BSNL launched EV-DO card last year here in India. It connects to the Internet providing close to broadband speeds. Their infrastructure has been improving gradually here and the news is that it would support speeds upto 2mbps by the end of this month.

[:http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffmpeg/|ffmpeg] is a very useful tool for conversion between various video encodings.
If you build it with all the supported libraries, you can convert almost all kinds of video files to the desired encoding.

Recently a video that we recorded was handed over to me in VCD format (!). Feisty doesn't seem to like VCDs much:

Opening audio decoder: [libdv] Raw DV Audio Decoder
Unknown/missing audio format -> no sound
ADecoder init failed
Opening audio decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg/libavcodec audio decoders
Cannot find codec 'dvaudio' in libavcodec...
ADecoder init failed
ADecoder init failed


The option left was to rip the VCD:

vcdxrip --cdrom-device=/dev/hdb --rip


Nothing new in Openoffice crashing on your Linux installation. It does, most of the times :P

But for the users who rely on SCIM (Stanadard Chinese Input Method) for Input in their regional language, Openoffice is completely unusable as of now on Ubuntu. It never takes off from the splash screen that appears. Turns out that Openoffice.org doesn't like the GTK_IM_MODULE set to scim.

There is a work around, though. But not so convenient one. Setting
GTK_IM_MODULE=xim
on terminal before launching the application,

OR

adding as below on /usr/bin/ooffice:

#!/bin/sh
GTK_IM_MODULE=xim
export OOO_EXTRA_ARG=''
/usr/lib/openoffice/program/ooqstart "$@"

worked for me, and I've also been able to use SCIM keymaps.

I've had to remind myself this every time I upgrade the distributions on my Workstations and notebook.

Upgraded Ubuntu on my laptop to the latest - 7.04, Feisty Fawn. The upgrade was smooth and easy.

For me, upgrading to a newer version is to just have the latest of applications, especially GNOME and Evolution. Looks like there is a bunch of [:http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/704tour|very nice features] on 7.04.

If your Firefox rendering of Indic characters (especially Kannada characters) go bonkers yet again, add your default locale back again on /usr/bin/firefox.