Good webcam for Ubuntu

I bought an HP KQ246AA 8.0 MP Deluxe web-cam from Amazon.  I tried it on Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala, Beta;  I also tried it on Ubuntu 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope.  For the price, it’s an excellent webcam.  It was plug and play.  Cheese and Skype automatically recognized it.  The only caveat is the blue light.   Inside the camera there is no barrier between the lens and the light.  So, basically everything you take a picture of or take video of has a light blue haze over it.  But, regardless it works great.  If you have any questions, don’t be afraid to ask.

byrd

Bad sectors

I am lucky enough to have 2 bad sectors in my “new” hardrive.  Well, I am expecting another, larger one, in a week or two.  Eh…

DeVeDe Error with OpenShot

Yesterday I decided to install DeVeDe on my HP desktop.  I had it installed on Ubuntu 9.04 with no problem, but when I try to install it on Ubuntu 9.10 and I get and error.  I t says that it cannot find mencoder and mplayer.  In which I have both installed.  I reinstalled devede, mencoder and mplayer thinking that it would fix the problem. But it didn’t.  I realized soon after that during all of this VLC was broken, too.  So I decided to do a little look-see and saw that ffmpeg was uninstalled.  So I tried to install it with apt-get.  Suffice to say, “Broken Packages”.  So I try aptitude.  Aptitude wants to remove OpenShot.  I was hesitate about it but I decided to give it a try. So now, VLC and DeVeDe works, but no OpenShot.  I tried to install OpenShot again, but now it wants to remove ffmpeg.  Not thinking, I comply and lose VLC and DeVeDe functionality again.  I am lost again wondering what did I do(my mind isn’t what it should be).  After a couple hours I remember what I did, and redone all the mess I started.  I lost OpenShot but gained VLC and DeVeDe.  I still haven’t figured it all out.

byrd

Edit:  Apparently OpenShot uses a different version of ffmpeg.  I saw this on the OpenShot website.  I guess I am at a loss.

recordMyDesktop

The other day I ran into a program called recordMyDesktop.  It does exactly what the title says, it records your desktop.  I figured I would give it a shot and try it out.  And here is the outcome. 🙂  This was done on my HP desktop.

byrd

Could not update .ICEauthority file

I recently came across this error on my CF-28.  I am currently running Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala.  [Which, BTW, is currently at Beta stage.]  This error is known on many distros and across a large time-frame, so this is by far not a new problem.  For a brief amount of time it did leave my computer useless, because I could not mount any external drive (which I have nearly all my personal and other files on).  And at times the X server would not start, which I had to manually start via the terminal.  What caused it I am still not sure, but it basically changed my permissions to an underprivileged user.  I first tried this from here:

Press Ctrl+Alt+F3, and login as your user

$ sudo chown user:user home/user/.ICEauthority
$ sudo chmod 664 /home/user/.ICEautority
$ exit

Which turned out to not entirely fix the problem.  Then as you read down, where someone had a similar problem but with the .dmrc file.  I tried something similar to his script but changing .dmrc to .ICEauthority (which I got the idea from here):

$ sudo chown user:user /home/user/.ICEauthority
$ sudo chmod 644 /home/user/.ICEauthority
$ sudo chown -R /home/user
$ exit

Press Ctrl+Alt+F7

And, BINGO, it worked!  Now my permissions are back the way they are supposed to be and I can login as usual.  Feel free to ask questions!

byrd