jaunty jackalope Ubuntu 9.04 compiz blacklists my video card

I have a Dell Vostro 1310, with I believe, the intel 965 chipset. The video card was working fine with Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 with compiz, but when I upgraded to Jaunty, the card was blacklisted. Don't know why, this link https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz/+bug/363821 says some crap about video freezes etc.. I've never had any.. But it says to add the line:

SKIP_CHECKS=yes

to the compiz-manager file

~/.config/compiz/compiz-manager

or

/etc/xdg/compiz/compiz-manager

This will remove the blacklisting check, and allow the card to render compiz effects..

Also make sure you have the CompizConfig Settings Manager package installed for tuning your compiz desktop.

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jaunty jackalope Ubuntu 9.04 keyboard and trackpad freeze at startup

I hit this issue on my Dell Vostro 1310 after an upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 aka Jaunty Jackalope - amd64. When I boot, most often, the onboard keyboard and mouse are dead. Most people reset and when it comes up again, it works. I had found the workaround in suspend/resume of the system. But honestly, it was a pain.

Finally found this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/341094

The workaround mentioned there viz. adding the options

i8042.reset i8042.nomux i8042.nopnp i8042.noloop

at the end of the list of kernel parameters in

/boot/grub/menu.lst

works for me.

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DivX encoding under Linux

Well, I am jealous of all those windows folks who have amazingly good GUI apps for video format conversions / transcoding. I've always wanted some good idea of how to do this under linux. How could you rip DVDs and convert them to DivX files so that you can save a copy even if the flaky and trashy optical medium dies out after a while?

Stumbled across this link while searching online.. Looks good, though a bit dated.

Title: DVD ripping and transcoding with Linux
http://www.bunkus.org/dvdripping4linux/single/
http://www.bunkus.org/dvdripping4linux/

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How to Rip and extract vob files from a css encrypted DVD

Refer to my previous post
Playing encrypted video DVD on linux
about installing libdvdread

Once you have libdvdread/CSS installed,
then apt-get install vobcopy, then just running the command

vobcopy -o [outputdirectory]

Will extract a decrypted version of the vob files into the mentioned output directory !

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Note: I'm not responsible for your indiscretions / violations of applicable law, if any,
in using the software mentioned above. Please ensure you have the right to copy
before ripping a dvd in the above fashion.

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playing encrypted video dvd on linux

I had rented some movies from the College Library at the UW-Madison, and tried playing them on my dell vostro 1310 running ubuntu 9.04. However, none of them would play :(

I was using gmplayer (www.mplayerhq.hu), and so I always thought it was a problem with my disk drive, like it was not reading the disk properly or something. I couldn't imagine mplayer not having the required codecs, and besides the error I got was something like "seek failed".

I tried with other linux media players too, but ditto ! So I gave up.. But then, lately somehow this sudden enlightenment flashed in my mind (don't exactly remember the nature of the apple that struck my head), and I realized that the disc could probably be encrypted for copyright protection.

I searched "play encrypted video dvd on linux" and bingo, this is the link I got..
http://theos.in/desktop-linux/linux-playing-encrypted-dvd/

Basically what it says I should do is, as superuser/root:

$ cd usr/share/doc/libdvdread[N]

where [N] is an integer; for me it was 4. And then run the script "install-css.sh"

$ ./install-css.sh
or
$ sh install-css.sh

Make sure you are plugged into the internet ;) and the system will fetch and install the necessary packages.. Once that is done, all those dvds which wouldn't play till now would miraculously start playing !! Yeah !

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Turn hibernation on or off on windows vista

Needed to start using windows vista because iPod need iTunes, and Banshee, etc doesn't seem to work for me. But then, I'd shrunk my windows partition too small and so space is precious.

To turn off hibernation:
Click start > In the "start search" box, type "powercfg /hibernate off" > press "CTRL+SHIFT+Enter" (this I guess runs the command as administrator.
Now do a disk cleanup to delete the huge hibernate file.

The command for turning hibernation back on is "powercfg /hibernate on"

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