Recently in Linux Category

Ubuntu is out today, but as of this writing the official Ubuntu site has not yet been updated with a download option for version 7.10, the "Gutsy Gibbon" release.

You can get it, however, if you're willing to search a little on the Ubuntu Mirrors. I'm currently downloading the desktop and the server editions of Ubuntu 7.10 from a German mirror while the official Ubuntu site still only makes version 7.04 available for download. Look in the ".pool" directories.

You don't need to download a new CD if you're simply upgrading your installation. Instead, if you want to get it while it's fresh from the oven and not yet on the store shelf, you may have to update your distribution source list to point to a mirror that hosts the most recent version of Ubuntu.

Assume you a set of files that you wish to post on the binary newsgroups; for example, a CD or a DVD with hundreds of Mbytes or maybe several Gbytes of data. There are a variety of applications that can do that for you, but sometimes it's convenient to use command line tools. (You'll need Linux for this.)

1. Install RAR. Just download the Linux distribution and unpack it. It contains an executable named "rar."
2. Install par2cmdline. I wasn't able to get the binary files to run on my system, and the source code wouldn't compile until I wrote this patch. Apply it to reedsolomon.cpp in the source code directory with "patch < par2cmdline.patch," and it will probably work.
3. Install cksfv.
   
4. Install newspost.

Some of these tools can be installed via apt-get.

You'll get three kinds of files to post: RAR archive files, PAR2 parity files, and an SFV checksum file. You should probably decide on a similar file name for each kind of file such as "mypost.rar", "mypost.par2", and "mypost.sfv".

The first thing you do is to compress the files and limit their size. You're about to spend a whole lot of bandwidth soon, so compress them tightly. In the following example, rarfilename is the name of the RAR output file (without the ".rar" extension), and the following files are the ones to be added to the archive. The example produces an archive that is split for every 50 Mbytes, includes recovery records, and applies maximum compression:

rar a -rr -m5 -v50000 rarfilename file1 file2 file3 ... filen

Next, expect errors on the news servers. Create so-called PAR2 recovery files containing at least 10% redundant information as follows. Again, omit the ".par2" extension from the PAR2 file name.

par2create -r10 -s262144 parfilename *.rar

As an optional step, you may want to create an SFV file with CRC-32 checksums for the posted files.

cksfv *.rar *.par2 > sfvfilename.sfv

You now have the compressed and split archive, recovery blocks for when the news servers around the world don't replicate the posts correctly, and a checksum file. Now it's time to post. yourusername and yourpassword may be required by your news server, but otherwise you may omit those switches. You can specify that the files are to be cross-posted to several newsgroups by separating the newsgroups with a comma; e.g., "-n alt.binaries.dvd,alt.binaries.dvdr". Everything else is hopefully self-explanatory:

newspost -i news.yournewsserver.com -u yourusername -p yourpassword \
  -f your@email.address -F "Your Name" -n alt.binaries.test \
  -s "Subject of the post" -q -y *rar *par2 *sfv

Now go get a cup of coffee. Or go to bed if your archive is several Gigabytes large, because your files are now posted to the news server.

The first time around, try the above with just a few small files, and use alt.binaries.test to verify that your files are posted. Oh, and limit the amount of cross-posting so you don't post your home videos to all of the erotica binary newsgroups.

If you know of similar tools that can be used to achieve the same effects, please let me know. I'm mostly interested in alternatives to par2cmdline and newspost.

My change from Windows to Linux wasn't based on ideological feelings against Microsoft or for Linux: It was a simple question of my getting tired of having to reinstall Windows every half a year because Windows had slown to a crawl. In addition, I've seen what I need to know about Vista by now, and wouldn't dream of upgrading the hardware all of the computers in our home to run an expensive operating system.

At the same time Linux is maturing. My current suite of applications that replace my usual Windows suite of applications include the following applications, most of which are free in my Kubuntu 7.04 installation (that is, Ubuntu with KDE as desktop):

It wasn't until I had already gotten my first iPod about a month ago (in black, of course, because if you're anything like me, you know that black isn't a color but an attitude) that I discovered its audio book support. Audio books can be read aloud via the iPod at normal rate or at a slightly reduced or increased rate without changing the speach pitch. The iPod also remembers where I left off in an audio book, resuming from that position the next time I decide to listen to the audio book.

Since we have a number of audio books in tape or CD format for our kids, it only made sense to convert them to audio book format for the iPod to bring along on long rides by car, for example.

The creation of an audio book from existing files isn't straightforward, unfortunately, as the iPod audio book format relies on Apple's proprietary formats.

It took me a while of searching and reading online until I learned how to easily convert a collection of MP3 files into an audio book suitable for an iPod.

First, get the following support software:

• mp3wrap, for combining multiple MP3 files into one,
  
• mplayer, for decoding MP3 files to PCM format, and
  
• faac, for converting audio to the audio book format.

Use your Linux distribution's preferred method for downloading and installing these free (of course!) utilities. On my Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 distribution, aptitude was able to locate, download, and install all three utilities.

You probably have multiple chapters or books in MP3 format from your CD or tape rip of the audiobook. Make sure they're named sequentially, e.g., "chapter001.mp3," "chapter002.mp3," etc. Combine these MP3 files into one single MP3 file using mp3wrap as follows:

mp3wrap outputfilename *.mp3

where outputfilename is the name of the combined MP3 files. You could call it "audiobook," for example.

Next, convert the file to PCM. This requires lots of disk space:

mplayer -vc null -vo null -ao pcm:nowaveheader:fast:file=outputfilename.pcm \
  outputfilename_MP3WRAP.mp3

where outputfilename is the same name as you chose for the mp3wrap utility. I'm using mplayer for the conversion, because several other MP3-to-PCM conversion utilities fail as soon as the PCM file size exceeds two Gigabytes.

When you start mplayer, look for a line in the status output that looks something like this:

AO: [alsa] 44100Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample)

This output indicates that the audio is output at a sample rate of 44,100 Hz (the sample rate of an audio CD), has two channels (i.e., it's stereo), and that sample in each channel is encoded in 16 bits, or 2 bytes, as "little-endian" (Intel mode).

Assuming that the parameters are 44,100 Hz, two channels, and 16 bits per sample, convert the PCM file to an audio book using faac:

faac -R 44100 -B 16 -C 2 -X -w -q 80 --artist "author" --album "title" \
  --title "title" --track "1" --genre "Spoken Word" --year "year" \
  -o outputfilename.m4b outputfilename.pcm

Again, outputfilename is your audio book filename. You probably want to rename it to reflect the title of the book by now if you didn't already specify that as an output filename. In the above syntax, author, title, and year are the author, the title, and the year of publishing of the book. You can put anything as genre, but "Spoken Word" is probably a good choice.

If the output of mplayer says anything else than 44,100 Hz, 2 ch, and s16le, such as 22050 Hz or 1 ch, then you must modify the appropriate parameters for faac. Instead of specifying "-R 44100," specify "-R 22050" in case the sample rate was 22050 Hz, and "-C 1" in case there was only one channel (1 ch) in the above command line example.

Once faac has finished encoding, which is by far the most time consuming part of the conversion process, you may safely delete outfilename.pcm. You can also delete your MP3 files, but you may want to hold on to the original MP3 files.

Audio books can be purchased and downloaded from a variety of online stores, but you might want to see if you can get one for free first. Check out Librivox, Project Gutenberg, Free Classic Audio Books, or Audiobooks.org for free audio books. These were just some of the suppliers of free audio books that came up on a Google search, so perhaps you'd like to add additional sources of free audio books in the comments?