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Configure own Media streaming minidlna Linux server to access data from your Smart TV

Friday, February 18th, 2022

If you happen to buy or already own or just have to install a Smart TV to be connected with a LAN Network to a Linux based custom built NAS (Network Attached Storage) server. You might benefit of the smart TV to Share and Watching the Disk Storage Pictures, Music, Video files from the NAS to the Smart TV using the Media Server protocol.

You have certainly already faced the Media Server at your life on many locations in stores and Mall Buildings, because virtually any reoccuring advertisements, movies projected on the TVs, Kids entertainment or Floor and Buildings Room location schedules or timeline promition schedules are streamed using the Media Server protocol, for many years now. Thus having a brief idea about Media Server proto existence is foundamental stuff to be aware of for sysadmins and programmers.

Shortly about DLNA UPnP Media Streaming Protocol

Assuming that your Smart TV has been already connected to your Wireless Router 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz Wifi, one would think that the easiest way to share the files with the SmartTV is via something like a simple SAMBA Linux server via smb:// cifs:// protocols or via the good old NFS Server, however most of Samsung Smart TV and many other in year 2022 does not have embedded support for Samba SMB / CIFS Protocol but instead have support for the DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) streaming support. DLNA is part of the UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) Protocols, UPnP is also known to those using and familiar with Windows Operating Systems realm simply as UPnP AV Media server or Windows Media server.
Windows Media server for those who never heard it or used it allows you to build a Playlists with Media files Video and Audio data files, that can be then later played remotely via a Local LAN or even long distance over TCP / IP remote side connected Internet network.

1. Set up and Stream data via Media server on Windows PC / notebook with integrated Windows Media server

Windows Media server configuration on Windows 7, 10 and 11 is a relatively easy to configure via:

Network and Sharing Center -> Media Streaming Options -> Turn on Media Streaming

Then you have to define the name of the Media Library, configure whether Media server should show
on the Local Netework for other conected devices and Allow or Block access from the other network present devices.

2. Using a more advanced Media Server to get rid about the limitation of DLNA set of supported file codecs.

The Windows default embedded DLNA server is the easiest and fastest one to set up, but it’s not necessarily the best option.
Due to the way DLNA works, you can only stream certain types of media codecs supported by the server. If you have other types of media not defaultly supported and defined by DLNA win server, it just won’t work.

Thus thanksfully it was developed other DLNA servers improve this by offering real-time transcoding.
If you try to play an unsupported file, they’ll transcode it on-the-fly, streaming the video in a supported format to your DLNA device.
Just to name few of the DLNA Media Streaming servers that have supported for larger MPG Video, MP3 / MP4 and other Audio formats encodings,
you can try Plex or the Universal Media Server both of which are free to use under freeware license and have versions for Linux and Mac OS.

3. Setting up a free as in freedom DLNA server MiniDLNA (ReadyMedia) on GNU / Linux

ReadyMedia (formerly known as MiniDLNA) is a simple media server software, with the aim of being fully compliant with DLNA/UPnP-AV clients. It was originally developed by a NETGEAR employee for the ReadyNAS product line.

MiniDNLA daemon serves media files (music, pictures, and video) to clients on a network. Linux Media servers clients you can use to test or scan your network for existent Media servers are multiple perhaps the most famous ones are applications such as totem (for QT users) and Kodi (for KDE).
The devices that can be used with minidlna are devices such as portable media players (iPod), Smartphones, Televisions, Tablets, and gaming systems (such as PS3 and Xbox 360) etc.

ReadyMedia is a simple, lightweight, the downside of it is It does not have a web interface for administration and must be configured by editing a text file. But for a simple Video streaming in most cases does a great job.

3.1 Install the minidlna software package

Minidlna is available out of the box on most linux distributions (Fedora / CentOS / Debian / Ubuntu etc.) as of year 2022.

Install on Debian Linux (Deb based distro)

media-server:~# apt install minidlna –yes

Install on Fedora / CentOS (other RPM based distro)

media-server:~# yum install -y minidlna

3.2 Configure minidlna

– /etc/minidlna.conf – main config file
Open with text editor and set user= , media_dir= , port=, friendly_name= , network_interface= variables as minimum.
To be add minidlnad support symlinks to external file locations, set also wide_links=yes

media-server:~# vim /etc/minidlna.conf

#user=minidlna
user=root
media_dir=/var/www/owncloud/data
network_interface=eth0,eth1

# Port number for HTTP traffic (descriptions, SOAP, media transfer).
# This option is mandatory (or it must be specified on the command-line using
# "-p").
port=8200
# Name that the DLNA server presents to clients.
# Defaults to "hostname: username".
#friendly_name=
friendly_name=DLNAServer Linux
# set this to yes to allow symlinks that point outside user-defined media_dirs.
wide_links=yes
# Automatic discovery of new files in the media_dir directory.
#inotify=yes

Keep in mind that it is supported to provide separete media_dir and provide different USB / External Hard Drive or SD Card sources separated only by content be it Video, Audio or Pictures short named in config as (A,V,P).

media_dir=P,/media/usb/photos
media_dir=V,/media/external-disk/videos
media_dir=A,/media/sd-card/music

You might want to diasble / ineable the inotify depending on your liking, if you don't plan to place new files automated to the NAS and don't care to get indexed and streamed from the Media server you can disable it with inotify=no otherwise keep that on.

– /etc/default/minidlna – additional startup config to set minidlnad (daemon) options such as setup to run with admin superuser root:root
(usually it is safe to leave it empty and set the user=root, whether needed straight from /etc/minidlna.conf
That's all now go on and launch the minidlna and enable it to automatically boot on Linux boot.

media-server:~# systemctl start minidlna
media-server:~# systemctl enable minidlna
media-server:~# systemctl status minidlna

3.3 Rebuilt minidlna database with data indexed files

If you need to re- generate minidlna's database.
To do so stop the minidlna server with the

media-server:~# systemctop stop minidlna

command, then issue the following command (both commands should be run as root):

media-server:~# minidlna -R

Since this command might kept in the background and keep the minidlna server running with incorrect flags, after a minute or two kill minidlna process and relaunch the server via sysctl.

media-server:~# killall -9 minidlna
media-server:~# systemctl start minidlna

3.4 Permission Issues / Scanning issues

If you plan to place files in /home directory. You better have a seperate partition or folder *outside* your "home" directory devoted to your media. Default user with which minidlna runs is minidlna, this could prevent some files with root or other users being red. So either run minidlna daemon as root or as other user with whom all media files should be accessible.
If service runs as root:root, and still getting some scanning issues, check permissions on your files and remove special characters from file names.

media-server:~# tail -10 /var/log/minidlna/minidlna.log
[2022/02/17 22:51:36] scanner.c:489: warn: Unsuccessful getting details for /var/www/owncloud/data/Videos/Family-Videos/FILE006.MPG
[2022/02/17 22:52:08] scanner.c:819: warn: Scanning /var/www/owncloud/data finished (10637 files)!
[2022/02/17 22:52:08] playlist.c:135: warn: Parsing playlists…
[2022/02/17 22:52:08] playlist.c:269: warn: Finished parsing playlists.
minidlna.c:1126: warn: Starting MiniDLNA version 1.3.0.
minidlna.c:1186: warn: HTTP listening on port 8200
scanner.c:489: warn: Unsuccessful getting details for /var/www/owncloud/data/admin/files/origin/External SD card/media/Viber Images/IMG-4477de7b1eee273d5e6ae25236c5c223-V.jpg
scanner.c:489: warn: Unsuccessful getting details for /var/www/owncloud/data/Videos/Family-Video/FILE006.MPG
playlist.c:135: warn: Parsing playlists…
playlist.c:269: warn: Finished parsing playlists.

3.5. Fix minidlna Inotify errors

In /etc/sysctl.conf

Add:

fs.inotify.max_user_watches=65536

in a blank line at end of file and do

media-server:~# sysctl -p

Debugging minidlna problems, index errors, warnings etc

minidlna does write by default to /var/log/minidlna/minidlna.log inspect the log closely and you should get most of the time what is wrong with it.
Note that some files might not get indexed because minidlna won't support the strange file codecs such as SWF encoding, if you have some important files to stream that are not indexed by minidlna, then install and try one of the more sophisticated free software Media Servers for Linux:

MediaTomb
UniversalMediaServer
Plex

plex-media-streaming-server-screenshot

Note that most Linux users from my quick research shows, MediaTomb is the preferred advanced features Open Source Linux Media Server of choice for most of the guys.

mediatomb-linux-media-streaming-server-picture.jpg.webp

4. Test minidlna Linux servers works, getting information of other DLNA Servers on the network

media-server:~# lynx -dump http://127.0.0.1:8200
MiniDLNA status

Media library

Audio files 0
Video files 455
Image files 10182

Connected clients

ID Type IP Address HW Address Connections
0 Samsung Series [CDEFJ] 192.168.1.11 7C:0A:3D:88:A6:FA 0
1 Generic DLNA 1.5 192.168.0.241 00:16:4E:1D:48:05 0
2 Generic DLNA 1.5 192.168.1.18 00:16:3F:0D:45:05 0
3 Unknown 127.0.0.1 FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF 0

-1 connections currently open

Note that there is -1 connections (no active connections) currently to the server.
The 2 Generic DLNA 1.5 IPs are another DLNA servers provided by a OpenXEN hosted Windows 7 Virtual machines, that are also broadcasting their existence in the network. The Samsung Series [CDEFJ] is the DLNA client on the Samsung TV found, used to detect and stream data from the just configured Linux dlna server.

The DLNA Protocol enabled devices on a network as you can see are quite easy to access, querying localhost on the 8200 server dumps, what minidlna knows, the rest of IPs connecting should not be able to receive this info. But anyways since the minidlna does not have a special layers of security to access it, but the only way to restrict is filtering the 8200 port, it is a very good idea to put a good iptables firewall on the machine to allow only the devices that should have access to the data.

Further more if you happen to need to access the Media files on Linux from GUI you might use some client as upmentioned totem, VLC or if you need something more feature rich Java eezUPnP .

That's all folks !
Enjoy your media on the TV 🙂

Tags: access, configured, data, default user, Digital Living Network Alliance, DLNA, Enjoy, file, file names, Install, linux?, Media, Open Source Linux Media Server, org, owncloud, root root, setting, software package, stuff, support, wiki, www

Linux: Add fun to your terminal login screen with boxes, Draw ASCII Art Shapes with date and user info etc. on login

Friday, July 16th, 2021

boxes-ascii-art-generate-cpu-memory-and-disk-system-info-beauty
Some of you might remember my love for Linux ASCII art stuff and fact that I'm daily forced to work on many consoles, which makes life a bit boring at point and you want to have some diversity as this black and white or black and green screen becomes quite of annoyance at times, hence adding some ASCII art kindness really makes sense. In that relation some time ago I've have written the howto add colorful random ASCII art picture and a bible verse on each SSH server login, joyout sysadmins life with cowsay, fortune, caca-utils and others.
Just recently a colleague of mine Georgi Stoyanov to whom I've shown cowsay, while playing around with cowsay, researching on related cool ASCII art entertainment one could add to his boring daily sysadm life stumbled on another nice piece of 1337 h4x0r software called boxes, that is nowadays available amongs most mainstream RPM and Debian distributions out of the box in default package repositories (it is installable on Ubuntu / Debian / CentOS with apt or yum).

root@pcfreak:~# apt-cache show boxes|grep -i desc -A 5 -B5
Version: 1.3-1
Installed-Size: 253
Maintainer: Salvatore Bonaccorso <carnil@debian.org>
Architecture: amd64
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.14)
Description-en: textmode box- and comment drawing filter
Boxes is extremely configurable filter for adding and removing ASCII art
(comments, for example) around chunks of text. Most modern text editors
support filtering text through external filters. Boxes is such a filter.
Description-md5: 71d39f5c7193aab87deb83d15f0b2e82
Homepage: https://boxes.thomasjensen.com/
Tag: implemented-in::c++, interface::commandline, role::program,
scope::utility, works-with::mail
Section: text
Priority: optional

To start using the preset of nice boxes and shapes depending on the distro type:
On Deb based Linuz OS

debian:~# apt install –yes boxes
…

On RPM based Linuxes:

[root@centos ~ ]# yum install -y boxes

…

Once installed to give it a try, do list all the available basic boxen ASCII Art ( template ) shapes beauties – the art pictures is quite high, below is a short 50 line raw example cut:

root@pcfreak:~# boxes -l |tail -n 50

unicornthink
unknown artist, coded by Mike Meyer <boxes@meyer.fm>:

_________________________________
/ \
| E L E C T R O L Y T E S |
\______________________________ '\
() \\
O \\ .
o |\\/|
/ " '\
. . .
/ ) |
' _.' |
'-'/ \

vim-cmt
Bram Moolenaar, coded by Thomas Jensen <boxes(at)thomasjensen(dot)com>:

"
" comments used in the vim editor's config file (.vimrc)
"

whirly
unknown artist, coded by Thomas Jensen <boxes(at)thomasjensen(dot)com>:

.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.
( )
) (
( )
"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"

xes
Joan G. Stark <spunk1111@juno.com>, coded by Thomas Jensen <boxes(at)thomasjensen(dot)com>:

<\/><\/><\/>
<\/></\></\></\><\/>
</\> </\>
<\/> <\/>
</\> </\>
<\/> <\/>
</\> </\>
<\/> <\/>
</\> </\>
<\/> <\/>
</\><\/><\/><\/></\>
jgs </\></\></\>

If you want to check out the full list of ascii art templates provided by boxes check out a complete dump out of boxes -l shapes here.

Next lets play a bit to give you an idea on some use of boxes you can add to your login /etc/profile or ~/bashrc or even randomize it with some little bash script to print out some cool stuff on each and every Linux SSH or tty physical console login to prit login date your user name, logged in users or whatever you would like shaped in ascii art picture. For example you can great yourself on system login with whoami command printed in one of the offered boxes ASCII art picture templates, etc.

Below is few sample ideas for use:

# boxes -a c -d mouse <<< "today is $(date)"

# boxes -a c -d mouse <<< "Hello $USER,today is $(date)"

# boxes -a c -d mouse <<< "Hello $(whoami),today is $(date)"

# boxes -a c -d mouse <<< "Hello $(whoami),today is $(date)" | lolcat

mouse-login-greeting

# boxes -a c -d unicornthink <<< "Hello $(whoami),today is $(date)" | lolcat

# boxes -a c -d cat <<< "Hello $(whoami),today is $(date); $(echo "Apache processes"; ps -ef|grep -i apache)|grep -v grep" | lolcat

If you have a multiple systems to monitor, it is useful to quickly have an overview of each system and add some artistic qualities for example use some tiny shell script like system_info_on_login.sh and make it look aritistic:

# cat /bashscripts/system_info_on_login.sh
free -m | awk 'NR==2{printf "Memory Usage: %s/%sMB (%.2f%%)\n", $3,$2,$3*100/$2 }'
df -h | awk '$NF=="/"{printf "Disk Usage: %d/%dGB (%s)\n", $3,$2,$5}'
top -bn1 | grep load | awk '{printf "CPU Load: %.2f\n", $(NF-2)}'

Funny cool stuff ain't it is up to your imagination to add whatever beauty you like. If you want to make a little prank you can misteriously place boxes to auto launch on some of the DMZ secured servers and print any strange form to a colleague next time he logs in by adding boxes to launch in his ~/.bashrc with some weird message such as "your account has been pwn3d by a 1337 h4x0r" and watch for his reaction 🙂
Enjoy !

Tags: amd64, ascii art, boxes, info, Linux Add, login, mail, terminal, today, type

Tags: amd64, ascii art, boxes, info, Linux Add, login, mail, terminal, today, type
Posted in Educational, Entertainment, FreeBSD, Games Linux, Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop | No Comments »

ASCII Art studio – A powerful ASCII art editor for Windows / Playscii a cool looking text editor for Linux

Monday, June 28th, 2021

This post is just informative for Text Geeks who are in love with ASCII Art, it is a bit of rant as I will say nothing new, but I thought it might be of interest to some console maniac out there 🙂

ascii art studio aas program windows xp professional drawing program screenshot

While checking stuff on Internet I've stumbled on interesting ASCII arts freak software – >ASCII Art Studio. ASCII Art Studio is unfortunately needs licensing is not Free Software. But anyways, for anyone willing to draw pro ASCII art pictures it is a must see. Check it out;

Isn't it like a Plain Text pro Photoshop ? 🙂 Its a pity we don't have a Linux / BSD Release of this wonderful piece of software. I've tried with WINE (Windows Emulator) on Linux to make the Ascii Art Studio work but that was a fail. It seems only way to make it work is have Windows as a worst case install a Virtual Machine with VirtualBox / Vmware and run it inside if you don't have a Windows PC at hand.

Of course there are stuff on Linux to ascii art edit you can use if you want to have a native software to edit ASCIIs such as Playscii. Unfortunately Playscii is not an easy one to install and the software doesn't have a prepared rpm or deb binary you can easily roll on the OS and you have to manually build all required python modules and have a working version of python3 to be able to make it work.

I did not have much time to test to install it and since I faced issues with plascii install I just abandoned it. If some geek has some more time anyways I guess it is worse to give it a try below is 2 screenshots from PLAYSCII official download page.

playscii_shot1-official.

As you see authors of the open source playscii whose source is available via github choose to have an amazing looking ascii art text menus, though for daily ASCII art editing it is perhaps much more complicated to use than the simlistic ASCII Art Studio

playscii_shot2-official

There is other stuff for Linux to do ASCII Art files text edit like:
JaVE (this one I don't personally like because it is Java Based), Ascii Art Maker or Pablow Draw Linux (unfortunately this 2 ones are proprietary).

Tags: ALL, Amazing, and, Anyways, are, art, art editor, art files, Arts, Ascii, ascii art, available, based, Below, binary, bit, BSD, case, check, checking

Tags: ALL, Amazing, and, Anyways, are, art, art editor, art files, Arts, Ascii, ascii art, available, based, Below, binary, bit, BSD, case, check, checking
Posted in Curious Facts, Entertainment, Everyday Life, Rant | No Comments »

How to add colorful random ASCII art picture and a bible verse on each SSH server login, joyout sysadmins life with cowsay, fortune, caca-utils and others

Tuesday, November 24th, 2020

Jesus-Christ-loves-the-world-ascii-art

There are pleny of console ASCII stuff out there that can make your console sysadmin boring life a little bit more funny and cherish some memories from the old times of 8 bit computers :).

One of this as I blogged earlier is cowsay and cowthink to generate a ascii picture with a cow with your custom message.
I've earlier blogged about that in my previous article Create ASCII Art Text bannners in Linux console / terminal with figlet and toilet

One of this cool things I'm using daily on my servers is a cowsay console goodie together with a bash shell script that does visualize a random ASCII picture from a preset of pictures on each and every ssh login to my server.
The script I use is cowrand below is code:

#!/bin/bash
# cowsay pix randomizer by hip0
# it shows random ascii from the cowsay prog during logging. :]
a=0
b=1
cowrand='/etc/cowrand';
dir='/usr/share/cowsay/cows';
var=`ls -1 $dir | wc -l | awk '{ print $1}'`
#RANGE=$var
number=$RANDOM
let "number %= $var"
var1=`ls -1 $dir | head -n $number | tail -n 1 | head -n 1`
if [ -z “$var1” ]; then
$cowrand;
else
/usr/bin/cowsay -f $var1 Welc0m3 t0 pC-fREAK … Enj0y.
fi

The script is set as executable under /etc/cowrand

hipo@pcfreak:~$ ls -al /etc/cowrand
-rwxr-xr-x 1 hipo hipo 432 Nov 24 19:21 /etc/cowrand*

I've set this script to my /etc/profile to auto start on every login on my Debian Linux systems right after the comments like so:

hipo@pcfreak:~$ grep -i cowrand -A 2 -B 3 /etc/profile
# /etc/profile: system-wide .profile file for the Bourne shell (sh(1))
# and Bourne compatible shells (bash(1), ksh(1), ash(1), …).
echo '';
/etc/cowrand | lolcat
echo '';
#/usr/bin/verse

As you can see to make my life even more funnier, I've installed another fun command lolcat

hipo@pcfreak:~$ apt-cache show lolcat |grep -i desc -A 3
Description-en: colorful `cat`
lolcat concatenates files like the UNIX `cat` program, but colors it for the
lulz in a rainbow animation. Terminals with 256 colors and animations are
supported.
Description-md5: 86f992d66ac74197cda39e0bbfcb549d
Homepage: https://github.com/busyloop/lolcat
Ruby-Versions: all
Section: games

You can think of lolcat as a standard cat command that has been made to print in colors, this gives a funny results.

cowrand-script-lolcat-os-release-how-to-make-your-linux-login-prompt-funnier

To add some spice to everything nice as a recipee for thethe creation of powerpuff girls, I've come up with a way to use fortune
console tool that uses to print quotes out of a database to use as a source a big database containing the Holy Bible books of Old and New Testament Books. The fortune prints me out a quote extract from the bible on each and every remote SSH login to my machine. The content of this bible database for fortune bible_quotes_fortune.tar.gz can be downloaded and used from here.

The command used to print out a verse from the holy bible is:

hipo@pcfreak:~$ /usr/games/fortune -s /usr/local/fortune/
For if thou refuse to let them go, and wilt hold them still,
       — Exodus 9:2
hipo@pcfreak:~$ /usr/games/fortune -s /usr/local/fortune/
And when the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning
the name of the LORD, she came to prove him with hard questions.
       — 1 Kings 10:1
hipo@pcfreak:~$ /usr/games/fortune -s /usr/local/fortune/
And Shelemiah, and Nathan, and Adaiah,
       — Ezra 10:39
hipo@pcfreak:~$ /usr/games/fortune -s /usr/local/fortune/
For by thee I have run through a troop: by my God have I leaped
over a wall.
       — 2 Samuel 22:30
hipo@pcfreak:~$ /usr/games/fortune -s /usr/local/fortune/
Unto the place of the altar, which he had make there at the first:
and there Abram called on the name of the LORD.
       — Genesis 13:4
hipo@pcfreak:~$ /usr/games/fortune -s /usr/local/fortune/
And there shall dwell in Judah itself, and in all the cities thereof
together, husbandmen, and they that go forth with flocks.
       — Jeremiah 31:24
hipo@pcfreak:~$ /usr/games/fortune -s /usr/local/fortune/
And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God:
many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the LORD.
       — Psalms 40:3
hipo@pcfreak:~$ /usr/games/fortune -s /usr/local/fortune/
And Jehoshaphat made peace with the king of Israel.
       — 1 Kings 22:44

The fortune is really awesome as it reminds me often of a verses from Holy Bible I often forget, the database is using the all famous King James Bible famous as (KJB) / (KJV) from 1611 this bible version that is like a protestant standard nowadays takes its name after James VI and I (James Charles Stuart; 19 June 1566 – 27 March 1625 – King of Scotland and Ireland) who was the sponsor of KJV collection and print.

Finally after adding the /usr/games/fortune -s /usr/local/fortune/ to the beginning of /etc/profile together with cowsay and cowrand I got this beautiful and educational result that combines fun with wisdom, below is example of what you will get after you do a remote ssh login;

ssh your-machine.com

Those who have a Linux Graphical Environment desktop might also enjoy xcowsay

Another must I recommend to the text geeks is the caca-utils package which contains cool things such as aafire (cacafire)

Or (Image to text converter) img2txt / cacaview (a text console picture viewer) that could give you a raw idea on how a png / jpg picture looks like (or at least the picture shapes) without a need for a GUI picture viewer such as Eye of the Gnome.

Here is a original bear

And here is the one you'll see in cacaview 🙂
To read more about cacaview I have and its uses, check my previous article Viewing JPEG,GIF and PNG in ASCII with cacaview in Linux.
If you want to show off even more as a '1337 h4x0r' you might also show your sysadm 1337 5K!11Z to colleagues by showng them how you check weather via console (i've a separate article for how to ASCII art check colorful weather forecast via console / terminal ).

If you're too bored in your daily sys admin job, you might make some fun and take some useless effort to install ASCII Art Aquarium ASCIIQUARIUM

If you're crazy enough and want to torture your other sysadmin colleagues and a get a nice prank, you might install and set asciiquarium to auto run for their specific account on each and every login to some server until they control C or if you're a bit evil you can even set a small auto load on account login via ~/.bashrc shell script to 'Disable CTRL + C' combination 🙂

Of course there is plenty of other cool ASCII games and stuff. I've collected some of them by launching the Play Cool Ascii games service on my machine for ASCII art geeks to test out some ASCII games here.

Tags: bible verse, colorful, console, games, hipo, How to, pcfreak, Play Cool Ascii, servers, sysadmins

Tags: bible verse, colorful, console, games, hipo, How to, pcfreak, Play Cool Ascii, servers, sysadmins
Posted in Entertainment, Everyday Life, Linux | 2 Comments »

Install Slack and Mattermost clients for Start Up Business communication on Linux

Wednesday, September 19th, 2018

Many businesses nowadays are lookig for alternatives to the Microsoft dominated market of communication – Skype / Skype for Business Chat Audio and Video desktop client.
The two are the defacto standard for most of Corporate Businesses and is heavily used across most largest Corporations (companies) such as IBM / Xeror / DXC / CSC / Oracle / SAP / Microsoft / Amazon / Adobe … the list goes on and on.

However even though Skype is so easy to use across Microsoft Domain connected Computers the many start-up companies of today often try to avoid its use. The reason, well Skype is totally Proprietary non-transparent and by using it you probably get spied by Microsoft the CIA and God knows how many other Country Agencies. Besides that Skype has a bad history often had problems with Audio (Linux microphone and Video settings) in Free Software (Linux, FreeBSD etc.) realm and even though nowdays situation is improving and Skype Video / Audio runs fine on GNU / Linuxes its Skype for Business has no working release by Microsoft and has left-up Free Software users and Staring Business companies platform of the size of 20 to 1000 people that choose Linux as a main Desktop / Work had to look for other ways to communicate internally within company and with clients.

Jabber XMPP communication protocol has been one alternative for a long time and historically many compainies that were running out of Skype use for their work often were using Small internally company hosted jabber servers, however as Jabber's communication clients such as Gajim development is lagging behind seriously over the last 7 years and it prooved so buggy many businesses were looking for ways to avoid it.

Slack is multi platform just like Skype and has versions for Linux / Windows for macOS but its power comes mostly because most of its users use it via Skype Web Client (while Skype is a Desktop app and heavily used in Web Browser.

slack-web-communication-client-in-webbrowser-screenshot

Slack reminds in a what of things to the good old IRC chats and has channels in a similar fashion, it support Audio conversations but unfortunately at the moment didn't support Video.

The emergency of New Age of Computing and the quick adoption of Clouds as an aim to cut business costs put Jabber totally out of the game and in the niche and in August 2013 on the scene raised Slack (Team Messaging) which is an acronymi of (Searchable Log of All Conversations and Knowledge) – a cloud-based set of proprietary team collaboration tools and services, founded by Stewart Butterfield for the purpose of online Game (now defunct) called Glitch.

asana-for-slack-integration-2018-2-linux
The problem with Slack is that it is a freemium product, whose main paid features are the ability to search more than 10,000 archived messages (the ordinary free version allows the user to make up to 10000 searches in chat history), the paid Slack versions adds also unlimited apps and integrations and theoretically unlimited number of users (though this is seriously doubtful).

slack-10000-messages-per-user-limitation-shot

One very handy feature of Slack is its integration with "The World's Leading Software Development Platform" – GitHub .

To solve the problem with the little amount of Slack Chat history in Users conversations many Start-Up Business Companies do use Slack as a communication media with Clients and does often use as a communication Media another very popular Cloud messaging Open Source Software called Mattermost deploys to Cloud infrastruture but is at IT control of your company or your hired support and not third party vendor supports, making it a great communication tool for small and mid-sized companies who want to save money of purchasing a special server and hiring an admin or paying for one to support it all the time but instead directly use their Cloud account and deploy it there.

Mattermost is capable to Reach anyone, anywhere on any device. From the airport to data center, safely connect teams with EMM apps, hybrid cloud deployment and enterprise-grade flexibility to meet the unique needs of enterprise.

It is capable to Integrate with existing applications and build new workflows and empower your teams especially operations and DevOps – to perform faster and effectively. Mattermost

To install Slack on Linux:

Go and Download slack from Slack Linux download (the DEB / RPM 64 bit package)

As of time of writting this article latest Slack Desktop packages are: slack-desktop-3.3.1-amd64.deb and slack-3.3.1-0.1.fc21.x86_64.rpm

Depending on the type of Linux distribution install it with dpkg or rpm

1. Installing Slack Desktop client on Debian / Ubuntu Linux

On Debian / Ubuntu / Mint install Slack with:

root@ubuntu:~# dpkg -i slack-desktop-*.deb

For Ubuntu users there is also unofficial third-party Slack app ScoudCloud

it integrates well with Ubuntu Unity desktop (which I personally dislike 🙂 ) and gives you some extra goodies such as showing in an Unity manner unread message count, notification, bubbles, unity quicklists for fast-switching between Slack channels etc.

2. Installing Slack Desktop client on Redhat / Fedora / CentOS Linux

…

On Redhat / Fedora / CentOS install it with:

[root@fedora ~]:# rpm -ivh slack-*.rpm
…

3. Installing Mattermost Desktop client on Linux

Download Mattermost Linux package from download URL here

As of time of writting the DEB versions are mattermost-desktop-4.1.2-linux-amd64.deb / mattermost-desktop-4.1.2-linux-i386.deb and there is no official RPM package for Fedora / CentOS users however I guess the .deb package can easily be converted to .rpm with alien tool.

To install Mattermost on Debian (in moment of writting September 2018):

root@debian:~# wget https://releases.mattermost.com/desktop/4.1.2/mattermost-desktop-4.1.2-linux-amd64.deb
…

root@debian:~# dpkg -i mattermost-desktop-4.1.2-linux-amd64.deb
…

Mattermost supports file attachment (send) / Video previews (you can play sent Web videos directly within the Mattermost client) and on experimental level even supports Video and Audio Calls.

mattermost-markdown-help-linux-screenshot

One nice feature of Mattermost for those who love coding is using tags to format messages

There is plenty of features of Mattermost among the best ones are integrations Private Cloud open source integrations (Jira, Jenkins, Bots, clients), supports Webhooks, Restful APIS, CLI and Public Cloud connections via Zapier – a connect and uatomate workflows e.g. gives you ability to move info between web apps automatically.

Tags: debian install slack, install mattermost linux, install slack chat linux, mattermost, redhat install slack, skype alternative, slack communication

Tags: debian install slack, install mattermost linux, install slack chat linux, mattermost, redhat install slack, skype alternative, slack communication
Posted in Cloud services, Curious Facts, Educational, Entertainment, Everyday Life, Various | No Comments »

Happy New Church Year ! – The Eastern Orthodox Church Year celebrated every 1st of September and some history on the Indiction

Wednesday, September 5th, 2018

Happy New Year, Happy New Church Year ! 🙂

On first of September every year the Holy Eastern Orthodox Church to which I belong is celebrating the beginning of a new Church Calendar feast year.

It is a common practice here in Bulgaria (as we are one of the 14 Eastern Orthodox Churches worldwide) it is a tradition to serve holy liturgies across the country and prayers are lifted to heaven for the well being of the Bulgarian nation and the world.

In the past the beginning of the new year was called also the beginning of the indiction.
In the VI-th century at the time of Emperor Justinian The Great in Byzantine Empire was introduce the Cyclical Calendar based calculation of days (based on indictions ) – this is delivered from latin word indictio (meaning announcement).
Indictions were celebrated originally on a cyclical periods of 15 years when the а financial review of the properties (possessions) of citizens that were taxated.

In the Latin Empire the word indictio has been used to mark the exact amount of taxes owed each year and in this is how with the beginning of the new indiction was beginning the new financial year of the empire according to some historians the origin of indictions system has been originating from Egypt.

The official byzantine calculation of indictions begun at the time of Saint Emperor Constantine on 1st of September year 312 A.D.
Historically it is interesting fact both in the Western and in the Eastern Latin empire March was another time marking a New Year …

On 1st of September in the Church it is accepted to read the Bible chapter where Jesus Christ red in the synagogue the prophecy of Isaiah (Is. 61:1-2) for the occurance of the favorable year of God. The Byzantines see in that reading a reference of the Lord for a celebration of a New Year.

In the Menologion of Basyl II from the 10th century it is said "From that time, he has granted to us the Christians this feast".

Primary_Chronicle_Povesti_Vremeninnih_let-baptizmal-of-Olga

It is interesting fact that in Byzantium this Bible reading was red in the Church by the Patriarch in Hagia Sophia Church Cathedral or another Church where it was common for him to serve Holy Liturgy on that date.

In Russia even though the Baptismal and Christianization of the nation until 15th century the Church New year begun on 1st of March. This is evident from all medieval manuscripts including The most famous and among most ancient Russian manuscript written by the eminent Nestor so called Primary Manuscript (Primary Chronicle) also called Tale of Begone Years.

With an Emperor decree of King Peter the I-st (The Great) the new year in Russia is transferred to 1st of January.

Saint_Simeon_Stylites-Stulpnik

Saint Simeon the Stylites

Our Bulgarian Orthodox Church by tradition according to the main Church service instructions book – the Typikon marks on the first day of the new year as a very important "tiny Lord feast" and has tradition to celebrate the memory of saint Simeon the Stylites who spend mostly all his life praying on a Stylite and was a notable ascet of the Orthodox Church.

Tags: celebrated, church, Eastern, Happy, Orthodox, year

Tags: celebrated, church, Eastern, Happy, Orthodox, year
Posted in Christianity, Curious Facts, Entertainment, Everyday Life, Rant | No Comments »

Saint King Boris feast and a Holy Liturgy in the Great Basilica of Pliska – 2nd of May 2018

Thursday, May 3rd, 2018

Pliska-Great-Basilica-air-view-biggest-medieval-church-Europe

Pliska is the first capital of Bulgaira and an ancient city that traces its roots back to the Baptizmal of Bulgaria by Saint King Boris (The Baptizer of Bulgarian lands and Slavonic People) the feast is of a great importance for Bulgaria to be pressent on the map of Europe over the last XV centuries since Bulgaria's establishment in 681 A.D.

Pliska which is an enormous architectural complex dated from IX / X century hsa played a pivotal role for the Baptizmal process of Bulgarian nation as it was King Boris's palace at that time and the Christianization of Bulgarians and Slavonic (natioons) people started exactly in the newly built so called Great Basilica of Pliska which was an archibishop seat and a central Monastery and Palace Church of Bulgaria, the building was completed approximately in 875 A.D. and was the biggest Cathedral church in Europe for about 1000 years onwards with the gigantic area of 2,920 square meters (31, 400 ft).

Old_Basilica_in_Pliska-walls-reconstruction

20 century reconsturction of the Church walls based on descriptions from history annals

The Basillica was build on top of ruins of older Bulgar pagan temple and has martyrium (a place dedicated to a martyr who has been martyred there) as many of the ancient Churches had. It is believed that the martyrium may be Saint (Boyan) Enravota – the first Bulgarian saint (circa 833). The basillica has a form of a Cross shaped mausuleum.

Old_Basilica_in_Pliska-left-part-of-the-alter

Reconstruction of walls left part of the Altar

The archibishop residence was north and south of the basillica on the northern yard there was a residential building with a bath which included hypocaust (an ancient water warming system). Building south of the cathedral was used as school and scriptorium. Nearby the basillica are situated necropolis (most likely monk graves).

Old_Basilica_in_Pliska_Sarcophagus-near-altar

Pliska Sarcophagus near the Great Basillica Church altar

As with every basilica of that time there is a special allocated place of the Church for nobles. Yard northside was used as a kitchen and a dining room and accomodated other monsatic buildings.

The Old Basilica reconstruciton original model should have looked something similar to below picture which is found in the Museum (which holds a little part of the artefacts found) situated about 1.5 kilometer from the Basilica.

Old_Basilica_in_Pliska_Reconstruction-model

A presumable reconstruction model of the Old Basilica

On 2nd of May KIng Boris Feast in 2015 for a first time since many centuries in memoriam of 1150 years since Christianization of Bulgaria in the Great Basilica was served an Eastern Orthodox Christian (an open air) Holy Liturgy headed by the Bulgarian Patriarch Neofit with many Metropolitans guests from other Eastern Orthodox national Churches where the ex-president Rosen Plevneliev and the Living ancestor King Simeon the III-rd was present.

1150-years-baptismal-of-bulgaria-feast-patriarch-Neofit-Pliska-Great-Basilica

Patriarch Neofit Patriarch and head of Bulgarian Orthodox Church blessing in Great Basilica y. – 2018

The event in 2015 was continued with the idea to become an yearly event on the feast of Saint King Boris each 2nd of May yesterday in 2018 by the Metropolitan of Varna and Veliko Preslav his eminence Metropoltian Ioan (John).

Orthodox Christian Believers in the Great Basilica Preslav 2018 (People gathered being transported by free of charge buses organized by the Eparchy from Dobrich, Varna, Shumen, Targovishte

Fr. Peter reading The Apostle readings

Metropolitan Ioan (John) of Varna and Veliki Preslav Blessing in Holy Liturgy 2018

The Holy Altar with the Holy Sacraments in Pliska Basilica in 2018 (Metropolitan Ioan and his deacon)

The Church service was a big gathering for the region (if we take the fact that the current town Pliska has about 900 citizens and is in practice a village), the overall present people were perhaps about 200 to 250. More than 1/3 of the priests (38 priests) from the whole Eparchy served the service together with the Bishop. The weather before the service was rainy but just after the service and onwards, it came sunny again just like it was saint King Boris with all the Christian saints rejoiced to see so many Christians gather together just like the times when Christianity started to spread from this same place over the lands of Bulgaria country and later during the golden age throughout the territories of Bulgarian Empire and all the Slavonic borderlines such as nowadays Romania, Serbia, Ukraine and Russia.

The whole set of pictures from saint King Boris feast in Pliska can be seen on the official website of Varna and Veliko Preslav eparchy here

Tags: boris, feast, Holy, King, liturgy, saint

Tags: boris, feast, Holy, King, liturgy, saint
Posted in Christianity, Curious Facts, Entertainment, Everyday Life, Various | No Comments »

A great way to relax visit to Sliven Cathedral, Planetarium ( Observatory ) and an Ancient History museum in Yambol, Bulgaria

Monday, January 29th, 2018

planetarium

It is very odd that nowadays most of people, don't know even their own countries but visit many other countries and significant places, without even knowing the hidden gems (the great places you can relax in) in their own country. I'm not exception to this rule and I've never made a trip visit through whole Bulgaria even though I live here most of the time for the last 34 years of my life. Just before Christmas, I was in Pomorie Monastery for a 4 days spiritual and physical rest and it happened that one of the Monks Father Sergij with his novice monk Damian had to travel to a village near Yambol for an unexpected funeral of the Godfather of Damian.

Since they were about to travel to Jambol (Yambol) and there was 2 places in the car, they agreed to take me and my wife for a short few hours trip to Yambol. And that's how I got the great chance to visit Yambol, Bulgaria for a first time in life. I didn't know what to expect as I've never been in Yambol but only have been near by in Bakadjika's Monastery and the nearly organized Motorcycle Show Rocker feast just one time.

1. A first stop Sliven Cathedral Saint Demetrius Sliven

We jumped into the Car and father Sergij drove us to Yambol with a few minutes stop in Sliven, because father Sergij had something to do in the Metropolitan Building (Bishop Residence) in Sliven (just for info Yambol is a spiritual district of Sliven and the city is governed by Sliven's Metropolitan Joanikije), meanwhile we used the time while hiero-deacan Sergij was on his visit with the metropolitan to eat some food and have a 10 minutes walk around and a few minutes to pray in the Cathedral Sliven's Church Saint Demetrius of Sliven

Cathedral-Church-saint-Demetrius-of-Sliven

Cathedral Church saint Demetrius of Thesaloniki holds icon of saint Demetrius of Sliven

Saint_Demetrius-of-Sliven-the-new-Martyr

Holy Icons of Saint Demetrius of Sliven the New Martyr (A Bulgarian Christian Martyr of the Turkish / Ottoman Slavery)

Saint_Demetrius-of-Sliven-new-martyr-Holy-Liturgy

The Church Interior a Holy Liturgy Snapshot with his eminence metropolitan Joanikij

Holy-Relics-saint-Demetrius-of-Sliven-new-martyr

The Holy Relics of Saint Demetrius of Sliven new martyr

Here in Sliven, it is interesting facts that earlier there was quite an attempt from Roman-Catholicism missionaries to take over the Christian Orthodox people but by God's grace and efforts of the Holy Synod and the bishops who were governing the city, catholicism never spread widely even though catholics did they best to attract people by means of money, free education and other various mathods which franciscans and other catholic missionaries use.

Sliven historically has always been a city of revolutionaries and played a key role during the Bulgarian-Turkish Liberation war, the city has given a multitude of national heroes, it also an important war preparation center both during The Ottoman Bulgarian slavery as well as onwards during the years of communism 1944-1989, even nowdays there is a military forces in the city, near the city are a lot atomic shelters left from communism carved as caves in the mountains. Other interesting thing about Yambol is that near it are located the so called Blue Stones, which are rich of uraninite and therefore near it the region is higher in radiation.

2. Visit to the Planetarium (Observatory) in a Mathematics High School and a History museum in Yambol

Onwards we jumped in the car and travelled to (Yambol) Jambol – an old thracian city which lies on both banks of Tundzha river which lies in the historical region of Thrace. Near Jambol there is a historical ancient thracian city Kabyle.

Ancient Thracian City near Yambol – Kabile

Yambol Park Ormana (picture source Wikipedia)

It is interesting Yambol Peak on Livingston Island in the South Shetland Islands, Antarctica is named after Yambol.

To be honest my first impressions from Yambol were much far from excitement, you see some old buildings left from communism situated on a stiff places in a short it looked like a city of ruins of an old communist experiment, but if you put away the not ideal architecture and communistic landmarks and the kind of little depressing mood (maybe partially because of the winter) and partially because of the many buildings that are to gone through repairment works or be totally destroyed, once seeing the river and the sideview of short mountains, the mood cheers up a bit and one things maybe I was over pessimistic about this place, after all there also live people like us and perhaps they had a lof things we miss in our places.

Yambol center area makes big difference from rest of the city, as it seems shortly being reconstructed and it looks pretty much new and shiny while compared to rest of the city.

Yambol-city-center-upview

Yambol city center, the 4 domes buillding leftside is an ex-turkish Bathroom, the other right side dome bld. is a Mosque
(Notice how odd and unusual seems to see some Ottoman Medieval buildings mixture with the Concrete high-heel buildings) – picture source Delnik

On our way to the city center, we passed through a Armenian Apostolic Church building Serp Agop, all surrounded by a buildings which looked in a post-war state

Armenian Apostolic Church – saint Agop Yambol

Yambol city in pictures (src. Wikipedia)

Yambol-panoramic-view

Yambol Panoramic view from Borovets (src. Wikipedia)

After having a walk on the city center, went to a caffeteria had a coffee with Svetlana and walked near river, we went to see the Ancient history museum, which keeps a lot of artefacts found in the Kabyle ancient Thracian village, the museum is also rich of national folklore costumes traditional for the regions, artefacts left from the Turkish-Russian liberation war an exposition of local poems, writtings, information about local customs connected with ancient Thracians and mostly a lot of artefacts before Christ.

To find the location of Yambol history museum, we had to ask some local people, as the museum is situated in a building that is not on the main centrain square but a bit aside in a cross street nearby.

After having really enjoyable time in the Museum, we went to look for the Planetarium (Observatory) which in my opinion is the greatest attraction in Yambol.
I've been to a Planetarium somewhere in Bulgaria one time as a kid and this experience has inspired me so much that later on in school the cosmos and the knowledge about the stars has always being in my heart and I learned Astronomy subject in 11 grade in school with such joy, that it was among the most interesting things I ever learned in life.

Yambol Planetarium is situated in a Yambol Mathematics High School and the Observatory is functional already for 47 years, the projection of the Stars is made via a complex device with a lot of lens manufactured by the famous Karl Zeiss East German optics and lens producer

Picture Source ranica.eu

Karl Zeiss lens Stars projection device in Yambol Observatory (Pretty Futuristic), ain't it?

The price of the Planetarium for a group is only 20 leva per group (10 EUR per group) and usually a group of 10 people each paying 2 eur is visiting through
prior reservation. But for people like me and my wife who don't have a previous reservation, you have to ask for a school pass by the school guard person an old good hearted man.
The price for 2 people was 5 EUR per person and we had the luck to visit the planetarium without any prior reservation, but I guess other visitors or foreigners can also agree
easily to have a visit to the Planetarium for the symbolic price of 10 eur per Planetary show.

The Planetarium's system of projection is pretty old but still the overall experience is really outstanding and it is impressive even for an grown kids like us. The lady that give us presentation
about the stars has a very indepth knowledge on astronomy and is a teacher of astronomy herself in the school (as far as I understood). The overall presentation of the stars in the Planetarium was about 2 hours and we learned tons of information about the constellations, the star order how to recognize them under a clear night sky etc. etc.

Planetarium rox and it is definitely a place to visit for people with kids, beside the planetarium room, there is an observatory with a relatively modern telescope, where on clear sky, one can enjoy watching the night sky.

Finally our trip to Yambol was over with our visit to Yambol Cathedral, saint Nicolas the Wonderworker.
The Church saint Nicolas the wonderworker was built after the Russian-Turkish liberation war, the church History starts in 1878, where a Small Russian Chapel was built by the Russian army on the place of the 2 Turkish houses. In 1894, the new Cathedral initiated by the Mayor of the city started and a Majestic Church was built whith today is an emblematic one for the city, the size of the Church is really impressive especially for a city where only 60 000 people live.

No doubt the Church is beautiful both outside and inside but unfortunately as many things in Bulgaria is to begone a reperation works so donations are welcome for sure. Yambol-Cathedral-church-st-Nikolai-chudotvorec-worndermaker

Saint Nicolas the Wonderworker Cathedral Yambol

Our trip to Yambol ended here, where we waited for father Sergij who took us with his car Daewoo and brought us back to Pomorie, where we had 2 more blessed days in Pomorie Monastery.
The trip to Yambol and the time spend with the fathers in Pomorie, as always was a real gift from God to me and my family, so if you have some free weekend and you wonder where to go in Bulgaria or you simply live or come to Burgas region and you want to change the routine boring daily pictures visit Pomorie, Sliven and Yambol, I'm sure you'll enjoy.

Tags: Cathedral, Great, planetarium, relax, sliven, visit

Tags: Cathedral, Great, planetarium, relax, sliven, visit
Posted in Christianity, Curious Facts, Educational, Entertainment, Everyday Life | No Comments »

How to enable Gravis UltraSound in DOSBox for enhanced music experience in DOS programs and Games

Tuesday, October 31st, 2017

Gravis UltraSound

Gravis UltraSound or GUS is a sound card for the IBM PC compatible systems.
It was lunched in 1992 and is notable for it's ability to use real-world sound recordings (wavetable) of a musical instruments rather than artificial computer-generated waveforms.
As one of my friends used to say back then: "it sounds like a CD".

To enable GUS in DOSBox all you need to do is:

1. Download the archive with the GUS files from https://alex.www.pc-freak.net/files/GUS/ULTRASND.zip. Extract the archive (there is already a directory in it so you don't have to create one) preferably where you keep your DOSBox stuff (like Games).

2. Find your DOSBox config file. Depending on the version or host OS, the dosbox conf file is located either inside the user profile folder or inside the same folder as dosbox.exe. In Windows 7 the config file is located at

"C:\Users\Fred\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\dosbox.conf"

where "Fred" is your username.

In GNU/Linux it's in "/home/Fred/.dosbox/dosbox.conf" where "Fred" is your username.

The name of the conf file may also have dosbox version (for example –

"dosbox-0.74.conf").

Open it with a text editor like notepad (Windows) or equvalent for GNU/Linux (vi, Kate, gedit…). Locate "[gus]" section (without the quotes) and edit it so it looks like this:

[gus]
#      gus: Enable the Gravis Ultrasound emulation.
# gusrate: Sample rate of Ultrasound emulation.
#           Possible values: 44100, 48000, 32000, 22050, 16000, 11025, 8000, 49716.
# gusbase: The IO base address of the Gravis Ultrasound.
#           Possible values: 240, 220, 260, 280, 2a0, 2c0, 2e0, 300.
#   gusirq: The IRQ number of the Gravis Ultrasound.
#           Possible values: 5, 3, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12.
#   gusdma: The DMA channel of the Gravis Ultrasound.
#           Possible values: 3, 0, 1, 5, 6, 7.
# ultradir: Path to Ultrasound directory. In this directory
#           there should be a MIDI directory that contains
#           the patch files for GUS playback. Patch sets used
#           with Timidity should work fine.

gus=true
gusrate=44100
gusbase=240
gusirq=5
gusdma=3
ultradir=C:\ULTRASND

Then save the dosbox conf file.

3. Start DOSBox and mount "ULTRASND" directory to "C:".

You can do that with

mount c (directory to ULTRASND)

For example if you have extracted the archive in "C:\Games" it has created "C:\Games\ULTRASND" and the command you will have to write in DOSBox is

mount c c:\Games

(example: if your game is in "C:\Games\Heroes2" and your GUS directory is "C:\Games\ULTRSND" (if you have extracted the archive "C:\Games\") then you "mount c c:\Games" and you are set)

or for GNU/Linux if you have extracted the archive in "/home/Fred/Games" it has created "/home/Fred/Games/ULTRASND" and the command you will have to write in DOSBox is

mount c /home/Fred/Games (where "Fred" is your user name).

(example: if your game is in "/home/Fred/Games/Heroes2" and your GUS directory is "/home/Fred/Games/ULTRSND" (if you have extracted the archive" /home/Fred/Games/") in then you "mount c /home/Fred/Games" and you are set)

You can make this automatic so you don't have to write it everytime by adding this command in the end (bottom) part of your dosbox conf file and save it.

You're practicly ready. All you need to do now is set Gravis UltraSound in your game or application setup (for example with the file "setup.exe") with IO: 240, IRQ 5 and DMA 3. If you prefer you previous sound card you can do that by selecting it again from the setup without disabling GUS from the dosbox conf file.

Happy listening!

Article written by Alex

Tags: config, dosbox, enhanced, experience, file, GUS, Happy, How to, music, version

Tags: config, dosbox, enhanced, experience, file, GUS, Happy, How to, music, version
Posted in Entertainment, Games, Games Linux, Linux, Linux Audio & Video, System Administration, Windows | 3 Comments »

THX 1138 a must see SCI FI-movie every Computer geek or IT professional must watch

Wednesday, October 25th, 2017

THX 1138 is an American science fiction film set in a dystopian future in which the populace is controlled through android police officers and mandatory use of drugs that suppress emotion, including outlawed sexual desire. It was directed by George Lucas in his feature film directorial debut in 1971.

Produced by Francis Ford Coppola and written by Lucas and Walter Murch, it stars Donald Pleasence and Robert Duvall.

THX 1138 was developed from Lucas's student film Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, which he made in 1967 while attending the University of Southern California's film school. The feature film was produced in a joint venture between Warner Bros. and Francis Ford Coppola's production company, American Zoetrope. A novelization by Ben Bova was published in 1971. The film received mixed reviews from critics and failed to find box office success on initial release; however, the film has subsequently received critical acclaim and gained a cult following, particularly in the aftermath of Lucas's success with Star Wars in 1977.

THX1138 Director's cut: The Future Trailer

The movie is one of the most awesome movies on SCi-Fi Topic I've ever seen much better than comercial ones such as Star Wars and perhaps one of the best if not the best movies, George Lucas has done ever.

The THX with its Android police is another inspirational one that perhaps has inspired the naming of the Android Operating System like that.

THX 1138 movie is an example of a kind of communist society in the future which perhaps the global elite has planned for humanity. The only mean of the THX 1138 is to consume and work being programmed (conditioned) by the central authorities with a full control over all aspects of the individual life, its kinda of pretty much what is today western world has been turning into.

I believe we're currently in a transitional stage to this futuristic society in which, the life costs zero.

Well, after all the global programmers of society in our age has a sense of humour to finance a movie like that 🙂

Tags: Computer, Electronic Labyrinth, Film, Francis Ford Coppola, future, George Lucas, life, movie, must see, nice, oldschool scifi, scifi movie, society, star wars, thx, Watch

Tags: Computer, Electronic Labyrinth, Film, Francis Ford Coppola, future, George Lucas, life, movie, must see, nice, oldschool scifi, scifi movie, society, star wars, thx, Watch
Posted in Entertainment, Everyday Life, Movie Reviews | No Comments »

☩ Walking in Light with Christ – Faith, Computing, Diary

Archive for the ‘Entertainment’ Category

ASCII Art studio – A powerful ASCII art editor for Windows / Playscii a cool looking text editor for Linux

Install Slack and Mattermost clients for Start Up Business communication on Linux

Happy New Church Year ! – The Eastern Orthodox Church Year celebrated every 1st of September and some history on the Indiction

Saint King Boris feast and a Holy Liturgy in the Great Basilica of Pliska – 2nd of May 2018

A great way to relax visit to Sliven Cathedral, Planetarium ( Observatory ) and an Ancient History museum in Yambol, Bulgaria

THX 1138 a must see SCI FI-movie every Computer geek or IT professional must watch

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