FOSSwire

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.

Backing up generally isn’t a fun activity, but always proves to be worth it when that disaster you are not expecting happens.

Building a backup strategy can be a relatively complex process as well. What exactly should you back up, what format do you use, where do you store the backups? It can quickly become a task that demands quite a lot of technical expertise without the help of a program to make things relatively easy.

Back in Time is a solution for Linux, somewhat modelled on Apple’s Time Machine backup system for Mac OS X Leopard, but it also inspired by a few other Linux backup tools.

It has a nice GUI interface, supports automatic backups at time schedules you specify and keeps multiple snapshots of the whole backup, while only backing up the changed files each time. So, what is it like to actually use?

For the purposes of this review, I’ll be looking at the GNOME interface version, but much of this should follow the same for the KDE interface as well.

Setting Up

When you first launch the program, you are presented with the settings window. You do have to set up a location to back up to and which folders to include in the backup (the Include tab).

This does require you to have spent some time thinking about what you need to have backed up first, and the multiple tabs across the Settings window could be a bit intimidating for the new user.

If you are confident with what you want to set up, however, you can quickly set the base directory for your backups (which is probably on an external disk somewhere), the files you want to include in the backup and any advanced settings if you want.

It would be nice to have a couple of preset backup profiles for people who really just want to click one button and have their system backed up. For example, a preset which backs up your home directory to an external disk would be nice to have in a one-click configuration.

Despite the complexity of the settings window for new users, it is really quick and easy to get started.

Running a Backup

Supposedly the application will backup on an automatic basis, based on the schedule you set earlier. I have to admit, I don’t leave my backup drive plugged in all the time, nor do I have Back in Time open all the time, so I haven’t actually tried this out.

Doing a backup manually is a really easy process. In the Back in Time interface, you can simply press the large Backup Now button and it gets to work making a new snapshot.

Back in Time uses rsync underneath to backup only the files that have changed, but you don’t really need to care how it works. You press the button, it works out which files have changed, and makes a new snapshot on your backup disk. It really is effortlessly simple and I like it.

Restoring Files

What I really love is that Back in Time’s snapshots work just like a normal hierarchy of folders on your backup disk. Each snapshot appears just like a folder containing all the files you have chosen to backup, so even if you want to restore a file on another machine where you don’t have Back in Time, you just copy a file across. Again, it just works. (It uses hard links, so it only uses the minimum space

Of course, Back in Time allows you to restore from within the Back in Time interface, it is again really easy to do. All of your snapshots are listed across the left hand side and you can pick one, browse through the file system and bring a file back by clicking the Restore button.

Conclusion

Having played with this for a while, I’m really impressed. There are areas, particularly initial setup, that could be made a little bit easier for new users.

Apart from that, this is a really robust and effortlessly simple way to back up your home folder, for example. Its snapshot functionality works really well, meaning you can have as much or as little backward history of your system as you need, while also keeping a copy of the whole system.

I love the fact that it requires very little effort on my part to update my backup – I just plug in the drive, launch the app and click Backup Now.

I also find it very reassuring that the files aren’t in a weird format which has to be decompressed or manipulated by a program; they’re just files sitting there on the disk that I can access.

I’ve found Back in Time to be really useful as a backup solution for my home directory on this machine. It’s not powerful enough perhaps for some requirements, but if you are using Linux as an everyday desktop machine and have some files you need to get backed up, give Back in Time a try.

Welcome back to Part 2 of this series - pitting GNOME's Evolution Personal Information Manager (PIM) suite against KDE's Kontact.

If you haven't read Part 1, please take the time to do so, as I'll be making quite a few comparisons between Evolution, covered there, and Kontact.

Now, we continue with KDE's Kontact.

Kontact

Interface

Kontact's interface has some similarities with that of Evolution. One of the most striking differences is the fact that in many areas there are three sidebars.

On the far left you have a sidebar for switching between the different sub-applications - Mail, Contacts and the like, and then in Mail, you'll have another sidebar for your mailboxes and then a main area split into a message list and the preview pane.

The addition of this triple-vertical-pane approach for me makes the interface a lot more cluttered and less easy to pick up straight away.

Certainly, though, it feels less like an absolute copy of Outlook than Evolution; it feels like an application developed for KDE, rather than a clone of something else that is just ported over. Where Evolution feels a bit like a GNOME slant on a Windows app, Kontact really does feel very much an integral part of KDE.

It's worth mentioning as well that Kontact is quite literally, a collection of distinct KDE apps that are simply stitched together into a single application. Unlike Evolution, it is possible to launch each component, or 'part' in KDE terminology, as a separate application on your desktop.

Email

One thing that really bugs me about the KMail part of Kontact is the fact that by default, it only shows you messages in plain text view.

I fully appreciate why you'd want to send email as plain text and why you might prefer reading email as plain text, but the fact that it is so incredibly difficult to read an HTML-formatted message out of the box is infuriating.

In terms of searching, KMail sadly lacks an advanced full text message search as far as I can see. The toolbar-based search works fine, though, if you only need to search message subject or sender.

Calendaring and Sharing

The Calendar module is similar to Evolution's, although it does sport the three-pane layout which I don't like. You can share events with others through the context menu; starting a new message with an attached .ics of the event. This works more smoothly than Evolution - and you can actually type a message in the body!

Interestingly, this time I experienced a crash importing an ICS file into an existing calendar, but I had no problem making a new calendar with my exported events from Google Calendar. In addition, the Google Calendar specific CalDAV support didn't work either.

Extra Features

I'm going to diverge from my self-imposed structure for just a moment here. One of the best features of Kontact is that it is relatively easy to bolt a new KPart into the application. I particularly am impressed with the Feeds module; a example of this - taking the standalone Akregator application for KDE and putting it into a Kontact.

Having support for RSS news feeds in an application like this I think is an excellent idea, allowing you hopefully to bring together all of the information you care about into a single applciation.

There are also several other modules available that Evolution lacks, including a Journal and support for Usenet newsgroups.

Integration

Within the suite itself, Kontact has a similar level of integration to Evolution. You can obviously send a calendar event in Mail, access your Contacts from any part of the app and so on.

A nice feature which increases the utility of the suite is that any alarms you have set for events in your calendar can erm... go off even if the application is closed. The Calendar - and therefore alarms - part of Kontact is handled by KOrganiser, which runs a daemon which sounds the alarm even without needing Kontact open.

Kontact also feels very much like a first-class citizen on the KDE desktop. It behaves like other KDE applications do and brings a lot of functionality together to try and become the information hub of your KDE desktop.

Conclusion

So regardless of their desktop environment, which of these suites solves this PIM problem better? Of course, a lot of this is going to come down to personal opinion.

I think mine is clear, however. Despite being a KDE user for most of my time on Linux, I have found that I do prefer Evolution.

Yes, yes, I don't like how it feels very much like an Outlook clone, but the interface is just a whole lot cleaner than Kontact. KDE's philosophy of giving the user endless configurability makes Kontact's interface (and particularly its configuration) very cluttered and confusing unless you are already familiar with it.

The feed reader functionality in Kontact is excellent, however, and adding this into a single 'information dashboard' I think could be extremely useful. Unfortunately, this doesn't make up for the fact that the rest of the Kontact interface feels too complex and sometimes a little bit... well... old-fashioned (plain text email? I agree, but I do need to read HTML mail sometimes).

If you are a die-hard KDE user and you are very familiar with the way that KDE interfaces tend to work, you may well find Kontact to be the better choice. Particularly if you have already put a lot of investment into KDE applications, the integration of them into a single suite is very useful and an admirable achievement.

For me, though, Evolution wins this PIM battle. It might be a bit Outlook-alike (if you'll excuse the pun), but it just... feels better.

Not that I'll be switching to it. Despite writing this article and having had a good play with both, I actually still prefer keeping applications of this nature separate, so I'll be continuing to use Thunderbird for my IMAP email when I'm on Linux (under KDE, I might add).