Archive for February, 2011

Create Professional Videos on Linux with OpenShot


07 Feb

Open source has come a long, long way and video editing has not been left behind. You’ll find a number of video editing tools on Linux, but none of them are both as user-friendly and create as high-quality video as OpenShot Video Editor.

With this easy to use tool you can have your edited videos up on Youtube (or presented to your company/organization) in no time. With a very small learning curve, and numerous features, OpenShot will make you and your company look very good. Let’s take a look at how mult-track videos can be created in OpenShot.

Resetting a PC using the Reset Control Register


03 Feb

Last night I was reading a data sheet about the ICH10 I/O Controller Hub (Section 13.7.5) and got a little more insight on the workings of the Reset Control Register (port 0xcf9).

Bits 1 and 3 determine the type of reset being requested and bit 2 initiates the reset.   When bit 2 (SYS_RST) transitions from 0 to 1 a reset is initiated as determined by the policy of bits 1 and 3.

Bit 1, System Reset (SYS_RST) determines a soft reset (0) or hard reset (1).
Bit 3, Full Reset (FULL_RST) if set to 1 causes a full power cycle.

On some systems, the ACPI FACP RESET_REG and RESET_VALUE are set 0xcf9 and 0×06 respectively which essentially triggers a hard system reset when doing a reboot using the reboot=acpi kernel option.

The kernel also has a reboot=pci option that will force a reset via the Reset Control Register and does this in three stages. First it sets bit 1 (SYS_RST=hard reset), waits 50 microseconds and then transitions SYS_RST from 0 to 1 to initiate the reset.

However, a full system reset can be initiated by also setting bit three by writing 0x0e to port 0xcf9.  I’ve noticed that some newer laptops on the market seem to be doing a full system reset on reboot, so I wonder if this is the mechanism they are using nowadays.

The beauty of Linux is that one can string a bunch of commands together to do this from user space:

echo -e ‘\xe’ | sudo dd of=/dev/port bs=1 seek=3321

..so make sure you data is sync’d before hand as this is destructive as power cycling the machine while it’s on.

From Canonical

Ziben IT Solutions

Should be something about IT


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