22apr10

= 22-Apr-2010 LUG meeting notes =

This was our 4th user group meeting.

Recover MBR after failed external USB drive GNU/Linux install
While we had multimedia as a topic, one of our members was curious about the possibility of installing openSUSE Linux on to an external hard driver, and then booting openSUSE Linux from the external hard drive (without touching the internal hard drive). So an attempt was made to do that. Unfortunately, since it was an "adhoc" topic, none of us were able to prepare for this in advance, and our attempt failed. The openSUSE YaST installation menu was misleading, and we mistakenly overwrote the MBR on the internal hard drive. At one stage it was not possible to boot the laptop at all without using a CD. Despite some notable efforts made in attempting different mbr setups we did not succeed in our "adhoc" goal. Still I learned a lot of some basic grub and dd command use, just from watching. But in the end, fortunately an MS-Windows XP boot CD was found, and we restored the laptop MBR with "fixboot c:" after booting to the MS-Windows XP boot CD. That restored the MS-Windows MBR back to the way it was. Hence we only ended up where we started, having progressed more in increasing our knowledge as opposed to succeeding in our "adhoc" goal.

GNU-Linux Multi-media programs
In parallel some of us looked at a few multimedia programs, looking at vlc, smplayer, xine and kaffeine.

We noted the program "mediainfo" was useful for determine the exact codecs inside a wrapper (such as "avi" ).

We also looked at a couple of programs that might be useful for chopping up a very large (massive) video stream into smaller pieces. The programs that were looked at were avidemux, and dvbcut - which was not on my list of programs below, but it is one I use quite often).

A very quick look was done on the functionality of xvidcap (which captures a selection portion of the screen in a video) and also kdenlive, the non-linear video editor.

As well we checked out a "Sidux Linux" bootable USB stick (16GB). Unfortunately the Sidux version was too old to boot to the new laptop hardware that this was being tested on, and it would only boot to run level 3 (full screen ascii mode). We likely need to try a more current Sidux version.

I think in the end an impression I was left with is we need to repeat the "multimedia" theme in another meeting, and we probably also should plan in advance a separate Linux Users group meeting where the topic is installing Linux to boot from an external hard drive and/or an external USB stick (without touching the internal drive).

Planning for advanced topics
I also think that for advanced topics such as "installing/booting from an external hard drive", it may be best we decide on this topic in advance, so the team can prepare ahead of time, as opposed to "just winging it" at the time.