Linux, programming, computers and life

It looks like a lot of people are looking on my posts about mplayer configuration. At least i see relatively many references from google searches. (Does it mean more linux users or mplayer is penetrating into windows world?)
So a summary here:

• if you want nice mplayer GUI - take a look at smplayer
• my mplayer configuration posts: 1 and 2

Technorati Tags: mplayer, smplayer, linux, media player, configuration

mplayer is very nice audio, video and generally all-you-name-it player. The one aspect i did not like about it was it’s UI, it’s pretty minimal and you have a lot of keyboard shortcuts to remember. I had to do “man mplayer” from time to time to remind myself of those.
smplayer is a great discovery. It’s great looking and very powerful GUI. I do not know whether all the aspects of mplayer can be controlled… but a LOT can. Currently, it’s (more than) enough for me. If you are looking for media player for linux - i’d suggest trying smplayer

Technorati Tags: mplayer, smplayer, linux, media player

Recently i had a long text file (about 114K lines) which contained strictly formatted lines (output from some of our tools) which i wanted to sort by a certain columns.
While my first solution is usually command line based i thought “I will need a lot of different sorts - let’s do it in Excel - it’ll probably be faster over all”. So i went to my remote desktop, opened Excel and imported the file - which was very easy (i believe there’s File->Import and even File->Open worked). However there’s a limit of 64K lines in Excel - so i got less then 50% of the file. I didn’t give up. I remembered i have OO installed so i launched Calc and, after some time spent in menus browsing (well, there’s File->Export but no File->Import, i believe the solution was somewhere in Insert menu), i imported the file. Well. A surprise - OO also has line amount limitation.
I’m human after all, and i gave up. In order to find minimal and maximal values in 2nd column of the file i needed to do the following:

sort -un -k 2 MyFile | head -n 2

sort -unr -k 2 MyFile | head -n 2

Technorati Tags: sed, awk, spreadsheet, sort, grep, excel, openoffice, linux

You are working with your Linux system, with GUI (which is some kind of WM which works on top of X Window system) and then suddenly everything is stuck. Mouse doesn’t respond, nothing moves on the screen and it seems like there’s nothing to do except reboot. WAIT.
Reboot is dangerous. You don’t want to reboot unless the system is really stuck. Maybe it’s only the UI. There are virtual consoles in your Linux, which may help. As you can read in this howto, you can switch to virtual console using Ctrl-Alt-F# (F# is the F1…F6 keys on your keyboard). Guess what, there’s a terminal there! Now you can login, kill the bad behaved application and get back to your X using Alt-F7.

Technorati Tags: linux, X Window, reboot, virtual console