Lucid Lynx and nvidia

OMFG! Of course, Lucid is still beta, so I should not complain.

Nonetheless, the upgrade with Nvidia is painfull as usual.

Have done lots of stuff to get this working.

• blacklist the nouveau driver [need link]
• make plymouth (new graphical boot splash) use vesafb; see this bug.
• clean out manually installed nvidia drivers (nvidia-uninstall)
• apt-get purge nvidia-current
• apt-get install nvidia-current
• set nvidia-current in Hardware Drivers (System menu, administration)
• let X automatically configure stuff

[reboot inbetween each step for good measure]

I still don't have the splashscreen at boot, I do have it at shutdown. I pray that this splashscreen is temporary until the real thing is ready.

MTS AVCHD and nautilus thumbnails

AVCHD, MTS, M2TS or even short MTS is an mpeg transport stream containing h.264 video and ac3 audio. It is the output of many HD capable cameras, including my Panasonic.

To get nautilus support for thumbnailing this in lucid lynx, you need to create a mts.schemas file containing:

<gconfschemafile>
<schemalist>
<schema>
<key>/schemas/desktop/gnome/thumbnailers/video@mp2t/enable</key>
<applyto>/desktop/gnome/thumbnailers/video@mp2t/enable</applyto>
<owner>totem</owner>
<type>bool</type>
<default>true</default>
<gettext_domain>totem</gettext_domain>
<locale name="C">
<short></short>
<long></long>
</locale>
</schema>

<schema>
<key>/schemas/desktop/gnome/thumbnailers/video@mp2t/command</key>
<applyto>/desktop/gnome/thumbnailers/video@mp2t/command</applyto>
<owner>totem</owner>
<type>string</type>
<default>/usr/bin/totem-video-thumbnailer -s %s %u %o</default>
<gettext_domain>totem</gettext_domain>
<locale name="C">
<short></short>
<long></long>
</locale>
</schema>
</schemalist>
</gconfschemafile>


Then use gconftool-2 to actually create the entries in the gconf registry (Oh, right, disclaimer...).
gconftool-2 --install-schema-file=mts.schemas

After restarting I nautilus started showing thumbnails for these video files.

You need Lucid Lynx. If you have Karmic and don't want to upgrade yet (wise, very wise):

http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/s/shared-mime-info/shared-mime-info_0.71-1ubuntu1.dsc
wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/s/shared-mime-info/shared-mime-info_0.71.orig.tar.gz
wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/s/shared-mime-info/shared-mime-info_0.71-1ubuntu1.diff.gz
sudo apt-get build-dep shared-mime-info
dpkg-source -x shared-mime-info_0.71-1ubuntu1.dsc
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b
sudo dpkg -i *.deb

(you need to change dirs a few times...)

tomcat and eclipse

For the fourth time I have struggled with getting eclipse and tomcat to play along on Ubuntu.

Some tricks:

• install JST containters from WTP updates to get Tomcat server configurations in the server runtimes panel of WTP. Alledgedly it has to be from http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/updates and no other site.
• make sure in /usr/share/tomcat6 you symlink conf to a valid tomcat6 configuration dir. I have it like this "sudo ln -s /var/lib/tomcat6/conf conf", it ends up pointing at /etc/tomcat6/ anyways.
• make sure your project has the Dynamic Web Module Facet installed.
  
• make sure you have webContent/WEB-INF/web.xml pointing at a config of your preference.
• have lots of Zen. Next ubuntu/eclipse update will break everything. Start with fixing your nvidia xorg.conf. Erm, no install the drivers somehow first. No, not from apt, from envy or something or.... grr. Whatever. I got linux coz I wanted to be able to freely muck around with my system. Mucking around I get tons of.
  

Geotagging tools

Like all things linux, it takes some searching and fiddling around. But there are amazing geotagging tools around. I use

• gpsbabel to convert NMEA files to gpx (or any format apparantly)
• exiftool -geotag=FILE pictures exiftool correlate time between the NMEA or gpx or whatever file and geotag the photos.
• GPSDings is a java library that can create kmz files with pictures placed on the map. I'm currently trying to figure out how I used GPSDings googlemaps last time.

Some command lines

exiftool -geotag=/home/fraco/NMEA.log /boellieslug/fotos/20100221_1*

gpsbabel -i NMEA -o gpx,gpxver=1.1 /boellieslug/fotos/20100221_WandelingLaHulpeNMEA.log /boellieslug/fotos/20100221_WandelingLaHulpeNMEA.gpx

java -jar gpsdings.jar exifloc -g /boellieslug/fotos/20100*.gpx -z /boellieslug/fotos/20100212_LaHulpe.kmz -i 1024 800 -y /tmp /boellieslug/fotos/20100221*Hulpen*.jpg

Photo Workflow

Years ago, on windows, I had a pretty sweet picture workflow using pixVue. This little explorer plugin could write IPTC tags to [a batch of] pictures and could rename [a batch of] pictures based on that tag and the date the picture was taken.

Before that I had used picasa for a while, decided I didn't really like it at that point, and then discovered that the [few] tags I had added to my pictures were somewhere in a database and if I changed to another tool I would have to enter them again. Not good.

So basically, I wanted a picture workflow where I can easily tag a batch of pictures, with tags that are attached to the pictures [IPTC, EXIF or XMP]. I also wanted to be able to generate decent filenames from these tags.

PixVue did all of that.
Nautilus does it too.

But you need to customize Nautilus somewhat.

Nautilus Actions

Using Nautilus-Actions, you can really easily extend the nautilus right click context menu. I have following actions:

Some of these actions in more detail:

DigiWf
/usr/bin/digiwf %M

Simple UI to enter description, tags, title etc. for a number of pictures. It uses exiftool in the backend.

https://launchpad.net/digiwf

Exiftool

A script that uses exiftool to rename the pictures based on the XMP metadata. Script is basically a one-liner, but I just couldn't get the quotes right, so I put it in a separate script:

exiftool '-filename<${CreateDate}_${Title}%c.jpg' -d %Y%m%d_%H%M%S "$@"
I use that to batch rename all my tagged pictures to something like "20091018_115032_Planckendael.jpg".

Exiftran

I have a lossless 90 degree rotate, using exiftran:

/usr/bin/exiftran -9i %M

ln

I have a very very simple favorites action, just a bunch of symlinks in one directory, aptly called "favorites":

/bin/ln -s %M /boellieslug/fotos/favorites/

krename

krename always comes in handy to handle videos; of course, if someone knows how to actually embed standardized tags in videos...

gthumb and gimp

other than that, I simply use gthumb for viewing and the gimp for editing.

Nothing here

Strange, I was convinced I had notes about using ubuntu in this blog, but it seems empty.