FOSSwire

The future of OpenOffice.org

Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems has been the cause of some uncertainty and concern for the open source projects and initiatives that Sun were previously responsible for. Oracle are not known for being particularly welcoming or supportive of FOSS — and with the relatively high profile OpenSolaris project being cancelled soon after the acquisition, much of that concern appears justified.

Attention has therefore turned to OpenOffice.org, the premier open source office suite and a very big, and important, product and project in the FOSS world. Of course, it's very unlikely Oracle would cancel something like OOo outright, but many still remain concerned about the future direction Oracle might take the project.

Enter The Document Foundation.

There have been forks of OpenOffice.org before. Perhaps you might remember the NeoOffice project, which developed the first version of OOo's code that ran semi-natively on Mac OS X (or at least, without requiring X11).

This new Foundation, and its OOo fork LibreOffice, however, arise directly because of the concerns about Oracle and its future management and direction of the OOo project. The other difference is that this fork has a huge amount of support from the existing OOo community, who appear to no longer be happy to continue their work under Oracle's direction. The press release makes things fairly clear:

The community of volunteers who develop and promote OpenOffice.org, the leading free office software, announce a major change in the project’s structure. After ten years’ successful growth with Sun Microsystems as founding and principal sponsor, the project launches an independent foundation called "The Document Foundation", to fulfil the promise of independence written in the original charter.

In essence, the community is jumping ship from what is currently ‘OpenOffice.org’, and moving over to this forked product.

Oracle, who acquired OpenOffice.org assets as a result of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, has been invited to become a member of the new Foundation, and donate the brand the community has grown during the past ten years. Pending this decision, the brand “LibreOffice” has been chosen for the software going forward.

Oracle have a couple of choices:

Retain the OOo brand, probably lose most, if not all, the existing community around OOo, and develop the suite on their own. They’ll be able to incorporate changes made under the LibreOffice brand under the terms of the licence, but won't have direct control over those new contributions.
‘Donate’ the brand to the new Foundation and the product will continue to be called OpenOffice.org, and give up their influence and control over the project as they have now.

Regardless of what happens, the future of OpenOffice.org (not the name itself, but the provision of a Free office suite with that code) is likely to be pretty stable after this gets sorted out, with or without Oracle’s cooperation. What we call it might change, but there are enough people behind the new Foundation and its commitment to the suite’s neutrality, that it should be fine.

There will be those, however, who will see this instability in the project as a reason not to use it, or to discourage its adoption — perhaps even attempt to discredit any adoption of FOSS entirely. That's an unfortunate consequence of this situation.

Users of the suite, and those considering deploying it, however, should rest assured that there will be a future for the suite (whatever its name) for a long time to come. It’s just too important and useful to get ‘gobbled up’ in this mess.

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Blender’s Durian Open Movie Project Premieres “Sintel”

Yesterday, the Durian Open Movie Project premiered Sintel, a short animation film produced independently by the Blender Foundation and licensed under a Creative Commons licence.

What makes this film (and previous Blender films, Big Buck Bunny and Elephant’s Dream) special, is that they are designed, produced and rendered completely with free and open source software. All of the ‘source’ files of the movie — including all of the artwork — will also be made available under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, giving anyone who might be interested the ability to study the files and see how the film was put together.

The film is an epic and emotional fantasy adventure, that manages to fit into 15 minutes, where we follow the hero Sintel on a quest. As well as being a technical achievement — with beautiful CG animation, especially if you are able to watch it in its full 2K quality — the film has very high production values and, I think, a compelling storyline. You would be forgiven for thinking this came straight out of Hollywood.

The project is funded partially through sponsors and the Netherlands Film Fund, but also from those who order the 4-disc DVD set, which will include the full movie (as an HD movie file in various formats as well as DVD video) and all of the source files, with tutorials, as well as behind-the-scenes content.

It is an impressive showcase, once again, of what can be achieved with a completely FOSS workflow, focused around Blender. In fact, proving that Blender and open source tools can be used to produce something of this calibre.

You can watch the full 15-minute movie by downloading it in various formats, buying the DVD set, or watching it on YouTube.

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Quick Reference — Converting Images with ImageMagick

While you might associate working with images with big graphical programs like GIMP or Photoshop, ImageMagick is an entirely different animal. It is a suite of command-line programs for converting and manipulating images.

But why would you use a command line program to work with images, which are by definition, graphical? Well, for a start, you don’t have to load up a slow (and dare I say bloated) graphical app just to achieve a simple conversion task: you can fire off the command and have the result done in no time. Also, you can go to pretty much any Linux computer and know that ImageMagick is available — its ubiquity makes it a useful tool to know how to use.

So let’s jump right in to doing some simple, but useful, conversion tasks with ImageMagick.

Change format of a single image

If you have, say, a PNG file that you want in JPEG format, you can simply run convert with the source filename and the desired destination filename, and it will infer the desired format from the destination’s file extension.

For example:

convert source.png destination.jpg

Resizing images

To resize an image with ImageMagick, you can use the -resize command line switch to resize by either a percentage, or with the exact desired dimensions. Note that resize will preserve the aspect ratio of your image, even if you choose exact dimensions that are in a different ratio.

convert source.jpg -resize 75% destination.jpg

convert source.jpg -resize 800x600 destination.jpg

Apply heavier compression to an image

If you want to squeeze down the file size of an image in a lossy compressed format, such as JPEG, you can instruct convert to change the quality attribute.

convert big_file.jpg -quality 60% small_file.jpg

Batch converting from one format to another

So, say you have a folder full of PNG files that you now need in JPEG format. With many applications, you would have to go through the laborious process of opening each image and using Save as to save the file in the new format.

With ImageMagick and the command line, you can convert all the PNG files in the current working directory to JPEG like this:

mogrify -format jpg *.png

Trim off the edges of an image

If an image has too much space around the edges, you can use trim to automatically crop the image. This feature removes any edges that are exactly the same colour as the pixels at the corner of the image.

convert non_trimmed.jpg -trim trimmed.jpg

And there is more…

We really are only scratching the surface of this powerful suite of applications. There is extensive documentation on all its features and there is certainly more to explore if you find yourself using ImageMagick a lot.

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Getting to Grips with GRUB 2

For a long time, the Grand Unified Bootloader, or GRUB, has been the standard way of getting a PC to boot into your Linux, or other Unix operating system. The flexibility offered by GRUB makes it easy to dual boot, triple boot… well, actually, do pretty much what you want in terms of installing operating systems on your own computer.

The newer versions of Ubuntu (from 9.10) and their derivatives are going through a transition. The old ‘legacy’ GRUB is giving way to the new GRUB 2. The name is similar and the spirit is similar, but GRUB 2 makes a lot of changes to the bootloader setup. In this post, aimed at people who are already familiar with GRUB Legacy, I hope to outline some of the important differences so you can get up to speed as newer distributions adopt the new bootloader.

Using the Bootloader

For the most part, how you actually interact with GRUB once it has been set up is mostly the same. You still get the same list of operating systems to boot, from which you choose the one you want. It still should be good about auto-detecting other operating systems co-existing on the same machine, such as Windows, and offering you those choices.

A couple of key differences when actually using the bootloader:

If you have only one operating system on your machine, the menu is bypassed entirely and the machine boots straight away into your OS.
With the ‘hidden menu’ feature, you now press Shift rather than Esc to show the menu.

Fundamentally, though, it’s pretty much the same thing. You can still, for example, press e when an entry is highlighted to edit the boot commands at runtime, although the key combination to actually boot once you are in this mode has been changed from b to Ctrl-X.

Configuring and Installing

Some really important changes have been made to the way the GRUB configuration file is set up and read by the program once it is running. These changes have been the most frustrating for me personally.

The menu.lst file (or occasionally grub.conf) has gone away, to be replaced by grub.cfg. The format of the file has also changed quite a lot — it now includes its own Bourne shell-like scripting language.

The biggest and most important change, however, is that the grub.cfg file is not meant to be edited manually. (It is certainly possible, but expect your changes to get overwritten without warning.)

Instead, there are a series of scripts that are placed in /etc/grub.d which are executed by the update-grub command in order to generate the grub.cfg file. The names of these files begin with a number, which sets the order in which the scripts are processed.

For example, on my Linux Mint 9 system, I see these files:

00_header  05_debian_theme  06_mint_theme  10_linux  10_lupin  20_memtest86+  30_os-prober  40_custom  README

If you want to add any custom entries to your boot menu, you can use the file 40_custom and set up entries with a syntax very similar to that of GRUB Legacy. Again, in my example, I have a CentOS 5 install co-existing with Linux Mint, but the GRUB 2 auto-detect process doesn’t create a GRUB menu entry that actually will boot the system successfully, perhaps due to the older version of the kernel on CentOS (it even still uses hda,b,c notation to refer to IDE hard drives, rather than the more common sda,b,c). Therefore, I’ve set up a custom entry to boot CentOS:

menuentry "CentOS" {
      insmod ext2
      set root='(hd1,1)'
      linux /vmlinuz ro root=/dev/hdb1
      initrd /initrd
}

As you might guess, you can reorder these different sections of the boot menu by simply renaming the files and setting the number prefix so that those entries are in the desired order. In my example, I could rename 40_custom to 15_custom.

Also notable in /etc/grub.d is the 30_os-prober file, which is designed to search for other operating systems co-existing on your machine, such as Windows, and automatically adding an entry to boot them. This should, in the long run, make dual-boot environments more reliable in the face of changes, as this search process is re-run every time that update-grub is executed.

There is also a /etc/default/grub file which contains more general GRUB 2 settings, including the default timeout before the default choice will be booted, the screen resolution and even whether GRUB makes a beep when it starts.

Once you’re done editing any of those ‘source’ configuration files, simply run update-grub for it to regenerate the main configuration file.

I think the changes in the configuration files are likely to be the biggest hurdle to overcome in the migration from GRUB Legacy to GRUB 2. I’ve spent plenty of time screaming at the way it works in GRUB 2, but am now grudgingly coming to accept it as I learn to keep my customisations in 40_custom and learned where all of the new configuration files are.

For new installations and relatively simple dual-boot environments, GRUB 2 should work just great without too much fiddling.

Useful Resources

Perhaps I am lazy — I’ve only really looked into GRUB 2 for as much as I need to do, which mostly has involved setting up my PC system with a ridiculous number of operating system boot choices.

There are lots of other useful resources out there which can help you to get your head around the changes and get used to the new way of doing things.

GRUB 2 isn’t standard across the board yet, with many Linux distributions taking the cautious approach for now and sticking with GRUB Legacy, which still works very well. But with Ubuntu and its derivatives taking the lead on the issue, it would make a lot of sense for anyone involved with administering Linux systems to get used to the new version now.

Have you had experience with GRUB 2? Are the changes good or bad? Feel free to have your say in the comments.

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Roundup: Text Based Text Editors

For some reason, text editors are something that us Unix geeks get very passionate about. Whether it’s an argument over which editor is better, or just professing our love for our favourite keyboard shortcuts, it’s an emotive issue.

You might think that a plain text editor is a pretty simple affair. After all, all it has to do is allow you to type stuff in and then change it. Right?

Well, it turns out that there are lots of different ways you can approach a text editor and lots of different feature sets that different people prefer.

Why a text-based text editor?

If you’ve used a desktop Linux distribution recently, you’re probably familiar with programs such as gedit, Kate or maybe LeafPad. These are, of course, text editors, but they are graphical programs.

Text editors that run in the command line environment are what we are looking at here. But why would you use any command line based text editor in preference to a graphical one?

It will run everywhere. If you need to SSH into a remote server, for example, where you only have access to the command line, these editors will be your only option. So learning one of the common editors can come in very handy.

Extensible and customisable. The flexibility and power offered by some of these tools is unparalleled. If you don’t like the way the application works, you can tweak it and hack it and script it until you do. Getting the same degree of configurability is much more difficult with GUI apps.

The keyboard. While there’s a learning curve to any set of keyboard shortcuts, putting in the time to grok the keyboard interface can make text editing much more efficient, especially for doing more complex tasks which would require many clicks in a GUI.

Geek is the new chic. Seriously, you can’t deny there’s a certain sense of satisfaction one gets from using something really geeky. If you’re into that sort of thing…

So, let’s take a look at three of the most common editors, in alphabetical order.

GNU Emacs

Emacs describes itself as “the extensible, customisable, self-documenting, real-time display editor”. It is arguably the most powerful and configurable text editor available and has a long history. The software contains its own programming language, a version of Lisp called Emacs Lisp. This means that pretty much every feature is customisable, such that you can even have 'applications’ that run inside of Emacs (there is a text adventure game called Dunnet and many other 'games’ for Emacs). It even has a built-in web browser.

As a consequence of its 1970s heritage, for someone that has never used it before, the way it works might be unfamiliar. For example, it refers to the 'Meta’ key, which refers to what is now the Alt key on modern PCs.

It is probably fair to say, however, that its extensibility and programmability is unparalleled. If you do want complete control, Emacs is an über-editor.

Advantages

Infinitely configurable.
More than just a text editor — can become a whole operating environment!

Disadvantages

Quite a steep learning curve, with many keyboard shortcuts to memorise.
Some argue it is too 'heavyweight’ with resource usage.

GNU nano

Modelled around pico, an editor that derived from the Pine email client (though wasn’t under a free software licence), GNU nano is probably the most lightweight of the three editors here and also probably the easiest for new users to immediately get familiar with.

It, helpfully, lists the most common keyboard commands you might need to use at the bottom of the screen (^ denoting Ctrl), so even if you have never used it before, it is pretty easy to work out how to create a new file and save it without having to read any documentation.

The name implies that it is mean to be small and light — you won’t find masses of unnecessary functionality, as it is designed to be just a text editor, rather than something like Emacs which is a whole platform in itself. You will also have less configurability and options, although it’s still possible to do quite a bit of interface tweaking.

Advantages

Easy to get started with — common commands are always listed at the bottom of the screen.
Lightweight and simple, just a text editor with nothing else you may not need.

Disadvantages

Does not offer the same degree of flexibility and extensibility as other editors.
For serious editing tasks, a lack of advanced features.

vi/vim

Like Emacs, vi and the 'vi improved’ version, Vim, have been around for some time. The original editor, vi, was written in 1976 for BSD Unix, while Vim was written later, in 1991, for the Amiga. For a long time, it was essentially the standard Unix editor until Emacs gained popularity. Inclusion of vi is still a requirement for an operating system to be covered under the Single Unix Specification and the POSIX standard.

The 'improved’ version, Vim, has an internal scripting language which means that it can be customised in many ways, as well as sophisticated syntax highlighting support.

One of the biggest differences between vi and other editors is that it uses a modal interface. There is an insert mode and a normal mode. Any keys you press are only actually 'typed in’ when you are in insert mode. Any keys you press in normal mode are commands. This can be potentially destructive if you are not careful about which mode you are in! The modal way of working, though, does mean the user avoids frequently having to use modifier keys like Control, which in theory can improve typing ergonomics for experienced users doing heavy editing.

Advantages

A version will ship on every Unix operating system — you know it will be available.
Configurable and scriptable.

Disadvantages

New users might find the modal nature interface very confusing at first.
Not capable of doing everything as an 'operating environment’ as Emacs can.

Everyone has their own preference…

As I mentioned in the intro, which editor you pick is an emotive issue for Unix geeks. If you’re someone less familiar with the command line, but you still do need to learn a command line-based editor, nano is probably the way to go initially, just because of its simple operation and the fact that it shows you the keypresses you need to make.

If you’re more experienced, you’ll either already have a preference for vi or Emacs and you’ll probably be sticking to it. If you don’t, though, give them both a try and see what you like best.

Personally, I’ve always used vim for my command line editing needs. I am lazy, however. I probably only use a tiny percentage of vim’s functionality, and there are many things I should spend more time learning to speed up repetitive tasks. The point is, though, I can get what I need to done, and whichever system I find myself on, I know there is something there I can use.

What is your favourite editor and why? Are there any editors other than these that deserve a mention? Have your say in the comments.

Keyboard image at top of post is by Flickr user john_a_ward. Licensed under CC-BY 2.0 GB.

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Open Video on the Web: Where Are We Now?

Back in January 2009, I wrote a post on opening video on the web. At the time, the Mozilla Foundation had just invested $100,000 in the Wikimedia Foundation to use Theora for videos on their sites.

In the last year and a half, the situation with video on the web has changed quite a lot. So what do those changes mean for free software and open source — where are we now with video on the web, are we any closer to open source and patent free web video?

HTML5, audio and video tags

Something really important has happened in the last 18 months. Adobe Flash, long the dominant platform for delivering web video, is in trouble. HTML5, a standard which will soon be supported by the major browsers, supports audio and video tags which are designed to allow video and audio playback to be supported natively by the browser — no plugins required.

This all sounds great in theory — the standardisation of this way of embedding content should make interoperability with web video even better, but unfortunately these tags alone don’t tell the whole story. audio and video themselves are just ways to embed audio and video content; you still need audio and video codecs that the browser will support. This is where things still remain very messy and riddled with legal issues.

Codec Soup: H.264, Theora, VP8 (WebM) ...

I discussed Theora and H.264 in my previous post on this subject and many of the issues that were present then still are there now.

H.264 seems to be one of the best codecs from a technical point of view and has wide support from commercial vendors. Most notably, there are a significant body of consumer devices that now have H.264 encoding and decoding hardware. While covered by patents and having a possibly uncertain future (it is free of charge only for personal use until the end of 2015), there is only a single body that holds all the patents and rights, the MPEGLA, making it more attractive for businesses who otherwise may fear being sued.

Theora has traditionally faced criticism for being technically inferior to competing codecs like H.264, but it is supposed to be an open standard which can be distributed without licensing fees and used without issues in completely open source systems, which should make it ideal. Unfortunately, it isn’t as simple as that. Owners of video compression patents feel threatened by competing, free technologies like Theora, and recent rumours suggest that Theora could be the target of legal threats because of some of these patents which it supposedly infringes upon.

There’s also a new kid on the block, WebM. With the backing of Google, WebM is a separate attempt from Theora to create a royalty free video compression standard which works great on the web. The codec used for the video is VP8, originally developed by On2 Technologies (who also developed VP3, which is now Theora). It is supposed to be technically superior to Theora, the implementation code is open source under the BSD licence and Google have also freed the patents covering the technology. So could WebM be the ideal open source solution if Theora is stuck in the legal doghouse? Unfortunately, it still remains unclear — the patents granted to various technology companies for video technology are so numerous and fundamental that it is likely VP8 could be legally challenged in the same way. To be clear: less direct threats have been made against WebM, and the backing from Google, Mozilla and Adobe could help defend against any future problems, but it still remains a concern. It is exactly that uncertainty that makes the open solution less attractive to businesses who fear legal action.

Browser Support

One of the big ideas of this new web video technology, as I explained earlier, is not needing any plugins to play web video. Of course, that will only work in practice if each browser supports both the HTML5 video tag and the right codec. There’s a useful table on codec support on Wikipedia, but I’ll summarise here.

Mozilla supports Theora in today’s Firefox and by version 4 will also support WebM. They have decided not to support H.264.

Apple’s Safari will support only H.264.

Internet Explorer, from version 9, will support H.264 natively, and WebM will work if the user has separately installed the WebM codec.

Google Chrome supports both Theora and H.264, will soon support WebM in the regular release.

In fact, recent builds of Firefox, Opera and Flock are now WebM-compatible.

My guess is that H.264 is likely to become the most popular format for HTML5 web video, particularly given the momentum it already has due to the Apple iPad, but if Mozilla stick to their word about not supporting it, website owners will probably be forced to encode in two formats – one for 'most’ browsers, H.264 and either WebM or Theora for Firefox users, along with other browsers such as Opera which are unlikely to support H.264.

Conclusion

So, where are we now with open video on the web?

Sadly, the answer is — still in a mess. There is, I think, still hope for truly open video on the web. There are significant players in this space, including Google, who seem to have the will to get behind open technologies and to challenge the dominant position of H.264 and the MPEGLA. The momentum behind WebM, in particular, and the impressively wide browser support already gained by Theora, means that the free software and patent-free approach still has influence in what will happen in the future.

I think one of the pivotal issues right now is what decision Mozilla will make about supporting H.264. It’s a tough decision, but if they stand their ground on only supporting Theora and WebM, there will either be a backlash against Firefox (a risk it seems they must take), or website owners will have to also support either of those formats in order to serve their Firefox users, meaning H.264 will not become the new de facto standard, or at least not on its own.

This is a really complicated and controversial issue, but it’s one that will be key to the future of the web. As challenging as this is, I believe that if those with influence stick to their principles, we will at least have choice about which technologies we want to use.

Our sister site YouMakeMedia has a tutorial for converting older FLV Flash video to H.264 if you do need to support those clients for the videos on your site!

VHS tape image is from http://www.sxc.hu/photo/992499. The Xiph Fish Logo and its theora.org variant are trademarks of Xiph.Org. The WebM logo is owned by The WebM Project.

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WattOS — a lightweight, low-power Linux

A lightweight Linux distribution often seems to require making sacrifices — using a UI which many users would find unfamiliar and using software which is heavily cut down in functionality.

WattOS is a really interesting lightweight Linux distribution that is based on Ubuntu 10.04 (as of WattOS R2). As the name might suggest, it is also focused on low power usage and is said to work well with older and less powerful hardware.

At the same time, though, it runs familiar software, like Firefox, Empathy for instant messaging and has a friendly user interface. It uses Openbox and LXDE to form the desktop environment, and while many Linux users may not have even heard those names, the combination works brilliantly — keeping the software lightweight and super speedy, but without behaving oddly or describing things in an unusual way. In short, a non-technical user certainly won’t have a problem with the way the desktop works if they have used full-fat Ubuntu before.

While older machines might struggle to run the latest and greatest Firefox 3.6, its inclusion in WattOS, again, ensures good compatibility with websites. The newest R2 release also includes the Microsoft TTF fonts package and Adobe Flash Player 10.1 out of the box, so you don’t need to do any configuration to have a usable, modern web browser where websites behave as expected and render as intended.

In other areas, the developers have rightly steered away from the traditional productivity choice of OpenOffice.org to offer Abiword for word processing and Gnumeric for spreadsheet tasks. There is also RhythmBox, the Totem Movie Player, as well as microblogging client Gwibber and the Transmission BitTorrent application, as well as a few other utility applications that can be found in Ubuntu. Again, though, if you need or want anything more heavy duty, or want something that is not offered, you have the flexibility of the entire Ubuntu software catalogue at your disposal.

So, the interface is good and it has great software, but how does it actually run?

If you have a fast machine, very quickly, and if you have a slower machine, probably with acceptable performance, depending on the hardware (you can see what success others are having with older hardware on their forums). Even in Live CD mode, things are snappy, as you would expect; the only really significant risk of slowdowns being when running Firefox. It’s a sensible tradeoff in order to have a modern browser, but, again, it is the one area that might present issues on those older computers.

The other focus of WattOS is, of course, low power consumption. The distribution ships with its own power management software. Unfortunately, it needs a little bit of manual configuration post-install to work (you have to add the user to the powermanagement group) and the configuration interface doesn’t have the same feel of simplicity as the rest of the OS. I personally don’t have the right hardware to be able to really test it, but it does offer Auto and Manual power management modes and Performance and Power Saving settings. How much difference it would make to battery life, then, is something that would be difficult for me to comment on.

What strikes me most about WattOS is it seems to combine the best of both worlds — it is genuinely fast and lightweight and supports older hardware, but comes without the significant compromises in functionality and in ease of use that often accompany other cut-down distros. This makes it an excellent operating system choice for many applications — a simple web browsing box for beginner computer users, a way to give a new lease of life to older hardware, a netbook OS and even in a kiosk or thin client situation. In many cases, it would even work well just as a live CD, even without the hassle of installing it alongside anything else.

If you are looking for a lightweight Linux, WattOS is most definitely worth a look. You can download the new R2 release from planetwatt.com.

Do you have experience with lightweight Linux distributions? What do you think of WattOS? Have your say in the comments.

from FOSSwire

Ohio LinuxFest is ready for 40 Years

Ohio LinuxFest is definitely one of my favorite Linux and open-source conferences. If you’ve never been to a Linux conference, now is a great time to begin. If you have, it’s also a great time to experience this conference.

The main reason you should go? It’s free. OLF is funded by sponsors, so you aren’t required to pay to get in (though you certainly can upgrade your conference pass if you choose). The only thing you have to do is register. Registration closes on September 19th, so be sure you’re not left out!

From Ohio LinuxFest: Back to the Future of Linux!:

bq.
Don’t miss your last chance to register for Ohio Linux Fest! A mere two weeks away on September 25-27, it’s coming faster than a Free Software freight train!
...
People come to OLF to meet with others that have helped create things like the backbone of the Internet, FireFox, Linux and the Apache web server. If you come to Ohio Linux Fest you will gain a unique perspective of this community. You will see the technology and some of the faces that have made possible such a wonderful change to the digital world.

There are some great speakers at the event, including Doug McIlroy, the inventor of the UNIX pipe, as a keynote speaker:

The featured keynote speaker this year is Doug McIlroy, a major contributor to the great grandfather of Linux and a direct contributor to code that powers many of the Unix products of today. Doug invented the concept of pipes inter-process data streams that no true Unix / Linux geek can live without. This concept made its way into less stable products as well from other proprietary vendors.

It’s definitely an event you don’t want to miss. Visit the Ubuntu booth and there’s a good chance you’ll see me there.

OLFU training classes will be offered the day before the event on the 25th. This is, literally, a bargain. This years training will be guided by LOPSA Where else can you go and get a days worth of training for only $350.00?
What other crazy things will you miss out on if you miss OLF? You’ll miss cool Tee Shirts, the yearly After-Party, the Free-Geek Columbus Linux Basics and more. Don’t be sorry that you didn’t register for the event.

There’s a rumor about that some people go to OLF for the after-party.

Regardless of your reason, make it a point to register. You’ll have a great time, trust me.

See you there!

from FOSSwire

The File Menu

This.

The File menu has been around since the dawn of user interfaces. But do you know what? It has overstayed its welcome. The File menu has been abused in far too many applications.

A File menu should deal with files. That’s it. Open a file, save a file, print a file, quit editing the file. Some, no.. most applications have been using the File menu to do everything from opening new windows to changing preferences. They don’t belong there: opening a new window should go in a Window menu, and changing preferences should be under Edit or Tools.

Here are some specific instances I’m talking about. I’m not trying to pick on any application or developer, these are just applications I have installed at the moment. But they should be fixed.

Firefox, Epiphany, Opera, and many other browsers are abusers of the File menu. A browser generally does not have a whole lot to do with files at all. Two, maybe three items on their File menus might actually fit. But things like Open Tab, Location, and Send Link? No. It would make more sense to rename the File menu to “Browser” or “Web”.
GNOME System applets like system-config-printer-applet that only have one option in their File menu: Close. Really?
Seahorse has a File menu that will create, import, or export keys and passwords. It kind of makes sense, but a something like “Key” or “Keyring” sounds more in-context.
GNOME Terminal has a File menu that doesn’t have a thing to do with files.
Evolution has a huge File menu that has little do with files. “Mail” or even “Evolution” would be more appropriate.

Synaptic's File menu could be “Package,” but considering there is already a Package menu other things would need to be reorganized.
Olive's File menu has more to do with branches, though some items would fit as File.
GConf Editor's File menu has five items for managing keys, two of which are disabled unless you know what you’re doing.
D-Feet has a File menu that allows you to connect to different D-Bus sessions. I can’t quite put my finger on what this should really be labeled.
Devhelp, a documentation browser, has a File menu that opens new windows and prints.
Many, many more.

Again, if you’re a developer of something on this list, don’t feel too offended. Glade (a GTK+ designer program) sticks a File menu on new menubars by default, so it may just be an oversight. That doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be fixed.

There are programs where it does make sense to have a File menu: Gedit, OpenOffice.org, GIMP, PiTiVi, and other applications that edit files as their main function.

Instead of dropping the File menu, it should be renamed to something more useful. Even though many applications abuse the File menu, there are plenty that do not. Banshee has a Media menu; Rhythmbox has Music. Most GNOME games have a Game menu. Baobab has Analyzer. Totem: Movie; Vinagre: Machine; Empathy: Chat; Gwibber: Gwibber.
Yes, even renaming your File menu to the name of your application might even be a good option.

So the next time you’re designing a GUI, keep in mind that your menus should make sense. Do that and we’ll have world peace. Well, maybe not, but it will shut me up.

from FOSSwire

OpenShot — Video Editing Made Simple

Desktop Linux isn’t necessarily the first platform you’d think of going to for video editing. Despite that, there are several great projects that offer video editing functionality; things like PiTiVi, Cinelerra and Kino to name just a few.

Jonathan Thomas wasn’t satisfied with the existing video editing solutions on Linux, however. They weren’t easy enough to use, powerful or stable enough. Enter OpenShot, Jonathan’s solution.

Let me say right up front — the project is in a relatively early stage of development. There are plenty of things not yet completed or that don’t work quite right just yet. But I’ve had a brief play with OpenShot, and I am really quite impressed.

The interface will look familiar if you’ve used any other timeline-based video editing package before. You have a project bin on the left, a preview monitor on the right and the timeline at the bottom, where you arrange the clips in sequence to make your movie.

You can’t capture clips directly from a video camera at the moment, but if you are able to get video captured via another source, you then just import the video into OpenShot. I had some old PAL DV footage lying around. I just went to File > Import Files and selected the files.

Right away the clips just appeared in the Project Files area. It just, sort of, worked — I didn’t have to wait any time for the clips to be processed or for any conversion to take place. Now I did only import three clips of fairly short length, but it really was an easy, slick process.

You can then drag the clips to the timeline and arrange them. You can use the Razor tool to slice the in and out points of a clip or split a clip into two and rearrange it. It all really works in a very friendly, familiar way if you’ve ever done anything like this anywhere else.

The only thing that did throw me off with the timeline is the fact that the clips don’t seem to 'snap’ to the edges of other clips, for example, so at times it feels quite difficult to line clips up one after another without having black space in the video between them. Having a satisfying 'snap’ feel to the timeline where appropriate would really enhance it.

When you’re done, you can export the finished sequence into an array of formats.

Again, I’m going to admit to being lazy. I just accepted the default settings and exported — and it just worked, again. It is somewhat of a complicated dialogue box if you’re not into video codecs and standards and all of that, but you don’t necessarily need to spend time fiddling with it — the default settings will produce something useful (provided you can play back the codecs in your favourite media player).

There are issues with this project. I found the interface a bit — blue — and not really to my tastes. Also, the icons feel a little bit indistinct and unclear. It’s quite difficult to see quickly what each icon does and I did find myself taking a few minutes to get to grips with which button was which because of that.

Some keyboard shortcuts I’d expect to work, such as the Delete key to delete a highlighted clip in the timeline, spacebar to toggle pause/play in both the timeline and the clip preview in Project Files, to not yet be functional.

I want to stress again that this is an early in-development project. Despite that, it’s the most user friendly, simple video editing program I’ve used on the Linux platform. It just seems to have the attitude of a program that follows conventions, is really simple and just plain makes sense.

There are a lot of features more demanding users may expect before it can be accepted perhaps by a more seasoned video editing audience, but OpenShot shows promise and real potential to be the best home-orientated video editing solution on Linux.

You can download some pre-built packages for Ubuntu as well as source code from the OpenShot Downloads page. If you’re into video editing with Linux, give this a try.

from FOSSwire