Photo slide-shows on Linux: Imagination

As soon as Summer comes I find myself juggling with hundreds of digital photos, taken during trips, holidays, picnics and other “Summer activities”. This amount of pictures needs a handy way to be shown and distributed to relatives and friends without becoming too boring. Since the first time I bought a DVD writer I started producing short slide-shows videos showing my photos with some transitions and some background music. I used doing it using an old Windows program but, since I upgraded my desktop computer I decided not to re-install that old program and producing my videos entirely using Linux.

Imagination

Imagination is a simple program dedicated to producing video slide-shows. It can easily installed from Ubuntu's software centre. Once started the program shows a very intuitive user interface with a film strip on the bottom, a preview area on the left and current slide details on the right.

Arduino: playing with LCD displays

My experimenting with the Arduino board is continuing even if I'm not gone so far from trying provided example sketches. That's why I'm writing so little about it. I recently got a couple of LCD display modules based on the Hitachi HD44780 chip, that is the most widely used character LCD standard.

Setting up the circuit

Connection the Arduino to a LCD display module is quite easy, four wires carry the data while two more (Enable and R/S) handle the control signals. Of course you can use the Arduino digital pins you prefer to carry the task but using pins 5,4,3 and 2 for data signals and pins 12 and 11 fro R/S and Enable pin respectively will let you test the provided examples without modification. Apart from connecting wires the only extra components needed are a couple of trimmers (small variable resistors) for LCD contrast and back-light intensity adjustment. Here how the whole circuit looks like (not different from what you can find on Arduino site examples.)

Developing Gnome 3 extensions (on the EEEPC)

When I decided to install Linux Mint on the EEEPC 900 I was, among other things, particularly interested by the hidden flexibility of Gnome 3. Linux Mint interface MGSE proved Gnome 3 being far more flexible and configurable than I would ever imagined by seeing it at first. At last I managed to find some time to give a look on how Gnome 3 extensions are written. There are many sites on the Internet about developing Gnome extensions I based my experiments mainly on articles on this blog.

“Hello-worlding” in Gnome-Shell

A command-line utility “gnome-shell-extension-tool” is provided to prepare all files needed in a gnome-shell extension. Once executed:

gnome-shell-extension-tool --create-extension

it asks for the extension name, “helloworld” in my case, some descriptive info and the extension unique identifier. This identifier can be any string but it takes the following mail-like form: <extension-name>@<your-name>.<your-address>.
By the way my extension identifier was “helloworld.musante@EEEPC900”.

Test Drive: Linux Mint 13 “Maya” on the EEEPC 900

I know I'm unforgivably late but, at last, I managed to give a look to the latest Linux Mint release running live on my EEEPC. I've been a bit busy in this time bu the truth is also that I'm quite satisfied with my Mint 12 installation so I'm not really eager to upgrade. On the other side I've been positively impressed by new Mint's desktop environment, Cinnamon, and I was curious seeing it on my netbook computer.

First impressions

As usual, I downloaded Mint 13 disk image, using bi-torrent protocol, from Linux Mint download page and prepared a bootable USB disk using Ubuntu's disk preparing utility.

After a relatively fast boot (for a live version) here is how Mint 13 appears.

Choosing the desktop ...

Since I bought the new desktop computer I planned testing some desktops, among the many available for Linux, to experience with the different interaction ways they offer and to choose the one I felt more comfortable. My previous hardware poor performances limited me on using only light-weight desktops (I used XFCE). XFCE is a honest and robust desktop indeed, but I felt someway limited provided programs like, for example, Thunar.

Unity

I'm not a Unity fan but I have to admit that it's a great desktop for beginners. My wife started using Unity (2D) on the old computer and she found it easier to use than XFCE. I so decided to install Ubuntu from the beginning on the new computer in order to make her preferred interface available in the shortest time.