pptpd

It seems pptpd is easier to setup as the VPN server, compared to OpenVPN. See this blog. For OpenVPN, we need to set up iptables but the good thing is we have a virtual device.

pypy

pypy is another python interpreter, which can run many existing python packages. The good thing is that it is even faster than cpython. The downside is that it still needs sometime to fully supports all packages, esp. numpy/scipy. The acceleration comes from JIT part.

To play with it, just apt-get install pypy. Now you can play with numpy by import numpypy. Similar to python's bytecode compilation, pypy also includes a pypycompile. pypyclean can remove the compiled pyc files.

dlna server: gmediaserver

Easy to use:

gmediaserver --friendly-name "server name" --file-types unknown,mp4 -b /my/path

but it looks strange that some mp4 will be stuck after a while of playing...

APE player

I like mplayer, which supports APE already. But how about some GUI players, such as audacious?

Luckily I was able to resolve this by simply upgrading audacious to 3.4.1 (not sure though). Audacious now can play from ffmpeg's plugin, which then supports lots of unlisted format in audacious plugins, I guess.

some reference site:
http://www.deb-multimedia.org/
usu. it contains lots of unsupported multimedia related packages that you can't find from the official repository.

audio extraction wiht avconv

More often than not I have to extract some audio from a video file:
avconv -i your-video -nv -acodec copy your-audio-output

Please be noted that some video files might have aac/vorbis/other formats, therefore the suffix of the output should be changed correspondingly.

usu. mp4 videos have aac audio, webm videos have vorbis audio (can be stored in ogg files).

lxde setup for autostart programs

auto start some program:

• find a .desktop file from your package, e.g. gnome-terminal can be found by dpkg -L gnome-terminal
• link/copy it to ~/.config/autostart folder
• if you want it to appear in some desktop, find your ~/.config/openbox/lxde-rc.xml, add the application to the applications section (usu. at the bottom of the xml, there are examples)

fix mplayer missing dependencies

Mplayer is always complaining missing dependencies from SAMBA 4. missing shared objects (something similar to these):

/usr/bin/mplayer: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/samba/libcli_smb_common.so: version `SAMBA_4.0.8_DEBIAN' not found (required by /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libsmbclient.so.0)
/usr/bin/mplayer: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/samba/libsamba-security.so: version `SAMBA_4.0.8_DEBIAN' not found (required by /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libsmbclient.so.0)
/usr/bin/mplayer: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/samba/libkrb5samba.so: version `SAMBA_4.0.8_DEBIAN' not found (required by /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/samba/liblibsmb.so)
/usr/bin/mplayer: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/samba/libcli_cldap.so: version `SAMBA_4.0.8_DEBIAN' not found (required by /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/samba/liblibsmb.so)
/usr/bin/mplayer: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/samba/libndr-samba.so: version `SAMBA_4.0.8_DEBIAN' not found (required by /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/samba/liblibsmb.so)

Solution:

• upgrade to mplayer2
• upgrade SAMBA to 4.0.10 series
• add additional package libwbclient0 (might be missing from SAMBA packages)

now it works.