I’ve tried using Grip and other GUI CD ripping tools. They are much too complicated and unpleasant to use. I found a great command line tool for ripping CDs: abcde, A Better CD Encoder. You can easily rip to flac, ogg, or mp3 format - even all at the same time. It queries the CDDB […]

I wanted to install Open Office on my Xubuntu laptop, but since I’m already using the Sun Java JRE - a requirement for Java development, I don’t want to install the excremental GCJ (GNU Compiler for Java Runtime). Aptitude wants to install gcj-4.1-base gij gij-4.1 libgcj-bc libgcj-common libgcj7-0 libgcj7-awt libgcj7-jar and other sundry gcj packages. I prefer to manage my […]

Debian releases are few and far between, irritatingly so. It’s great news to see that Debian 4.0 - named ‘Etch’ - was released 8 April 2007. It looks to have plenty of good upgrades, including Xorg, udev, etc. See the release notes for details.

For annoying political reasons, Debian doesn’t include Mplayer. See the Multimedia Debian […]

I’m working on an image manipulation program that requires the Ruby ImageMagick bindings, RMagick. I was unable to install RMagick from either the gem, or the Debian package. Building RMagick from source didn’t work either.

The following worked for both a Debian Sarge box, and an Xubuntu laptop. I hope it saves someone some grief.

$ dpkg -l | grep magick […]

When I upgraded my Linux boxes to Firefox 1.0 (I’m now at 1.5), I finally made the jump to using the GTK 2.0 libraries. The only drag is that the default key bindings are more Windoze like. Ctrl-a selects all, rather than moving to the beginning of the line, and other annoyances to the enlightened.

To fix this, create […]