Author: Gayan

If you recently switched to GNU/Linux (from Windows) and all you do is just browse the web, play a video, listen to some music … you know the ‘usual things’, then you surely don’t really need to worry about running your favorite, Windows based applications in GNU/Linux, because GNU/Linux has apps that can do those pretty easily. But that’s not to undermine the power of GNU/Linux, as even if you perform complex tasks such as heavy graphics or video editing, composing documents etc, then there are still, very powerful applications such as ‘GIMP’ or ‘LibreOffice’ that can come into your…

‘ffmpegthumbnailer’ is a ‘FFmpeg’ based video thumbnailer for GNU/Linux. It is very popular among the users because it has the ability to generate video thumbnails few times faster than the ones included in desktop environments such as Gnome & KDE. I have written about how to install it in Ubuntu and Linux Mint (Cinnamon) in the past. Now because I have been using Fedora 18 in the past few days, I thought of writing an article on how to install it in Fedora might be beneficial for the users who are less experienced in GNU/Linux. As far as I know,…

I cannot really point out the exact reason, but a lot of GNU/Linux distributions fail to keep the last saved status of my Bluetooth device. So even if I had turned it OFF in my previous desktop session, the next time I login, it will be turned ON. This is how it is with Ubuntu, and sadly, the same issue exists in Fedora 18 as well. Most Laptop users don’t use their Bluetooth connection, and when not used, it should be turned OFF, as it draws a reasonable amount of power when running. And turning it OFF, will also prolong…

In GNU/Linux, you can create a bootable USB flash drive using an ISO disc image of another distribution, by using the command-line. The command that is used to create that is called ‘dd’. By default, almost all USB flash drives use a common partition layout (which of course can be changed) that consists of a single, primary partition occupying the whole space. However, when you use ‘dd’ on an USB flash drive, it will destroy this layout and will create a new partition layout. It will create a partition that is big enough to hold the data of that ISO…

Windows 8 comes with a new feature called ‘fast start-up’ (also called ‘hybrid boot’), which is based on the ‘hibernation’ feature that came with older versions of Windows. ‘Hybrid boot’ lets Windows 8 to boot really fast, and it is also enabled automatically when you shut down your computer too. If you dual boot your Windows 8 computer, say with Ubuntu, then with this feature comes a drawback as well. For example, after shutting down Windows 8, if the next time you boot into Ubuntu and tried to access Windows 8’s OS partition, then ‘Nautilus’ (file manager) will give you…

‘ffmpeg’ is a powerful multimedia framework (a set of tools for handling multimedia file) that is being used by hundreds (if not thousands) of audio & video applications (editors, encoders, players, streaming apps … you name it!). It supports multiple operating system platforms, and if you use GNU/Linux, then applications such as; VLC, MPLayer, OpenShot & Kdenlive (video editors) and even ‘Gstreamer’ (another multimedia framework) supports using ‘ffmpeg’ for playback (these are of course just a handful to mention). Anyway, as an Ubuntu user, if you wanted extract the audio track of a multimedia file (without having to encode it)…

As mentioned in a previous article, the hibernation feature in Windows 8 can have a direct impact on your computer’s performance (as it reduces the booting times impressively), therefore, unless you are having a serious issue, it is recommended that you keep it enabled. However, if you want to disable it (say that you’re running out of free space on your Windows partition, and one cannot move the ‘hiberfile.sys’ to another partition either. If that is the case then you can try reducing its size though), then it can be done pretty easily. For that, please follow the below steps.…

Whether it’s a laptop, desktop or a mobile computer, Windows 8 boots really fast compared to its predecessors, and the main reason behind that is the newly implemented ‘hybrid boot’ or ‘fast start-up’ feature. As the name suggests, it is nothing but an improved version of the existing ‘hibernate’ feature that had been there in Windows operating systems for a long time. Below is a simple explanation of the process and few ways that you can use to disable this feature … An operating system’s boot process can be divided into two main ‘phases’ called he ‘Kernel Session’ and the…

Thought it is certainly not my favorite multimedia player, any GNU/Linux distribution that comes with Gnome desktop or make use of its core applications, use ‘Totem’ as the multimedia player. Plus, it is also being used to create thumbnails of video files (including ‘previewing’ audio files) as well. Like many others, I too have been using the Gnome desktop, even before ‘Totem’ had this feature. Sure it had its issues in the beginning, but nowadays, once you have installed the proper multimedia codecs, it can generate thumbnails of almost all the popular video formats without much difficulty. However, ‘totem-video-thumbnailer’ (that…

I don’t know which to blame here, whether its VLC or the PulseAudio sound server’s fault or something else. Because whenever I’m playing a multimedia file in VLC (noticed it while using the newly installed Linux Mint 14 Cinnamon), according to the system monitor, the ‘PulseAudio’ process uses unnecessary amount of CPU cycles. For example, if I were playing an audio file, then ‘PulseAudio’ uses even higher CPU cycles than VLC does!, despite the fact that it is VLC that is doing the decoding etc, therefore it should be the one that uses most of the CPU. If I were…

Few days ago, Linux Mint 14 (Nadia) was released, so I decided to give it a go. I downloaded the ‘Cinnamon’ version, and as soon as the download fished, I went ahead and wiped out Ubuntu and installed Linux Mint 14. Within the first few minutes of using the Cinnamon desktop, I said to myself, wow!, and let me tell you why. Linux Mint developers originally tried to fork the Gnome Shell desktop by using the ‘Mint Gnome Shell Extensions’. But after seeing the drawbacks of using mere extensions to customize a desktop, as they are after all extensions, and…

Sometimes, stress testing a computer (despite what operating system it uses) can be a very useful thing. For example, if you have a faulty hardware, say a hard disk drive that is having performance issues, then you can run disk I/O intensive tests to see whether it is stable or not. Or, if you have just overclocked your hardware (CPU, GPU, RAM …) and want to make sure that it won’t make your computer unstable, before applying those changes permanently, then stress testing is among the best ways of knowing that also (or for evaluating the capability of your PC in…