RafKill Raptor Free Software (Open Source) clone for GNU/Linux

I've earlier blogged on playing Apogee's Raptor Shadows of Death arcade on GNU / Linux with dosbox All the old school raptor addicts will be interested to hear Kazzmir (Jon Rafkind) a free software devotee developer has created a small game resembling many aspects of the original Raptor arcade game. The game is called Rafkill and is aimed to be a sort of Raptor like fork/clone. Originally the game was also named Raptor like the DOS game, however in year 2006 it was changed to current Rafkill in order to avoid legal issues with Apogee's Raptor. The game is not anymore in active development, the latest Rafkill release is from January 2007, anyhow even for the 2012 it is pretty entertaining. The sound and music are on a good level for a Linux / BSD shoot'em'up free software game . The graphics are not of a top quality and are too childish, but this is normal, since the game is just one man masterpiece. Rafkill is developed in C/C++ programming language, the game music engine it uses is called DUMB (Dynamic Universal Bibliotheque). By the way DUMB library is used for music engine in many Linux arcade games. DUMB allows the Linux game developer to develop his game and play a music files within different game levels in "tracked" formats like mod, s3m, xm etc. The game is available in compiled form for almost all existent GNU/Linux distributions, as well as one can easily port it as it is open source. To install Rafkill on Debian, Ubuntu, Xubuntu and Linux Mint en other Debian based distros root@debian:~# apt-get install rafkill Installing on Fedora and other rpm based is with yum debian:~# apt-get install rafkill ... Once rafkill is installed, in order to start it on Debian the only way is using the rafkill (/usr/bin/rafkill) command. It appears the deb package maintainer did not wrote a gnome launcher file like for example /usr/share/applications/rafkill.desktop Just to explain for all the GNOME noobs, the .desktop files are a description file GNOME reads in order to understand where exactly to place certain application in the (Gnome Applications, Places, System …) menu panel. Even though it miss the .desktop, it is launchable via Applications menu under the Debian section e.g. to open it from the GNOME menus you will have to navigate to: Applications -> Debian -> Games -> Action -> Rafkill This "shortcut" to launch the game is quite long and hard to remember thus it is handy to directly launch it via xterm: hipo@debian:~$ rafkill or by pressing ALT+F2 and typing rafkill : Starting the game I got some really ugly choppy music / sound issues. My guess was the fizzling sounds were caused by some bug with the sound portions streamed through pulseaudio sound system. To test if my presume is correct, stopped pulseaudio and launched rafkill once again: hipo@debian:~$ pulseaudio -k hipo@debian:~$ rafkill This way the game was counting on ALSA to process sound en the sound was playing perfectly fine. I solved this problem through small wrapper shell script. The script did kill pulseaudio before launching rafkill and that way solve gchoppy sound issues, once the game execution is over the script starts pulseaudio again in order to prevent all other applications working with pulseaudio. Finally, I've placed the executable script in /usr/bin/rafkill : Here is the script: #!/bin/bash pulseaudio --kill /usr/games/rafkill pulseaudio --start You can download rafkill.wrapper.sh here Or write in root terminal: debian:~# cd /usr/bin debian:/usr/bin:# wget http://www.pc-freak.net/bshscr/rafkill.wrapper.sh debian:/usr/bin:# mv http://www.pc-freak.net/bshscr/rafkill.wrapper.sh rafkill debian:/usr/bin:# chmod +x rafkill Interesting in Ubuntu Linux, rafkill music is okay and I suppose the bug is also solved in newer Linux distributions based on Ubuntu. Probably the Debian Squeeze pulseaudio (0.9.21-4) package version has a bug or smth.. After the change the game music will be playing fine and the game experience is cooler. The game is hard to play. Its really nice the game has game Saves, so once you die you don't have to start from level 1.  I've seen rafkill rolling around on freebsd.org ftps under the ubuntu packages pool, which means rafkill could probably be played easily on FreeBSD and other BSDs. Enjoy the cool game RafKill Raptor Free Software (Open Source) clone for GNU/Linux Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary

by Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary

How to Install Rarcrack on ubuntu

Rarcrack is an open source rar file password cracker.  Use it when you’ve forgotten the password you put on a rar or zip file.  The current version (0.2) doesn’t work flawlessly on Ubuntu, so follow these steps.

1. Download the source:

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/rarcrack/rarcrack-0.2/%5BUnnamed%20release%5D/rarcrack-0.2.tar.bz2

2. Un tar

tar -xjf rarcrack-0.2.tar.bz2

3. Change directory

cd rarcrack-0.2

4. Type make, hit enter.  You will likely receive an error about a memory.h file that can’t be found.

5. Install libxml2-dev

sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev

6. Run make again

make

7. You will now have a rarcrack file that you can use.  If you use it as such you may receive a Segmentation Fault

./rarcrack filename.rar

use the –type parameter instead

./rarcrack --type rar filename.rar

It should then run properly

Fix audioCD play problems with VLC on GNU Linux

I've not played audio CD for ages. Anyways I had to set up one computer with Linux just recently and one of the requirements was to be able to play audiocds.

I was surprised that actually a was having issue with such as simple tasks.
Here is how i come with this article.

If you encounter errors playing Audio CDs on any Linux distro in VLC or other players, you might need to apply the following fix.













root@xubuntu-desktop:~# apt-get install xubuntu-restricted-extras
...
root@xubuntu-desktop:~# apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras
...

I'm not sure if this packages are required, anyways having them installed is a good idea especially on computers which will have to support as much multimedia as possible.

Trying to play a CD with VLC the result was not nice, you see in the picture above the error that poped up while trying it with VLC:

Due to wrong configuration of the play device VLC will be looking to read the audio cd from.

To succesfully play the audiocd invoke VLC command with a cdda///dev/sr0 argument like so:

hipo@xubuntu-desktop:~$ vlc cdda:///dev/sr0
...

To permanently fix the error you will have to edit ~/.config/vlc/vlcrc :

Inside ~/.config/vlc/vlcrc find the lines:

dvd=/dev/cdrom

Substitute the above line with:

dvd=/dev/sr0

Next find the line:

vcd=/dev/cdrom

Change the above line with:

vcd=/dev/sr0Due to a bug in generating vlcrc , the dvd= might be set also to other messy unreadable characters (different from /dev/cdrom). This can also be the reason why it fails to properly read the disc.

If dvd= and vcd is set to a different unreadable characters delete them and substitute with /dev/sr0 .I've experienced this on Xubuntu Linux with a Bulgarian localization (probably the bug can be seen in other Linuxes when GNOME is installed in Russian, Chineese and other UTF-8 languages.

The strange error can be observed also in other players when the localization is set to someone's native language …
Alternative solution is to install and use rhythmbox instead of VLC.
Other program to play audio CDs called workman , you will have to get used to the interface which uses gtk1 and therefore obsolete. Putting aside the ugly interface it works 

Fix audioCD play problems with VLC on GNU Linux

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How to enable Automatic login in GNOME GDM 2 on GNU / Linux

I needed to enable automatic passwordless login in my Debian GNU/Linux … GNOME and GDM desktop environments developed a lot through the last few years, achieving these simple task was doable only through gdm manual configurations. Nowdays creatiion of user to login without any password is easy via easy to use GUI program. In this article I'll explain, few ways to enable automatic login in GNOMEThe quickest way is to navigate in GNOMEs gnome-control-center -> Login Window submenu To do so launch gnome-control-center – press (ALT+F2) keys and type in gnome-control-center, or launch via command line in gnome-terminal or xterm: hipo@debian:~$ gnome-control-center While inside the control center find en launch the Login Window as in the screenshot below: Login Window configuration can be also done directly by launching gdmsetup from command line e.g.: hipo@debian:~$ /usr/sbin/gdmsetup ... gdmsetup will further pop up a window asking to type in the root password to allow you to customize, how gdm will deal with user logins. For who might not know gnome well architecture, gdmsetup is part of the gdm (Gnome Display Manager) package and is the default login program used to login the end user in most of the modern Linux based distributions as well as BSDs. gdm logins the users on many of the free software OS desktop environments like GNOME, LXDE, XFCE… Just to name a few of the many Linuces counting on GDM to handle the user logins: Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Linux Mint, OpenSUSE etc. Once the Login Windows Prefences appears go to the Security tab. As you can see in the screenshot, what you can do with gdmsetup it is pretty self-explanatory: The two options of interests for user authorization without pass are: a. Enable Automatic Login To enable:- put a tick on Enable Automatic Login - from user dropdown menu, choose the user which has to be configured b. Enable Timed Login Enable Automatic Login lets the user login without any user password input, immediately after the configured username is typed in (if gdm is with type username prompt). In case where the usernames are represented by Avatars, (like its in most user friendly Linux distributions), once clicked avatar the user is logged in. When Enable Timed Login is ticked and a username is choosen or typed, instead of immediately logging the user on click or username input, the user logging is delayed with a number of set seconds . Enabling the Automatic and / or Timed Login is doable also using few simple configurations directives in /etc/gdm/custom.conf. In many distros /etc/gdm/custom.conf will be not existing and hence the file has to be created. To enable delayed autologin without password for a user using gdm config: Create the file with a text editor ( vim, joe, nano )whatever your favourity and place inside: [daemon] TimedLoginEnable=true TimedLogin=hipo TimedLoginDelay=30 The above gdm config vars can also be placed inside /etc/gdm/gdm.conf but for the sake of clarity its better if custom.conf is used. If you don't want to bother with a text editor copy paste inside any terminal lets say mlterm : echo '[daemon]' >> /etc/gdm/custom.conf echo 'TimedLoginEnable=true' >> /etc/gdm/custom.conf echo 'TimedLogin=hipo' >> /etc/gdm/custom.conf echo 'TimedLoginDelay=30' >> /etc/gdm/custom.conf To enable auto-login for a user on a first PC boot in /etc/gdm/custom.conf put: [daemon] AutomaticLoginEnable=true AutomaticLogin=hipo An auto login can also be done by using the TimedLoginDelay gdm config directive by putting insetad of the previous code a code like: [daemon] TimedLoginEnable=true TimedLogin=hipo TimedLoginDelay=0 Where hipo is my desired username that will autolog, and as you see the LoginDelay is 0 (e.g. no gdm login delay) I attempted to also allow autologin for several users with some cinfigurations like: [daemon] AutomaticLoginEnable=true AutomaticLogin=hipo AutomaticLogin=other-username as well as configurations like: [daemon] TimedLoginEnable=true TimedLogin=hipo TimedLogin=other-username TimedLoginDelay=0 In gdm3, the location of GDM config files should be /etc/gdm3/ directory, anyways the configurations directives should be working just like in gdm2 After any configuration changes to gdm.conf or custom.conf to load the new settings in gdm a gdm daemon restart is necessery with cmd: root@debian:~# /etc/init.d/gdm restart ... Note that, weirdly not using the gdm init script and trying to kill -HUP $(pidof gdm) / killall -9 gdm will not make gdm to load its new configurations. So always restart via/etc/init.d/gdm restart after gdm conf change. Another alternative method to achieve login without a password input is by creating a passwordless user account on the system. This method is not recommended though, especially for machines with real IP addresses visible from the Internet (with lets say enabled) SSHD access. Using a passwordless system account can expose the system to a severe security risk!!! Anyways, for systems not running telnet/sshd or any other system remote access service creating a user without an empty password might be not such a bad idea. To make a user auto login without any password input /etc/shadow file (storing all user account information) needs an edit. This is an example user entry taken from /etc/shadow: test:$6$OPdvXArZ$ktujC6bBh9JNaCz8E9v61yNeWcJHqQiuNk8eBzevcwcIl8KFvQzJ6aBCvVpIs0Lf5MAbHjjqftUeN9crWUfxs.:15275:0:99999:7:::Now to make the test user login directly without any pass input, one can just remove his encrypted password string. After the change the user line in /etc/shadow, should be: test::15275:0:99999:7::: If the user is created just from scratch e.g. (a new user) that needs to login passwordless in GDM, create it without password: root@debian:~# adduser -d newusername To sum it up the good thing about the remove password hash method to auto login a user is that it will allow user or users login across all Display Managers (not only GDM specific). The bad side is it is very insecure and therefore in most times a really bad practice. I guess the described ways to login without password in Gdm on FreeBSD should similar, unfortunately right now I have not access to BSD running desktop to test it. If someone has tested it and can confirm it works it will be great to drop a comment. How to restore accidently removed Gnome volume control in GNOME in GNU / Linux

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Ubuntu Console Non free

1. Add Medibuntu package repository

root@ubuntu:~# wget --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list \
http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list \
&& apt-get --quiet update \
&& apt-get --yes --quiet --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring \
&& apt-get --quiet update
2. Enable Ubuntu to play Restricted DVD
root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install --yes libdvdread4
...
root@ubuntu:~# /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh

After that VLC will be ready to play DVDs for some programs which was compiled without DVD, source rebuilt is required.

If DVDs hang you might need to set a Region Code with regionset:

# regionset

3. Install non-free codecs

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install non-free-codecs

4. Install Chromium ffmpeg nonfree codecs

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install chromium
root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-nonfree

5. Install w32codecs / w64codecs

Depending on the Ubuntu Linux installation architecture 32/64 bit installw32codecs or w64codecs

For 32 bit (x86) Ubuntu install w32codecs:

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install w32codecs

For 64 bit arch Ubuntu:

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install w64codecs

6. Install ubuntu-restricted-extras meta package

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

7. Install cheese for webcam picture/video snapshotting

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install cheese

8. Install GIMP, Inkscape, xsane,sane, shotwell etc.

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get --yes install sane xsane gimp inkscape gimp-data-extras gimp-plugin-registry \
blender gcolor2 showtwell bluefish kompozer

9. Install multimedia Sound & Video utilities

Install Subtitle editor, video editiking , sound editing, mp3 player, iso mounters, DVD/CD Burners

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install rhythmbox banshee smplayer mplayer \
realplayer audacity brasero jokosher istanbuk gtk-recordMyDesktop \acetoneisohexedit furiusisomount winff fala audacious dvdstyler lives hydrogen
subtitleeditor gnome-subtitles electricsheep k3b

10. Install CD / DVD RIP tools

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install acidrip sound-juicer ogmrip thoggen
11. Install chat messanger programs, Browsers, mail pop3 clients, torrent, emulators, ftp clients etc.

apt-get install seamonkey thunderbird transmission transmission-gtk gbgoffice kbedic \
pidgin openoffice.org gxine mozilla-plugin-vlc wine dosbox samba filezilla amsn ntp \epiphany-browser ntpdate desktop-webmail alltray chmsee gftp xchat-gnome ghex \gnome-genius bleachbit arista

12. Install Non-Free Flash Player

Unfortunately Gnash is not yet production ready and crashes in many websites …

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree flashplugin-nonfree-extrasound swfdec-gnome

13. Install Archive / Unarchive management programs

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install unace unrar zip unzip p7zip-full p7zip-rar sharutils rar uudeview \
mpack lha arj cabextract file-roller

15. Install VirtualBox and QEmu

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install qemu-launcher qemu-kvm-extras virtualbox virtualbox-ose \
virtualbox-ose-guest-dkms virtualbox-ose-guest-dkms

This should be enough to use Ubuntu normally for multimedia Desktop just as MS Windows for most of the daily activities.
Am I missing some important program?