Test Drive: Ubuntu-Gnome 14.04 “Trusty Tahr” on the EEEPC 900

It's almost one month before Ubuntu's spring update time. As soon as first alpha then beta releases are made available I take some time to have a look at them. Since the EEEPC is the oldest computer I actually use the first question I ask myself before every upgrade is: “Will the new release work fine on my old netbook?”. I so downloaded the latest (beta-1) available preview of Ubuntu Gnome edition and prepared my USB disk for a brief evaluation.

Yes, It works!

The short answer is: yes, it works. Ubuntu-Gnome booted in the usual featureless screen

Gnome Shell is as responsive as before, the new versions show some (welcome) differences in the application launcher where smaller icons and a different scroll-bar look are used

Test Drive: BlankOn 9.0 on the EEEPC 900

During one of my frequent visits to DistroWatch I happened to notice the post informing of the latest release of BlankOn: a Debian derived Indonesian Linux distribution. I, usually, don't care much about “National” distributions, they are interesting initiatives but often lack of support if you live outside their “target” country. What in this case caught my attention has been the custom panel interface resembling, in DistroWatch screen-shots, the “good” old netbook interface I used for years.

I so downloaded BlankOn ISO Image; it took a little to me find the right link since BlankOn site is only in Indonesian language, eventually I found it by following the “big blue button”. I then prepared a bootable USB disk using UNetbootin and re-booted my EEEPC.

First impressions

BlankOn desktop is based on Gnome Shell, it opens with plain screen with only a panel at the to side.

by clicking in the BlankOn logo in the upper-left corner the side panel is activated.

Video editing on Linux: Lightworks

I often use my desktop computer for editing family videos even if I do this at a very amateur level. Wile I mostly produce “animated slide-show” videos, every now and then I adventure into the “real” video editing field. Until now I used OpenShot: I appreciate mostly its clean and easy to use user interface. Unfortunately, with my current desktop configuration, OpenShot appears to e quite unstable crashing without any clue especially before video preview.

I so decided to explore the panorama of available Linux video editing in order to find a proper replacement to OpenShot

Lightworks is one of the video editing software that received many positive reviews among many blogs I visited so I decided to give it a try.

Lighworks

Lightworks is a closed source software, both a free and a payment version are available, but limitations on the free version don't prevent you from a amateur level use. I so downloaded the “.deb” installation package and installed it by just double-clicking on the installation file.

Registration

When you download Lightworks you are asked to log-in or register to Lightworks site. Registration, which is free, is not mandatory to download the file but it is mandatory to activate and start the program.

10 000 Thanks (again)

I realized that my counter reached the symbolic milestone of 10000 hits since I restarted my blog on the Blogspot platform. So ten-thousands thanks to all my visitors and readers and ... stay tuned!

Netbeans 7.4 on the EEEPC 900

It has been a while since last time I wrote about Netbeans installation on the EEEPC 900. I usually use Eclipse as my preferred Java IDE, both at work and at home, but on the nine inch EEEPC display Eclipse has too many parts falling off-screen. I so started using Netbeans on the EEEPC and, as the time passed, I learned appreciating it.

Installation

Installing Netbeans on Linux is quite simple: I downloaded the installation script made it executable and started it like following:

chmod +x netbeans-7.4-javase-linux.sh
sudo ./netbeans-7.4-javase-linux.sh

Then I just followed the wizard instructions: