Tor can easily be installed on Ubuntu by running:

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install tor

This will download and setup Tor as a system service, which I personally don’t like starting at boot (I prefer starting it manually when I want to go anonymous). Installing Tor also installs Privoxy as a system service (more on Privoxy in a bit). Stopping them from starting up at boot can be accomplished by:

sudo update-rc.d -f tor remove
sudo update-rc.d -f privoxy remove

Now, whenever you’d like to start up Tor, run:

sudo /etc/init.d/tor start

and when you’d like it to go back to sleep:

sudo /etc/init.d/tor stop

I prefer the manual startup and stopping method because I like to keep close track of what’s eating up my memory, and if I’m not using a service, why have it running? Although, leaving it running at all times when not being used won’t hurt anything either.

Tor sets its tunnel up on port 9050 by default. To tunnel your connection through the Tor network, simply point your application to “localhost” on port 9050 as a SOCKS5 proxy.

Privoxy
While Privoxy is not necessary for the proper running of Tor, it can help further increase your anonymity online. By default, Tor will forward on the full user agent strings of your browser (like when using Firefox). This doesn’t strike me as a huge violation of anonymity, but it could theoretically be used for certain attacks and abuses. If you’d like to filter them out, Privoxy is your man.

Edit your Privoxy config (located at /etc/privoxy/config) with your favorite text editor and add the following line to the bottom:

forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 .

The period at the end is necessary. Now, startup both Tor and Privoxy:

sudo /etc/init.d/tor start
sudo /etc/init.d/privoxy start

And instead of pointing Firefox to Tor directly at port 9050, point it to port 8118 (Privoxy’s) on localhost instead. Your HTTP traffic will be routed through Privoxy, which will filter your headers, and then through the Tor network.

Torbutton
If you intend to use Tor with Firefox, Torbutton is an extremely easy to use extension to enable and disable Tor without messing with any settings in Preferences. It can be found and installed here. Once it’s activated, simply click “Tor Disabled” now located in the lower-right corner of the browser to enable anonymous browsing. This still requires the proper installation and setup of both Tor AND Privoxy via apt.

First thing you need is a remote SSH server to connect to and an account on it. You can set one up on your own machine using a:

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install openssh-server

This will get an ssh server running on the default port of 22. If you’d like to change any config options (including port), go for a:

sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

If you do decide to edit some options, be sure to restart the server when you’re done:

sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart

If you’re using a broadband router, you’ll likely need to setup some port forwarding so that your ssh server can be seen by the outside world (namely, getting port 22 forwarded to the internal ip of the machine running the ssh server). PortForward.com offers great guides for more detailed help on doing this. Once we have our server running and our ports forwarded, we can access it from anywhere on the internet (work, school, etc.) and send our connection through it via an encrypted tunnel (eat that, campus firewall). On your client machine, run a:

ssh -D 9999 username@ip-of-ssh-server

If you changed the default port of your remote server, run:

ssh -D 9999 username@ip-of-ssh-server -p <port>

instead. If you’d like to give yourself an easy to remember domain, or if your home IP frequently changes, dyndns.com offers free dns services to get this done.

After running the previous command, you will have created a local SOCS tunnel to your SSH server. Now all you have to do is instruct whatever application you want to proxy to connect to port 9999 on “localhost” as a SOCKS (v5 is a preferable option, if available) proxy.

Although this does not anonymize you (in most cases, you’re just using your own machine to route a remote connection), this is useful for circumventing firewalls and encrypting your data, sometimes faster and more reliably then with Tor.

Chances are you have mplayer installed already, but just to make sure:

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install mplayer

Next, all we have to do is invoke mplayer using some special commands:

mplayer <input filename> -novideo -ao pcm:fast:file=audio.wav -channels 2

This will drop “audio.wav” into the current folder.  You can then encode it into the format of your choosing or easily create an audio CD using your favorite burning app (Brasero being mine).  I sometimes like to use this to extract the audio from youtube videos.

Installing couldn’t really be much easier:

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install youtube-dl

Then, all you have to do is run:

youtube-dl <url of video>

To grab that great video in .flv format.  Lots of media players play them just fine.

Of course, there is always the GUI utility found in Menu -> System -> Administration -> Services, but I’ve noticed that for some reason or another, that utility doesn’t always list all the services set to startup at boot. That’s where the command line, once again, saves the day. You’ll need to know the exact name of the service to use the utility, which shouldn’t be that hard to figure out. If in doubt, drop a:

ls /etc/init.d/

in a terminal to see a list of the services available to the system. Once we have our name, we can make use of the Debian service configumator (that’s really its technical name):

sudo update-rc.d apache2 defaults

will start apache at boot in the default run levels (2, 3, 4, and 5). Inversely, running a:

sudo update-rc.d -f apache2 remove

will ensure that apache keeps it face shut at boot. Lots more options for update-rc.d can be found by checking out its man page, if this sort of thing really interests you:

man update-rc.d

Happy servicing! \m/

Note
This should also work for the Playstation 3 with a little tweaking, but alas, I do not own one to mess around with.

What We Need
First things first: in order for this to work, we need both your computer and Xbox 360 living together on the same network. Many people already have this setup (e.g. modem plugged into a router, computer(s) and 360 plugged into router). If you don’t have things setup like this already, either fire up that dvd burner or purchase yourself a router and some patch cable.

Media Sharing
The whole idea behind this is that your computer acts as a media server on your LAN, sharing the files you configure it to, and your 360 plays the stream (in my experience, it does this flawlessly). This is great for a whole bunch of reasons. Microsoft has built this serving functionality in some which-woo version of it’s bloated Windows Media Player, so us Linux users have created our own apps for getting this done.

Ushare vs Fuppes
Both Ushare and Fuppes will stream files to your 360 on the Linux side of things. They do, however, have some differences. Ushare is more bit more straight-forward in its use and configuration, but it does not automatically transcode media on the fly. This means that all the media you wish to stream has to be within the 360’s sorta strict playback specification (see this faq). It also seems to have a nasty bug in streaming large files (playback will stop with an error at around the 2gb mark, even though the 360 supports streaming files up to 4gb). Fuppes on the other hand, while being slightly more complicated to setup and use, will transcode video into an Xbox 360 playable format on-the-fly (although I haven’t really used it for this) and handles >2gb files fine. Personally, I tend to use Ushare for smaller xvid sharing (~350mb tv eps) and Fuppes for my mkv to mp4 conversions (they tend to be around 2.2gb per half). I should probably use Fuppes for both, but I guess I’m just strange like that.

Ushare
Installing Ushare is a breeze. On Ubuntu Hardy, it can be found in the repos, so a:

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install ushare

will get you setup. On Gutsy, the Ushare site provides us with a nice .deb here. To ensure that Ushare didn’t add itself as a startup service, issue:

sudo update-rc.d -f ushare remove

To get Ushare up and running, go for a:

ushare -p 49153 -x -c /path/to/your/media

Fuppes
Fuppes can also be installed via deb: Gutsy | Hardy. I like making sure that fuppes didn’t go the service route either:

sudo update-rc.d -f fuppes remove

Next, we need to do a little bit more config before our first run:

cd ~
mkdir .fuppes
cd .fuppes
wget http://linuxlove.info/files/fuppes.cfg
wget http://linuxlove.info/files/vfolder.cfg

Now, the only thing left to do is to edit the top of your fuppes.cfg using your favorite text editor to include the directories you’d like to share. Once that’s all setup, run Fuppes by typing:

fuppes

In a terminal. This will start up the app and drop you at an interactive prompt (it’d be nice if it told you that, wouldn’t it?). Type r <enter> to build your media database and then v <enter> to refresh your vfolder listing. I’m sure there is a way to do this automatically at startup, but I take the lazy route and do it manually every time.

Whichever route you go, your 360 should detect either fuppes or ushare as a “computer” in the media tab of the dashboard. Yippee!

Save Some Disk Space
At the top of my fuppes.cfg, you’ll notice that I have my dvd drive shared. This is because I like to burn my mkv2mp4 conversions to dvd and then stream them from my computer’s dvd-rom drive (using speedcontrol to quiet the bugger down). This takes the stress of frequent movie watching off the 360’s drive, which is always a good thing. We all know how great the 360 is at failing on its own ;].

Now, there are lots of guides around the internets for doing this, but for me, none of them worked. Not one technique out of about five. Then one day I came across a small application appropriately enough named “speedcontrol” writen by Thomas Fritzsche and man, it’s been smooth sailing since. The following terminal commands should you get you setup:

cd ~
wget http://linuxlove.info/files/speedcontrol
sudo mv speedcontrol /usr/bin/
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/speedcontrol

Now, whenever you’d like to slow that drive down, simply run a:

sudo speedcontrol -x 2 /dev/dvd
(you may have to change the path to your device if it differs)

and enjoy the pure, streaming silence. To reset it back to max speed when you’re finished, type:

sudo speedcontrol -x 0 /dev/dvd

or just restart your machine.

Don’t let yourself become overwhelmed with the seemingly large number of steps involved with this. Trust me when I tell you the results are more than worth it. This is a far preferable method to re-encoding the entire mkv to .mp4 because 1) it’s infinitely quicker (less than a half hour for a 4.4gb file) because we’re only converting the audio and remuxing the streams and 2) there is no loss in video quality because the stream is left untouched.

Acknowledgements: Uber, mega, ultra thanks go to jexxie, m3_del, and hansa56 on the Ubuntu Forums for all their work and research on this topic and for teaching me how to do this. This is essentially a compilation / re-organization / expansion of the info found in these two threads: one two.

Setup

Before starting, we need to get our needed applications installed. First up is a patched version of MP4Box that fixes a bug with files larger than 2gb. The following commands should get you downloaded, patched, compiled, and installed:

cd ~
sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install zlib1g-dev
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gpac/gpac-0.4.4.tar.gz
tar -vzxf gpac-0.4.4.tar.gz
wget http://linuxlove.info/files/gpac.patch
patch -p0 < gpac.patch
cd gpac
chmod +x configure
./configure
make
sudo make install

We’re also going to need the Nero AAC encoder:

cd ~
wget http://linuxlove.info/files/neroAacEnc
sudo mv neroAacEnc /usr/bin/
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/neroAacEnc

Finally, we’ll need some packages from the repos:

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install bbe mkvtoolnix mplayer normalize-audio

File Size Limitation

Now that we have all the required apps installed, here is an important note regarding file sizes. Any mkv that is larger that 4gb will have to be split prior to be converted. This is a limitation of the Xbox 360’s current playback capabilities. More about this in a bit.

Compatable Audio Formats

This technique currently works best for mkvs with either AC3 or DTS audio. Some of the newer formats, such as EAC3, are not officially supported by mplayer yet. If you really need support for these formats (I don’t see many mkvs with them yet), I’m fairly sure it can probably be compiled into it. Google around for info.

Some Handy Time Saving Scripts

1. Jexxie has written a really excellent script with lots of auto-detecting features. While I have used parts of it to make my own script, I have not actually used it to convert anything, so your luck may vary. It can be found here. I’m pretty sure the script does not currently auto-split any files larger than 4gb, so you’ll have to do this manually before running them through the script:

mkvmerge -o output.mkv --split 2300M input.mkv

Now you can use the script on each half independently.

2. Another option is to use my far more simple and noobish script. I have borrowed some stuff from Jexxie’s as well as added my own twists and optimizations to some of his techniques. I have found that my script tends to be more compatible and forgiving of various audio formats and encodes (this lies in my mplayer commands). I have used this script to convert over 120 movies and I’m going strong ;]. I have created two versions of the script, happy360, which is intended for files over 4gb (it splits the files and handles them separately for you), and happy360s (s for small, does not implement a split), which is intended for files under 4gb. The following commands will get them installed on your system:

cd ~
wget http://linuxlove.info/files/happy360
wget http://linuxlove.info/files/happy360s
sudo mv happy360* /usr/bin/
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/happy360*

Now, simply type:

happy360 <filename>
(larger than 4gb files but less than 8gb, the script will need some changes to accommodate > 8gb mkvs)

or

happy360s <filename>
(smaller than 4gb files)

And after anywhere from a few to about twenty minutes, you should have your finished .m4v(s) in the folder.

The Old Fashioned Way

Too hardcore for the scripts? Let’s get dirty:

We’ll need to run two informational commands first:

mplayer -frames 0 -identify -ao null -vo null input.mkv

Note the fps of the movie.

mkvmerge -i input.mkv

Note which track is the video track (usually the first). Next, if we have a larger than 4gb file, we’ll have to split it and then work with each half separately. If your file is less than 4gb, you’ll be able to work with it as is. A split can be achieved by a:

mkvmerge -o output.mkv --split 2300M input.mkv

For simplicity, the rest of the guide will assume you didn’t have to split, but remember that you’ll have to repeat the remaining steps for each half if you did split. Next is extracting the video stream from the mkv:

mkvextract tracks input.mkv 1:video.h264

Where 1 is the track number of the video. Change accordingly if your mkv differs. We now have to change the profile level to 4.1 (note that this works on 90% of mkvs, some will still have blocky artifacts in the final product for some reason):

bbe -e “r 7 \41″ --output=videonew.h264 video.h264

You can remove your original video.h264 now if you like since we’ll be working with the new one. Next is extracting the audio from mkv:

mplayer input.mkv -novideo -ao pcm:fast:file=audiodump.wav -channels 2

This next step is optional but I highly recommend it. We can now normalize our dumped audio with a:

normalize-audio audiodump.wav

Next is converting the audio to 2 channel AAC LC:

neroAacEnc -lc -ignorelength -q 0.50 -if audiodump.wav -of audio.m4a

You can reduce the -q setting if you like for a smaller file but I find the output results with 0.50 to be real nice. Finally, we need to remux the new video and audio into the MP4 container:

MP4Box -new output.mp4 -add videonew.h264 -add audio.m4a -fps 23.976

Where 23.976 (fairly common for NTSC) is where the fps of the movie you noted earlier goes. This needs to be accurate or you will encounter nasty audio sync issues during playback.

That’s it! Get your file over to your 360 either by burning it to a dvd, sticking it on an external, or streaming it (more on this is a later guide) and enjoy your new method of acquiring HD content ;].

1. First of all, you’re going to need the proper equipment for any compiling job. Open up a terminal and type / copy-n-paste:

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install build-essential checkinstall

This will get you going with the basic software needed, including Debian’s checkinstall which will try to make everything a deb before installing it (useful for uninstalling via apt/aptitude but doesn’t always work in my experience).

2. Next we need to find a source tar.gz to install. For this example, I’m going to use LAME. After downloading and extracting the archive, you should have a folder like “lame-3.98b8″ lying around. Get into a terminal and cd into that folder.

cd ~
wget http://internap.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/lame/lame-3.98b8.tar.gz
tar -vzxf lame-3.98b8.tar.gz
cd lame-3.98b8

3. Next comes probably the least fun part: resolving build dependencies. If this is an application that is also in the repository and you have all of your software sources checked (Menu -> System -> Administration -> Software Sources), you can try to type/copy-n-paste:

sudo apt-get build-dep lame

If this doesn’t work for you or it’s an application not in the repos, you will have to hunt down the build dependencies manually. This usually involves searching around the website of the application you’re trying to install, finding out which packages it requires, searching around in Synaptic for Ubuntu’s name for it, and installing them one by one (they usually end in “-dev”). If you don’t successfully acquire all the needed dependencies, you’re going to get some errors in the next step.

4. Finally, time for some compiling action. First, we need to type:

./configure

After a whole bunch of text, the command should exit without any errors. Note: there are usually arguments that can be passed here (--something) that will change how the application will be compiled. Check the developer’s website or readme for info. Next is time for:

make

After some time and more text (and hopefully no errors), we can issue:

sudo checkinstall

Hit enter to accept the defaults at the prompts. Hopefully checkinstall will be able to successfully convert the app to a .deb before automatically installing it. This is great because we can remove it in the future through Synaptic or by typing:

sudo aptitude remove lame

just like if it was an application installed from the repos. If for some reason this fails (and it fails more often then I’d like), you will have to issue:

sudo make install

instead, which will likely put the app in your /usr/local/bin folder. Applications installed this way can be uninstalled if you keep your original source directory, cd to it, and type:

sudo make uninstall

or sometimes

sudo make deinstall

If neither command works out for you, you will have to remove the app by hand, which can be a pain.

Hopefully this gives you an idea of the basic process of compiling programs from source. Different programs compile different ways (and some in ENTIRELY different ways) so always read any readme or installation instructions before getting your favorite app compiling!

Open up Synaptic: Menu -> System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager
Click Prefernences -> Repositories, up top
Click in the drop-down next to “Download from” and select “Other…”
Click “Select Best Server”

Synaptic will then ping a whole bunch of the mirrors to determine which one is the fastest for you. The one coming out of Columbia happens to be the fastest for me, and lemme tell ya, it’s fast. Canonical probably also appreciates the reduced stress on their main mirror.

Download on \m/