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How To Enhance My Linux Environment.


Symbolic

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Hi,

I have been using Linux for 7-8 months... it is usually my computer at Uni... And I am impressed with Linux...

I am graduating and I plan to keep my Linux workflow and run Houdini / Nuke on my Linux system.

So I have installed Ubuntu 7.04 on my MacBook Pro... it runs great... Houdini runs perfect... The performance is ok...

I am normally a Mac OSX user.

The system at Uni, yes it was Linux... but we were not allowed to change anything... basically it was managed by the System Admins... as one would expect...

So now I will be my own System Admin, which is quite dangerous...

The question is... what are the small tools that are good for Linux... that make life easy and any workflow comfortable...

Things like movie players (VLC? MPlayer?), MPEG2, MPEG1 etc encoders... RAR, ZIP, TAR tools etc... anything that you find cool in your own Linux environment....

Any tips... and ideas will be a great help...

And I plan to learn Phyton... Any good reason? :) Thanks.

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The key here is to go ahead and just play with everything. :) The best way to find your own workflow is to experience the benefits and hurdles of personalizing your system first-hand. Since you're using a pretty mainstream distro with a great package manager take some time to dig around in synaptic and find out what things do and how you might use them...and quickly uninstall the ones you don't like much so you don't forget about it later and suffer from a bloated system.

It's a really good idea to be comfortable with writing shell scripts, even if they are really basic. I prefer bash personally, but any shell is good. It's a great skill to have for project directory management and creation especially.

Not too long ago on the mailing list someone pointed out the program 'screen' to me. That is a really cool utility! It's not clear at first how to use it, and maybe you'll never need it, but it's still cool, and may come in handy if you ever remote into your machine for stuff.

Python is useful outside of Houdini too, so learn at least the basics.

I prefer VLC, but use mplayer as well because they are better at different things. The mplayer firefox plugin is nicer than the vlc plugin too. But neither browser plug-in works as well as the quicktime plug-in installed with cross-over office (or whatever wine version you may use). When it comes to ecoding video I've sucked it up and settled on using Blender's sequence editor. It's still not 100% so if you wanted to run quicktime pro under wine I hear good things.

untar, 7z weren't installed on my system by default, but they are handy. lha is another archiver that I've had to use a couple of times.

gkrellm is still the only system monitor I will use. I have it running all the time showing both cpu cores, my ram and swap, disk write times, network load, user and proc count, uptime, diskspace per mount, time and date, and I enjoy the Egan theme. On your laptop it should also be able to show you your video and cpu tempreture which is gerroovy.

Other than that I'd say just rock out and don't be afraid to screw things up! It's the best way to learn. :)

Cheers!

_chip

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Hi photex,

Thanks for your help... I will start trying things that you have suggested... I hope i will get more and more comfortable with my Linux in a short time :)

...i know it takes time...

And sorry for the late reply... But I just run into that annoying WACOM INTUOS3 problem... where I could not get my wacom to work under Linux... Which is very strange...

My friend has a MacBook PRO, 17inch, the last generation with an NVIDIA display adapter on it... we both installed Ubuntu 7.04 at the same time...

I also have a MacBook PRO, 17inch... just an older generation... those with the ATI X1600 display adapter... and we plugin my Wacom Intuos 3 to his computer and it runs under Ubuntu with out any problems... no extra drivers nothing... and it just does not run for me...

I have tried everything... days and nights trying different stuff that I see on the forums... things that I really do not understand... and it just does not work...

IT DRIVES ME CRAZY!

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