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Linux HowTos
Yet another redundant and badly-supported audio compression file format, Monkey's Audio (hence the .ape extension) exploits the fact that the information streams in two stereo channels are similar. It then only encodes one channel and the difference of the other channel plus a few other tricks, for loss-less compression. This may well be a vaguely clever idea, but useless for mono or multi-channel encoding. Besides, we have FLAC-encoding, which compresses audio (to the same degree as Monkey) in a loss-less way for CD-quality reproduction. More importantly, it is very well supported.
So, what do we do with this stupid ape-file?
Yet another bespoke file format that unsuccessfully attempts to futher the agenda of vendor lock-in: If you are running Windows, you need to purchase PowerISO from poweriso.com , if you are running X86-based Linux flavour, the same people offer a free program to read and write .daa files. Go figure...
A well-meaning person gives you a .nrg file and you will not invest in a piece of expensive bespoke software to read it. After all, you run free, open-source software and never have and never will pay for software. What to do with this stupid .nrg file?
Directly Burn DVDs from .avi files
Here is a quick and simple-to-use utility to convert an AVI video file to the weird intermediate files that DVDs require, and to then write/burn the files all to a DVD. It is called avi2dvd and is written in BASH shell script.
More about it here at https://sourceforge.net/projects/avi2dvd
A Linux Distro for those 1990's Ultra 5 and Ultra 10 Sparc-II computers!
Blessed are the cheesemakers
Blessed are the meek
Blessed are the bignosesOooh, that's nice, isn't it?
- from Monty Python's The Life of Brian
In 2008 and I built a specialized Linux "distro"! BigNoseLinux is a binary Linux installation for Sun Ultra5/10 computers that hail from the late 1990's (!) and is based on the Gentoo Linux meta-distro. The BigNoseLinux distro is primarily intended to quickly create a web server using the classical LAMP-stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) with Joomla and a few other useful web-based management tools.