Tag: ubuntu

Installing Ubuntu on a HP Pavilion laptop

So I decided to install Ubuntu on my daughter’s new laptop, more specifically an HP Pavilion. The choice of this particular laptop was because it looked nice, and had good specs for the money. It was first after the purchase I read all the complaints people have about the weird UEFI implementation on HP laptops. So I started the install process with some worries.

Reading on various forums, people seemed to have been doing all sorts of strange things to be able to install Ubuntu on HP laptops, including modifying the UEFI setup, changing the BIOS, and so on. I recall that on my Lenovo laptop I had to work quite a bit to turn off all the fancy auto-Windows-stuff.

I am not sure if HP has changed something recently or not, but the final procedure was super-easy: I just hit the F9 button on startup and got a regular “old-school” boot selector. Here I chose the USB drive, and the Ubuntu installer fired up.

I have installed Linux (primarily various Ubuntu versions) on several laptops over the years, and it is very seldom that I get into problems with drivers. Also this time, things went smoothly; everything worked perfectly right after the install. I think it is crucial to continue repeating this message because I still hear people saying that it is tricky to get Ubuntu to play with different hardware. True, there used to be driver issues some years ago, but I haven’t experienced that in five years or so.

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!

Sort images based on direction (portrait/landscape)

I have lots and lots of photos on my computer (and servers!). Sometimes I have a pile of photos of which I want to find only the ones that are in portrait or landscape mode. This can be done manually for a few images, but browsing through thousands of them is more tricky. Then I often tend to use a nifty little shell script that I found here. It effectively sorts all images into two folders automagically.

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 graphical 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. Fortunately, there is a way to do this with the wonderful command-line utility FFmpeg. It is available for most platforms and has a ton of different options. So to remember how it is done, here is a simple one-liner:

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 (after the -ss command) to 2h18min (after the -to command). The copy parts of the command are meant to copy both the original audio and video content without recompressing. This means that the above command only takes a few seconds to run.

You may instead want to specify a fixed duration to extract, in which case 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 (using the -t flag) starting from 1min10sec (the -ss flag) in the file. Happy trimming!