Tip 1
Floola
Floola
Hi All,
I've been using a program called Floola. It can be found at www.floola.com. It is an open source application that has downloads for Windows, Linux, and Mac. You only have to download and extract it to your Ipod's drive. You can then browse to the file and run it and you get a full featured Ipod manager. I have the Windows and Linux versions copied to it so that I can run it from any computer.
Check it out,
xom4life
Tip 2
Improving Video Playback Quality
by DrDOS
This is going to be a big help for people who have problems playing videos and are getting washed out colors with too much brightness. The dev people might want to look at this too. What I've found is that modifying the driver preferences for the X11 server will give much better quality with Kaffeine and Mplayer.
For Mplayer, to to Preferences, Video and choose the:
X11 (Ximage/Shm) drivers.
For Kaffeine player go to Settings, Xine Engine Settings and choose the:
opengl drivers.
I've tested all the available ones and these give the best results.
Tip 3
Updating Pci.ids and Usb.ids
by Phinger
Firstly, what are pci.ids and usb.ids files? Well, they are the database files used by the lspci and lsusb commands. They contain all known ID's used in PCI and USB devices, that is, ID's of vendors, devices, subsystems and device classes. These files are constantly being updated so it is important to keep our copies similarly up to date, so let's do it.
These files reside in /usr/share/ and if you look you'll see you have a copy of each file there now - albeit probably out of date. To ensure regular updates of these files I use anacron to update them on a weekly basis. To achieve this, place your copies of the update-pciids.sh and update-usbids.sh scripts into the /etc/cron.weekly/ directory. You will need to be "root" to do this. Now we just need to ensure that anacron is being started at boot. Open PCLinuxOS Control Centre (Administration Centre) and navigate to System -> Enable or Disable the System Services. Ensure that anacron has the On Boot box ticked. Job done.
Now, we don't want to wait a week to test the scripts, so let's navigate to /etc/cron.weekly/ in Konqueror and then drop to a shell (Press F4). Now su to root and type ./update-pciids.sh. When it has completed we can then type ./update-usbids.sh. You can then open the new files in a normal text editor to see the date of this particular snapshot (about thirteen lines down from the top of the page ). There, all up to date. If you ever need to update quickly, rather than wait for the anacron job, you can use this method.
I hope this has been informative. You can always visit the Linux PCI ID Repository at:
http://pciids.sourceforge.net/
and your Linux USB ID Repository at:
http://www.linux-usb.org/usb.ids#
and you can even help by submitting new data.
Tip 4
How To Recover Your Desktop
by DrDos
Your mouse went on a rampage and all your desktop icons and the kicker panel are gone. All you have to look at is a nice picture. How do you get your desktop back? Pretty simple really.
Press Alt+F2 on the keyboard and a Run box should pop up. Type in "kcontrol" and press the Enter (Return) button. When the KDE control panel appears just go through the Desktop settings and put everything to default. You can fine tune things later. In about five minutes your desktop will be back to normal.