CD Ripping with Linux doesn’t have to be the labor intensive task that it once was. No longer do we have the days of writing a hundred character command to rip a CD with the perfect options. Here are some utilities aimed at making your life of ripping your collection of CD’s to a digital format you can actually use.

Ripping a CD or DVD is one of the most basic tasks for a PC user. But you need the right tools if you want to automate the process.

GNU/Linux offers several tools for ripping, some specific to the GNOME or KDE desktops, and others more general.

There are a few different programs for ripping DVDs on Linux. The following details my personal experience with four different applications over the last week and a half.

There are many GUI based CD rippers available for the Linux desktop. While many of these applications do a great job of ripping, I like to understand the underlying technology. For that reason, I decided to figure out how to rip CD's from the command line.

OGMRip is an application and a set of libraries for ripping and encoding DVD into AVI, OGM, MP4, or Matroska files using a wide variety of codecs. It relies on mplayer, mencoder, ogmtools, mkvtoolnix, mp4box, oggenc, lame, and faac to perform its tasks.

Many technologists use a Linux distribution as their corporate desktop or laptop solution. These users often have a few common requirements that apply to a large group of users. These requirements typically are:

- Mobility
- Encryption
- Common Authentication
- Firewall

The primary reason for writing this is to help new users develop an understanding of the Linux file system commands. Not all of them, just some of the more common ones. Let's look at what they do and why I would need to use them, what not to do, what each thing means and what it's for.

Here's how to set up a system with pretty graphs to track your practice time and display it at your Wordpress site! I'm using mine to track the time I spend each day on four different categories of practice, and also show my progress toward the goal of 10,000 hours of total practice.