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. ย Sweet.
On my Dell Inspirion lappy running Ubuntu 10.04, I installed and tried several DVD ripping utilities. ย I settled on Thoggen which was much simpler than the others. ย I ripped several DVDs into .ogv format, copied them to the netbook with my 2GB USB flash drive. ย Boom.
Then I installed VLC on the netbookย to play them. ย “F” for full-screen mode is your friend. ย Awesome.
The default screen saver and power management settings were not conducive to watching a 2-hour video. ย I foundย Caffeine, which allowed me to override the power management settings for a specific period. ย Perfect.
Not long after we got on the road, I noticed my wife’s iPod Nano is missing all of its playlists. ย GTKPod to the rescue. ย 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. ย Easy-peasy.