.3 kernel and I was very surprised at how easy it was. I’ve read some ghastly stories about custom kernel compiles going horribly wrong and most of the initial tutorials I read were unnecessarily long but I found an excellent tutorial on the ubuntu forums that makes things simple. The only tedious part was choosing what should be compiled… that was essentially the whole point of compiling the custom kernel but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. It took just about an hour and a half to finish compiling and then I found out I had not enabled CONFIG_TIMER_STATS (powertop needed it to estimate power usage) and I had to do it all over again.

Now that I know how to compile the kernel however, my natural urge to speed things up has taken over and I spent the best part of the night disabling kernel modules and options I did not need. This might occupy my time for the best part of the week.

Yeah, my internet access problems have almost melted away so it’s back to business as usual. Which reminds me, I should rant about slow internet here in Ghana one of these days…

I finally got around to downloading and compiling powertop this afternoon but unfortunately, I couldn’t use it since my kernel was just too old (2.6.20-16) and it wanted 2.6.21 and higher. I’ve stuck to this particular kernel (and feisty for that matter) because I only have mirrors for feisty. Internet here in Ghana is usually crappy so until I get the gutsy (or hardy, when it finally gets released) mirror, I’m sticking with safe-and-convenient.

But I digress… I grabbed the 2.6.24.3 kernel and now I’m scouting around on the net for potential issues arising from compiling that kernel version on my hardware. It’ll probably take me another hour or so to make sure all is good (or at least can be made good with a few fixes), write out my will, say my last prayers and then I might probably be just in the right frame of mind to compile the kernel, I think… maybe.

I’ll post the details later…

Ever since Akuafo Hall opened up its own ICT centre, I’ve been spending more time on the internet, largely due to the fact that laptops are allowed. Anyways, one of the apps I’ve been trying out it Miro. I’ve played it before when it was going by the name Democracy Player but did not have much use for it since I had such horrible internet. But I pulled it from Canonical’s commercial repository this afternoon and I’ve been loving every minute of it. The interface is very clean and without any screen clutter and it’s terribly easy to use. I’ve a few screenshots to show for my afternoon’s adventure.

I took out my LG DM150 phone to make a call yesterday and it prompted me for a four-digit unlock code. So I looked it up in the manual and it said to enter 0000 … didn’t work. So I turned to Google and guess what, my friend Henry had a page on unlocking the same phone. It’s very simple really… just enter the last four digits of your phone number. Though I live in Ghana and use the kasapa mobile network, its appears it doesn’t matter what your carrier is or what country you live in. In my case, I had to enter 8690 since my cell phone number is 028 731 8690.

All the other methods (enter 0000, 1111 or 1234) did not work for me so I really recommend the enter-the-last-four-digits-of-your-phone-number method.