The VLC player is rumoured to be one of the best players to day for playing many different formats including mts and m2ts proprietary SONY formats. (Which just so happens to be the format of my Camcorder movies)  This is the way my camcorder has been saving them in and to date, there are few if any players out there capable of playing such files without first converting them (A notable exception is now Windows 7 that has this capability built in natively).

Thankfully the VLC player does the job neatly playing these two type of files well on my recent Windows 7 installation.  However, I wanted to play it on Linux where I work and would like to watch the occassional movie.  I was glad to see that VLC has copies for Linux as well.  Unfortunately, it does not run natively from the previlidged root account and requires a regular no previlidged user account.  Here is how to satisfy these conditions, run VLC from an unprevilidged account while you are logged in through the root account.

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For this howto we will be using the TP-LINK line of USB wireless cards.  More precisely the 54Mbps TL-WN321G and the 300M TL-WN821N adapters otherwise known for running the Atheros Communications, Inc.  Atheros eXtended Range™ technology.  This is an important note because this is how this card will appear under Linux.

I find these adapters at least much cheaper and apparently more reliable to their DLINK counterparts – they just work out of the box with Linux without any install CD's.  No drivers necessary as, presumably, the controller chip is registered as Atheros AR9170, for which drivers appear readily available on Linux systems.

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Here I would like to take you through the steps to configuring and securing a router (In this case we will use the WRT54G as an example) for your home or small office setup. 

Securing a router can be very important especially when the wireless function is enabled.  Likely the most important reason is to prevent would be hackers / criminals from attacking other larger networks or institutions by hijacking your network or PC to do so with.  This could have unpleasant consequences for you even though you would be just a pawn in such a mess.

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Fedora 13 has been out now since around May 25th, so it's time for the semi annual upgrade.  Unlike with previous versions, I've now switched to the GNOME desktop since I have been finding the KDE desktop to be far less intuitive then it's former competitor and far less responsive.  (As you recall from the previous upgrades, KDE was introduced rewritten almost entirely in Qt4).  The only benefactors of the new KDE appear to be my kids.  The start menu panel in KDE seams more easy to use for them then GNOME's start menus, though I'm sure a little tweaking in GNOME can fix that.
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PROBLEM

You get this when trying to SSH to a host from some IP (Let's assume it's 111.22.33.44 for the scope of this problem):

ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host

What to do? Read the rest of this entry »

PROBLEM

A little tidbit of Windows knowledge.  When highlighting a section of a Microsoft Word document and pressing the delete key, nothing happens.  No errors or messages at all.  Try this to fix it…

SOLUTION

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Skype is a popular text, video and voice (VoIP) chat client.  A more detailed article can be found on the Wikipedia Skype page.  Here is a list of some of the hurdles I've ran into getting the client to work on my own distribution.

PROBLEM

Skype for Linux had poor video in the not so distant past so having upgrade to Fedora 12 recently, I've decided to see if my setup still worked fine.  So the typical problem you might run into is that Skype will simply crash when doing anything with a webcam (When using a command like # /usr/bin/skype & or from your UI menus which defaults to that command anyway).  Here's one way how to resolve this issue that worked for me.

SOLUTION

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Fedora 12 has been out of the oven since about Nov 17 so it's high time I upgrade before it spoils.  As with the previous release, I look forward to any new features in KDE 4.3.  (As you recall from the previous upgrades, KDE was introduced rewritten almost entirely in Qt4).  Also noteworthy to mention is the issues in ATI graphics that popped up after upgrading.  Hopefully the community has had time to catch up as at the time support for my old Radeon 9600 was dropped and after some searches at the time not even ATI was maintaining support for Linux drivers for the family of chipsets of the cards.  Unfortunately, there was even some division around how cards like Radeon are supported from Linus himself.  (As far as I'm concerned David can do what he wants  just like Linus did  ).
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Since around Fedora 8 and KDE 4.0, the default DESKTOPMANAGER that greets you before you login to your GUI  is  set to GNOME (Even now with Fedora 13 out, the same is still true).  Now I was an avid KDE user and though I started on Gnome, KDE just grew on me up until about Fedora 12.  After that, I'm now a GNOME user, pending numerous fixes the KDE team is still working on.  The fact that I had a GNOME login panel at the beginning as I'm going to login to KDE didn't really make at the time.  Now I have another reason.  What I wanted was something that looked a little bit more completed:

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Following a recent upgrade, Xorg was apparently also updated to version xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.6.1.901-1.fc11.i586 which unfortunately didn't play nicely with version xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.12.2-14.fc11.i586 .  After a brief investigation, the combination resulted in this error:

 /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//radeon_drv.so: undefined symbol: DRIOpenDRMMaster

Ultimately, this had the following effect:

• No GUI (System never got as far as showing any graphics let alone KDE, Gnome etc)
• No Keyboard functionality: Couldn't open console window with CTRL-ALT-F1-9 keys.
• No mouse functionality.
• No error message on the screen.  Just an empty screen.

Not good.  The system was frozen and unresponsive and nothing I tried on the terminal did anything.  Here's how to go a about solving this issue.

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