Rip a DVD

I needed to rip a DVD the other day so that I could take a movie with me on a trip.
I had a hard time finding the command to do this. Finally I found this:

mencoder dvd:// -o title2.avi -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4

I did not play with it much but it got the DVD onto my computer and the size of the
files was 850 megabytes. I also really like that this is a command line option. If I
get board on the road I can get someone to put a DVD in the player and rip and download it
without having to run any GUI over the internet.

mencoder is part of the mplayer system. I also had to track down the libdvdcss2
package and get it installed.

M2N-SLI Deluxe and BIOS 1604

I tried to update my M2N-SLI Deluxe motherboard to ASuSTeK BIOS version 1604 without success.

My problems seemed to be with the SATA drivers. I could not get a complete boot as I keep having problems with the hard drives failing.

I reverted to BIOS version 1502 and except for some corruption to my hard drives I had no trouble.
Fortunately most of the problems are in the 'usr' partition.

I would suggest not upgrading to this BIOS, at least not for Debian Lenny.

En8500gt color problem

My realplayer and xine output was full of the bluemen. I assume that the Red channel was missing.

To fix this on xine I changed the video driver to the opengl driver.
This is under the menu->setting->setup->video->video driver.