Digikam crashes on Debian

Dec 182012
 

Today I thought it’s time to install digikam and play with it. I was using digikam when I was still on Ubuntu and compared to F-Spot and Shotwell, digikam was way way superior when it comes to tag management.

Of course I immediately ran

sudo aptitude install digikam

and installed diigkam 2.6.0 along with its necessary dependencies.

 

The Problem

Then I just ran

digikam

and I started, asked me some useful questions and then greeted me with:

QSqlDatabasePrivate::removeDatabase: connection 'ConnectionTest' is still in use, all queries will cease to work.
[0x2f86b90] main services discovery error: no suitable services discovery module
digikam: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/qt4/plugins/phonon_backend/phonon_vlc.so: undefined symbol: libvlc_audio_filter_list_get

Normally I don’t pay attention to the messages in the terminal after starting a program (Hello, Iceweasel), but digikam was nice enough to crash, so that I would not distract me from the error message. How kind.

 

The Solution

When looking at the error message, you can see that the file “/usr/lib/qt4/plugins/phonon_backend/phonon_vlc.so” plays some role here. And playing around with aptitude you can find a package named “phonon-backend-vlc”. The package name matches the file having the problem quite nicely. I am convinced now, that the solution is to remove the package (be sure you do not need it):

sudo aptitude remove phonon-backend-vlc

Aptitude might then suggest to remove a bunch of other stuff as well (digikam among them), which I find counter-productive. So I just enter “n” the first few times until I am satisfied with the solution aptitude offers me:

The following actions will resolve these dependencies:

     Install the following packages:                   
1)     phonon-backend-gstreamer [4:4.6.0.0-2 (testing)]

That does not sound too bad, so I accept it.

When aptitude is done removing the phonon-backend-vlc package, I try it again:

digikam

And now it works.

Error: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library ‘/usr/lib/php5/20100525/suhosin.so’ [Debian Wheezy]

Sep 162012
 

The Problem

Chances are you have seen the following error message (or else you would probably not have found this post):

Error: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/lib/php5/20100525/suhosin.so' -
/usr/lib/php5/20100525/suhosin.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory in Unknown, line 0

I hope I am not the only one who lived with this message for a while, because everything was working as expected. But even though I never noticed any real problem, the message surely gets on your nerve after a while, so it’s time to make it go away…

 

The Solution

The solution is actually very easy. As mentioned on the Debian Bug Tracking System ages ago, all you need to do is to purge the suhosin package (the php5-suhosin package, to be precise):

sudo aptitude purge php5-suhosin

(In case you have not enabled sudo, just do the usual and run this command as superuser without the sudo.)

Using a HTML5 based video player on Youtube instead of Flash

Sep 072012
 

This will be a very short post. If you want to use the HTML5 based video player on Youtube instead of the Flash based one (which is presented to you by default), then you just need to follow these simple steps:

Enabling HTML5

Go to http://www.youtube.com/html5 and at the bottom you will see this:

before entering the HTML5 trial on Youtube

Here you can see the capabilities of your browser and if you currently are in the HTML5 trial (which means HTML5 will be enabled). As you can see here, it states “You are not currently in the HTML5 trial”.

But directly below this statement, there is a link which reads “Join the HTML5 Trial”. When you click on it, HTML5 on Youtube will be enabled and the site will now look like this:

after entering the HTML5 trial on Youtube

That’s it. You don’t need to do anything else. But one thing you should know is that the HTML5 based player will not work on all videos. Therefore, if you still happen to see the flash based video player on a lot of videos, it does not mean that enabling HTML5 did not work. It just means that those videos can not be presented to you using the HTML5 based player.

Check Which Player Is Used On A Specific Video

You can check if the HTML5 based player is used by right clicking on a video while it’s playing or paused. If the HTML5 based player is used, you will see something like this when right clicking on it):

The HTML5 is used for video playback

The “About HTML5″ indicates that this is the HTML5 based player.

When the default Flash based played is used, the menu presented to you when right-clicking on the video will look like this instead (the version at the bottom will be different, but you can clearly see that it’s the “Adobe Flash Player” which is used):

The Flash based player is used for video playback

 

Like I said, the HTML5 based player will not be used for every video and you might even be wondering if entering the HTML5 trial worked at all, because quite a lot of videos will still be played with the Flash based player. All I can tell you is: It does work! The number of videos that will be presented to you this way will probably increase over time.

Command: md5sum (Extended Documentation)

Apr 042012
 

I published an extended documentation for the md5sum command in my wiki:

http://www.tordeu.com/commands/md5sum

md5sum Command Overview (Cheat Sheet)

Jan 292012
 

I published a small command overview (cheat sheet) for md5sum on my site:

md5sum Command Overview (Cheat Sheet)

Using Aliases in Bash

Jan 222012
 

Introduction

What Aliases Are

Here is a short introduction to aliases in case you have not idea what they are:

An alias is simply a different name for a specific command line command. You can call an alias like any other program and the shell will then replace the alias with the command it represents.

If you find yourself typing”aptitude” a lot you could, for example, define an alias “a” for this command instead. Now, instead of typing

aptitude install <package>

you just need to type

a install <package>

Bash will recognize that the command a is really just an alias that stands for “aptitude” and therefore replace a with “aptitude”. You could make your like even easier by assigning an alias “ai” to the command “aptitude install”. Then, when typing

ai <package>

bash will notice that the command “ai” is really just an alias for “aptitude install” and replace “ai” accordingly. Therefore, the command that bash will execute is:

aptitude install <package>

Continue reading »

Disable GNOME3′s Habbit Of Turning Off The Display After Some Time.

Jan 152012
 

Gnome3 has the annoying habbit of turning off the monitor after a while, even if you are watching a video. Unfortunately, if you go to

System Settings > Screen
 

you will be surprised that if offers you the possibility to change the time the system has to be idle for the monitor to be turned off from 1 minute to 1 hour. But what is missing is an option to turn this function off entirely.

Fortunately, it is possible to do that, just not in System Settings and you can either do that from command line or with a GUI.

Continue reading »

How to use Ctrl+Alt+F1 etc. in a Virtual Machine in VirtualBox

Jan 072012
 

Problem

When using a virtual machine in VirtualBox you might want to switch to a different console by hitting

Ctrl+Alt+F<n>
 

where <n> stands for the number of the console you want to access (like Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get a text console and Ctrl+Alt+F7 to get back to your X session).

Unfortunately, key combinations with Ctrl+Alt like the mentioned Ctrl+Alt+F<n> or Ctrl+Alt+Del will not be sent to the guest operating system. Continue reading »

rename – Batch renaming files in command line

Dec 082011
 

 

There are several ways one can batch rename files in Linux. One of the possibilities is the linux command rename.

Usage

To rename files you have to supply a Perl expression. Using Perl expressions might be scary for beginners (because they look like someone hit his head on the keyboard), but they allow for complex renaming with a minimum of characters.

Although I won’t go into detail about Perl expressions here, I will try to make it a little easier for beginners to use them for batch renaming.

According to the man page of rename, this is the way to use rename:

rename [ -v ] [ -n ] [ -f ] perlexpr [ files ]

If you have not worked with Perl expressions before, this might not be enough to get you started. So let me present you with the way one would probably use rename most of the time:

rename 's/OLD/NEW/' FILES

OLD is an expressions which describes a pattern in the name filenames. If rename can find this pattern in the name of a file, it will replace this part of the filename with what is defined as NEW. The files rename should rename are defined by FILES.

Let me provide you with two examples: Continue reading »

Converting FLAC to MP3 (including Tags) on command line

Nov 232011
 

 (Download the script from this article flac2mp3.sh)

When converting FLAC files to MP3, the first problem you will notice is that lame does not support FLAC files. This might now seem like big problem, because you can easily decode FLAC files using the command line tool flac and then use the decoded file with lame.

The Problem

The real problem is that you will loose your metadata in this process, so the tags you added to your FLAC won’t be copied to the MP3 file. While you could “easily” add them by hand, it is pretty annoying to do that even if you only want to convert a handful of files.

Continue reading »

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