For quite some time I was trying to find out why I wasn’t able to listen audio streams in vlc, rhythmbox or any other player while i was able to listen those same streams on owner’s web page by using their flash based stream player. After listening for few minutes playback would completely stop with error “Unable to play stream” or something similar.

Finally, I’ve found out why. This particular behavior was caused by faad2 decoder available on RpmForge repo. RpmForge repo faad2 is compiled with drm (–with-drm) that is causing these problems. I am providing few easy steps that will help you recompile faad2, create rpms and reinstall it in order to get rid of this annoying problem.

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Centos 6 comes with gnome-screensaver by default. Also, VLC media player that you can find on rpmforge repo is 1.1.13. VLC has an option “Disable screensaver”. If you check that option VLC will try to disable screensaver while movie is played. But, unfortunately, that option is not working if you are using gnome-screensaver. So, I decided to give xscreensaver a go. You can find a lot of articles on the internet where authors are explaining how to do that. But, i couldn’t find any how to that explains how to make global changes to system making me able to make a switch transparently, without users even noticing a change.

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Windows users are able to use Cisco VPN Client to establish VPN tunnel. On linux there is a kvpnc that can be used to achieve the same thing. But, for me, command line is much more simpler than kvpnc setup. I am able to establish VPN tunnel much faster that way. Also, i don’t even need graphical environment to do that. So, what needs to be done? I will give you Centos 6 example. I don’t think there is a big difference with other ditributions.

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Linux distributions do not include proprietary NVIDIA drivers for obvious reasons. But, fortunately, installing NVIDIA proprietary drivers is pretty straightforward.

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Number of battery experts claims that Li-Ion battery life can be prolonged if battery is not fully charged during use. Windows 7 has this option too in it’s Power Manager. In order to have that option, OS has to have correct drivers for battery ACPI calls. In order for CentOS to be able to do that same thing, there is a acpi_call kernel module.

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