HowTo: Rip a Blu-ray movie using an LG GGC-H20L Blu-ray drive with Ubuntu
The Blu-ray disc format has brought with it the ability to easily provide the next generation of High-Definition 1080p movie content. There’s just one problem – Ubuntu and Linux in general has no official support for Blu-ray, and its encryption scheme is vastly different to that of DVD – it’s not just a simple case of installing a library like the libdvdcss2 library for decrypting DVD’s – the protection is done both at a software and hardware level.
This article discusses how I used my recently purchased LG GGC-H20L Blu-ray ROM drive to successfully read and watch movies using Ubuntu Intrepid.
HowTo: Image your hard-drive for transfer or backup using dd
Imaging, also known as Ghosting in the Windows world, is the act of creating a sector-by-sector copy of a hard-drive and saving it to a file, or transferring it to another hard-drive. Such uses for imaging include:
- Backup to an image file
- Clone to another hard-drive (eg: building multiple identical workstations) either directly or via an image file
- Data recovery (it’s safer and easier to examine an image file than risk further damage to the hard-drive itself)
Linux has a neat little command that can do this for us called simply “dd”. It is completely filesystem independent, so you can backup any hard-drive regardless of whether it was Linux formatted, Mac formatted or Windows formatted. It copies the drive bit by bit, sector by sector, not file by file.
