Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

The mpv file I swiped from Kino export whilst it was in the middle of working (it deletes it after mplex) caused this error from xste: Frames per second error in /video/.vie/project/project.mpv
29.970 is different from 29.970 specified in main form
this will give timing errors

WTF?

Tried SMILutils. This is a tar xf; configure; make; make install type installation. The magic incantation this time is smil2yuv kino.smil -a project.mp2 | yuvscaler -O VCD | mpeg2enc -o project.mpv -f 1. Same error from xste unfortunately.

The DVD editing partition is mounted at /mnt/edit. It’s an ext3 file system. To back it up, I put in a DVD+RW, changed to /mnt and ran growisofs -M /dev/dvd -R -J edit. About 20 minutes later, the 3.7GB was backed up.

Parted is supposed to be able to resize an ext3 file system, but version 1.6.3 complains No Implementation: This ext2 filesystem has a rather strange layout! Parted can’t resize this (yet). This is strange because print shows the system to be ext3. Mm-kay. I remember reading that it’s easy to switch between ext2 and ext3 and found the following commands to do so:

ext3 -> ext2: tune2fs -O '^has_journal' /dev/hdb2

ext2 -> ext3: tune2fs -j /dev/hdb2

Alas, parted still complained about the partition in its ext2 incarnation. Some Googling turned up references to this error as an unresolved Parted issue due to Parted using an old version of ext2resize. The recommendation is to use the utility directly. So I downloaded and installed (rpm -Uvh) ext2resize-1.1.17-1.i386.rpm from the ext2resize site. The man page for ext2resize says it only resizes the file system, not the partion. To resize the partion, you should delete and recreate it with fdisk making sure you use the same starting position. Hey, I made a backup, right? On exit of fdisk, it said there was a problem reloading the partition table and the kernel would use the old one. Time for a reboot.

So far, so good. Next command is ext2resize /dev/hdb2 which will resize the file system to fill the partition (now about 104GB). No errors. Converted back to ext3 and mounted. Touchdown!

Before getting too far into the DVD creation project, I thought I’d increase the size of my editing partion. Yes, these are the things I think when I wake up at 6 am. It’s 40GB, but since it’s a quarter full already and I’ve got lots more video to work with, I want to avoid the hassle later. The first step is backing up what’s there. Why not use the DVD drive? I poped in a DVD+RW and clicked on the DVD icon on my desktop. Instead of the directory listing in Konqueror, a message box came up telling me

Could not mount device.

The reported error was:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/dvd, or too many mounted file systems

(could this be the IDE device where you in fact use ide-scsi so that sr0 or sda or so is needed?)

Pretty nice error message, huh? I had set up IDE-SCSI emulation earlier for the DVD burning tools, but I didn’t update my entries in /etc/fstab nor my links in /dev. /dev/dvd was pointing to /dev/cdrom which was pointing to /dev/hdc and there was no entry for the DVD in /etc/fstab. So I added /dev/dvd /mnt/dvd udf,iso9660 user,noauto,kudzu,ro 0 0 to /etc/fstab and made /dev/dvd point to /dev/scd0. Now I got “no medium” when I put a disk in. cat /proc/scsi/scsi told me the Plextor PX-708A was on scsi host scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 but not which device in /dev it was attached to. This ought to be in /var/log/messages (dmesg) but thanks to long uptimes and having a million Windows machines bombarding my firewill, the startup messages scrolled out of /var/log/messages*. After scratching my head awhile and contemplating a reboot to see the startup log, I remembered scd0 is the first SCSI CD device–my older Plextor PX-W1210S, which is actually a SCSI unit. After changing /dev/dvd to point to /dev/scd1, it mounted. I need some coffee.