The Shotwell developers need small AVI files created by diverse cameras to improve metadata handling of such videos. If your camera creates AVI, consider uploading a short video in their wiki.
This mail has the details.
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Patches for video upload support to Flickr and Facebook were just accepted and commited to trunk and will be available in Shotwell 0.8, most likely this month :)10
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As an experiment to see if it alleviates slight back pains, for the past four weeks I have been working standing. I don't use an actual standing desk but rather stacked a lot of cardboard boxes on my regular desk, then put the monitor, laptop, keyboard and mouse on top of them. It doesn't look good at all, so I won't provide a picture. Besides, the boxes carry the names and logos of various manufacturers and I don't want to spoil the post with product placement :)The mouse sometimes falls on the floor but otherwise the setup is great.I don't plan to go back to using a chair for computer work anytime soon.Even if I stand 8-10 hours my legs don't mind and my back feels a lot better now. I felt improvements after a few days already. The lower back pain went away and there is almost no bother higher along the spine where I used to ache sometime after sitting - having a very bad posture, I admit, even though the chair is somewhat ergonomic.I also feel like I can concentrate better standing but this may be unrelated.11
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Up until two months ago, had I been asked the question "Which is the open source project that you are least likely to ever contribute to?", I would have, without hesitation answered OpenOffice.org. Here by open source project I of course mean one of the reasonably popular ones not any random homework that has a COPYING file attached and uploaded to the internet.One of the barriers is of course the large and mostly legacy C++ codebase, but in the case of OpenOffice it was a lack of a real independent community in charge of the project and the extensive control Sun had that made contributing unattractive. I have not experienced it first hand, but the fact that the project had such a reputation is probably telling of the manner in which it was ran. So do the piles of patches distributors had to maintain out of tree.But since the LibreOffice fork the answer to that question is different. The OpenOffice people that initiated it made a few nice changes in order to break down the barriers.
- dropped the annoying contributor agreements
- restructured and migrated the code-base to git repositories (about 20, because of performance considerations apparently) on freedesktop.org
- started maintaining a very active wiki with potential easy tasks for newcomers and are very welcoming and helpful on the mailing list and IRC
I have also sent a trivial cleanup patch in that was accepted, so now I know that if I ever have an annoying bug in LibreOffice I will not treat it with a shrug as I would do with proprietary software and as until now but will feel confident diving in the code.I'll also send a few more patches in of course, the list of tasks is huge.Office software is unlikely to get one laid and I suspect the motivation of many of new contributors since the fork happened partly comes from seeing the project freed from corporate bureaucracy and a desire to show that better software can be created if it is ran as other meritocratic projects.2View comments
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Shotwell trunk allows downloading movie files from cameras and playing them, as it makes sense to catalogue videos and photos in the same app, using an unified interface.My patches to enable uploading videos to YouTube and Picasaweb albums from Shotwell have recently been tweaked and accepted upstream so the list of things I am missing in this great application has just shrinked significantly :)7
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Scopul principal al distribuției Kiwi Linux este de a face Linux cât mai atractiv pentru începători și de a-i introduce în lumea softului liber și în comunitățile aferente. Succesul distibuției e definit de câți utilizatori de Windows sau complet începători în ale calculatoarelor rămân plăcut impresionați și interesați de Linux în urma contactului. Dacă Kiwi e doar primul pas și ulterior aleg Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo sau orice alt sistem free software, tot succes îl consider.Kiwi oferă ceva - chiar dacă puțin - în plus față de distribuțiile menționate mai sus prin simplificarea configurării și setupului inițial, prin timpul mai scurt în care ai un sistem cu aproape toate funcționalitățile active și prin evitarea căutărilor sau confuziei datorate lipsei acestora.Mă găndesc care ar fi metoda cea mai bună de a continua să oferim o astfel de soluție pentru utilizatorii locali așa că am pus un poll cu 3 întrebări în engleză aici . Aș reduce frecvența edițiilor (până la urmă a fi la zi nu e o prioritatepentru majoritatea începătorilor, altfel nu ar folosi încă Windows XP) dacă ar fi semnale mai clare legat de ce lipsește din setupul actual care ar putea face și mai ușoară sau plăcută adopția - aplicații instalate implicit, configurări specifice unor scenarii sau medii de lucru/școală. Dacă adunăm căteva idei clare am putea continua pe 10.08 LTS (sau 10.10) cu updaturi timp de un an sau doi și să ne concentrăm pe aplicații specifice locului lăsând sistemul de bază stabil.Cine are idei și dorește să contribuie la răspândirea softului liber în România prin Kiwi e invitat să le detalieze în poll, nu neapărat în engleză. Mai încolo le discutăm și pe listă.17
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Mulțumiri celor care au contribuit la Kiwi în ultima perioadă:lui Radu pentru ajutorul la grafică, Silviu pentru tema Wordpress pentru site (dar care încă nu e pus online), Árpi, Flaviu și Gelu pentru testele ISO, Imi, Stas, Ciprian, Călin și Emil pentru mirroruri.0
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Finally, after a hiatus of over a year, the Ubuntu derivative tailored for Romanian and Hungarian Linux beginners is having a new release! Of course English is still available on the CD :)Here is the iso (700M)Its focus is to provide much of the commonly needed software conveniently installed by default but without straying away from Ubuntu in looks or by forming a separate community. These two decisions were made in order to keep those that see or use both distributions on a familiar ground.Kiwi Linux 10.08 is based on Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS and as always it only comes in GNOME x86 Desktop CD edition.The main differences from Ubuntu are in the default application lineup. The decision to switch out some components are based on my own usage and on input from a subset of the Ubuntu-RO community.
- Chromium instead of Firefox because it is snappier, more stable, has built-in page translations, and has a cleaner albeit at first non-intuitive UI. HTML5 video codecs included.
- Shotwell instead of F-Spot - a nice fast tool, it is happening in Ubuntu 10.10 as well.
- Pidgin instead of Empathy - while I am sure that Empathy and the Telepathy stack is the way in the future, Pidgin is more mature at this point.
- VLC 1.1.3 along with Totem . VLC just handles better regular movies, DVDs, and subtitles. Totem is kept because Chromium annoyingly (but wisely) does not support Mozilla browser plugins that don't use XEmbed and are written instead in the old way using X Intrinsics.
- Adobe Flashplugin and the gstreamer ungood bunch for mp3 and various other codecs.
- Libdvdcss2 for encrypted DVD support
- Evolution removed as most home users are on webmail. The nice desktop-webmail helper app included
- p7zip and rar tools added to help file-roller deal with archives sent by Windows users.
- Gnote instead of Tomboy - more or less equivalent
- Compiz extra settings config
- Firmware to support the Speedtouch 330 USB modem driver - the initial reason to create this derivative is still shipped on the CD, but now fewer people need it having migrated to saner ISP connection equipment.
- Removed Mono, Erlang + CouchDB, Telepathy, Gwibber - as space needed to be freed for the above software the ones that were removed are those I considered stuff for more savvy users and less used by beginners.
The rest are small changes - custom liveCD boot screen and plymouth theme just to make it clear this is not 100% Ubuntu and no confusion arises in case of support issues.The Launchpad PPAs are a great help, I copied VLC and Shotwell from Nate Muench's and Yorba's PPAs to the Kiwi release PPA where the custom packages are kept as well (Ubiquity slideshow and Plymouth theme only).Thanks to all who tested release candidate images and helped with graphics!Download here16View comments
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Does anyone reading this know what program was used to create the splash.pcx file that is the first thing coming up when the CD boots? It has a small text in the new font saying 'ubuntu' with a subtle glow around the text. My trials as a beginning GIMP user to recreate it using the text 'kiwi linux' resulted in a coarser look of the font after glow and a blur effects were applied and the palette is disturbed leading to the menu items having a dark purple background.If the original was done using Gimp or Inkscape and someone knows the steps to achieve that effect - that exact effect in that image, not glowing effects in general as I have looked at a few tutorials before trying my hand at it - I'd be grateful if they shared their tips in the comments.Maybe the original needs to be done in a certain way so that it can be converted to pcx and 256 colors without loss of quality.3
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