Application: Cinelerra

Okay I know not really the mainstream type of application, but this one is so neat, I just had to mention it.

It's a video editing system similar (but not the same) to programs such as Adobe Premiere, or Pinnacle Studio, or Finalcut Studio, etc. Unlike the aforementioned titles Cinelerra is open source. We were able to make an amazing video with it, and it didn't really cost us much.

This is something we really didn't expect to find. My boss even made a green screen to film himself on. If you go to the main site and select the hi-speed option, you'll see the video in flash at the top of the page. We were able to add all kinds of compositing and effects into the video. All in all it turned out looking very professional, and we didn't need windows to do it.

One caveat with the program is that, it is a work in progress. So it's not too stable, but as long as you save often it's not that much of an issue. I never had it crash during a render, only when I was setting up the edit. One thing about this though you start craving multi-processor boxes. My uncle had just told about building a dual AMD64 box just prior to this little endeavour, and man was I jealous ;-)

Anyways that's all for Cinelerra

-NT

Application: Kontact

This post I'm going to be talking about a fabulous application that's included with newer versions of KDE called Kontact. This is an all in one Personal Information Manager. It has basically combined the functionality of several related programs into one, such as KMail, KAdressBook, KOrganizer, KNode, sticky notes, there's even an rss feed agregator. I'll lay out all the diferent pieces and provide screenshots.

Here is the main screen when you start up Kontact.


As you can see this is a summary page. (Notice the RSS feeds on the bottom right)
It alerts you to new email messages, even the current weather, birthdays, and upcoming appointments you might have in the calendar. Also along the left edge are quick buttons to get to the different components of Kontact.

So let's check out the other quick buttons and their screens.


This is just the standard Kmail interface. KMail is my preferred mail client. I tried thunderbird which looks really sharp, but I found myself going back to this.

The next button is the Contacts list.


Note that you have the ability to filter your contacts by category. This feature is very handy if you set up your contacts properly. It helps me maintain my personal contacts separate from my business contacts.

Next is the To Do List.


This feature has some nice options you'll notice you can create a hierarchy of sub-todos. This is great for starting with a rough list of what needs doing, and then break it down. When figuring out timelines for projects I have found this feature indispensable. I haven't even started getting into the due by, and categories yet.

Next is the Calendar.


This feature is totally awesome. It contains several different views, you can view by day, week, or month. It visually displays any upcoming appointments, events, or meetings. As you can see I've listed an upcoming birthday, a scheduled phone call, and a yard sale my kids want to put on. I haven't used this feature to it's full extent as of yet, but I have noticed I can do things with it, that I wasn't able to do with Outlook. This suprised me actually. It will work with an IMAP server as well so it's quite powerful.

Next is the News button.


As you can see I don't have this feature configured. I use a different usenet reader when I need it. Which to be quite blunt is not all that often. Still it's a nice feature, that they add it in. News, and email kind of go together.

Lastly is the sticknotes.


Being a Mac fan, I love this feature, even if it is a little wonky. ;-)

Kontact can also be integrated with certain server side groupware programs. One notable is the open source eGroupware. Which is great for sharing contacts, calendars, tasks, etc. All in all an indispensible tool, and one that definitely freed me from my daily usage of windows. The only feature from Outlook that I miss, but is not necessary is the read receipt option when you send an email. I always like knowing if someone's read my emails at least. ;-)

Next time I'll talk about an amazing application that we used (mostly my boss ;-) ) to create our promotional videos. Once again open source and free, it's called Cinelerra and is used for video editing, you might think of it as the Premiere for Linux. Some would scoff at that statement, but considering what we were able to do with it I would say it's fairly capable considering it's a work in progress.

Until next time...
-NT

Application: Netbeans 4.1

I've just recently upgraded to the new Netbeans 4.1 as I stated in my last post. It's quite the upgrade from 3.6. The ant based project files are really neat. I'm currently working on upgrading our old build files to work with the new ide, because there's a lot of features in it we want to take advantage of. One of the biggest is the profiler. This feature allows you to see just how your program is performing, and if there are any choke points in your code, you will find them quickly.

Here's a screenshot of the main screen of the IDE:

The project allows you to keep the build separate from the source a lot easier, also with the libraries section it makes it easier to maintain your classpaths. All in all I love this new version I can't wait for some of the expected improvements. One thing about it it's made me learn a lot about Ant and build files. If you need to learn I heartily recommend O'Reilly's Ant The Definitive Guide. You grab it online at Chapters, or Amazon.

The support for web applications has been improved quite a bit too. It sets up the project and builds a war archive that's ready to be deployed. I found testing to be a lot easier within the new IDE.

Next time I'll talk about Kontact, and amazing Personal Information Management system that for me was instrumental in severing the ties from Microsoft software (namely Outlook).

Setting the system up.

Okay so this post will be about actually using the system. As you probably already saw in my previous post about Blender there is some pretty amazing software out there for Linux. The company I work for codes primarily in Java. So I needed to of course grab the Java Development Kit or JDK from Sun. This is in binary form on their website java.sun.com and installed without any hitches. It also came with a free Integrated Development Environment called Netbeans. Here's a screenshot of it in action:



You may have noticed that the window controls look vaguely like Mac OSX. That's a little theme I added to my desktop called acqua. Got to love it! Anyways this is the first version I started using, and I did use it on windows before I made the switch. Netbeans is now up to version 4.1, and it uses an ant based project file. It's quite a long stretch from version 3.6 that I started with. It's a lot smoother for building files. You can produce war files directly without having to do it manually like you had to with earlier versions, and the profiler is quite amazing. Because of the ease of use I've stuck with it rather than Eclipse. Having said that Eclipse has a crazy amount of addons, and plugins for it. So if it's pluggability you're looking for Eclipse is the ide for you. I'm waiting for Netbeans to become more supportive of C/C++, and other languages so I can use it for all my coding. As it is I'm using 3 different IDEs for all the types of coding I do. I messed up my KDevelop environment, which stinks in a way, but in another it keeps the number of IDEs down to 3 ;-)

I'll talk about the best way to upgrade Mandriva in a future post. (Basically don't use the built in upgrade function if you value your sanity!) Between this an the excellent PIM tool Kontact I haven't needed to use windows except for the odd video application that doesn't exist in Linux. (Who would have thought a simple translation of rotating a frame 90 degrees in an avi wouldn't be supported) All things considered though, I could live without the need for windows very easily. I haven't booted into windows for almost a month now.

Anyways it's 3:26AM, and I've been coding since 9:00PM yesterday I think I'll call it a day. See you next post.

-NT

ALinux AKA Peanut Linux, and DSL

So I was looking for a distro I could get on my old Pentium 100 with 24MB of RAM. One of the first distro's I tried, and liked was Peanut Linux (now called ALinux). It was fun pulling up a desktop on a newer kernel in such an old school computer. It seems to have changed somewhat from the minimalist distribution it was when I tried it out. I successfully booted it and had a KDE desktop on a rather old school pc.

DSL, no not Digital Subscriber Line, but "Damn Small Linux". This is neat this one fits on a 50MB business card cd, and is a real minimalist distribution. It was perfect for the old machine. Although it was fun booting up kde on that box, you really don't want to know how responsive it was. :-D It uses a desktop that's not anywhere near as resource intensive...Fluxbox a useable and fast desktop manager. This little distro that could is quite amazing considering the space on the disk it takes up is pretty laughable. It even has cdrtools so you can burn cds. Unfortunately it comes with an older version of firefox 0.91, but hey that can always be downloaded. It does have the older kernel base 2.4.26, but that's perfect for old school hardware.

All in all pretty neat stuff. I also successfully installed debian on the box, which my boy's were extatic about since they love the educational software that comes in with debian.

The next articles will be talking about my experience with the development environment in linux.

Applications: Blender

Here's an example of some of the really amazing applications that are available for linux. I made a 3D CGI rendering of the earth for a promotional video with this application. The amazing thing about this is Blender is open sourced, and is free. It's quite a complex piece of software and I've just scratched the surface using it. Anyways without any further adieu here's my rendering.

Image Copyright 2005 Tracking Solutions International.

-NT

Live CD List Link

I found this while reading up on Morphix. It's a list of live cd distributions. Enjoy!! http://frozentech.com/content/livecd.php

-NT

Fourth Distro: Mandriva!

Ok so as I already alluded I ended up using Mandriva, because that's what we use in house. I bought a Western Digital 120 GB drive and dual booted. Mandrake was very impressive, I was quite suprised by the ease of installation, and relative ease of use. Now let me preface that with the point that I was not entirely ignorant of configuring and using linux. The one piece of hardware I had to manually configure was my Linksys USB100TX network adapter, but that was it.

it was a simple as:
# modprobe pegasus
# ifconfig eth0 up
and I was set, but I did have to google to find out what kernel module had the driver for my network adapter.

I've been using this distribution every day now for over 1 year. I've hit a few bumps on the road. And here's some things I've learned.

1. Use a journaled file system. When your system locks up you will be glad.


2. backup often, when something goes wrong you won't regret backing up. (Of course that's a general computing maxim)


3. Read as much as you can about your distribution, and linux issues in general.

Do these things, and you'll get by just great. Of course if you are a gamer, there are a few what are considered "good" games (popular anyways) that you can play on linux. However if you want the latest and greatest in the gaming front. Dual boot and use Windows for your games, and use linux for everything else. BTW- I don't really game, any games I play, I use Linux for :-P

Anyways that's it for now. Next time I'll talk about some neat distros I took a look at to put on an old school P100 box I had kicking around.

-NT

Third Distro Gentoo!

The third distro I tried was Gentoo. This one was more of the inner (and not so inner) geek in me asserting itself. This distribution is source based, and you have the option of compiling the entire thing so that it is completely optimized to your system. I couldn't resist the challenge to see if I could pull it off. As a side note this is not for the squeamish, but I have to admit Gentoo has the best documentation for installation I've ever seen in a Linux distro. All you really need to do is follow the instructions step by step, and you will have a completely optimized system.

It took quite a bit to do the entire compile, another reason for the squeamish to be sure this what they want to do. I was more wowed by the fact that I actually just compiled my entire operating system, and setup my drive and the whole nine yards. It was really cool. For those who don't need that much tweaking there are partially pre-compiled, and fully pre-compiled stages as they're called available to install.

Gentoo uses a rather unique packaging system called Portage, which takes a nod from the BSD Ports. It's a really neat system, that grabs the source code needed and compiles everything you need. So no more package hunts like I do with Mandrake (rpm.pbone.net is my friend)

If you want a highly optimized distribution this is the distribution for you. Just keep in mind if you're going to compile the whole thing from scratch, be prepared to wait a while. The pre-compiled stage (stage 3) is excellent though for most users. The only reason I went with stage 1 was the opportunity to compile the whole works, just for the experience of it.

Over all this one was probably the most fun for me, but alas I had to go with what we're using for work. Considering I get to work from home though I am not complaining in the least. Mandriva is not a bad distribution by any stretch of the imagination. It's a very well put together distribution, and next time I'm going to talk about my experience with Mandriva (Mandrake 10.0 at the time) and some things I learned about it, so that you don't have the same glitches I have encountered should you choose to go with it.

See you next time!

-NT

Live CD List

As promised here's a list of "Live CD" distributions. A note this is by no means an exhaustive list. If you know of any by all means let us know.

1. Knoppix - the grandaddy of them all.
2. Mandriva Move - Mandriva's live CD.
3. Linspire Live - Linspire's (formerly Lindows before M$ sued them) live cd.
4. Damn Small Linux - This one is neat it fits on a business card cd, and is great for use on an old school computer.
5. Gnoppix - live Knoppix but this one uses Gnome instead of KDE for the desktop.
6. Morphix - I haven't tried this one out yet but from the concept of different target types, I'm intrigued to try it out.
7. PCLinuxOS - Another one I want to try. This one is a Mandriva based distro, but it has a lot of features that normally aren't found on live cds, like java, and few other packages that due to licensing normally don't find themselves on live cds.
8. Slax - this one is based on Slackware, another one I haven't tried but really want to.
9. Suse - these are evaluation cds, not the full blown product, but hey it's a good way to see if you want to buy it. Suse has a lot of good things going for it. Especially if you're a newer user of gnu/linux, and computers.

Like I said this is by no means an exhaustive list of Live CD distributions if you want a more exhaustive list check out Distrowatch.

-NT

Second Distro: Debian!

I was really excited to mess with Debian, because this actually was the first linux distribution I had actually used. Years before I installed Debian on my old Mac Quadra 700 (No I'm not making that up, it runs linux!) So I was excited to run it on a system with some power, and I wanted to use the KDE desktop, rather than ICEWM ;-)

Debian was even easier to setup than Slackware, because of the installer interface. So if you don't know what partitioning is all about the install program will walk you through it. The coolest thing about my tests with Debian was I now could use more than one desktop. I tried out Gnome, KDE, Enlightenment and for giggles I even had ICEWM.

The package management on Debian is a lot more advance, I would dare say one of the best. To put new software on it was as simple as:
$ apt-get {package-name}
and the package was searched for in the prescribed locations downloaded if necessary and installed.

I still use a debian based system from time to time. A rather popular "live cd" called knoppix, and a special variant of this called knoppix-std which I use for security work, that I do from time to time. With a live cd you don't need a hard drive the entire operating system is on the cd. It boots into ram and runs from there. Basically when a program is run it is uncompressed into memory and away you go. Really neat concept. There are a few of these distros out there, I'll post a list in a while.

Anyways I digress, I probably would have stuck with Debian but my boss had run into difficulties with it and was kind of set on Mandrake by this time, so I left it.

Next time Gentoo!

First Distro Tried: Slackware

So a few months before I setup my second drive with Mandrake, I decided to see what was out there. I installed VMWare on my system. Next I installed slackware on the virtual drive. Slackware is one of the oldest gnu/linux distributions that's still going. I was intriqued with what I found when I installed it. I had heard horror stories from the old days of setting up a slack box, but there was no sign of the old school commandline installs with this one. I believe it was Slackware 9.0 if I remember correctly it was the last version that came out before Patrick Volkerding got real sick, and was out of action for quite some time. I was amazed at all the software that was available for free as well. Some of it was quite impressive. I tried Openoffice for the first time and was impressed. I played around with this distribution for about a month before trying the next one. Here are some things I found with it:

1. It is very stable, I never had a crash the whole time I used it.


2. It actually wasn't that hard to install


3. Despite the ease of setup, as a new user figuring out how to install new software was a bit of challenge (One which I took, and figured out in short order)

I should preface this and state I found the installation easy. A person new to computers who has only used windows would probably be intimidated by the partioning step, but for me this was old hat ;-)

Rabbit Trail Alert *** Request for VOIP experiences ***

I'm working on a little java application that will take care of recording, mixing and producing a podcast. This of course would include support for or, as the case may be inclusion of VOIP. Can anyone out there tell me about their experiences good or bad, with the current VOIP software out there, and producing a podcast? I've heard some horror stories, and some meh stories. Nobody seems to have found a solution that is a hundred percent, so I want to see if I can remedy that. So go ahead recount your experiences, and make sure you let us know what software you used (or tried to use as the case may be) and how it went for you. Or maybe you have a wish list, that the software out there just doesn't do yet. Go for it, tell us about it! ;-)

Digg Story

Podcast in the works.

I doubt many people have even found, or care about my blog. Despite this fact I'm thinking of starting a podcast more as a learning experience and hey just cause. There's so much to talk about, and I would like to get interviews from some people who have helped me along in my break from the bluescreen, and people who have made the opensource scene better. Stayed tuned for more details.

The slough of despond

So the journey continues. As I was saying in my windows 3.1 days I was using a 486 66MhzDX2 system. This is when the Pentium Pro hit the market, so I was quite a bit behind the times. I got married during this time period, and started selling Microsoft business services I also upgraded to a AMD K62-350Mhz machine. (OOOOO!!! Snort! Cough! Gag!) and of course put on good old Windows 95. Enter the bsod!!! This became a weekly occurance, usually while surfing the internet. Which was always nice after a half hour download, in which I would usually leave my system running, and go do something else. When I came back I had a little suprise on the screen for me! Not only that but my first real experience with Microsoft's business practices was starting to take it's toll on me at work. Cold calling on their behalf was an interesting experience to say the least. I moved on from there to retail sales and upgraded again to a half decent (for 2000 anyways) Pentium III 667Mhz system. I finally made the move to Windows 98 SE surely now there would be no sign of the dreadful bsod. Fat chance of that! Not only did I get that but some of the weirdest system behaviour for which to this day I have no explaination for. I was doing some web development and when I tried to get web pages on the local host in internet explorer page cannot be displayed came up. In Netscape the page came up as expected. So I repartitioned the drive, reformatted the drive and reinstalled windows...result samething...replaced the hard drive...same thing. Don't ask me what it was I have no idea. The weirdest thing is the old system did the same thing, till I upgraded it on a lark to Windows XP Pro go figure. At this time I was developing in ASP with a MySQL database. Ever watch paint dry, that's what it was like waiting for ASP to render the pages, and make all the queries, etc. It was even worse trying to do it with MSSQL. The horror that is Access still haunts me to this day. To my amusement one of our clientel who were doing a scary amount of business several hundred thousand dollars a day, didn't listen to our pleas about backing up their data. Guess what database package they were using? You guessed it Access. Well they were too cheap to spend a few thousand on an appropriate backup system, and lost whole job descriptions. Considering who their clientel were that was bad news. Needless to say their head of IT suddenly found himself jobless. The CEO ordered some serious servers to make sure they had proper backups. Unfortunately they still insisted on using the totally unstable Access. So for not wanting to spend $2000 - $3000 they ended up loosing hundreds of thousands of dollars, and spent that much again to make sure it didn't happen ever again. When I pointed out had they been using DB2, or Oracle it never would have happened in the first place, they just got annoyed. I guess no one likes to be reminded of a bad decision. Not suprisingly they have since stopped using Access altogether, and have switched to DB2. Time after time I bumped into all kinds of weirdness dealing direct with Microsoft sales reps, and the RMA department. I got to deal with RMA because I started working in the service department as well. Needless to say, there was a lot of unexplicable operating systems I came across. To which the most cost effective solution was reformat reinstall, until it happens again. To which I had done several times personally by this time. Around 2002 I upgraded again, and left my sales job. This time I was running a decent box Athlon XP 2100+ with a gigabyte of RAM. In fact I'm still using that box. I started doing technical support for an american dsl company, and decided to help out with supporting MSN which they were bundling. You think I would have learned by now I was thoroughly disgusted with Microsoft software and really didn't want any more dealings with it than necessary. I still was using it at home though. Then enter my brother-in-law. Who wanted me to help him with his startup, but he believing Microsoft to be a thoroughly vile institution for reasons other than my own wanted a strictly non-ms shop. I had never contemplated this before, but decided to take the plunge enter Linux. I bought a second drive and installed Mandrake (as it was called back then) I wouldn't say that it was problem free, and there was a bit of a learning curve. I hadn't touch a POSIX type operating system for almost a decade by that time, and Linux being a work in progress had some glitches to deal with. I didn't care it was actually refreshing because the glitches, were something I could actually deal with. It wasn't just a blue screen 0E Fatal Error starring me in the face. In fact I found out that most weirdness that happened with my system, had a decidedly non-weird explanation. This was such a relief from windows, that I probably could not describe the weight that was lifted from my day to day work. Not only was there a viable reason for problems that occured with my operating system, there were a ton of people willing to help me out with it. This is something I had never encountered before. Let me tell you it was a real eye opener. For years I put up with mediocrity in my software because I didn't know there was anything else. Now I know there's an alternative, albeit it's not without it's own issues, but these issues in my opinion are far outweigh the annoyances I had put up with previously.

Next time we'll talk about taking the plunge and freeing oneself of the bluescreen and I'll discuss some of the distributions I've tried out, and what I learned about them.

The journey begins.

Well I guess I should start at the beginning. I'm an old schooler. I learned how to program by feeding punch cards into a behemoth that we called a computer, some of you younger folks out there would probably think the thing looked more like a chest freezer.

Things were great in the old days of BASIC, FORTRAN, and COBOL. Then entered the Commodore Pet, and my own personal computer the Commodore 64, or the Commode as it was affectionately known(sometimes not so affectionately ;-) ). I learned a new programming language assembly language, and well it didn't stop there. By the time I left College I had over 30 different programming languages under my belt. Some of which I've never used since :-D (eg RPG useless language)

It was during this time period I experience my first irksome experience with Microsoft products. It seems their compilers always did some unexpected, and undocumented thing (in fact quite often the opposite of the documentation). These unplesant things would not come to light, until you http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.giftried to debug your code, and blow and lehold the exclamation "Why in the world is doing that? That's NUTS!", followed by the obligatory bashing of the head angainst the keyboard.

This was the start of my annoyances. Then enter into the scene Windows 3.0. Which seemed pretty nifty at the outset, but as time went on and it transmogrified into something truly nasty. Then came windows 95, and introduction of the Blue Screen of Death
commonly known as a bsod. Well this little nasty wasn't just an occasional visitor to my screen, in fact the little beggar became quite a frequent visitor. I was ready to thrash the programming team that came up with it, but you know how it is...you put up with it, because there are no alternatives. In 1995 that was more or less true. I supposed I could have gone back to using Amiga OS but by that time the Amiga really had it's time in the sun, and after all I was using a 486 66Mhz DX2 no less.(Yeah I was a little behind the times ;-) ) At this time the only programming I was doing professionally was consulting work, and that was sporadic to say the least. Most of my code from that time period never became public.

I think I'm going to leave the introduction there, and continue this later on, as it's 4:50AM and I think I need some sleep. We'll pick this up later on today.