Planet Open Ghana

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…

Life elsewhere outside ones own native country is sometimes great and fun. But somtimes too it becomes like been in hell. And every single person in a country not of his/her native will bear witness this.
I have lived here for almost seven (7) months. And i decided never to blog about this place. But i think sometimes one need to express how they feel for been in a different place.

Language is really one fustrating thing, as today there was a hindi song been played and everyone starts to laugh and i ask for the meaning and everyone keeps tossing me around. As no one wants to really explain to me what the meaning of the song is. Mean while everyone keeps laughing aloud.
People might see it as nothing, but i guess today might be counted as one of the bad times of my stay here.
Life goes on still and as they say is one of the experiences of a foreigner.

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. Look for ro and change it to rw. Now navigate to the end of this line, leave a space and type:

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.

Drupal is a very powerful content management system (CMS). But it can be very confusing and fustrating to start with and get documentations.
I have been working on some drupal projects for the past 2 weeks. And i have really come a long way getting some documentation links on Drupal. So i have decided not to allow people also go through by parcelling all the documentation links i came across on the web and also got through the IRC.

And i will be updating each time somthing new comes up

For Drupal Clean URLS
http://drupal.org/node/15365

Flash Video in Drupal 5: A complete multimedia tutorial
http://www.travistidwell.com/flashvideo

Ziping files on linux using shell is one of the most easy things to do
but today i got a bit confused when a friend asked me how to zip a file with
a different name.
example : normally i zip with the source and target name all been same.

zip -r foobar foobar

which will result in

foobar.zip

but what my friend wanted was having a different name for the result.

So i had to jump straight to the linux channel on IRC. below is what i learnt from there.

zip -r foo.zip bar

which results in foo.zip

what abt unziping too

unzip foo.zip

but what about unziping to have different name .

unzip foo.zip && mv foo bar

Just today i had all my configurations for my wifi card which is
Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01) wiped of after a Hardy upgrade. So below i fixed it. But i used it also for the first time when installing Hardy fresh.

1. Open you terminal

2. Get this version of madwifi:

wget -c http://snapshots.madwifi.org/special/madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz

3. Untar the downloaded package:

tar xvf madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz

4. Get inside the unpacked directory:

cd madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007

5. If you haven’t compiled anything from source before on your linux then you propably need the build essential package:

sudo apt-get update && sudo aptitude install build-essential

6. Now you can build your madwifi and install the modules:
make

sudo make install
sudo modprobe ath_pci
sudo modprobe wlan_scan_sta

The last 2 commands can cause some complications on some systems. If they do check your System >> Administration >> Restricted Drivers Manager and disable atheros here. Then try again.

7. Now restart your computer and you should be able to see any aviable networks in your Network Manager.