This is a continuation of my series of notes on my install of Ubuntu 15.04 on my laptop. The full list of posts is on this page. Previously, in the last post, I installed some virtualization tools. In this post, I’ll install the media tools that I use.
Visual
One of the most important programs that I use now is Shutter. It allows me to easily take screenshots of what I am working and edit the screenshots. The shutter package is easily installed from the Software Center. Once installed, I tweaked a few of the settings in Edit > Preferences.
I checked the version, and it’s a little behind. The website says they are at 0.93.1, while it installed 0.92.
The 0.93 version doesn’t add that much according to the website, so I am not going to worry about it.
First, I changed the path for the screenshots from the Pictures folder to a new folder that I created called screenshots.
In addition, I checked the first two options on the “Behavior” tab to allow it to start when I boot up the computer.
I installed the following other programs for working with visual media:
- Gimp: for editing photos
- Inkscape: vector-based drawing
- Xournal: has features that allow marking up a PDF
Audio
Note: I installed the latest version of MuseScore from the repo:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mscore-ubuntu/mscore-stable sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install musescore
Videos
These are the programs I use for playing and editing video:
- mplayer – nice general video/music player from the command line
- mplayer-gui
- gnome-mplayer
- vlc – video player
- kdenlive – video editor
- openshot – video editor
- avidemux (GTK+): Great for converting video, for example see Why Can’t the Users Just Rotate Their Screen?
- cheese – nice for testing to make sure the webcam works (already installed)
Update: Scanning
I forgot to add one important piece. I have a network scanner that I like to use. It is an old HP PSC printer with a scanner attached. To enable that on my laptop, I needed to add the IP address of the server to /etc/sane.d/net.conf:
192.168.x.x
Codecs
This installed many different things for media. For example, I noticed that it installed True Type fonts. It also installs codecs for playing videos, etc.
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras
In addition, I installed the libdvdcss to get the restricted formats. That was simply by installing this package…
sudo apt-get install libdvdread4
Then, I ran the script…
sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh
Finally, I determined that I had to use the /dev/sr0 as the device for playing my DVDs. Like this:
