YWAM Information Technology - Software - Comments

you're welcome

neo — Wed, 21 May 2008 02:38:26 +0100

It's a service I provide, you know.... ;)

On a serious note, I actually was wondering if there is something that could help with GENESIS. We had a link the other day with about 5 locations. One of them was using MS NetMeeting. So, after reading a bit through that discussion I thought: If NetMeeting can do it why not other software as well?
Which then also could be used for other video conferencing links as well.

I agree, of course, that appropriate equipment is necessary, no matter what software and technology is used. Echo cancellation and room design was mentioned in a few posts in that discussion, as well.

It would be great if you, or someone else, could try out some of the software and share briefly about the pros and cons. Specially in regards to GENESIS.

Greetings from the MatriX,
neo

Thanks for the tip

Mike — Mon, 19 May 2008 17:40:46 +0100

Thanks for the tip bro!
Interesting reading, and watch as it updates....
I guess I will need to download some more progs and test them.
The H323 stuff is of most interest as that is an open industry standard and is even what our GENESIS systems use..... So, you can use Xmeeting, Ekiga etc to log into a GENESIS codec too.
One key about using software videoconferencing (paid or FOSS) is in having a good camera and mic.
Skimp on that and nothing will look or sound good!

Blessings
Mike

Subtitling

Mike — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 14:28:49 +0000

Well, noone responded, but this site seems to have been down (no posts making it through) for several weeks.

I have ended up creating the subtitles from text in
- SUBTITLE WORKSHOP (freeware) and making initial timings there.
- AUGISUB (freeware) was used for finetuning timing using waveform editor.
- resulting subtitles saved in .SRT format

The DVD .VOB file and subtitle .SRT file can be muxed using DVDFLICK (freeware) or by using CONVERTX2DVD (shareware - costs about 40 Euros) which seems to do a better job.

This has been an interesting project.
regards
Mike

re: 64Studio

neo — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 06:57:37 +0000

Hi Takabuntu,
I checked out UbuntuStudio when it came out, well, when it was downloadable anyways. But at the end of the day I couldn't really test it because I didn't had a extra computer for a test install and I didn't want to make it dual boot just to see how it looks like. So I made a VM which was of course unusable with the hardware I have. But I really just wanted to see it.
And guess what, I still don't like the Gnome Desktop. But that's another story. However, I liked the overall work they did with that distribution. I just realized that non of my hardware would be capable for sound recording & editing. Besides that fact that if I want to run any of this software I also could install that on my desktop.

If I would have got another laptop than the one I have now I would have had other plans. But I'm happy that God provided for this machine. It might be just not the time to get into more serious audio recording.
The 64Studio is a good find. I came across that as well. However, about the low-latency kernel I must say that this is nothing magic, that one is available for UbuntuStudio as well. Well, actually for every distro. Although it's nice that they have it in there as default. This is how it should be.

So, just for the record I add the link here to 64Studio, in case anyone is interested:
http://64studio.com

Greetings from the MatriX,
neo

64Studio

Takabuntu — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:28:17 +0000

And it comes with a great variety of graphics tools, just like ubuntu-studio (somehow my previous post got in here twice and I can't delete it...so I edit it short sorry)

Tried it, but switched to 64Studio

Takabuntu — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 11:24:00 +0000

Hi Neo,

I tried ubuntu-studio immediately when it got out. I was already a Kubuntu user at the time and had my system set up for audio processing. It might have been my PC (a PIV-1.8Ghz-750Mb-7200rpm pata), but somehow it responded slow and seemed bloated to me. I was kind of disappointed because Ubuntu is great as a workstation. I also tried Jacklab, but could not get past the installation process. I heard it is a decent 32-bit audio distro too (OpenSuse).

After some research I ran into 64Studio, a 64-bit Debian audio distro, that also had a 32-bit version available. I really started to like Debian, so I gave it a shot and guess what: it worked out-of-the-box, got lower latencies (because of their tweaked low-latency kernel) and the overall response was great. I also tried it on a lower-end machine (PIII-1GHz-256Mb-5400rpm pata) and it also performed very decent and left ubuntu-studio disappearing in the rear mirror. One of the contributors is a developer with Debian, so that must count for something. I now have 64-bit PC and am running the 64-bit version of 64Studio and am having a blast.

Out-of-the-box it comes with Gnome installed. But you might as well use it with KDE, because the case libraries of KDE are already installed. GNOME is a bit lighter on the memory so I like it better, but it is all a matter of taste basically.

doesn't suprise me...

KevinColyer — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 23:02:43 +0000

Nice to hear you have it working in the wild! No excuses now. Did you find it straight forward to set up?

Doesn't surprise me it is faster than Vista. I did a head to head start from a cold boot on my Ubuntu Dell Latitude 750Mhz, 192 Mb machine against Steve Sullivan's new Toshiba Vista beast. I won it easily and was typing away at least a couple of minutes before his was responsive. Sigh. Progress eh?!

Cheers,

Kevin

PS Guess who forgot his password for his virtual machine and had to wipe it!

Crypto LVM (ubuntu on Dell Inspiron)

pcp1976 — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 22:04:54 +0000

I've been using a fully encrypted root/swap on an encrypted lvm for ubuntu installed on my inspiron (1.8 celeron). No noticeable hit in speed. Runs much faster than Vista (which came pre installed).

Virtual web development

Dan B — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 07:25:15 +0000

I started using virtual machines back when I converted to Mac. But since I develop web sites (for mainly Windows users) on a Mac, I found that my code (actually, the CSS) was buggy, and lacked cross-browser compatibility.

That's when I realized I couldn't be a die-hard single platform user, when my audience uses varied OS'es... and browsers.

So now I build (design and code) an Mac OS X and test on Win XP and DSL (linux). As long as a can have virtual copies of my least favorite OSes, then I can live and work in a relatively smooth Mac environment, and avoid the worlds of Windows and... (sorry guys) linux. :-]

sounds exactly like that

neo — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 13:50:17 +0000

Hi Kev,
your right. Our terrible loud vacuum cleaner is nice compared to that.

Luckily the fans are spinning down after a short while. Otherwise I guess the guys from across the street would watch out ufos. haha
But seriously I thought about getting out my ear plugs as long as I have to sit next to the server. But with the fans spinning down it's OK.

Greetings from the MatriX,
neo

Sounds like...

KevinColyer — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 13:40:07 +0000

...it will go VRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

Have fun!

Cheers,

Kevin

server setup

neo — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 12:06:53 +0000

Hi @ all,
& thanks for your comment, mate.

I couldn't be here for a while, so sorry for my late reply.
We now have all the hardware, everything sits in the rack and is ready to be installed. First thing I needed to do is figuring out how to set up the RAID. Never done that before but it should be working now.
So, quickly after I turned on the system for the first time I was surrounded by half the folks from our office. Not because they all wanted to see how it looks like with all the flashing lights but because they couldn't figure out what the noise was. Well, a server with redundant power supply, redundant cooling fans and a disk enclosure with redundant cooling as well make quit some noise & wind when turning on and every blows at full speed. It's like a jet engine, I guess.

Anyways, I wanted to install the system but couldn't read the install CD on that machine. After a while I found out the problem. I downloaded the Debian Image for IA64 (Intel Architecture 64bit), exactly that what we have. But then I figured out that this is only for Itanium processors but we have a Xeon 64bit. So, I need to download the AMD64 install Image. I just thought I don't have an AMD so I need the other one. I guess I should have done my homework better.
So, tomorrow morning I will download the correct one and then I'll see how it goes.

Greetings from the MatriX,
neo

server setup opinion

crashsystems — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 01:02:02 +0100

I think that the answers to most of your questions boil down to two main things: how the server will be used and personal opinion. Since I do not know much of the former, I'll give you my opinion. Debian is a good choice for an OS no matter what use the server will be put to.

As far as swap amount, there a lot of disagreements in that area. I've heard a number of people say it should be double your ram, but with 4gb, I think that would be overkill. The main server I'm administrating (also running Debian) is performing NAT with three ethernet cards, running Samba/LAMP/SSH, has 1gb of ram, and only uses 32mb of swap. Even (or espessialy) Linux kernel developers cannot agree on this.

For your file system, the most common choice is ext3, as it is a good all-around file system. However, its not the fastest one out there. My personal favorite is XFS, which is good for both general desktop usage as well as file server usage. It has amazing performance and is very efficiant. Two caveats about XFS though: first, if you use grub as your bootloader you must make a small non-XFS /boot partition, and second, you really should run a power backup if you use it (which you should do in any case). Another option is JFS, which I've heard is good for mail servers and anything else that involves read/write to many small files. Yet another option I've researched recently is LVM, though keep in mind that if you go this route, XFS volumes do not shrink.

Two backup programs I've used quite a bit are rsync, and more recently rdiff-backup. Both are easy to automate with cron + bash, and work with Mac too.

Here are some articles I've read that you can check out to read more. Have fun playing with your fancy new hardware!

File system comparisons: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/388
LVM: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/388
Rsync: http://www.linux.com/feature/113847
Rdiff-backup: http://arstechnica.com/articles/columns/linux/linux-20060202.ars/2

LVM

KevinColyer — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 10:32:10 +0100

Dear Douglass,

Gutsy implements the encrypted filesystem on top of the LVM, so I guess you could use any filesystem you want. Never tried XFS. I briefly flirted with Reiser 3 but went back to ext3 in the end.

As a speed tip I always at noatime to the options in /etc/fstab as this stops ext3 from making a save for every read (to update the "last accessed time" record). That speeds things up by 10% or so. But to be honest I have never been disappointed with the speed of the filesystems!

It is quite neat to see the encrypted filesystem in action as once you boot you have to enter the passphrase and that is as far as you will get! After that it is business as usual.

I chose the "guided setup with LVM and encryption" for ease from the installer. All seemed to go well except I got dumped at the text prompt when the machine rebooted! I tried startx but nothing happened. That was odd. I did a quick (well slow) sudo apt-get install kubuntu and about 700 packages were selected. I had some trouble remounting the CD ("sudo mount /dev/scd0 /cdrom" or something - Linux uses the SCSI subsytem for all disk drives now from IDE to Flash) but eventually it pulled the packages from the internet and all is tickerty boo now!

It does run like a slug under VirtualBox - but it does run! I it definitely the way to go if you want to run Linux on a laptop. As I doubt the encryption will slow much down on a real box (biggest bottleneck is always the hard disk writing).

Perhaps someone else will want to play with this!

cheers,

Kevin

Re: Virtual Machine

crashsystems — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 16:15:50 +0100

I've been testing Gusty since RC1 came out, and have been quite impressed. During the span of time I've been following Ubuntu releases (almost two years), this has been by far the most innovative. The encrypted hd option on the alternate install cd sounds quite interesting. I wonder why that is not an option on the main cd. Since you are already testing that installer out, does it have options for setting up LVM? I've been thinking about using LVM + the XFS file system on my new laptop I am about to get. I have been using XFS for six months now, and love it.

As far as VMs go, I use VMware very extensively. I used VirtualBox for quite a while, but it is so much easier to set up networking in VMware. Perhaps some day I'll try out KVM.

P.S.
If anyone is having problems downloading 7.10 due to clogged mirrors, check out torrent.ubuntu.com:6969