If you are looking to do some video conversion in Ubuntu check out this post from Tombuntu.

If you’re an Ubuntu user, I would suggest visiting Tombuntu on a regular basis for some great insight and information on the many various programs available for use.

Neal

Last week my sister-in-law asked me how to get the photos that she had in her Kodak software (came with camera) and photos she had on a CD, all in one place on her laptop so that she could show them as a slide show on a projector. I gave her a couple of pointers on where to look for the photos and how to move them and before long my brother-in-law had everything working fine in Picasa. My sister-in-law later commented on how easy it was to use Picasa and that they were going to start using it for all there photos and stop using the Kodak software that came with their camera.

This all made me realize that even though there are a number of good photo organizers available today not everybody is aware of them. Those of us who have been using these applications for a number of years forget that a lot of people have never heard of them. So in what I hope will be the first of many “Free Three” posts, here are my favorite Free Three: Photo Organizers.

1) Picasa

For the basic family photo taker nothing beats Picasa. The free application from Google does everything most users would want and it does it well. Check it out: Picasa

Pros:
- Allows users place a single photo in multiple albums without creating copies. This is a really nice feature when you want to create an album of your child’s first year and an album of Christmas photos with out having to create copies of all your images.
- Provide a good mix of basic photo fixes (Crop, Red eye removal, straighten and color adjustments)
- Allows users to upload their albums to Picasa Web Albums for free. Now you can not only create that Christmas album, but you can place it online too.

Cons:
- Relies primarily on a folder structure to organize your photos. Tagging is available through the Keywords function, but is not well intergrated into the user interface.
- Picasa does not protect your original photo when you edit it. Many other applications will create a second version of your photo and not alter the original.
- Not available for Macs

2) F-Spot

Is a Linux based tool for the GNOME desktop. F-spot comes standard with many Linux distributions, including Ubuntu. You can also download it here.

Pros:
- Provides great organization of photos using both a time line and tagging.
- Provides an excellent set of editing tools (Red eye removal, straighten, crop, color adjustments) while protecting your original photo
- Provides the ability to export photos to Picasa Web Ablums, Flickr, 23hq and more

Cons:
- Slide show function does not seem to let you select photos to show. Currently, I can only show all of my 5000+ photos or none. (If you know of a way to fix this please post it in the comments.)
- Linux Only application (I see this as a plus, but that’s just me)

3) Adobe Photoshop Album Stater Edition

This is Adobes very entry level application. The whole purpose is to get you hooked so that you spend some money and upgrade. None the less the application provide a great feature set. Adobe does sort of hide this application but you can find it here.

Pros:
- Good organizer with both a time line and tagging features
- Provides basic photo fixes (Red eye removal, crop, auto color adjustments) while protecting your original image.
- Provides users access to a number of additional for pay services (CD ordering, Print Orders, etc…)

Cons:
- No way to upload photos to anything other than Kodak’s photo site.
- Windows only application (No Mac or Linux versions)

As you can tell the feature set is pretty much the same for all of these applications. If you have a lot of photos and use tagging then F-spot or Adobe may be the way to go. If you already use a folder structure to organize your photos then Picasa will be easy to slide into.

Neal

Since the the release of Ubuntu 8.04 a couple of weeks ago there has been a number of reviews done to show what is good or bad about Ubuntu. Reviews certainly have their place and we all like to know what is going to work and what we will have to tweak. However, I thought that perhaps a better question to asked is who should be using Ubuntu?

So after some serious thought, here is my list of 5 types of users that should be using Ubuntu.

1) The Basic Home Users

These are those people who do nothing more than turn on their computers, open their internet browsers and check email, surf the internet, listen to music and maybe balance the checkbook. These basic users don’t do much that is resource intensive. The most advanced of these users may edit some photos and synchronize their music with their music player of choice.

Why should they use Ubuntu? It is simple, secure and allows them to do everything they need and want to. These basic users don’t want to think about viruses or spy-ware. They want to check their email, read the news and listen to music. Ubuntu allows you to do that with almost no effort. Ubuntu provides a simple interface and the secure Firefox browser. Linux by nature is generally considered (and rightfully so) more secure than most of its competitors. So that means no annual fee for virus protections and virtually no spy-ware risk.

2) The SOHO Users

The Small Office Home Office crowd is really a perfect fit for Ubuntu. This user group generally needs a stable, easy to use, low cost solution to computing. They are focusing on their work and they don’t want to wast time trying to keep their hardware and software up to date with each other. These users tend to use the internet and business applications to get their work done so that they can enjoy the fact that they are not corporate drones or at least they have found a way to escape the daily trip to the office.

Why should they use Ubuntu? In addition to being simple and secure, Ubuntu is stable and free! A lot of people still think that Linux is a do it yourself operations system, but that is just not the case anymore. Ubuntu and most other major Linux distributions install with relative ease and once they are going you can pretty much forget about them. Since moving to Linux last sumer I have found that the number of restarts I have had to perform is a fraction of what it was using Windows. Ubuntu (as well as other distros that I’ve played with), just doesn’t seem to have the stability issues I dealt with in Windows. Ubuntu also offers a wide variety of free business applications. From the OpenOffice.org office suite, to project management and accounting programs, Ubuntu offers it all.

3) The Cost Conscious User

Let’s face it the economy isn’t exactly firing on all cylinders right now. For those that are looking to save a few bucks, Windows is not going to be your best friend. A new copy of Vista will run you between $200 and $300. If you need to upgrade you computer it will obviously be more. The other option is to buy a new PC with Vista pre-installed but that will be even more expensive.

Why should they use Ubuntu? Well to start with its FREE! Just download and install, no dollar cost at all. Plus almost all the software that will run on Ubuntu is FREE. While the free thing is nice, I think the bigger thing might be that Ubuntu requires far less resources to run than many other operating system. That means that if you bought a computer in the last three years it will probably run Ubuntu and run it well. The fact that Ubuntu allows you to extend the life of your computer should alone be enough to get the cost conscious to consider making the switch.

4) The Socialist Users

This group can be defined a number of ways, but I like to think of them as the people who are interested in advancing society through common works. These are the people that realize the world can be better if we work together for that purpose. They advocate “Green” initiatives, conservation, improved education and other social justice causes. This group is often confused with Communist and Social Dictatorships that we have seen in Russia and China, but are in fact dramatically different. This group advocates social issues not central control and generally does not have a major issue with capitalism as long as it is not trampling on those social issues.

Why should they use Ubuntu? Ubuntu is for the most part a community driven product meant to improve society through the advancement of knowledge. This is true of almost all GNU/Linux software. Ubuntu and Linux are by nature products that work to bring people together and not to separate individuals that can not afford a product or are unwilling to abide by some licensing agreement that is designed more to prevent competition than to spur innovation and advancement.

5) The Blogger/Webmaster Users

This group of users is pretty strait forward. These are users that have a website or blog that is not hosted by WordPress, Blogger or TypePad (or other lesser known hosts). If you are in this group then you probably like to try out changes to your site before you actually go live.

Why should they use Ubuntu? LAMP. Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP make up the LAMP software stack that is used by many of today’s open source web applications. Ubuntu lets you install the LAMP stack by executing a few commands and that allows you to host your blog or website locally so that you can check out any changes you make before changing your live site.

In the end, I’m sure we could come up with many more groups that could benefit from using Ubuntu. We can also assume that a number of different Linux distributions will most likely satisfy the users listed above. We can talk about what is great in Ubuntu 8.04 and what needs improvement, but the Ubuntu desktop is already in a position to satisfy the needs of a large majority of today’s users.

Neal

In the last two weeks I have helped my brother-in-law recover files from a botched Ubuntu install, helped my in-laws deal with spy-ware and helped a member of my church put together a presentation where I took to heads of our pators and placed them on other bodies.

During this time I was asked repeatedly if I ever though of doing this as a side profession. This blog is sort of the answer to that question. My hope is that I can share some of the knowledge I gain by serving as “The Family Tech” and pass it on to other people dealing with the same sort of issues.

To be honest, I’m training in most of this technical stuff. I just really enjoy it and have become pretty good at it most of the time. I’ll also be upfront in saying that in the last year since I’ve started using Linux (specifically Ubuntu, but I have tried a number of distros) I have become a strong advocate for it and other Open Source Software.

Well, one post done.

Neal