Category Archives: Info Links

Wake on LAN via Windows

Windows

To wake a machine from a Windows computer there are a few choices.

wolcmd

wolcmd for the command line from Depicus.com is good to use in scripts or by itself. It works 100% of the time for me.

 wolcmd yourmacaddr localserveripaddr 0.0.0.0 9

wolcmd can start the Linux server using wolcmd <-download page, from Depicus.com

Wake on LAN GUI

A GUI version of the wolcmd tool from Depicus.com WakeOnLanGui

WOL Magic Packet Sender Tool

WOL Magic Packet Sender, uses a WOL Setup MSI file.  I have used this quite a bit and it does work nicely. It is the first one that I used and have it on my Windows machines.

Online

At Depicus.com you can wake your machine directly from the Internet as well without loading any application via this page –> http://www.depicus.com/wake-on-lan/woli.aspx

There is even a way with the Depicus site to make up a URL that will have the MAC address, IP address and Port as parameters to send a magic packet. I’ve tried it and it works.

 

 

 

 

CD recording from the Linux command line using cdrdao

I’ve been interested in a way to burn right from the command line, with a possibility of using one of my Linux computers with a mode as a burn station, ideally I could throw in a CD, it would detect it and start the copy process and eject when done. This post is about a small step in that direction.

I researched it a bit and tried the example given by this page….

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/cdrdao

But, I modded the  $HOME/.cdrdao file a bit to include a list of cddb servers that I pulled off of,http://roozster.info/eac/06.html,  plus added a timeout for the cddb set to 10 seconds.

The .cdrdao file goes in your home directory and it acts like a configuration file for the cdrdao program. The help site above goes into details. But, briefly the write buffer at 128, which is 128 seconds, at an 8x burn gives 16 seconds of under-run protection. The device has to be set correctly. My CD burner is at /dev/sr0. According to the help.ubuntu site above, running sudo cdrdao scanbus, will produce an output that yields the device name. For me it didn’t yield a /dev type of connection but rather a 1,0,0 bus attachment type of readout. But I hovered over the CD in the file manager and found out the device mount point from there which was /dev/sr0.

Output from running sudo cdrdao scanbus
Cdrdao version 1.2.2 - (C) Andreas Mueller <andreas@daneb.de>
  SCSI interface library - (C) Joerg Schilling
  Paranoia DAE library - (C) Monty

Check http://cdrdao.sourceforge.net/drives.html#dt for current driver tables.

Using libscg version 'ubuntu-0.8ubuntu1'

1,0,0 : QSI     , CDRW/DVD SBW-242, UD22

Paranoia Mode

Paranoia mode is interesting as it provides some repair of the ripped audio, from http://www.linuxcommand.org/man_pages/cdrdao1.html

--paranoia-mode mode
              Sets the correction mode for digital audio  extraction.  

0:  No checking,  data  is  copied  directly from the drive.
1: Perform overlapped reading to avoid jitter. 
2: Like  1  but  with  addi-tional  checks  of the read audio data. 3: Like 2 but with addi-tional scratch detection and repair.


              The extraction speed reduces from 0 to 3.

Below is the code that I pull from the site and modded by adding the cddb_servers and cddb_timeout this code is used to create  the $HOME/.cdrdao file

#---$HOME/.cdrdao --#
write_buffers: 128
write_device: "/dev/sr0"
write_driver: "generic-mmc"
read_device: "/dev/sr0"
read_driver: "generic-mmc"
read_paranoia_mode: 3
write_speed: 8
cddb_servers: "http://cddb.cddb.com:80/~cddb/cddb.cgi","http://sc.ca.us.cddb.com:80/~cddb/cddb.cgi","http://sc2.ca.us.cddb.com:80/~cddb/cddb.cgi","http://sj.ca.us.cddb.com:80/~cddb/cddb.cgi","http://sj2.ca.us.cddb.com:80/~cddb/cddb.cgi","http://us.cddb.com:80/~cddb/cddb.cgi"
cddb_timeout: 10
 A few good command line options for cdrdao

I also fire the cdrdao command with the options –with-cddb to include the text info onto the burned CD and –eject to eject the CD on a completed burn.

sudo cdrdao copy --with-cddb --eject

This code can be put in a bash script. I created cdcopy.sh to make it simple to fire off from the command line.

Download as cdcopy.sh.txt -> cdcopy.sh

Rename cdcopy.sh.txt to cdcopy.sh, put in home and run chmod 755 on it to make it executable

chmod 755 cdcopy.sh

 

So far I have used this method to burn about 10 CD’s in the first week I finished trying this and tested them out in a CD player and ripped them both with Media Player and iTunes, all worked well!

 

 

 

Windows 9 gets a start menu again

People complain pretty hard about Windows 8. I hear it all the time. I’d kind of wish they would give Linux a try, but that is not the reality for most. With the advent of Win 8, bad timing for Microsoft. I think a lot of people are hanging on XP still actually because it was so good as far as start menu and etc. I was in Staples and the county library, they both still use XP. Microsoft is possibly missing a market here. They plan on having a core that will go across all platforms. If they could offer an easy upgrade route on older machines XP->9. I am thinking like the way there is a light version of Linux Mint or Lubuntu. They could get some XP diehards to switch to 9. In other words, new kernal, stuff under the hood, but simplified desktop and lower processor load version.

 

But here is an article and a preview of 9….

http://www.ibtimes.com/windows-9-leaked-video-shows-start-menu-cortana-virtual-desktops-1689140

I am not surprised that the start menu is back in 9.