Perhaps the hardest part about moving to Linux from Apple will be losing iMovie for video editing. iMovie is incredibly simple to use and has a ton of good-looking, built-in themes, title scenes, and transitions.
I tried many, many Linux video editors (PiTiVi, KDEnlive, Kino, and OpenShot spring to mind) and they all have big or small problems. I have two video editing tasks that make up 90% of all of my video editing.
Most of the time I want to take DV off of my standard def video camera, crop out a few scenes, stick on a title and credits, and rip it to H264 for uploading to YouTube. Kino is actually quite good at this, though it sometimes has trouble with exporting to H264.
The rest of the time I am taking MP4 clips from YouTube or ripped from DVDs and editing them for playing on my HDTV. I have found Handbrake is nice for ripping DVDs to H264, and Cinelerra works for editing and exporting.
I ran into a bug in Cinelerra with the AAC or AC3 audio produced by Handbrake – in short, Cinelerra saw no audio. A little bit of Googling turned up an easy solution, and now I can rip and clip DVDs with ease.
At this time, I am satisfied with editing video on Linux, and I’ll be working on a nice presentation or two for the GRLUG and/or WMLUG this spring.
One of my New Year’s resolutions is to do away with Apple and move myself to Linux for my home computing needs. I have now copied my audio files (~7000 mp3s and Flacs, ~45GB) to Ubuntu and am using Rhythmbox for my audio playing needs. This move went very smoothly and Rhythmbox had no trouble indexing my collection.
I got a 4GB Sansa Clip+ for Christmas from my wonderful wife. This nifty little thing plays MP3, Ogg, and Flac, charges over USB, has an FM radio built-in, and many other features. I love it so far! However I have filled it up rather quickly, and that is due to putting a too many high bitrate MP3s and Flac files on it. So I am in the market for an audio syncing program or Rhythmbox plugin that will down-sample audio as it is synced to a device.
My next step is to move my 5,000 – 10,000 photos from iPhoto to probably F-Spot. I started by exporting all of my photos out of iPhoto to a folder, and copied the folder to my Linux laptop. There are about 16,000 files in the export, and many of them are duplicates or lower-resolution versions of the same file. Grrrr, iPhoto. I think this is going to be a pain in the ass to sort through, but it is just a one time annoyance.
So it’s a new year, and I have a few resolutions. Our health trainer at work gave us some S.M.A.R.T. guidelines to help us succeed with this sort of thing.
Specific – “I will exercise for 3 hours/wk” as opposed to “I will exercise more” Measurable – “I will lose 3lbs/month” as opposed to “I will lose weight” Attainable – Don’t try to do the impossible Realistic – A reachable goal is more likely to be attained Timely – A short term goal is better than a long term
With that in mind, here are my S.M.A.R.T. resolutions for 2010:
Weight: Today, I’m the heaviest I’ve ever been, ever. I need to lose 25-35lbs in total. I tire far too quickly, and my knees ache from the extra stress. My goal is to lose 3lbs every month, which certainly seems realistic. To attain this goal, I will take a two-pronged approach.
Exercise: I will wake up early and use my Gazelle Freestyle for 30 minutes five days a week. This sounds simple, but it also means that I need to keep the computer room/office/guest room/exercise room clean enough to use the Gazelle.
Diet: My main dietary problem is that my portions are too large. To correct this, I will cut my lunch and dinner portions by 25% compared to what I normally eat. I will also substitute my normal lunch with a Slim Fast Shake three times a week. I have had some success with both of these diets in the past.
Be Less Evil: I’ve used an Apple MacBook as my main home computer for the last two years. I have previously converted to Linux, only to lazily wander back to Apple because it’s much easier to do video editing. Apple is an evil company, and Linux has everything I need, so I need to buckle down and get better at Cinellera. My goal is to migrate all of my locked-in data and be Apple free by the end of January, and to sell the Macbook by the end of February. I will also put together a video editing on Linux presentation for the GRLUG and/or WMLUG.
Blog More: I come up with things to blog about several times a week (mostly new George skills, Python projects, and Linux tweaks), but I never get around to actually putting them on the computer. To rectify this, I resolve to blog at least every other day. I have also recombined by personal and technical blogs since I have found a lot of overlap in the things I want to post. If you are only interested in my technical posts, I suggest you subscribe only to the Linux and Python tags.
So there you have it. For me, 2010 will find me slimmer, more energetic, more freedom-loving, and more communicative. From my comfortable seat on the couch it seems so easy!
My EeePC 901 has a 4GB soldered-on SSD and a 32GB removable SSD. It also has 2GB of RAM. When I installed Ubuntu on it, I used 3GB of the fixed SSD for / and 1GB for swap, and my /home resides on the 32GB SSD. I recently realized that I do not use the machine for anything that gets close to needing swap, so I decided to remove that partition and grow / to use the whole drive which was badly in need of more space – it was down to 16MB free.
I had never tried to modify a swap partition before, so I braced myself for some frustration. In fact, it was really easy.
I first booted into the system and issued the command ‘sudo swapoff -a’ to turn off any swapping that might be occurring.
Then I edited the /etc/fstab and commented out the line for the swap partition.
I then booted from a live USB Netbook Remix drive (the same one I used to install, in fact).
Finally, I went into Gparted, deleted the swap partition, and grew the / partition.
When I rebooted, everything was perfect.
One thing I observed is that the live disk has Gparted on it, while it does not actually install Gparted. Instead it defaults to the Palimpsest Disk Utility, which really works quite nicely. I’m guessing they left Gparted on the live disk so people who routinely use the live disks for things like this are not stuck with an unfamiliar partition editor in times of stress when you’re trying to maintain yourself with beach buzz delta 9 gummies and yoga to not absolutely freak out.
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