Firefox flash plugin: no sound

If you can not hear any sound when playing flash video in Firefox, It's probably because that you hasn't installed the package 'libflashsupport'. To solve it, just install that package and restart Firefox.

For Fedora, you may use the command

# yum install libflashsupport

Using `cvsd' to setup cvs pserver

CVS was designed to use `xinetd' to startup service. But now most Linux distributions do not install xinetd by default, and configuration of CVS is somewhat complicated. `cvsd' is a wrapper program for CVS in pserver mode, it can startup CVS as a standalone daemon, under a special uid/gid in a chroot jail. It is relatively easy to use cvsd and its configuration file to setup CVS repositories.

In this article, I will describe how to setup a cvs pserver step by step.

1. Installation of cvsd package

For RPM-based distributions, you may download precompiled RPMS from this site:

cvsd-1.0.14-1.i386.rpm
cvsd-1.0.14-1.src.rpm (source)

For other distributions, you may download source tarball here, compile and install it yourself.

Setup of VSFTPD - another approach

If you are hosting several web sites, for security reason, you may want the webmasters to access their own files only. One of the good way is to give them FTP access by setup of VSFTPD virtual users and directories.

In my last article, I described how to setup VSFTPD virtual users. In this article, I will describe another approach to setup VSFTPD, it needs real users on the system.

1. Installation of VSFTPD

For Red Hat, CentOS and Fedora, you may install VSFTPD by the command

# yum install vsftpd

For Debian and Ubuntu,

# apt-get install vsftpd

Setup of VSFTPD virtual users

If you are hosting several web sites, for security reason, you may want the webmasters to access their own files only. One of the good way is to give them FTP access by setup of VSFTPD virtual users and directories. This article describes how you can do that easily.
(See also: Setup of VSFTPD virtual users - another approach)

1. Installation of VSFTPD

For Red Hat, CentOS and Fedora, you may install VSFTPD by the command

# yum install vsftpd

For Debian and Ubuntu,

# apt-get install vsftpd

Method to solve `Downloading bookmarks ...' problem

I am migrating to `Google bookmarks', but the button on Google Toolbar always says `Downloading bookmarks ...'. But in Windows, Google Toolbar in Firefox can import, download, add bookmarks normally. What's different in Linux?

After googling for some time, I realize that it is due to lack of the library `libstdc++.so.5'. This is one of the old versions of C++ libraries, most of current Linux distributions do not install this library by default. The method to solve 'Downloading bookmarks' problem is:

1. Install the package that contains libstdc++.so.5. For Fedora 8:

# yum install compat-libstdc++-33

For Ubuntu:

# sudo apt-get install libstdc++5

For other distributions, you should install the corresponding packages.

2. Exit Firefox, restart Firefox, re-install Google Toolbar. This is very important, or else the problem will not be solved!

3. Restart Firefox. Now you can see all your bookmarks in your Google toolbar!

A shell script to convert APE/FLAC to mp3

There is a shell script that can convert a big APE/FLAC file to mp3 files easily. The author of the script is not clear, the script just says: Brian's Archive CUE/FLAC Splitter v0.1, No sanity checking in place. Be careful.

Download the script 'ape2mp3'. The original script has been slightly modified to be used with newer versions of the related software.

Use of the script is very simple (of course you need both the CUE file and the APE/FLAC file):

# ape2mp3 album.cue album.ape

It requires several packages installed on your system. For Fedora, some packages can be found at freshrpms.net. You may first install freshrpms-release, then use 'yum' to install them.

1. mac - Monkey's Audio Codec (MAC) utility and library

# yum install mac

2. lame - LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder... but it's the best of all

# yum install lame

3. shorten - Low complexity and fast waveform coder

# rpm -ivh shorten-3.6.0-1.2.i386.rpm
(src: shorten-3.6.0-1.2.src.rpm)

4. shntool - Multi-purpose WAVE data processing and reporting utility

# rpm -ivh shntool-3.0.6-1.i386.rpm
(src: shntool-3.0.6-1.src.rpm)

5. cuetools - Utilities to works with cue and TOC files

# rpm -ivh cuetools-1.3.1-2.i386.rpm
(src: cuetools-1.3.1-2.src.rpm)