stuart test blog

I’ve been following Ubuntu since it’s inception in 2005 with Warty Warthog which was labelled 4.10. Each year since then they’ve released two versions a year – one in April and one in October – and this is where the version number comes from. For example, the 8 in 8.04 is from the year 2008, and the 04 is the fourth month of the year.

Each release has been getting better, and especially the last version (7.10) which I thought was a definite contender. So Ubuntu 8.04 was released today and I’ve just finished ‘installing’ it and giving it a very quick test.

I put ‘installing’ in quotes, because if you’re running Windows, Ubuntu have created an impressive installation called Wubi. This allows you to install it on your Windows computer without having to make any changes to the disk partitions. They do this by creating a folder called Ubuntu on either your C or D drive and install all the necessary files in this folder. Then, with a simple modification to your boot options, when you first turn on your computer you can choose between Windows or Ubuntu. Here’s a screenshot of the Wubi installation manager:

Once Wubi finished installing, I rebooted choosing the newly added Ubuntu option. Ubuntu loaded up quickly and I was presented with a login box. I had already set up the first user account in the Wubi installation manager as you can see in the installation window above. After logging, I was impressed to see that my screen resolution was set to the correct size, sound was working, and a network icon in the top menu bar indicated that there were available wireless networks available. I selected my wireless network, enter the secure key and connected successfully.

Wow.

What just happened there isn’t possible with any other operating system on my notebook. Not Windows XP, Vista or any other flavour of Linux that I’ve tested. The key hardware was detected automatically and I didn’t have to install any additional drivers or software to get up and running. That’s impressive – and all that without needing to repartition or reformat my disks.

So once again I’ve been impressed with Ubuntu, but there was one major problem – and this was a show-stopper for me. Ubuntu have always prided themselves on providing the absolute latest software and sometimes on the bleeding edge too. So I wasn’t completely surprised that they included Firefox 3.0, but I also wasn’t happy as it’s still in beta and in my opinion still has a way to go before being complete. This becomes obvious when trying to install addons, even installing the Adobe Flash plugin through up an error after just browsing for a few minutes.

For me, my internet browser is the most important tool on my computer, and I absolutely need it to be as stable as possible. That’s why I never run beta versions of Firefox as my default browser. So I tried to install Firefox 2 by using the add/remove programs applet but I couldn’t find anything apart from the version that was installed.

I’m sure that I could have installed Firefox 2 by downloading it directly from Mozilla but it just annoyed me that they would think that a beta version of Firefox would be fine for the typical home user.

Link: Elliot with Minnie

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Elliot…

Link: Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron – First impressions

I’ve been following Ubuntu since it’s inception in 2005 with Warty Warthog which was labelled 4.10. Each year since then they’ve released two versions a year – one in April and one in October – and…

All Windows users should download and install Ubuntu 8.04 using Wubi – requires no changes to disk partitions. Works superbly.

Elliot with Minnie: Our favourite photo of Elliot yet.

Getting full speed on my 10mbps internet connection.

Funny video: http://tinyurl.com/2a64vf

Mum’s moving story about her young son battling a tumour down in Ronald McDonald house in Christchurch: http://becs.blogtown.co.nz/

Link: State of rugby in NZ

After the early exit from the World Cup, NZ rugby seems to be losing support of their traditionally fanatic fans. There’s a real feeling of apathy towards rugby union at the moment – the rules…

When Flickr announced their new video service that allows you to store your videos in-line with your photos, I thought it was time to start processing all the videos that we’ve taken of Elliot over the last 10 months and start posting them online.

Turns out that video editing and processing is a lot harder than I first expected.

The first thing I did was start up Windows Movie Maker on my Vista notebook, expecting it to be a complete breeze. Came across a showstopper pretty quickly – Windows Movie Maker doesn’t support the MPEG2 videos from our Sony Video Recorder. It’s not like it’s an uncommon format or anything, so it’s annoying that there’s no support built in. I also found out later that the MPEG4 videos from my Nokia N95 are also not supported by Movie Maker. Not impressed.

So I then started some research into video editing software – I was hoping to find a good freebie that would do the job, but was also willing to pay for something if needed. After much research and downloading, I finally was deciding between Sony Vegas Movie Studio, or Adobe Premiere Elements.

I preferred the interface of Vegas as it was quite advanced but also dead simple to use, so it makes you feel like a pro. The interface in Premiere Elements is also nice, but more in a pretty, child-like way.

Both seemed to do the same sorts of things, but Premiere Elements had better options for exporting videos, whereas the Sony software tried to trick you into using their own online service for uploading videos to the Internet.

But the Premiere Elements trial was super annoying because you couldn’t export videos without a huge banner overlaid on the video saying that it was produced by a trial version of the software. The Sony software had no such limitations, and I almost bought the Sony software for that reason alone.

But I went for Adobe’s Premiere Elements in the end because it was the only software that I could use to export my videos in widescreen format without the letterbox bars and without the videos looking stretched. (I also learned a lot about the differences between square pixels and PAL and NTFS sized videos along the way.)

I actually bought the Adobe Elements bundle which also includes Photoshop Elements as the interface looked the same as Premiere so I thought it would be easy to use.

Anyway, here’s the first video from Premiere Elements. I haven’t actually done any editing on it as I was just pleased enough that the size came out right. A nice feature about embedding videos from Flickr is that you can choose the size of the video when embedding.