xvidcap Segmentation fault crash

xvidcap users on Ubuntu Hardy Heron are in for a nasty surprise. The moment you press the red record button, the program greets you with a segmentation fault error (bug #224355). This isn't a serious problem but it does make users shy away from using the xvidcap tool.

The solution is to tweak few settings on the Multi-Frame preferences page. The xvidcap preferences page can be accessed by right clicking on the first button on the left hand side marked test-0000.mpeg[00000] .

Xvidcap Main Screen

Xvidcap Preference

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Instant Messengers for Kiosk Linux

The ground floor of our campus library is lined with public access computers, anyone can surf the Internet, search library database and access the scholarly journals in digital form. These machines run one version of Microsoft Windows operating system or other, anti-virus and security updates are non-existent. The only kind of maintenance these machines see is when they crash and someone runs a re-install with a Windows boot CD.

It doesn't take much to migrate some of these machines to gnu/Linux (if you can cut the red tap) and provide a secure and safe browsing experience to the users. There are quite some documentation that help you turn a KDE desktop or the popular Ubuntu Linux to work as a public access kiosk machine. Its relatively easy to setup and makes economic sense too.

However there are still some (technical) problems that need to be addressed, the needs of the kiosk mode desktop environment are quite different. Instant messenger clients running on a Internet kiosk need interface that enable users to log on without storing the user name, password to a user account on the computer. I haven't yet come across any exist free software IM clients that have this kind of facility. You can use the web based IM clients but they aren't a very good alternative.

Pidgin (formerly gaim) is the most popular instant messenger client that comes with most gnu/Linux distributions, it can connect to multiple IM protocols including AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, XMPP, ICQ, IRC, SILC, SIP/SIMPLE, Novell GroupWise, Lotus Sametime, Bonjour, Zephyr, MySpaceIM, Gadu-Gadu, QQ ,Google's Gtalk and more. However pidgin logon interface to aimed users with personal accounts. Perhaps this is one of the issues that free software IM developer should remedy in near future.

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My Niece Guna

Here is the new girl in my life, a great kisser, she shakes her booty to all my favorite songs and to top is all she shares my passion for gadgets.

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firefox-3.0 Assertion failed error

Caught myself some FireFox crash bugs #240507 and #251891 this morning, great way to start the day.

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Ubuntu is running in low-graphics mode

I haven't figured out what went wrong, must be a bug or my disk started to show its age. After couple of reboots and doing file system check everything went back to normal. The issue seems to be that half of modules went missing, Beats me!

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Looking For Moderators

Its time for me to throw in the towel, I no longer have time and energy to moderate the India Engineering Students list anymore. The India Engineering Students is a community of Engineering students from the subcontinent and elsewhere, its hosted on Yahoo! groups. Most of early moderators, including the founder of the list is MIA(Missing In Action). So, I decided to look for some young blood to run the list and keep the spammer's, trolls, bots at bay.

If you are a active member of the list and would like to spend time as a moderator then do please leave a comment with your Yahoo! groups user name or links to your past threads on the mailing-list.

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Ubuntu Unleashed 2008 Edition :: Book Review

Here is yet another review of a Ubuntu book before the release of the next version of Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex at the end of this month. In my last post I wrote about Beginning Ubuntu Linux

Ubuntu Unleashed 2008 edition by Andrew Hudson and Paul Hudson is the second Ubuntu book I am reviewing this week. At 850 odd pages this book covers a lot of ground and is yet another wrist breaker from Unleashed series.

The book caters to a wide range of audience from beginner to advanced, this is the highlight of the book and its major defect. The book starts by teaching you the much feared task of installing your first Ubuntu system (Part I Installation and Configuration, Part II Desktop Ubuntu) and do some basics tasks like adding new users, configuring network connections, backup up the system and burning DVD disks (Part III System Administration) and advanced system administration tasks like turning Ubuntu machine into a File and Print server or LAMP server(Part IV Ubuntu as a Server) is also covered. These who are planning to learn bit of programming could get started with Perl, Python, PHP, C/C++ or Mono (Part V Programming Linux).

Also the book has a section on Linux gaming which is rarely given coverage in other gnu/Linux books . You will find out how to install games like DOOM 3 , Unreal Tournament 2004, Quake 4, Wolfenstein, Battle for Wesnoth on Ubuntu. The book lives up to unleashed series reputation of power packing information into a single book. If you are beginner learning Ubuntu Linux this is a book you should have on your bookshelf. As for advanced users you better stick with your O'Reilly books for now or read The Debian System book.

Search Amazon.com for Ubuntu Unleashed 2008

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