Weekend two with Ubuntu

This is such good fun. I was feeling quite jaded and fed up with computers recently but getting to work with Linux as my main home machine has re-sparked my interest and more importantly the joy of it. It's a proper hobbyist thing. Everything is there to tinker with and although there is no need to bother if you just want to get on and do something specific (just bang on windows) the end result feels so much nicer - it's something i crafted myself and know intimately. With windows there is a feeling that things are going on you don't know about. You install a package and it modifies this DLL and that registry entry. You install something and it adds a tray icon you need to figure out how to get rid of that, then it phones home to tell the developer about you. On Linux you can see every module, every library and every process. If you stick to open source packages you can compile them yourself so you know exactly what's there. It's very very liberating. I guess that's the idea.

progress update

Close to 100% of my hardware is now working under Linux. The only thing I haven't got working is the Sony MP3 player but I think that would require modifying the ROM on the player to work around the DRM and I'm not sure i will even look into that at present.

1. The DigiTV tuner card and MythTV are now working well together. I don't really watch broadcast TV much these days so i haven't tested it thoroughly, but it seems at least as stable as it was under windows (it wasn't very stable under windows).
   I mainly like watching American rubbish and it's easier to get that as torrents.
   Although you can schedule recordings (so you're not bound by the schedule) it's still pretty inconvenient. The main problems with this are:
   1. It's unreliable. Recordings sometimes break up; take up CPU and if you need to reboot during a recording, you can't.
   2. It's a haste to schedule the recordings and handle conflicting air times. Windows Media Center (WMC) is pretty sophisticated in this respect but it's still a lot more haste then firing up a torrent.
   3. Adverts.
   4. The raw MPEG2 files are big (about 2GB per hour). Vs. 600Mb for a DivX
   I spent a lot of time fine tuning MythTV so it's pretty good now and has quite a few features that WMC doesn't have - although i can't say it's as rich in functionality overall as WMC is.

2. My Sony digital camcorder is working. I was able to get the video off the camera but playback is bad - i think it's something to do with interlacing which is a subject i don't quite understand. The video editing software is really rubbish. I need to look into finding something better. Worst case scenario is that i use Linux to grab the raw video and edit in the windows VmWare box.

3. I got a good deal further in getting my Quick cam Pro 5000 working. I had to download and compile a kernel module. This module is V4L2 only and doesn't work well at the moment, but hopefully that will change in the near future. Currently there doesn't appear to be any video conferencing package that has a windows equivalent and works with my camera. The most promising one I could find is aMSN which recognised the camera once I built it from the latest source so I'm going to focus on this. I might even have a go at hacking the source. One thing that occurred to me today is to plug the CamCorder into the TV card's composite input. When I select the composite input in aMSN i get an empty blue screen which looks like it's being generated by the device - so that just might work.

I also haven't tried setting up my palm T3 yet. I haven't used the T3 for a while but I think I will see what it's like under Linux. The main problem was the sync which was slow and had to be started manually. I expect the Linux tools will be better and might make it worth bringing it back into service.