Ever since shifting exclusively to Linux (Ubuntu Linux 7.10, "Gutsy Gibbon" is what I am running currently), I thought I'd document whatever steps I took to solve certain problems I encountered.  Of course, you could go and look at the same websites I did and find workarounds for what you want to do, but I thought my writing about my experiences might still be helpful.  So here are two tips that I discovered recently.

I mentioned in the last post that I bought a bunch of VCDs yesterday, right?  Well, I ran into trouble playing them on my computer.  Totem Movie Player pops up an error, saying that the playback of the disc required the VCD source protocol which was not installed properly.  Huh?  So I tried playing it back in VLC and that didn't work either.  I tried playing it through VLC's Open Disc menu, and I also tried opening the DAT files with the players.  Didn't work.  A little hunting on the net turned up two solutions —

• Open up Synaptic Package Manager and install MPlayer and associated codecs.  Now, put in your VCD, right-click on MPlayer's Video Window, go to the VCD menu and click "Open Disc".  You will get a popup with an error message, but the disc will still playback fine!
• I had best results with this though.  Install the XINE player and associated codecs.  That plays back VCDs properly.

I was kind of surprised that VCDs would have trouble playing back in Linux.  After all, they're just MPEG encoded video, and you could play them back effortlessly even on Windows 95!  I don't think the issue is that the media players lack MPEG codecs.  I think it has more to do with the fact that they're not able to recognise that the DAT files on the VCDs contain MPEG data (I could be wrong though).  Anyway for now I'm happy that I can play back these VCDs.  A side note — the Video CD is still a popular format in India and in Asian countries.  It just didn't pick up in other countries (I think in the US, they went directly from VHS to DVD), but here you get lots of movies released on VCD even till today.  Now many of these are obscure movies that you won't get on DVD either, over here!

Now for Tip #2!  This is regarding configuring my internet connection.  You see, if I plug in my network cable, I'm not able to directly browse webpages.  I have to go to the Network Configuration tool (System » Administration » Network) and then enter my ISP's DNS IP addresses manually.  Then, things work fine.  I've even saved these settings as a Location under that tool.  But the problem is that these settings aren't persistent.  Whenever I restart the computer (or even when the computer wakes up from hibernation), these settings revert to defaults (the only DNS IP is that of my router itself, 192.168.1.254).  So I searched around for a way to retain these settings, and this post gave me a solution.

Apparently, the nameserver IPs are stored in a file called resolv.conf, and the problem is that each time the computer restarts/wakes up, the router is queried or something by DHCP, and the file is overwritten with the default nameserver IP.  So, one way to make the IP settings persistent is to make resolv.conf read-only, but that is a pretty ugly method.  A better way is to follow the third method on that page.  Here, what you are essentially doing, is to tell DHCP to prepend your ISP's known nameserver IPs to resolv.conf.  This worked well for me, and I think my pages load faster too!  Step-by-step, here's what you do —

• Open up the file dhclient.conf in a text editor.  You'd enter the following command in a Terminal window: sudo gedit /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf
• Now, there should be a line over there that looks something like this: # prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;
• What you do is, you simply remove the hash on the beginning of the line, and enter your ISPs DNS IPs after that.  If you have more than one IP, separate with a comma.  My entry looks like this: prepend domain-name-servers 202.54.12.164, 202.54.29.5; (don't forget the semicolon at the end)
• Save the file and then re-enable your network connection, and that's it.  I restarted my computer and the first thing I did after it booted up was to open Firefox.  I was able to access webpages.

Note: Since I am running Ubuntu, I have described the steps that worked for me, if you are using another Linux distribution, you should be able to follow similar steps to achieve these results.  I have another big Linux-related post coming up shortly.  That one is on using Windows fonts under Linux!