Thursday, September 25, 2008

Tweaking your wireless on PCLinuxOS

Sometimes wireless card is troublesome to install. but there are always solution for it. here's mine

1. first is to know that kind of wireless device installed on your system. Have a copy of the drivers and save them to your hard drive. (for example im using a BCM4318 or Broadcom, BCM4318 Airforce)
2. open your text editor available and open /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist (note: must be a SuperUser to access or edit it)
3. go to the last line and input the following
#broadcom native driver
blacklist bcm43xx (bcm43xx is the device code for bcm4318)
4. save & close
5. open up terminal on SuperUser mode
6. type "rmmod bcm43xx" (or the device code you put on the blacklist)
7. type "rmmod ndiswrapper"
8. type "modprobe ndiswrapper"
9. type "ndiswrapper -l" (this give the list of wirelesscard installed on you linux system)
10. remove all of them one by one using "ndiswrapper -e" Example: " ndiswrapper -e Wsd33x" (wsd33x is the device code sample)
11. after removing them try checking by type "ndiswrapper -l" again
12. go to the directory where your driver is saved. Example "cd /home/yourusernamehere/drivers"
13. type "ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf" (note: this command will install the driver to your ndiswrapper using the .inf file {bcmw5l.inf is the file which is located on that folder} )
14. type "ndiswrapper -l" to check if it is properly installed
15. type "ndiswrapper -m"
16. restart your system and reconfigure wireless card to the PCLinuxOS Control Center.

after that lets hope it works perfectly fine ^_^

Thanks for phil0083 of the PCLinuxOS and Rayman411 of http://www.linuxquestions.org

is my instructions are not understandable go here
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-wireless-networking-41/how-to-for-the-bcm4318-airforce-one-card-473194/

Friday, September 19, 2008

My most required Program in PCLinuxOS

here are the following Programs/Application that is on my list when ever install PCLinuxOS

1. Pidgin
2. Openoffice.Org (office program needs)
3. Web Browser (FireFox)
4. Mplayer
5. Frostwire
6. Adobe Flashplayer
7. Adobe Acrobat Reader
8. Ktorrent(BitTorrent downloader/uploader)
9. GIMP (GNU Image Manilpulator Program)
10. Kuickshow(fast photo/image viewer)
11. Amarok
12 TiMidity++
13 K3b (CD/DVD Burning tools)
14. Realplayer
15. rar & unrar
16. beryl
17. Audacity(Audio manipulating program)
18. devede (VCD/DVD movie maker/recompiler)

other dependencies
1. avifile-win32
2. avifile-xvid
3. samba
4. win32-codecs-all
5. LAME

for kids
1. tuxpaint
2. tuxtype

Pidgin NoSound Solution

For some reason, Pidgin, do give a sound output to your computer even though the sound card and drivers works perfectly.

the best solution for that is do the following.
  1. In Pidgin, select Preferences from the Tools menu (or simply press Ctrl+P)
  2. Click on the Sounds tab
  3. In the Method drop down list, select Command
  4. In the Sound command text box, enter the following: aplay %s
  5. Select an event with an assigned sound from the Sound Events list
  6. Click the Test button. You should now hear the notification sound
  7. Click the Close button.
many thanks for Peter Ridge for the guide ^_^

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Converting WMA to Ogg

somehow some WMA versions are hard to convert to ogg or mp3 or any audio file.
but linux has a very good solution to it by using wma2ogg.pl.

how to use it?
1. fire up your terminal
2. go to the directory where the wma can be found
3. type the following
wma2ogg.pl -f filename.wma -br 128

Here the options, so you can understand better

-f, -filefilename
-aconverts all wma files in the current directory
OPTIONS:
-toutput filetype (ogg, mp3) [default=ogg]
-lameI wanna use L.A.M.E. sure enough!
-brbitrate (kb/s) [default=from the wma]
-delremove wma file(s) after the transcoding

therefor "wma2ogg.pl -f filename.wma -br 128" tells that -f filename.wma is obviously the wma file and -br 128 is to convert it to ogg with 128 bitrate.

after you have successfully converted the WMA to Ogg you can now convert the audio file easily in MP3, wav or any other audio format.

Friday, September 12, 2008

TiMidity++

General Information

TiMidity++ is a software synthesizer. It can play MIDI files by converting them into PCM waveform data; give it a MIDI data along with digital instrument data files, then it synthesizes them in real-time, and plays. It can not only play sounds, but also can save the generated waveforms into hard disks as various audio file formats.

TiMidity++ is a free software, distributed under the terms of GNU general public license.
The History

TiMidity++ is based on TiMidity 0.2i, written by Tuukka Toivonen *1, released on 1995. No new version of this original project is developed since then. Development has been continued by Masanao Izumo et al. in the new project named TiMidity++. ++ is to show the difference from original project.
♪ Features

* Plays MIDI files without any external MIDI instruments at all
* Understands SMF, MOD, RCP/R36/G18/G36, MFI
* Converts MIDI files into various audio file formats: .wav, .au, .aiff, .ogg and so on
* Uses Gravis Ultrasound compatible patch files and/or SoundFonts as the voice data
* Displays information about the music that is now playing
* Various user interfaces: ncurses, gtk, Win32-GUI, and others
* Plays remote MIDI files over the network
* Plays MIDI files in archive files
* Displays sound spectrogram for the playing music
* Trace playing

some terminal commands commonly used in TiMidity++ to convert midi file into wav & ogg format
1. timidity -Ow [sourcefile.mid] [objectfile.wav]
this command convert the source midi file to wav.
2. timidity -Ov [sourcefile.mid] [objectfile.wav]
this command convert the source midi file to ogg

playing midi on web using firefox
In order to play midi files on the web you must have both Timidity & Mozplugger installed in your system