FOSSwire

For quite a while now, there has never quite been an application that edits video in any standardized way. For example, Avidemux only works well with AVI files. Diva Kino only edits digital video from cameras. With all of these frameworks for video out there, where has that one good editor been?

At PiTiVi, that's where. PiTiVi is a GStreamer/GNonLin based editor, meaning that if you can play a GStreamer format, you can edit it. That's quite a lot of formats. We've been following the PiTiVi project for a few months now, and it is probably one of the most promising ones available.

At the beginning of the summer, which is basically the latest release, all PiTiVi can do is add clips and audio to a scene and render them. Not very useful, nor very stable.

But, it was a part of Google's Summer of Code. Someone had signed up for the project and is currently developing in a separate branch. Day by day, the editor was updated. Upcoming features include clip editing and even effects. Now, the SOC branch is able to edit clips and export using an advanced timeline, with less crashes.

FOSSwire editors, myself included, are all pretty excited for PiTiVi. I went as far as compiling my own copies of GStreamer for use with the development branch. It is going to be one of the popular editors everybody has a year from now (you heard it here first!). I'd say to go out and checkout the SOC branch, but you'll need at least two hours of free time to get all of the libraries and GStreamer versions needed. Keep checking the progress of it however as new releases are made available.

PiTiVi will definitely play a role in things later this year. Keep checking back to see what we mean.

Since the days of early Unix, systems have always had different methods of starting up, shutting down, and managing jobs. Throughout the development of Linux distributions, many saw the usage of System V init, the most common starting system, to be suitable. Distributions have a system that one way or another is compatible with this System V initialization.

Then came the time when distributions began to split apart more and more. Slackware Linux now uses a BSD-style init system, and Gentoo uses completely its own. Writing a cross-distribution initialization script now is not probable nor feasible.

Fast forward to mid 2006: Canonical software saw the release of Ubuntu 6.06, the most popular distribution at its time. But, it had still used the somewhat venerable System V Init process that had still not been changed. Canonical software employee Scott James Remnant had began to test out a new startup system based on System V Init. He called it "upstart," and the system gradually began to make its way into Ubuntu 6.10.

This new system had promised to be a replacement for the System V init process. Currently, it is based off of it, so some initialization scripts may still be compatible. It also promises to be a complete replacement for cron, atd, among other various processes while still trying to stay backwards-compatible.

While replacing cron and atd, for example, Upstart will add new features to it. You will be able to start events and applications a certain time after another. For example, I could have an IRC chat bot start up 5 minutes after Apache does. This level of order in Upstart should help bring organization to many distros.

Ubuntu 7.04 has had a newer revision of Upstart since then, mostly making changes to the boot process. Now, the plan for Ubuntu 7.10 is to have every event handled with Upstart. While we are not 100% sure it will make it into the release, it has a very good chance of it. This means that the Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) will have a much improved starting system, all the way down to core applications.

Other distributions are gradually beginning to adopt Upstart. Since it is still a very experimental process, we won't see too many distributions using it yet, but within a few years you should see many Linux systems running it. Debian currently has a testing version in their experimental systems, and Frugalware plans to integrate it into their 0.7 release.

Could this be the beginning of a startup system where all distributions are compatible with one another? Only time will tell.

In my last post, I noted that the major upgrade to Feisty as of Tribe 1 was The Gimp. Now it's time to see what has changed in the latest installment, which will be released under the name Gimp 2.4.

The major change for this release seems to be a big usability overhaul. New defaults are now in place that make the Gimp look a little bit like Photoshop, but still has many features that make it unique.

As you can see from the picture above, Gimp has some major and minor tweaks to the default interface. First is the inclusion of a Tango-style icon theme. You now get to finally have icons that match your desktop.

A minor, but still important change, is the inclusion of a color picker in the default layout. This color picker is actually in Gimp 2.2, but it is relatively hidden in dialog menus.

The color picker has been removed from the main tool window on the left and everything color-related is now here.

Two notable features were shown at a Gimp event a few years ago, and only now are they starting to appear: Spot Healing and Foreground Select.

Spot healing is just like the tool in Photoshop. You define a place to "heal" from, then you click on the spots you want to patch up.

In the picture above, I removed the blue blob shown in the first screenshot of this post, only using the Healing tool.

Another feature from Photoshop that was in the Gimp first (but never went public until this release) is the foreground select. You simply doodle on a person or texture you want to select, and it will make a best guess at selecting the object. It still needs a little bit of work, but it works fairly well.

This is one of the Gimp updates that I definitely will be looking forward to as development progresses. It is now becoming more and more "usable."