Blog of Alexander Mamchenkov

I always like to watch the improvements of usability in Linux. This time I found another nice tool: Smart Package Manager. I haven\’t tried it a lot yet but it seems to be a bit more advanced than Synaptic – the tool I used before. Smart supports a variety of repositories and types of packages, can work both in GUI and CLUE, has KDE system tray integration addon and some other features.

Today I decided to work with my KDE desktop through VNC and I found out that additional keyboard layout that I have specified in my KDE settings was not working :( I have found a couple of errors both telling that XKB extension is missing.

Does anyone have had this problem before and if yes – is there any way out to make X server additional layouts work through VNC?

For the past few days I had to rip around 8 DVDs and I have about 10-15 more to do. No doubt that DVD::Rip is the best application I could find for ripping dvds. It works very good and I have no problems with it. The only question is \”which settings are good for ripping?\”.

I am not quite familiar with video and ripping, so somehow I stopped on using xvid4 coded with fast interlacing, medium sound normalization, big frame, high quality resize and the final result to be the size of 2 cds (1.4 gb).

Looks ok, but maybe someone have better idea on how 1.4 GB can be used when ripping with DVD::Rip?