mOcknox

Sometimes - I can not really tell when - <ctrl>, <alt> and <shift> keys do not work any more for me after releasing the focus from a vmware guest. Then running the following command will revive my keyboard:

setxkbmap de nodeadkeys

(or whetever your keyboard setting is). Note that I usually have an xterm open (or I can open one since I have a laucher available in the panel). In order to reduce typing, I put this into the $PATH into a little shell script ~/bin/kbdfix .

I just found this really cool Linux command line tool for ripping cd's into ogg vorbis files (or mp3, or ...): abcde (A Better CD Encode).

It does all you need for ripping cds: grep info from cddb, rip tracks into .wav files, normalize the volume of the individual files (if you want it), encode the wav files into the format you specify (given external commandline encoders), appropriately comment or tag (ID3/ID3v2) the file, calculates replaygain.

abcde can be configured via a ~/.abcde.conf file. Here you can configure where the created files should be stored and many other things. The manual page has the details.

Here is my ~/.abcde.conf file. I have configured the naming scheme for my .ogg files and given a custom name translation function that maps the names to lower case and does not (like the default) translate spaces to underscores:

# ~/.abcde.conf

OUTPUTTYPE='ogg'
OUTPUTFORMAT='${ARTISTFILE}/${ALBUMFILE}/${TRACKNUM} - ${TRACKFILE}'

mungefilename() { 
        echo "$1" | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]" | tr -d "[:']"
}

That's all. Here is the Homepage: http://lly.org/~rcw/abcde/page/.

When AltGr or other special keys are not working in your vmare (windoze) clients, try adding this to your ~/.vmware/preferences or /etc/vmware/config:

  
xkeymap.keycode.108 = 0x138 # Alt_R
xkeymap.keycode.106 = 0x135 # KP_Divide
xkeymap.keycode.104 = 0x11c # KP_Enter
xkeymap.keycode.111 = 0x148 # Up
xkeymap.keycode.116 = 0x150 # Down
xkeymap.keycode.113 = 0x14b # Left
xkeymap.keycode.114 = 0x14d # Right
xkeymap.keycode.105 = 0x11d # Control_R
xkeymap.keycode.118 = 0x152 # Insert
xkeymap.keycode.119 = 0x153 # Delete
xkeymap.keycode.110 = 0x147 # Home
xkeymap.keycode.115 = 0x14f # End
xkeymap.keycode.112 = 0x149 # Prior
xkeymap.keycode.117 = 0x151 # Next
xkeymap.keycode.78 = 0x46 # Scroll_Lock
xkeymap.keycode.127 = 0x100 # Pause
xkeymap.keycode.133 = 0x15b # Meta_L
xkeymap.keycode.134 = 0x15c # Meta_R
xkeymap.keycode.135 = 0x15d # Menu

Thanks to gladiac for the hint! He also told me that the problem only occurs when you use evdev as your keyboard driver.