It’s easy to learn the basics of video editing, especially in Linux! This software is based on the FFMPEG and MLT frameworks so it can handle almost any video file format you throw at it. This quick tutorial will teach you how to put together a video complete with titles, transitions and effects, the program I used is called Kdenlive; It’s like Sony Vegas, except it’s free and open-source!
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Unfortunately in Linux, certainly Ubuntu, the default GUI file search is not always useful. With just a small amount of patience you can find files quickly and easily using the command line, and your options for this are really powerful if you want to learn a bit about it.

The easy, quick command is called "locate." To use this command at the terminal you simply type:

This will search for all files and directories with "searchstring" in the name, and -i means the search is not case sensitive (i.e. it will find searchstring, Searchstring, sEaRcHsTrInG, and so on). The results are instantaneous because the system has created a database (also known as an index) to tell you where files are located. The only problem is that newly created or moved files may not be found correctly until the next database update, and you don’t have many options to choose from for your search.  (forcing locate to update the database/index is done with $ sudo updatedb, and it doesn’t take a lot of time)

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This guide works for the gnome desktop manager (used by Ubuntu and other Linux distributions).

First we go to Gnome-looks. This is a large collection of themes and other artwork that can be used to make gnome look any which way you like. From there we select and download a theme. Since many people have asked what theme I use, I chose my theme, SlicknesS-black, for the example. Once we’ve downloaded our theme and saved it to the desktop, we will then extract it to the desktop.

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Let’s enable the desktop cube in Compiz, this tutorial will show you how:

From CCSM under Desktop click to enable Desktop Cube (and then disable Desktop Wall), and enable Rotate Cube. Under Effects enable Cube Reflection and Deformation (and resolve the conflict by disabling Next Slide) and 3D Windows.

Now we click on Desktop Cube and then the Appearance tab, and click on Skydome (Skydome is the image displayed behind the cube, on the “sky”). From here we click on the first checkbox to enable the background, and then Skydome Image to browse to the picture we want to use. Note – if you click “Animate Skydome” the background image will rotate when you rotate the cube.

Going then to Cube Reflection and Deformation and choose Appearance. Here we’ll set the top and bottom images, or “caps.” Just click New and browse to the images wanted, and you can then remove the default images by clicking on them then clicking Delete. Then we choose the Reflection tab and click on the Reflection Mode, then Distance. Next we choose the Deformation tab and then Sphere for a spherical “cube,” Cylinder for a cylindrical one, and None for a normal cube. Note – Aspect ratio will make your sphere look more round or more squished (oblong?) depending on what you put there.

CTRL-ALT-leftmousebutton is the default for rotating your sphere.

Next we will install the compiz-fusion-plugins-unsupported. Open up a terminal and enter the following command:

$ sudo aptitude install compiz-fusion-plugins-unsupported

When that is done enter CCSM and enable Snow under Extras, for a little freezing fun. Super/Windowskey-f3 starts and stops the snow falling.

Have fun!

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