Category Archives: Tips and tricks

How to compile Openmeetings: an audio and video conferensing program for Linux (Part I)

Disclaimer: Remember that everything in this post is provided purely on educational purposes. If any harm should come to your system the author of this blog withdraws from any responsibility.

Openmeetings home page: http://openmeetings.apache.org/

Openmeetings is an audio and video conferensing program for Linux which provides a free alternative for similar software provided by Adobe and others. Openmeetings home page says that: “Openmeetings provides video conferencing, instant messaging, white board, collaborative document editing and other groupware tools using API functions of the Red5 Streaming Server for Remoting and Streaming.”

In this entry we will do the following steps to get the essential Openmeetings parts:

1  Compile Yasm modular assembler  from git. Yasm is needed by X264
2. Compile x264 from git.X264 is an advanced encoding library for creating H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC) video streams.
3. Compile VP8 from git. VP8 is a video codec.

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How to change GRUB bootloader background

These days most Linux systems use GRUB (Grand Unified Bootloader) to provide the Linux booting experience which in most cases looks very basic as you can see from this Wikipedia screenshot: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AGRUB_screenshot.png

In order to change the default background of GRUB you can follow the next simple procedure:

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How to blacklist a sound card in Linux

Sometimes it may happen that you have a sound device that you do not use or then you are one of those people how dislike Pulseaudio and use Alsa instead. Especially with Alsa it gets very useful if you have only the sound device enabled which you actually use. Here are some notes about using Alsa instead of Pulseaudio in Linux.

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Mounting and unmounting devices from the command line

As it may happen sometimes you either work inside a terminal client or you find yourself using a Linux system or a filemanager which does not automatically mount volumes (meaning, for example, usb sticks or external hard drives). The next solution will help you on your mounting efforts.

Mounting devices

First you need to find out what is the address of the device you are trying to mount. Attach your  device to your computer and run, for example, gparted to see the device’s address (should be something like /dev/sdb1).

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