Posts Tagged ‘screen’

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What is Xorg’s server DPMS module for? And how to use it to reduce your computer power consumption

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

As I’m manually configuring a Xserver via xorg.conf I have noticed a block of code in:

Section "Monitor"
Identified "Generic Monitor"
Option "DPMS"
EndSection That triggered my curiousity to research further what is DPMS . A very quick google search revealed that DPMS’s purpose is to communicate to communicate between the monitor and the computer, to make the computer turn off the (CRT or LED) based monitor if the computer is not used

Thus in short to rephrase DPMS is a power saving handy Xorg feature. I many custom configured xorg.conf like the mine I’m building right now does not include DPMS as many people doesn’t have idea what DPMS is and how to enable it.

DPMS is also an interface to the Energy start power-saving capability if not all, most of the modern day monitor screens.

DPMS enables the Xserver to control automatically the computer screen and thus reduces the overall computer power consumption.

To enable the use of DPMS on my Linux, all I had to do is place a couple of configuration directives in my xorg.conf .:
Here is how I enabled DPMS in my Xorg server:

1. Edit with a text editor /etc/X11/xorg.conf

2. Find the Monitor Section , e.g.:

Section "Monitor"
....
EndSection

3. Add inside the Monitor Section Options "DPMS" "true"

4. Lookup for the ServeryLayout section , e.g.:

Section "ServerLayout"
...
EndSection

5. Place inside the ServerLayout section For instance the following options:

Option "StandbyTime" "20"
Option "SuspendTime" "10"
Option "OffTime "25"

You might like to change the options StandbyTime, SuspendTIme or OffTime to match your likings.
6. As a last step restart the Xorg server.

Press Ctrl+Alt+BackSpace or by issuing:

host:~# pkill -HUP X

Test that DPMS is loaded properly by reviewing /var/log/Xorg.0.log for example:

host:~# grep -i /var/log/Xorg.0.log
(II) Loading extensions DPMS

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Posted in Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Linux Audio & Video | No Comments »

Best software available today for Linux video Desktop capturing on Debian

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

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 3 free software programs which are capable to record Desktop environment on Linux with sound embedded

The interesting screen video capturing Desktop tools I’ve found are:

1. recordMyDesktop
2. Istanbul
and
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:

RecordMyDesktop GTK interface entry screen

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 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:

recordmydesktop recording minimized in 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:

recordmydesktop saving captured desktop video

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 on, I continued and (gave the other Desktop screen capturer) Istanbul a try 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 tested vnc2swf , launched it by: pressing alt+f2 and typing in vnc2swf in GNOME’s run application prompt, just to be surprised by an error …:

vnc2swf error no 111 Connection refused

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

Now let me conclude, the results from my desktop video screen capturing experiments prooved that vnc2swf is superior (as it is capable of properly saving a movie with sound and video from a Linux Desktop). It appears this soft is actually the best one you can use to make a video of your Linux desktop.

Sadly my testing 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 and Gnome or KDE developers will soon provide us with better software capable to save properly a video and audio captured from the Linux Desktop.

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Posted in Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Linux Audio & Video | 4 Comments »

A few words on Pseudo Christian Spirituality. A false “Spiritual” Movies and Books which we as Christians should Fully Avoid

Monday, April 18th, 2011

Heresies and How to Avoid them

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

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Posted in Christianity, Movie Reviews | 1 Comment »

How to make Video from your Linux Desktop with xvidcap / Capture desktop output in a video on Linux

Wednesday, April 6th, 2011

If you have wondered on how to create videos aiming at manuals on how you do certain stuff on Linux, let’s say related to programming or system administration.
Then you should definitely check out

xvidcap

Below is the package description as taken from apt-cache show xvidcap

A screen capture enabling you to capture videos off your X-Window desktop
for illustration or documentation purposes. It is intended to be a
standards-based alternative to tools like Lotus ScreenCam.

On Debian based Linux systems (e.g. Debian Ubuntu) xvidcap is available straight from the package repositories. To install and test it you can straight issue:

linux:~# apt-get install xvidcap
...

To start using xvidcap, either by starting it with alt+f2 in gnome or straight launch it from the applications menu via:

Applications -> Sound & Video -> xvidcap

Here is how the xvidcap program looks like right after you start it;
xvidcap screenshot main menu

As you see in the screenshot xvidcap’s menu interface is extraordinary simple.

As you see it only has a stop, pause, rec, back and forward buttons, a capture selector and movie editor.
Pitily xvidcap does not support music capturing, but at least for me that’s not such an issue.

If you click over the field test-0000.mpeg[0000] with your last mouse button, you will notice a drop down menu with an option for preferences of xvidcap.

Take the time to play with the preferences, since there are quite a few of them.

The most important preference that you might like to straightly adjust in my view is in the:

Preferences -> Multi-Frame tab -> File Name:

The default file that xvidcap uses to store it’s content files as you will see in the preferences is utest-%04d.mpeg

If you want to change the type of the output file format to let’s say flv change the File Name: value to utest-%04d.flv
Next time you record with xvidcap, you will have the file stored in flv format.

The red lines which you see in the above screenshot is the capture area, you will have to also tune the screen capture area before you can proceed with recording a video from your desktop.

The way to capture your Desktop in fullscreen is a bit unusual, you first need to mark up all your visible Desktop and before that you will have to select from xvidcap’s preferences from:

Preferences -> General -> Minimize to System Tray

By selecting this option each time you press the xvidcap’s record button the xvidcap’s controller interface will be minimized to tray and capturing the video of the region previously selected with the capture selector will start up.

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Posted in Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Linux Audio & Video | 7 Comments »

Upgrade Ubuntu from 9.04 to latest Ubuntu

Friday, April 1st, 2011

Updating a version of Ubuntu version 9.04 to the latest stable release is actually very simple and BORING.

It takes some long time and a lot of clicking, however eventually, the upgrade to the latest Ubuntu will be at hand.
The whole upgrade philosophy to Upgrade an outdated Ubuntu distribution to the newest supported stable Ubuntu release is in a consequentual number of release to release upgrades.

Let’s say you’re running Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope and) you want to upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10 TLS
then you will have to to the following step by step upgrades;

Upgrade Ubuntu from;

  • Ubuntu 9.04 to Ubuntu 9.10
  • Ubuntu 9.10 to Ubuntu 10.04
  • Ubuntu 10.04 to Ubuntu 10.10
  • Ubuntu 10.10 to Ubuntu 11.04
  • Ubuntu 11.04 to Ubuntu 11.11

Now let’s start upgrading …
1. Upgrade Ubuntu 9.04 to Ubuntu 9.10

Press Alt+F2 and type:

update-manager -d

Update Manager Ubuntu

Press the Run Button afterwards to launch the command.
You will be prompted for your Linux administrator password, so type it in.

Next the command will launch the Update Manager . The update manager will show you all the available updates.

The Update Manager will show you the update options, it should say something like:

New distribution release ‘9.10’ is available

update manager ubuntu 9.10

Click Over the Update button and wait.

The Ubuntu update will went by by few steps:

1. Preparing Updates
2. Setting new software channels
3. Getting new packages
4. Installing the updates
5. Cleaning up
6. Restarting the computer

You will see further on a screen reading “Support for some applications ended”, on that screen simply press the Close button.

Further on you will be prompted with a windows reading:

Do you want to start the upgrade? You have to click over Start Upgrade button to finally begin with the upgrade process.
Getting new packages screen Ubuntu Update procedure

Now a prompt window will appearing asking you to reboot the system, when the prompt appears click over:

Restart Now

After the upgrade the new release of Ubuntu 9.10 will start booting up, and you will see a screen similar to the picture below:

Ubuntu 9.10 boot screen

Now as you have updated from Ubuntu 9.04 next step is to upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04

Now guess what you will have to upgrade the trivial quick update procedures once again.

Once again launch the Ubuntu Update Manager

System -> Administration -> Update Manager Now as you have updated from Ubuntu 9.04 next step is to upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 (LTS – Lucid Lynx)

Now guess what you will have to upgrade the trivial quick update procedures once again.

Once again launch the Ubuntu Update Manager

System -> Administration -> Update Manager

Now follow the above described procedure with update-manager -d

After repeating the few trivial steps you will have Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on your Desktop

Further on complete the trivial update steps with the update-manager to update to Ubuntu release 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat).

After having succesfully upgraded to version 10.10, now repeat the boring update procedures described in the beginning of the article to update to Ubuntu 11.04

Now as you should be with Ubuntu 11.04, upgrade once again with update-manager to Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal).

And ast a last, once again with the update-manager -d update following the instructions to Ubuntu 11.10.

I’m pretty sure this is one of my most boring articles ever …
It’s interesting fact that I learn once from a friend of mine about the Ubuntu distribution. The Ubuntu distribution has it’s versioning based on months and year whether a version is out for instance Ubuntu 9.04 means this Ubuntu release is released on (Month 04 (April), year 2009)), Ubuntu 11.10 Means this distribution is released in (year 2011, month 10 (October)).

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Posted in Linux, System Administration | 4 Comments »

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