Video Editing in Linux: Kino v Open Movie v KdenLive

I have yet to see a decent article on using video with Linux, so I thought I would write one. I’ve been working with video and posting my clips on YouTube using Windows Movie Maker 2. It is an adequate program, but I’d like to find something that could be as good or better in Linux. Could I pull it off? Follow along and see…

I used a Canon Powershot A630 and captured the video on an SD card. The video was only about a minute long, just to keep it as simple as possible.

Would PCLinuxOS be able to read the output? Would I be able to edit it with a title and maybe add some music? Would I be able to post my video on YouTube? Let’s see.

I was looking for some likely video editors and these were on my list:

Kino

Cinalerra

Open Movie

KDEnlive

I’ve been using Movie Maker for all of my videos thus far, so anything I used in Linux would at least have to measure up to that. I had not used any of these but did some research on each of these and downloaded everything except Cinalerra. I’m not opposed to Cinalerra but didn’t want to spend scads of time learning features I would never use. I wouldn’t mind trying it eventually, but this is a basic project. Capture, edit, render and post. Once a body does that, we can experiment and tweak.

PCLOS was able to read my SD card, no problems. That’s more than I can say for my niece’s laptop which is running Vista. Oh well.

Meanwhile, I’m also playing with Ksnapshot for screen capturing. I’m definitely expanding my skill level with this exercise!

Kino

Kino looked pretty simple until I tried to import my .avi file. Then it acted confused as it wasn’t a DV file. I said import anyway, and away it went. It said it might take awhile. Okay. So I waited for a couple of minutes. And then some more. This movie was about 90 seconds long, so I was not going to wait forever. I purposefully made the clip short in order to limit processing and rendering issues.

Finally, it imported, taking a full 3 minutes. Next, I went to the timeline.

The Kino Timeline

This did not look like a timeline view to me. I had a series of clips, each about 6 seconds long. I clicked the Trim button and saw that I could do a little basic editing, but it was not a timeline format I was familiar with using other editors I had fiddle with. Even the editor that comes with Nero seemed more full featured than this!

I looked at the export feature just to see what it looked like and it appeared to support several formats including some DVD options. But I decided to look else where to do this project. I didn’t see anywhere to put titles especially in light of not having a proper time line. Perhaps I missed something? I may need to do more research in order to warm up to Kino. NEXT!

Open Movie

For some reason, my package manager did not install Open Movie in the menu, so I ended up searching for it. Then I put an icon on the desktop.

Now here was an editor that I could understand a bit better. There was a more “normal” timeline with multiple tracks with the capacity to add even more audio and video tracks. But I ran into trouble when trying to add any effects other than a title. Plus, the program would simply disappear whenever I tried to preview my movie.

More research needed. I did look at the export options, and those options looked a bit complicated for someone used to using Movie Maker. Lots of promise here, but I need to be able to preview without the thing crashing.

NEXT!

KDEnlive

I’m running out of options, here. Kdenlive came on to the scene relatively recently, and I was keen to give it a try. I had seen some YouTube videos made with this program, so I knew some people were using it. Could I use it?

The default video format stymied me for a bit. ATSC is something I hadn’t heard of before. Reading a bit, it sounded like a fancy name for mpeg-2. Okay, moving on…

Next I could decide how many audio and video tracks in my project. Movie Maker only allows one video and 2 audio so the flexibility to add more is nice. I decided to stay with the default of 2 and 2.

Next I was greeted by a screen that looked intuitive as it really seemed to fit with the KDE theme. Perhaps this would be the one.

So I went to Project>add clip and was able to browse for my movie clip. I was able to drag it to the timeline. So far so good! Next, clicked the “play” button in the preview window….

Not good. Not good at all.

So I tried it again, and the second time it worked. I have no idea what I did different if anything. So while I knew I might crash at any time, I also knew this program showed promise. So it was time to save before it crashed again.

Time to add a title, which looked like it needed to be a text clip. So I created and added it…or at least I think so.

It didn’t show up in my preview.

Okay, so far so good. Let’s render this thing out, shall we?

Under file, I tried “export timeline.” Good choice.

I had a lot of choices for high and medium quality. Medium is good enough for the moment so I picked mpeg 640×480 high. So far so good. Lots of audio choices, too. Now I’m starting to feel a bit overwhelmed as there really are a lot of choices here!

I finally clicked the export button and let fly. It said it should be finished in about 5 minutes and had a progress moniter to show me how things were going. This is the furthest I had gone with any of the programs and was looking good.

After rendering, the title still did not make an appearance. I went back and tried to fiddle some more but never was able to make the title appear in the preview window on top of the clip.

There were still choices available in Movie Maker that were lacking here, such as toggling between timeline and storyboard view and number of transiton and effects. But overall, this program is a pretty good fit. Or it would be without the niggling defect of not seeing the Title/text screen I created. I did not play with that many features as I wanted a quick and dirty demonstration just to see if using Linux with TouTube was even possible for a noob like me.

Out of the 3 programs previewed, I liked Kdenlive the best, but not having the Title show up was a real bummer. Kdenlive could eventually become my editor of choice by the time it gets to 1.0 status. The trick is going to be to keep the development moving and thus keep my interest alive. This type of progression is what has helped Linux reach critical mass as desktop choice. It is good enough now to hold the interest of the average user, even if it not totally perfect. Handling video tasks such as screencasting, editing for online viewing and working with webcams are going to be crucial in order to make this OS viable for the future. Video rendering remains one of the most intensive tasks most home computers do and it is becoming more and more necessary for business. The future of computing is in video, and Linux is woefully behind in that area. This is why Macs have seen such a rise in sales is because iLife makes video creation so easy and painless. Most prominent YouTubers are using Macs. It would be nice if Linux could at least make an appearance but right now Linux is in sad, sad shape in the area of allowing average users to generate content.

The finished product isn’t anything too special but here it is:

The good news is that I was able to completely capture and render the video and post to YouTube within Linux without having to go into Windows.  And really, that was the ultimate objective.  I’ll still use Windows for the majority of my video work, just because it is faster at the present time and plays nicely with my webcam on the laptop.

I’m also in search of screencorder software, similar to Camstudio.  Or it would be cool if Camstudio were ported to Linux. I feel this type of software is crucial to further development of Linux.  That is because no one is going to sit down with a book or manual to learn about Linux or software.  But they will watch a series of short, concise video tutorials on the subject.  I can learn more from 4 minutes of video than an hour of reading a technical manual.  I can’t do code, but I could make technical support videos for Linux if there existed the right tools.  The Xvidcapture that I found isn’t quite cutting it, even though it’s a good start.

D.

Mandriva 2008

I’m trying out a new distro on my new laptop and so far, pretty good. This is a Dell Vostro 1500 (1 G RAM Intel 2 core duo) which came preloaded with Windows XP. Yes, I opted away from Vista as I knew that the machine wouldn’t be all that happy with 1G RAM with that OS. I’ve had a chance to play a bit with Vista, and 1 G is a minimum requirement. It runs like an XP system upgraded to 512 Mb RAM.

I’ve had my eye on Mandriva for awhile. I’m not sure why it didn’t work on my work machine (with and Intel Dual core 2.4 Ghz) the last time I blogged it, but it did work on my home machine (an old 1.8 Ghz eMachine) on the live CD. In fact the Compiz feature worked right out of the box and right up front on that machine.

Mandriva and PCLinusOS are forks of Mandrake, so they are either siblings or really close cousins. They both look very similar and work similar enough that moving from one to the other is not a big deal. One thing I like about Mandriva is the option of upgrading to the Power Pack version if I choose.

I began the work of installing by downloading and burning a live CD version of QTParted. Since installing PCLOS on another machine, I’ve gotten better and more comfortable with resizing partitions. QTP made it easy. Installing Mandriva was as easy and painless as any other modern Linux distro. I can’t imagine doing new Windows install nowadays, as the last time I had that done it took PC repair people over 2 days to get it all installed and I still had to call the Mother Ship to reinstall Office XP.

This Dell already had 3 partitions set up. One was the main Windows partition, with two other very small partitions for media and recovery files (I’m guessing). So I was limited to creating one more partition as I was limited to 4 total partitions with this program. With a 250 GB HD, I had plenty of real estate to spread out. I ended up giving the new partition 50 GB of that. If I ever master video creation in Linux, I may need more. But I’m still using Windows to make and edit video.

One issue that crops up with people going to Linux is wireless support. For a desktop hooked with an ethernet cable, internet access is no big deal. For laptops, it is a different story as wireless access is much more critical. One reason why I waited a couple of months to put Linux on this machine was not knowing how to make wireless work. But I persisted with the live CD until I figured it out. Using Ndiswrapper (included in the installation process) was a new experience and there was some trial and error involved. I was able to find my Windows “drivers” folder and found the wireless folder easily enough. But there were two folders and each had a different .inf file for wireless. I tried each, and of course the first one wasn’t the right one, but the second one was. Getting wireless to work was the critical factor for me doing an install, making this a dual-boot machine. Being successful with this and the partitioning were the major concerns of this install. It wasn’t anything about Mandriva or Linux that made these issues, it was my inexperience and nervousness.

Mandriva did give me one major issue right out of the box.  I noticed up front there was some loud speaker hiss that persisted no matter the volume/mute status on volume control.  That was a huge annoyance since I use headphones most of the time.  In fact it was huge enough that even though Mandriva worked better and faster than Windows in most respects, I still booted in Windows much of the time.  I finally found another blogger who had a similar issue.  The fix was not exactly the same but similar: I went to the volume control, clicked mixer, and then went to the input tab.  In this case, turning off the left capture mixer did the trick.  This will be fine as long as I never have to actually input or capture anyting.  But I might want to, someday.

The Grub bootloader works fine, but it did take some fiddling and experimenting to figure out which partition was going to load Windows when I wanted it as the menu choice “Windows” wasn’t the proper one.

But right now, everything else works well so I’m going to stick with it.  However, I need to test it out more before deciding on whether or not I want to pay for an upgrade.  I realize that getting a distro to work properly out of the box on a laptop is trickier that a desktop for some reason, mostly having to do with the wireless issues.

D.

PCLinux 2007 WINS!

I took a big risk repartitioning and installing MEPIS 7.0, risking the beloved XP operating system.  But XP did and still does survive.  But it is no longer the operating system of choice on the family desktop.  Neither is Mepis.

The downfall of Mepis began after I reviewed and tried PCLinuxOS.  But I was hesitant to go through another installation and risk losing everything again or a corrupted MBR like I have suffered before.  What finally toppled Mepis from favor was the fact that it only wanted to recognize and “see” its own partition and none of the other hard drives or partitions. I was trying to move some files from my wife’s Mepis desktop and it would not only not read those other hard drives, but gave me fits about moving the files to a USB drive.  What put the nail in the Mepis coffin as it would not even recognize a floppy drive.  That was the end of that.  I had no such problems with earlier versions of Mepis and not sure what caused this glitch.  But Mepis was on its way out as it was, and it just gave me a ready excuse.  This is the double edge of having distros obtained so freely and installed so easily; instead of muddling through or trouble shooting, I canned the thing and put on the distro that “just works.”

And it just does.

The machine: @2001 Celeron 1.8 Gz with 612 RAM with XP home.  HDa = 40 Gb, HDb = 127 GB + 40 Gb (linux) + 20 Gb unclaimed space.

The family: 1 6 yr-old (kindergarten)  1 9 yr. old (2nd grade) and one wife (college graduate)

My wife is relatively new to computers, but thanks to her husband has some experience with Mac OS 7, Win95, Win98 and Win XP and recently Mepis 7.0 and now PCLinuxOS 2007.

All members have successfully learned to use and enjoy the new family OS.  My wife probably has the biggest adjustment, as she still uses XP to play spider solitaire and do editing with her pictures.  However with Picasa downloaded and installed (she was using this on XP) this should be a small matter.  I’ll have to download spider solitaire or some open source variation.  Otherwise she is perfectly pleased with PCLinux.

The two kids could care less what the operating system is.  They like visiting the Disney website and fiddling around with Google Earth and that’s all they care about.  They still like to play a few games occasionally, but mostly they are content with online activities.

And this brings up a very important point, when discussing the digital divide.  When it comes to school-aged kids, computer and online access can mean a world of difference in terms of  school performance.  The state of Georgia is offering practice versions of their state mandated tests online.  Those kids without computers will be left behind and continue to be at a disadvantage when it comes to the new modalities of learning that the digital age is offering.  A computer is as necessary nowadays as paper, pencil and a calculator.  Those who do not have computers in their homes are being given the mathematical technology equivalent to a slide rule!

Linux offers an opportunity for schools and businesses to offer their old PII’s and PIII’s to these disadvantaged youngsters instead of clogging landfills.

dick

Distros that did not make the cut

I’ve been downloading and previewing several distros.  A lot of them have done surprisingly well.  Others have done not so well.

I think Linux has really arrived at a place where the average computer user can handle it.  And a lot of people will like Linux.

Distros that have not made the cut:

1.       Open SuSe 11.0 – Went black after the splash screen and never returned

2.       Sabayon 3.4 – Same as #1

3.       Mandriva 2008 – Same as #1 and #2.  These were all disappointing but made those that made the cut look a lot better

4.       Damn Small Linux – This one did load but did not find my Ethernet  connection

Distros that made it:

1.       PCLinuxOS 2007 – It’s taken everything I’ve thrown at it in Live CD mode.  It’s real close to getting installed.  I’ll put Minime 2008 behind this as it does work off a flash drive but has a few niggling issues like not using the 8G of space I’ve given to it to expand out like I’d like.

2.       Mepis 7.0 – This has been my distro of choice for a long time, but one slip up and it will be replaced by #1.  It really does work well, but PCLOS seems to work better with more features.  It’s a tough choice.

3.       Ubuntu 7.10 – Killer graphics make this one very appealing, and it is a very mature distro very much ready for the desktop.  For business users, it could be a Vista killer.  Unlike its predecessor, this one is distinctive and out front in many ways.  I can respect people who choose this one over my choices, which was not the case a year ago.

4.       Puppy Linux 3.01 – This has been another one of my pet favorites the past year, but is falling from favor now that I no longer rely on a modem.  It can not connect with my Ethernet and is unreliable as far as wireless.  I found the look and feel of 2.15 to be better than 3.01 but that may be just me.  I’m ready to look at some other lighter distros for older machines.

5.       Linux Mint 4.0 – I need to give this one some more play time.  It did work well for me, but I chose Mepis mostly because of the familiar interface.  Now that I’ve been playing around with other distros, I can make a fairer comparison here.

Ubuntu 7.10:Just About Worth the Hype

I’ve was critical of Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake and the hype surrounding it and wasn’t terribly anxious to try the Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 release.  However, since I’ve been trying out various distros, not trying Ubuntu would be an embarrassing oversight.  So I downloaded and burned the live CD and booted it up.

If you’re a Windows user and get one of these CD’s, you can put it in the CD tray and install MS versions of Firefox, Abiword and Thunderbird, but these are not the unknown or fancy applications that they were back when Dapper Drake first came out.  6.06 also came with GAIM and the Gimp but I’m guessing the newer version didn’t have room for too many Windows toys.

Ubuntu succeeded where other distros failed to even get anywhere past the splash screen.  But that is not all.  Once loaded, I began playing around with Ubuntu.  Even without Compiz, this distro was clearly targeting a Vista-type of graphic experience.  And it was faster and superior to anything I’ve ever seen on a Vista machine that had more hardware than this one did.  Ubuntu has arrived and I’m willing to give it the respect it deserves.  And there’s more.

Unlike other distros I’ve tried, Ubuntu detected and connected to the ethernet connection right out of the box with absolutely no configuration necessary.  It also detected and was able to read my hard drive which I had not previously tasked other distros to do.  And with Open Office 2.3 it was able to open and read Office 2007 documents.  That was a big plus!  It was able to detect the Microsoft networking neighborhood, which others had not seemed to be able to handle.

This edition of Ubuntu has a lot going for it and a lot to like.  So is this a contender for my home desktop?

No.  Ubuntu is at the top of its game, especially with the ease of use in working with the various types of hardware.   But it is a very basic distro with very basic features that look very nice.  It does things no other distro I’ve tried can do.  But those things are not especially critical to my present needs and desires.  The synaptac repository seemed a bit on the shallow side, especially compared to what PCLinuxOS is offering.  But even compared to Mepis, it is looking like I might have to do extra work to get Picasa, Google Earth and Stepmania on and running.  I’d be willing to try it, if Ubuntu had anything else that sufficiently grabbed my attention and interest.  The appearance and speed is clearly an attention-getter, but it is the applications that are going to compel me to stay with an outfit for any length of time.  Ubuntu came very, very close this time around and perhaps a future release will win me over.  If my work machine didn’t have a NTFS hard drive, I would have been sorely tempted to partition it right there and then and give the dual boot a whirl.  But my home needs are a bit different and more eclectic than my work needs. 

For my money, PCLinuxOS still has earned its way to the top of Distrowatch, but Ubuntu has definitely earned its way into the top 10, especially compared to 6.06.  The features are there and they are unique but the targeted audience seems to be more business oriented than home desktop oriented.

 

PCLinuxOS 2007: It really is as good as the Hype!

Oh my. I may have found myself a new favorite distro.

I nearly overlooked this one because of my difficulties with PCLOS Minime 2008 on the flashdrive. I will say one thing about Minime: it does work and works well. I do like the look and feel of it and if I could get the package manager to work, I would be all over it.

I downloaded and burned the live CD of the 2007 version and must say that I really like it. The latest PCLinux 2007 is the Gnome version, but the default is the KDE version. If you don’t understand what I just wrote, don’t sweat it. I have always preferred the KDE but that’s just me.

PCLinuxOS has been riding very, very high in the Distrowatch charts, toppling Ubuntu from #1. Ubuntu sat there for about a year, until PCLOS knocked it off. And it’s for a very good reason, because this is a very good distro packed with a lot of good, attractive features that just work. One doesn’t fully appreciate the “just works” aspect until they try a bunch of things that don’t work. I’ve been trying several distros on my work machine (2.66 Ghs Dual core P4 with 512 RAM and ATI Radeon 9500 graphics card, DVD/CD-RW) and have run into a few that are not working as of yet.

PCLinuxOS found all my hardware, the Ethernet and booted up just fine. In fact I decided to go ahead and work on this post using it, and I”m really liking the look and feel of it. It will seriously give Mepis a run for its money and may seriously end up replacing it. It’s that good.

Aside from simply working, there’s other things I’m discovering that I like. For instance, when you open a new distro’s Firefox, they often have some generic bookmarks. PCLinux actually has some interesting and helpful bookmarks, like PCLinux, PCLinux Extra, PCLinux Hardware data base, something called Lortal and LinFX.com. If you can’t find help and answers in these places, you’ve got some serious issues!

I like how easy it was to find things and the richly populated Synaptic libraries of goodies that the Mepis library seemed to be sparse with. Mepis didn’t have Picasa, Google Earth or Stepmania. PCLinuxOS has them all.

Ksnapshot was right there.

Pretty cool, eh? I don’t include many screen captures because I’m such a nOOB but PCLinux made it just so easy!

dick

Mepis 7.0: Everybody’s on Board

About a week ago, I installed Mepis 7.0 on some vacant space on my hard drive.  (1.8 GHz Celeron, 640 Mb RAM) The installation was as painless as one could ever imagine.  In about 30 minutes, I had a working Linux with the GRUB bootloader installed so I could get to XP when necessary.  It’s been about 3 days since XP has seen the light of day in our house.

Having an ethernet/high speed connection has made all the difference in the world.  While Mepis comes with pretty m uch everything one needs, I was able to apt-get updates and a few other things I wanted.  So how is it working out?

My wife, Jane, has been pretty bold in trying this thing out, perhaps out of necessity.  When I boot the computer it goes to GRUB and gives a person 20 seconds or so to choose a boot option.  If you do nothing, it goes right to the Mepis login.  I have 4 different user accounts: Mine, hers, the two kids share one and the Root account. We had set up XP to run passwords to keep the kids from raiding the computer, so doing this in Mepis was a small matter.  And the Mepis login looks better than XP.

I showed Jane how to get to XP but I’m not sure she remembers but she hasn’t complained much.  Her biggest complaint was not having the printer loaded, which I got around to finally doing when I had my oldest (a second grader) type some homework in Open Office which he needed to print.  Mepis 6.0 did not support our Epson CX7800 printer, but Mepis 7.0 installed and ran it flawlessly.  The print installer is mostly intuitive, but there were a few niggling decisions I had to make which turned out to be correct ones, so far.  Once I got a working test page, printing the homework was easy.  And the boys have no idea and don’t care about the OS when they are watching Thomas the Train on YouTube.  They sort of like the fact that the computer looks new.  And they’ll be mastering Tuxracer in no time.

Jane has done her surfing and email (we use Gmail) and even downloaded some files.  I thought downloading the files was a gitsy move, since she is totally in the dark about the Linux file system.  But she did, and she was pretty happy overall with the performance.  She’ll be totally in heaven if we get her digital camera hooked up.

Mepis 7.0 does work with my hardware better than 6.0 did, especially evidenced by the printer.  However, compared to the Ubuntu repositories, the Debian looked a bit sparse and I’ve had some issues with downloading and installing Picasa and Google Earth.  Jane does most of her editing with Picasa and the boys like playing with Google Earth.  These are both ported to Linux but there are issues with the installation I’m fiddling with.  In my brief foray into the PCLinuxOS repositories, there were a lot more programs available in that library.

I lurve the KDE  desktop that comes with Mepis which is going to make it very difficult for any other distro to make me want to change.  but that’s not to say there are not some others that I’m looking at.  I just downloaded SuSe Alpha 11.0 and Saybayon Mini edition for grins and giggles.  I still have a ways to go before I’m ready to settle down or at least I’d like to look at some other distros that might work with my minimal and aging system.

I also have some tasks to perform with a neighbor’s aging hardware that has different requirements, but that’s for another post.

dick

Done: Installing MEPIS 7.0

I finally did it, and did it successfully, much to my own surprise.  No, I did not get any new distros installed on a flash drive.  I had been working on that for quite some time, but seemed to always run in to some niggling problem.  For instance, Pendrivelinux looked to be easier to install than any other OS.  Just download it and unzip it on to a thumbdrive.  Simple, right?  But the thing would never extract all the way.  Ever.  And I tried with several downloads, machines over several networks and flash drives. 

I reinstalled PCLinuxOS Minime 2008 and it did work but it wouldn’t let me install any packages due to lack of space….on an 8G flash!  That made no sense and was just frustrating.

I tried Puppy Linux, but it could not find my ethernet connection on my home machine.  That was disappointing.  However I did play around with the Puppy a bit and looked at the Gparted utility and made a startling discovery. 

A couple years ago, I maxed out my 40 G hard drive and bought a 200 G hard drive to add on to the system.  When I installed it, I did something or failed to do something so it only installed 127 G and I had no idea what happened to the other 73 G’s.  At the time, I didn’t worry that much about it, because I figured that 127 G should be enough to last forever.  And then I learned the joys of video editing which quickly filled that space.  So I’ve been backing up things and deleting and generally working on making use of the limited space.

But when playing with Gparted, I found the 73 G’s of unallocated space.  So I allocated a 40 G partition and formatted it with FAT32 (while the rest is NTFS) and then considered my next move.

I had avoided trying a dual boot, largely because I had screwed things up on another machine before, and was a bit reluctant to go through that again.  But I was intrigued.  Plus malware threats were getting so annoying and alarming that my wife was even asking about trying our Linux, which she always mispronounces making it sound like Linus from Peanuts fame.  Which makes sense considering the source of Linux.

Anyway, I was staring at that empty partition and decided to go for it.  I decided that Mepis 7.0 was the distro that had worked best with my hardware, detecting my Ethernet easiest and I knew it the best.  So I installed it on that partition.  It took about 30 minutes to get it installed and then it was not without a lot of trepidation that I gave the bootloader the okay to load on the MBR.  And it worked.

I’ll update more about how this arrangement is working later, but it is working.

dick

New Need: Streaming TV Shows

So my PC is acting up and is getting infected (and later cleaned up) at an astonishing rate.  I would really, really like to leave Windows for games and assorted picture/video work and not have it on the internet at all.  But I recently discovered that I can watch my favorite TV programs online.  ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX are all offering selected shows and episodes online, some of them in HD programing.  HD is not a big issue for me at present.

I recently tried cruising in using a MEPIS 7.0 live CD and discovered, to my dismay, that the ABC site does not have streaming available for  Linux.  The have it for Mac and Windows Firefox but not Linux.  what is up with that?  I did email them my feedback but haven’t heard anything.  that’s the latest thing that keeps me on a Windows machine.  Trust me, if I could go without it, I would.

I notice that while the programming does not show up, the commercials come through just fine.:-/  What is up with that?!?

With more applications and content being delivered over the web, it will help to loosen more users from the grip of Microsoft.  But if I’m watching stuff with Firefox, why can’t I watch streaming content regardless of the OS?

As it is, I am tired of playing nursemaid to this old Windows machine.

dick

PCLinux OS – Minime 2008

It’s been awhile since I’ve played with and reviewed any distros, so I’m overdue. I do have a need for something I can use other than Windows as there are legions of viral and malware attacks that are attecking my XP everyday. I recently cleaned off over 20 infections thanks to the Spydoctor downloaded from Google. Now that I have a high speed connection, my rate of infections also seem to increase.

I also wanted to try something portable as I do work with and from different machines frequently. I had a 1 G thumb drive just waiting for a linux install but this is still not a lot of room for most full-sized releases. It has been awhile since I looked at PCLinuxOS so I was anxious to see how they had progressed and the Minime version seemed to fit the bill perfectly. Plus it is relatively new, so I’m early to this particular party for once.

I landed at the Pendrive Linux site and was wooed by that screen shot and wanted that snazzy desktop. So I followed the direction given for downloading and installing the Minime distro found here. Things went very smoothly getting my pen drive all set up and ready to go following the directions given. However, I was not able to boot to the machine I really wanted and needed to use it on because this was an aging Celeron 1.8 GHz that must be at least 7 years old. I have over 512 MB RAM and have tricked it out as much as can be done. But when it came to the BIOS, there was no option for booting from a USB flash drive. I tried the USB HDD option but that got me nowhere so I tried it on my laptop. Success!

When installing to a flashdrive, it does divide it into various partitions and I never did get to adjusting those sizes. Minime is a 296 MB distro, so it is not as big as most full-sized linux releases. I figured I would have room to spare for some documents and fun stuff. But I was mistaken.

I was seduced by that snazzy 3D desktop screen shot but I never did get it to work like you see in the picture. But it is still attractive and modern looking all the same. PCLinux looks better and more modern since way back in the day when I last reviewed it. I had no troubles getting it to pick up my wireless connection. But later on when I tried it on my work computer, it seemed to not be able to find the ethernet connection, which I still find odd.

PCLinuxOS apparently has a KDE desktop, but I wouldn’t call it a pure KDE interface. I noticed there were many gnome files on it as well as in the Synaptec repository. In my earlier review, someone had corrected me by saying that PCLinux used KDE but my particular live CD at the time had Gnome. The fact is that it looks and works a lot more like Ubuntu 6.06 than a Mepis 6.0 so I can see why there would be confusion. But that really was not an issue for me, because I just wanted it to work.

There’s a reason why this thing is so light. For web browsing, you get Konquerer and nothing else. I did end up going to the repository to get Firefox. Hint to other newbies; make sure to refresh the repository list to get more download choices. I was generally pleased with the repository choices as there were a lot of them. I even managed to find Stepmania 4.0 CVS, which was something I wanted with my Linux. However as I began downloading a few choices, I kept getting a message indicating that my disk space was too limited or the drive was full. Downloading in several bites instead of trying to get many packages at once seemed to help overcome that.

Minime is a bare bones distro. It does not come with any office software to speak of, nor does it have any CD burning software or DVD watching software. In fact it had no multimedia programs at all except on for sound that I didn’t recognize. I didn’t even see any email clients, although I’m sure there was something affiliated with KDE and Konquerer. Since I like Gmail, that’s not a huge issue. But Google kept reminding me that my browser might not be compatible with all of their features which is what prompted me to go get Firefox.

My laptop is a 1.8G Pentium 4 with 512 MB RAM and it was the machine that I spent the bulk of my time trying Minime. As I said, I went looking to see if I could get that nifty 3D box desktop thing working but I never did. While that’s not the deal-breaker, it would have made the experience more fun. As it was, there were times when I managed to get the program to stutter and almost freeze up. It seemed sluggish and slow to me which could have something to do with the flashdrive, but anything that small should be able to use the RAM efficiently enough to have some speed.

The deal breaker is that as it came out of the box it wouldn’t do much more than surf the web. It has some modem tools, which thankfully is no longer an issue for me. But the lack of anything productive would drive a modem user bonkers because they would have to download several packages. So for someone looking to actually do something with a distro on a flash drive is going to be disappointed with PCLinuxOS Minime. Having to download things to make it work is simply going to make it bigger and you might as well get the regular-sized distro with all the stuff.

I liked the look and feel of it, and the full version would be something I might recommend to someone just starting out with Linux with a full install on a machine. The interface was highly intuitive and those programs that I did install were installed in the right places with no fuss. However, this is not the distro or the version of choice for me at the present time. The distro has matured since my last review and will be comfortable on any desktop. And perhaps it might be more comfortable on a larger thumb drive. But for the present time Minime is an interesting toy but not a terribly useful one. I learned a thing or two getting it installed on the flashdrive and that was useful. But I don’t think it will be staying there for very long.

dick