Linux

Glxgears is a very simple benchmarking tool for your graphics card.

Running glxgears with no vsync (vertical synchronization) is a great simple way to do a very simple benchmark of your graphical situation when you are testing out drivers on your linux system.

You just run the command: vblank_mode=0 glxgears

Easy way to see current graphics driver in use in Xorg: egrep -i " connected|card detect|primary dev|Setting driver" /var/log/Xorg.0.log

Downloading videos from Facebook: http://fbdown.net/down.php

I did not succeed with youtube-dl unfortunately.

Here is a great reference how to compress and reduce the size of PDF files with Ghost Scrip (gs) in Linux: http://blog.virtualzone.de/2012/11/how-to-reduce-pdf-file-size-in-linux…

Example: "gs -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf"

I used a couple of moments to figure out if I wanted to stay on Kubuntu 14.04 LTS (Long Term Support), but then I decided to go with the new version 15.10. I want the new KDEnLive, so I can create more bad videos no one watches on my Youtube Channel PlantSugar.

Initial Setup

Update 2022-12-22: Optimized and started to strike through old not needed info when using Windows 11 and Kubuntu 22.10 end of 2022.

Get the bootloader working with Windows 10

In the old days we all had CD-drives, but most modern computers these days don't have an optical drive. This makes things even more efficient, because you need to think smart. Some people choose to have an external optical drive, but why all the hassle when you can have a bootable USB or a bootable partition on your harddrive. There ar many guides on the internet, how to get that done manually. Again, why the hasse when we have UNetbootin, the perfect software for booting your favorite ISO's from your harddrive!

My random notes regarding screen capture. The screen capture is not hard, and it is not hard to have one source of audio like the microphone. The hard part is to have multiple audio sources, like the microphone and the system sounds.

I use Cheese for the built in webcam capture. Here are the random links:

TLP is an advanced power management tool I use for my laptop that runs Linux. I have not tested the different settings, but it seems that the battery time is increased compared to not running it. :-) I only use it in battery-mode. There are some extra features for Thinkpad laptops.

TLP settings file Ubuntu: /etc/tlp.conf

Reload config: sudo tlp start

Check TLP status: sudo tlp-stat 

Check battery: upower -i /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT0

Appending MOV files efficiently can be a challenge. The only "safe" and easy way without destroying the video or the sound is done by using Avidemux which is a free video editing tool for Linux.

Here is my modified image-convert bash script used for the appending all .MOV files in a folder and have the full video ready for editing in the Avidemux graphical user interface (GUI).

Update 2022-07-14: kill kiod or kiod5 and then do jmtpfs

Update 2021-07-10: sudo aptitude install gmtp

It can be a challenge to mount your Android phone (MTP device) in Linux if you have some strange files from your old Iphone. I needed to do it the hard way.

You need to install mtpfs and use this command: sudo mtpfs -o allow_other /media/android-device

Reference.

Holy molly. I thought Garmin would provide a fancy and "updatede" procedure for uploading and/or extracting data from the fancy Garmin 910XT... but no. You need to search for a while before you find the gold. First I thought you could find a garmin connect tool or plugin for Firefox, but that failed completely. Then I narrowed down my search to "forerunner 910xt linux" (without the quotation marks in google). I found some sites that suggested to download a lot of python stuff and get things directly from Git.