Switching ubuntu boot from graphics to text mode.

This one has always puzzled me and make me go round and round few times now on all my new VM's, so I decided to note down what I did this time.

To Change the Graphic boot to Text mode on startup all you need to do is modify your /etc/init/.cfg file.

In my case I was trying to do this with gdm.cfg based on many google results however, I missed a crucial point that I had selected another Display Manager lightdm. After trying few things I finally realized the mistake. So here is the snippet from /etc/init/lightdm.cfg (This should be same for gdm as well in gdm.cfg):

start on ((filesystem
           and runlevel [!026]
           and started dbus
           and (drm-device-added card0 PRIMARY_DEVICE_FOR_DISPLAY=1
                or stopped udev-fallback-graphics))
          or runlevel PREVLEVEL=S)

stop on runlevel [016]

You can change the runlevel in

stop on runlevel [016]

but I didn't find it necessary, just changing it in start on section did the job.

Finally sorted my duplicate photo collection.

I figured out recently that I have accumulated 21GB of photos and movie clips from my small Pentax S4 camera and was wondering what should I do to remove the duplicates. Having searched google for linux photo management softwares I installed digiKam (from KDE) and it took almost half an hour to catalog them and used fuzzy search (I think I used the right term) to find duplicates and shocked me with many photos with as many as 11 copies in different folders from backups.

I took the painful way of manually cleaning them from duplicates list in digiKam and spent almost 1 whole day in all to do this. In the end I was expecting my original collection to be clean but it wasn't but digiKam showed it clean. So thought of deleting and recreating new album (biggest mistake) and was shocked again by it found all the duplicates and then I realized when you add an album it does the whole copy of the collection and edits the copy. (this is really annoying for me but it may there for good reason of not loosing stuff accidentally) Having said all this I do think it's a very good photo management application.

I was no way ready for the same exercise again so back to Google again and found another solution fslint which shows duplicate files but is still manual work to remove duplicates.

Further search gave me wonderful command on one of the forums using fdupes which did a very good job for me. I was bit skeptical in first place with fear to loose some files so ran it without -d option like
fdupes -r photos/clean_album and reviewed output and was happy with the listing so when ahead and used it as suggested by forum
yes 1 | fdupes -rd photos/clean_album and I had my 95% or duplicate removal work done. (I wish I should have used it in first place) Rest of the work was to clean up using Digikam and then flatten them into one directory where I have some name conflicts which I used as my blog name low-tech approach and added prefixes to avoid clashes.

End result 21GB is now reduced to 8.5GB.

I think I should be more careful going forward about duplicates and backups.

EDIT: Another note is I did miss the avi clips when I did manual cleanup using digiKam but fslint and fdupes sorted those out as well.

gdm vs xdm surprise on my Ubuntu 8.04.1 x86_64 machine.

While looking at some cleanup in Synaptic package manger for unused packages I thought of seeing what difference it would make to GNOME if I use xdm instead of gdm. Well
1. I saw not so nice startup text display (I am fine with it though)
2. I saw fine black and white mesh screen which is awfully painful for graphical login with thick text box for entering login/password. (I even managed to stand this one)
3. Login was much swift than previous into GNOME. (so it was worth the switch for now)/
4. I could see all the menus icons taskbar etc. so it's good sign.
5. Only thing I missed was shutdown option in GNOME System->Quit (or from the quit button).

The biggest surprise was without anything running I would normally see most of my 4 GB RAM was always in use with GDM which is now drop down to around 700-900Mb even now with Thunderbird, pidgin, firefox on it is at 1.1GB I think to me this is big improvement. (there may some others limitations but for now I thik I will see how it works for me). I past I always saw my system eating away into the 6 GB swap without running much of the applications.

I think I will also try another not so heavy window managers like Enlightenment etc.

The part of inspiration to think about it is DIY I am doing with my homemade Digital Picture Frame out of P-II for which I am trying various linux options after staring the project 2 years back and shelved it with initial success with Windows.

I wish to get more than a digital picture frame out of the DIY possibly low-end media player controllable via remote using lirc. (sounds too ambitious but will give it a go)