Linux

Helps in installing and maintaining the Linux operating system. May also be of interest to Apple owners using OS X.

Contact: Drew Kwashnak 203-910-6477 (Cell). Meets 3rd Wednesday, 7:30pm at the DACS Resource Center.

Yahoo! Group: linux_dacs

News and Notes

April 2008

In the April Linux SIG meeting we were joined by Joe Bruno of the Westchester PC Users Group due to a scheduling conflict they had that same night.

We took a look at the popular video capturing and editing application, Kino. While it is a pretty good open source DV editing program for Linux, it has a ways to go to match Apple's iMovie or Microsoft's Movie Maker.

Kino did well when it came to capturing and exporting the video. There were no issues with capturing the video from the Sony Handycam by way of Firewire and the application split the scenes into individual DV clips, or in exporting the finished project into a variety of formats including
AVI, MPEG-2, and Quicktime. It even includes the option of exporting a single frame as a picture file or an entire batch of frames.

The difficult part of video editing is adding all the glamour and while Kino made a good stab at handling it all, it didn't "wow" us very much. Setting up a transition in the beginning was a bit of pecking around and trying things, and when we clipped one of the scenes it would still play the removed portion.

Due to not knowing where my second hard drive is, with KDEnlive installed on it, we looked at Pitivi instead. Pitivi is a video editor application geared towards the Gnome desktop. It doesn't capture from the camera, or really do much other than collecting clips in order and exporting them to the .ogg video format. So far, though, they have a pretty good foundation to add the slick features to.

Mid April, the newest version of Ubuntu, 8.04 LTS (Long Term Service) or "Hardy Heron," is due out. Even before its official release, the Beta has gotten some great reviews. Ubuntu has been skyrocketed in popularity in a short time and has time and time again proven that it has earned it
too. Ubuntu has met so many needs that it was selected out of all of the Linux distributions to be offered installed instead of Windows, on a growing number of Dell consumer desktops and laptops.

While it's original release date has been moved by 2 weeks, Fedora 9 will be out in plenty of time to also get a chance to explore. Fedora is Linux industry leader Red Hat's "bleeding edge" distribution which means it should be exciting to see what is included in Fedora which may or may not make it to Red Hat's official distribution. That is not to say it is unstable, far from it. Fedora is a full community of
developers and users not associated with Red Hat.

With these two distributions being released, this is a perfect opportunity, if you have been thinking about it, to make the May Linux SIG meeting an install-fest!