Blogcritics Author: Steve Wild

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Non-Destructive Partitioning with GParted

Steve Wild — Sun, 1 Apr 2007 09:57:55 EDT

"Grandpa, tell me a story.""Okay, little Percival, let me tell you what partitioning was like in the old days. If you already had information on your hard drive, but wanted to re-partition it, all your data would be erased. There were programs available that would partition your drive without erasing all your stuff, but they cost money.""Gee, Grandpa, that story sure did suck."It's true. That story did suck. But it's also true that, unless you really, really knew what you were doing and were willing to spend a lot of time on it, repartitioning your hard drive would destroy your data. Commercial programs were (and still are) available to partition your drive without data loss, but they cost money. If repartitioning your hard drive is something you only do once in rare while (and for most of us it is) free tools may be a better option.Let's back up a bit. What is partitioning and why would you want to repartition? In the simplest terms, partitions are separate areas on your hard drive. In Windows a single hard drive can be partitioned to look like separate drives, so that what appears to be drive C:, drive D:, and drive E: may all be separate areas of a single physical drive. In Linux they may appear as hda1, hda2, and so on. There are many reasons why a hard drive may be partitioned, but a very common one is to keep the operating system and user data separate. In this way if the operating system is to be upgraded or restored the user's data doesn't have to be touched, lessening the risk of data loss. Another reason is to control damage from runaway files. In Linux most log files are kept in the /var folder. Sometimes servers are set up to put /var in a separate partition. If a runaway process starts filling up a log file it can only fill up the partition /var is on, leaving the free space on the other partitions untouched.GParted is a free utility that allows you to partition your hard drive without destroying your data. It is a Linux program, but can be used to partition filesystems for Windows (FAT16, FAT32, NTFS) and Mac OS X (HFS, HFS+) as well. A full listing of the filesystems and operations available can be found here.GParted does many checks and is very safe, but keep in mind that the partitioning process is only non-destructive if everything goes well. I think GParted says it best with the message it gives you if you try to run as a regular user: Since GParted is a weapon of mass destruction only root may run it. Always back up your data before major operations on your hard drive.Even if you're not running Linux on your computer you can still use GParted by booting from the LiveCD. The LiveCD is a small image (about 50 MB) that contains a stripped down version of the Gentoo Linux operating system, the Fluxbox window manager, and GParted. It's probably the easiest way to partition your hard drive, as you won't have to worry about unmounting partitions. It is dangerous to modify a mounted partition, and using the LiveCD ensures all partitions are unmounted unless you explicitly mount them.Download the iso image and burn it to a CD. If you're running Windows your CD burning program should have an option to "Burn Image to Disc" or something similar. Don't just burn it as a data disk; it won't work. In Linux, if you're using Gnome, just right click the iso image and select "Write to Disc." With KDE right click the image and select "Actions," then "Write CD Image with K3B." Burn the CD, put it in the CD tray, and reboot.You'll see a screen like this:Just select the first option (GParted LiveCD) with the arrow keys and press Enter. You'll be prompted to hit Enter a couple more times to accept the default language and keyboard template. Once the boot process is complete you will see this:(click image for full size)A list of partitions on your hard drive will be listed. Mine looked like this:(click image for full size)I have four primary partitions on one hard drive: hda1, hda2, hda3, and hda4, which is an extended partition with hda5 and hda6 in it. Don't worry too much about what extended partitions are. They are primary partitions that are partitionable, allowing you to fit more than four partitions on a single hard drive.My problem was that the partition my operating system was on, hda2, was too small at about 5 GB. I wanted it to be twice that size. I needed to take some space from my data partition, hda3, and give it to my operating system. The first thing I needed to do was resize the data partition, hda3. Highlight the partition you want to shrink, and click Resize/Move. You will see a graph representing the partition, as well as some fields telling you how much space is available. We have the option of freeing up space either before or after the partition. The partition we want to give the space to (hda2) is before, so grab the left arrow with the mouse and move it to the right until enough space is freed:(click image for full size)We'll move the arrow until about 5 GB is freed in front. The new free space is represented by the gray area directly to the left of the the arrow. Rather than moving the arrow, you could also have entered the amount of space you wanted directly into the "Free Space Preceding" form:(click image for full size)Click the Resize/Move button. Now let's select the partition we want to enlarge, hda2. Click Resize/Move, and there will be a window similar to what we've seen before. We want to use the freed space immediately following the partition, so grab the right arrow and pull it all the way to the right:(click image for full size)You will see the extended graph cover all the available space, with the new space being about twice as large as it was before:(click image for full size)Again, click Resize/Move.Now that we've told GParted what to do, we're going to tell it to go ahead and do it. Click on Apply, and you'll see a final warning:If you're sure you've backed up all your data and that you want to do this, click Apply. Using a graphical tool like GParted hides a lot of the complexity of partitioning. The first operation we asked it to do, freeing up space in front of the partition, actually involves resizing and moving the partition. A lot of data has to be checked and copied, so it takes some time. For this operation, resizing two partitions by 5 GB and moving one, it took a little over two hours. Operations involving moving more data and more partitions will take longer.Now you can tell your grandchildren about how easy free software made it to repartition your hard drive. Your stories will still suck, but at least your data is safe.

Steve has been using Linux since 2002, and writes about computers, gadgets, and random thoughts on his blog at Chronological Dissonance. He also recently started a computer support company called HiTech Assist.

Book Review: Saban and the Ancient by Dante Amodeo

Steve Wild — Sun, 1 Apr 2007 04:03:38 EDT

Saban is a dork on a mission. Well, dork is probably too strong a word. "Socially challenged" is a gentler way to put it. Saban is the protagonist in Dante Amodeo's Saban and the Ancient, and even though you find out pretty early that he's not an ordinary teenager, you still don't find out just how special he is until much later on.Saban and the Ancient is the first book in Amodeo's Transformation series. It is aimed at young adults but should be enjoyable by everyone. It's full of slowly revealed mysteries that lead to other mysteries, paramilitary action, martial arts, and mutant super powers. The action starts quickly after we find Saban, a 19-year old college student, and his study partner Margo in the middle of an apparent military strike against the school. The action that follows shows that Margo is also unusually capable. More is revealed later, but not all.The book is a progression of mysteries. As you find out more about the characters and their histories, more questions are introduced. The answers to those questions reveal more mysteries. You slowly start seeing the edges of a large conspiracy, then get a feeling of multiple conspiracies plotting against each other. Parts of Saban's past, present, and information about the organization he belongs to, the Ancient, are parceled out piece by piece, giving a good sense of discovery. Questions are raised about Margo, who is more than she seems to be. Nobody has a complete picture of the situation, but everybody seems to have a part of it. Other people involved in Saban's life are introduced and fleshed out, many of whom have their own special abilities. Amodeo has chosen to give many of the characters code names in addition to their real names, a tactic that could have been confusing. He does a good job of helping the reader keep track of which character belongs to which code name, however.Lots of pop references and quotes riddle the book. Some I found genuinely funny -- "An accent that thick was normally peppered with the words 'moose and squirrel'" made me laugh out loud. Some fell flat -- "Your mother waz a kangaroo and your fath-air smelt of elderberries" sounded just wrong to me, even knowing it was changed to refer one of the characters' abilities. Everyone will recognize at least some of the references, and most people will get a chuckle or two from them.Occasionally Amodeo seems to use characters to push his own views, and it's done clumsily enough to seem preachy. A couple of times the characters make references to evolution -- "'Mutation has never produced a generation more robust or viable than the previous,' Saban recited from something he had read. 'People confuse it with adaptation'" seems to need more explanation than it merely stemming from a college student blindly quoting from an unknown source. And "That kind of randomness makes evolution look mathematically sound" sounds more like the author speaking than something a teenage character might say. It might have made an interesting discussion into how they got their powers, but we'll probably get that in one of the following books. The author also has a character thinking "The price of being one of the cool kids" about an aged Slavic agent's smoker's cough. Being a "cool kid" doesn't really seem to fit an old Russian spy, and it ends up sounding like a public service announcement.Amodeo explains terms the reader might not be familiar with, especially the military jargon, such as P. E. for "personal effects." He's not afraid to use unusual words in a context that makes their meanings clear however, words such as "syzygy" and "sternutation" (which I thought was a reference to Frederick Pohl's Heechee Saga series, but it wasn't. Or maybe it was.) Saban and the Ancient is an enjoyable read that could have used a little more polish. By the end of the book enough is shown about the big picture to be satisfying, yet enough questions are left unanswered to leave you wanting more. I'm sure the next book will answer many of those questions while posing others.

Book Review: Fast Forward 1 edited by Lou Anders

Steve Wild — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 20:30:19 EDT

Fast Forward 1 is an anthology of 19 stories and two poems by mostly established authors. Some of my favourite writers are here: Stephen Baxter, Ken MacLeod, Larry Niven, Ian MacDonald, Gene Wolf, Paul Di Filippo, Mike Resnick, and Nancy Kress, along with many other excellent authors.The idea behind Fast Forward is to present a variety of science fiction stories, without imposing a theme. Every story in the book was enjoyable, while a few of them were outstanding.Paolo Bacigalupi's disturbing Small Offerings shows us a world polluted and contaminated with chemicals, and some of the consequences. Stephen Baxter brings us No More Stories. It starts out being almost excruciatingly mundane, slowly builds up a sense of strangeness, and ends up showing us a future on a grand scale.I really didn't want to like Kage Baker's Plotter's and Shooters, but I did. Besides the obvious comparison to Orson Scott Card's Enders Game, it seems like just another nerds versus the jocks story that you can find in any genre, or bad teen movie. I found myself liking it even though I kept giving myself reasons not to. The ending is what really made the story for me. Happily ever after, but not really.One of the things I like about anthologies is that they can introduce me to writers I'm not familiar with. I had never read anything by A. M. Dellamonica before, but her Time of the Snake has made a fan of me. It's a story of alien invasion told from the point of view of a human guiding a squad of squids. The door-to-door urban warfare will bring to mind some real life events.Ken MacLeod tells us of Jesus Christ, Reanimator, a sacrilegious, funny story about the second coming, while Sanjeev and Robotwallah takes place in Ian MacDonald's future India. Robots and war, what's not to like? One of my three favourite stories in the book.Mary A. Turzillo's Pride tells the story of a boy and his... cat. A very bad cat. It begins by being a slightly amusing tale of a hick, but ends with an emotional wallop.By far the longest story in the book is John Meaney's Sideways From Now, and it was still too short. Almost two stories in one, one about a future with quantum telepathy, and one similar to Jack Vance's Dying Earth books, where magic, dying technology, and Machiavellian politics reign.Paul Di Filippo's contribution Wikiworld combines concepts from Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling, and Neal Stephenson, wraps them up in his own original idea, and throws in more cultural and online references than any one person is likely to get. Pyr Books has wisely made this story available free of charge online.I've just touched on a few of the stories available, there are many more well worth a read. If Sturgeon's Law (ninety percent of everything is crud) is true, then there are nine other anthologies filled with dreck, because this one is excellent. I look forward to more Fast Forward anthologies.

Linux Truths, Half-Truths, and Myths

Steve Wild — Mon, 5 Mar 2007 16:12:03 EST

When people find out I run Linux on my computer instead of Windows or even Mac OS X they sometimes have funny ideas about what it must be like. Some of it is historical; Linux used to be quite difficult to administer in its younger days. Some of it is misinformation, or no information at all. I hope to dispell some of the misconceptions.Linux is difficult to install - Myth. For the most part. Depending on the distribution, Linux is much faster and easier to install than Windows is. A smooth install of Linux takes me about an hour including installing updates, and even less sometimes. This includes installs of Red Hat (before it was Red Hat Enterprise Linux), Fedora (after it was Red Hat), Mandrake (now Mandriva), and Ubuntu (still Ubuntu). Of course, there are some distributions aimed at more experienced users that seem to go out of their way to make the whole installation process a little more, shall we say, complex. I'm looking at you, Gentoo.I just recently re-installed Windows on a friend's computer that had become so infected with god-knows-what that it was completely unusable. I didn't keep track of how long the install took, but it was hours and hours, not even including when I had to go to bed and continue the install in the morning. Downloading and installing updates, rebooting, downloading and installing more updates, rebooting again. On and on it went.Of course, after the install all he had was Windows with some minor applications like Notepad and Wordpad, and some games like Solitaire and Minesweeper. Don't get me wrong, I've wasted plenty of time on both of those, but it's a pretty sparse selection.When I install a Linux distro I get a complete, usable desktop. An office suite, CD and DVD burning software, image manipulation software, full featured email suites, and lots of games. All for no cost. And lots more easily available. Which brings me to my next point...Programs are difficult to install in Linux - Half-truth. Most distibutions give you on-line access to repositories, large collections of programs picked and packaged by your distribution maintainers for easy installation. Installation this way is actually easier than in Windows. On my Ubuntu box I open up Synaptic, type in a search for the kind of program I want, select it, and it installs. And again, for no cost.Compare this to Windows where I have to search the web for the program I want, check forums and review sites to see if anyone has been infected with spyware with it, download it, scan it with my anti-virus program, install it, and then find out it's a crippled trial version of what I want. Where it can be more difficult to install software in Linux is when the software you want isn't available in your repositories, or you need a more recent version. Sometimes the writers of the program have made a package available for your distribution, in which case installation is still pretty easy. Sometimes you have to compile the program from the source code, though, which can be tricky.There are very few games for Linux - Truth. Compared to Windows, there aren't many commercial games available. Games such as World of Warcraft can be run under Wine, a program that allows Linux to run some Windows programs, but if you are a hard core gamer you'll either have to dual-boot with Windows or use a game console to get your fix.That's not to say there are no good games available. PlaneShift, Alteria, America's Army, Sauerbraten, Battle for Wesnoth, and Frozen Bubble are just a few of the great games you can get for free.I need an anti-virus program for Linux - Myth. One of the most common questions from Linux newcomers is which anti-virus program to use. They simply can't believe that one isn't needed. That's not to say viruses don't exist for Linux, there must be dozens and dozens of them. Very few exist in the wild, and those that do fizzle out very quickly.One of the common arguments against this is that Linux has such a small share of the desktop that not many are written for it; if there were more Linux desktops there would more Linux viruses. This argument ignores the fact that Linux is fundamentally structured so that you have to work very hard to allow a virus to thrive. If you're interested, this guy goes into a lot of detail as to why that is. The one time you may want to run an anti-virus is if you're running a Linux server that has Windows clients, for example an email server. This is not to protect the server, but rather to protect the Windows boxes from email borne viruses. The people you find recommending Linux anti-virus software are usually working for the anti-virus software companies. I'm sure they have your best interests at heart, and aren't only interested in selling more product. Linux is hacker proof - Myth. Just like any piece of complicated software, vulnerabilities appear and need to be fixed. You must keep your operating system updated, and if you're running servers you must understand how to configure them securely.Having said that, when vulnerabilities are reported they tend to get fixed very quickly. And keeping your system updated is actually very easy.Linux users are a bunch of commies and hippies - Truth. I needed to get one more truth in this list.Getting hardware to run on Linux is difficult - Half-truth. Linux actually supports more hardware than Windows does. There can be problems with some newer hardware when the manufacturer hasn't released Linux drivers, but often times there are Linux gurus working hard to get it working. You may have to wait.There are also devices that are designed to use Windows to do some of their work. Cheap modems (called winmodems by Linux users) are particularly infamous for this. It is possible with some work to get some of them working, but you are probably better off getting a real hardware modem.Linux is difficult to use - Myth. There are those who say free (that is, open source) software is hard to use. If you're used to doing things a certain way there may be an adjustment to learning a new way of doing things, but that doesn't make the new way more difficult, just different. One small example is the difference between OpenOffice and Microsoft Office. In OpenOffice if you want to insert a header or a footer into a document you go to the "Insert" menu, then select "Header" or "Footer". In Microsoft Office if you want to do the same thing you have to go to the "View" menu. One isn't necessarily more difficult than the other, but to me the OpenOffice way makes more sense. If you were used to the Microsoft Office way, though, you may find that hard to get used to.My programs won't run in Linux - Half-truth. No, your Windows programs probably won't run (although they might under Wine or Crossover Linux) but chances are there exist replacement programs in Linux. The Gimp will replace Photoshop for 95% of people, although it does take getting used to. I've already mentioned OpenOffice as a replacement for Microsoft Office. There are dozens of different media players, many different web browsers and email clients, peer to peer file sharing programs, DVD and CD burning programs, and so on. All of them are free, and many of them actually better than the ones you've already paid for in Windows.What are your experiences with Linux like? Do you disagree with me? What else do people get wrong about Linux? Let me know in the comments, or by email.

Software Review: Democracy Player

Steve Wild — Fri, 2 Mar 2007 05:56:00 EST

More and more content on the internet is in the form of video. Browsing sites like YouTube or Google Video can be fun, but what is really needed for serious viewing is a way to find, download, and organize all those videos from a single application. Less searching, more watching is what we want. Democracy Player, available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, allows you to select from hundreds of channels, containing thousands of videos, for free, such as Homestar Runner or The NBC Nightly News. You can make your own channels, search video websites, and organize your collection.The video guide allows you to add new channels and is easy to use, dividing the channels into categories such as animation, business, comedy, health, family, and so on. Channels are also tagged, allowing you to browse even more categories. You can search the video guide for specific items, or check out the most popular or recently added channels.Channels can also be added manually from your favourite video site, as long as it has an RSS feed that is compatible.Once a channel is added you can choose to have it download new videos automatically, or simply alert you to new videos and allow you to download the ones you want manually.Democracy can also search your computer for video files, adding them to your collection. It picked up all of my videos, but it seems that it can't yet distinguish between Ogg Vorbis audio files and Ogg Theora video files, as my video collection ended up containing many audio files.You can also search video websites such as YouTube, Yahoo Video, Google Video, Revver, Blogdigger, Daily Motion, and blip.tv. Your searches can be saved as channels so that new videos meeting your search terms will be automatically updated. If you want to be able to keep up on the newest "three toed sloth" videos, or even something a little more practical, this is a great feature.The New Videos option can display all your unwatched downloaded videos. You can browse them and watch only the ones that interest you, or have them all played one after the other.The Democracy Player website also has a helpful page with information and tutorials on starting your own channel, allowing you to star in your own videos to be watched by potentially thousands of people.Democracy Player has lots of features for organizing and watching internet video, and yet is very simple to use. This excellent piece of free software is continually under development, so expect to see even more features in the future.

Website Review: In Pictures

Steve Wild — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 15:00:57 EST

My mother, while not completely hopeless with computers, does have a certain naivety with them. She once called me in the middle of the night telling me "the internet is down" when her dial-up modem gave her a busy signal. When she said her email client wasn't displaying properly I noticed she had somehow made the window tiny. I fixed it by maximizing its window. The list goes on.Where she leaves me in the dust, however, is in her understanding of Microsoft Office. We were testing OpenOffice to see if it will replace Microsoft Office for her, and she had lots of questions to which I had no answers. Off we went to the online OpenOffice help and the web.While we eventually got her questions answered it made me realize how little I know about using an office suite. I use it mainly for opening existing documents, writing letters, and using existing templates for projects such as cards or CD covers. When I was alerted to In Pictures I decided to give them a try.In Pictures offers tutorials on Microsoft Office 2003, OpenOffice 2.0, Dreamweaver 8, Fireworks 8, and HTML & CSS. They seem to update their tutorials regularly; Fireworks 8 was just recently added, and their website says Office 2007, Photoshop, MySQL, and PHP tutorials are coming soon. They also offer downloadable PDF files and bound books of their tutorials for an additional cost.Their philosophy is "The simpler, the better." The tutorials are given with black and white screenshots, with red markers showing you points of interest or where to click next. The lessons are given step by step, with explanations of what you are actually doing throughout.The first tutorial I tried was for OpenOffice's database component Base. I had never used Base before, but while following the tutorial I was amazed at how much I was actually understanding. I was really grasping the concepts, rather than just clicking through the steps. The screenshots show you exactly what to do and the steps are easy to follow, clearly explaining what you are doing.When I tried the Writer tutorial for OpenOffice I was tempted to skip ahead to the more advanced sections, but decided to plod through from beginning to end. I'm glad I did. While I was bored at first by being shown very basic operations, there were always little things that came up that I never thought of doing. That's one of the valuable things about tutorials. They can show you how to do the things you want to do, but can also show you things you never thought of doing.Of course, you don't have to start at the beginning. Each tutorial is divided into sections, so you can navigate to the area you are most interested in learning. You already know how to use bullets, but want to use footers to number pages automatically? Just go to the "Employ Headers and Footers" section.In Pictures has been useful for my mother in learning the differences between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice. She knows all the tasks she needs to complete, she just needs to know how to do them in OpenOffice. The tutorials won't cover all the advanced features she needs, but it will give her confidence and a solid footing.In Pictures is a great place to get started in learning new software, or in covering gaps of knowledge in software you already use. Worth trying out.

Make a Movie of Your Linux Desktop

Steve Wild — Mon, 5 Feb 2007 19:43:32 EST

Want to show off your snazzy 3d desktop, or demonstrate the features of your favourite new program? Make a movie of your desktop to capture all your actions, edit it, then add a soundtrack.You need two pieces of software to accomplish this: xvidcap to capture the video and Avidemux to edit the movie and add a soundtrack. You may also need Audacity to shorten the audio file used for the soundtrack.If your distribution doesn't have xvidcap in its repositories it can be downloaded from here. Debian and Ubuntu users will be able to use the .deb file, others will have to compile from source. Avidemux is most likely available in your repositories, but can be downloaded from here if it isn't.It takes quite a bit of your system resources to record video while running applications, so you may have to do a bit of tweaking to get a decent framerate from xvidcap. Recording only part of your desktop will get you a better framerate. Click the "eyedropper" toward the right side of the window, then use the mouse cursor to select a region of the desktop to record. Or, if you want to record the full screen, you can lower the resolution of your monitor. The other thing you can do is tweak the frame rate xvidcap records at. Right click on the file name at the left of the window and select Preferences. Select the Multi-Frame tab, and lower the frame rate. You may have to experiment a bit with different resolutions and frame rates until you get an acceptable level of quality. You can also change the directory and file name the movie is saved to here.When you are ready to record click the red Record button. xvidcap will record all your actions to the file specified. When you are finished, press the Stop button. You will be presented with a screen that will tell you the frame rate of your movie. Play it to see what it looks like. If the frame rate is too low it will play very quickly. Do some more adjusting of the frame rate, your resolution, and perhaps record a smaller region to improve the quality.This is the vidcap I made of my desktop before any editing was done. Once you are satisfied with the quality of your recording you will probably want to do some editing to remove things like the xvidcap window, long pauses, and stupid mistakes you may have made. We can use Avidemux to do some simple editing.Open Avidemux, then open your movie. We are going to remove the bits of the movie we don't want. Click the A button at the bottom of the window to select the beginning of the section you wish to remove. In this example we are going to remove the section of the movie that shows me starting xvidcap.Press Play, Next Frame, or use the scroll bar to go to the end of the part you wish to remove. Click the B button at the bottom of the window to select the end. Click the Edit menu item at the top of the window and select Delete. If you play the movie now you will see that the part you selected between the A and B markers is now gone.This is a vidcap of the editing of the original vidcap. It's getting recursive now. Do you want to add a soundtrack? I chose to use the song J-Nic Beatz by Andrew Stevens licensed under a Creative Commons attribution only license to perk up the video a bit. You may have to cut the length of the song down to the length of the video. Audacity is perfect for this.In Avidemux with the video open select Audio at the top of the window, then Main Track. In the Audio Selector window select External PCM if your sound file is an uncompressed .WAV file, External MP2/3 if it is an MP3 file, or External AC3 if it is an AC3 file. Hit OK, choose the sound file you wish to use, then hit Save. Here is our final edited Teenage Zombies video with sound. These techniques can be used in a variety of different ways. Be creative! If you want to do some more advanced editing of your video, try Kino or KDEnlive. Experiment, post your video to the web, burn your new how-to video to DVD, show off what your computer can do.Do you have any questions or suggestions on making desktop videos? What other programs would you use? Leave a comment or email me.

Making DVDs with DeVeDe in Linux

Steve Wild — Mon, 5 Feb 2007 15:07:18 EST

DeVeDe is a great way to create DVDs quickly and easily. You won't be able to make fancy menus, but sometimes you want to just pop in a DVD and have it play.DeVeDe should be available in your distribution's repositories. If it's not, or if you want the newest version, you can download it from the DeVeDe homepage. Installation is easy. In a terminal enter the directory you downloaded DeVeDe to and unpack it with tar xvjf devedefilename. Enter the directory created with cd devededirectoryname and type ./install.sh as root. Ubuntu users will use sudo ./install.sh then type their password. Others will first su, enter their password, then type ./install.sh. The install script will install DeVeDe and create a menu entry.When you first open DeVeDe you are given the option of choosing different discs to create. Select Video DVD.Under Files on the top right of the window, click Add.Now click the Forward button in the lower right corner.Select the file you want to convert. You also need to select the video format here. It defaults to PAL/SECAM, which is used in Europe, so if you live in North America you'll want to change this to NTSC.Click OK. You will see a Disc usage bar showing how much disc space the movie will take. This bar is lying to you. DeVeDe always seems to overestimate how large the final file will be. A single two or three hour movie should almost always fit on a single 4.7 GB DVD. Now we want to choose how the converted file will be saved. Choose Only convert film files to compliant MPEG files if you want to save the file as an MPEG-2 file and author it with another program such as DVDStyler to add menus. I've shown how to use DVDStyler in my article Making DVDs in Linux.Create disc structure will make a VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folder with the VOB video files necessary to create a DVD. These can be used by a disc burning program to make a DVD.We're going to Create an ISO or BIN/CUE image, ready to burn to a disk. Click that option, then click Forward.Select where you want the image saved, and name it. Click OK.DeVeDe will now spend some time transcoding the movie and creating the disc image. Time to have some dinner, watch TV, or have a nap.Once it's done we have to burn the image to a DVD. In Gnome it's really easy. Just open up Nautilus, the file manager, find the iso image, right click it, and select Write to Disc.It's almost as easy in KDE. Find the iso file in Konqueror, right click it, go to Actions and then select Write CD Image with K3B. When K3B pops up, click Start.That's it. In a few minutes you'll have a shiny DVD ready to play. I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any suggestions or problems by emailing me or leaving a comment.

Book Review: O'Reilly's Backup & Recovery

Steve Wild — Sat, 3 Feb 2007 14:48:39 EST

"No one cares if you can back up -- only if you can recover." This is probably the most important point in this book. Using a variety of open source tools, you are shown how to back up, test, and restore your Windows, Macintosh, Unix, or Linux systems, including file system and database backups. There is even a chapter that will help guide you in choosing a commercial alternative if the open source solutions don't meet your needs. This is not a book for the beginner. It is aimed at professional systems administrators, although it contains useful information for anybody who needs backups. You should be comfortable with using command line tools and the shell. Having said that, the author (W. Curtis Preston) does an excellent job of explaining the various tools and concepts he presents. There are lots of examples given, and the most fun parts of the book are the real world examples of back-ups gone wrong.The first two chapters provide an introduction to the concept of the book and basic back-up principles. You are shown why back ups are necessary and what should be backed up. Preston explains his philosophy of backing up the entire system, excluding what's not necessary, and automation. There are a lot of eye-openers in the beginning chapters, and they should not be missed.Basic tools such as cpio, dump, dd, tar and rsync for Unix and Linux systems, ditto for Mac OS, and ntbackup and System Restore for Windows, are covered. The book continues on with more advanced tools such as Amanda, BackupPC, and Bacula. Bare metal recovery - restoring the entire system from the operating system on up - is also explained. The reader is walked through each program, with ample explanations and examples given.Commercial software and hardware are covered. The author has chosen to not suggest specific utilities, but rather gives guidance on how to choose a back-up solution that will meet your needs. The reasoning is that there are so many programs available that are constantly changing that a specific recommendation will soon be obsolete. It seems to be the "if you teach a man to fish" technique. If you are shown what to look for in a back-up utility, you can see for yourself the benefits of the various programs available.The chapters on database recovery are very extensive. It is not assumed that the reader is intimately familiar with the structure of databases, and there are plenty of explanations of the concepts of relational databases and the problems with backing them up. Oracle, Sybase, DB2, SQL Server, Exchange, PostgreSQL, and MySQL are all covered, sometimes with multiple back-up solutions.A companion website is provided at backupcentral to cover additional material that didn't make it into the book as well as detailing changes that have happened since publication. A searchable online Safari version is also offered for a 45-day free trial.Backup & Recovery is clearly written and is full of excellent advice and information. If you need to be able to get your system up and running quickly after a disaster, you need this book.

Desktop War: KDE vs. Gnome

Steve Wild — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 19:20:56 EST

One of the most common questions asked by newcomers to Linux is "Which is better, KDE or Gnome?" The answer commonly given is, "It depends. Try them both and see which one you like best." It's a reasonable answer, because it costs nothing but time to try them.The same answer is given in articles with similar titles to this one. Again, a reasonable answer. I won't be giving you that answer. I'm going to tell you which one is better.My first distro was Red Hat 7.2, and the default desktop manager was Gnome. I was happy enough with it, then I changed distros to Mandrake (now Mandriva). Mandrake's default desktop was KDE, and I thought I'd give it a try. After using it for a while I found I liked it more than Gnome. It was more configurable and customizable. I could select which applications I wanted to open for all different kinds of filetypes instead of the miserable choices of email and web browser that Gnome gave me. There were also way more options for customizing the desktop and windows.When I plugged in my iPod KDE would let me choose to open Amarok automatically, or any other program I wanted. Gnome opened Rhythmbox, and only Rhythmbox. In order to get it to run Amarok I had to delete Rhythmbox, write a small script that launched Amarok, and name the script Rhythmbox. Then when Gnome tried to run Rhythmbox, it would actually run my script, which would run Amarok. It was an ugly kludge.KDE also let me do "pretty" things easier. I could run Xplanet as a background using KDE's "Use Program" option in the background selection. You had to use a script for Gnome, and it never worked the first time, and you had to go to forums to figure out why, and you finally decided that it wasn't worth it. Well, maybe not you, but me.KDE also has a neat random desktop background feature that Gnome needs a script to do. Nothing wrong with using scripts if they work, except they can be more of a pain to configure and just feel uglier.After using KDE for a while, though, I started to notice the little things. I'm sure some of the bugs were distro specific, but quite a few bugs followed me from distro to distro. Yes, in KDE I could select which programs to use for which filetypes, but it would sometimes forget, and I would have to choose again. Editing menus in KDE was hit and miss. USB devices would sometimes mount, and sometimes wouldn't. The extra keys on my multimedia keyboard never worked in KDE, no matter what I did.Gnome was always much more dependable. Menus would be edited properly, devices always mounted nicely, and the extra keys on my multimedia keyboard just worked, even without configuration. This was true even on distros that used KDE as their default.KDE was a little flakier than Gnome, but I was willing to put up with it for customization's sake. Then I got a new digital camera for Christmas. I could not access my pictures. KDE would detect the camera, but it would not let me see the pictures. It was like KDE promised a friend that it wouldn't let me see them, no matter how much I begged. I spent hours trying to get it to work, and almost decided that Linux just wasn't able to use this camera yet. Then, on a whim, I started Gnome, plugged in the cable to my camera, and there were my pictures. Just like that. No fiddling around, no searching forums, no changing permissions, no mucking about with configuration files. It just worked.Now I had a choice. I could use KDE for everything else, and switch to Gnome when I wanted to use my camera, or I could give Gnome another shot. I switched to Gnome, and am happy that I did.I was surprised to find out that my main pet peeves have been somewhat addressed. I can now choose more options for opening programs. Gnome now has a control panel for removable drives and media, where I can choose which program to run when I plug in a device, such as running Amarok when I plug in my iPod or digiKam when my camera is plugged in.KDE still has more options, but I don't feel as constrained as I used to in Gnome. And it's nice having a desktop manager that Just Works.I still mostly use KDE applications. Amarok is the best music player on any platform, I use Kmail for my email, Kopete for instant messaging (although it may get the boot soon), K3b is the best for CD and DVD burning (although I'm using right-click -> Write to Disc in Nautilus, the Gnome file manager, a lot. Spiffy.), and so on. Firefox is my web browser of choice, although I use Konqueror for some of the other protocols like ftp, sftp, and webdav. It's like a swiss army browser.So in the war between KDE and Gnome, Gnome is the winner. What good is customization when you're constantly fighting your computer to get it to do what you need it to? Gnome works, and that's what you need a desktop manager to do.Why do you use Gnome? Does KDE do everything you want and more? Do you hate them both and use Fluxbox instead? Let me know in your comments and emails.