Tag: Linux

I’ve never done much with audio data, so when I had to write some audio files to cd, and they weren’t sampled at the right rate, I had a problem. Fortunately, I found sox:

sox input.wav -r 44100 output.wav resample

did the job. And I tought it was going to be difficult 🙂

I recently wanted to shift to a UTF-8 locale, because I wanted to play with stuff like writing in Arabic, and because it seems to be the road forward. So I switched and GNU Emacs starts to enter garbage in my buffers. I type “æøåÆØÅ éí€“, but Emacs gives me “æøåÃÃà éíâ¬“. Ever so slightly less useful, and less readable too. I tried fiddling with “Options | Mule | Language Environments” and “Options | Mule | Set Coding System”, but to no avail. Somewhat deluded I gave up and went back to Latin 1, mostly at least. Every once in a while I tried again, and one day I stumbled over a reference to the Emacs file etc/PROBLEMS, a section on problems with UTF-8 support in GNU Emacs. Unfortunately the section was gone from my copy, but I found it on the net. The solution to all my problems: add the following lines to ~/.emacs:

(setq locale-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-terminal-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-keyboard-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-selection-coding-system 'utf-8)
(prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)

The problem went away and haven’t been seen since. BTW, I’m using GNU Emacs 21.3.1, installed from Debian testing and unstable (tried them both).

I’m moving most of my old Linux related material over here, to have it all in a single location. Since the material is old, I backdate the pages so they won’t appear on the front page.

Currently, migrated are:

• Linux on Asus L8400 laptops
• Linux on Olivetti Echos laptops