Alex Sleat » windows

Linux USB Errors with usb-creator-gtk “stdin: I/O error stdin: error 0 /init: line 1: can’t open /dev/sr0: No medium found”

Alex — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 14:29:01 +0000

After installing Ubuntu on a USB stick with the Ubuntu USB Startup Disk Creator (usb-creator-gtk) you might encounter an error such as the following:

stdin: I/O error
stdin: error 0
/init: line 1: can‘t open /dev/sr0: No medium found

This is actually a bug with the software and isn’t anything you’ve done wrong. It seems to be a bug that’s effecting users running Karmic, Lucid, Maverick and Natty so it’s a pretty wide spread issue.

The best way I have found to get around this issue is to install and run unetbootin to create live USBs. If you’re using linux it should be found in the usual place you can install things.

Installation:

Ubuntu/LinuxMint/Debian:

sudo apt-get install unetbootin

Fedora/OpenSuse:

sudo yum install unetbootin

Create a live USB:

To install a distro it’s pretty simple, either select it from the “Distribution” option and pick a distribution and version, UNetbootin will then actually download it and install it for you. Alternatively you can pick an Diskimage and browse for the ISO file you download (and would usually burn to a CD/DVD) and install from that. Select the USB Drive at the bottom and hit ok and it’ll install a bootloader, the system and you’ll be up and running in no time.

Persistence File:

If you wanted a persistence install which allows you to save files, settings and installed programs you’ll have to do a little manual work as it currently doesn’t support that option.

Go to http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/diskimg/ and download one of the files (128mb.zip, 256mb.zip, or 512mb.zip) corresponding to the amount of persistent space you want (make sure the size of the persistent disk image is smaller than the free space you have on your USB drive).

You’ll then need to edit the syslinux.cfg file that was created by UNetbootin in the root of the directory (just open it with a text editor) you should see something similar to the following:

label unetbootindefault
menu label Default
kernel /ubnkern
append initrd=/ubninit file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper quiet splash –

So on the line that starts “appen initrd=” you’ll want to add the option of “persistent”, it should then look like the following:

NOTE: WordPress changes my double dash at the end of the last line to a single long dash, this won’t work. It’s easiest just to add the final word before the double dash in the file, do not copy and paste this in to your file. If you do, you will get more errors.

label unetbootindefault
menu label Default
kernel /ubnkern
append initrd=/ubninit file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper quiet splash persistent –

I added this line to all that used the “file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed” option, since that’s the image that’s being opened and it should then change all options on the bootloader that will load the ubuntu install.

Steam in Wine, Repeated Windows

Alex — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 23:08:29 +0000

After installing Steam on my linux machine in wine I noticed a really annoy bug, the windows of steam are tiled across my screen as shown in the screenshot below.

Fix:

I managed to fix this by opening up the ‘Configure Wine’ program that comes with wine and under the Applications tab switching from Windows XP mode to Windows 7, this fixed this bug and I now also have system borders on the steam windows.

Installing Wine:

If you’re interested in getting steam installed I used this guide - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuMagazine/HowTo/InstallingSteam – It’s pretty simple and only takes a few minutes to do. Below is a quick, simple breakdown of what that guide says to do.

Download wine:

sudo apt-get install wine

Download the steam installer from here:

http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php

Copy over the tahoma.ttf font from a Windows install (or Download it here – http://source.winehq.org/source/fonts/tahoma.ttf ). Do this command from the folder you downloaded the font to.

cp tahoma.ttf ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts/

(If it doesn’t work and says the folder is missing or somthing like that do the following and then re-do the cp)

mkdir ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts/

Finally install Steam (Do this command in the directory you downloaded the Steam installer to):

msiexec /i SteamInstall.msi

HowTo: Install & Use Resynthesizer for GIMP

Alex — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:28:54 +0000

Remember this Photoshop CS5 sneak peak showing off it’s latest and greatest feature Content-Aware Fill a couple months ago, well it turns out a reasonably old plug-in for GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) named Resynthesizer seems to work just as great and because it is what it is, it’s free and open-source.

Installing on Ubuntu 9.10/10.04 install:

sudo apt-get install gimp-resynthesizer

or for the Source/Windows/Fedora Core 4 versions see the download section.

Once you have it installed, it’s simple to use really just select something on your image that shouldn’t be there and right click on the selection Filters -> Map -> Resynthesize.. and up should pop an options box, these settings are pretty standard and will get rid of most things given that they aren’t too big. It’s best if you’re not getting the results you want to play around with the settings yourself to get to know them better.

Click after the break for an example with step by step guide.

Example:

Let’s see, we start out with this nice photo of a house but wait.. what are those smelly students doing there? Well, let’s sort that out..

First thing you’ll want to do is grab your best selection tool and cut around the edge of those waste of time students..

Now all you have to do is right click Filters -> Map -> Resynthesize..

Next here, you can just hit the Ok button and watch as they magically disappear (probably back to their germ infested student flat).

Now you can just do that for anything, however while doing the edges some strange things happen with the default settings:

To counteract this, I found unchecking “Make vertically tileable” seemed to fix this and I would assume (without trying) that if you are doing a vertical edge you might want to take off the horizontally tileable option.

This brings the end result to a pretty reasonable (student free) image only after a couple of minutes, much better than could be expected from using the clone tool and whatever other means you would go through.