Posts Tagged ‘old school’

The greatest tracker (demoscene) composers / Purple Motion, Necros, Skaven, Pro-XeX

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

For all of us who yet remember the Demoscene , Purple Motion, Necros and Skaven are absolutely legendary names.
Their music work contribution for tracked Electronic music, video games music and general development of the IT culture is truly invaluable.

Many younger computer users (I’m 26 now), and probably IT starters would probably never heard about neither Demoscene nor Purple Motion or the other three patriarchs of tracked Electronic music.

This musicians have a special value for people who has ever composed music with Impulse Tracker and the many other programs to compose music from samples.

Purple Motion has his own home page for quite some time now, however I just noticed that he has recently turned his home page to a PHPBB Forum where there is plenty of information about the composer as well as open discission and many questions and answers of people who are interested into the great electronic composer.

The “foster-father” of tracked electronic music is Necros.
Necros is the Artistic Pseudonim of Andrew Sega, probably his most notable piece of music work is called mech8Mechanism 8 .

The third by significance electronic musician who is probably known by the many old school computer users and musicians is Skaven .
Skaven is part of the Future Crew .

One of the most notable Skaven music works is actually the soundtrack song produced for the Second RealityDemo .
It’s worthy to say few words about Future Crew as well, Future Crew (link to wikipedia)
– “Future Crew is a now-defunct group of Finnish computer coders and artists who created PC demos and software, active mostly between 1992 and 1994.”
You might also consider checking Necros profile in modarchive
There you can find plenty if not all of his works for download and listening.
A descendant of the the 3 up-mentioned wonderful tracker musicians is Pro-XeX also known under the artistic pseudonim Necroleak
Though his works are much later first originating from the distant 1995 his works are comparable by quality and goodness to (PM, Necros and Skaven’s works).
If you really want to completely turn back some memories about the good old times when we used to use DOS environment and to listen the great old MOD, S3M, XM etc. songs with the good old Cubic player which is already available under the free port called Open Cubic Player

A port is even available for most UNIX platforms You can download and install the Linux / Unix port of Cubic player here plus on the below link you will find some brief instructions on how to make it work on Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat, Gentoo and FreeBSD.

Under Debian Lenny, Squeeze/Sid installing opencubicplayer is pretty easy and comes to simple installation via apt-get as follows:

debian-desktop:~# apt-get install opencubicplayer

First time I’ve noticed Cubic player I should admit it was a real joy to know there is already a Unix port since Linux and BSD are my OS choice for almost 10 years already.
Another possible way to play the old school songs on Linux is through the well known console player mikmod
I’ve prepared a downloadable song archive for each of the 3 great electronic composers (Purple Motion, Necros, Skaven) on my personal webserver.

Below I present you with links to their music.

Download all tracked music by Purple Motion

Download Necros composed music works

Download the songs composed by Skaven

Download a collection of all composed songs by Pro-XeX / Necroleak

I have few other composers who are very liked by me, their music works can be obtained through my tracked music tiny collection available here

Many of the demos created and works by Jonne Valtonen known under the artistic pseudonim Purple Motion are currently uploaded and available for watching via Youtube – (search) Purple Motion

I’ll close this post with a the Award Winning Demos (Second Reality and Panic) which are the most notable produced Computer Simulation Demos of all times created by the collossal Future Crew group.


Second Reality by Future Crew [ Winner Demo of Assembly ’93 competition ]


Panic by Future Crew


Toasted by Cubic Team & $een
Also don’t forget to check The ultimate source for MOD Music – modarchive.org

Resolving messed up console / terminal on GNU Linux / A tiny old school hack ;)

Thursday, September 26th, 2013

Resolve fix messed up unreadable gnu linux console terminal screenshot

Its probably not so common problem among new-comer Linux users / admins but sooner or later even those who haven't will cat by mistake (or on purpose) some binary file end result will be physical console / terminal / SSH Client (lets say PuTTY) will display some non-sense characters and whether typing you will type in some "alien language" characters this continues until you close up console and re-login. Of course its not such a big problem to re-login or (kill active SSH session).

fix terminal after showing displaying binary file by mistake catting wrong file incident

But there is no sense to do that and loose time and most importantly loose your logged in session (especially if you have hopped to 4 ssh sessions and you forgot to run GNU / screen). Thus its handy to know about
 

# reset

command. Once issued in most cases TTY messed up characters gets fixed up. However if even reset doesn't fix it, there is another "hack" to resolve it with no need for relogin. This is an old hack from my old Linux days and not so popular among admins, here is how:

Type

cat

press Enter

and then press

Ctrl + O (Ctrl ^ O)

 

then press Enter

and then again press

Ctrl + D (Ctrl ^ D)

Nice hack isn't it ? 🙂

Quitting my job as IT Manager and moving to Further Horizons in Hewlett Packard

Friday, September 13th, 2013

International University College Logo IUC

I haven't blogged for a while for a plenty of reasons, I'm going through a change period in my life and as any change it is not easy.
This post will be not informative and will not teach any of my dear readers, anything on Computers its pretty personal but still for my friends it might cause interest.
Here is my personal life story over the last few months …

For a while I worked in a International University College situated in my hometown Dobrich. I was hired on position of IT Manager, and actually was doing a bit of E-Marketing to try to boost traffic to College's website – www.vumk.eu and mostly helping the old school hacker ad college system administrator over the last 10 yrs – Ertan to fix a bunch of Linux Mail / SQL and Webservers and some Windows machines. In college I learned from Ertan how to install and backups of restaurants software called BARBEQUE as well as how to fix problems with billing terminals situated in College Restaurant (3rd floor of building). Other of my work time I had to  fix infested Windows computers with viruses re-install Windowses and fix various printing and network problems of College's teachers, accountants, cash desk, marketing and rest of college  employees.

Talking about Ertan I should express my sincere tremendous Thanks (Thanks Ertan) to it for recommending me for this job position. Right before I started work in the college I was jobless for a while starting to get desperate that its impossible find work. Current IUC sysadmin – Mr. Ertan Geldiev is a remarkable man and one of the people that made great impression in my mind. Something I found interesting I can learn from Ertan was to get from his cheerful "admin" attitude. As a true hacker Ertan had this hacker attitude of playfulness I myself has for a while lost over the years. So seeing someone like this near my life make me a good favor and had a positive influence on myself.

I have learned a lot from Ertan during the 3 months and 3 days in International University College. Just for a bit of historic information earlier IUC was known as International College – Albena, also among Dobrich citizens known as The Dutch College – as earlier IUC had good relations with Dutch Universities and was issuing double degrees both Bulgarian and Dutch. Nowadays I'm not sure if still Double-degrees partnership between IUC and Dutch Universities exist, what I know for sure is college is issuing European Double Degrees in partnership with Cardiff Metropolitan University. I myself have earlier studied in the college and already know the place well thus will use this post to say a few words on my impressions on it …

International University College - one of top prestigious colleges in Eastern Europe

The college is a great place to be as you have chance to meet plenty of people both lecturers (professors), participate in the various events organized by College's as well as get involved in the many European Projects which are being handled by a European Projects department special department situated on the back of the College Building. Other positive about College is it is small and located on a peaceful town of Dobrich. This gives the bright people a lot of space for personal development, anyways on the other hand it can make you also a bad as Dobrich as a small city is a bit boring. The studies in College are good for students who want personal freedom as there is not too strict requirements for professors on how to teach.

Though college had help me grow, especially in my knowledge in Windows 7 and 8 (Ertan had a really good Windows background), I couldn't have the chance to develop myself too further in the long term. So my job offer to work in HP as Web and Middleware Implementation Engineer opened much broader opportunities for my long term IT career. Other reason I quit the College IT job was simply because I needed more money I had the vision to make a family with a girl from Belarus – Svetlana and in order to take care for her I need to earn good money. My official salary in the college was the funny for the position – 640 lv (though after a few months I was promised to have a raise and earn 400 EUR :)) . Such low sallary was for the reason I had the idea to continue studying in College and complete my Bachelor Business degree and we had agreed with the College CEO Mr. Todor Radev to extract part of my salary monthly and with that to pay my 1 semester tuition fee (2200 EUR) – necessary for my graduation assignment. Though completing the Bachelor is important phase to close in my life for a long time, I found for the moment more valuable to work for HP and earn normal living salary with which to possibly finance myself and create family with woman of my life (hopefully) in the short term.

In this post I want express my sincere thanks to all people in International College (Elena Urchenko, Krasimir – for helping me in my job duties), Pavel and Silvia for being a colleague for a while I worked partly in the Marketing Department.

Talking about Marketing Department what I did there is some Twitter Marketing (building some twitter followers) and wrote a tiny document with recommendation on how to optimize College website – vumk.eu (future version) – for better SEO ranking. This included complete analysis from user outlook to Indexing bots and site current code. 

Mr Docent Phd Todor Radev

I have to do a big underline on how great person the College President and UNI Rector – Docent Todor Radev is. I have already bitter experience studying for a while in a government universities when younger and I know from experience usually Rectors and Universities management of state universities is pure "Hell". Thanks to Mr. Todor Radev for he did me a big favor letting me quit  job just a week later (instead of 1 month as it is officially set by Bulgarian Dismissal Law and explicitly stated in my Work Contract. Also as a person my experience from Docent Radev is wonderful too. He is extremely intelligent, brilliant gentleman and  most importantly open minded and always open for innovation.
 

As a close up I would like to say Big Thanks to everyone which I worked with or met in International University College! Thanks guys for all your support and help, thanks for being work mates and friends for the time.

Create ASCII Art Text banners in GNU / Linux console and terminal with figlet and toilet

Tuesday, January 15th, 2013

Create fun and colorful text ASCII art banner logos on Linux (figlet and toilet)

As an old school hobbyist, I'm a kind of ASCII art freak. Free Software is just great for this text / console maniacs like me, who spend their youth years in a DOS (Disk Opearting System) command prompt.
For long time, I'm researching the cool programs which has to do somehow with ASCII Art, in that relation I decided to write few ones of figlet and toilettwo nice programs capable of generating ASCII art text beautiful banners based on a typed in text string. Obviously toilet developer Sam Hocevar had a great sense of humor 🙂

To play with figlet and toilet install them, according to (rpm or deb based package manager on distro) with yum / apt-get.

yum -y install toilet figlet
....

apt-get --yes install toilet figlet
....

There are no native tool packages for Slackware, so Slackaware Linux users need to compile figlet from source code – available on figlet's home page figlet.org

Once figlet and toilet are installed, here is few sample use cases;
 

hipo@noah:~/Desktop$ figlet hello world!             

figlet ascii art banner hello world
 

hipo@noah:~/Desktop$ figlet -f script Merrcy Christmas

figlet merry christmas text in ascii art with script font linux

Plenty of figlet font examples are available on Figlet's website example section – very cool stuff btw 🙂 To take a quick look on all fonts available for toilet – ascii art banner creation. Type in your console tty or terminal; for i in $(dpkg -L toilet-fonts|grep -i /usr/share/figlet); do toilet -f $(echo $i|sed -e "s#.tlf##g" -e "s#/usr/share/figlet/##g") test; done

On below picture, I made a screenshot of my gnome terminal with most fonts installed by toilet-fonts (fonts package).

ascii art banner create generate program linux figlet toilet with fonts on debian linux screenshot pic - how to create ascii banners linux

There are about 150 fonts, most of which needs to be downloaded and installed manually. A quick search online led me to a fonts collection of 263 figlet ascii art fonts – you can download a mirror of the file figletfonts40.zip here. To aid up toilet and  with those 263 extra fonts (on Debian) do; wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/figletfonts40.zip cd /usr/share/figlets unzip figletfonts40.zip Note: you have to have installed unzip in advance, unzip is not in default install, so if you don't have it fetch it with; apt-get install --yes unzip toilet and figlet are partially compatible, between each other so most fonts should work okay on both.

figlet supports, also simple formatting of ASCII art banner, here is few examples with formatting; a.) format to center  

$ figlet -c bla bla

figlet centered ascii art text bla bla screenshot

b.) format to left


figlet ascii art banner left formatted text debian gnu linux

c. right formatting


figlet ascii art banner right formatted ascii art text debian linux generator

d. format to terminal width By default text that figlet generates is to suit for 80 rows terminals, normally on higher resolution in gnome-terminal and other Linux environments, terminals are not dimensioned 80×25, thus it is useful for longer sentences text to display text in accordance to terminal size;

figlet ascii art banner sentence phrase to terminal width banner debian gnu linux

The cool thing and advantage of toilet over figlet is toilet can print out ASCII art banners in colors – very very cool stuff; To quickly test all filters issue; for i in $(toilet -F list|awk '{ print $1 }'|grep -v Available|sed -e 's#"##g'); do toilet -F $i pC-fREAK; done Change text pC-fREAK with whatever you like;

> using toilet to create funny ascii-art banners linux pc-freak logo pictures

Very nice use of toilet or figlet, can be if it is placed to produce some nice message in ASCII banner on each user login. Other nice fun applications  is together with cowsay.

apt-cache show cowsay|grep -i description -A 5 Description: A configurable talking cow Cowsay (or cowthink) will turn text into happy ASCII cows, with speech (or thought) balloons. If you don't like cows, ASCII art is available to replace it with some other creatures (Tux, the BSD daemon, dragons, and a plethora of animals, from a turkey to an elephant in a snake).

In case interested in using cowsay on system logins, I suggest you check out my tiny cowrand script which uses cowsay and shows random cow ASCII art picture on each user login.

Also a good use if you're Christian is to combine, some nice Holy Scriptures  verse in text ascii with  some encouraging daily bible phrase from verse or fortune.

Apart from fun, common use of ASCII art slogans is in e-mail or blog comments ASCII art signatures, also they are certainly good for creating unusual (text) advertisements and even can be used to save printer ink:) cause text generated in ASCII art logo is not massive like most text fonts are 🙂 Last but not least  ASCII art banners are useful in generation of ASCII slogans as an art; after all ASCII art is one of innovative arts of 21st century 🙂

SWITCH OFF your Mobile Phone and TV at night to save energy!!!

Thursday, June 7th, 2012

TURN OFF YOUR MOBILE PHONE AT NIGHT to SAVE ENERGY and MONEY

We’re constantly being said to reduce energy consupmtion, they sell us new bulbs to save energy, new TVs with energy saving. The newer the computer equipment microwaves or whatever home electrical equipment we buy the more it is said to be saving energy.

So far so good it is true we can reduce energy consumption by producing gadgets which consume less. However there are also another approach to the “green problem” which we never are said about.

It is rather simply instead of saving energy on technology base, we can save energy on physical base. One simple thing to do to save energy with no need to spend money on latest advacement gadgets is to simply make it the old school way.

a -= Learn to switch off your lamps and home equipment whenever its not necessery

If you’re about to go to sleep, you can simply switch off the mobile and use a mechanical clock to wake you up on the morning, this way you have 3 benefits.

1; Less energy will be discharged by the mobile in the time you’re not awake, so you don’t need to charge so frequently the battery and therefore you will draw less energy from the Electrical network hence saving energy.

2; You will not be radiated with a bit less radiation produced by the Mobile phone in order to stay connected to the GSM local located cell.

Though the good this does will not be dramatical it for sure will be better for your health than if the mobile is switched on the whole night.

3; You will not be awakened in morning by some crazy person who just decided to call you early in the morning.
Often this morning unexpected and desired phone calls make you jump off the bed rapidly and hence giving a large dose of stress to your organizm.

-=- Of course switching off the mobile has some disadvantages if you can receive a crucial phone calls during all time of day or night you can’t afford to simply switch off the mobile, this is however not true for most people who work in an OFF-ICE.People working in offices can simply wake up at a scheduled time, get a shower do their morning hygiene and jump to a car or bus to the office so the need for having the mobile switched ON at night is not really needed.

Of course thinking in the same direction, it is logical that switching off the computer earlier when not needed, the wireless home router or the TV is another place from where a huge energy savings can be achieved.

If large amount of people re-learn their energy in-efficient habits to be more energy cautios a HUGE amounts of energy can be saved. This of course can have a positive impact on the monthly energy bills and hence can save you money in monthly expenses.

The TV is surely another big energy draining source, many people have the habit to sleep with a Television switched on. Besides this has a negative impact on the conscious since vast amounts of information are being stored and processed by the conscious and unconscious mind, also the lights emitted from the TV screen prevents the persons body to not have a pieceful rest.

Its rather stupid that companies are constantly ranting on how they improve their products to be energy friendly but they don’t invest even a penny to educate the masses that energy saving does not only depend on how good the technology is produced to save energy but also on how much the people are educated how to use the technology with energy saving in mind.Probably there are plenty of other ways a households can change their habits to save energy. I’ll be glad to hear some other suggestions ,,,

The last two days

Saturday, March 17th, 2007

The last few days went smoothly in general No drastic problems in work which was a great blessing for me. Praise the Lord Oh My Soul :] We lost two afternoons with Narf writting (actually translating) a text for a presentation we have in Business Communication scheduled for Tuesday with Mrs. Svetla Stoyanova (a vice rector) in the college. It became like a tradition the eating of rise with vegatables in the new chineese restaurant. I used to watch two very intriguing films about the Quantum Physics/Mechanics which is on a way of prooving the spiritually exist. On a low level the Universe is even more magnificient than on the surface. I also watched very interesting film about “The Secret of the Water” which was based on a scientifically researched fact that water is “alive” and have memory just like a computer RAM. Yesterday Night we went out just for 20 or 30 minutes and Met a friend of Nomen who offered us to drink beer. He told us a very interesting fact that in Dubai Arabian men who are usually close relatives walk over the streets holding their hands Like gays (For their traditions this is something like great honor), even in the pubs this close relatives used to sit one in other :]]. After that we were just on our way home when we met Paco we walked for some time and speak about our Faith in Christ. Paco said he didn’t feel spiritually okay the last days so I tried to confort him about some truths that flowed out of my heart. Today I was on a coffee with Lily and She got depressed again (I really hate this thing). I heard a great Christian Industrial band on http://christianindustrial.net/ (Dead Turns Alive), what I personally like in the band is the old school sounding they were able to put in their music, actually they played EBM here is a link to their video you can enjoy http://www.deadturnsalive.com/video/influence.avi .I was in my grandmother this evening I really feel bad about this old sweet granny. She is so good hearted and like a model for what we the believers should be sadly she has real problems with her Ears and Seeing the Diabet is making her suffer badly… I hope she’ll be better. I prayed The Lord to help at least a little with, Laying her hands. During the day and in the mornings and the Evenings for a group of ppl and the World in general. There is also a good news. I speak with Slavcho (A brother in Christ), a month ago he suffered an amputation of his right leg. Slavcho is in a really terrible material/financial state. Every month he is living on the edge. Living with 120 lv. per month where 40 lv. from the sum he has to give for the rent of the apartment they live with his aunt. But God knows our needs and did a glorious thing for him. Slavcho told me his testimony today. He was in two protestant Churches in Plovdvid where he is currently for examination of his health state after the amputation. He told his story how he grown as an orphan how he believed/received Christ and how hard his life was. One of the Churches member decided they’ll collect tithe will donate him the money. Yes Praise be to the Lord Shabbaoth The Lord of Hosts.. HalleluYah . Seems like there are some real servents the world has. Whilst the Devil is taking inch after inch after inch of the earth leading so many blind ppl to his Satanic Kingdom. I looked at http://adsx.com. The probable technology matching the Prophecies for which we can read in The Book of Revelation. The technology now serves 500 Big Hospitals in the USA. Only for 5 or 6 months they put it in a new 200 Hospitals … But I guess this is just the beginning of the integration of the “Number of the Beast” Into the World Economy/Trade/HealthCare/Structure …END—–

Installing Linux on old hardware PC. Few thoughs on Puppy and Xubuntu Linux

Tuesday, January 24th, 2012

I needed a G/Linux distribution that will work fine on an old PC with hardware configuration:

guest@xubuntu-desktop:~$ grep -i cpu /proc/cpuinfo; free -m; df -h
cpu family : 6
cpu MHz : 797.613cpuid level : 2
total used free shared buffers cachedMem: 497 470 26 0 35 259-/+ buffers/cache: 176 321Swap: 1454 10 1444File System Size Used Free % Mounted on
/dev/sda1 37G 4,3G 31G 13% /

I've read a lot on the internet and come to the conclusion I have basicly two popular Linux distros as option to install on archaic x86 hardware:

1. Puppy Linux
2. Xubuntu Linux

I first give Puppy Linux a try. It worked quite nice, but the interface was too old school and the desktop felt like a bit out-dated.
Besides that many of the Puppy Linux shipped programs were not a mainstream programs available across most of the other Linux distributions.

Many of the programs shipped with Puppy are great, but more suitable for a computer geek than for a Windows accustomed GUI user.
Puppy Linux Screenshot

My opinion on Puppy (from what I've seen) is that its great distro for old school hardcore Linux users.
Anyways its not suitable for absolutely "uniniated" users who encounter Linux for a first time.

Secondly I installed Xubuntu. Most of the archaic hardware on the PC was detected during install time (a pleasently surprise).
Xubunto works fast and Xfce menus opens "light fast" as on the old 800Mhz pc with 512 mem of ram. Generally the GUI worked quick and responsive.
To conclude I liked Xubuntu a lot and I strongly recommend it to anyone who want to quickly roll on Linux on an old PC.
Xubuntu GNU / Linux theme

What impressed me most is the minimalistic look & feel and simplicity.

I'm sure Debian will be working great on old hardware as well, however configuring it will be hell a lot of work. Thus I think Xubuntu is a good choice for people who want save some time in obscure configurations and easily have a neat Linux ready for desktop use.

Kill everything that Moves (KETM) an arcade spaceship Tyrian GNU / Linux game

Saturday, January 7th, 2012

I always love so much to go back to the times, when games were games and people had still valued words like moral and respect.
In that great days of old school computing, we used to play the awesome old schools Tyrian and the Nintendo 1941 game (hopefully some still remember).

KETM Tyrian like Old School 2d Spaceship shooter awesome

For all who don't Tyrian is one of the best Spaceship Arcades of all times!, and especially for DOS operating system the best I've personally seen.

Recently I was checking the arcade games available for install on my Debian GNU / Linux and happily come across a game called KETM.

KETM acronym stands for the memorizable KILL EVERYTHING THAT MOVES and is free software distributed game under GPL.
The original creation idea was probably to resemble the so famous in the '90s spaceshooter games.

KETM is pretty addictive just like tyrian and has santimental meaning for me since it brings me memories for my arcade gaming years 😉

The game is easy to play and has a feeling of "diversity" especially in type of weapons your ship can obtain and use against enemies.

The powerups you get is quite plenty compared to the enemy ship types you should destroy 😉 In overall the game is quite easy to play, this however is also a good thing, as you can play more smoothly without dying every few secs like it is in so many arcade games…

The game has only 4 game levels and on each level end there is a big spaceship "the boss" which is the last in line to destroy in the tradition of the 2d arcade games.

KETM Tyrian like Linux Debian arcade game

Kill Everything That Moves is available for Debian and Ubuntu as a deb installable with apt. To install the game on Debian and Ubuntu

debian:~# apt-get install ketm
...

ketm's official latest available source and binary of time of writting this article is at version 0.6 and as far as I checked it unfortunately seems like the game development is stucked and the code seems a unmaintained.
I'm sure ketm has a lot of potential en hope somebody will adopt the code and will push further its development.
The game runs by default in the annoying windowed mode, I don't like this so I always run it fullscreen:

Kill Everything that Moves Tyrian like arcade game for Debian Ubuntu Linux

debian:~# ketm -f

KETM also reminds a bit on GEKI 2 / 3, which I have previously blogged about but I found KETM to be more enjoyable than gekis.
I've seen KETM has RPM ports as well so installing the game on fedora will be probably as easy as downloading the respective RPMs fulfilling the RPM package requirements and installing with rpm -i. I would be glad to hear from people who had succesfully run the game on Fedora and other RPM based Linux distributions?

The only thing that prevents the game to feel a bit more awesome (in my view) is the missing sound & music … Even though in the game settings inside the main menu there is an option for Sound On / Off the game runs by default without any sound or music (at least on my Debian).
I hope you will have some fun with KETM just I like I did! 😉
Also if you haven't played Tyrian yet, then I strongly advice you download Tyrian from here and try it out with dosbox (a dos gnu linux / bsd game emulator)

Absolute Game Classics Tyrian native game play with dosbox Linux screenshot

Interesting fact to mention here,  while looking for the native tyrian game info , I found tyrian has an open source version under development called OpenTyrian . I'll check the game and write on it when I have time.

How to change GNOME Resolution with a command using terminal or console on Debian GNU / Linux and FreeBSD

Friday, January 6th, 2012

I'm testing some old school arcade games, available from Debian's package repositories and quitting one of the games ended me up with a GNOME Screen Resolution of 640×480 pixels.

I wanted to revert back to the Classics resolution, so what I would normally do to do that is use >GNOME menus:

System -> Preferences -> Monitors

In that huge screen resolution on my 14 inch lenovo notebook screen, however the System menu cannot fit in 640×480 resolution. You can see the non-screen fitting System on the screenshot below:

Screenshot Debian GNU / Linux Squeeze GNOME Desktop 640x480

Having this situation, I needed a way to change back to my normal daily used 1024x768px screen resolution to continue my daily work by some other way.
One possible solution I thought of was Logging Off Gnome and logging again. Loggig off and log on again would usually restart the initiated GNOME session and therefore will reset the screen resolution to my default 1024×768 / 32 bit color.

Having the unobservable System gnome panel menu on my screen however made using the usual Log off procedure via System -> Log Out myusername impossible…

Another possible way to actually restart my screen and hence revert back to my original resolution is achiavable using the classical restart X server key switch CTRL + ALT + backspace (bckspc) . Though this was a possible approach to the situation, I had a bunch of programs already running on my desktop and I did not wanted to interrupt my desktop session, what I was looking for is simply change the screen resolution size .

With all said I had to look up for alternative way (preferably easy) way, to revert back my screen resolution to my desired 1024×768.

As a console guy, I was interested if there is some kind of possibility to change my GNOME resolution directly using xterm or gnome-terminal , after a bit of check up online, I've found few threads started by people who were looking just like me for a way to change GNOME / KDE screen resolution size on various distributions Linux desktops as well on Free/Net/Open/BSDs. The answer to the question on few places was the command xrandr which I had used some few years ago to initiate remote X server connections via SSH

xrandr is actually a great tool part of the x11-xserver-utils

Actually xrandr is capable of doing a few things besides setting the screen resolution size, just to name a few it supports change the screen orientation, reflection of the output of the screen, adjust brightness, set color gamma etc. etc.

It is good to mention that xrandr changes the resolution not on a GNOME level but on Xorg server level.

Using xrandr to change the screen resolution appeared to be very easy.

1. First I issued xrandr to check all the supported xrandr resolutions by my X server hipo@noah:~/Desktop$ xrandr Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1024 x 768, maximum 8192 x 8192VGA1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)LVDS1 connected 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 304mm x 228mm 1024x768 60.0*+ 50.0 800x600 60.3 56.2 640x480 60.0 59.9 TV1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)hipo@noah:~/Desktop$

From the output you can see I have 3 basic resolutions configured in my Xorg, I can switch between.

2. To switch to my previous default screen resolution

hipo@noah:~/Desktop$ xrandr -s 1024x768

After using xrandr command to revert back to my default screen size, I realized there is two other (partially command line partially gui) way to change to 1024×768 pixels.3. Through launching gnome Control Center and searching for Monitors menu.

If one prefers this way he can;

i) press ALT+F2 to invoke Gnome's Run Application dialog

ii) issue gnome-control-center command:

GNOME run application Dialog GNOME Control Center cmd debian GNU / Linux

GNOME Control Center search Monitors menu debian GNU / Linux

4. By invoking gnome's Control Panel -> Monitors settings window by a command

hipo@noah:~/Desktop$ gnome-display-properties

GNOME display properties command to launch monitors screen resolution settings
 

How to play VCD videos in Debian Linux

Monday, September 26th, 2011

Totem VCD error occured, could not open location you might not have permissions to open the file

A friend of mine gave me a VCD with some coptic Orthodox Christian exorcism, where there pope was chasing some evil spirits from possessed muslims who came to the Coptic Orthodox Church in egypt. The video was made to be in VCD and as you can expect this did not worked out of the box with Totem and VLC out of the box.
Putting in the VCD video inside my cdrom poped up an error like the one in the header of the post.
In order to make the video play I had to use the old school and now a bit obsolete mplayer.
Hence in order to play the VCD on Debian Linux I had to install mplayer and w32codecs packages first e.g.:

debian:~# apt-get update && apt-get install mplayer w32codecs

Second to play the video from gnome-terminal, I had to switch to the mounted cdrom location /media/cdrom0 and launch the video with mplayer cmd like so:

debian:~$ cd /media/cdrom0/vcd
debian:/media/cdrom0/vcd$ mplayer vcd://2
...

In some cases it might be necessery to play the video with mplayer command like:

debian:/media/cdrom0/vdd$ mplayer vcd://2 vcd://3

Watching it with mplayer from console has some downsides as I couldn’t make the fast rewind work, but still it’s way better than nothing.
Too bad in Debian Squeeze 6 gmplayer is no longer installable. The gmplayer can probably be installed if mplayer is compiled from source, but I’m too lazy to try it out.
I’ve red also in some forums online that gxine is capable of playing the VCD play nice, but I couldn’t install it from my existing Debian repositories so I did not give it a go.