Posted by SV on May 19, 2008
I recently installed CentOS 5.1 on my system as I want to prepare for the RHCE exam. Though I’m not a music buff, I do like to listen to music now and then and sadly most of the music are the ugly mp3 format files. Many linux distros do not have out-of-the-box support for mp3 format for licensing issues. CentOS which is an unbranded form of RHEL is one such distro. So, we have to find a workaround to give life to our mp3 collection.
The easiest and the best thing to do is to install “VLC Mediaplayer“. Open a terminal and do:
yum install vlc. And you are done.
The other way is to use fluendo’s mp3 decoder if you are using GNOME, which uses gstreamer. Use these links:
1. http://core.fluendo.com/gstreamer/src/gst-fluendo-mp3/
or
2. https://shop.fluendo.com/
The first link is for the source code. Do the regular, compile-install stuff if you like it that way.
The second link takes us to the fluendo webshop, select the mp3 decoder which is ’sold’ free-of-cost, go through their process and download the file. Unzip the file and copy the ‘libgstflump3dec.so’ file to “$HOME/.gstreamer-0.10/plugins” or if you are a root copy it to “/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10″. Once this is done, run a test, “gst-inspect-0.10 flump3dec”. If it doesn’t return any errors then we are done. We can open any application that uses gstreamer to enjoy the mp3 music.
I said installing VLC is easiest and best because it is a ‘mediaplayer’ with decoders for all possible formats, not only the mp3 format. So, by installing VLC we also get to listen music file in other proprietary formats, and get to watch proprietary format movie files. The second option though is only to enable mp3 support in the mediaplayers that use gstreamer. Anyway, isn’t it good to know more than one way of doing things. 
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Posted by SV on May 9, 2008
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Posted by SV on April 26, 2008
Aah, I had to install Fedora on my laptop as the Ubuntu install got erased.
The Dell customer care had sent an engineer to check the installation and operation of the newly purchased laptop. But the guy instead of correcting things just erased my harddisk and went giving a complaint copy… 
Actually my Dell Restore CD did not have any drivers for Vista in it. I told him about the problem and that all I needed was the RescueCD with drivers for Vista but otherwise the system was ok. The guy told instead that the CD does have the drivers, that probably I did not install the OS properly and that re-installation is the only solution??? He installed the Vista again by erasing everything in the disk but still could not find the drivers in the Rescue CD?! Ayyo papa… 
He then asked me to get the drivers from Dell’s website and filled a complaint form stating that new Rescue CD had to be sent to the customer, took my signture and went.
I was so angry with him for not listening to me but calmed down later when I came to know that the guy is from my native and speaks Tulu 
Not just that, the guy’s father is a priest in the Sri Dharmasthala temple! Hmmm… maani, e onji sarti budute pola… so much for the brotherhood
I had taken my Ubuntu CD to my office to install it there! I didn’t have the patience to wait so I just installed Fedora 8. Everything works even with Fedora… It even has option to configure wlan, but I don’t know how to configure it. Has to work on it. Otherwise, everything seems to just work.
Let me live with the ‘Werewolf’ till the ‘Sulphur’ is released.
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Posted by SV on April 20, 2008
Oh yah! Impatience is another name for me. Barely few hours after my lost post about my experience with Hardy Heron on my desktop, I installed it on my newly bought Dell’s Vostro 1400 laptop. I just could not resist. I made it dual boot with Vista Home Basic that came with it.
Contrary to what I read in the net as to how Vista may trouble dual booting, my experience was quite normal. I had read that we should not use any Linux partitioning apps to partition the Vista space (mine was the regular company install with whole drive being the C drive). The author had suggested using Vista’s ‘Shrink Volume’ utility. Thankfully I read it after I did partitioning with GParted LiveCD. I had partitioned the drive the very same day I received my laptop!
I just put the Ubuntu 8.04 CD inside my optical drive and started the liveCD mode after reboot. Once inside, I clicked on the ‘Install’ button and everything went smoothly. Only thing I noticed was that inspite of 2GB RAM and a Intel Core2Duo processor, I thought the speed was not as good as on the desktop with only 1GB RAM and an old Sempron processor. Anyway the installation took less than 35 minutes and after I rebooted I was greeted with regular dual boot option.
I logged into Ubuntu and spent some time there and created a FAT32 partition so that I can share data between Vista and Linux. I again restarted my system just to see if I have any problem booting into Vista. Thank God, nothing such happened. Its working normally. Even the FAT32 partition created for data share is working properly.
Ofcourse, I’ll have to check the system performance for quite some time to come to any conclusions. But as of now, there seems nothing to worry.
Happy mobile computing with Linux!
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Posted by SV on November 15, 2007
Test v2.0 of Nerdiness: The type of the nerd
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