Open SUNY

Playing Smartphone Recordings in Ubuntu 9.04

Andrew Cullison — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:51:45 +0000

If you have a smartphone (e.g. Android Phone or Iphone), then you probably have some cool app that lets you capture audio recordings.

Problem: These are in a 3gp format that, for some reason, doesn’t play well with a clean Ubuntu.

Answer: You need some codecs and a player that will communicate with those codecs.

Install Add Mediubuntu repositories to your software list. Here’s the command line code for Jaunty.sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/jaunty.list –output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
Add the AMR codecs. I searched “AMR” in the package manager and installed (amrwb, amrnb, amrita)
For some reason, not all media players will play 3gp files even with this stuff installed. But RealPlayer 11 for Linux will. (Click here to download the file)

That should do it.

10 Reasons Linux Should Be Your Netbook Operating System

Andrew Cullison — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 11:47:22 +0000

Story here.

Linux Support for Hardware is Awesome

Andrew Cullison — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 01:09:50 +0000

Debunking the myth that hardware support for Linux is terrible.

Giver, Easy In-Network File Sharing

Andrew Cullison — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 01:07:01 +0000

We recently bought a netbook for Sarah, and I’ve been looking for an easy way to share files across the network. Eventually, I set it up so we can log in to each other’s laptops with SSH.

But this is another cool way to do it. It’s called Giver.

Ubuntu - Move Home Directory to its Own Partition

Andrew Cullison — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:35:53 +0000

There are a lot of advantages to having your home directory on a separate partition on your hard drive. However, if you’re like me, you didn’t realize this until well after your Ubuntu install.

Here are some instructions on how to move your home directory after an Ubuntu install. Now that summer is here, I’ll probably be trying this in the next few days.

Ubuntu to Support Android Platform

Jon Nalewajek — Wed, 27 May 2009 01:19:01 +0000

Story here.

Video Editing on Linux: Things Are Looking Up

Andrew Cullison — Sat, 23 May 2009 03:37:51 +0000

I am a pretty enthusiastic Linux fan, but I’ve been having problems with video editing. Video editing is important to me because of (youngphilosophers.org).

Video editing has gotten much better on Linux within the last few months. First, kdenlive seems to be relatively stable on my machine with my recent upgrade to Jaunty Jackelope.

Second, this story was just posted today. I’m pretty excited to try this out over the summer.

Microsoft Office 2007 will support Open Document Format

Andrew Cullison — Wed, 06 May 2009 11:30:39 +0000

Story here

Ubuntu Netbook Remix

Andrew Cullison — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:52:41 +0000

Jaunty Jackelope (Ubuntu 9.04) comes with an optional skin for netbooks called Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Here’s a nice review.

French Police Switch to Linux

Andrew Cullison — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 12:16:18 +0000

I’m not sure this is news. There has been a lot of information floating around the internet about how many governments and government agencies have switched to Linux to save money.

But this article does give you a nice bit of background about how the switch came about. It began with one person switching to Open Office. They found it was a suitable replacement to Microsoft Office. They encouraged others in their office to switch, and soon an executive decision was made to drop MS Office. It seems something similar happened with Firefox and Thunderbird.

It was after that, that they started looking into more ways to save money with open source, and that’s when they started looking into linux based operating systems. They made the switch, and it’s estimated that they’re saving 70% on their IT budget!

Moral of the story:
(i.e..my opining)

I’m often told that the biggest opposition to open source will be from bureaucrats with some irrational chip on their shoulder regarding making the change to open source (and perhaps change in general). This seems like evidence that bureacrats can be won over. How? Well it seems to help to start small. Convince a few people to try things like Open Office. Then convince them to try Thunderbird. Convince them to try GIMP (etc…) eventually you’ll turn some heads. When the bureaucrats realize they can save 70% by going down this road…they’ll listen.