PhillC's Journal: Giving it to Ubuntu

Many years ago, in the early 1990s, I tried to install a version of Slackware on my old 386 machine. It was a miserable failure. Over the years I've tried Linux again a few times, but never with much success. Something always didn't work correctly and after a couple of days I went back to Windows. This time I promise it'll be different.

I had a 120GB external 2.5" hard drive knocking about, not being used for much. This seemed like an ideal candidate to try a Linux distro, booting from USB. Ubuntu is in all the press and they have a "Studio" edition specifically for multimedia work. Whether it's any good or not, at multimedia I mean, is another question, but downloading the ISO and burning it to disk was easy enough.

The install process went reasonably smooth. The only thing I had to really think deeply about was which hard drive to install on - was it SCSI1 or SCSI4? I chose correctly of course and didn't accidentally destroy my Windows OS. I must admit to also initially screwing up the X windows config. Choosing 1280x800 as the only option for X to try resulted in total load failure. I went through the install process a second time leaving all options as possible, although there's probably an easier way that I just don't know about.

Then I was in! Ubuntu studio (Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 of course) in all its glory. Only problem was that X only loaded at a maximum of 1024x768 resolution. Damn those ATI drivers. Same thing happened with Feisty Fawn and Breezy Badger in the past. However, the popularity of Ubuntu is now great enough that other smart people have figured out exactly how to sort this out, and ATI has made the necessary drivers easily available. I followed the user written How-To on the Ubuntu forums and problem solved! Crisp, clear fonts and a 1280x800 widescreen resolution. Nice.

So, with that out of the way I've customised a few Gnome setting to have a desktop looking closer to how I like it. I've installed some of the GStreamer plugins to ensure various video containers play correctly. I still need to do the same for sound as nothing using AAC currently works. I've had a quick look at the various video editing tools included in Ubuntu Studio and frankly they're all a bit crap. I was hoping PiTiVi might be more advanced than where it currently is. My next likely bet is to install Kdenlive and see how that measures up.

I'm sure there's also lots more configuration I'll be doing over the next few days. Maybe even give VirtualBox a chance as there are some Windows apps that I truly do need, that there are no Linux equivalents for - Trackvision for example. For now though, bring it on.