I was surprised to see there was no fitting packaged mercury compiler available in any of the Arch Linux repositories. Arch has many compilers available but apparantly not the mercury compiler. I admit that mercury is perhaps not the most popular language, considering it is a) declarative and b) not backed by a major company like Microsoft, but I was suprised nonetheless. It may be worth mentioning that compiling mercury takes a little while (depending on your computer a few hours) so make sure you have the time if you’re building it.

CSRFTester is a whole different application. It is used for testing Cross Site Request Forgeries in web applications. It sits in between your browser and the internet and logs your http requests. Based on those logs, it can generate sample code to exploit possible csrf vurnerabilities. As the name suggests, it’s just for testing purposes and logging. Don’t expect any out of the box exploits.

Here’s the output of my Nvidia Geforce 8400M GS:

display: :0.0   screen: 0
API version: 0
Information string: NVIDIA VDPAU Driver Shared Library  190.36  Wed Sep 23 06:55:52 PDT 2009
 
Video surface:
 
name   width height types
-------------------------------------------
420     4096  4096  NV12 YV12
422     4096  4096  UYVY YUYV 
 
Decoder capabilities:
 
name               level macbs width height
-------------------------------------------
MPEG1                 0  8192  2048  2048
MPEG2_SIMPLE          3  8192  2048  2048
MPEG2_MAIN            3  8192  2048  2048
H264_MAIN            41  8192  2048  2048
H264_HIGH            41  8192  2048  2048
VC1_SIMPLE            1  8190  2048  2048
VC1_MAIN              2  8190  2048  2048
VC1_ADVANCED          4  8190  2048  2048
 
Output surface:
 
name              width height nat types
----------------------------------------------------
B8G8R8A8          8192  8192    y  Y8U8V8A8 V8U8Y8A8
R10G10B10A2       8192  8192    y  Y8U8V8A8 V8U8Y8A8 
 
Bitmap surface:
 
name              width height
------------------------------
B8G8R8A8          8192  8192
R8G8B8A8          8192  8192
R10G10B10A2       8192  8192
B10G10R10A2       8192  8192
A8                8192  8192
 
Video mixer:
 
feature name                    sup
------------------------------------
DEINTERLACE_TEMPORAL             y
DEINTERLACE_TEMPORAL_SPATIAL     y
INVERSE_TELECINE                 y
NOISE_REDUCTION                  y
SHARPNESS                        y
LUMA_KEY                         y
HIGH QUALITY SCALING - L1        -
HIGH QUALITY SCALING - L2        -
HIGH QUALITY SCALING - L3        -
HIGH QUALITY SCALING - L4        -
HIGH QUALITY SCALING - L5        -
HIGH QUALITY SCALING - L6        -
HIGH QUALITY SCALING - L7        -
HIGH QUALITY SCALING - L8        -
HIGH QUALITY SCALING - L9        -
 
parameter name                  sup      min      max
-----------------------------------------------------
VIDEO_SURFACE_WIDTH              y         1     4096
VIDEO_SURFACE_HEIGHT             y         1     4096
CHROMA_TYPE                      y
LAYERS                           y         0        4
 
attribute name                  sup      min      max
-----------------------------------------------------
BACKGROUND_COLOR                 y
CSC_MATRIX                       y
NOISE_REDUCTION_LEVEL            y      0.00     1.00
SHARPNESS_LEVEL                  y     -1.00     1.00
LUMA_KEY_MIN_LUMA                y
LUMA_KEY_MAX_LUMA                y

In case you’re wondering, vdpau is an api that allows video programs to offload portions of the video decoding process and video post-processing to the GPU video-hardware, resulting in less cpu load.

MPlayer has initial support for libnemesi to handle rtsp stream, as an alternative for live555 and that would be the only reason I wanted to try it out. MPlayer should automatically detect libnemesi. Otherwise you will have to append the –extra-cflags option to the ./configure statement.

While netembryo is getting more and more stable, libnemesi is still in early development and  no official release exists as of yet. In fact, many libnemesi revisions don’t even want to compile so it can be a real drag to find one that does. I’ll save you some time: the public git version of 20090501 works.

I found the packaging itself pretty complicated. Brother made the driver only available for debian and red hat based systems. Arch Linux is none of the two. This isn’t a big issue, it’s pretty much an archive of the necessary files. The main problem was that it doesn’t adhere to the packaging standards of Arch Linux. It uses /usr/local paths and arch doesn’t. I had to write a patch that adjusted the paths in all the files that used them. Third problem was that I used it on a 64bit system. It took me a while to realize I had to install a lib32 library. The last problem is that Brother pretty much assumed you used usb to connect the printer. I used the network. In the end it worked out well so I can finally print on it.