So I just got back from a nice vacation with my family. I borrowed the department Asus Eee Pc 900 for the trip. It had CrunchBang Linux on it, which wouldn’t update anymore. I reformatted it with Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Edition in about 45 minutes. Everything worked with the base install. Â Sweet.
On my Dell Inspirion lappy running Ubuntu 10.04, I installed and tried several DVD ripping utilities. Â I settled on Thoggen which was much simpler than the others. Â I ripped several DVDs into .ogv format, copied them to the netbook with my 2GB USB flash drive. Â Boom.
Then I installed VLC on the netbook to play them.  “F” for full-screen mode is your friend.  Awesome.
The default screen saver and power management settings were not conducive to watching a 2-hour video.  I found Caffeine, which allowed me to override the power management settings for a specific period.  Perfect.
Not long after we got on the road, I noticed my wife’s iPod Nano is missing all of its playlists. Â GTKPod to the rescue. Â I plugged in the iPod, specified the model, mounted it, re-created a few playlists, and wrote them right back to the iPod. All without iTunes. Â Easy-peasy.