Photo editing on Ubuntu... can be done...

These two tools are very impressive... and available for Ubuntu 12.04

1. Rawstudio
2. Noise Ninja (2.2 for Linux)
3. Bibble (now Corel AfterShot Pro ;o(

Rawstudio is a pretty good RAW photo editor. Contrast, exposure etc.  It is blindingly fast at converting RAW to JPG once the editing is done.  I've not used a RAW editor that is so efficient and fast. I really like Phase One but it takes a long time to process the RAW to JPG files.

Noise Ninja is just great and works seamlessly on Windows or Mac.  I've always used the Standalone.  Fortunately, you can still get Noise Ninja for Linux but you have to pick older/alternative downloads.

You can find 5Dmk2 NN Profiles here

Editing, so far, I've only found GIMP.

There are numerous plugins (scripts) for GIMP, but the FX Foundary
Simple resizing etc can be done using GIMP Batch Processing using Davids Batch Processor (DBP) plugin mentioned here.

Another plugin/script for GIMP that is really useful, and frankly, necessary is paste-into-selection (.scm).

Bibble is really fast and works well on Linux/Ubuntu.  Unfortunately, Corel bought it recently, so it will likely die a slow death and be poorly supported. (At the time of writing Bibble supports Canon 5Dmk3 which the current release of RawStudio seems unable to parse the white-balance correctly.  RawStudio developer-version appears to support this change in RAW2 format but I've been unsuccessful in installing/compiling the nightly version of RawStudio on Ubuntu).

Pixel King Flash Tx/Rx

I wanted a middle-of-the-road wireless flash solution.  With the low-end "Chinese dip-switched" systems at the bottom end and the PocketWizards at the top.

http://www.pixelhk.com/proshow.aspx?id=101

In recent years there are many more middle-of-the-road vendors.  So I did some research and in the end went for the Pixel King Canon wireless triggers.

The ebay, amazon etc descriptions of how they work and their compatibility seem appropriately vague and unclear.  Once received, the printed manual is equally impressively unclear.

So I set about configuring them and seeing what can be done without reading the manual.

I have a 5Dmk2 with the latest firmware, 2x 580EX and 1x 580EXII and an Opus Flash.

Points to note so far:

• When the Pixel King says it is compatible with 580EX, it means it can trigger it.  The Pixel King only supports ETTL2 which is available on 580EXII.
• There is a fair amount of chatter between Rx and Tx units whenever you focus the camera.  Some adjustments on the flash can occur... mode, zoom etc.
• ETTL2 performance seems very marginal.
• Basic wireless trigger works fine.
• Opus Flash works well with a remote trigger and doesn't work very well with light sensor.

The most annoying thing BY FAR is the Canon 5Dmk2 "External Flash" menu system which must be used to control the flashes.  Different lines and features enable and disable seemingly at random.  Some make sense, some change, then bounce back to the original setting.  Titles of each External Flash setting sort of make sense but there are numerous key presses to change anything.

If/When I get a second 580EXII I will hope the A:B ratio logic works.  This was ultimately what I was hoping to use but it seems 580EX will not work with ETTL2 and Pixel Kings.  At least for now, presumably there may be a firmware upgrade available.

Which brings me on to the Windows firmware upgrade software and software release information on the website... OMG.  No idea if I upgraded the firmware.

Bottom line: expensive wireless flash triggers (~US$380 for 3 Rx and 1 Tx).  Either go cheap or go PocketWizard.

Bottom line 2: I've spent more time using the in-camera flash menu which quite frankly is very poor and often resets to default settings.  The reset seems to occur at the same time the Pixel King units reboot or freeze.  They seem to freeze as often as 1:3 times.  They also seem to confuse and upset the 580EX flashes periodically causing them to strobe.

Navfree GPS

This application is pretty good, considering its free, and seems to be actively improved upon as we speak.

Presently you may need a data-connection to search for addresses, however the map data is offline, stored on the phone.  For different countries/regions search facilities while offline are cropping up with updates to the app.

Google Market: Navfree GPS

So far, initial impressions are that the GPS on the phone is not that stable so the map jumps around a lot, especially when stationary.  In comparison to say the Garmin Nuvi 250 or 320, the maps are similar but the routing and stability of position is not as consistent.

Visually, the maps look great and there is a nice feature where you can fix map errors.  This feeds into the openstreet foundation map data-set.

ZBOX HD ID33 with bluray

ZBOX HD ID33 with bluray

http://www.zotacusa.com/zbox-hd-id33-blu-ray.html

Twice the price of previous Zbox unit I have, but this came with 250Gb HDD, 2Gb RAM and a bluray/DVD drive.  (Not having a drive on the Zbox is problematic when trying to install Ubuntu).

Successfully installed Ubuntu 12.04, MythTV and XBMC on this unit.
HDMI sound worked out of the box with MythTV.
Not been as lucky with XBMC... so far had to resort to using the stereo analogue connection.

I've not spent much time tweaking the video, Next Gen ION seems to be configured well enough to only suffer minor tearing and jitters.  I have yet to tweak the X11 config to turn off Composite to see if the tearing disappears... as with the other system, this is the typical solution.

Very useful command to remove all unwanted kernels

dpkg -l linux-* | awk '/^ii/{ print $2}' | grep -v -e `uname -r | cut -f1,2 -d"-"` | grep -e [0-9] | xargs sudo apt-get -y purge

mythtv

In pursuit of the perfect working mythtv frontend HDTV experience...

(Updated Apr 2012 - migration to MythTV0.25 on U11.04)

Summary

This blog entry is supposed to document useful information and the not-so-obvious trials and tribulations of trying to get MythTV to work with Ubuntu 10.10 on Zotac Zbox.  Since time has passed, I found myself intrigued by newer editions of XBMC and MythTV both of which were eventually unsupported on U10.10.  So I took the plunge and migrated to U11.04.  (U12.04 is freshly out but I didn't want to push my luck, specifically around NVIDIA chipset/driver support... it turned out I was lucky this time and everything upgraded fairly seamlessly.)

So, these notes are in part written down in case I have to repeat the exercise and in part to offer some help/insight into the process.

Myth 0.24+fixes circa Feb2011 - due to hardware and software limitations on Zotac/NVIDIA chipset I found myself downloading and manually compiling/installing MythTV 0.24 on a 2.6.36 kernel.  More information here.

Myth 0.25 circa April 2012 - I took the plunge and upgraded using the Ubuntu Upgrade Manager.  Usually this is an utter disaster.  However, from U10.10 to U11.04 things were 'fairly' smooth. I chose to upgrade a perfectly working system as other frontend laptops/netbooks were running newer Ubuntu releases for hardware support and by default ran MythTV 0.25 frontends.

Currently Working Frontend System using MythTV 0.25

• Ubuntu 11.04 with 2.6.38-14 kernel
• NVIDIA 260.41.06
• MythTV 0.25 ppa installed via Ubuntu apt-get
• Zotac System ZBOX HD-ND02 Atom 330 (IONv1) with single 2Gb DDR3 RAM. (Two 1Gbs DIMMs are actually recommended for performance using this chipset.)
• HDMI connected to a Panasonic TYFB8HM Adapter for TH-50PH9UK 50" plasma screen at resolution 1360x768 (aka 768p or 1080i) for "best" picture quality instead of full HD resolution.
• No LIRC remote control, using smart-phone apps and/or keyboard

Other frontend systems include:

•  Android 4.0 Nexus Phone using MythFrontend, 
• Lenovo T420 laptop U12.04.
• Zbox HD-ID33 Bluray (ION2) and U12.04

Backend System

• Dual-core 4200 AMD based desktop in an Antec case with 3Tb of disk space
• Hauppauge HVR 1800 capture card
• Channel Master CM 7778 Titan2 VHF/UHF Preamplifier with Power Supply (CM7778) ~$90
• Channel Master CM 4221HD 4-bay HDTV/UHF Antenna (CM4221HD) ~$80.
• DLINK gigabit hub connected to the main frontend system.  Typically ~2.6MB/s for a single HDTV channel.
• Linksys WRT54GL running Tomato for wireless clients utilising ~2MB/s per channel with occasional drops to 1.5MB/s.

It is easy to make your own bow-tie antennas.  I originally made a bow-tie and a hoverman in testing but decided that it was cheaper/easier/better-built to buy a double-bow-tie with reflector.  It also had all the mounting accessories.

The CM7778 amplifier is reportedly better than the CM7777 when there is a range of signal strengths for different channels and one is very strong. They are also very well built.

What is there to Watch?
tvfool.com has a utility that can show you the nearest transmitter directions and channel line-ups with suggestion antenna types/placements.

As of Sept 1st 2011 when in Canada the analogue transmitters were switched to digital there are about eight channels now available.  On my system, about four are watchable due to signal strength and only two actually interesting. ;o) EIT has gone for about 4 out of 8 of them including CBOT again and CBC replied to me saying they have had a lot of problems and do not plan to support EIT on the CBOT channel.


Ubuntu upgrade from 10.10 to 11.04

I leave the Myth 0.24 notes up here as some were related to compiling and installing MythTV while other notes are related to NVIDIA, VDPAU and MythTV which I did not seem to have to do when migrating to U11.04 and MythTV 0.25.

The Ubuntu upgrade did require me to:

• Reset the MythTV Playback profile to VDPAU Normal (I have not needed to tweak Temporal/Advanced etc) but I am still running the system in 720p over HDMI and suspect the same video/playback issues remain if I were to try 1080p.  (See original installation notes)
• On the first few logins I found I had no Desktop menu bars.  I found (online) a suggestion to create a launcher for terminal, then issue sudo killall Xorg.  This dumps you back out at the login where you can select "Ubuntu Classic".  As usually  in a Ubuntu upgrade the Unity crap fails to install properly.  Now I am back to the non-Unity (classic) desktop environment.

All MythTV settings were intact and I could watch tv with no problem.

I did notice the NVIDIA driver migrated from 260.19.06 to 260.41.06.  I have no idea what the difference is but very surprised it successfully upgraded with no loss of desktop.

Original installation notes can be found in this post.