GUI media converter

ffmpeg is a very powerful media converter but unfortunately it is text based. For people like me who use terminal as much as GUI, using ffmpeg in its original nature, which is text based is ok. You can refer to my post about converting flv to avi using ffmpeg. But for people who want to harness the power of ffmpeg yet not familiar of using terminal, mobile media cenverter from miksoft is a good option. This application is a GUI for mmpeg, so you can expect some of the goodness of ffmpeg if not all of them. You can download this application here, where it is available for windows and linux. For debian based linux user, the application is available in .deb form where you can install easily. For other linux user, a little bit of extra work has to be done to start using this application.

A few of mobile media converter features are drag n drop, using ffmpeg engine, it is free of charge, it has integrated youtube downloader and it is available for linux and windows. Supported formats are:
- Desktop Audio: mp3, wma, ogg, wav
- Mobile Audio: amr, awb
- Desktop Video: wmv, mpeg, wmv, avi, flv
- Mobile Video: 3gp, mp4
Installation instruction is available here under Help.

Below are screenshots of the application in ubuntu 8.10



and windows vista

Searching or finding files owned by user

A few days back, I have to find in my machine files that belong to a user or to a group. The general form are like below:

# find location -user username -group groupname

To find files in / directory owned by user foo:

# find / -user foo

To find files in / directory owned by user in group bar:

# find / -group bar

To find files in directory / owned by user foo and group bar:

# find / -user foo -group bar

You can also use uid or gid
To find files belong to uid 500:

# find / -uid 500

To find files that belong to gid 500

# find / -gid 500

Knowing your hardware

In linux, there are a few ways that you can know you hardware details without opening the chassis of your machine. Below are a few ways that I know and hopefully can help linux users out there;

1. Refer to the /proc directory. This directory contains a few files that can give you information about your hardware such as memory (meminfo), processor (cpuinfo), partitions (partition) and many more
2. Use "lspci" command. This is a command to list all pci devices connected to your machine
3. Use "lshw" command. This command will list out all hardware installed on your system. Available in ubuntu
4. Use "kudzu -p" command. This is redhat/centos hardware probing and installing tool. Use "kudzu -p" to display all the hardware connected to the system
   
5. Use "dmidecode" command. This is a tool for dumping bios information into human readable form
6. Run "lsusb" to list out all usb devices. Thanks to KwangErn Liew for the suggestion in the comment.
   

If anyone have any tool that I didn't list out, please feel free to drop out a comment

Strace - powerful troubleshooting tool

Strace is a tool in linux used for tracing system call and signals. This is very useful for tracking the error occurred when a program is run and we do not have any clue where to start troubleshooting. The usage of strace is very simple. It will record the system calls that happen during the execution of a particular program.

To use strace (below is an example if you want to trace the system call when you run ls):
# strace ls

To use strace and print the output to file
# strace -o outputfile ls

After that, you can analyze the outputfile, to see where is the error that fails the program

Fedora 10

Fedora 10, is available now. Download the livecd iso here. For those who are upgrading from fedora 9, check out the guide here. For more info, go here. Enjoy