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In a circle of non-geeks, when one brings up the name "Linux," some might think you are referring to a particular cartoon character. Others may have heard the name associated with computers. Still others will know that it's an operating system, but think it's one that's only used by programmers. Finally, you may, possibly, encounter one who has actually seen or used a computer with Linux. But that's all beginning to change. Linux is moving into the main stream.
It's not all that new, really. Linus Benedict Torvalds began to develop the kernel back in 1991 to 1994, as a project at the University of Helsinki, Finland. The name is short for "Linus' Unix." It began as an idea for a free operating system that was similar to Unix. The reason for keeping it free was to encourage other programmers to hack away at it and improve it and develop upon it. Right from the beginning he enlisted the help of others. That seems to have worked. Today there are many different distributions of the constantly improving kernel of this operating system, which have been written to run on virtually any hardware platform, and thousands of applications, with more being added every day.
It's true that it has started off slowly. That may be because it was just a project for programmers to play with at first. It was command line structured, like other DOSs, and remained that way until fairly recently, but now it's like a snowball rolling down a mountainside, picking up more and more code as it grows. In fact, today there are several graphical user interfaces available for it, and quite a large number of organizations and companies, schools, and individuals promoting its virtues.
Although it is considered "free" software, some of these entities are releasing it for sale in pre-packaged, and boxed bundles, called "distributions," which include selections of software to do the most common tasks that people use computers for. Among the most popular of these are Red Hat Linux, Debian, Lindows (now called Linspire), Gentoo, SuSE, and Mandrake, as some examples. Free software does not necessarily mean there is no charge for it, but that it follows the GNU Public License, which gives anyone the right to freely copy, modify and distribute the source code. However, many of the programmers, and distributors take the idea of "free" literally, and there is no overt charge for the applications. They will often just ask for a donation, or that you become a member of their supporters group. The result of this is that there are thousands of programmers all over the world working on each other's applications, sharing the source code, and improving on each other's work.
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| OpenOffice |
I am writing this article using one of the free applications (Open Office 1.1.3) that was included in the free download of Mandrake Linux (now known as Mandriva Linux). These applications can be found all over the net with two of the main clearinghouses being SourceForge and freshmeat.net. There is free software available for almost any application you can think of, including audio, and video production and multimedia. Open Office, as a suite, even includes presentation software. There is also a very powerful image editing application called the Gimp, which I've used to edit the images included in this article, and a great audio editing app called Audacity.
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| The Gimp |
Even though there is software for almost every application, not as much has been available for editing video as compared to the other major operating systems. Cinerella is currently the only open source app available as a package, and that requires some knowledge of how the Linux operating system works to make it functional. Another DV editing application called Kino is also in development and is included with the latest Linux distributions. In fact, the author of that, Arne Shirmacher, also is responsible for a great DV capture utility called "dvgrab."
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| Audacity is an audio editing app for Linux |
There is a lot of potential here for the development of open source audio and video editing software, and the community could really use the help of experienced artists - not just programmers - to provide feedback to the programmers. This open source community relies on such feedback to continually make its products better.
With the availability of such a powerful, stable operating system that is gaining such momentum and popularity, one would think that the commercial world would take notice and step in to help fill the void. In fact they are beginning to do just that. In part two of this series we will review a video editing application for Linux that is produced by a major commercial video software developer.
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Dan Conklin is a multi-media producer with 20 years of experience in broadcast, commercial, and corporate video and audio production. He is currently employed at Food For The Poor, in Deerfield Beach, Florida, the fifth largest relief organization that operates in the Caribbean and Latin America. There he enjoys being an idealist and a producer at the same time.
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