Right after installing Ubuntu 8.04, I attempted to install Cinelerra CV but failed miserably.

Seems there were serious dependency problems in their repository. That's now been fixed.

If you want to try your hand at some awesome video editing in Linux using Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), just add the following repository and install Cinelerra. They have versions optimized for AMD 64 bit processors, and even more generic 32 bit systems.

deb http://akirad.cinelerra.org akirad-hardy main

I'll try and post a tutorial in a few days.

I use Ubuntu servers in various places. I've built a terabyte backup server that reaches out and grabs various files from other servers for a longer term storage using rsync over ssh.

Works like a charm!

Unfortunately I neglected to check it's SSH key's after I installed the security upgrades for Ubuntu after the SSH vulnerability was announced, and the key it was using was invalidated so all the rsync connections were failing.

I really should implement some sort of real network backup system one day so I'd be notified if something failed. In the meantime I've replaced the key pair and everything's working fine again.

I returned home to a special surprise today. Sitting on my desk was a sample pack of Rosco Color Filters that I'd requested months ago.

I'd given up on ever seeing them. These beauties will fit perfectly over the head of my flash, so I just got a couple of hundred filters for my flash for free. Can't beat that!

Setting up KVM for virtual machines in Ubuntu 8.04 is easy!

A few simple steps will get you up and running. First, install the packages with your favorite package manager, or at a console type:

sudo apt-get install kvm libvirt-bin virt-manager virt-viewer

I also found I needed to add myself to the kvm group:

sudo adduser `id -un` kvm
sudo adduser `id -un` libvirtd

You must add yourself to libvirtd for networking to function :-)

Here's one of the few situations where rebooting linux is probably easier for most people than trying to manually start everything, so give her a boot and log back in.

Under your Applications menu in "System Tools" you'll find "Virtual Machine Manager". Connect to the qemu "localhost" setup that is already there by right clicking on it. After it says you are connected, click New at the bottom of the window to create a new virtual machine instance. Follow the wizard to configure your install.

I found that after installing XP, when it rebooted to complete the install that kvm didn't remount the cd-rom image I was installing from, so I had to manually edit the virtual machine setup and add a storage device pointed at the Windows XP cd-rom. Then installation finished normally.

The first thing I noticed was that install took about 45 minutes total, which seemed a bit long to me. It could be the setup I chose. I'm running a dual-core AMD 64 on a 64 bit Ubuntu install, and chose to run a 2 processor 32 bit virtual machine for the install.

I was just doing some math and here's some interesting tidbits:

My recent PHP project that I'm about 80% done with has 57,237 lines of code.
My largest PHP project has over 120,000 lines of code, of which I wrote 99% personally.

An average novel has less than 8,000 lines, and my PHP lines are much wider than your average novel.

Make one typo in a novel, and nobody really cares.

Make one typo in a program, and everyone complains!

So the next time you scoff at a programmer, think about that. She's probably written a lot more than your favorite novelist, done it a lot more accurately, and gotten paid a lot less.

After installing Ubuntu 7.10 on my machine that refused to install Ubuntu 8.04, I then updated it to 8.04.

Things seem to be working... we'll see.

Well, I gave up on Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron". It refused to format the drive whatever I did. I did format the drive once with a 7.04 disc I had lying around and then tried to install 8.04 on it, and it still failed.

So, obviously it didn't like my motherboard chipset. Basically if you have a Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H motherboard (AMD 690G Northbridge) then don't try Ubuntu 8.04.

I ended up installing Ubuntu 7.10 on the system and it went on perfectly first try!

For the record, here's what I have:

Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H Motherboard
AMD AM2 X2 64 bit 5600 Brisbane CPU (fastest 65 watt CPU they have)
8 GB of RAM
160 GB SATA Barracuda
160 GB SATA Raptor
Asus GeForce 8600GTS with Dual 20" widescreen monitors

I'm still not sure what the problem is. I'm attempting to install Ubuntu 8.04 on a new machine and it keeps freezing up during the install. So far I've tried disabling virtualization in the BIOS, a different hard drive and now I'm trying the built-in video instead of the GeForce card I'm going to use.

Update:
Things I've tried:

boot params: noapic, nolapic acpi=off
Multiple hard drives
Removed PCIx video card and used onboard video
Setting BIOS SATA controller to "Legacy IDE"
Native SATA Mode
Standard IDE hard drive
Another DVD reader in case it was a bad source drive
Memtest, just to make sure it wasn't bad memory
Booted into 8.04 live CD and tried to partition the drive - still froze
Tried different SATA cable and port (even though the IDE drive failed too)
I finally booted a 7.10 32 bit Live CD and was able to partition and format the drive
Still no luck installing 8.04 on top of that formatted drive, however...
Tried setting SATA mode to RAID

I recently rebooted my desktop, only to find it painfully slow on restart. It took about 20 minutes of investigating to figure out what was going on, but finally I stumbled on the answer.

The first thing I noticed with top was that there were 10 instances of "identify" running, all using around 10% of the CPU.

If I killed all the instances of identify, they would immediately come back. It was driving me up the wall. With nothing else running on the desktop, these things would constantly pop up.

Finally I noticed that trackerd was the last process started. After killing it, the problem went away.

Tracker is a Linux search and indexing utility. One that I never use. Apparently it was trying to index the thousands of images I have stored on mounted NFS shares to a server.

Since my search utility of choice is "slocate", I uninstalled Tracker and the problem was solved.

Some weeks ago I was introduced to Twitter, which is billed as a "micro-blogging" web service. When I first saw it about a year ago I really didn't quite get what it was all about. Later I learned that many of the photographers I talked to on Flickr were into Twitter as well, so I thought I'd try it out.

It didn't take long until I was addicted. Twitter is essentially a cross between instant messaging and blogging. It's like instant messaging with an RSS feed. You don't normally select who you want to send your instant message to, but the people who are interested in what you have to say will subscribe to your twitter feed. This means that anything you say can be read by anyone else if they are so inclined.

Soon I found I was being followed by such people as Abbie Lundburg, chief editor for C.I.O. magazine and Guy Kawasaki, one of the original founders of Apple.