To give a little equal time to operating systems that are not Windows 7, and in acknowledgement of the recent release of Ubuntu 9.10, let’s revisit one of the most popular free distributions of Linux. (Note: that’s free as in beer and free as in speech, at least for the following distributions.)

The aforementioned Ubuntu 9.10 is one of the most prevalent distributions that can operate as a Live CD. That is to say, you can try Ubuntu 9.10 by running it off the CD that you burn it to (its performance will be hobbled since everything’s being read off the CD, but everything still works–this can be overcome by putting the contents of the CD onto a USB flash drive and booting from that instead.) This is one of the reasons why I really like this distro. If you’ve never had any exposure to Linux before, it’s worth a try; the hardest part about it is probably burning the ISO image that you download onto a blank CD. And both Fedora and OpenSUSE have new versions coming out soon as well. These are also popular free distributions with deep-seeded roots. All of them are worth trying out if you have some extra hard drive space.

But there are many more distributions than just these: check out DistroWatch for information on literally hundreds of Linux, BSD and Solaris distributions. You can filter down to the distributions that will best suit your needs. While not everyone can replace Windows outright with a Linux distribution, you might find that a free operating system offers a great way to eke some more life out of an old system that you can’t part with, or for cobbling something new together for pretty cheap.

So, back to the question we raised in the headline: can one edit video with Linux? The answer is an unqualified yes! There are at least 10 free video editing applications that can be run with Linux. At least a couple even offer AVCHD support. For more information on what’s out there and what might be worth a try, hit Wikipedia’s Comparison of video editing software and List of video editing software.

After spending the last few days, on and off, installing Windows 7 on a couple of laptops, and after seeing some press releases over the last couple of days for Win7-ready versions of several utilities, I thought I would compile a quick list of utilities that I have found helpful for either optimizing systems or just saving my bacon… Read the rest of this entry »

Today is the day you can get Microsoft Windows 7 in stores and via download. We’ve been playing with the release candidate around here for a few months, and we really dig it. It’s still bloated compared to, say, the very svelte (but now woefully outdated) Windows 2000, but is significantly faster than Windows Vista. It plays nicely with all of the video editing applications we’ve thrown at it, but we’re not too surprised by that.

I’ve been boning up on the installation notes to see exactly how I want to do this for the laptops at my home. I have come to the conclusion that I want to do custom installations to wipe out the previous Vista installations; but I have been making backups carefully to make sure that I’m not going to lose anything major. I think if I have a good disk image for each computer, I should be golden. Hopefully.

Things I’m looking forward to:

• Support for even more GPU features.
• Smoother, prettier fonts.
• Quicker than Windows Vista for pretty much everything.
• Less-painful networking.
• 64-bit computing on my computer (which shipped with 32-bit Vista; hence, why I’ve been reading about the custom install…)
• New taskbar that is vaguely reminiscent of Mac OS X dock–significantly reduces clutter

(Yeah, the above video is a bit on the lame side, even if it is now considered a classic of sorts. I’m surprised I wasn’t forced to watch it when I was in school. Nonetheless, even though we’ve gone to different software distribution media than floppy disks, many of the points on the video are still valid.)

Software piracy, no matter how you slice it, is simply not acceptable in the creative fields. Think about it: you’re pouring your heart and soul, not to mention brainpower, mind space and creative energy into the video you create. You want to be compensated for it. Since you do get compensation, you should be appropriately licensing your software. Read the rest of this entry »

Just stumbled upon a blog entry titled “Netbooks = Deja vu all over again?” at TechThoughts. It reminded me of a previous blog post of mine in which I was contemplating taking the Pepsi Challenge with a netbook myself. I ultimately decided against it, and I’m glad I did–the 320GB hard drive in my new 17″ notebook ended up getting almost completely filled up. But this was after I discovered that the machine is truly powerful enough to be a desktop replacement… so it accumulated the release candidate of Windows 7, a huge amount of video, and all of the documents that I could successfully convert from the Mac (they make it easy to go from PC to Mac, but not the other way… grrr…)

Ahem. But anyway, back to the other article: the author makes the interesting point that netbooks aren’t a particularly new idea. The author owned a Sony PictureBook back in the bad ol’ days of Windows Me. It actually had more capabilities than the MacBook Air, arguably the machine that started the netbook movement, depending on whom you ask. And it was an interesting machine in the annals of computing history, in that it is one of the very few machines ever released to use the Transmeta Crusoe processor.

How will history treat the netbook craze? Are they a fad? A nice, cheap computer to use to look for jobs with as the economy emerges from the brink of ruin? Or will they become a fixture in every household? The kind of computer issued to every new kindergärtner? Time will tell.

Reprinted from a Western Digital press release:

Western Digital® today announced that it has commenced volume shipments of its 9.5 mm high, 2.5-inch notebook hard drive with 640 GB capacity. The WD Scorpio® Blue(TM) 640 GB hard drives utilize 320 GB-per-platter technology and are designed for mainstream notebook computers. The WD Scorpio Blue 640 GB is the highest capacity 2.5-inch hard drive available today in the industry-standard 9.5 mm, 2-disk form factor.
The new WD Scorpio Blue 640 GB drive has a 30 percent reduction in overall power consumption from the previous generation WD Scorpio Blue drive to achieve best-in-class power and performance(1), making it an ideal solution for notebook computers and other portable devices that require extended battery life and cool, quiet operation. Read the rest of this entry »