The Caffeinated Penguin

Posted By matt on April 17, 2005

Okay, first, Kino vs. iMovie HD.

Kino notes/discussion:

• I turned left “auto split files” on, but set the size to 0. This splits files when the camera is started and stopped, but not on any file size, which is useful.
• I did have a problem where the screensaver activated and, when I wiggled the mouse, Kino's window wouldn't redraw. However, this was not repeatable.
• I tried to use my PowerMate as a jog dial, but I had no luck.
• As I mentioned before while running Gentoo, DV import seems to be broken on SMP systems under 2.6.10. It is less broken than while I was running the Gentoo sources – I can at least see the device attached to the bus now, but I can't seem to get a video feed out of it. I might play with it some more, but considering it “just worked” under Warty's 2.6.8 kernel, I think it's not going to be fixed short of a kernel upgrade.

iMovie notes/discussion:

• I had to copy the PowerMate settings from iMovie to iMovie HD.
• iMovie disables the screensaver during capture; I like this.
• In the File -> Share menu, there is an iDVD option that lets you only export certain clips to iDVD, rather than the whole project. This allows you to grab, say, 6 hours of home movies, chapter them up, then export 2 hour chunks as individual iDVD projects (or so goes the theory, I haven't tried).
• The nondestructive editing sounds great, in theory, until you realize that it wastes a LOT of space. Basically, it tries not to modify the captured DV files, EVER, which creates this problem that even the stuff you edit out is still on your hard disk. This is kind of annoying, considering that it can end up wasting a lot of space, if you're not careful with how you capture stuff. If anyone knows how to force it to rewrite the DV file, with only the bits I want to keep, I would very much appreciate it.

Okay, so now I'm running Ubuntu Hoary. Notes on that:

• As mentioned above, DV is broken
• /dev/dvd and /dev/cdrom links are no longer created. I consider this to be a very bad thing, since so many items depend on these being in place. To fix this, edit /etc/udev/cdsymlinks.conf and uncomment the appropriate lines (the file is well commented). Then, link /etc/udev/cd-aliases.rules into /etc/udev/rules.d
• Suspend/resume is now implemented and works pefectly on my laptop, with a few caveats. They are fully documented here, but condensed below:
  1. The ATI binary drivers (fglrx) break when you try and resume from suspend. This is ATI's fault, not the kernel maintainers' or Ubuntu's. The solution is to use the free drivers, which limits me to 2D only because 3d on the FireGL doesn't work yet.
  2. Edit /etc/default/acpi-support and uncomment ACPI_SLEEP to enable suspend to RAM
  3. Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and find the #kopt= line. Add resume=/dev/hdaX (where hdaX is your swap device). Then run update-grub, which will rebuild the grub list with the revised kopts.
• It would be nice if there was a generic wireless configuration app that worked well. There are a couple, but they are either gnome or KDE specific applets, or limited in some way (the generic KDE one is limited to 4 wireless configurations; not nearly enough)
• The Ubuntu maintainer removed the XOSD support from tpb, so I had to grab the debian package for it. This is all detailed here.

More general Mac notes:

• I switched from iTunes to XMMS. This has nothing to do with iTunes, it is quite a good program. However, I use XMMS on my Linux boxen, and all my playlists are in that format, which iTunes doesn't read. This is what I did to get it working:
  1. Install the XCode tools (you need them to compile the OSX output plugin
  2. Get glib, gtk+, and all the xmms stuff via Fink.
  3. Get the XMMS OSX output plugin. Configure it with –prefix=/sw, then make and sudo make install it.
• I found a way to make shell scripts click-on executables; you chuck a .command extension on them. Ironically enough, this was documented in my friend Brian's book.
• Given the above, I'm annoyed with the standard BSD tools (the behavior of ps and lack of a pkill). Basically, I need to get the pid of a (possibly) running process and kill it. So, I'm going a ps aux | grep ssh | grep -v grep | sed.. And I'm working on the right sed string to give me just the pid. I know regexps, I just don't know what the syntax for sed is. Oh, and the second grep gets rid of the grep which shows up in the list when you're grepping for ssh.
• It takes the mini about 3 hours to encode an hour of video for DVD. This is not too shabby.
• iDVD 5 does not include the themes from previous versions. This is kind of a shame because iDVD 4 had a lot of nice themes. So, bear that in mind if you have iDVD 4 and are looking to switch boxes – make sure to back up those themes first.
• Oh, and you can open up x11 apps from the command line with the open-x11 command.
• Now, all I need is to get the stupid xterm to not open when I start X. I think if I make an empty xinitrc, it will work.

Other stuff:

• I got my new KVM. It's nice. It has OSD and front panel buttons which gives me much happiness. There is a slight issue with the PS/2 to USB KVM cables which I'm trying to run. Namely, the new KVM probes for connected machines, which causes it to get an intermittently false signal bouncing off the circuits in the cable. It works fine if the cable is actually plugged in, but when it's not, the KVM gets confused. So, I ended up cascading my 2 KVM's, connecting the old KVM just like another machine to the new KVM. Since all it's used for is to connect “transient machines” (those which are not permanently connected), it's not that big a hassle. Indeed, it exends the distance machines can be from the core KVM by about 6 feet, so that makes my life easier.

I guess that's it for now. I'll have some random pics soon, too.

Category: LJ Import
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