How to make Avidemux work under Ubuntu 13.10

Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander
Avidemux 2.5.4

I was quite disappointed in Ubuntu 13.10, when I first tried it last year. Several apps were broken and many things did not function.

One of those apps was Avidemux, which I am using regularly at home to encode videos. Note that I'm talking about avidemux2-gtk version.

In Ubuntu 13.10, Avidemux would run, but after selecting some menu item which opens a dialogue window and then closing that dialogue would always hang Avidemux.

For example Help / About will open the About window and when you click OK, the window will hang with the button still appearing pressed and after a moment the main window will fade into black-and-white indicating an unresponsive window. Only xkill will help out and put Avidemux out of its misery.


I recently decided to try again. At my workplace I had upgraded to 13.10 a while ago, as I did not need Avidemux in there. A lot of time had passed and I thought perhaps it had been fixed already and Avidemux would now work.

I installed Avidemux and surprise - it worked. No more hangs. But as I had upgraded my machine at work from 13.04 to 13.10, I was not sure as of why it worked. I decided to try it out also in fresh installation into VirtualBox.

I installed a fresh 13.10 64-bit image into a new VM, then, without installing the VirtualBox additions, upgraded the packages and then installed Avidemux. The result - it hung, like before.

I started to look for differences between the two machines. Into my work machine, I had installed a mainline 3.12 kernel - maybe that was the solution? Nope, that did not help, the Avidemux in VirtualBox would still hang.

Then I noticed that the Avidemux in my main machine was displaying its menus inside the window, and not in the global menu bar. I also noticed, that gnome-terminal, for example, was also displaying its menus inside the main window, so I ran dpkg --get-selections|sort in both machines and compared the selections. And there was the answer - my main machine was missing the following packages:

unity-gtk2-module
unity-gtk3-module
unity-gtk-module-common

I removed these packages from my VirtualMachine installation and confirmed that Avidemux would no longer hang. Problem solved.

How I got the Precise Pangolin to play ball.

Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin

At first I thought that it would be impossible to get Ubuntu 12.04 to be usable in my workplace environment, but after a lot of tweaking and time, I have finally made the Precise Pangolin work exactly the way I wanted.

In the following I bring a set of changes I had to do to make it work.

1. The language problem (see my original post about this)
   The main problem is, that by choosing Estonian as your language, then in addition to the LANG environment variable, all of the LC_* variables are set to "et_EE.UTF-8" as well. This, as I wrote earlier, makes regexp [a-z] to exclude the letters coming after "s". The original solution I used previously was to set LANG back to English "en_US.UTF-8" locale in .profile, but this has the side-effect of turning everything into English.
   
   My current solution is much more elegant and will solve the regexp problem, while retaining the Estonian language - add these two lines into .profile:
   export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"

A quote to remember.

Babylon 5, “A Late Delivery from Avalon”, Marcus Cole:

 I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.

WD My Book Live - a good external HDD and NAS

Western Digital My Book Live
AnandTech review

As I have previously posted, I have one of my older PC's (an Athlon 64 3200+ box) acting as a sort of NAS box, a Library, with four 320GB hard drives in RAID-5 configuration, resulting in approx 875GiB of useful redundant storage.
In addition to that, a few years ago, for media storing purposes, I put together a SATA-to-USB box and a 500GB WD Green drive in it.

However, now that I have bought Samsung's 46" LED-TV (EH5450W), which is also a PVR, I realized that I need an external HDD for the PVR functionality, and since it does not really have to be very big, the above mentioned 500GB box suit the purpose best.

I needed to move the stuff on that drive to somewhere else. The Library machine was out of the question, as my digital photos, documents and source code takes a lot of space there already and the RAID-5 redundancy is more important for this kind of content. It was therefore time to get a new external HDD.

At first I thought of getting WD My Book Essential drive, as I had some experience with it previously. Deciding to go with 3TB version, I was a bit worried about the max 30GiB/s transfer speeds inherent to USB2, as my machine lacks any USB3 ports.

Fortunately though, the Essential drives were currently out of circulation and I was offered a My Book Live instead. Back then, I only knew that the Essential is accessed through USB and the Live through the network. But in fact, they are very different beasts indeed. While the My Book Essential has only SATA-to-USB bridge in the box beside the drive, the Live is actually a whole independent PC, with 800MHz PowerPC 464 processor, 256MiB of memory and a Gigabit LAN port. It is running a ppc version of Debian Linux.

In addition to exposing the contents of the 3TB WD Green drive via Samba, also NFS is supported (though it is considerably slower apparently thanks to the NFS inherent encrypted data transfers). SSH access into the machine is also available. It also has web server, which includes nice UI for changing the settings of the NAS. And it has a media server, so my Smart TV picked it up automatically and was able to play back the media I had already copied there.

I was really surprised by this device.  The transfer speeds are much higher than USB2, reaching an average of 65MiB/s and going sometimes as high as 80MiB/s. The whole device is also almost totally silent, save some HDD head moving sound.
A bit worrying are the temperature readings, as after long coping stuff into the device, the hddtemp reports up to 65 degrees Celsius. Under normal operation, however, the drive is mostly sleeping and the temperature drops considerably.


I highly recommend this drive!

Setting up Flash Builder in Ubuntu 10.10

Adobe Flash Builder 4
Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

In a very sad news, Adobe has officially terminated the Linux Flex Builder project, which has stagnated in alpha status for more than three years now, olny receiving updates to extend the termination date. Regardless of the stated alpha status, the Linux Flex Builder plugin was very usable and quite stable, provided, of course, that you used it with Eclipse 3.3.

Since the current alpha 5 of the Linux Flex Builder plugin terminates at the end of this year and as Adobe has no intentions to allow anyone to use it past that termination date, I had to find an alternative.

Although JetBrains is welcoming all Flex programmers in Linux to switch to IntelliJ IDEA, I didn't want to learn yet an another IDE, especially one that is not open source nor free.

And finally I found the fb4linux project which works great (including the debugging).

The following is mostly a copy of the project wiki with only some additions to make it work with the Eclipse installed from Ubuntu repository.

1. Install Eclipse 3.5.x from Ubuntu repository;
   
2. Download the four FB4Linux* files from the fb4linux project download section, concatenate them to form FB4Linux.tar.bz2 and extract it somewhere.
   
3. Run Eclipse as root!
   sudo su; cd; eclipse
   
4. Select Window / Preferences and open the General / Capabilities section in the Preferences window.
   
5. Verify that Classic Update option is checked and close the preferences window.
   
6. Select Help / Software Updates / Manage Configuration
   
7. Right-click, select Add / Extension location... and browse to the Adobe Flash Builder 4 directory you extracted above.
   
8. Restart Eclipse as per its demands.
   

That's it, you can now open Eclipse from your user account and start coding Flex and AIR applications!

Small RegExp to reformat curly brackets Flex style

Adobe Flex 3

Find: [^( *)(.*)(\S+) *\{$]
Replace: [\1\2\3\n\1{]

In order to differentiate between Java code and JavaScript/ActionScript code I have defined for myself, that in Java the opening curly bracket should be at the end of the line where it starts, like this:
if (true) {
    System.out.println("true");
}

And in JavaScript/ActionScript code it should be alone in the next line, like this:
if (true)
{
    System.out.println("true");
}

The above code I am using in Eclipse to replace all such instances in the JavaScript/ActionScript code which does not conform to this rule.

How to remove higher version packages installed from another source in Ubuntu.

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx
Linux Mint 9 Isadora

I am currently torn between plain Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx and Linux Mint 9 Isadora. Previously I have had both Linux Mint 7 Gloria and Linux Mint 8 Helena installed and liked them a lot. The main attraction for me is the MintMenu.

The last one was actually Ubuntu 9.10 with Linux Mint 8 repository set up and the packages from there installed over the Ubuntu packages. The reason for this was technical - I decided to try and set up RAID 0 array with my dual 750GB hard drives and unfortunately only Ubuntu had the so called alternate install available needed to install on RAID while the normal installer in Linux Mint 8 did not recognize this, even if it had been previously created.

Ubuntu 10.04 has made some considerable improvements in many areas over the previous version:

• My SB Audigy 2 ZS card works fine now even with the 5.1 setup switched on.
  
• The 3D desktop with my Radeon HD3870 works also out of the box (though it still recommends the ATI driver, but I have decided not to install it, see the next one for why).
  
• The LCD display powerdown works now (saving the backlight) with the automatic Mesa DRI R600 driver.
  Previously the ATI driver broke this LCD powerdown leaving the backlight on and I'm afraid it is still not fixed.
  
• The CD/DVD automatic mounting works now with correct volume labels appearing in /media instead of using the cdrom0, cdrom1 and cdrom2 directories previously (yes, I have three drives).
  The volume label automatic creation worked also in prior Ubuntu version but this functionality disappeared mysteriously after I installed Linux Mint packages over Ubuntu ones.
  
• The switching between text-mode and graphics is almost instantaneous - I wonder if the kernel graphics mode swithcing is already supported with ATI graphics or is this just very good MESA driver...?
  
• The resolution of the text-mode is perfect using the whole 1920x1200 screen with 240x75 characters!
  Previously in Linux Mint 8 or perhaps instead because of the ATI driver, the text-mode was an awful 80x25 and switching back messed up the graphics mode aswell...

After trying out the newly released Linux Mint 9 I felt that it looked and worked very similarly to the previous Linux Mint 8 while the Ubuntu 10.04 was considerable jump forward from 9.10 and therefore I decided to do similar configuration as before (though I'm not using RAID this time) to install Ubuntu 10.04 and then include the MintMenu from the Linux Mint 9 repositories.

What happened, unfortunately, is that I accidentally installed a lot of Linux Mint packages including grub and plymouth related things that affect the booting. I decided to remove these packages but alas, this seemed to be impossible without complete reinstall.
Most of the packages depended on others that depended finally on nearly all of the packages (the list was in hundreds of packages).
While each of these packages had counterpart in Lucid repositories, they all outranked the Lucid ones with higher version numbers.

The apt-get does not provide any way to downgrade nor to use different repository for reinstallation, the dpkg can reinstall any version, including downgrading to an earlier versions, but needs physical .deb files.

The answer was the forgotten aptitude package manager, which has somewhat similar syntax and with simple tasks can be used in place of apt-get, while having considerably more power.

And here is the step-by-step list of how I reverted these packages back to their Lucid Lynx counterpars:

1. First, in order to know which packages I need to switch back to Ubuntu versions, I listed those packages with dpkg:
   
   sudo dpkg --list | grep mint


2. Second, I downloaded the physical .deb files from lucid repository:
   
   aptitude -t lucid download libplymouth2 plymouth plymouth-label plymouth-theme-ubuntu-logo plymouth-theme-ubuntu-text plymouth-x11 python-software-properties software-properties-gtk


3. Third, I installed these versions with dpkg:
   
   sudo dpkg --install *.deb

That's it.