Tag Archives: ubuntu

Change is in the air!

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Since there haven’t been any updates for a while, I figured it was time to sit down and write something.

2013 is proving to be an interesting year so far.  I have switched to a new job, with all kinds of pretty cool opportunities to expand my knowledge and experience using some new technologies, as well as honing my existing skill-set in a new environment.  Looking forward to what the rest of the year brings!

This past Black Friday’s trip to Fry’s Electronics yielded a new server for the basement.  I now have an eight-core AMD system, loaded with 32GB of RAM and a small software RAID array for local storage.  The new server is currently running Proxmox VE, and hosting a small set of virtual machines.  One of those VMs is actually my Zimbra server, which has been performing flawlessly, as well as much faster than the old physical box I used previously.

In other news, I have reacquired some domain names that I had originally registered back in 1999.  ServerUnderground is gaining a sister site, BurningServer!

BurningServer systems will be made up of my motley crew of SPARC based hardware running NetBSD.  I have to get the hardware sorted out, RAM purchased for those systems that were donated last summer, and storage set up.  It’s been pretty chilly in the basement lair this winter, so I haven’t spent a lot of time on this project yet.

Another project is to virtualize the web server currently dishing out content for this site.  I will attempt to load up a fresh VM running Ubuntu, and migrate the data over for the blog.  The older hardware will most likely be used for a NAS based off of FreeBSD so I can use ZFS.

I’m still a huge fan of the AMD Trinity line of processors!  After building the dual-core system, I ended up going all out and built a top of the line A10 based system with 16GB of RAM.  Super quiet, runs cool, and great support for the FGLRX driver under Ubuntu 12.10!

I hope to have more frequent updates on the blog in 2013 compared to last year.  That’s all for now!

Ubuntu 11.10!

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This evening I finally took apart two of the systems I put together last year, and stuffed the guts into a couple smaller computer cases.  Now I have my two full-size ATX chassis ready for some fresh hardware after this year’s Black Friday sales.  :-)

After migrating the hardware, I didn’t know what to load for an operating system.  These machines are going to be used by the kids for games, educational software, and internet access.  After messing around with Windows XP on one of the systems, I decided to start over and load the latest version of Ubuntu, which is now at version 11.10.

Both systems loaded just fine from my USB DVD drive (no internal removable media on either system), and the latest version of Ubuntu recognizes all of the hardware just fine.  I’ve previously had issues with Ubuntu and the onboard ATI 4350 video chipset on both of these systems, so I was pleased to see everything work “out of the box” on the first try, with the open source drivers.

Now it’s time to clean off some desks, and set up some space for the kids to use their new systems!

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!