Posts from the ‘Ubuntu’ Category
Enable Nuxeo Live Edit with LibreOffice and Firefox
Following is a quick how-to, as apparently Live Edit with Nuxeo DM 5.5, LibreOffice, Firefox, and the Nuxeo-provided plugins doesn’t work that well out of the box.
My example platform is Ubuntu 10.04 x86, Nuxeo DM 5.5, LibreOffice 3.4.6 (with the LibreOffice Java support packages installed as well), and Firefox 11.
First, grab the Nuxeo add-ons for LibreOffice and Firefox, respectively:
http://download.nuxeo.org/desktop-integration/live-edit/nuxeo-liveedit-ooo-lateststable.oxt
https://updates.nuxeo.org/desktop-integration/live-edit/nuxeo-liveedit-ff-protocolhandler.xpi
The latter link Nuxeo refers to as the “protocol handler” for Firefox, but let’s just say that both are needed to enable Live Edit functionality.
The LibreOffice add-on once installed requires no configuration (and there are in fact no preferences to set). The Firefox add-on however requires manual configuration – as the default settings are inadequate.
Referring to the below screengrab, we have entered our Nuxeo user credentials for automatic server access when saving documents to Nuxeo from LibreOffice. We have set the /tmp directory as our working directory – but note that the path must have the trailing forward slash (i.e. “/tmp/” will work, but “/tmp” will not). We have retained a single default “OpenOffice.org” mapping, but we have changed the editor command to that of LibreOffice 3.4:
That should be all that is needed. When you click the “Edit Online” icon from within Nuxeo you should observe LibreOffice launching and opening the document for editing automagically. Likewise, clicking on the “Save in Nuxeo” icon in LibreOffice should push the document back up to the server without error:
Like this:
Importing Firefox RSS bookmarks into Thunderbird
Although I’ve tended to use Firefox to subscribe to RSS feeds via its Live Bookmarks feature, turns out Thunderbird can import Firefox bookmarks with the help of a third-party add-on. In this way, you can use Thunderbird to subscribe to any number of your existing Firefox bookmarked RSS feeds, without otherwise having to manually subscribe to each one in turn.
First, download the Firefox OPML Support add-on here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/opml-support/
Install the add-on in the normal way, and restart Firefox. After restarting, go to “Bookmarks -> Show All Bookmarks” where you will observe a new “OPML Support” menu item entry. Click on this, and select the “Export OPML…” command:
I have used the following export settings:
Save the exported file somewhere convenient. Next, in Thunderbird go to the “Account Settings…” window, and add another account.
The account type should be “Blogs & News Feeds”
Accept the default account name, and finish the process:
Now, go back to the Thunderbird “Account Settings…” window where you will see the newly added account. Select the account, and click on the “Manage Subscriptions…” button.
Here we will finally import our Firefox RSS feed bookmarks. Click on the “Import” button, and locate the OPML file you exported:
If all goes well, you should now see all your RSS feed bookmarks:
Close this window (by hitting the red “x” in my case), and you’ll see the feeds have appeared in the main Thunderbird mail view. If you like, you can force retrieval of the feed posts (the default setting otherwise is to check for new content every 100 minutes):
The fallacy of Firefox “bloat” apropos of comparisons to Google Chrome
Chrome users seem to use the “bloat” argument against Firefox any chance they get, seemingly without being able to back the claim up with anything of substance. So, these recent benchmarks are rather interesting.
Memory usage under Windows and Mac OS X:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/macbook-air-chrome-16-firefox-9-benchmark,3108-13.html
“Under a heavy load of 40 tabs, Safari for Windows uses the least amount of memory (just 725 MB). Firefox comes in second at 910 MB, followed closely by Opera at 925 and Chrome at 995. Microsoft’s own IE9 uses the most memory (1.75 GB).
Opera is the only competitor to use less than a gigabyte of memory in Mac OS X. Safari comes in a close second, eating just over 1 GB, followed by Firefox at 1.25 GB. Chrome reports a whopping 2.3 GB of usage with 40 tabs open, which is significantly more than any other browser.”
Windows 7 and Ubuntu:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-17-firefox-10-ubuntu,3129-14.html
Tres intéressant.
Adding a custom theme to GIMP
GIMP running on .nix distributions that support the Gnome desktop environment can be used with custom themes. Following is a brief how-to which covers doing this on OpenIndiana oi_151a x86, with GIMP 2.6. The method should be very similar or identical for Linux distributions (e.g. Ubuntu).
First, let’s locate a sample GTK theme. I am using a rather nice theme called “Darkilouche” found here:
http://art.gnome.org/themes/gtk2/1285
Simply download the compressed file in the above link, and extract the contents to disk.
Next, we need to locate the gtkrc file in the uncompressed theme folder. The sample theme we are using contains the following files and directories once uncompressed:
$ ls -al total 7 drwxr-xr-x 4 dave staff 5 2012-03-07 22:47 . drwxr-xr-x 3 dave staff 3 2012-03-07 22:47 .. drwxr-xr-x 6 dave staff 9 2007-02-28 00:22 .svn drwxr-xr-x 3 dave staff 4 2007-02-28 00:22 gtk-2.0 -rw-r--r-- 1 dave staff 240 2007-02-28 00:23 index.theme
The gtkrc file sits within the gtk-2.0 directory, and appears to be the only critical file that is needed.
Next, we copy the gtkrc file into the GIMP themes directory. In this example, I am using the global GIMP themes directory at /usr/share/gimp/2.0/themes. We simply create a directory named after the theme we are installing (in this case “Darkilouche”), and copy the gtkrc file into it.
Finally, we launch or restart GIMP and test that the theme is accessible at Edit -> Preferences -> Theme. The following screengrab illustrates that GIMP has found the theme, and, it is also the active theme:
Stream video content from XBMC to an Android tablet (continued…)
In my blog entry describing how to stream from XBMC to an Android tablet, a commenter remarked that the ASUS “MyNet” application used in the example was an ASUS-specific product, and therefore not applicable to other non-ASUS Android-powered devices. A quick look in the Android market reveals plenty of other free and paid-for UPnP applications, so let’s briefly repeat this exercise using one such vendor-neutral app, which goes by the name of BubbleUPnP.
I am using the free version of BubbleUPnP (hence the ads visible in the following screengrabs), on the same platforms as described originally here.
After installing BubbleUPnP, fire up the application, browse to the Devices tab where you should be able to see your XBMC server listed. Make sure that the “Local Renderer” is selected as the renderer, and the “XBMC: Media Server” is selected as the library source:
Then, head over to the Library tab, and drill down until you find the relevant movie content:
On the first attempted playback, you will observe a prompt to select playback through one of the media player applications installed on your tablet. In my case, I am going to use the built-in Android “Video player” application, and set this as my default (of course, if you have other media player applications installed you would expect to see a different set of apps listed here):
Et voila:
Again, the chunky video quality in the above screengrab is simply because I am using a low-quality example video, not because of any inherent quality issues with the source material, software, or hardware.
Screencasting on Ubuntu using ffmpeg
What follows is a very brief guide to using the FFmpeg Linux utility to record a live screencast. I’ve used this method (which is quite well documented out there) after discovering that the recordMyDesktop utility is unsuitable in certain critical areas for my needs.
The first thing to note here is that FFmpeg consists of a suite of libraries and codecs for handling A/V media, and, the ffmpeg command line utility itself. The latter is what we will be using to capture our screencast.
Our example system is running Ubuntu Linux 11.10 x86. Note that at this stage we are only capturing live video, not live audio.
First, use Ubuntu Software Center to install FFmpeg:
Once installed, launch a Terminal window: it’s time to enter a text command, but don’t worry, it’s straightforward and you can cut and paste the below example to get started. Simply enter the following command, noting that this will save a video recording of your live session to an example file named “testscreencast.mp4″ on your Desktop.
ffmpeg -f x11grab -r 25 -s 1280x1024 -i :0.0 -sameq ~/Desktop/testscreencast.mp4
To stop the recording, press Ctrl+C with the terminal window in focus. To view the video file, you can use VLC or a similar media player.
Let’s look at the various options and parameters of the above command in more detail:
- ffmpeg – this is the ffmpeg command itself being invoked
- -f – force the input or output file format (note – not the file itself). In this example, we are forcing the file input format to be the X11 display (see below)
- x11grab – use the X11 display
- -r – frame rate in frames per second. This defaults to 25 fps
- -s – set frame size. It can be set either as WidthxHeight pixels, (e.g. 1280×1024), or accepts a variety of preset abbreviations (e.g. sxga which corresponds to 1280×1024)
- -i – set the input file. This does not have to be a “file” per se, and indeed in this example the input file is the value :0.0, which corresponds to the value of the $DISPLAY environment variable (in display.screen format). See: http://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html#X11-grabbing for more information
- -sameq – this option sets the transcoding quality to be the same as the source input.
The last portion of the command simply sets the location for the output file. Also, the default video codec for ffmpeg (you’ll note that we haven’t explicitly set a codec anywhere) is MPEG-4 (note, not MPEG-4 Part 10), which for screencasts is fine.
Once you’ve captured your screencast, you can use an application like OpenShot to perform the editing.
Like this:
Freedom in video media production
ffmpeg to do screen captures: $0
Audacity to capture audio, perform clean-up and EQ: $0
GIMP to design titles and watermarks: $0
OpenShot to edit footage, add transitions and effects: $0
Web delivery transcoding to the free, patent-unencumbered Theora codec: $0
The Ubuntu OS to run it all on: $0
And seamless video playback (without stupid plugins) using Firefox…
Freedom rules.
OpenShot video editor for Linux – watch out iMovie…
I’ve recently begun to use OpenShot on Ubuntu Linux to edit a series of short screencasts with, and holy smoke what a pleasant surprise. Stable, easy to use (including a polished and smoothly responsive UI), a nice selection of effects and transitions, and pretty darn stable to boot:
It’s pretty much based on the iMovie paradigm, before Apple screwed too badly with it. Lots of advanced goodies which the competition doesn’t have, like fancy 3D animated and SVG titles via integration with Blender and Inkscape. Built-in support for insta-upload to YouTube. Even the documentation is great. Between Ubuntu, ffmpeg, and OpenShot (oh, and Audacity for the audio), it’s entirely possible to put together high-quality screencasts for zero software cost.
OpenShot is totally worthy of a donation, which I have happily made.
recordMyDesktop, Ogg video files, and OpenShot – part 2
A quick follow up to my post here. As it turns out, VLC refuses to play back any Ogg file generated by recordMyDesktop at normal speed: playback jumps all over the shop, with the net effect of it appearing to run much faster than the speed it was actually originally captured. So, we are shit out of luck with using it to transcode recordMyDesktop files for editing in OpenShot.
You can read what the VLC core developers thought of this issue in posts 8 and 9 here:
http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=94169
Frustrating that recordMyDesktop is so close to being perfect for my needs, but as it’s a defunct project I am forced to look elsewhere. Turns out that the ffmpeg command line utility can be used to capture a live desktop (loads of guides on the web on this topic), so in a follow up post I will outline my efforts to use this instead.
Like this:
recordMyDesktop, Ogg video files, and OpenShot – part 1
Quick post before bed – I am playing around with using recordMyDesktop on an Ubuntu Linux 11.10 x86 system to create screencasts with, using OpenShot (which looks great by the way) to import and edit video files recordMyDesktop spits out.
To cut a long story short, it seems OpenShot doesn’t like the Theora-encoded video produced by recordMyDesktop:
Numerous postings on the web finger recordMyDesktop as the problematic application – and because recordMyDesktop only outputs Ogg video (which is entirely fair enough), I’m kind of stuck without transcoding it to another format which OpenShot can use without trouble.
In a future post I’ll outline the settings I’m using in VLC Media Player to transcode files created by recordMyDesktop into H264-encoded video in MP4 container format, which can then be imported into OpenShot for editing – and subsequently exported back out as Ogg video (yes, because I actually want my users to be able to view the resulting screencasts in Firefox or Chrome without a bloody plug-in…). Some quality loss is inevitable, so it’s not ideal, but with the right settings it looks like something entirely acceptable is fairly easy to do.
