Podcast Season 2 Episode 1

Notes

Nobody Important (not verified) - February 4, 2010 @ 7:05pm

I can't believe you guys kept the same music.

I don't know if you'll post a message for the Dares you want the community to come up with, but here's one: USE ONLY FREE SOFTWARE. Like RMS-labeled stuff. Swap to gNewSense if you have to.

I'm glad you guys are back; love the podcast.

more

Nobody Important (not verified) - February 4, 2010 @ 7:33pm

I real-time post comments as I listen!

A new hot seat topic would be audio formats (OGG Vorbis versus MP3, for example).

lxquick searches through about twelve different search engines at once. Google is not included, and Yahoo and Bing is. It doesn't save your searches or IP addresses. I've had mild success with it.

Re: Typo

TuxRadar - February 4, 2010 @ 8:36pm

@BobTFish: Doh, sorry! Fixed.

Challenge ideas

uomosenzanome - February 4, 2010 @ 9:27pm

*Do all text editing for 2 weeks with the (non-interactive) text editor "sed" and write the best sed tutorial ever for beginners

*Use LaTeX to create all office documents for two weeks (presentations, documents, spreadsheets)

* Write a webpage where a guest enters all their specific system information: motherboard name, memory, optical drive name, monitor name, mouse, keyboard, sound card, etc . . . and it generates a custom kernel or distro with modules ONLY relevant to that specific hardware configuration.

*port GNOME to haiku

*Use MikeOS only for two weeks

Have a competition for 2 weeks amongst the hosts to see who can:

*convince the most people not using Linux to switch and install it for them (family doesn't count)

*write the best Rube Goldberg bash script or single command line entry (I was inspired by the Useless use of cat award http://sial.org/howto/shell/useless-cat/)

* install the most number of linux distributions successfully (eg. all functionality of the windows operating or mac operating system that was preinstalled) in two weeks from a randomly selected group of 3, 2010 laptop/tablets/netbooks sold at a local computer store. The first distribution must be the current Debian stable.

* score the highest on the exams for LPIC-I II and III

* beat all levels of the game koules the fastest

* execute the most functions in the GIMP that are equivalent to Photoshop CS3 (and share any script-fus that are developed in the process).

* send me the most free linux swag this year :)

dare

steve jobs (not verified) - February 4, 2010 @ 10:07pm

use osx for 2 weeks

Dare

Harvey (not verified) - February 5, 2010 @ 2:24am

I second the first post... use only *Free* software. On the Yahoo/Ubuntu point I think it's a little absurd to be surprised by Canonical's announcement - anyone banging on about 'Freedom' (as you lot always do) and be using Ubuntu is surely being a little ironic, surely? Have read of these articles (I agree 100% with the first, and roughly with the second):

http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/01/14/ubuntu-debian.html

http://www.kev009.com/wp/2009/02/i-hate-ubuntu/

Ubuntu

HandyGandy (not verified) - February 5, 2010 @ 4:16am

I must say that I agree with Harvey. I use Mint which seems fairly robust except for some things. Those things all seem to originate from Ubuntu, including some things that crash my system.

It seems to me that Ubuntu is trying hard to provide an example of Gerald Weinberg's "White Bread Recipe Warning".

Challenge

Tobi (not verified) - February 5, 2010 @ 9:43am

How about switching the text editor? Emacs users switch to VI and vice versa, and maybe gedit and nano users could switch as well - or everyone uses a combination of echo, cat and sed...

Or how about having to use the Free Software Song (either sung by RMS or by Mike) as a startup sound - including on a laptop in public places?

My topic suggestions for that hot seat thing would be "GNU/" - with an emphasis on the "/".

And thanks for mentioning Crunchbang - love that distro and can't wait for an upgrade either!

hot topic suggestion

cheeky devil's ad (not verified) - February 5, 2010 @ 10:38am

On Jun 13th 2009 Chris DiBona of Google made a remarkable claim on the WhatWG mailing list:

"If [youtube] were to switch to theora and maintain even a semblance of the current youtube quality it would take up most available bandwidth across the Internet."

Given that Google has refused to offer the backing that Mozilla has to theora, should we use Firefox rather than Chrome as a gesture of support towards open standards? Remember that Google sided with Apple in refusing to sanction theora as the html5 <video> tag standard. If Google Chrome overtakes Firefox in market share then I see no prospect that theora will ever really take off. Another thing to consider is that, since it's aquisition of On2, Google is expected to come up with it's own video codecs. How would this affect things?

These are important issues - not just in relation to the web, but also because everyone admits that Video editing is one area where Linux lags behind other operating systems. Also, it is an increasingly important area to the average user, as I believe Ubuntu has recognised by deciding to include a Video editor by default for 10.04. If an open codec such as theora were to become the standard then I believe it would really help to push Video editing on Linux forwards.

Speaking for myself, if there was a video editor as good as iMovie for Linux and if Ardour was as easy to get working as on Mac I would never use OSX again. It has everything else I need. As far as I'm concerned, these are the only things holding it back and preventing it from being my sole OS.

Finally, while we're on the subject - is there a good GUI tool for ripping DVDs to theora in an ogg container? I am aware of Handbrake, but this results in files being in an mkv container which firefox cannot render. I have also used Thoggen which can give you a file in an ogg container, but this is ridiculously slow, even on my QuadCore Machine and to be honest, in my experience, the quality is poor and does not compare to that of handbrake.

I dare you

Tecumseh - February 5, 2010 @ 11:08am

To include the "One more thing" in the rest of the season

Here is my dare!

Dylan (not verified) - February 5, 2010 @ 4:51pm

All non-programmers try to learn programming (with any language) and make a graphical application to read text files and write text!

Then see who comes up with the best one. :)

Also Set the deadline for 2 months... the person with the better app wins two pints of his favourite drink! :D

I challenge you to...

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - February 6, 2010 @ 5:46pm

I challenge you to... use Warty Warthog and nothing else. Then tell us how far Ubuntu and Linux has come in the last 5 years.

theora debate

Judas (not verified) - February 7, 2010 @ 11:46am

"Anyway, if Apple (+Nokia) and maybe Microsoft decide not to use Theora then using theora in FF or Opera is basically useless. Whole point of video-element was to have one way of doing things. Atm it looks like Opera and Mozilla are on their own and that doesn't fix the web. Actually is just causes more fragmentation."

Not my words but a comment I came across in the Ubuntu forums. What do people think?

Living the life of Richard

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - February 7, 2010 @ 7:12pm

Living the life of Richard Stallman sounds like a great challenge, you probably wouldn't be allowed to even use Firefox since its proprietary logo.

On an another note, I'd like to see TuxRadar's take on why EU keeps bugging Microsoft about irrelevant matters about default browser and media player, when they don't do anything about the real anti-competitive practices of Microsoft forcing vendors to bundle Windows on all systems or pay the ridiculously high non-OEM prices, which really isn't an option if you want to make money.

video editing

herbie (not verified) - February 8, 2010 @ 11:50am

the vlc team are making a video editor - VLMC (Video Lan Movie Creator). Hopefully this could be the end of my video editing woe.

It's the first sign of the apocalypse!

Muzer - February 9, 2010 @ 3:54pm

First of all, great new podcast, I got a bit bored of the last few of the previous series but this new one filled me with hope (that probably won't be fulfilled :p)

Now onto the main point of my message - PulseAudio actually fixed something for once rather than breaking it! Doom is coming! On my netbook* (this is the only system I've seen with this exact problem; from the Internet, others have the same symptoms but different causes), presumably caused by an obscure bug in my sound driver that I can't be bothered to find or even report, Phonon (and ONLY Phonon, nothing else) will occasionally think it is broken and refuse to play sound through it, even though it very much works - this is more likely to happen if I had it on mute at one point for some reason, but it can be seen even when not on mute. In these situations, KDE tries to fall back to PulseAudio, which is very odd as that daemon isn't installed by default by Kubuntu. So, after getting fed up of having to restart in order to use Kaffeine (which they should have kept as a KDE3 app, by the way), I checked on the Internet, and finding no solutions (they all involved installing packages I already have or removing packages I didn't have in the first place), I decided on a whim to install PulseAudio, and reboot. And what do you know, Phonon now works perfectly every time - although the messages about my sound card not working still appear, it actually has something that works it can fall back to whilst it has time to "realise" that the sound card is in fact working perfectly!

*Acer Aspire One ZG5 with Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller [8086:27d8] (rev 02)

Challenge

Zabadda (not verified) - February 10, 2010 @ 11:43pm

How about you try using http://susestudio.com/ to create your own distro each, then spend the next week or two only using that.

Do this without discussing with eachother what you might add and see how different each distro that you create is, or maybe swap with eachother for the second week.

A Dare/Challenge

Andrew Cole (not verified) - February 11, 2010 @ 1:43pm

Live the future like of chrome OS.

Use only your chrome browser, which means all needs (except for those you can't help, like recording the podcast) must be online apps, and you must use as many google provided ones as possible. Gmail, Google docs, Picassa Web, etc.. Also, you must use your Ubuntu One space or other cloud space as much as possible instead of your HD. You are allowed to move files to the cloud before you begin though.

I think a challenge like this will allow you guys to discover not only some of the best web apps out there, because you will have no choice, but also what the web still lacks for good apps.

Double dog dare you

YAAP (not verified) - February 11, 2010 @ 5:26pm

to keep doing one more thing the rest of the season!

Dare / Challenge

Tiny Montgomery (not verified) - February 12, 2010 @ 10:39am

You have 2 weeks to create a new theme tune for the Tuxradar Podcast using Open Source tools exclusively eg. Ardour, Hydrogen, Rosegarden etc.

PS. How about some video tutorials. Somethings are easier to pick up if you can actually see them being done rather than having them explained to you in words. I think this is especially the case for multimedia where reading about something is no substitute for actually hearing/seeing it. The Challenge I have set you could be the basis of a series of video tutorials on how to use various audio tools in Linux. You could have a similar series for video editing and one for graphic editing and one for office software, one for mythbuntu, one for how the magazine is produced etc. The online Video tutorial series "Meet The Gimp" is really fantastic and Richard Querin's Inkscape tutorials site also. I don't believe that I am the only one who wishes there were similar projects exploring other programs. I know there is stuff on Youtube, but most of these videos are merely short introductions and only scratch the surface rather than continually adding new material to build upon what has previously been covered and progress to how to use more advanced features.

On interviews.

Anonymous Hippopotamus (not verified) - February 17, 2010 @ 3:18pm

First, thank you for a great podcast!

Just wanted to chip in and say:
Yes! Would love to hear interviews on the show!

Just my two-yens.

/Anonymous Hippopotamus from Tokyo

Have any serious mention of Annodex

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - March 12, 2010 @ 1:20pm

Has anyone here heard of "Annodex" at all? Something I remember from a lug meet a couple of years ago - don't know how it is going but if I recall, it sounded like "the Sh*t" - sorry for swearing, but I really think it had great promise.

Maybe someone could try looking up Annodex and see how far it has come since then.

Oh, yeah, and I have recently tried putting Msys onto my other computer, a posix environment for GCC inside windows XP without having to virtualise ... what does everyone think of this particular cross compiling arena?

Has anyone tried actually working it into something really ground shattering? For example getting Enlightenment compiled on a windows machine to work and then creating - say - an RPM for a linux box?

Before you laugh too much, you should consider: getting a compile of a windowing system that you could then actually run in the other partition which has been holding linux but you just haven't used very much. It might be an interesting way to cross pollinise people's interest.

I fear it would be a little too tricky for newbies, but might be an interesting way to get the doubters to attempt something mildly heroic?

What do you reckon?
Mike in Bankstown