HowTo: Uninstall software that makes Ubuntu’s boot process fail
Whilst rebuilding a friend’s Medion laptop, in my attempt to get the Wireless LAN adapter working, I set about trying to use ndiswrapper and the Windows drivers. Unfortunately upon rebooting, the system failed to boot, always locking up when the boot process tried to load the Windows driver. It was so bad that I wasn’t even able to boot to a recovery prompt because it still attempts to load the hardware drivers before dropping you into a root shell.
The solution was simple – get rid of ndiswrapper and that will prevent the offending Windows driver loading which I can then delete afterwards, but how do you do this when you can’t even boot to a terminal?
With the assistance of an Ubuntu LiveCD (on USB stick in this case), I was able to remove ndiswrapper without needing to do a complete re-install of the system. Here’s how to do it.
LikeHowTo: Get SigmaTel STAC 9200 chipset audio working in Ubuntu Intrepid
I was asked to rebuild a friend’s old Medion laptop – you know, those ones Aldi used to sell for peanuts. It’s an AMD Turion64 based machine with NVidia GeForce Go 6100 gfx and SigmaTel STAC 9200 “High Definition” audio and a 1280×800 display. I have to admit it’s not a bad little machine.
Anyway, the default installation of Ubuntu Intrepid picks up everything except the Fn keys, wireless LAN adapter and the audio. The wireless LAN adapter has proven to be a bit of a challenge, so if I suss it out, I’ll write up about it later. Fn keys I’m not really fussed about (and neither is the laptop’s owner), but we needed the audio.
HowTo: Encode a Blu-ray rip into a smaller format without losing quality
Those of you who archive or backup their Blu-ray movie media to hard-drive will already be aware that the average movie comes out at a good 25GB. Some of the bigger titles top out at around 40GB or more. This eats up an awful lot of disk space.
Blu-ray titles are already compressed down using the MPEG2 codec, and quality pundits will abhor the idea of re-compressing the title again for fear of losing image and audio quality. Certainly if you go down the Xvid route, you will definitely lose image quality, but as per my previous DVD HowTo, you can do excellent rips with virtually indistinguishable quality to the original using the x264 codec, and have a significantly smaller footprint to go with it.
The process of encoding a Blu-ray rip isn’t quite the same as doing a DVD, however, so here’s a quick guide on how to take your decrypted .m2ts file and finish up with a much smaller, but 99% perfect copy in a Matroska .mkv file.
Power failure!
My site’s been offline for most of the last 24 hours due to an unexpected power failure caused by a constant week and a half of rain shorting underground mains power lines, and taking half of my street with it. I have to admit I’ve been a bit complacent and have never acquired a UPS for the server that serves this blog!
But the power’s back now, and meantime I’ve gone and bought a shiny new UPS to keep the server running should there be any future power issues. Sorry the inconvenience, folks!
Where will you be at 1234567890 Unix time?
Some of you may be aware that Unix systems and its variants including Linux, Apple OS X, etc store the time in seconds using a 32-bit integer, with the 1st January 1970 as the epoch.
Tomorrow morning at 10:31 and 30 seconds, eastern Australians (except Queensland who will get it at 09:31 and 30 seconds) will experience 1234567890 Unix time. Where will you be on this momentous occasion?
If you’d like to check your own local time, simply drop into a terminal and paste this line of perl in:
$ perl -e 'print scalar localtime(1234567890),"\n";'
Sat Feb 14 10:31:30 2009
$
After that, we only have the 32-bit Unix Millennium Bug to look forward to in 2038!
