Walking in Light With Christ - hip0's personal blog on System Administration, Free Software, Computer Security and Religion

testanism I've stumbled upon a very educative videos, which might be interesting for both Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholics and Protestants.
The video contains an Orthodox Christian fathers who explain with simple words the difference between the Orthodox Christian Faith and the rest of the most popular Christian faiths present today. Watch learn and enjoy! :)


Understanding the Christian Orthodox Faith - Part 1


Understanding the Christian Orthodox Faith - Part 2


Understanding the Christian Orthodox Faith - Part 3

The videos also questions very important questions about Orthodox Christianity which I believe non-orthodox christians could truly benefit and hopefully some might even turn to orthdoxy.

If you're building (compiling) a new qmail server on some Linux host and after properly installing the qmail binaries and daemontools, suddenly an you notice in readproctitle service errors: or somewhere in in qmail logs for instance /var/log/qmail/current the error:

/usr/local/bin/tcpserver: error while loading shared libraries:
libc.so.6: failed to map segment from shared object: Cannot allocate memory


then you have hit a bug caused by insufficient memory assigned for tcpserver in your /var/qmail/supervise/qmail-smtpd/run daemontools qmail-smtpd initialize script:

This kind of issue is quite common especially on hardware architectures that are 64 bit and on Linux installations that are amd65 (x86_64) e.g. run 64 bit version of Linux.

It relates to the 64 bit architecture different memory distribution and thus as I said to solve requires increase in memory softlimit specified in the run script an example good qmail-smtpd run script configuration which fixed the libc.so.6: failed to map segment from shared object: Cannot allocate memory I use currently is as follows:

#!/bin/sh QMAILDUID=`id -u vpopmail` NOFILESGID=`id -g vpopmail` MAXSMTPD=`cat /var/qmail/control/concurrencyincoming` # softlimit changed from 8000000 exec /usr/local/bin/softlimit -m 32000000 \ /usr/local/bin/tcpserver -v -H -R -l 0 \ -x /home/vpopmail/etc/tcp.smtp.cdb -c "$MAXSMTPD" \
-u "$QMAILDUID" -g "$NOFILESGID" 0 smtp \
/var/qmail/bin/qmail-smtpd \
/home/vpopmail/bin/vchkpw /bin/true 2>&1


The default value which was for softlimit was:

exec /usr/local/bin/softlimit -m 8000000


A good softlimit raise up values which in most cases were solving the issue for me are:

exec /usr/local/bin/softlimit -m 3000000


or exec /usr/local/bin/softlimit -m 4000000


The above example run configuration fixed the issue on a amd64 debian 5.0 lenny install, the server hardware was:

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU @ 2.93GHz
System Memory: 4GB
HDD Disk space: 240GB


The softlimit configuration which I had to setup on another server with system parameters:

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU (8 CPUS) @ 2.80GHz
System Memory: 8GB
HDD Disk Space: 1.4Terabytes


is as follows:

#!/bin/sh
QMAILDUID=`id -u vpopmail`
NOFILESGID=`id -g vpopmail`
MAXSMTPD=`cat /var/qmail/control/concurrencyincoming`
exec /usr/bin/softlimit -m 64000000 \
/usr/local/bin/tcpserver -v -H -R -l 0 \
-x /home/vpopmail/etc/tcp.smtp.cdb -c "$MAXSMTPD" \
-u "$QMAILDUID" -g "$NOFILESGID" 0 smtp \
/var/qmail/bin/qmail-smtpd \
/home/vpopmail/bin/vchkpw /bin/true 2>&1


If none of the two configurations pointed out in the post works, for you just try to manually set up the exec /usr/bin/softlimit -m to some high value.

To assure that the newly set value is not producing the same error you will have to, reload completely the daemontools proc monitor system.
To do so open /etc/inittab comment out the line:

SV:123456:respawn:/command/svscanboot

to
#SV:123456:respawn:/command/svscanboot

Save again /etc/inittab and issue te cmd:

linux:~# init q


Now again open /etc/inittab and uncomment the commented line:

#SV:123456:respawn:/command/svscanboot
to
SV:123456:respawn:/command/svscanboot


Lastly reload the inittab script once again with command:

linux:~# init q


To check if the error has disappeared check the readproctitle process, like so:

linux:~# ps ax|grep -i readproctitle

The command output should produce something like:

3070 ? S 0:00 readproctitle service errors: .......................................


Hope that helps.

Below's text is a Paschal greeting of the Byzantium Emperor Thedodore Ducas Lascaris, the text is really beautiful, I've translated it from Bulgarian translation which was translated from Greek, the general idea of the text is clearly observable. I'm really sorry if the text has translation mistakes. Have an enjoyable reading!


"Christ is risen from the death", that are the words of the Angel; this saw the women; this testifies Pilatus stamps, this is what the empty grave of the Saviour proclaims; this is what testifies for the moved tomb (about 2 tons) stone; the guardians lay bare by their own speech; the grave guards acknowledges and takes the money; the High Priests [Anna and Caiphas] show off they're guilty; Pilatus is feeling guilt; the centurion on the curtain tear down does believe; the sun has prooved the Godly essence of Christ darkening itself during the crucifix; the resurrected bodies of the many dead saints does testified about the truth; the whole nature confirmed the Resurrection, which has happened in the end of the Saturday, in the beginning of the [first day of the week].

Rejoice oh Man: Christ has Risen from the dead; the testimonial is truthful; Rejoice for you have been freed; hell is bound up, Rejoice!; It's the day of the Resurrection, rise up your voice; The master of our salvation has risen up from the dead; rejoice oh heaven and earth, see through the resurrection a harmony between holy Angels and humans has been established; rejoice oh you plants; the execution of Christ has been on a Cross, but through the Cross the Resurrection has accomplished; Adam has been risen up again; Eva has been released from the chains; Christ has preceeded over the prophets; The Kings Solomon and David are salute with victorious songs!

Rejoice oh man the darkness has lessen [in the world] the light has come; the shadow has fade away quickly; grace come in; the spring of life has rised. Does somebody needs to hear about God? Doesn't everybody know, that he rose up from the dead? Why Pilatus is riotous; Chaiphas thinks where to have the assembly of the Jewish elders. Rejoice oh also you robber, and enter in paradise, when everyone is gathered there; here is the firy sword has turned it's back; the grandparent has been released; rejoice oh you children of him. From Eva has the has the falling come, from the immaculate Theotokos - the rising up; through disobey death has come, through humility of the Son of God has the resurrection was given as a gift. Through a woman the fall up come, and through a woman is the resurrection preached.

Christ is Risen from the death!, let the clouds flow the rain of joice, let the plants draw a fresh leaves and the earth does bring forth fruits.

The creator of all has Risen from death and you rejoice; virtuous branches bring forth your fruits.
Who is not joious today; who is not feeling sweet joy, who is not rejoicing?

Risen up from the death, Christ destroyed kingdom of hell, He is Risen and destroyed the devil; he has risen and erased sin; he has Risen and decreased the idol-mania; He has risen and chased away dilusions; he has risen and rescued Adam; he has Risen and made the engles motionless for evil; He has risen and rescued Man; He has risen and joined the heaven ones with the earth ones, ruling himself as a King of the whole world and most-supreme ruler of all; angels and man, elements, elemental force something unseen so far by the demons.

Therefore rejoice with unspeakable joy; rejoice oh you who hear that Christ is Risen from the death; who does not obey to the first and the last in accordance with the God driven voice (Revel. 22:13), who is not glorifying him? The darkness has been crucified, we're free from the chains; we're risen to the upper (heavenly) kingdom.

It's the day of the Resurrection; who is not picking up a spiritual guitar, to sing up many times a repeating song, with songs, psalms and great joy and with a piercing melody to cry out?: "He is risen from the death" Christ has risen from the death

Let all demons phalanx run far away; and the ruler of darkness with his army let enter the Tartara (hell), because the master of life has Risen and the evil one's kingdom is robbed.

Let noone all you who are truthful be on the feast with poor garments; let we the Orthodox, does dress our corporeal and spiritual eyes with the shiny garments of goodness; let we the orthodox christians, be dressed up shiny; the enemy [the devil] is dead; the Bishop of Bishops has Risen; yesterday's sorrow has turned to joy, what is keeping us to sing together with the pupils, to sing up victorious songs together with the Maryies? The Godly home-building is achieved: the descendance of [the Holy Spirit], the conceal, the birth of a Virgin, the baptizmal, the Godly signs, the suffering and Resurrection; Christ has risen from the death, rejoice ohh all you nations.

Likely we on Great Sunday with a divine hymn do glorify the risen from the death Master Christ - truly Risen, truly without doubt.
And for us oh God where from will there be mercy sent for our petitions.



Paschal Greeting Text by Byzantium's Emperor Theodore II Ducas-Lascaris (1254-1258 AD)
Translated from Bulgarian (Original text translated from Greek by Alexey Stambolov)

One of the most precious commands I ever learned to use in Linux is ifconfig and route .

They have saved my life in configuring the static IP based internet of numerous Desktop Linux computers & notebooks.

Though the usage is very much known by most of the people who are into Linux, I believe it's likely that the newer people who entered the world of Linux or some Unix system administrators are still lacking the knowledge on how to manually configure their eth0 lan card, thus I thought it might be handy for someone to share it, I know that for most unix users & admins especially the advanced ones this post might be funny, so if you're an advanced administrator just skip the post and don't laught at it ;)

Now the universal commands (works on each and every Linux host) to configure manually static IP internet connection on Linux are:

linux:~# /sbin/ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.3 netmask 255.255.255.0
linux:~# /sbin/route add default gw 192.168.0.1
linux:~# echo 'nameserver 192.168.0.1' >> /etc/resolv.conf


I've used this simple commands on thousands ot Linux hosts and it's still handy :)

In above example 192.168.0.3 is the static IP address provided by the ISP, netmask is the netmask and the second /sbin/route add default gw would set the default gateway to the example ip 192.168.0.1

The third final line would add up a resolver nameserver the Linux host would use.

Cheers ;)

I've been struggling for more than 10 hours to fix up issues on a Ubuntu Maverick-Meerkaat with a rtl8187B Wireless Adapter

The RTL8187B almost drove me mad. I could see the wlan0 which meant the kernel is detecting the device, I could even bring it up with ifconfig wlan0 up , however when I tried it in gnome's network-manager or wicd the wireless networks were not showing up.

Trying to scan for networks using the commands:

ubuntu:~# iwlist wlan0 scan


was also unsuccesful, trying to bring up and down the wireless wlan0 interface with:

ubuntu:~# iwconfig wlan0 up


or

ubuntu:~# iwconfig wlan0 down


Both returned the error:
iwconfig: unknown command "up" and iwconfig: unknown command "down"

Running simply iwconfig was properly returning information about my Wireless Interface wlan0 :

wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:off/any
Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=20 dBm
Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off


The exact information I could get about the wireless device was via the command:

ubuntu:~# lsusb | grep realtek
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0bda:8197 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8187B Wireless Adapter


Trying manually to scan for wireless networks from console or gnome-terminal with command returned also the below weird results:

ubuntu:~# iwconfig wlan0 scan
iwconfig: unknown command "scan"


More oddly tunning wlan0 interface with commands like:

ubuntu:~# iwconfig wlan0 mode managed
ubuntu:~# iwconfig wlan0 essid ESSID
ubuntu:~# iwconfig wlan0 rate 11M


were succesful ...

I read a bunch of documentation online concerning the wireless card troubles on Ubuntu, Gentoo, Debian etc.

Just few of all the resources I've read and tried are:

http://rtl-wifi.sourceforge.net/wiki/Main_Page (Returning empty page already a lot resource) http://rtl8187b.sourceforge.net (A fork of rtl-wifi.sourceforge.net which is still available though it was not usable)

Some of the other resources which most of the people recommended as a way to properly install the RTL8187B wireless driver on linux was located on the website:

http://datanorth.net/~cuervo/rtl8187b/ (Trying to access this page returned a 404 error e.g. this page is no-longer usable)

I found even a webpage in Ubuntu Help which claimed to explain how to properly install and configure the RTL8187B wireless driver on which is below:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Device/RealtekRTL8187b

Even the Ubuntu help instructions were pointing me to the broken cuervo's website URL

Anyways I was able to find the rtl8187b-modified-dist.tar.gz online and made a mirror of rtl8187b-modified-dist.tar.gz which you can download here

Another rtl8187b driver I found was on a toshiba website made especailly for the wireless linux drivers:

http://linux.toshiba-dme.co.jp/linux/eng/pc/sat_PSPD0_report.htm

The questionable file which was claimed to properly be able to make the Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8187B Wireless Adapter to work out was called rl8187b-modified-804.tar.gz.
I've made a mirror of rtl8187b-modified-804.tar.gz is here

None of the driver archives rtl8187b-modified-dist.tar.gz and rl8187b-modified-804.tar.gz that was supposed to make the Toshiba L40 realtek wireless to work out, after compiling and installing the drivers from source worked out ...

Both archives produced plenty of error messages and it seems on newer kernels like the one on this notebook:

Linux zlatina 2.6.35-28-generic #50-Ubuntu SMP Fri Mar 18 19:00:26 UTC 2011 i686 GNU/Linux, they're no longer usable.

The compile errors I got when I tried compiling the rtl8187b driver provided by the archive rtl8187b-modified-dist were:

root@ubuntu:/home/zlatina/rtl8187b-modified# sh makedrv
rm -fr *.mod.c *.mod *.o .*.cmd *.mod.* *.ko *.o *~
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.35-28-generic/build M=/home/zlatina/rtl8187b-modified/ieee80211 CC=gcc modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.35-28-generic'
scripts/Makefile.build:49: *** CFLAGS was changed in "/home/zlatina/rtl8187b-modified/ieee80211/Makefile". Fix it to use EXTRA_CFLAGS. Stop.
make[1]: *** [_module_/home/zlatina/rtl8187b-modified/ieee80211] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.35-28-generic'
make: *** [modules] Error 2
rm -fr *.mod.c *.mod *.o .*.cmd *.ko *~
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.35-28-generic/build M=/home/zlatina/rtl8187b-modified/rtl8187 CC=gcc modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.35-28-generic'
scripts/Makefile.build:49: *** CFLAGS was changed in "/home/zlatina/rtl8187b-modified/rtl8187/Makefile". Fix it to use EXTRA_CFLAGS. Stop.
make[1]: *** [_module_/home/zlatina/rtl8187b-modified/rtl8187] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.35-28-generic'
make: *** [modules] Error 2
root@ubuntu:/home/zlatina/rtl8187b-modified#


Another driver I tried which was found on aircrack-ng.org's website was rtl8187_linux_26.1010.zip

Here are the error messages I experienced while I tried to compile the realtek wireless driver from the archive rtl8187_linux_26.1010.0622.2006

compilation terminated.
make[2]: *** [/home/zlatina/rtl8187_linux_26.1010.0622.2006/beta-8187/r8187_core.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [_module_/home/zlatina/rtl8187_linux_26.1010.0622.2006/beta-8187] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.35-28-generic'
make: *** [modules] Error 2
make: *** [modules] Error 2


I tried a number of fix ups hoping to solve the compile error messages, but my efforts were useless, as it seems many things has changed in newer Ubuntu versions and they could no longer be compiled.

As I realized I couldn't make the native drivers provided by the above sources compile, I decided to give a try to the Windows drivers for Realtek 8187B with ndiswrapper, a link for download of Realtek 8187B (RTL8187B_XP_6.1163.0331.2010_Win7_62.1182.0331.2010_UI_1.00.0179.L.tar.gz is found here

I untarred the RTL8187B_XP_6.1163.0331.2010_Win7_62.1182.0331.2010_UI_1.00.0179.L.tar.gz and used ndiswrapper to load driver like so:

root@ubuntu:~# tar -zxvf RTL8187B_XP_6.1163.0331.2010_Win7_62.1182.0331.2010_UI_1.00.0179.L.tar.gz
root@ubuntu:/home/zlatina/RTL8187B#
root@ubuntu:/home/zlatina/RTL8187B# cd Driver/WinXP
root@ubuntu:/home/zlatina/RTL8187B/Driver/WinXP# ndiswrapper -i net8187b.inf


In order to test the RTL8178B Windows driver I used:

root@ubuntu:~# ndiswrapper -l
net8187b : driver installed
device (0BDA:8197) present (alternate driver: rtl8187)


To finally load the Windows XP RTL8187B driver on the Ubuntu I used again ndiswrapper:

root@ubuntu:~# ndiswrapper -m


Further on I used the ndisgtk graphical ndiswrapper interface to once again test if the Windows driver is working on the Ubuntu and it seemed like it is working, however still my wicd was unable to find any wireless network ....

There were many online documentation which claimed that the driver for rtl8187b works out of the box on newer kernel releases (kernel versions > 2.6.24)

Finally I found out there is a driver which is a default one with the Ubuntu e.g. rtl8187.ko , I proceeded and loaded the module:

root@ubuntu:~# modprobe rtl8187


I also decided to check out if the hardware switch button of the Toshiba Satellite L40 notebook is not switched off and guess what ?! The Wireless ON/OFF button was switched OFF!!! OMG ...

I switched on the button and wicd immediately started showing up the wireless networks ...

To make the rtl8187 module load on Ubuntu boot up, I had to issue the command:

root@ubuntu:~# echo 'rtl8187' >> /etc/modules


Voila after all this struggle the wireless card is working now, it's sad I had to loose about 10 hours of time until I come with the simple solution of using the default provided ubuntu driver rtl8187 , what is strange is how comes that it does not load up automatically.

Thanks God it works now.

As you can read in my few previous posts I have just installed a new Ubuntu 10.10 on a Toshiba Satellite L40 notebook.

Most of the things which are necessery for a fully working Linux desktop are already installed and the machine works fine, however I just noticed there is an issue with the default torrent gnome client and transmission unable to download files from torrent trackers.

Few minutes of playing with the transmission's settings has revealed what was causing my torrent download problems.

It seems on Ubuntu 10.10 (probably on other Ubuntus and Debians) by default the transmission bittorrent client is trying to use for torrent download connections an incoming port 53636 number.

As the computer is behind a firewall and does not have a real IP address seeders cannot properly connect to the notebook port 53636 and hence the transmission bittorrent client could not initialize any torrent downloads.

Fixing up the issue is rather easy to fix it I had to change the settings in transmission from the menus:

Edit -> Settings -> Network


You need to select the options:

• Pick a random port on startup
• Use UPnP or NAT-PMP to redirect connections

Next I had to restart transmission and my torrent downloads started ;)

Linux Does your provider provides you with a connection to the internet via a static IP address? Are you an Ubuntu or Debian user like me? Are you looking for a way to configure your eth0 Linux network card with the static ISP provided IP address? That was the scenario with me and in this article I will explain, how you can configure your Home internet access with your Ubuntu/Debian based Linux.

Both Ubuntu and Debian does have a graphic tools, which also can be used to set a static IP address to your network interface, however I find it easier to do it straight from the command line.

To configure your internet static IP via a command line, what you will need to modify is the file:

/etc/network/interfaces


In order to configure a static IP address, your provider should have equipped you with few IP addresses like let's say the example values below:

Host IP Address: 192.168.0.5
Netmask Address: 255.255.255.0
Gateway: 192.168.0.1
Primary DNS Server: 192.168.0.1
Secondary DNS Server: 192.168.0.2


Now edit with vim, nano or mcedit /etc/network/interfaces e.g.:

root@ubuntu:~# mcedit /etc/network/interfaces


A plain /etc/network/interfaces file should contain something similar to:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback


In order to be able to set your static IP address, Netmask, Gateway and DNS servers you will have to append in the interfaces file, the settings:

iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.0.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.0.0
gateway 192.168.0.1


The eth0 sets the lan card on which the values will be assigned, address variable is the IP address assigned by your ISP, netmask is logically the netmask, network should always be configured same as the value set for address but the last ip block should be always .0 , gateway as you already know is the gateway (the ISP router).

One more thing you need to do is to configure your DNS servers by including the DNS ip addresses to /etc/resolv.conf , just issue something like:

root@ubuntu:~# echo 'nameserver 192.168.0.1' >> /etc/resolv.conf
root@ubuntu:~# echo 'nameserver 192.168.0.2' >> /etc/resolv.conf


To test that your new Linux static ip configuration is correct exec:

root@ubuntu:~# /etc/init.d/networking restart


Next use ping or (if ping is disabled by ISP), use matt's traceroute (mtr) or a browser to test if the Linux is connected to the net.

ubuntu:~# ping google.com
...
ubuntu:~# mtr google.com


If none of the two are not able to show either ping requests flowing around, or routes to google, then something is either wrong with your internet configuration or you forgot to pay your internet bill ;)

OME login in Ubuntu 10.10 I just completed a fresh Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick-Merkaat install.
Following the installation I used a small script to install a bunch of packages I used on the same notebook before the Ubuntu re-installation.

Now after the number of packages are installed on the newly installed Ubuntu, everytime I login with any GNOME user account I get mail notification settings window to automatically start-up

Closing on every gnome login session the mail settings is not a pleasent experience, therefore I took a bit of seconds to find out what launches the New Mail pop-up window

Here is how the annoying window looks like everytime I login on my ubuntu:



Some of the text on the above screenshot is in Bulgarian as the default configured locale for this Ubuntu install is set to Bulgarian but I hope this doesn't matter as other people who have the same popup can still recognize the window.

Now to find out the process which spawned the mail notification popup I issued:

root@ubuntu:~# ps ax |grep -i mail 2651 pts/1 Sl+ 0:01 mail-notification --sm-disable


Further on I checked what is the original location of mail notification command :

root@ubuntu:~# which mail-notification
/usr/bin/mail-notification


To be absolutely sure mail-notification does spawn the mail settings window I used pkill -9 mail-notification

As the window suddenly died now I was absolutely sure that mail-notification is spawning the unwanted pop-up window which appeared right after me logging in.

I used dpkg -S to check which package does the mail-notification program belong to as I thought that the solution to get rid of this annoying popup will come to removing the whole package, here is what I did:

root@ubuntu:~# dpkg -S /usr/bin/mail-notification
mail-notification: /usr/bin/mail-notification
root@ubuntu:~#


Now knowing the package I simply wiped it off:

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get remove --yes mail-notification
...
root@ubuntu:~# dpkg --purge mail-notification
...


After that I guarantee you you won't see the irritating new mail settings pop-up window again.
Farewell mail-notification annoyance, hope to never see you again!!! :)

I have updated Ubuntu version 9.04 (Jaunty) to 9.10 and followed the my previous post update ubuntu from 9.04 to Latest Ubuntu

I expected that a step by step upgrade from a release to release will work like a charm and though it does on many notebooks it doesn't on Toshiba Satellite L40

The update itself went fine, whether I used the update-manager -d and followed the above pointed tutorial, however after a system restart the PC failed to boot the X server properly, a completely blank screen with blinking cursor appeared and that was all.

I restarted the system into the 2.6.35-28-generic kernel rescue-mode recovery kernel in order to be able to enter into physical console.

Logically the first thing I did is to check /var/log/messages and /var/log/Xorg.0.log but I couldn't find nothing unusual or wrong there.

I suspected something might be wrong with /etc/X11/xorg.conf so I deleted it:

ubuntu:~# rm -f /etc/X11/xorg.conf


and attempted to re-create the xorg.conf X configuration with command:

ubuntu:~# dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg


This command was reported to be the usual way to reconfigure the X server settings from console, but in my case (for unknown reasons) it did nothing.

Next the command which was able to re-generate the xorg.conf file was:

ubuntu:~# X -configure


The command generates a xorg.conf sample file in /root/xorg.conf.* so I used the conf to put it in /etc/X11/xorg.conf X's default location and restarted in hope that this would fix the non-booting issue.

Very sadly again the black screen of death appeared on the notebook toshiba screen.
I further thought of completely wipe out the xorg.conf in hope that at least it might boot without the conf file but this worked out neither.

I attempted to run the Xserver with a xorg.conf configured to work with vesa as it's well known vesa X server driver is supposed to work on 99% of the video cards, as almost all of them nowdays are compatible with the vesa standard, but guess what in my case vesa worked not!

The only version of X I can boot in was the failsafe X screen mode which is available through the grub's boot menu recovery mode.

Further on I decided to try few xorg.conf which I found online and were reported to work fine with Intel GM965 internal video , and yes this was also unsucessful.

Some of my other futile attempts were: to re-install the xorg server with apt-get, reinstall the xserver-xorg-video-intel driver e.g.:

ubuntu:~# apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-video-intel


As nothing worked out I was completely pissed off and decided to take an alternative approach which will take a lot of time but at least will probably be succesful, I decided to completely re-install the Ubuntu from a CD after backing up the /home directory and making a list of available packages on the system, so I can further easily run a tiny bash one-liner script to install all the packages which were previously existing on the laptop before the re-install:

Here is how I did it:

First I archived the /home directory:

ubuntu:/# tar -czvf home.tar.gz home/
....

For 12GB of data with some few thousands of files archiving it took about 40 minutes.

The tar spit archive became like 9GB and I hence used sftp to upload it to a remote FTP server as I was missing a flash drive or an external HDD where I can place the just archived data.

Uploading with sftp can be achieved with a command similar to:

sftp user@yourhost.com
Password:
Connected to yourhost.com.
sftp> put home.tar.gz


As a next step to backup in a file the list of all current installed packages, before I can further proceed to boot-up with the Ubuntu Maverich 10.10 CD and prooceed with the fresh install I used command:

for i in $(dpkg -l| awk '{ print $2 }'); do
echo $i; done >> my_current_ubuntu_packages.txt


Once again I used sftp as in above example to upload my_current_update_packages.txt file to my FTP host.

After backing up all the stuff necessery, I restarted the system and booted from the CD-rom with Ubuntu.
The Ubuntu installation as usual is more than a piece of cake and even if you don't have a brain you can succeed with it, so I wouldn't comment on it ;)

Right after the installation I used the sftp client once again to fetch the home.tar.gz and my_current_ubuntu_packages.txt

I placed the home.tar.gz in /home/ and untarred it inside the fresh /home dir:

ubuntu:/home# tar -zxvf home.tar.gz


Eventually the old home directory was located in /home/home so thereon I used Midnight Commander ( the good old mc text file explorer and manager ) to restore the important user files to their respective places.

As a last step I used the my_current_ubuntu_packages.txt in combination with a tiny shell script to install all the listed packages inside the file with command:

ubuntu:~# for i in $(cat my_current_ubuntu_packagespackages.txt); do
apt-get install --yes $i; sleep 1;
done


You will have to stay in front of the computer and manually answer a ncurses interface questions concerning some packages configuration and to be honest this is really annoying and time consuming.

Summing up the overall time I spend with this stupid Toshiba Satellite L40 with the shitty Intel GM965 was 4 days, where each day I tried numerous ways to fix up the X as I gave my best to get through without re-installing the old Ubuntu system.
This is a lesson for me that if I stumble such a shitty issues I will straight proceed to the re-install option and not loose my time with non-sense fixes which would never work.

Hope the article might be helpful to somebody else who experience some problems with Linux similar to mine.

I believe the solution I explain, though very radical and slow is a solution that would always work ;)
Let me hear from you if the article was helpful.

Here are two really nice videos produced by Daniela Popova.

One is called Black and White Story and the other one is with the funny name To Download an Apple
,br /> The videos was produced for her Graduation assignment in NATVIS (National Academy of Theater and Film arts).
Even better the Black and White Story Video has been selected for the Festival of the Orthodox Christian Cinema in Moscow.
The movie was selected by a the jury on the festival (a professor) who realized there is a deeper spiritual meaning behind the Black and White Story

The Black & White Story Video has also an outstanding bulgarian national folklore music combined with some modern day music, just check it out and enjoy.

The second movie To Download an Apple is a humorous one and I believe presents the sometimes stupid and serious efforts we do to follow fake imaginative goals.



[FLOWPLAYER=http://pc-freak.net/files/black_and_white_story.flv/media.flv,480,390]
Black and White Story


[FLOWPLAYER=http://pc-freak.net/files/to-download-an-apple.flv,480,390]
To Download an Apple

As Daniela is a Christian the movies contain also a hidden Christian messages ;)
I greet her for the great work! Considering the uniqueness of the videos it's obvious Daniela is really talented!
I'm looking forward to see some more from her works.

According to latest scientific research conducted in Stanford University USA .

People who actively use computers and internet has been the object of the research in 2009.

Social Networks, Tablets Smartphones etc. provides more and more possibilities for us to access information.

Most of modern people today tend to loose approximately between 8 and 10 hours a day either using Internet, a PC, Word-excel, their mobile phone or some kind of other mobile gadget like let's say IPAD.

Most of today's technologic goods we use to make our lives easier are multitasking.
The brain itself is not adjusted to work in such a multi-tasking mode as a direct consequence of being in contact with this multi-tasking for a long periods of time.
Suddenly it starts being multitasking, or in other words starts processing information in parallel.

As the amount of information is constantly increasing online and we're in contact with more and more information and moreover the altered way of our brains which starts working in multi-tasking the brain-overflows or (information brain overlow) is starting being more and more occuring event.

The consequence of this complexity is starting to impact us seriously as we tend to get addicted to technology usage and day by day it seems that the amount of information our brains are able to process is decreasing.

Logically enough the long-term consequence of a an internet addiction or any kind of technology addiction, plus the tremendous amounts of information we do think over daily is starting to show up the negative consequences on our psyche and (soul)

The brain starts changing the way it gets information as it adapts itself to "not remember", as the information to be processed daily is so much that it couldn't really comprehend it.

A good example for multi-tasking which if not all most of the users on the Internet today use daily is one of terriblest things ever created facebook, in my of my previous articles I've blogged about why social networks are big evil read it here and it seems this new information about brain altering caused bhy multi-tasking is just another supporting reason on why it's better not to use social networks like facebook and twitter.

The endless amount of information according to the Stanford University research has prooven that the endless amount of information is pernicioufor our (brains) minds and is in many ways similar to the excessive amount of sugar in the body.

The scientiests which conducted the research does recommend to heavy computer and tech users (like me), to self-control themselves and be on a tech-diet (e.g. not use technology completely for at least 1 or 2 days every week).

Another serious damage which was prooven according to Stanford's scientiests research was that people's brains who have a severe exposure to internet or phone usage tend to have very serious problems with contentration and are very easily distracted.
This in a long term surely leads to a chaotic way of living obviously.
Suddenly it seems technology to be slowly becoming even more deadly and destructive than drugs.

Many people would say this kind of research is not true, but I can confirm that for instance many of the proven facts are things I have experiences myself in my daily life, so I believe what the research has prooven is mostly true.

This research was just another one after a month before other scientiests has prooven that Mobile Phone use leads to alteration of the brain chemistry
Apart from all the said negative consequences of use of technology for human brain is the problem with technology today heavily used as a way to spy on personal privacy I wonder be glad to hear in the comments section for other people like me who have problems with concentration and have a very short time memory (I myself have serious problem with that one).

It's the third day, after the saviour's tomb was found empty. The third day after the evel living has manifested his divinity by showing himself alive to The Holy Virgin Mary (Theotokos) to Mary Magdalene and to few of the Holy Apostles.
The upcoming week is called within the Church The Bright Week
The whole week is a week of a divine spiritual joy which we all the Christians experiens (feels).

God is really graceful to us the sinners in this holy days of the year.

"Christ is risen from the dead,
trampling down death by death,
and on those in the tombs bestowing
life!"

Happy Easter to all my beloved readers. In relation to the Greatest feast of all times I wish to all my readers a lot of good health, a lot of success in all good, and a lot of love. Rejoice for the Lord and Saviour of mankind has been risen!

In Jerusalem the Holy Fire has descended from Heaven. For all Unorthodox Christians, it's important to note that the Holy Fire is the miracle confirming that the Christian Orthodox faith is the true ancient Christian faith in fulness!

Each year the Holy Fire descends from heaven and lights up the candle of the Patriarch of the Jerusalem Church. This only happens on the Orthodox Easter! This is without question a great miracle and a very graceful act by which God shows us he has not left us behind.

Here is a video you can watch, where you can see the miracle happening itself as well as some people testimonies who testified the miracle:



Holy Light (Holy Fire) in Jerusalem: Proofs & Testimonies

Today is the great and sad day for us Christians in which the Lord has been crucified.

It's a day of a great spiritual sorrow for all the Orthodox Christian.
It's also the day in which we do venerate the holy shroud (plashtenica) in which the Lord's body has been wrapped, after it was removed from the life giving cross.



The priest takes the plashtenica and walks through the temple and afterwards we do venerate the holy plashtenica (The dead body of the saviour).

There is a local Orthodox Church tradition which I believe is very specific to the bulgarian orthodox Church.
The plashtenica is placed on a table, the holy gospel and the holy cross are placed by the priest over the plashtenica (the shroud), after which grouped in a line (first the children, then the man, followed by the woman) we the layman do kiss the holy gospel, the cross and the plashtenica showing evidently our love for Christ and his gospel and their respect for the Lord's Great Cross sufferings. Further on the layman does crawl (under the table with the plashtenica).





The crawling under the plashtenica in Bulgarian Orthodox Church is a very known tradition by bulgarian people.

The crawling under the table symbolically shows that we take participation in the Lord's death.
As it's written that we all who are in Christ are being death for the world after the Holy Baptism.

There are probably other reasons for which the Church has established the passing under of the holy plashtenica which I'm not aware of.

What is sad is that most people does not really understand the real symbolism behind the crossing below the plashtenica (crossing below the table).

Thus many people who know the feast of Great Friday do come to the church to cross below the plashtenica as an act of superstition, as they don't really understand why they do it.
They simply interpret that crossing below the plashtenica would grant them "good health", "a life success" or good fortune.

Many of those people who come to crawl under the table, are not a regular on other Church services (Holy Liturgies) and therefore completely miss even the basics of our Christian beliefs.

Many of those people who are not adept in faith, do come to the Church with the only goal "to crawl below the table" and leave the Church immediately after that ...

It's truly sad to see that especially when I know that we Bulgarians are Orthodox Christian nation.
An Orthodox Christian nation who is starting to forget Christianity ...

Just to give you an idea on how people have left astray from Orthodox Christian faith I can tell you for sure that the regular Church goers who attend Holy Liturgies and have intermediate knowledge of Orthodox Christianity and Church order in Bulgaria are not more than 4% of all the Bulgarian population.

This means that probably no more than approximately 300 000 of Bulgarians are in a communion with our Bulgarian Orthodox Church and do regularly confess and take the sacraments.

Here is an Orthodox Singing of the core troparion for the day (in Greek):

Today, a day before the suffering of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ for our sins remission we do commemorate the day of the Last Supper or (The Supper of Mysteries) in the Orthdox Church.

According to our Church tradition today is the day on which the saviour has established the Church mystery of the Sacrements! (Eucharist)

Here are the exact passages from (Matthew 26:26-28), where by the word of the Lord the Eucharist was established:

"Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said, 'Take, eat; this is my body.' And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, 'Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.'" (Mt. 26:26-28)

The feast is celebrated with a morning Holy Liturgy among all Eastern Orthodox Churches around the world.
It's common that many layman do confess and take the sacraments on this date.

Before sacraments are received we the layman confess our unworthiness for Christ and beg for him to make us worthy to receive the communion with the prayer:

I believe, O Lord, and I confess that Thou art truly the Christ, the Son of the Living God, who camest into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the first (see 1 Tim 1:15). I believe also that this is truly Thine own most pure Body, and that this is truly Thine own most precious Blood. Therefore I pray Thee: Have mercy upon me and forgive me my transgressions, committed in word and deed, whether consciously or unconsciously. And make me worthy to partake without condemnation of Thy most pure Mysteries, for the remission of sins and unto life everlasting. Of Thy Mystical Supper, O Son of God, accept me today as a communicant. For I will not speak of Thy Mystery to Thine enemies, neither like Judas will I give Thee a kiss; but like the thief will I confess Thee: "Remember me, O Lord, in Thy Kingdom." May the communion of Thy Holy Mysteries be neither to my judgment, nor to my condemnation, 0 Lord, but to the healing of soul and body.

This prayer is actually said everytime before we do take the sacraments through the year, so it's one of the most-important prayers in our Orthodox Church life.

The Holy Communion establishment is also an act of remembrance a of the Lord's suffering for the remission of our sins according to his commandment.

One major difference between Orthodoxy and Protestanism concerning Eucharist is that we orthodox believe that by taking the sacraments, we do receive the Most-holy flesh and blood of Christ and through his blood and flesh, the damage sin has created in our hearts, minds and souls (which is forgiven by God in the the mystery of the confessment) is being recovered completely.

I'm using a backtrack Linux to recover a broken Ubuntu Linux, to fix this disastrous situation I'm using the Ubuntu Linux through chroot after mounting my /dev/sda1, where my Linux resides with:

linux-recovery:~# mkdir /mnt/test1
linux-recovery:~# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/test1
linux-recovery:~# chroot /mnt/test1
ubuntu:~#


I consequently needed to mount up the /proc and /dev partition inside the chroot environment.

Here is how I did it:

ubuntu:~# mount /proc
ubuntu:~# mount -a


Next I switched on on a different virtual console in the backtrack and to mount /dev issued the commands:

linux-recovery:~# mount --bind /dev /mnt/test1/dev


Now using I can use properly apt-get to fix up the whole mess ...

After some upgrades of Ubuntu from 9.10 to Ubuntu 10.04.2, I faced problems during apt-get upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade

I had to fix it up with apt-get upgrade -f , however the "fix" which was targetting a fix up to the apt-get dist-upgrade removed about 260 packages, among which were the grub boot loader , xorg-server and even gnome

As in order to fix the package mishap the apt-get update -f was my only possible solution I went by and confirmed that I would like to wipe out all the packages.

Logically afterwards it was required that I install my missing xorg-server and gnome in order to make the Ubuntu desktop work again.

Here is how:

ubuntu:~# apt-get update && apt-get xorg-server ubuntu-desktop


The ubuntu-desktop is a meta package which installs the GNOME environment.

A new zero-day exploit for the Adobe Flash Player has been published on http://exploit-db.com .

The exploit published is targetting Windows 7 systems.

Even though the published version of the exploit is said to affect Windows 7 installations, the shellcode with this proof of concept exploit (PoC) could surely be changed to a one that would also take effect in Linux.
Most likely Linux exploitation will be a harder task to achieve, however thesecurity advisory issued http://www.adobe.com/support/security/advisories/apsa11-02.html recommends an immediate update of the flash player.

According to some rumors the 0 day adobe flash vulnerability has been exploited since a long time to get access to access to confidential U.S. governmental documents.

A classical ways said that malicious hackers uses is by sending a flash (.swf) containing email, by simply opening the email the victim gets exploiteda.

Adobe officially has reported, there are no official information if attacks has targetted other company software like Adobe Acrobat Reader which supports their flash player product.
According to Adobe Adobe Reader is not vulnerable to this kind of attacks as it uses a protected mode which would mitigate the attack (though I hardly doubt this claim).

The affected versions of Adobe's Flash player are:

• Flash Player 10.2.153.1 for Windows
• Flash Player 10.2.153.1 for Apple Macintosh
• Flash Player 10.2.153.1 for Linux and Solaris
• Flash Player 10.2.156.12 for Android Mobile platform

as well as the Authplay.dll library used by Adobe's Acrobat Reader

Earlier versions of Flash player are also reported to be affected to the critical security vulnerability.
There are already rumors that already the exploit is exploited using a crafted (.swf) files embedded into Microsoft Word .doc files.

This new critical vulnerability is another example which shows clearly how insecure a user who has flash enabled in their browser is.

According to preliminary information, exploitation of this critical security flaw can be sucessfully achived in most (if not all) browsers ...

By so far browsing on Linux was always considered to be a way more secure than on Windows, with this issue rising up this kind of trend would change a bit, as surely many Linux distributions will probably not release a newer version of the adobe flash (flashplugin-nonfree) package.

Today the flash player is a de-facto standard and is wide spread among most modern internet connected operating system obviously it's unified use creates could lead to a unified problems.

The example with this flash security issue is a good example against why non-free technologies should not be set as standards.
If the flash player and standard was free and everybody could create and distribute flash players for free. Such a vulnerability affecting so many operating systems and so many browsers would never become a reality.

To sum it up, this issue will surely create a lot of problems and opens a serious security hole for us the Linux users.

Be sure to update your flash player before someone has exploited you through the web.

I've been experimenting since some time in order to understand better what is the current situation with Video Desktop Capturing Software available today for Linux and FreeBSD.

My previous investigations has led me to write an article about xvidcap called How to make Video from your Linux Desktop with xvidcap

Though xvidcap works pretty well, it is currently uncapable of capturing the audio stream of a Linux Desktop env and hence part of the interactivity of the videos is missing when used.

A bit of further investigation on the topic has pointed me to two three free software programs which are also capable to record Desktop environment on Linux with sound in

The interesting screen video capturing Desktop instruments, I've found are:

1. recordMyDesktop
and
2. Istanbul
3. vnc2swf

Installing them on a Debian based distribution is pleasable, as there are installable debian packages of each one which I installed easily with apt:

debian:~# apt-get install istanbul recordmydesktop gtk-recordmydesktop vnc2swf


RecordMyDesktop's package contains a command line little tool which when started directly starts capturing video and audio of the Linux Desktop. After a Ctrl+C is pressed the program quits, saves and encodes the video in ogg-encapsulated theora-vorbis file format.

Here is the output I got in saving a sample file by launching recordmydesktop without any arguments:

hipo@debian:~/Desktop$ recordmydesktop
Initial recording window is set to:
X:0 Y:0 Width:1024 Height:768
Adjusted recording window is set to:
X:0 Y:0 Width:1024 Height:768
Your window manager appears to be Metacity

Initializing...
Buffer size adjusted to 4096 from 4096 frames.
Opened PCM device hw:0,0
Recording on device hw:0,0 is set to:
2 channels at 22050Hz
Capturing!
Broken pipe: Overrun occurred.
Broken pipe: Overrun occurred.
Broken pipe: Overrun occurred.
^C
*********************************************

Cached 5 MB, from 207 MB that were received.
Average cache compression ratio: 97.3 %

*********************************************
Saved 69 frames in a total of 69 requests
Shutting down..Broken pipe: Overrun occurred.
...
STATE:ENCODING
Encoding started!
This may take several minutes.
Pressing Ctrl-C will cancel the procedure (resuming will not be possible, but
any portion of the video, which is already encoded won't be deleted).
Please wait...
Output file: out.ogv
[100%]
Encoding finished!
Wait a moment please...

Done.
Written 692529 bytes
(635547 of which were video data and 56982 audio data)

Cleanning up cache...
Done!!!
Goodbye!


The captured file as I you see in the above output is saved in file out.ogv

RecordMyDesktop has also a GUI interface (written in Python) called gtk-recordmydesktop

Below you see a screenshot of the GUI gtk-recordmydesktop:



gtk-recordmydesktop is a super-easy to use as you already see in the picture, you can either configure it with Advanced button or use Save As button to select where you want the Desktop captured video and audio to be stored.

In Debian Squeeze 6.0, the Advanced GUI button interface button is not working but that's not such an issue, as the rest of the buttons are works fine.
After the recordmydesktop's Record button is pressed it will start capturing from your Desktop and the window seen in the above screenshot will disappear/hide in the system tray:


When you press over the white little square in the system tray the screen capturing will be interrupted and a window will pop-up informing you that the captured video and audio is being encoded, here is another screenshot of recordmydesktop encoding a saved Desktop video stream:



After the final .ogv file is encoded and saved to further transfer it into (.flv) I used ffmpeg;

debian:~# ffmpeg -i test.ogv test.flv
...


Now let's evaluate a bit on the the final results, the produced test.ogv's synchronization between sound and video was not good as the sound was starting earlier than the video and therefore even though recordmydesktop used to be highly praised on the net, the proggie developers still needs to do some bug fixing
Further I continued and tested Istanbul hoping that at least with it the video and audio of my Linux desktop will be properly captured. But guess what, the results with Istanbul was even more unsatisfactory as the produced videos and sounds, were slow and a lot of frames from the screens were missing completely.
Moreover the sound which was supposed to accompany the video was completely :(

Thus I will skip on talking about Istanbul as in my view, this piece of software is far away from being production ready.

I also tesed vnc2swf , launched it after pressing alt+f2 and typing in vnc2swf in GNOME's run application prompt and pressing the program interface start button, just to be surprised by an error ...:



The reason for this error is caused by the xserver (Xorg) port 5900 is being closed by default on Debian

However this error is easily solvable, by making the Xserver to listen to a the port 5900, to make the Xorg server on Debian to listen on this port you need to edit the file:

/etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc

and change inside it:

exec /usr/bin/X -nolisten tcp "$@"


with:

exec /usr/bin/X "$@"


and further either reboot your Linux or restart only the Xorg server by pressing Ctrl+Alt+BackSpace

The results from desktop video screen capturing whether vnc2swf is used prooved to be superior and it appears this soft is actually the best one you can use to make a video of your Linux desktop.

Sadly my testings has proven that Linux is still lacking behind Windows and Mac in even doing the most simple tasks ...
Let's hope that situation will get better soon.

As a Linux user I sometimes face difficulties with watching subtitled, movies. I mostly use Mplayer, Totem or VLC to watch the common video files.
The most common problems I face with subtitles are caused by bad timing, many times the solution to the bad timing issues is very simpleand comes up to changing the default movie player I use MPlayer to VLC or Totem.

However at many occasions trying to watch the movie with different kind of movie player does not help.
In this dark moments I get seriously irritated I am not a regular Windows user, where such kind of problems are almost none as many of the Windows movie player problems does fix bad timing issues automatically.

Luckily there is a work-around to this subtitles timing issues and other mishaps caused by guys who created a Movie subtitle files with a Windows subtitle editor program, subtitles timing, the Linux work-around takes a few more minutes to install a package called Subtitles

The Subtitles text utility is written in Perl and contains two executables subplay and subs .

Subtitles is the Linux subtitle Swiss Army Knife as it is capable of convert, join, split, and re-time of subtitles files

Installing Subtitles tools on Linux is a trivial job and it comes to download and installation of the 2 perl executables.
Here is how:

1. Download Subtitles.tar.gz tools I have mirrored Linux Subtitles (Subtitles.tar.gz) here originally the binaries are to be found on URL address: http://karasik.eu.org/software/ , issue the commands:

linux:~# cd /usr/local/src
linux:/usr/local/src# wget http://pc-freak.net/files/Subtitles.tar.gz
...
2. Unarchive it

linux:/usr/local/src# tar -zxvvf tar -zxvvf Subtitles.tar.gz ...
linux:/usr/local/src# cd Subtitles-1.0


3. Compile and install Subtitles system wide Pitily the Subtitles tools are not currently available as a packages in the repositories of Debian and Ubuntu Linux and thus easy installation without compilation via apt-get is unfortunately not available.

Here is the commands with which to compile and install Subtitles:

linux:/usr/local/src/Subtitles-1.0# perl Makefile.PL
...
linux:/usr/local/src/Subtitles-1.0# make
...
linux:/usr/local/src/Subtitles-1.0# make test
...

All tests successful. Files=1, Tests=17, 1 wallclock secs ( 0.05 usr 0.00 sys + 0.06 cusr 0.01 csys = 0.12 CPU) Result: PASS

linux:/usr/local/src/Subtitles-1.0# make install

Installing /usr/local/share/perl/5.10.1/Subtitles.pm
Installing /usr/local/man/man1/subplay.1p
Installing /usr/local/man/man1/subs.1p
Installing /usr/local/man/man3/Subtitles.3pm
Installing /usr/local/bin/subplay
Installing /usr/local/bin/subs
Appending installation info to /usr/local/lib/perl/5.10.1/perllocal.pod


Now as we have the subs executable installed, Let's say your movie subtitles displays 5 seconds earlier before the movie scenes (bad timing), all you need to do to adjust your subtitles to show up in correct movie scenes is issue:

hipo@linux:/home/hipo/Movies$ subs -i -b 5 your_movie_subtitle_file_name.sub


now check out the subtitle files once again with your favourite player and the early subtitles display on your movie should be fixed.
Let's have another scenario, say that your movie file is encoded to display 24 frames per seconds (fps) but the subtitle file is created to display the subtitles for a 25 fps, to solve this situation issue:

hipo@linux:~# subs -i -a 24/25 your_movie_subtitle_file.sub


Another possible scenario where subs command will be a precious asset is if you for example want to merge two subtitle files into one. Let's say you have subtitles for a movie which are split over in 2 parts and the corresponding subtitles are in 2 different files, but eventually you find a better quality of the movie (DVD quality) in a single file and therefore you need the movie subtitles to be stored in one single file.
In that case to merge the subtitle files from let's say the files movie_subtitle_file1.sub and movie_subtitle_file2.sub use the command:

subs -z movie_subtitle_file1.sub movie_subtitle_file2.sub


Some few other helpful things you can do with subs on Linux, are for example: splitting a file after a determined period of time, separating overlapped lines, and joining files into a single subtitle.

If you want to remove all the comments of gestures, facial expressions loud laughing etc. which displays usually the annoying ('[Sneezing]' or '[Music playing]) during the movie screen play, issue:

subs -e 's/[\s-]*\[.*\]\s*\n*//gs' movie_subtitle_file.sub


Also other interesting Linux tool which is useful if you want to make conversions between subtitle in a (.sub) format to (.srt) format is called sub2srt perl script:

sub2srt's home page is located on the URL address: http://www.robelix.com/sub2srt/, just to ensure it won't just disappear with time I have created sub2srt mirror here

The most basic usage of sub2srt linux converting tool is by simply passing input sub and output srt file names like so:

linux:~# ./sub2srt 5rFF-pop.sub 5rFF-pop.srt


sub2srt supports changing of fps rate per second during conversion with the -f option as well as creationg of converted files in dos like end of file (CR+LF) with the --dos option.

Hope this article makes sense. If you find it useful, please drop me a thanks comment

We live in the age of the boom of sects, false prophets and false "messiahs". Today it's common that the bookstores are filled in with all kind of occult literature and magic teaching literature, agnostic books, horoscopes and all kind of empty modern day philosophy books which teaches evil, the so called "Get rich for a day", "The secrets of success", "How to take advantage over the others", "How to be succesful", "NLP for your success", "How to enter into business", "How to become rich quickly" etc. are e very short list of all the non-sense literature one can meet on the books market.

Along with the books we are being offered all kind of movies and philosophies "teaching us" about the life meanings, trying to explain the meaning of life and the universe and the meaning of each self as a human being.

From Christian perspective, most of this movies and books which plead to contain "a deeper life meaning" are empty of any real pure spiritual contents but are simply a mixture of various religious beliefs belonging to different group of worldy faiths and mostly targets to make the authors of the story or screen play rich.

This movies are not being inspired by God - The All Holy Trinity and they reject Christ as a founding stone on which to stand over, it's clear that they contain an anti-christian content and every truly devoted Christian should try to abstain from watching them.

To name just a few of asuch a movies which are ecumenical (preach for unification of world religions) and from Orthodox Christian perspective are anti-christian in essence:

• What the Bleep Do we Know - Down The Rabbit Hole
  
• The Great Secret of Water
  
• The Secret
  
• The Fountain
  

We as Christians should try not watch this movie or praise them as something which confirms our faith, as they don't confirm our faith in Christ but they try to spread up a "sick spirituality" and insane ideas.
This is just a small list of movies I have encountered which has influenced my spiritual health in a really negative way, therefore I hope if you're a Christian you will take my warning and CHOOSE NOT TO WATCH THESE MOVIES!.
The reason for choosing not to watch this movies would be purely to prevent yourself from experiencing a spiritual (soul) damages by exposing yourself to the heretical teachings and ideas of the aforementioned ones.

Also try to get astray from all the genres of boks which I have mentioned above which try to teach you how to become sucessful in life, I have personally read a book I'm not sure about the exact name but it was similar to:

• "The subsconscious could do everything / (Psyche can achieve everything) / The power of Mind etc."

The book teaches the false idea that with our subconscrious mind we built our own current realities and promotes "positive thinking" as a way to attract wealth, personal success and happiness to yourself.

You can see yourself that this is insane not only from a Christian perspective but even for any rational person.

The idea of this false teachings is to convince you that man is undeveloped god and that we are masters of our own reality.

Therefore it is in direct contrast with even basic Christian beliefs, we Christians do belief that our reality and existence is completely in God's hands and nothing could happen without God to allow it to happen.
Therefore from a Christian perspective if you, "during the whole day think about how you will get rich and how you will have millions in a bank account" as many of the up-mentioned devilish movies and books teaches, nothing will happen if God does not allow it.

We're clearly said and taught from the Holy Bible and the Livings of the saints that all our life and daily goods we attain through our life are given by mercy, the saints has taught us that our lives and all we're and possess are from God for God and through God! To whom be glory now and forever and ever! Amen.

Watch out for this heretical false doctrines which might separate you from Christ and our mother the Orthodox Church. The appearance of all this kind heretical literature and movies is in accordance to the prophecies by our Lord Jesus Christ who said that in the last days there will be many wolves in sheeps clothes, who will deceive and be deceived.

Let we as an Orthodox Christians be careful about what kind of books we read and keep our selves away from these and the similar kind of poisonous teachings.
Let we be fully delivered by God's grace from being exposed to this kind of faith tempting books by the Holy Prayers of The Theotokos and all the Saints. Amen

I really hate this new Debian theme SpaceFun / More Blue Orbit - (cosmic stars theme). I find it too childish and the combination of the blue color and the stars is so dis-tasteful.

If you're not using a Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 or Debian Testing/Unstable you have probably not encountered this ugliness, you see on below's picture.

I do understand the theme design guys wanted to have something which ties to Christmas (at the time of creating it), but come on Christmas has gone long time ago and it's about Easter and the bad Christmas looking theme is still there ...
The possibility that this theme might stay as a default one for the GRUB boot manager and for Gnome Display Manager during the whole Debian Squeeze 6.0 release cycle (about 2 years time) is quite sad.

My dislike for the more blue orbit theme has pushed me into a desire to change this theme into something which is more likeable for the eye.

The idea behind this post was to express my thoughts on the bad graphic design policy Debian has recently embraced, along with the few lines concerning the gdm theme change setup.

This ugly new theme picture has even appeared on the official website of Debian ( debian.org ).

We all know that Linux is not notable with a great Design, as most good graphic designers are Windows users, but still the old simplistic Debian ideas about themes made more sense to me.

Now after I've expressed my personal thoughts and feelings on Debian's new graphic design policy I'll skip further and will explain how to change the gdm theme: in few seconds:

1. Open gnome-terminal and become root and launch gdmsetup:

GDMSetup requires root privileges as it changes the theme of Gnome Display Manager for the whole system:

hipo@debian:~$ su root
debian:~# gdmsetup


2. You will see the gnome display manager setup program to appear on the screen You see it in the screenshot below:



3. As you see in the screenshot you need to go to the menu:

Local and scroll down to see the complete list of system installed themes.
Installing new themes is also a piece of cake, all you have to do is download a selected GDM from art.gnome.org or gnome-look.org and use the Add button you see on the screenshot to include the theme from the list of themes you can further use.

There are number of options in gdmsetup which can change the way gdmsetup authenticates users in Gnome, it also allows useful things like for example:

• Remote Login (located in Remote menu, for example remote gdm logins through Xserver)
• Accessibility (see Accessibility menu) - options (for blind and deaf people's login)
• Automatic user login (Logging in Gnome without a password)
• Enabling the root (administrator) user login
• Disable certain system user's ability to login via gdm

etc.
The default Welcome screen text "Welcome" could also easily be changed from the menus:

Local -> Custom


Just type in your custom text you want to appear on Gnome's user login screen in the Custom field, and restart gdm:

debian:~# killall -HUP gdm


Next gdm login will prompt you with your new selected theme and text.

I personally liked LiNsta (LiNsta is Not Vista GDM theme with Gnome Logo) the most and I recommend it to everybody who wants to switch from the old Debian MoreBlue Orbit ugly theme.

Concerning the Debian themes bad design, I hope truly that this will change soon.
I'm quite interested if other people share my opinion about the new themes implemented in Debian.
Looking forward to hear for your opinions!

I'm just coming back from the Bulgareevo (a small village cituated nearby Kavarna).
Bylgareevo is a middle size bulgarian village situated near the sea on a first look, there is nothing special in it.
The village has two Orthodox Church temples and a serving Priest (an Archimandrite, father Metodii).
Father Metodii is one of this priests that you tend to remember as he is a truly devoted to Christ monk. Since about two years of time he has reconstructed his local village house and the yard nearby the house into something which hopefully in the short future will become a fully monk inhabited spiritual fortress (A Monastery).
Father Metodii lives and believes part of his service to God is constites in rising this small monastery and gathering together Bulgarian believers in order to further rise up the Bulgarian faith in Christ and to become a center for spiritual pilgrimage.

The monastery already has a monastery bell, a monks cells and the small chapel (parakles/paraklis) prepared to be as a place for monks pilgrimage.

Father Metodii's efforts to make the monastery an attractive place for future candidate novice Monks and Monks are genuine.
All he has done by so far is a good example for all us the Christians to follow. Most of the expenses related to the Monastery building are being paid by the Father himself.
As part of this efforts to rise up the place as a place for spiritual pilgrimage by God grace Bylgareevo's monastery has been granted the honour to contain a particle of the Holy Live giving Cross Tree on which our Lord Jesus Christ has been crucified.. By God's mercy the Patriarch of Jerusalem and the local national museum has donated two particles of the Holy Cross on which our Lord Jesus Christ was Crucified and suffered for our sins.

Now the particles are being kept in the Monastery's small chapel for pilgrimage. Thus the opportunity for a pilgrimage journey to Bylgareevo on this day of great spiritual joy Palm Sunday was a huge blessing for me and the few more brothers and sisters with whom we traveled to Bulgareevo
Below I present you with a picture on which you can see Father Metodii (Methodius) holding in lands the small particle of the Crist's Crucifixion cross tree (embedded in the center of the wood cross on the picture).

The name of the village Bulgareevo is also really notable as it's a direct direvative from the word Bylgariq (Bulgaria).
Along with the two particles of the Holy life giving Cross where the saviour Jesus Christ was crucified, father Metodii has collected some great saint relics, just to name a few of the relics which are in the newly built monastery in Bulgareevo; holy relics of saint Panteleimon, holy Relics of Saint John of Rila etc.

The day's service as I mentioned earlier is among the 12 Church feasts in the Orthodox Churches, we use to call (The Lord's feasts [Gospodski Praznici]), and thus is one of the 12 feasts which are most spiritually richful for Bulgaria as an Orthodox Nation and for all other national Orthodox Churches around the world.

Palm Sunday is always the last sunday before the beginning of "the passionate week", the week in which who believe in Christ's name remember the great trials and suffering our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has born for the salvation of all Christians.

Palm Sunday is the feast in which we the orthodox Christians commemorate Christ's entrance in Jerusalem on a small donkey.
The donkey presenting his son of God glory in front of the stunned people who were excited of his entrance in Jerusalem and was placing their clothes and all kind of palm leaves on the path before the Lord, here is a small chunk of the Gospel reading for the day:

They took palm branches and went out to meet him, shouting, "Hosanna!" "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!" "Blessed is the King of Israel!"


The people were glorifying God and Christ as the son of the God in accordance to the Old testament scriptures in which it was prophecised that the Saviour of Mankind (The Messiah) would walk in through the entrance doors of Jerusalem riding a donkey.
People who were present observing the Lord's entrance were witnessing the fulfilment of the old testament psalms prophecies by glorifying the Lord.

This were the same people which just a week later were screaming "crucify" him ..

On Palm Sunday it is a Church tradition in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church that willow branches are being sanctified by the priest and then distributed among layman as a blessing and a remembrance of the Palms which were layed upon the Lord's Jerusalem entrance.

Later on we put the willow branches in our homes in our home icon-stands.

The use of willow branches in our Church has been established through the years as Palm Trees are not growing in the lands of Bulgaria.

It's a pity that many bulgarian people who are baptized in our Bulgarian Orthodox Church, fails to understand the symbolic meaning of the willow branches and doesn't really understand the essence of the Church feast but just go to Church to light up a candle "to have a good fortune and health".

I thank the Lord for having this good blessed day and I pray that we all come to the understanding to know Christ as he knows us!

It's one day before the the great feast of Palm Sunday . On this day in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church we do have a reading of the glorious miracle with the raising (resurrecting) of Lazarus, that our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ did in front of many Jewish people.

In the gospel readings, we hear that the Lord has went nearby the place where Lazarus has been buried.
The Jewish tradition of this time is that their dead be buried in a small cave, while the body is being wrapped up in a specific white clothe matter. This kind of burial ceremony is directly related to most of the ancient Jewish beliefs about the resurrection of the death which will take place.

In that time, Lazarus has been dead (or in grave) for already 4 days, even in the Gospel, we read that the rottening body has started to decay and hence the rotting flesh to smell badlhy ...

The gospel also taught us, Lazarus has been a friend of our Lord Jesus Chirst, and Christ himself loved him. Very interesting fact concerning Lazarus earthly life is also that he has been a brother of the sisters Mary and Martha.
Mary is actually the same Mary which we read about in the Gospel of Luke, the same mary which bows and cries in front of Jesus's feets, repenting and begging the saviour for a forgiveness of her sins.

Even though our Lord has been sent a word 4 days before he came, whether the overall journey to the place where Lazarus was at that point was only 2 days. The Lord has come on the 4th day to Bethany (a village near Jerusalem)

When the Lord came in Bethany he found that Lazarus is dead and has been in the tomb for 4 days. On his arrival he met Martha and Mary in turn.
Marta was loudly crying regretting that Christ haven't arrived earlier otherwise he would have healed from the sickness and he would not die..

The Lord replied to Marta's lamention with his majestic words: "I am the Resurrection and the Life. He who believes in Me shall live, even if he dies. And everyone who lives and believes in Me shall never die".
As the gospel reading continues, we're told that Christ has been sorrowful in himself and the Lord Jesus further said the famous phrase: "Jesus wept!
In the presence of a crowd of mourners (obviously many people has loved Lazarus), the Lord did his glorious miracle of Lazarus Resurrection.

After on the heavy stone which was sealing the cave with Lazarus dead body was moved away by the order of the Lord.
The Lord entered in the cave prayed and said to Lazarus: "Lazarus come forth!"
Hearing the order of the son of God and our saviour Lazarus has risen up with the funeral clothes still wrapping his body. Jesus instructed some people from the crowd to remove the grave-cloths from Lazarus and let him walk.
As many people in the grave has saw the indescribable miracle the people witnessing the miracle "believed in him".

The meaning of the Lord's "Come forth!" is crucial, as with the the glorious miracle of Lazarus Raising the Lord has shown his authority over death and live.
Even the death was submissive to the Lord's order! Even the death couldn't go against his mighty word and silently obeys!

This story was given by our God the Holy Trinity to clearly show us that he is the one in charge over death and over life on earth and hence he is the one in charge of every human being still breathing on this earth.
On the other hand the raising of Lazarus was done to show to us who still doubt in our hearts and minds and disbelief about the promised Resurrection of the Death in the glorious day of the Lord.

Our Lord has even wept, clearly showing to us that he is not indifferent to our suffering, but on the contrary is suffering with our pain himself.

After Christ's Crucifixion, death, Resurrection and Ascension, Lazarus has become a vigilant Christ disciple. He has further compelled to seek refuge away from Jerusalem to avoid the anger of high priests and the pharisees, who wanted to kill him.
Lazarus has leaved Judea to seek refuge in another country. He found his refuge in Kittium (today called Larnaca) and situated in Cyprus.
According to Orthodox Church tradtion Lazarus has been ordained to become the first Church bishop of Kitium.

Little is known about Lazarus after Our Lord's Resurrection and Ascension except that during his thirty year he never smiled or joked except for one occasion. One day, he saw someone stealing a clay pot and he laughed saying, "the clay steals the clay".

Another famous tradition connected to Lazarus is the discovery of Mount Athos in 52AD.
Lazarus was very close to the Virgin Mary and he was very grieved that he could not return to Jerusalem to visit her (he was still in fear of the Jews).
The Theotokos learned of his sorrow and sent him a letter to comfort him.
She asked that he might send a ship to her that she might visit him in Cyprus.
With great joy, Lazarus sent a ship to the Holy Lands to bring the Virgin Mary and John, the beloved disciple to Cyprus for a visit.
On their journey, a great storm blew them off course and carried them to the shores of Ephesus and then the ship to the shores of Athos, Greece.
Unaware that divine providence had brought her to this area, the Virgin Mary completely taken by the beauty of the area, prayed to her son that this could be her garden devoted to prayer to "fight the good fight of faith".
Having converted, blessed and established a new christian community from the local idolaters they set sail for Cyprus and met with Lazarus.
The day of Lazarus as we call it in Bulgaria is one of the great Christian feasts in our Orthodox Church, even though it's not among the 12 greatest Christian feasts it's one of the major feats throughout the Church year.
The first tomb of Lazarus in Bethany remains as a site for pilgrims to this very day. The second tomb, on the island of Cyprus, was found in Kittium sometime in A.D. 890, with his relics inside and bearing the inscription "Lazarus, the Friend of Christ."
The commemoration of the day the Lord Jesus has risen Lazarus from the death is one of the few feasts during the great Lent which are considered days of spiritual joy in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and all other national Orthodox Churches around the world.
The feast is also known under the name Lazarus Saturday is always commemorated in Orthodox Churches, one day before the Palm Sunday feast.
By the Holy prayers of Lazarus let our Lord Jesus be merciful to us the sinners! Amen.

In my quest to know Linux better and use it capabilities to fulfill a multimedia tasks I came across the question:

How can I extract audio sound and music from Flash Videos .flv file format?

After a bit of investigation online I've found out in order to achieve this task the quickest way is via the handy ffmpeg conversion tool .

It's rather easy actually, all necessery to do the conversion is to have the ffmpeg installed.
FFMpeg is part of Debian and Ubuntu repositories, so if you haven't installed it yet, go straigh and install it with:

debian:~# apt-get install ffmpeg
...


Many modern day Linux distributions already have the ffmpeg pre-installed by default, ffmpeg even have a Windows version so this little tutorial should be directly applied on a Windows host with installed ffmpeg.

Convertion of a .flv file to .mp3 file for example is a real piece of cake to so do issue the command:

debian:~# ffmpeg -i input_file.flv -ab 128 -ar 44100 output_file.mp3


The few mmpeg options meaning is as follows:

-i (specifies input file)
-ab (Set the audio bitrate in bit/s 64k by default)
-ar (Set the audio sampling frequency (default = 44100 Hz).)

For more options checkout the ffmpeg help.

I found ffmpeg to be a bit slower than I expected. A 17 minutes .flv video file is converted to .mp3 for 38 seconds time.

Here is the textual output I got on my Debian Linux while extracting the flash video's sound and converting it to mp3:

debian:~# time ffmpeg -i g7tvI6JCXD0.flv -ab 128 -ar 44100 output.mp3

FFmpeg version SVN-r25838, Copyright (c) 2000-2010 the FFmpeg developers
built on Jan 21 2011 08:21:58 with gcc 4.4.5
configuration: --enable-libdc1394 --prefix=/usr --extra-cflags='-Wall -g ' --cc='ccache cc' --enable-shared --enable-libmp3lame --enable-gpl --enable-libvorbis --enable-pthreads --enable-libfaac --enable-libxvid --enable-postproc --enable-x11grab --enable-libgsm --enable-libtheora --enable-libopencore-amrnb --enable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-libx264 --enable-libspeex --enable-nonfree --disable-stripping --enable-avfilter --enable-libdirac --disable-decoder=libdirac --enable-libschroedinger --disable-encoder=libschroedinger --enable-version3 --enable-libopenjpeg --enable-libvpx --enable-librtmp --extra-libs=-lgcrypt --disable-altivec --disable-armv5te --disable-armv6 --disable-vis
libavutil 50.33. 0 / 50.39. 0
libavcore 0.14. 0 / 0.14. 0
libavcodec 52.97. 2 / 52.97. 2
libavformat 52.87. 1 / 52.87. 1
libavdevice 52. 2. 2 / 52. 2. 2
libavfilter 1.65. 0 / 1.65. 0
libswscale 0.12. 0 / 0.12. 0
libpostproc 51. 2. 0 / 51. 2. 0
[flv @ 0x1336760] Estimating duration from bitrate, this may be inaccurate

Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 2000.00 (2000/1) -> 29.92 (359/12)
Input #0, flv, from 'g7tvI6JCXD0.flv':
Metadata:
duration : 1060
starttime : 0
totalduration : 1060
width : 480
height : 360
videodatarate : 76
audiodatarate : 94
totaldatarate : 179
framerate : 30
bytelength : 23723246
canseekontime : true
sourcedata : B5F9E82C6HH1302704673918653
purl :
pmsg :
Duration: 00:17:40.35, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 174 kb/s
Stream #0.0: Video: h264, yuv420p, 480x360 [PAR 1:1 DAR 4:3], 77 kb/s, 29.92 tbr, 1k tbn, 2k tbc
Stream #0.1: Audio: aac, 44100 Hz, stereo, s16, 96 kb/s
WARNING: The bitrate parameter is set too low. It takes bits/s as argument, not kbits/s
Output #0, mp3, to 'output.mp3':
Metadata:
duration : 1060
starttime : 0
totalduration : 1060
width : 480
height : 360
videodatarate : 76
audiodatarate : 94
totaldatarate : 179
framerate : 30
bytelength : 23723246
canseekontime : true
sourcedata : B5F9E82C6HH1302704673918653
purl :
pmsg :
TSSE : Lavf52.87.1
Stream #0.0: Audio: libmp3lame, 44100 Hz, stereo, s16, 0 kb/s
Stream mapping:
Stream #0.1 -> #0.0
Press [q] to stop encoding
size= 16576kB time=1060.81 bitrate= 128.0kbits/s
video:0kB audio:16575kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead 0.002404%

real 0m38.489s
user 0m37.126s
sys 0m0.764s



When talking about conversions, another very useful application of ffmpeg is in case if you want to:

Extract Audio from online streams

Let's say you have a favourite radio, you often listen and there are a podcast you want to capture for later listening, or just catch a few nice songs, using ffmpeg it's a piece of cake by using the command like:

debian:~# ffmpeg -i http:///xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/some -ab 128 -ar 44100 captured-radio-sound.mp3


The possible ways of use of ffmpeg is truly versatily, you can use it for instance if you have to convert some kind of audio or video format to another one I have given a very simple example of converting a .flv file to .avi and vice versa in my previous post

If you're on Linux the questions like, how can I convert between video and audio formats, how to do photo editing etc. etc. have always been a taugh question as with it's diversity Linux often allows too many ways to the same things.

In the spirit of questioning I have been recently curious, how can a subtitles be added to a flash video (.flv) video?

After some research online I've come up with the below suggested solution which uses mplayer to do the flash inclusion of the subtitles file.

mplayer your_flash_movie.flv -fs -subfont-text-scale 3


While including the subtitles to the .flv file, it's best to close up all the active browsers and if running something else on the desktop close it up.
Note that above's mplayer example for (.srt and .sub) subtitle files example is only appropriate for a .flv movie files which already has a third party published subtitle files.

What is interesting is that often if you want to make custom subtitles to let's say a video downloaded from Youtube on Linux the mplayer way pointed above will be useless. Why?

Well the Linux programs that allows a user to add custom subtitles to a movie does not support the flv (flash video) file format.

My idea on how to create custom subtitles and embed them into a flv movie file is very simple and it goes like this:

1. Convert the .flv file format to let's say .avi or .mpeg
2. Use gnome-subitles or subtitleeditor to create the subtitles for the .avi or .mpeg file
3. Convert back the .avi/.mpeg file with included subtitles to .flv (flash video format)

This methodology is really long and time consuming, but pitily as far as my understanding goes it's the only way to do that on your Linux.

You will have to spend some time to get to know one of the two major subtitle editor programs for Linux:

1. gnome-subtitles

and

subtitleeditor

To make my conversations between .flv and .avi format you will need to use the ffmpeg - (FFMpeg command line tool video converter), here is how:

- Convert .flv to .avi

debian:~# /usr/bin/ffmpeg -i input_flvfilename.flv output_avifilename.avi


- Convert .avi file to .flv

debian:~# /usr/bin/ffmpeg -y -i /path/to/your/avi/input_avifilename.avi -acodec mp3 -ar 22050 -f flv \
/path/to/your/flv/output_flvfilename.flv


The required overall tools which you will have to have installed on your Debian or Ubuntu Linux are:

1. ffmpeg
2. gnome-subtitles
3. subtitleeditor
4. mplayer

You will also have to spend some time to get to know gnome-subtitles or subtitleeditor, but it won't be that long until you get the idea on how to use them.

Watching videos in youtube today and already for about 2 years is the de-facto hype.
There is almost none a day passed without almost each one of us has watched a dozen videos in Youtube.

Watching videos in youtube has become even more addictive for many than the early days of Internet Relay Chats (IRC)

As youtube is very accessible for people and it's a comparativily easy way people share more and more with the day.
There is no question that the business idea of youtube is great and youtube generates millions of dollars for Google day by day, however I have a serious objection here! All is good the only pitfall is that you don't own the youtube videos you watch!

Youtube's story is not that different from the story of the cloud computing threat to internet users Freedom

The good thing here is that we're not still completely dependant on youtube and there is still way to retrieve your favourite youtube video and store it for later watching or distribution.

Probably the most famous browser plugin that allows files retrieval from youtube, as most people know is DownloadHelper .

However using download helper is browser dependant, you need to use the browser to save the plugin and I don't find it to be the best way to download a youtube video.

Since the old days I have started using Linux, I've been quite addicted to as many things on my linux as possible from the command line (terminal / console) (CLI) .

In that manner of thoughts it was a real delight for me to find out that a group of free software developer guys has come up with a command line tool that allows downloads of youtube videos straight from terminal, the great software is called youtube-dl and at the moment of this post writting it's to be found on the URL address:

http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/

Youtube-dl is written in python so, it requires the Python interpreter, version 2.5 in order to properly run on Unix, Mac OS X or even on Windows!

The fact that it's written in python has made the little shiny tool quite a multi-platform one.
To start using immediately the tool on a Debian or Ubuntu Linux you will have to install python (even though in most cases you must have it already installed):

1. To make sure you have python interpreter installed issue the cmd:

debian:~# apt-get install python
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
python is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.


As you can see from above apt-get's output I do have it installed so nothing gets installed.

2. As a next step I used links to download the youtube-dl python script, like so:

debian:~# links https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/raw/2011.03.29/youtube-dl >> youtube-dl
Use the links interface to save youtube-dl and use gzip to ungzip it
debian:~# gzip -d youtube-dl.gz
debian:~# chmod +x youtube-dl


Now to make it system wide accessible I have copied the youtube-dl to /usr/local/bin , whether I selected /usr/local/bin as a location as this location is predetermined to contain mostly files which does not belong to a regular deb package.

3. Move youtube-dl to /usr/local/bin

debian:~# mv youtube-dl /usr/local/bin


4. Test the newly installed youtube-dl command line youtube retrieval tool:

debian:~# ./youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7tvI6JCXD0
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] g7tvI6JCXD0: Downloading video webpage
[youtube] g7tvI6JCXD0: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] g7tvI6JCXD0: Extracting video information
[download] Destination: g7tvI6JCXD0.flv
[download] 53.3% of 22.62M at 33.23k/s ETA 05:25
[download] 100.0% of 22.62M at 31.91k/s ETA 00:00 [u


As you might have noticed from the above youtube-dl command output the newly retrieved youtube file will be saved under a name g7tvI6JCXD0.flv

The line I passed to youtube-dl is directly taken from my browser and pasted to console, the file downloading from youtube took me about 10 minutes but this is mostly because of some kind of youtube server speed restrictions ...

In general at least I have this video for later, watching, so after a while I can watch it once again without loosing a lot of time trying to remember what was the video headline name

5. To use youtube-dl in a bit advanced way you can for instance invoke the command with options like:

debian:~# ./youtube-dl -l -w -c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7tvI6JCXD0
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] g7tvI6JCXD0: Downloading video webpage
[youtube] g7tvI6JCXD0: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] g7tvI6JCXD0: Extracting video information
[download] Destination: BSD is Dying, Jason Dixon, NYCBSDCon 2007-g7tvI6JCXD0.flv
[download] 4.4% of 22.62M at 1.43M/s ETA 00:15


As you can see now youtube-dl was even able to detect the downloaded video file name and store it on the computer with a correct name ;)

I would recommend you also to check out the youtube-dl help page, to do so issue: youtube-dl --help

There is a miracle of incorruptable holy relics (Incorruptable Bodies) of many of our Orthodox Saints.
Little or none is actually known in the non-orthodox christian realm about this great miracle proof of the truthfulness of our faith.

The incorruptability of saints has been a phenomena longly known to exist, some of the incorruptable bodies of saints are still preserved already for more than 10 centuries.

The phenomenon of incorruptable bodies is a sure sign for saintship in the Church. There are dozens of orthodox christian saints whose bodies are still intact.
Our Orthodox Church teaches that the incorruptability of the saints body is given by God's grace for all us the believers as a confirmation of the Resurrection of the Dead, which is about to come in the Great day of the Lord as the scriptures teaches.

A good example for incorruptable body which exists for 10 centuries in the bulgarian lands are the incorruptable holy body of St. John of Rila.
St. John of Rila is the greatest known Bulgarian saint also officially recognized by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church as the patron saint of Bulgaria (protector of all Bulgaria).

In below's videos I present you the antiphon of St. John of Rila:



Antiphon translated to English means (Sonf of Praise) dedicated to some Christian saint and is actually an Orthodox well-known Church term.

Saint John's incorruptable bodies is still kept in his established monastery The Rila Monastery .
Each year on the saints feast his incorruptable body is being bringed out of the monastery for a procession around the Church monastery.

On that day all the pilgrims who are looking for St. John's spiritual intercession in front of God (The Holy Trinity) are lined up to venerate the great God servant St. John of Rila.

Unfortunately there is no video that has video-taped the incorruptable body of Saint John of Rila. However there are plenty of videos which shows a lot of incorruptable bodies of saints some of which are even Roman Catholic.

Along with the saints bodies incorruptability, many of the saints bodies does emit a specific a flower like odor, nevertheless the body is a thousands of years old.

Here is an example of a saints remains which is considered incorruptable, his body is preseved for more than 60 years without any special chemical threatment.



What is most important is many believers does receive a spiritual blessing or get healed from various spiritual or bodily diseases, when they look up for the holy intercession of the saint, who has been honoured by God with incorruptableness.

Before a saint's body is recognized as a saint and his body as incorruptable, usually there are testimonials by christian layman for healings by his holy prayers during his earthly living.
Some of the saints which are found to have incorruptable bodies has happened after a few years they have been put in a normal earthly grave.
In holy mount athos there is a tradition that (if I remember correctly 5 years) after a monk's death and burial, his grave is being digged out to collect his remains and put it in a ossuary.

After this 5 years some of the holy monks remains are found to possess this miraculous graceful incorruptable bodies.

As we know from Holy Bible, the body is the temple of the holy spirit my logical interpretation of some of the saint's incrorruptability is rooted in there saint's way of living as they have achieved the Holy Spirit (The Spirit of God) in an immeasurable quantities that, the Spirit of Truth that's being flowing out from their incorruptable bodies is still sustaining the body and prevents the natural laws to destroy it.

The bodily incorruptabilities of our Orthodox saints is also a clear sign for the truthfulness of Orthodox Christian faith.
The incorruptability is also a direct violation of the natural laws by God's great providence and mercy and I guess is given as a stimulator of us whose faith in our saviour Jesus Christ and in God the Holy Trinity - The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit, to whom be glory now and forever and ever Amen!

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