Tag Archives: linux

Giving the AMD Trinity CPU+GPU a try!

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Initial thoughts on my new AMD Trinity based desktop:  Amazing for the money!

I just put together a system based on the AMD A4-5300 processor, ASRock FM2A75M-DGS mATX motherboard, 8GB of DDR3-1333Mhz RAM, and an Antec ECO 400W power supply.  Everything was from NewEgg, and very affordable.  This system was built using the slowest of the new AMD Trinity series of processors, and the cheapest AMD A75 chipset based motherboard I could find.

The goal was to load a Linux based operating system, and see how GPU performed under my most demanding graphical application:  Minecraft.

For less than $200 shipped (the power supply was on sale when I ordered), I was able to build a system using an existing case, hard drive, and monitor that will run Minecraft at 1920×1080 (full-screen) between 60 and 80 frames per second using Lubuntu 12.10, the “default-jre” package through Lubuntu, and the “fglrx” proprietary driver for the AMD graphics.  No other tweaks were made, and all the video settings were left to their defaults in Minecraft.

Neat.

So far, I am very impressed with the AMD Trinity system I put together for my tests.  The UEFI BIOS was very nice to work with, and even has the capability to configure the network interface via DHCP, fetch the latest BIOS version over the internet, download it, and update itself.  No operating system needed!

Lubuntu 12.10 runs like a dream.  All the hardware appears to be supported, and even without the “fglrx” graphics driver, the video worked perfect during the installation of Lubuntu, and after.  It was even quick enough to play Minecraft, but with some noticeable slowdown while running full-screen.

More updates to come as I mess around with this latest desktop systems architecture from AMD!

The End of an Era – Selling the Mac Mini!

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Tonight I finished cleaning all of my personal data off of my first Apple Macintosh.  The hard drive was wiped, and the operating system reload is in progress.  It’s time to put the little beastie up for sale, and get some more modern hardware!

This was a big purchase for me back when I started messing around with my Canon HF100 HD video camera.  iMovie ’09 worked great with my video camera, and it made sense to purchase a Mac Mini (and then upgrade it) to handle all of my video editing and storage duties.

The machine I purchased was a Mid 2007 Mac Mini, which had an Intel Core2Duo 2.0Ghz processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 120GB internal hard drive.  I immediately upgraded the system to 4GB of RAM and installed a 500GB Western Digital 5400RPM SATA drive.  Massive improvements in speed, video editing capabilities, and storage in one easy afternoon.

The system has served me well as a workstation in general, and working with video through iMovie.  Sadly, the time has come to upgrade to something more modern, with a little more RAM and some more CPU power to handle the longer videos I’d like to shoot.  Also, the 500GB drive was full, and I’d rather not try to stuff a 1TB drive in the system.  External drives work great, but are much slower.  I have outgrown this system.

What will I get to replace this system?  I doubt I will get another Mac, since video editing capabilities under Linux have caught up to (and surpassed in some areas) iMovie, and i can get a LOT more storage space, CPU, and RAM by building my own system instead of paying for another Mac.  I’ve had a lot of success editing the raw files from my video camera under a couple different video editors in Linux, so I’m comfortable leaving the Mac behind at this point.

Not sure what the specs will be on the new system.  I have to sell off the Mac Mini first to help fund the new hardware.  That will be another blog post in the near future.  :-)

Editing video on Ubuntu 11.04 – An update

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After fiddling around with different video editors in Ubuntu 11.04, I’ve settled on what I think is the most stable, and most useful software package: OpenShot

OpenShot is available through the Synaptic package manager, so it’s a fairly straightforward installation. You also might want to get the extra codecs package, “libavformat-extra-52″, if you want to export anything using the h.264 codec.

From a terminal window, you can install everything you need to use OpenShot by typing the following:

sudo apt-get install openshot libavformat-extra-52

OpenShot seems to work better with the native .MTS files that my Canon HF100 saves on its SDHC card than Pitivi. At least, it hasn’t crashed yet, and hasn’t failed to import any files from my camera.

Ubuntu 11.04 – Trying it out for the first time

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Everyone who pays any attention at all to Ubuntu knows that last week Ubuntu Linux 11.04 was released. *huzzah* Tonight I finally made a bootable USB stick from the 64-bit ISO, and loaded the latest version of Ubuntu onto one of my test machines.

Unity desktop will take a little getting used to, but it’s not bad so far. The system is somewhat limited in the graphics department (nVidia 6150 onboard, shared memory with system RAM), but seems nice enough using the open-source drivers.

This evening started out with the question, “How far have the open-source video editors come in the past two years?” I ask this, because I own a Canon HF100 HD video recorder, and it saves files on its SD card in AVCHD format (.MTS files). These are somewhat difficult to work with, and were next to impossible to even play on Linux when I got the camera a couple years back.

It seems PiTiVi (the default video editor in Ubuntu) now has the ability to understand these files in their native form, straight off the camera’s SD card! I’m currently rendering a movie shot in 1080i down to 720p, and saving in the new WebM format. We’ll see how this ultimately goes, as the conversion process is bringing this system to its knees. :-) Time to get a faster computer for video work, I suppose!

Previously, I used an Apple Mac Mini with iMovie ’09 to handle all of my camera footage. I’d like to move this over to the Linux systems because I have a lot more storage capability (HD video, even in AVCHD form, takes up a LOT of disk space) in the Linux systems than I could ever dream of having in the Mini. I also could batch some of my conversion jobs across multiple machines fairly easily with the Linux systems, where I only have the one Mac.

I’ll have some more posts as I use the new Ubuntu system more over the coming days. Stay tuned!