On Ubuntu 11.04

I did an in-place upgrade of the Ubuntu 10.10 running on my mother's netbook to Ubuntu 11.04. I had it run overnight, and by morning, voila!, I had Natty Narwhal on the computer. The upgrade went by without a hitch; real sweet, considering this was a Wubi installation.

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Setting up Ubuntu 10.04 on the HP Mini 2144

Stuff I did when setting up Ubuntu 10.04 of my HP Mini 2144 (listed for my future reference, details to follow):

1) Install Ubuntu.
2) Install driver for WiFi (requires wired broadband connection).
3) Switch menu buttons back to the right.
4) Change themes and backgrounds.
5) Remove user list.
6) Set up additional users.
7) Add MP3 and AVI codecs.
8) Rearrange Firefox default search engines.
9) Set up shortcut icons.
10) Install applications:
* Pyroom
* ImageMagick
* Cheese
11) Set up Empathy.
12) Set up Evolution.
13) Set up Ubuntu One.

Humble Indie Bundle

Just a short plug for an offer that's worthwhile every which way for gamers: Wolfire Games, publisher of small independent games, has put together the Humble Indie Bundle, a collection of five top-selling games.  The games are

* World of Goo
* Aquaria
* Gish
* Lugaru
* Penumbra Overture

All these games are playable in Windows, Mac, and Linux.

This will sound crazy but you get to choose how much you want to pay for the games.  Proceeds of this sale are split between charity and the developers (and you also get to choose how to split.)

As if that wasn't crazy enough, they've also added Samorost 2 into the collection.

What are you waiting for?  Check it out now!

Lucid Lynx due within the next 36 hours

...and I am honestly excited by the prospect.  The Beta has been very good on my laptop, and I'm looking forward to using the release for a long time to come.

First impressions of Pitivi

I first saw Pitivi a few weeks ago, when I took Ubuntu 10.04 Beta for a spin.  I got curious then but didn't have enough time to fully try it out.  Yet another Linux movie editor?  I had some passing experience with Kino and Open Movie Editor but at the time I used them they fell short in functionality and stability.  Would Pitivi do better?

Today I finally found out.  I tried Pitivi on my HP Mini running Ubuntu 9.10.  Stability-wise, lots of plus points.  I haven't run into any crashes yet.  Granted, it's not as full-featured as some people might like, but I think that's another advantage (people complain about the GIMP for having too many features).  If all you want to do is assemble clips with some minor edits here in there, then Pitivi should work fine.

Since Pitivi works with the gstreamer plugins, anything that Ubuntu can read, e.g., AVI, MP4, Ogg Theora, MP3, etc. Pitivi should also be able to read.  Thus far, I've worked with test clips that involved Ogg, MP4, and JPG files.  Quite intuitive, actually.

I'll see if I can post a fully assembled clip tomorrow.