"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." (Robert A. Heinlein)

Sunday 30 August 2009

OpenShot for video editing

Editing home videos is one of the activities I use my desktop computer for. I'm still using some Windows program to di this but I'm continuously looking for the definitive Linux program to solve my problems.
I first read about OpenShot in this post of Gabuntu blog. I so decided to try it even the program is still in a development phase (version 0.9.22).

Installation
OpenShot is available as .deb package, I downloaded them from OpenShot's download page. The files needed are two: OpenShot main package and a dependency archive containing the packages required by OpenShot installation. I also downloaded the optional Italian language package. I so extracted the dependencies package and installed them all as follows:

Tuesday 18 August 2009

Recovering a unfinished DVD using Linux

I spent some of this summer days off converting my old VHS-C videos to DVD format. It's usually only matter of playing the old cassettes on a VHS recorder connected to my Panasonic DVD recorder, I only have to change cassette every 45 min. And finalize the DVD every three cassettes, just a long simple boring task.
Unfortunately last time (about a week ago) the DVD recorder refused to finalize two disks (which means four hours and half of work). I don't know if the problem was because of defective DVDs, recorder overheating or simple, plain bad luck. I so started looking in the 'net for a solution. Things started to become interesting when I found not only a solution but a Linux solution! This post on Rip Linton's Blog sounded a little odd at first but it worked and solved my problem.

Saturday 1 August 2009

Three games for the EEEPC

The EEEPC flexibility gives you, among many other things, also a reasonably good portable games machine. Speaking about gaming depends a lot on personal preferences, one could spend a lot of time playing simple games like solitaries, I'm going to speak about three near commercial quality open source games: Glest, Torcs and Vega Strike.

Installation
Installing all of these three games in EEEBuntu is quite easy: just matter of selecting them in the “add remove programs ...” utility. After installation ended all games needed only a little of manual configuration to adjust  them to EEEPC resolution.