A Pipe and a Keyboard

At the time of writing, Linux Mint 11 (Katya) has not been officially announced, but the final release is now available on at least one of their mirror servers.

Naturally I had to install it.

One of the many things I like about Linux is the ability to create partitions for various areas of the OS.  The lesson I learned in the past year is that one essential trick is to give /home its own partition.  The rest can fend for themselves.

My current setup is an extended partition beside my Windows one.  The extended is divided into the Root partition (around 12Gb) and the Home partition (around 90Gb).  Some may say that allocating 12Gb to Root is a lot (it will work on a quarter that) but some applications require a lot of temporary space, and the /tmp folder is included in that partition.

As a result of this partitioning, all my personal stuff, from documents and downloads through to program settings and mail accounts are all stuck in the Home partition.  The trick then is that when installing (or reinstalling) a new version of the OS, you set the small Root partition to be formatted and set the large Home partition to ‘/home’ but do not set this partition for formatting.

The end result is that the OS is installed in a nice clean partition, but all your files and settings remain intact.  Fire up Firefox?  There are all your bookmarks, and even the tabs that were open before the installation.  Open up Thunderbird?  There are all your accounts and mails.

A lovely example of the convenience of this method is that I have VirtualBox installed.  I have several virtual machines set up, including one for Windows 7.  After the upgrade to the OS, it is a simple matter of reinstalling VirtualBox and voila – there are all my virtual machines just as I left them.  I have saved myself the bother of having to restore tens of gigabytes of data.

All in all, from burning the DVD through to having all programmes up and running took less than an hour, and I use quite a few programmes that aren’t on the release DVD.  Not bad?

Now I have to play with my new version to see what’s what!

Filed under: Linux on May 25th, 2011 | No Comments »

Recently I started messing around with screen captures.

There was no reason for this other than straightforward curiosity, and the belief the the best way to learn anything is through trial and error.

Obtaining a static snapshot of any part of the screen is pure simplicity in Linux.  I use Shutter and it does everything I could possibly ask.

Dynamic recording of a desktop (or part thereof) is a little more complex, as I discovered.

I searched around and discovered recordMyDesktop, which on the face of it does precisely what I wanted.  I went into my Software Manager and downloaded it along with gtk-recordmydesktop, which is its front end.  Both were downloaded form the Linux Mint repository so I didn’t expect any problems.  I fired up the programme, selected a portion of the screen and clicked on ‘record’.  That was the start of my problems.

Having let the programme record for about fifteen seconds, I told it to stop.  Immediately the recordMyDesktop-encoder appeared on my screen with its progress bar and a dire warning that doing anything to it would lose my recording.  Two things worried me straight away.  The first was a ghost outline of the area I had recorded, which refused to go away, and the second was that the progress bar did absolutely nothing.  It steadfastly remained stuck on 0% and that was it.  In the end, the only way I could shut the whole lot down was to kill the process using System Monitor.

I searched the Internet, but could find no resolution.  After a lot of false trails I decided that recordMyDesktop was just not going to work so I decided to try alternative methods.  During my research, I came across one tutorial that talked about command line capture using ‘ffmpeg’.  I decided to try that, even though I am not a particular fan of command lines.  However, I discovered that ffmpeg is not part of the base install of Linux Mint.  No problem – I installed it.

It was at that point I had a thought that maybe that was why recordMyDesktop wasn’t working.  I tried it again, and it worked perfectly!

As a test, I recorded a Movie Player visualisation.  As I wanted good sound quality, I decided to record just video, and to dub on sound afterwards.  Capturing the video went without a hitch, but I ended up with an ‘OGV’ file which could be played in Media Player but that’s all.  I wanted to dub the sound on, and had chosen Avidemux as my chosen application, but that didn’t recognise OGV files.

I resorted to the Internet again and found the solution –

mencoder out.ogv -o newfile.avi -oac mp3lame -lameopts fast:preset=standard -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=4000

n the above, ‘out.ogv’ is the file I wish to process and newfile.avi is the output.  This worked perfectly so then it was a simple matter of combining my original video with my original MP3.

The result –

Incidentally, the only reason I chose to work on that particular visualisation is because I like the effect.

Bang it up to full screen, then sit back and relax!

Filed under: Linux, Tech stuff on May 16th, 2011 | 2 Comments »

Since switching to Linux, I have played around with a few distributions.

Using my Virtual Box I have installed and run various flavours including Suse and Ubuntu.  I wasn’t that happy with Suse at it came across (to me) as being rather clunky.  Ubunto was much better but was so similar to Mint that it wouldn’t be worth changing over.  Better the devil you know, and all that.

Earlier this wee I heard of a new flavour that promised to be a tad different – Ubuntu Natty Narwhal.  I thought I would give it a try.

I had been warned that Natty doesn’t install very well under Virtual Box, so I decided to add it straight to hard disk.  I shrunk one of my partitions to create some space and fired off Natty.  Here I found a strange quirk – everything went very well up to the very last stage of the install.  It had cycled through all the various splash screens and was on the last one that thanked me for installing it.  The progress bar had done all its copying, clearing, installing of Grub and the rest and then came to a halt about three quarters way across the screen.  I waited for about fifteen minutes and decided there was something wrong.  During that fifteen minutes the DVD hadn’t spun up, and the hard disk seemed to pretty quiet as well.  I rebooted the machine and tried again, with the same result.  This time I left it at its three quarters mark and sat back and waited.  This time it installed perfectly but be warned – that ‘sticking’ at three quarters is a false error – it is in fact still installing even though it appears to have stalled.

Natty is different from any other flavour of Linux I have tried before.  I will be honest and say that it is not for the beginner as it functions very differently from either KDE or Gnome.

It’s emphasis is very much on using as much of the screen as possible, and therefore there are no such things as menu or status bars, apart from one narrow one at the top of the screen.  Whenever an application is opened, its menu automatically appears in the top bar which is a little disconcerting at first.  The main menu is also nicely concealed and is activated by shoving the cursor to the top left of the screen.

This is only a Beta release of Natty and I appreciate that it will lack some functions.  What I did find very strange was that the Software Centre was quite generous with games, but lacked such items as Skype or VirtualBox.  By adding the standard repositories, I was however able to download all the usual suspects.

I have been playing around with it for a couple of days now, and I am impressed.  It took a while to get used to the repositioning of a lot of items, but practice makes perfect.

I possibly will transfer my allegiance to Natty once the final release is out.  What is even better is the fact that Mint is based on Ubuntu so the two are virtually interchangeable.  Therefore when I am finally setting up Natty, I will specify its current partition as Root, but will specify my Mint Home partition as the new Natty Home partition, remembering to specify the old format (Ext4) and NOT formatting it.  That way, all my documents and other work don’t have to be transferred as they will already be there in the new Natty Home.  I tried this, and it works perfectly, though I have since given Natty its own small Home partition for test purposes.

The only real problem that I have encountered with this new install is that my Grub menu is getting damned cluttered!

Filed under: Linux on April 8th, 2011 | 2 Comments »