Interesting side project: Setting up an Edubuntu machine for a special friend

With so much going on one would wonder why take on any more; I am behind on things as it is. Well for one thing I pay the tab here so if it takes me a year or two this get this out, ya know what? Too bad. Sometimes there is a karma tab to pay in life too and so I do. I feel so lucky about so many things in life that when I can help someone else I will. I have a great wife, a great job and at a time when so many more have so much less I will really try to help folks but the help has gotta mean something…it can’t be just coins in a bucket or a check in the mail.

But first let me tell you about Walter Tore, where my blues crosses my tech…

Walter is so many things: a cool human being, an original blues man, a one-man band, a teacher, chef and more. I met him through the Blindmans Blues Forum; he used to be a resident of these parts but lives in the wasteland known as Ohio. So what makes his music so original? Well, simple math: he never plays the same song twice and improvises as he goes. That would be enough to do me in but he plays harp, drums and guitar while he sings!

On top of all that he is a great BBQ cook, a teacher (makes him an ace in my book already) and a fellow Hound Dog Taylor lover. The kids he teaches all have special needs and when he posted a question recently on the BBF about how much laptop could he get for one of his superstars for 300 bucks, well, we all know what kind of machine that will buy. Anyhow I volunteered to send him one better than he could get for the cost of shipping on the condition that it would come with Linux pre-installed. I know Walter really didn’t get what a change this would be. However, as a man who has never played the same tune twice, who else would be in a position to think in new ways…the point was not to push Linux on him at all, simply expose him to a machine that had the OS tailored for it that did not originate in the PNW. In the end, the student and then the teacher has to come first and since he was getting some nice hardware for a fraction of the cost he could probably find an OEM XP Home for a pittance and still  come in under budget. Of course, then my free tech support would dry up too

So in any event I had a machine I bought with the idea of using for work that became obsolete around here due to a combination of the arrival of the EEE 701 (which kicks butt, BTW) plus a few tech changes in the work-structure.  It had dual cores, 64-bit, nVidia something with 256 dedicated RAM, 17 in screen, 2G of RAM, 200 or so G of hard drive space, wireless, dvd burner, etc. Truth is carrying this big SOB on my back to and from work everyday was killing my arthritic back. So I reburned it with Ubuntu 8.04.1 and then because this was slated for a kid I added the latest Edubuntu add-ons.

Then I went through and made sure everything worked, configured what I could (dvdcss, codecs up the yang, etc). Then added a folder with a bunch of free documentation in eBook format; since I knew both the teacher and the student had a bridge with music programs I installed some music software and then I stopped…

I realized that since the only teaching I had done was for other adults, I had no clue as to what a kid or student might want. However I did realize that since I had no real-world experience with the needs of special kids than the average Joe, I figured that a series of video lessons might work and so I made a handful just to show that while this isn’t Windows, this is a very usable OS. This is for people who don’t know what an OS is. This is no slam to either; Walter has forgotten more about playing and singing the blues than most performers will ever know and that is no exaggeration.

So I did the videos like this:

Prep one-time-only stuff

1. Pick a task to demo; say running a web browser.
2. Install GTK-Recordmydesktop for recording either a whole desktop or just a window (sudo apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop)
3. Install AVIDemux  for video editing if needed (sudo apt-get install avidemux)
4. Install FFMpeg for file conversion (sudo apt-get install ffmpeg)
5. Install Transcode (to get avimerge, seamlessly joins AVI files) (sudo apt-get install transcode)
6. Install Mencoder for other file conversion (sudo apt-get install mplayer)

Now I am sure you noticed all of the non-OGG related tools listed above; OGG is the default output format of GTK-RecordMyDesktop after all and this is a free system…more or less. I did do the nVidia drivers to make it as visually appealing as I could; as I recall the wireless drivers were open-source but don’t hold me to that. Anyhow the problem is a dearth of tools useful for editing OGG files and since I knew AVIDemux well and I wanted these *easily* playable on Windows, AVI is a lowest-common-denominator. Sorry.

Digression: if you are making these on the machine that will be demonstrated, you are ready to rock now. However in my case I was needing to demonstate on a machine that looked and acted nothing like what the child would get so again open source to the rescue. Install (now Sun) VirtualBox, create a virtual machine and install the same version of Linux that is being demonstrated. This actually serves two purposes: 1. You are demonstrating stuff on the exact same machine the student has in front of them and 2. The inevitable tech support call will come and I can boot up that VM to see what they see in far-off lands of Ohio. In any event, I tried (when I remembered to) to point GTK-Recordmydesktop at that.So the process of creating most of the videos involve a few basic steps:

1. Run GTK-Recordmydesktop, set the Save As… filename to something meaningful. “browsing_the_web.ogg”, then click Record.
2. Do the task, in this case start Firefox, browse, use bookmarks, etc. Hint: in any portions that you think require more explaining, be sure to add some pauses to what you are physically doing. Later when we add dialog, you will be glad you did. Yes with other tools you could add bits of textual or graphical training aides but in this case, I had to get this done quick.
3. When done with the task, click on stop on the GTK-Recordmydesktop which will have icon-ized itself by this time. It will transcode the video to your hard drive in the name you supplied in step 1.
4. Transcode the video to AVI. Mencoder to the rescue. If you are going to do a lot of these, make a script to do the transcoding for you:


#!/bin/bash
mencoder $1 -o $2 -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc

Where $1 is the input (ogg) file and $2 is the expected output (AVI) file. Saved as cvtmovie.sh, a call to ./cvtmovie.sh ./how_to_browse.ogg ./how_to_browse.avi did the trick.

Now load up the file in AVIDemux:

Editing a video showing the VM running the target system. Update:  I know this picture is a little messed up; when editing, the session was a lot more usable than the screen shot here would imply.

The point of loading it in AVIDemux is if you need to remove visual gaffes or mistakes. Save it to a new filename. Next we need to add audio to the mix. Donning a headset that I use for Skype based conference calls, I launched Audacity. Finally I hit play on the video and record on the audio providing audio description as the video played along. Hint: be a little vague about *when* something is expected to happen when describing it. You will be off; if not this time then next time.

Once the video finishes, click stop on Audacity and export it to a WAV file like browsing.wav

OK folks, we are in the home stretch; we have our video in a format and container that anyone can play and our (roughly) timed audio as raw WAV file. All that is left is to multiplex them into a single file. No problem. Since I had to do this over and over I coded up the simple script below to help things along:

#!/bin/bash
INPUTVID=$1
INPUTWAV=$2
OUTPUTVID=$3

ffmpeg -i $INPUTVID -i $INPUTWAV -vcodec copy -acodec mp3 -map 0:0 -map 1:0 $OUTPUTVID

Bang we are done. I saved this to muxaudio.sh and called:

./muxaudio.sh how_to_browse.avi how_to_browse.wav how_to_browse-final.avi

The output file is your finished product. Yep you could do a lot more but this gets the job done.

In any event, even if Linux proves to be too strange for the student or it needs to run some specific Windows app and blows all this away, so what. In the end the kid needs to be happy and productive, that is all that matters.  And I know Walter, being the maverick that he is might take a liking to it too since it is in his price-range (teachers are always underpaid as well as under appreciated) and embraces many of his ideals, who knows. I did try to overcome the one stumbling block that many Windows users have when trying Linux for the first time (and a Debian-based distro to boot) is how software and drivers are installed. With Windows it either comes on a disk with a product or you download it or drive to the store and buy it. With Linux and broadband its like you are hooked into this whole ecosystem thats there to support you with a single command: apt-get install…

Me to you.

Jeff