Category: General

Play H.264 Encoded Video On Ubuntu

If you want to play H.264 (also known as MPEG-4 AVC) video on Ubuntu you will need to go through a few steps. It’s possible, and I’ll show you how. It’s a little complex, but I’m sure you can handle it. In just a few terminal commands, you’ll be able to play H.264 encoded media.

If you don’t know, the H.264 encoding is a codec. Codecs enable playback and creation of media types. The H.264 codec is still pretty new and, more importantly, isn’t ‘free’. It isn’t truly open source, and it is patent encumbered software. As Linux doesn’t do the whole closed source thing, it can actually take some work to make H.264 encoded videos play in Ubuntu.

The phrase H.264 covers a fairly broad video encoding and transportation of compressed video. In the uncompressed format, it’s not of much use to the viewer. To be able to use/view the media you’ll need the codecs and some additional software.

This article is going to tell you how to install everything you need in order to play high-def, H-264 encoded video. It’s not all that complicated and you can mostly just follow the directions one-by-one and call it good.

Play H.264 Encoded Video:

First, open up a terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T and enter the following command:

Now, with that entered, you should get some interactive screens. Agree to everything on offer by using the arrow button to navigate between choices and pressing the ENTER to confirm your selections.

Next, you’ll reconfigure some options by entering the following:

Again, make sure to agree in the same way you did with the above command.

Following that, you’ll need to enable a repository. It’s the multiverse repository, and you could do it with a GUI, or you can just enter the following:

Which would be followed with this:

That will, of course, require some interaction (like accepting the EULA). That interaction is the same as the above – navigate with arrow keys and confirm your selection with the ENTER button.

And that’s it. You may want to reboot to ensure everything has restarted and working. You can do that with:

Like I said, it’s not all that difficult. You can basically follow the commands and not know exactly what they’re doing. Like always, it’s best to know what the commands will do – but the ones in this article are pretty self-explanatory.

Closure:

Yup… Another article, and this one wasn’t too terribly complicated. It’s something you should know – if you want to play patent encumbered videos on your devices. Sadly, as it stands today, we have to jump through these hoops to get compatibility. As long as this sort of stuff is proprietary, it’s going to be a problem (for many distros) for the foreseeable future.

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Disable Printing And CUPS.

I don’t print much of anything these days, and haven’t for a long time, and on older hardware I’d disable printing by disabling CUPS. I’ve also found printing enabled on server installs. That doesn’t seem like a good default to me, but I’m definitely not an expert. 

If you don’t need to print, you don’t need the CUPS services running. Today, we’ll discuss disabling it. We could mask the services, like we did in the article about disabling sleep/hibernation. Instead of doing that, we’ll use this as an opportunity to show how to disable a service. That seems like a reasonable choice.

If you don’t know, Linux printing is (usually) controlled by CUPS. CUPS is developed by our friends at Apple. CUPS has actually been around since the late 90s and has pretty much become the default printing system. If you check the man page, it defines itself like:

cups – a standards-based, open source printing system

And the description:

CUPS is the software you use to print from applications like word  processors, email readers, photo editors, and web browsers. It converts the page descriptions produced by your application (put a paragraph here, draw a line there, and so forth) into something your printer can understand and then sends the information to the printer for printing.

If you don’t print from your system, you don’t need the service running. Back when I cared about optimization, this would be something I’d disable. I’m not sure that it ever did much good at making things run faster, but it definitely made me feel like I was doing something!

Disable Printing/CUPS:

Like many other articles on this site, we need an open terminal. You can open a terminal with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T. That should do it!

Now, with your terminal open, we just need to enter a few commands. Just in case, we should first make sure to stop any of the printing services. To do that, you run the following:

If you did it right, you’ll get no feedback. We also need to stop ‘browsed’ (the daemon that broadcasts/receives broadcasts from remote printers) with:

Again, nothing should show up on your screen. You’re also done stopping any of the printing services and the next step will be to disable those services. It’s pretty easy – you just replace the stop with disable. It looks like this:

And again for the daemon:

That should do it, actually. You should now no longer be able to print from your device. This could even be an additional security setting for times when you don’t want basic users to be able to print sensitive information while still keeping a printer up on the network. If the system can’t print, you don’t have to worry about them acquiring the print credentials. For those who’ve covered the costs of a ‘print room’, you might even see some benefits on the bottom line!

Closure:

See? That was a nice and easy article. It’s not even all that long! Heck, the stuff around the commands is more complicated than the commands themselves! Now that I think about it, that kinda describes a bunch of these articles. I can’t write essays every day! Besides, who would read them?!?

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Why I Use Linux

Today’s article will be short and simple, about why I use Linux. I’ve wanted to write it for a while, and it may end up being another one of those articles that gets updates over time. (Note: This article is from the defunct site, due to a death in the family.)

I tend to use Lubuntu and that’s my preferred desktop system – even after the change to LXQt. It’s visually simple and familiar. It’s light on resources, even though I have plenty.

I don’t use Linux because I hate Microsoft. You’ll never see me call them a derogatory name. I don’t have any major anger towards Microsoft or their products.

I don’t even care if the product I’m using is opensource. Being closed-source doesn’t bother me. I care that the application works and lets me do the things for which I installed it.

I am using a closed-source browser as I type this. Like Linux, it just works for me. It gets out of my way and lets me accomplish my computing goals.

That’s what I really like about Lubuntu. It just gets out of my way. Once it is configured, I don’t have to keep tinkering with it. I don’t have to continually pay attention to the operating system – it just keeps working and I just keep updating it.

I love the simplicity and efficacy of the terminal. When I boot my computer, a terminal emulator is one of the first things I open. I often have two or three of them open at once.

I never have any hardware issues that I can’t resolve. Sure, it may be a bit difficult to find your wireless driver – but once you do then you needn’t worry about it again. In the mean time, tether your phone and connect that way. Then again, I always have an adapter that works well enough for me to get the drivers for any built-in hardware.

I don’t see the process as any different than Windows. You have to put some effort in to make it work. But, once it’s installed, all of my updates are done at the same time and with just a single command. The concept of a package manager is fantastic and you get a wide variety to choose from.

I like both the sense of community and the actual community. If I really want to put the effort in, I can find the person what wrote the driver for my wireless adapter. I don’t suppose that’s really true with any other operating system. With Linux, I can find the person(s) who put my OS together – and, in fact, I do. I try talk with them at least once a week at the online team meeting. I recognize many of the names I see across the ‘net and I’ve known some of them for many years.

I suppose that I do like having access to the source code. I don’t tend to make (m)any changes, as my programming skills aren’t that great these days. Still, I do sometimes make a quick change, apply my own patch, and compile applications on my own.

I like that I have the freedom to have as much, or as little, operating system as I want. I can have a distro with everything installed or I can have a distro that barely has a terminal installed – and you’ve gotta compile that yourself. There are so many choices. There’s a Linux for everyone and, if you’re willing to learn, there are seemingly infinite combinations. I like being able to pick my desktop environment, favorite terminal emulator, favorite window manager, etc…

I like that it’s always changing. I legitimately like systemd, for example. I like learning Netplan. I like learning the new features. I like understanding what’s going on under the hood – or having access to people that can actually explain it. I also like that no matter how hard I try, I will never truly understand everything. There’s always something new to learn. There’s always something new to ‘geek out’ with.

I guess, with the above, you could say that I like the constant innovation. Sure, sometimes Linux is trying to ‘keep up’ with the other mainstream operating systems – and sometimes it goes out on the edge and the community does things you simply can’t find elsewhere.

Linux isn’t perfect. There are bugs aplenty and flaws we’d maybe not tolerate in an operating system we paid for. Sure, we overlook the warts and call it our own – but we really can call it our own. We can meaningfully contribute to a project, to a distro, to an organization, and to the community. There are so many ways that we can give back, and that is awesome.

Anyhow, I don’t want to make this too long. Feel free to write a sentence or two below, letting me know why you like Linux. If you’d like, instead of responding where you’d normally find me, respond here so that folks can see this in the future and see your contributions to the subject.

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Let’s Determine The Number of RAM Slots Without Opening The Case

Today’s article is going to show you how to determine the number of RAM slots without actually opening up your case. It’s actually a pretty easy task, consisting of just a single command. 

But, wait! There’s more! You may want to know than how many RAM slots you have, you may want to know a lot more about the RAM you have already installed, how many slots are filled, if your RAM has ECC (error correction), the speed, the quantity of RAM per stick, etc…

Well, you can do all that and you can do it all with just a single command. The command in question is dmidecode. While dmidecode isn’t guaranteed to be 100% accurate, it’s usually pretty close. It pulls its data from tables in the DMI (SMBIOS) and presents them to you. Hardware manufacturers aren’t always as nice to Linux users as they could be, so there’s some risk of bad information – or wrongly interpreted information.

While dmidecode has partially been covered previously, it defines itself as:

dmidecode – DMI table decoder

And dmidecode is a pretty handy tool. In a previous article we used it with some success, and we’ll be using it again today, this time to determine the number of RAM slots available to you. On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d say this is a solid 2 – meaning even a rank beginner can follow along.

Determine The Number of RAM Slots:

This article requires an open terminal. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal open, enter the following command:

The line that is important is, “Number of Devices”. On my laptop, the output looks like this:

using dmidecode to determine the number of RAM slots available
The answer is two. Two slots. Ah ah ah ah! Oh how I love to count things!

So, from that, we can determine the number of RAM slots is equal to two. If you want, you can then scroll down and it will show you what RAM is installed. You can see if you have the same number of devices as you have slots. You can even see the size, number of slots, location, vendor. You can use it to learn a great deal about your RAM. 

As I mentioned above, it’s not necessarily going to be 100% accurate. With bleeding edge of hardware, you’ll find it may be less accurate. If your hardware has been around for a bit, you can be pretty sure of the accuracy.

One of the things I notice is the “Maximum Capacity”. That may mean OEM suggested max capacity. I’ve sure seen more RAM than the claimed maximum. On the system, I see a max capacity of 8 GB of RAM. The box has 16 GB of RAM. I’ve seen it claim a maximum of 4 GB of RAM but had 16 GB of RAM in that box. 

Otherwise, it is usually pretty accurate. In the above, I suspect some OEMs are less than honest and would rather you not know that you can add as much RAM as you can. They’d rather you buy a more expensive device, so report the maximum RAM as less than it really supports. However, that’s just a guess and I have zero evidence to support it. It does seem pretty common, however.

Closure:

And there you have it, another article said and done. This one will help you determine the number of RAM slots that you have available. It’s a pretty easy article and a good tool to have in your toolbox. 

As you may have surmised, the antibiotics are kicking in. I’m feeling quite a bit better. Hopefully the articles reflect that. For the past few, I’ve kinda been phoning it in. My goal is to get ahead again. I can probably do that over the coming weekend. 

… Also, anyone reading this out of sequence probably has no idea what half of these closure comments are about. Then again, how many of those folks keep reading after the important bits? Probably not a whole lot. I could write darned near gibberish down here and nobody would be the wiser.

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Let’s Learn About Halt

Today’s article is about the halt command. The reason we’re writing about the halt command today is because I was halfway through another article before I realized I’d already written an article on that subject. So, this is going to just be a nice, easy article.

And, yes, yes I did write more than half of an article that I’ve already written. I ain’t even intoxicated!

The command we’re looking at using today is called ‘halt’. For such a little command, here’s an interesting post about the difference between halt and shutdown. And, if that’s not enough, you can read the other answers and comments on that page. 

Anyhow, halt is described like this in the man page:

halt, poweroff, reboot – Halt, power-off or reboot the machine

Of those three, we’ll just be covering the halt. Yes, the man page contains all three in just one page. They’re all related. As I said, we’ll just be covering the useful features of halt command today.

And, without further ado…

The Halt Command:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

Once you have the terminal open, the first use of halt would be just to halt the system:

That will halt your CPU. It probably won’t shutdown your computer all the way, it will just stop it. So too won’t the -f (force) flag. If you force it, it just stops the CPU. It looks like and requires sudo:

Finally, of the options we’ll cover, is the -p flag, and the -p stands for poweroff. It’s just another way to shut down your computer, and it obviously looks like this:

Those are about the only ways you’re ever going to use it, if you use it at all. It’s not a command that you’re likely to bump into but now you know it exists and how to use it.

Closure:

There you have it, another article. This one covers the halt command in Linux. It’s not a major article, but I needed one in a hurry – just to ensure there’s one scheduled. While my health is mostly returned, I’m still not so caught up that I have a bunch of extra articles. Feel free to step up and write one or two!

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