Playing only Audio from a Video File

If you want to play only audio from a video file (say xyz.avi),
please provide -vo null in mplayer, given as:

$ mplayer -vo null xyz.avi


Speeding up Disk Performance

We can increase Hard Disk performance by ~40%, and decrease power consumption by Hard Disk, if we provide "noatime,nodiratime" options during partition mounting. Actually what happens is: whenever a file/directory is accessed, its atime "access time" is updated with epoch. These two options prevent these not-so-useful disk accesses. Hence
performance improvement.



The sample mount point (/home) entry in /etc/fstab may look like:

$ cat /etc/fstab | grep home
/dev/sda2 /home ext3 defaults,noatime,nodiratime 0 0

Windows XP in Grub 2

When I installed Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) on my laptop, I found that Debian Installer had not added Windows XP entry in the GRUB 2. You might also face same issue, then you can add following lines in /boot/grub/grub.cfg

## (1) Windows XP in /dev/sda1
menuentry "Windows XP" {
    set root=(hd0,1)
    chainloader +1
}

Here are few tips how to set root in the grub.cfg

# DEVICE NAME CONVERSIONS
#
#  Linux           Grub
# -------------------------
#  /dev/fd0        (fd0)
#  /dev/sda        (hd0)
#  /dev/sdb2       (hd1,2)
#  /dev/sda3       (hd0,3)
#

Cleaning of Temporary Install Files in Ubuntu/Debian

Cleaning of Temporary Install Files in Ubuntu/Debian can be done by giving
following commands:

$ sudo apt-get autoclean; sudo apt-get autoremove

How to change boot order in GRUB2?

With Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala), GRUB2 is the default boot loader.
How to change boot order in GRUB2?

1.
$ cat /etc/grub/grub.cfg
see the order of the wanted kernel. Starts from 0.

2.
$ vi /etc/default/grub
change GRUB_DEFAULT=0 value to wanted kernel

3. run
$ update-grub
to update

4. reboot and check with
$ uname -r
to see if correct kernel selected.

Find Biggest Files/Directories

Since ls does not give correct size on disk, better to
use du command.

$ du /path/to/dir | sort -nr

I hope above
command will give you the proper result you wanted.



Note: The above command may take large time, depending on

number of files in /path/to/dir . You can use depth(say 2) in
that dir.

$ du --max-depth=2 /path/to/dir | sort -nr 

Newer Yahoo! Messenger Protocol on Pidgin on Debian Lenny 5.0

Yahoo! has changed authentication method of Yahoo! messenger protocol, which is not supported in Pidgin (Version <>= 2.5.7) supports newer Yahoo! Messenger Protocol. But Debian 5.0 Lenny repository has older pidgin (2.4.3). We can install newer pidgin, in the following steps:

## download latest pidgin from pidgin.im (at this time 2.6.3 is latest)
$ wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/pidgin/files/Pidgin/pidgin-2.6.3.tar.bz2

## extract files using tar
$ tar -zxvf pidgin-2.6.3.tar.bz2

$ cd pidgin-2.6.3

## Configure, Compile, and make
$ ./configure --disable-screensaver --disable-vv --disable-avahi --disable-tcl --disable-tk --prefix=/usr 
$ make
$ sudo make install

Now you can use newer pidgin with newer Yahoo! Messenger. :)
Enjoy Yahoo!