TW: Intro Music
DW: Welcome to the Ubuntu UK Podcast, episode 3. You're greeted by me, Daviey
AP: Alan
CD: I'm Ciemon
TW: And I'm Tony.
CD: On this podcast we're going to talk about the command line vs the GUI, Mythbuntu, the production process - how we make the podcast and also a bit about the news.
TW: Sounds good, let's get on with it.
No Speaker: Bumper Music
AP: I don't know who said it, but there is a theory that if you are using the command line to do something in Ubuntu it's broken because you should be able to do it with the GUI. I wondered what you thought about that?
DW: I think that it is very much what you are used to, I'm very much used to using the console, even for things you can do graphically, probably easier graphical. As that is what i'm used to, that is what I prefer. However if I were a new user, then i may well end up using the GUI more. I think that for everyday users they shouldn't have to use the GUI...
AP: Shouldn't have to use the GUI or shouldn't have to use the command line?
DW: Sorry shouldn't have to use the command line and I think that they should be aware that it is there and know that they might have to use it for something.
AP: What's so scary about it? Why should someone not have familiarly with some basic commands?
CD: Problem is, they are not basic are they? The command line is not basic, you've got to know what you are doing before you can use it.
AP: Well no, if you said to me how to I upgrade a system, how do I upgrade the packages on my system? I could either say you follow 'this' menu item, or you press the orange button on the toolbar at the top. Or you open a terminal and type, 'this' command. Either way I'm conveying to you how to do it.
CD: Sure, but it's one of the stumbling blocks you've got to know the command before you can do the command.
AP: Yeah but, you've got to know the menu before you can choose the menu.
TW: Isn't the point with the menu system is that you can just explore for it. You can just poke around, try the different options until you find something that you want. Where as with the command line you're presented with a flashing cursor, unless you know what the commands are, you're looking for. You can try to use things like apropos and man.
AP: None of us live in a bubble. A large proportion of us have access to documentation and whether that is online, you do have online help in Ubuntu, and there is help on google and whatever.I don't know, i find it difficult when someone says, "I don't know how to do anything" or "I don't know what to do". They clearly have zero google skills or haven't even bothered trying to read a manual. When they stare at a console, is that too harsh?
CD: I think that is a bit harsh. We sit in a room and we ask each other, we sit on an IRC channel and we ask about things rather than spending hours, and hours searching through google or reading 'man'.
AP: You might.
CD: I fell into the trap initially of popping into IRC and asking everybody, "How do i do this?". You only learn by searching yourself.
AP: Some people learn by being shown how to do something, some people learn by actually going off and doing it themselves.
CD: But if somebody shows you, a specific thing then you don't learn about the theory behind it, you don't learn about shell. If you asked somebody about a specific command, you don't understand.
AP: But some people don't want to, some people just want to know how do I upgrade my packages. How do I install you know whatever game, I don't care that the program 'dpkg' does the install and its held in /var/lib you know they just really don't care, they just want it installed.
DW: Going back to what you said Ciemon I actually have a different tolerance level if someone I know is a complete newbie I know that term is not necessarily correct but someone who is completely new comes in and asks a question where it will turn up in the first hit on Google I don't mind telling them the answer but if its anyone in this room here who turns around and asks a really simple question that's obviously available on Google I would you know say here's a google link.
AP: But that's because we're friends and we can rib each other and stuff
DW: Well I don't know. The people I've known for a year in the LoCo channel, if they ask the same question I'd probably do the same thing.
AP: Either yesterday or the day before we spent how long with someone in a channel trying to help that person who was clearly quite inexperienced with linux and we got them from, they had a server install when I think they wanted a desktop install and they wanted to get from a server install which only has a command-line so they had no option to try GUI tools and you know, basically, every command we told them they just ran. They didn't really care what the effect of it was and they don't really care what the underlying infrastructure or why in fact something was broken
DW: But I wouldn't be surprised if that comes with time
AP: Yeah, yeah totally.
TW: Isn't part of the issue that its easier to help people via command-line than it is via GUI. With the command-line you can paste a string into a wiki or on to IRC or whatever instant messenger and you get some text back out that you can then look at and go "Yes thats worked" or "Yes that hasn't worked". Trying to describe how to do something in the GUI, you know click applications, add new application, search for this string, click apply, click yes to add extra repositories. It starts to become a much longer description and then you have to get screenshots if you have a problem that you want to debug and you're hoofing(sp?) bandwidth around and graphics and all sorts.
AP: I had exactly that problem about a year ago on a linux user group mailing list. Someone asked a question, it was something really basic like how do I install something like cow-say or something like that and I just replied "sudo apt-get install cowsay" which is not a wrong answer, its the right answer and because it was an email I was able to reply to that person with one line giving them them the exact answer and I got berated by someone else on the mailing list who shall remain nameless because I didn't explain the graphical way of doing things and its the Ubuntu way to use the graphical interface and what if I was a new user and you're telling me to use the command line. What I think I'm getting at is that I try to tailor the answer for the audience. If my brother phones up and says how do I install some application I'd tell him to go through Synaptic
DW: The fact that you were able to give one line which is precise and will do exactly what they wanted maybe that is a better solution.
CD: No, the console is scary because people have never used it before. Most people come from Windows where everything is done on the GUI, you know I was there, what is the command-line and it was scary and it is scary to new users.
AP: I wouldn't say most people come from Windows, I would say most people under a certain age who are not of a technical background. I'm not trying to be picky but the are a significant chunk of people who are older than us who pre-date Windows and have used DOS
DW: Windows 95 was still heavily dependent on DOS as well, you can get away without using but Windows 3.1 was DOS just with a GUI
AP: But there wasn't much command-line work
CD: If you're not used to the commands and you don't know the commands they're difficult to use. When I started using Linux I kept a big list of the commands
AP: So whats the fix for it, stop telling people to use the command-line or give people more help
CD: No I think we need to give command-line, its incredibly powerful. Sure use the GUI but have knowledge of the command-line so you know about it when you need or want to use it.
AP: So should we - when we tell people how to do stuff with a graphical interface - also at the same time tell them how to do it with the command-line?
CD: Individual dependent of course, but yeah.
DW: Maybe on the forums there should be a tick box to say I want a console answer/I want a GUI answer.
AP: Its tricky because any of these mechanisms by which you're asking for help in a text way, like if you compare two ways of asking a question. If I'm sat next to you and you're asking me how to do something I might show you how to do it with the GUI because we're both sat there and we can both see it but if you're on the other end of an IRC conversation or you're on the other end of a mailing list or forum or any other medium which is text based where we can't both see the same screen it makes more sense to use the command-line to tell you how to do something.
DW: Yeah, it would be really good if there was something like a screencast where you could actually watch people to see how to do these things graphically.
AP: Wouldn't that be marvellous!
DW: Hang on, I think there are aren't there
AP: There are yes, there are a few screencasts that show people how to do stuff graphically, but there is a problem which comes with that. They're huge, they're much more time-consuming to create than telling someone how to type a command-line, so there is a massive investment in creating a screencast. The other option, as well as screencasts, because screencasts do pre-recorded stuff. What about if we had a decent remote-control software in Ubuntu. Something not like VNC but VNC based but which allowed you to, the same way you do with Windows, press a button to say I need help and allow a trusted person...
DW: And to not worry about NAT issues or anything like that
AP: Yes, for it to just work, no matter what your network connection is like, whether its dialup or 3G or anything. You could press a button which says I need help and get someone to remotely control you screen.
TW: I'm a command-line user, I use it for administering servers, I use it a lot on my desktop because thats the way I learned linux but one of the reasons is that I find it difficult to just stick to GUI answers for people. Its not that its often harder, which it is, but its that the command-line gives you so much power and so much flexibility I almost feel like people who only use the desktop are kind of missing out on an aspect of the linux desktop. If you want to do things like batch renaming files and you can string command lines together, I know this is not something that a new user wants to sit down and be faced with but once they're used to a system, once they're familiar with the desktop and can fire up applications and do all their day-to-day stuff, if they want to do system administration tasks the possibilities are almost endless on the command-line and its almost a shame to deprive people of that or not to help them get used to it and get into it and find the power and flexibility of it
AP: I agree but its very difficult because there is an infinite number of command-line things you can do because it is so powerful as you say but shouldn't we have better front-end tools. A good example you gave was batch renaming of files like you get a whole load of pictures from one digital camera, photos from another digital camera and you want to merge them, you want to move them around and using the command-line you can do things like change en masse the names of files or if you've got a load of documents you can quickly change one word in every document with one line, do a mass search/replace and should we have better graphical front-ends for those kind of tools or do we end up with an absolute boatload of them, well we'd end up with KDE
DW: I don't think they would be installed by default. I would have thought there would be applications out there to do that
AP: To do what? That specific task batch renaming of files.
AP: Yes there are tools like that, but what about every other possible very, very clever thing you can do with the command-line. I don't think you could replace all those infinite things with an infinite number of graphical tools because its such high maintenance, its easier for people to just type a line
TW: Its the old Unix thing of do one task and do it very well. You can use those as building blocks to make up some fancy thing you might only use a couple of times. It wouldn't be worth writing a GUI application to do that because you might not do it again for another year. Whereas you can put a few commands together with pipes, if you have the skill to do that and do your job well.
DW: We could always pipe together GUI apps <laughs>
TW: How would that work Dave?
DW: You know I'm being silly...
CD: Its horses for courses, you know it depends what you're used to. If you're used to the GUI then you use the GUI, the command-line is there, its powerful, learn about it and use it if you need to.
TW: We have just got to understand that some people are happy using the GUI and don't really want to get involved in the command-line. If they want help using the GUI we have to make sure we can provide help for them in that way even if it is slightly frustrating at times because we're more used to the command-line.
No Speaker: Bumper Music
AP: We've been asked on more than one occasion how we make this podcast. What we use and we thought it only best to let everyone know what tools we use and software & hardware so if anyone wants to have a go at doing this themselves they know what might be involved. Of course, we're doing it one way, there are a million different ways to record a podcast and this is just the way we do it.
CD: Right, before we get in to the hardware we have to write down our ideas as things come up. As emails come in, as people come up with ideas of course we use the ubiquitous wiki. In our case we use MoinMoin to write down all our ideas
AP: Its running on a virtual server that we have for the Ubuntu-UK website, its a private wiki
TW: But we like to keep the ideas a bit secret so that its a surprise and people listen to the show.
AP: Exactly, and if people want to get involved in helping make the podcast we'll give them access to the wiki and all the other tools we have its keeping it out of the eyes of everyone
TW: So thats where we put our ideas. When somebody has a brilliant idea in the bath or on the way to work, whack it in the wiki and then when we actually get to the run-up to the show and we're all sitting round saying what are we actually going to record we use Gobby which is the collaborative editor, and we all connect to that and we hash around the content, sort what order we want to record segments in, takes bit out and add comments
AP: And the content thats in Gobby comes straight out of the wiki, so the wiki is great for editing over a period of two weeks between one episode and the next. But then during the four hours that it takes us to make one episode we'll all sit there with Gobby open because its easier for multiple people to edit the same document at the same time than it is for us all to commit edits to the wiki.
DW: The other thing we use is IRC. We collaborate a lot during the two weeks in between and discuss content and what we're going to do and such like that which has been quite useful
TW: And also email. All the emails that come in to the show, go out to the four of us that are here, and Dave Murphy who was on the last show so we can all see comments that people have made and people subscribing to our twitter feed and things like that
AP: So moving on to recording, how we actually record the podcast. It depends really because some of it is recorded in what we affectionately call a studio...
TW: Which is usually someones front room
AP: ... then sometimes we record segments outside so if we start off with the studio stuff.
TW: I have had for years a mixer, I got a new one a few months ago and its a relatively simple four channel mixer then it has a few extra inputs which enables us to have four microphones that all plug in so we can all hear each other via headphones, I've got a little headphone amplifier so we can all hear whats being recorded and hear each other, and it goes out through the outputs through to a Zoom H4 recorder which is a lttle solid-state recorder which records on to SD cards in wave format and thats a great little device. Thats what we use to record our interviews at FOSDEM, because it works independently so its very easy, very portable, stick it in a pocket or bag and off you go.
AP: I happened to have a couple of fairly decent microphones, SM58 Shure microphones, but you could use pretty much anything really.
TW: We were lucky that Alan had a couple of mics from a previous podcast idea and I had one kicking around but we have bought a few little bits and bobs just to help it along. Ciemon went out and bought a microphone and a mic stand.
AP: So once we've got this all recorded and the master if you like is on the Zoom H4 device on a solid-state SD card what happens then?
TW: I take it off and I copy it on to my computer and I start chopping it around, take out the stuff thats obviously rubbish and then listen to it again slightly more carefully and work out which bits and which segments we want to fit in, get an idea how long they are going to run for, and see what we need to fit into a forty minute show.
AP: Thats pretty time consuming I would think.
TW: Yes, I've heard both of the first two shows more times than I care to discuss.
AP: So, what do you use for the editing?
TW: The first episode was done entirely in Audacity, the open-source audio editor. The second episode I did using a mixture of Audacity and Ardour. The reason for starting to use Ardour is that its non-destructive in some of its operations so you can apply filters and make edits and cuts without removing the data from the file whereas Audacity is destructive. If you apply a filtering process or an effect and thgen save it you have effectively lost the original so you would have to go back to very original sound files and fish out the bit you wanted if you decided to undo that effect. I tend to use Audacity for chopping segments and chopping little pauses out because it seems to be easier for me to do that whereas Ardour is great for putting the whole episode together, applying processing and tweaking the layout. Sticking the music stings in between the segments
AP: You mentioned the music stings and we've had some positive and some negative comments about the music. Where did it some from?
TW: I found it on http://archive.org. We talked about it on IRC, the feeling we were looking for and the music we were after and I was searching for Big Band or Swing, any early, out of copyright material or Creative Commons License material that we were able to use in the podcast. I found this little piece, it was nice and cheery, chopped it up and it had a nice minute worth of intro music which was great before the vocals kicked in, and there was a nice little bit at the end for the outro and people seem to like it though a few have said "Great rid of it!"
CD: So Tony, when you've finished cutting it about and have come up with your final product we obviously have four outputs, what do you do to produce those four files.
TW: I end up with a big master .wav file and I encode it and I was encoding the first episode quite a lot of times, using different ways, trying to get the settings right so i ended up writing a little shell script to the encoding with the right settings, all the ID3 tags in the .mp3, embed our picture into the .mp3 file and by the time I'd finished it was reasonably competent, had a little .ini file and things like that. So I stuck it up on my web-site which is http://tonywhitmore.co.uk/repos and its called podcoder.
DW: Regarding hosting, its actually hosted on Ubuntu-Uk LoCo server. The webpage is provided by the Wordpress engine, we use various plugins including podpress. Regarding mirroring, although it looks like a single file, that redirects to one of our mirrors which helps with load-balancing.
No Speaker: <Music>
DW: OOXML has had ISO clarificationSo that means its now an officially ratified, international standard like OpenDocument format.
AP: So there's now two standards.
AP: Adobe have released AIR for numerous platforms including Linux.
TW: Ok, whats AIR?
AP: Its a development environment, and run-time environment for running applications coded in Flash, Flex and something else.
TW: So you can run proprietary programs on the net.Launchpad have announced that they now support OpenID for logins.
CD: The Conservative and Labour parties have been arguing about who started talking about open source first, who got on the bandwagon first.They're both wrongSurely it was the Green party
CD: Who cares, shout about it, the more the merrier. Lets talk about open source.
DW: This week was the vulnerability finding contest sponsored by Tipping Point(?). Of the three main Operating Systems, Ubuntu was the only one where a vulnerability was not found
AP: Tickets now available for Ubuntu Live, the conference thats taking place at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon on July 21st and 22nd, http://ubuntulive.com
No Speaker: <Music>
TW: So Dave, you're involved in the Mythbuntu project. What is it?
DW: Its a Home Theatre PC project where its basically a video recorder which is computer-based.
TW: Ok, so like a PVR
DW: Yes
TW: Personal Video Recorder
AP: Like a TiVoThe sort of thing you can go and buy from the shops
DW: Yes
TW: So, whats the difference between Mythbuntu and a PVR or TiVo I can go and buy in Woolworths?
DW: The difference is the feature set. The fact that you can customise it, the fact you can easily upgrade it, and that you can connect it to your network and watch it on another computer using drag and drop which I don't think you can do over TiVo.
TW: So I need a full computer to run this, I need to go and buy a new Pentium 4 or Core 2 Duo
DW: Well, its funny you should say that because there is one of the developers who is running it on particularly old hardware. I think his backend, because its split into front and backend systemsyou can run it on the same computer but it is split. One of the developers is running it on a 700mhz system for his backend and thats the one which always stays on. There is a plugin to make so that it switches on when it needs to but most people leave it on the whole time. Thats a very low powered computer and all that does is the recording, and then you have a separate front end which does the watching.
AP: So, what does it record?
DW: If its a Linux-supported tuner card, which most are these days
AP: So, a digital TV card
DW: Digital TV card, analogue, not so much in this country but abroad they use cable, especially America you can use cable cardsWhat about satellite?
DW: Satellite yes, I looking at getting FreeSat which is the new service which is being offered in Britain. There is also some functionality to be able to stream
AP: Like YouTube type streaming?
DW: Yes, there is a plugin for that, not everyone is keen on it because the quality of videos on YouTube isn't necessarily home cinema viewing
AP: What can you do once you've recorded. Does it have a graphical interface. You said there's a back end and a front end, the back end does recording
DW: The back end does the recording, and that also presents a feature called MythWeb and thats where you can administer the whole system so you can set recordings, delete recordings and even stream through that interface, so any computer that has an internet connection point, you can set programs to record from abroad and stream.
AP: So if I'm at work and I see on the web that there is a program on later and I'm not going to get home to record it I could log on via the web to my machine at home and set it to record.
DW: Yes, I've done that many times.Multiple channels? Will it record, depending on what you're trying to record, can I record multiple TV programs
DW: On the new version thats coming out, MythTV 0.21 thats actually got a multi-record option. What thats means is, if you're running digital freeview you can record any channel which is given on the multiplex. There is about six multiplexes I think, and all the channels are transmitted on them so if you have two tuner card set up you could potentially record up to ten channels simultaneously the only limit is how muchj storage you've got and how fast you can write to the disc.
TW: If I understand it, all the BBC channels or most of them are in one multiplex so you could record BBC1, BBC2, BBC3 and BBC4 at the same time with one tuner card
DW: I think four might be separate, but yes, it's the same point, you can record BBC1 and BBC2 at the same time the only problem is when BBC1, ITV and Channel 4 have interesting things on at the same time.
TW: And they are all on different multiplexes
DW: Yes
TW: So, you're going to need a lot of storage space for all this. Its quite a large file format isn't it
DW: You looking at about 1Gb per hour so if you have 100Gb hard drive you would be looking at storing
AP: Yes but is that 1Gb an hour for one channel
DW: Yes
DW: I'm quite into it now so I'm running 2Tb of storage and I haven't deleted any programs since January. Thats more than anyone needs, I started on a 200Gb hard drive for my storage.
AP: Can you squish them down a bit so they take up less space?
DW: Yes you can but you lose quality
AP: If you're watching it on a 14" TV in the bedroom quality might not be you primary concern
DW: One of the options the MythTV actually has is user jobs. That means that when a recording is finished you can set it to automatically or by option set tasks that happen so you could compress and reduce to a compressed file format automatically or one thing that a lot of people do which is installed by default on the Ubuntu one is a commercial scanner which looks for commercials in the recordings
TW: How well does it do that?
DW: Reasonably well, its particularly good with American programs because it looks for things like black splashes and difference in the screen picture like the resolution, whether its widescreen or not. It looks for different things like that, maybe logos in the corner, I don't know the specifics of that but its reasonably good
AP: You say you have a remote, so although its a PC I don't have to sit there with a keyboard and a mouse in the living room it supports remote controls.
DW: Most tuner cards these days actually come with remote controls and they are generally supported. You can also use other remotes via the serial connection or the USB connection, and you can get them for less than £10 that come with a receiver.
AP: So would the remote point at the front end?
DW: Yes
AP: And that would be the bit that sits under your telly.
DW: I like to try and not give the impression its a computer. I've got a slimline case which is the same size as a DVD player and you wouldn't know its not a DVD player and I like the fact that when people come round they don't know that I'm watching TV through a computer. I don't tell them, I just like the fact that I've got a pretty interface.
TW: What about the value-added features. As I understand it its not just TV playback and recording, but there are all sorts of plugins which you can add to extend the functionality
DW: You get the base one where you can watch and record programs but there is also another one called MythDVD for watching DVDs, MythVideo for watching video, there's a radio plugins which is under development, theres a crazy one called MythRecipe which is for displaying recipes so there are quite a few plugins available.
CD: Tell me more about the DVD side. I've watched the TV a lot but I've got a lot of films, can I convert my hundreds of DVDs, put them on the back end and then have multiple PCs in the house playback any film
DW: Yes you can, you can rip it into ISO format and MythTV will support playing back the ISO
AP: That you be really big wouldn't it
TW: Yes
AP: Something like 4Gb to 9Gb per film
DW: If you want perfect quality thats how you would do it but you can also insert a DVD and say I want to copy this, and then you can compress it to whichever option you choose.
AP: You mentioned multiple PCs around the house, so if I've got a back end PC thats medium to low spec with the TV tuner cards in it, thats running the MythTV back end, then I have a front end under the telly in my lounge which looks like a DVD player where I can use the menu and the remote control which all sounds great, but you said you can have multiple front ends so I can have one in my bedroom?
DW: Just the other day I was using my laptop as a front end which is a tablet so I can fold the screen round and use that wirelessly. With good signal it works quite well
AP: So you don't have to wire up your whole house with ethernet you could use wireless
DW: Well, yes...
AP: Whats the limitation? Is it the speed...
DW: If I've got bad signal it will be juttering, I would recommend ethernet or ethernet over power. MythTV has two options, it has an in built streamer that has its own protocol but it can also support reading from a filesystem so if you have an NFS or samba share mounted to the front end you can also make it so the front end will read that file directly rather than stream.
AP: If I have a box with some files on like one of those little NAS boxes you can buy that shares out disc space over samba and NFS I could use that?
DW: The new MythTV which is coming out supports storage groups so you could mount that as a storage location on the back end
AP: There's another feature you've mentioned to me in the past that sounded quite interesting which was that in the evenings when I'm not at work but working away from home, I'm staying in a place where I don't have a TV aerial so I can't watch TV but I have internet access. If I'm recording programs at home would it be easy for me to watch the programs that I've recorded from another location if I've got internet access
DW: MythWeb has inbuilt streaming which uses Flash. Its not great quality, I would liken it to the BBC iPlayer for quality, but that quality is dependent on your upstream bandwidth
AP: Of course
TW: Is that Flash generated playback in the new version?
DW: Yes, the new one which is v0.21 which was released about a month ago so it will be in Hardy and has been backported to Gutsy
TW: When I've looked at the previous version, the version thats currently in Gutsy it just allows you to download the whole video file in one big chunk which because they're so large can be a bit of a long process if you're miles away over 1/2Mb ADSL line
DW: With the new version of MythTV, its standard in Hardy and is in the Gutsy backports repository as well and upgrades have been safe.
TW: What does Mythbuntu give us that taking a normal Ubuntu and installing MythTV on it via the packages doesn't give us?
DW: I think the major thing is the speed of setup, as I understand it you're currently running MythTV and Ubuntu
TW: Yes, I installed MythTV on Ubuntu Edgy (6.10) when that was current so 18 months ago, and that was fine, it supported the hardware and it was a case of working through the setup routine which was ok to do but I know I'm a technical user, I was able to do it and its been upgraded since then.
DW: I'm still guessing it took you at least a couple of hours so set up.
TW: Yeah, one or two
AP: Couple of weeks wasn't it Tony?
TW: Well, in some respects it took two years <laughter> I started buying the hardware a couple of years before I finally got to a point where I was saying this is ready and this works.
AP: I must say Tony I've been to your house a few times since then and I've never seen it running.
TW: Well, it runs all the time and it records, in all honesty its the only things we've used for recording TV and watching TV for the last 18 months or so. It took a long time to get the hardware and for all the drivers to make their was in to the kernel but once I had my hand on an Ubuntu Edgy CD it took between four and six hours to go from bare hardware to having it all set up and running with MythWeb and all the bits working. Six hours is not an insignificant amount of time but compared with the previous revisions which were running on Debian, you had to SSH in and export environment variables and use complex xine command lines to watch any TV its somewhat more user-friendly just to have a remote
DW: So you've used the Ubuntu desktop of Edgy to install that
TW: I used the alternate CD because I didn't want to run a full desktop environment on my relatively low power small form factor box. It has the alternate CD installed to command line with no desktop, just X no desktop environment on top of that. X automatically starts and that starts the front end and if the front end crashes for some reason it will restart the front end so we've got over the phones calls saying "I can't watch any TV because your rubbish box has broken. Theres a big green button on the remote control which is linked to "kill -9 'myth front end'" so if the playback locks up pressing the button restarts the front end which only happens very occasionally. The least stable module seems to be MythMusic.
DW: You've actually partly answered the question there, the fact that you had to use the alternate CD or even the desktop CD for a LiveCD installation you would have a bloated desktop. You would have OpenOffice on a TV so that is one of the major things Mythbuntu actually offers, the fact that you can insert the CD and within an hour you can be watching channels. The other thing is you can use the CD as a front end from the live environment.
AP: Without installing, so if I have a PC and want to try out a front end I can whack a CD in
DW: I still think you should treat it as you would the Ubuntu desktop LiveCD, you wouldn't want that for production use
TW: Can you run it off a USB key on a small form factor diskless system
DW: You've raised a good point there, our new feature supports that, its Mythbuntu diskless. It has two options, you can either use it from the USB key or boot PXE which is diskless and it gets its whole image from the back end which is very fast and very efficient and I think thats the way the future is going
TW: That way you can have something where there is literally no fans no moving parts in your front end, very low current draw and you could have as many around the house as you want. Adding another would be trivial, easy to fire up, that could be quite cool.
DW: The only problem is some of the smaller ones don't support PXE and thats why you have to use the USB as a boot device
AP: Is it an official Ubuntu project or is it something thats done by a few people in their spare time?
DW: We're just over a year old and within a couple of months we approached the community council for blessing and they granted it without any problems so we're an official Ubuntu project but we're not supported by Canonical
AP: And your packages are in the standard Ubuntu repositories
DW: That was one of our founding things, that everything we do we would push back to the Ubuntu repositories so you can get Mythbuntu functionality from the normal Ubuntu repository
AP: I think I saw a How-To that said you could take a standard Ubuntu desktop and just add a bunch of packages that were in the repository and off you go, you've got MythTV. Now obviously from your point of view thats not how you want people to do it, you want people to use Mythbuntu because thats how you tailor the application
DW: If they're using MythTV they can use whatever desktop they want. We ship the XFCE one which is the same as Xubuntu, but if you install the mythbuntu-desktop package which is designed in the same way as ubuntu-desktop, kubuntu-desktop then they will provide you with the same functionality, it would look as if you did install from Mythbuntu.
AP: Does it tie in with the releases of Ubuntu?
DW: Yes, we've currently got a beta out which is undergoing testing so we should be following in the same release schedule as Ubuntu and about the same time as Kubuntu comes out. You can find further information at http://www.mythbuntu.org
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AP: We've had a few emails this week. One from Paul O'Malley asking us if we have ever thought of doing audio tutorials with a webpage of commands to give the extra layer of polish. I think what he's suggesting here is that we have some kind of tech-talk, teaching people how to do stuff within the podcast, what do you guys think of that?
TW: Its an interesting suggestion. Audio is probably not the best way of giving over complex commands, hence the document accompanying it. It would take a lot of work to polish and get right.
AP: Is it worth doing given that there are other resources like the wiki and documentation?
TW: The Ubuntu wiki is one of the major plus points of the community, there's so much stuff already documented on there I worry about creating a second version of that if we were to be hugely successful at it.
AP: And we'd also become out of date and not editable
TW: It would be a lot of work, its quite a lot of work just putting the podcast togther never mind writing tutorials as well. Having said that maybe there are members of the community who are interested in contributing tutorials
AP: So, what do you think Dave?
DW: I think it might be a suggestion but I don't know, audience let us know what you want
AP: Emails to podcast@ubuntu-uk.org
TW: We had an email from Michael G. Fletcher on our segment about would you go back, and he says that one of the things that has helped him not have to go back is using virtualisation. He uses VirtualBox from http://virtualbox.org and its also packaged in Ubuntu, to give him a Windows installation so for the very few Windows applications he still needs he can run it in unified mode which makes it appear as if its a native Linux app on his desktop.
AP: Thats pretty cool having Windows applications on top of your GNOME or KDE desktop. Its quite nice having it all seamlessly integrated together. Works quite well.
TW: The example Ciemon was saying about having to install Windows so your wife could do ACDL, so one of the things Michael is suggesting is you could just run it inside VirtualBox in unified mode, you can still get access to Office and not have to install the Windows OS.
CD: Good idea, thanks for that.
AP: Theres a great tutorial on the Ubuntu wiki, if you go to http://wiki.ubuntu.com/virtualbox theres a tutorial on how to get that working.
TW: He also suggests that we might want to talk more about virtualisation in future episodes because its a big subject and we might just do that.
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CD: Right, so Episode 3 in the can.
TW: Yep, nice one. I'm off to LUGRadio Live in the USA. If you're going over there come along and say hello, I'll be working the video crew so I'll probably have a video camera on me. Also the next episode might be a couple of days late as a result because I'm flying back and we're going to have to delay our recording by a day or so.
AP: Slacker! Canonical have given us approval to use the Ubuntu trademark in our podcast which is good news.
TW: So you can keep track of what we're up to on our twitter feed which is http://twitter.com/uupc
AP: You can email us at podcast@ubuntu-uk.org if you have any suggestions for the show or if you've recorded any material or tips or anything for us please email
CD: Join us on IRC on the Freenode network at #ubuntu-uk
TW: Ok, we'll see you next time, Bye.<Music>