Installing Thoggen on Fedora 11

Thoggen is a DVD backup utility ('DVD ripper') for Linux, based on GStreamer and Gtk+. There are several other DVD rippers. There is a good article Choose the DVD ripper that's right for you which give a good account of the various DVD ripping application available on linux.

Some of the features of thoggen (taken from Thoggen Website) are as followed:

• Easy to use, with a nice graphical user interface (GUI)
• Supports title preview, picture cropping, and picture resizing.
• Language Selection for audio track (no subtitle support yet though)
• Encodes into Ogg/Theora video
• Can encode from local directory with video DVD files
• Based on the GStreamer multimedia framework, which makes it fairly easy to add additional encoding formats/codecs in future.

To install thoggen on Fedora 11, first you have to install RPM Fusion. For more information on RPM Fusion installation, see Blog Entry RPM Fusion Repository. Remember to do a "yum check-update" after you have install the repository

Step 1: Install thoggen

# yum install thoggen 

Step 2: Install libdvdcss2. libdvdcss is a free software library for accessing and unscrambling DVDs encrypted with the Content Scramble System (CSS).

# sudo -s
# rpm -ivh http://dl.atrpms.net/all/libdvdcss2-1.2.10-5.fc11.i586.rpm 

Step 3: Install gstreamer and related gstreamer-plugins

yum install gstreamer gstreamer-plugins-base gstreamer-plugins-good gstreamer-plugins-bad

Compiling Grace: checking for a Motif >= 1002 compatible API... no

When you are compiling source package from Grace, you may encounter error during compiling on CentOS 5.x "checking for a Motif >= 1002 compatible API... no"

To resolve the issues, you will need to install the

# yum install openmotif openmotif-devel

Grace plotting tool for X Window System

Grace is a WYSIWYG 2D plotting tool for the X Window System and M*tif. Grace runs on practically any version of Unix-like OS. As well, it has been successfully ported to VMS, OS/2, and Win9*/NT/2000/XP (some minor functionality may be missing, though).

Grace is a descendant of ACE/gr, also known as Xmgr.

The instruction set to install the source can be found in the User Guide

Managing Volume using the command line tool aumix on Fedora

You can use the command line to manage the volume of a Linux PC.

yum install aumix aumix-gtk

To increase the volume by 10%,
# aumix -v +10

To reduce the volume by 10%
# aumix -v -10

To manage microphone volume, use aumix -m instead

How to pin Firefox to the previous version on Linux Mint

There are occasion where you may want Linux Mint to pin a specific version of firefox on Linux Mint, you can do the following:

# vim /etc/apt/preferences

Package: firefox
Pin: 3.0*
Pin-Priority: 800

1. "Package" refers to the name of the package
2. "Pin" refer to the criteria used for the pinning. In this case version 3.0 of firefox
3. "Pin-Priority": Priority to handle multiple pin entries

To get back your old programs, do the following:

apt-get upgrade 
OR
apt-get update