As a starting point for documentation, there's always the Linux Documentation Project.

It's not really up-to-date, but it does contain some useful guides on various aspects of Linux.

Another site that may come in handy for those who use Debian-based distros is the Debian Administrator's Handbook, which is fairly well up-to-date.

That's very helpful, thanks a lot.

Might not be the best place to ask, but how do you get the music files for Quakespasm out of 'Quake: The Offering'? Just bought the game for the assets to run in Linux, but the Music folder is empty in both the Wine installed version AND innoextract dump.

You'll have to wait for me to download it to get you confirmation, but my original Quake CD contains a DOS version and uses Redbook audio (CD Audio) for the music, so the GOG version probably uses a DOSBox config which mounts a CD image. (GOG prefers to offer DOS versions when possible, because DOSBox is easier to support than early Windows games when customers are running modern Windows.)

I'll let you know once my download finishes. (Probably in 3 or 4 hours. For some reason, I'm only getting download speeds in the 70-100K range right now.)

Thanks a lot. I really wish they didn't remove the oggs.

Is it your ISP? I just got the gigabit plan at last, and lgogdownloader can reach almost 100+MB/s. Though strangely, I need to restart it a few times. Often it just continues a slow download. I wonder if it's an issue with curl. If it's not your ISP, try restarting lgogdownloader.

If it's what I suspect, then I prefer it this way.

(I seem to remember them moving to switch from ISO+Ogg to CD images which had the audio in its original form without lossy compression.)


It's probably other family members. We live out in the countryside, so we're lucky to get 5Mbit DSL as-is and there are four of us at home right now. I didn't care enough to diagnose.

Yep. Almost immediately after I asked innoextract to open the installer, it lingered on these lines:

- "app/game.cue" (477 B)
- "app/game.gog" (732 MiB)
- "app/gamea.cue" (443 B)
- "app/gamea.gog" (320 MiB)
- "app/gamed.cue" (400 B)
- "app/gamed.gog" (334 MiB)

(These are BIN/CUE pairs. GOG has a history of renaming their .ISO or .BIN files to .GOG extensions for some reason.)

There are basically two common ways to get the audio out of those.

Since I'm already set up to rip audio from physical CDs and I have CDEmu installed, I usually just mount the CUE file in gcdemu and let my custom-configured KAudioCreator spit out Ogg and FLAC files.

The other option is to install bchunk (sudo apt-get install bchunk) and then ask it to explode the BIN/CUE pair into an ISO and a bunch of Wave files.

bchunk -w game.gog game.cue game_track

Here's a snippet of shell script which'll do it for all three images when run from inside the "app/" dir innoextract produces.

for X in game gamea gamed; do bchunk -w "${X}.gog" "${X}.cue" "${X}_track"; done

...or, with newlines inserted for readability:

for X in game gamea gamed; do
bchunk -w "${X}.gog" "${X}.cue" "${X}_track";
done

Isn't cdemu project dead essentially? Debian doesn't even have it in the repo by now.

I'm not sure how exactly bchunk saves it, but you can always convert WAV (to different variants of it) with sox if needed.

From what I remember of playing around with primitive CD-ripping tools back in my Win9x days, the completely uncompressed, 16-bit 44.1KHz linear PCM samples Redbook audio uses can be translated into the most bog-standard Wave files possible, simply by swapping out the framing, so that's probably what it's doing.

The complexity in ripping CD audio tracks is either in getting a good data stream from a physical disc (because Redbook assumes a human listener won't mind the occasional glitch or sloppy seek) or in compressing the audio to MP3/Ogg/FLAC/etc.

Looking in the forums, it seems you need to 'de-emphasise' the audio tracks for them to sound right. I'm not a sound guy, so can anyone fill me in on what this means and how to do it?

sox should be able to do it. See man sox and search for 'deemph' which also gives a background on it.

See also: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Pre-emphasis

So today I updated my linux mint like always and something happened during the update - during the update of *upnpc some file was locked and can't continue, it wanted me to run "sudo apt-get --configure -a" which was totally impossible because the console didn't start, nor the start menu, nor anything in the task panel or at the desktop :( After restart even the grub didn't load and send me straight to my windows on my other hard drive. Any thoughts how I can fix that, or I should reinstall and never ever update it again :(