Tag: ubuntu

Which Linux version to choose for a 9-year old?

My 9-year old daughter is getting her first laptop. But which OS should she get started with?

I have been using various versions of Ubuntu as my main OS for around 5 years now, currently using Ubuntu Studio on my main laptop. This distro is based on XFCE, a very lightweight yet versatile OS. The reason for choosing Ubuntu Studio over the regular XUbuntu was to get a bunch of music apps by default. I haven’t been able to explore these as much as I wanted to, unfortunately, primarily due to everything happening at our new centre (RITMO) and master’s programme (MCT).

Even though I like Ubuntu Studio myself, it is not a distro I would install on my daughter’s machine. Buying a new computer with Windows 10 pre-installed, one could argue that it would be best to leave her with that. This may also help her to be more familiar with the computers they are using at school, which run Windows 7 at the moment. But the question in the store about whether I wanted to buy some antivirus-software with the new laptop, was enough to ensure me that a Linux distro would be a better choice.

I have heard that some people like distros such as Edubuntu for kids, but it does not seem to be maintained? After thinking about it for a little while, I have concluded that it is probably useful for a kid to learn to use a normal OS. If you compare how things were a decade or two ago, most modern-day OSes are comparably easy to use anyways.

Finally I decided to make it simple, and installed the regular Ubuntu distro based on GNOME. It looks “modern”, has large icons, and is fairly easy to navigate due to the streamlining of menus, and so on.

Rotate lots of image on Ubuntu

I often find myself with a bunch of images that are not properly rotated. Many cameras write the rotation information to the EXIF header of the image file, but the file itself is not actually rotated. Some photo editors do this automagically when you import the files, but I prefer to copy files manually to my drive.

I therefore have a little one-liner that can rotate all the files in a folder: 

find . *.jpg -exec jhead -autorot {} \;

It works recursively, and is very quick!

Trim video files using FFmpeg

This is a note to self, and hopefully to others, about how to easily and quickly trim videos without recompressing the file.

I often have long video recordings that I want to split or trim (side note: sometimes people call this “cropping”, but in my world cropping is to cut out parts of the image, that is, a spatial transformation. Splitting and trimming are temporal transformations).

You can split and trim files in most video editing software, but these will typically also recompress the file on export. This reduces the quality of the video, and it also takes a long time. A much better solution is to perform “lossless” trimming, and fortunately there is a way to do this with the wonder-tool FFmpeg. Being a command line utility (available on most platforms) it has a ton of different options, and I never remember these. So here it goes, this is what I use (on Ubuntu) to trim out parts of a long video file:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -ss 01:19:27 -to 02:18:51 -c:v copy -c:a copy output.mp4

This will cut out the section from about 1h19min to 2h18min, and will only take a few seconds to run. If you instead want to specify a fixed duration, you can use:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -ss 00:01:10 -t 00:01:05 -c:v copy -c:a copy output.mp4

This will extract 1min5sec starting from 1min10sec in the file.

Remove standard bookmarks in Nautilus

Yet another note to self on how to fix things in Ubuntu after a fresh install, found at askubuntu, this time to remove the standard bookmarks in the Nautilus file browser. I use a different setup of folders, and don’t really need these unused bookmarks. I wish it could have been easier to just right-click and delete to remove them (like for your own bookmarks), but it turns out to be a bit more tricky.

The default bookmarks are actually built from ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs, and this file is rebuilt on login from /etc/xdg/user-dirs.defaults. So it is necessary to modify both of the files, which may most easily be done with:

nano ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs

sudo nano /etc/xdg/user-dirs.defaults

In the nano editor you should comment out the ones that you don’t want.

And after a login the bookmarks are gone.