FOSSwire

A lightweight Linux distribution often seems to require making sacrifices — using a UI which many users would find unfamiliar and using software which is heavily cut down in functionality.

WattOS is a really interesting lightweight Linux distribution that is based on Ubuntu 10.04 (as of WattOS R2). As the name might suggest, it is also focused on low power usage and is said to work well with older and less powerful hardware.

At the same time, though, it runs familiar software, like Firefox, Empathy for instant messaging and has a friendly user interface. It uses Openbox and LXDE to form the desktop environment, and while many Linux users may not have even heard those names, the combination works brilliantly — keeping the software lightweight and super speedy, but without behaving oddly or describing things in an unusual way. In short, a non-technical user certainly won’t have a problem with the way the desktop works if they have used full-fat Ubuntu before.

While older machines might struggle to run the latest and greatest Firefox 3.6, its inclusion in WattOS, again, ensures good compatibility with websites. The newest R2 release also includes the Microsoft TTF fonts package and Adobe Flash Player 10.1 out of the box, so you don’t need to do any configuration to have a usable, modern web browser where websites behave as expected and render as intended.

In other areas, the developers have rightly steered away from the traditional productivity choice of OpenOffice.org to offer Abiword for word processing and Gnumeric for spreadsheet tasks. There is also RhythmBox, the Totem Movie Player, as well as microblogging client Gwibber and the Transmission BitTorrent application, as well as a few other utility applications that can be found in Ubuntu. Again, though, if you need or want anything more heavy duty, or want something that is not offered, you have the flexibility of the entire Ubuntu software catalogue at your disposal.

So, the interface is good and it has great software, but how does it actually run?

If you have a fast machine, very quickly, and if you have a slower machine, probably with acceptable performance, depending on the hardware (you can see what success others are having with older hardware on their forums). Even in Live CD mode, things are snappy, as you would expect; the only really significant risk of slowdowns being when running Firefox. It’s a sensible tradeoff in order to have a modern browser, but, again, it is the one area that might present issues on those older computers.

The other focus of WattOS is, of course, low power consumption. The distribution ships with its own power management software. Unfortunately, it needs a little bit of manual configuration post-install to work (you have to add the user to the powermanagement group) and the configuration interface doesn’t have the same feel of simplicity as the rest of the OS. I personally don’t have the right hardware to be able to really test it, but it does offer Auto and Manual power management modes and Performance and Power Saving settings. How much difference it would make to battery life, then, is something that would be difficult for me to comment on.

What strikes me most about WattOS is it seems to combine the best of both worlds — it is genuinely fast and lightweight and supports older hardware, but comes without the significant compromises in functionality and in ease of use that often accompany other cut-down distros. This makes it an excellent operating system choice for many applications — a simple web browsing box for beginner computer users, a way to give a new lease of life to older hardware, a netbook OS and even in a kiosk or thin client situation. In many cases, it would even work well just as a live CD, even without the hassle of installing it alongside anything else.

If you are looking for a lightweight Linux, WattOS is most definitely worth a look. You can download the new R2 release from planetwatt.com.

Do you have experience with lightweight Linux distributions? What do you think of WattOS? Have your say in the comments.

Desktop Linux isn’t necessarily the first platform you’d think of going to for video editing. Despite that, there are several great projects that offer video editing functionality; things like PiTiVi, Cinelerra and Kino to name just a few.

Jonathan Thomas wasn’t satisfied with the existing video editing solutions on Linux, however. They weren’t easy enough to use, powerful or stable enough. Enter OpenShot, Jonathan’s solution.

Let me say right up front — the project is in a relatively early stage of development. There are plenty of things not yet completed or that don’t work quite right just yet. But I’ve had a brief play with OpenShot, and I am really quite impressed.

The interface will look familiar if you’ve used any other timeline-based video editing package before. You have a project bin on the left, a preview monitor on the right and the timeline at the bottom, where you arrange the clips in sequence to make your movie.

You can’t capture clips directly from a video camera at the moment, but if you are able to get video captured via another source, you then just import the video into OpenShot. I had some old PAL DV footage lying around. I just went to File > Import Files and selected the files.

Right away the clips just appeared in the Project Files area. It just, sort of, worked — I didn’t have to wait any time for the clips to be processed or for any conversion to take place. Now I did only import three clips of fairly short length, but it really was an easy, slick process.

You can then drag the clips to the timeline and arrange them. You can use the Razor tool to slice the in and out points of a clip or split a clip into two and rearrange it. It all really works in a very friendly, familiar way if you’ve ever done anything like this anywhere else.

The only thing that did throw me off with the timeline is the fact that the clips don’t seem to 'snap’ to the edges of other clips, for example, so at times it feels quite difficult to line clips up one after another without having black space in the video between them. Having a satisfying 'snap’ feel to the timeline where appropriate would really enhance it.

When you’re done, you can export the finished sequence into an array of formats.

Again, I’m going to admit to being lazy. I just accepted the default settings and exported — and it just worked, again. It is somewhat of a complicated dialogue box if you’re not into video codecs and standards and all of that, but you don’t necessarily need to spend time fiddling with it — the default settings will produce something useful (provided you can play back the codecs in your favourite media player).

There are issues with this project. I found the interface a bit — blue — and not really to my tastes. Also, the icons feel a little bit indistinct and unclear. It’s quite difficult to see quickly what each icon does and I did find myself taking a few minutes to get to grips with which button was which because of that.

Some keyboard shortcuts I’d expect to work, such as the Delete key to delete a highlighted clip in the timeline, spacebar to toggle pause/play in both the timeline and the clip preview in Project Files, to not yet be functional.

I want to stress again that this is an early in-development project. Despite that, it’s the most user friendly, simple video editing program I’ve used on the Linux platform. It just seems to have the attitude of a program that follows conventions, is really simple and just plain makes sense.

There are a lot of features more demanding users may expect before it can be accepted perhaps by a more seasoned video editing audience, but OpenShot shows promise and real potential to be the best home-orientated video editing solution on Linux.

You can download some pre-built packages for Ubuntu as well as source code from the OpenShot Downloads page. If you’re into video editing with Linux, give this a try.

We all like to learn a little bit about our computers and how they stack up against others. Even if not, the information might be valuable to others trying to diagnose a problem with your machine. There are many ways to discover information about your hardware in Linux, but none of them have come close to the ease-of-use of HardInfo (install).

HardInfo takes everything it can find about your system and presents it in an organized fashion. There’s no need to dig through the output of lspci or run a few commands to find out some network statistics; it’s all right there in front of you.

One key feature that makes HardInfo valuable is its ability to quickly generate a system report. This can be very useful to bug triagers, developers, or your laptop’s eBay listing.

Finally, HardInfo is a great tool to use to rank your system against other machines with various benchmarks, which can tell you if your machine is running at full speed or if something is going terribly wrong. These are also included in the generated reports.

Overall: great tool, easy to use, useful for everyone. Give it a try.