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:

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.

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.

Upgraded to Firefox 3.5

I recently updated both my desktop and my laptop machines to the new Firefox version
Sempron 2400 (Ubuntu 9.04)
I upgraded to Firefox 3.5 on my desktop Linux installation (Ubuntu 9.04 on Sempron 2400) simply by following instructions suggested on Ubuntu community documentation page about installing firefox new versions. I so simply clicked on Firefox's 3.5 APT Link (apt:firefox-3.5) to install all needed packages (As you probably already know I ever prefer the easy way).
At last I replaced firefox symbolic link from terminal by simply typing:

sudo rm /usr/bin/firefox
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/firefox-3.5 /usr/bin/firefox

EEEPC (EEEBuntu)
Upgrade Firefox on EEEBuntu it's a quite different thing (I haven't upgraded to EEEBuntu 3.0 yet) I did choose to try the command line way as suggested in Lifehaker and Kabatology blogs.
I backed-up my firefox settings:

cp -r ~/.mozilla/firefox/ ~/firefox_backup

and then launched the long download-and-install command (of course it must be typed all on a single line)

sudo wget -O - http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/
          mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.5/linux-i686/
          en-US/firefox-3.5.tar.bz2 | sudo tar xj -C /opt

I didn't resist, so I personalized it in order to install Firefox on the /opt path.

At last I changed the firefox link like in previous installation:

sudo rm /usr/bin/firefox
sudo ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox 

Links

• Mozilla Firefox
• Ubuntu documentation
• Lifehacker
• Kabatology
  

Migrating to Linux: hugin

I use my desktop computer (Sempron2400) mainly to manage my personal photos and videos. Often it happens I have to join two or more shots in a single panoramic photo. Of the many panorama tools I tried the one that permitted  me to obtain the best results with minimum effort is hugin.

Hugin is a multi-platform open source panorama software, it implements many complex image joining algorithms but keeps a simple and effective user interface.

Installation

I installed hugin the easy way, by simply selecting its components in the Gnome application installer (the add/remove applications menu voice).