On Friday 18 Mar 2005 9:27 pm, Arun Tomar wrote: > Hi! > > I'm thinking of buying a laptop & run linux on it... which of the > distros will be good & which laptop.
For my money, Mandrake and Suse are the most popular distros that run laptops. But again I have a notebook that aint really cutting edge and stuff like Slackware and Ubuntu have stood me in good stead there....It all boils down to your choice...Ubuntu, these days gives me the right blend of user friendliness and efficiency. And since I am no distro fanatic, I use that on my notebook. The fact that its based on Debian gives me the flxibility to tinker and upgrade at the click of a button. And yeah, for those like me, who cant do without KDE, Kubuntu is just next door ===> http://www.kubuntu.org.uk/ You obviously can mix and match Kubuntu and Ubuntu and Sarge and what_have_you, in a matter of hours!! Soon you wouldnt even remember where you started off from... > plus can anyone tell me how to copy vcd's on to hard disk while using > mandrake 10.1 because it always give i/o error, but otherwise > directly plays the movies well. The following set of commands always does the magic for me ==> #cdrdao read-cd --read-raw --device ATA:1,1,0 --driver generic-mmc --datafile foobar.bin foobar.toc #cdrdao write --device ATA:1,0,0 --driver generic-mmc foobar.toc Of course the device parameter would change on your system. The *.bin files thus created can be directly played back in mplayer. Since mencoder encodes everything that mplayer plays, you can create a divx from these files by just using a small script that should take input as follows $ ./scriptname inputfile.bin outputfile.avi The source code for the file would be as follws:- rm frameno.avi mencoder $1 -ovc frameno -oac mp3lame -lameopts vbr=3:abr=128:q=0:aq=0 -o frameno.avi mencoder $1 -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:vpass=1:vbitrate=600:vqmin=2 -o $2 mencoder $1 -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:vpass=2:vbitrate=600:vqmin=2 -o $2 This is a three pass encoding process. You can tweak the a/v quality by adjusting the abr/vbitrate parameters. abr=128 and vbitrate=600 works well for me. Please remember that for the above process to work effectively, you must have lame installed mencoder compiled with lame support. Also if you are burning your divx to a disc, then you might as well burn your disc after creating an emovix(http://movix.sourceforge.net/) ISO, so that none of your friends who dont have Linux on their systems, have trouble finding a good player on Doze. They can just pop in the CD into their CD drives and boot from it. Its a great advertisement for Linux as well cos the movix system is an embedded Linux kernel+mplayer combo!! > Arun. -- /Sumeet Twenty Percent of Zero is Better than Nothing. -- Walt Kelly -- /Sumeet Sumeet Madhukar Moghe��http://cipher-quaker.blogspot.com ------------------------------------------------------------------ GnuPG Keys: ���http://smith-morgan.mirrorz.com/gnupg.txt Fingerprint : �1388 881A 6FED A370 78B7 1342 2F51 20C9 083C 704D ------------------------------------------------------------------ Incumbent, n.: Person of liveliest interest to the outcumbents. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" -- ______________________________________________________________________ Pune GNU/Linux Users Group Mailing List: ([email protected]) List Information: http://plug.org.in/mailing-list/listinfo/plug-mail Send 'help' to [EMAIL PROTECTED] for mailing instructions.
