Properly ripping DVDs and adding subtitles in Ubuntu
There are occasions where you legitimately need tools to help that would otherwise be considered the domain of “pirates” and “ne’er-do-wells”. In this particular scenario, my grandparents send a DVD from the United States (Region1) to us in Belgium (Region2). Not only will the DVD not play back on a region locked DVD player, there are also no Dutch subtitles.
There are however technological solutions to this type of problem, including such programs as dvd::rip, vobsub2srt and a few websites dedicted to crowdsourced subtitles.
Dell DSET on Ubuntu 10.04 and 12.04
Dell System E-Support Tool (DSET) is an informative tool used by Dell’s support engineers to help diagnose problems for their clients. It is almost a requirement now and Dell usually refuses to continue support without a DSET report.
The problem is that DSET is only supported on Redhat and SuSE Linux and there isn’t any information on how to get it running in Ubuntu. I’ve assembled a rough guide on how to get DSET up and running on Ubuntu 10.04 and 12.04 and it is tested against a Dell R610 and R620.
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Wireless BCM4312 with the 3.4 and 3.5 kernel
The hybrid driver from Broadcom is still a bit behind in terms of support for the latest kernels but there are workarounds. This particular issue also effects other kernel modules such as the out of tree Nvidia and ATI blobs that require the asm/system.h file in their includes.
I’ve had success with replacing it with asm/switch_to.h which seems to have fixed things for now. The cause for this can be found on the LKML.
Chipsets supported by “Broadcom’s IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n hybrid Linux® device driver” are: BCM4311, BCM4312, BCM4313, BCM4321, BCM4322, BCM43224, and BCM43225, BCM43227 and BCM43228.
Skype 4.0 on Ubuntu Precise (12.04) 64-bit
There is a new version of skype out for Linux, version 4.0 which has interesting changelog entries:
* Much lower chance Skype for Linux will crash or freeze
* chat history loading is now much faster
* …several investments we made in improving audio quality … and improving video call quality
* …extended support for more cameras
* and more
Good enough for me! There is still no true 64 bit binary/package from Skype. The result is that their fake “64 bit” Skype needs an additional 100MB of i386 packages in order for it to run properly.
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Doing battle with a Dell R620 and Ubuntu
We recently got sent a Dell R620 to evaluate and while its technical specification is amazing there are a few things that need to be handled first.
As far as Ubuntu and the Dell R620 go, Precise (12.04) is the only way to go here. Every release before Precise has issues with this hardware in one way or another. This is new hardware of after all.
For our “use case” we downgraded the PERC H710P controller to a H310 controller so we can have direct access to the drives via pass-through. The H310 allows TRIM support for SSDs and SMART data via smartctl to be used without any problems. If you are interested in SMART information and PERC H700 series RAID controller, I posted about possible workarounds at Dell’s customer support site.
