One of the things frustrating me about linux - until now - is the inabilty to have a good video capture program. Screen captures are a piece of cake with KSnapshot, which I use all the time and have setup to run on CTRL + F2. However, I've failed miserably at installing a video capture program with even decent capibilities like the old SnagIt I used to use on Wintendo.

Well, my wait is over. I now can do tutorials and demonstrations on Linux.

http://www.youtube.com/v/mQAjPIZR2dg

The above is a video shot on my laptop. It is a quick demo of my donutmonster application (www.donutmonster.com) and done using RecordMyDesktop. I installed it - and the GTK front-end - using SMART and all is well.

For those who are curious and have a built-in SD card slot on a
notebook, here's how to enable it.

I have an HP Compaq nw9440 laptop with SUSE 10.2 and a built in
SD-MS/Pro-MMC-SM-XD card slot.

It doesn't work out of the box.

I saw this person had the same issue and solved it:

http://nw9440.narod.ru/

From his site:

After quick investigation i have found a note related to Texas
Instruments SD MMC pci controller. The one is quite old but remains
actual for TI [and SuSE?]
for pci device:
# lspci -s 6.2
02:06.2 Mass storage controller: Texas Instruments 5-in-1 Multimedia

What do you do when you're a tech guy and you have a bunch of old hard drives no longer usable?

Why you create a hard drive mirror - spindles included! This was done by one of my tech guys and hangs proudly in his cube.

On my new laptop, I've managed to successfully install our main application - the Enterprise Recording Archive (ERA). This is a good example of how one can run a legacy OS (Windows) inside a virtual machine of a newer OS (Linux) without losing the features of the more modern OS.

The application response time is excellent and I notice no degradation of the software. In addition, I'm able to run the VM Session full screen so that I can get 1280x960 resolution. Of course, this image shows a minimal panel in order to highlight the Linux desktop.

Okay, after several days of dealing with the inadequate version of NT that is Vista, I gave up and upgraded to SUSE 10.2. Whew! What a relief to have a working system now!

Well, I've got my new laptop - this is a 17" HP dual-core model. Nice and fast. Here's the first setup of Windows Vista. On looks, it appears very nice indeed. I'd dare say - can it be? - nicer than KDE at the moment. I can't wait to see what KDE does to catch up.

One of the last hurdles we needed to overcome was that of true electronic integration. So far, the users were able to receive paper and then index the documents from paper only. Now that we are set for e-recording, we need to allow the users to index from image. Thanks to my fantastic team of programmers and analysts, we are all set.

This allows the users to index documents - put the name information in the database - directly from the image. Now we get a document from an agency (in this case the IRS) and then can index it and spit it back to them without having to waste paper.

This is a screenshot from my laptop of Ubuntu's newest version - Feisty Fawn. I'd say it was...

...mostly harmless.

In any case, after trying to figure out how to change my deskop, I gave up. Back to SUSE for me.

D and I put together a lemon-powered clock yesterday. So far it is still running....

I saw today another file manger for use with KDE. Though I've been using Konqueror and been pretty happy, I've still wanted more. I really like certain aspects of Windows Explorer - like the split window with folders on the left and folders/documents on the right - and would want that added to Konqueror.

In any case I installed Dolphin. I'll have to start playing with it. It will apparently become a default File Manager in the new KDE 4.x coming soon to a desktop near you.