Shotwell is intuitive, well documented, extremely easy to use and reliable. It’s easy to dismiss Shotwell as an oversimplified photo manager. But once you start using it, you’ll quickly appreciate its clean interface and easy-to-use tools. Don’t just take my word for it either, Shotwell is now the default photo manager in Fedora 13 alpha. Here is a quick run down of the features.

• Import photos from folders or from any digital camera supported by gPhoto.
• Shotwell automatically groups photos taken at the same time. You can also use tags to organize your photo collection.
• You can rotate, crop, reduce red-eye, and adjust the exposure, saturation, tint, and temperature of each photo.
• Publish photos to Facebook, Flickr and Picasa Web Albums.

Shotwell provides a non-destructive way to tweak your photos. Instead of modifying the original photos, Shotwell stores all edits in a database and applies them on-the-fly as necessary. This means that you can easily undo all edits. Shotwell comes equipped with all the usual photo enhancing tools and slideshow.

You can download a source tarball from the Shotwell home page at: http://www.yorba.org/shotwell/ or grab a binary for Ubuntu Karmic or Lucid via Yorba’s Launchpad PPA at: https://launchpad.net/~yorba/+archive/ppa

My wiki page below explains how I arrived at that decision and how I tune XFS to get optimal, yet safe, performance that can rival Ext4 and JFS.

• Linux File Systems

I’ve recently upgrade my workstation with a 6TB internal RAID 0 array for data storage (music, videos, photos, etc) and an external 6TB RAID 0 array as a backup. My OS boot from a 1TB drive. For my 6TB arrays I want the maximum available storage and was interested to see what effect removing the reserved space would have. So, this is what I did.

First I made the Ext4 file system, mounted it and queried how much space was available.

sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdh1
sudo mount /dev/sdh1 /mnt
df -h

Looks like I have 5.1TB of available space.

/dev/sdh1             5.4T  186M  5.1T   1% /mnt

Then I unmounted the file system, removed the reserved blocks, checked the consistency of the file system, mounted it and queried how much space was available.

sudo umount /mnt
sudo tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sdh1
sudo e2fsck /dev/sdh1
df -h

Looks like I have 5.4TB available now, a saving of 300GB.

/dev/sdh1             5.4T  186M  5.4T   1% /mnt

Now, I could have simply created the files system without the reserved blocks in the first place, but I was interested to see the comparison.

sudo mkfs.ext4 -m 0 /dev/sdh1

Before you start removing the reserved blocks from your ext3/ext4 file systems do a bit a research first.

• Disk capacity, free space, and Ext3 reserved blocks
• Ext3 Filesystem Tips

I wanted to keep the same backup method, large internal volume backed up to a large external volume of the same size. I opted for Samsung Spinpoint F2 EcoGreen (HD154UI) drives because they are relatively inexpensive, low power (therefore lower heat) and quiet.

• Samsung Spinpoint F2 EcoGreen (HD154UI)
• Samsung Spinpoint F2 EcoGreen (HD154UI) Review

I decided to get 4x 1.5TB drives for the internal volume and stripe them to give 6TB of storage and I went looking for an external box in which I could install 4x 1.5TB drives and also stripe or span them.  That mean’t a multi disk external enclosure, with some kind of RAID, supported by Linux and that isn’t too expensive. A tall order as it turns out. After lots of research I finally found the StarTech S354UER which on paper appears to do what I required and a good deal more. Here is some blurb from StarTech…

• Compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems
• Fan control button to enable manual control of the fan and switch between the three fan speeds
• Internal three speed 80mm fan with automatic or manual controls
• Multiple LED indicators to provide RAID information, hard drive activity, HDD Status, RAID rebuild status, fan settings, and interface in use
• No software required
• Package includes 1x USB, 1x eSATA, 1x FireWire 400, 1x FireWrie 800 cable, Power adapter and cord, and the manual
• Plug-and-Play and Hot swap supported with USB 2.0, eSATA, and FireWire
• Push button raid configuration eliminated the need to disassemble the enclosure to upgrade your raid configurations
• Removable front cover for easy access to hard drive
• Rugged aluminum chassis
• Supported File Systems:NTFS, FAT, FAT32, and ext3
• Supports four 3.5in hard drives up-to 2.0 TB each in size
• Supports RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 3, RAID 5, RAID 10 (RAID 1+0), and Spanning

Normally, I will read reviews of different products and select something with  a proven track record particularly when Linux support is required. I couldn’t find much in the way of reviews for the StarTech S354UER so I took a gamble and decided to buy one. Eeek!

In short it works and it is quiet. It is currently sitting no more than 50cm from me initialising a stripped array of 4×1.5Tb disks as EXT4. I can’t hear it but I have manually set the fan speed to low using the fan control buttons on the front on the chassis. The build quality is not great, but not awful either, but once the drives are installed and clamped in place they are very secure. It is impossible to tell if you’ve pushed the power button you have to wait and see if the device powers up/down to be sure. The fan speed controls work, but are inverted from what is documented in manual. Fan1 is documented as LOW in the manual but is actually HIGH.

Setting up the device was not quiet plug and play either but the issues I ran into may not be entirely the fault of the StarTech S354UER. My plan was to connect the enclosure via Firewire and as yet I’ve not been able to get the enclosure to be recognised via Firewire using Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04. However, I am a Firewire newbie so maybe more research required. I don’t have eSATA (yet) so I have the device connected via USB 2.0. Which does work.

One of my new hard disks turned out to be DOA. It took me a while to figure out what was wrong here. The StarTech drive failure light on the front of the chassis was illuminated, but I didn’t know how to tell which drive had actually failed. After some trial and error I found that there are four internal LEDs, one for each disk. Starting the StarTech with the chassis door open you can see the internal LEDs blinking as each disk is spun up and tested. If the drive failure LED on the front of chassis is illuminated look at the internal LEDs, then drive LED which is off denotes the failed drive. This information is not in the user manual!

Anyway, I replaced the drive and was now able to select my RAID level. Selecting the RAID level is done though a combination of DIP switches under a panel at the back of the unit and buttons on the front. It is a slightly fiddly process, but it does have the advantage that you can’t accidentally change your RAID levels and re-initialise the array.

In order to create a partition greater than 2TB you have to use GPT. I’d never encountered GPT before, but I found everything I needed to know on the page below.

• Make the most of large drives with GPT and Linux

I used ‘gparted’ to create my partition and format with EXT4 with the enclosure connected via USB 2.0. The whole process took ~1 hour.

As you will see from the link the quoted price makes this enclosure pretty expensive. Search around though, because I got mine of 50% less than the price quoted on the StarTech.com website. You do get a healthy selection of RAID levels, all the cables, screws, screwdriver and drive handles you require.

Not only that but the MP3s are DRM free, encoded using variable bit rates aiming at an average of 256 kilobits per second (kbps), album cover art is included with each song and the tracks are typically cheaper than iTunes. Well done again. Doubtless some would want an Open Source client and unencumbered formats such as Ogg and FLAC, but I’m pretty happy with what Amazon have on offer so long as it works. Which it does

However, the Linux MP3 downloader client is 32-bit only. Not so good, but it can be successfully installed in 64-bit Ubuntu. Here’s how I did in on Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 64-bit.

 wget -c http://frozenfox.freehostia.com/cappy/getlibs-all.deb
 dpkg -i getlibs-all.deb    
 wget "http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/dmusic/help/amd-installer-redirect.html/ref=dm_amd_linux_ubuntu?ie=UTF8&forceos=LINUX&callingPage=%2Fgp%2Fdmusic%2Fhelp%2Famd.html&linux_Ubuntu.x=1" -O amazonmp3.deb
 dpkg -i --force-architecture amazonmp3.deb
 getlibs /usr/bin/amazonmp3

• Five gui hex editors for ubuntu

• http://wiki.flexion.org/JetDirectServer.html

The solution was to use p910nd, which is a small printer daemon that does not spool to disk but passes the job directly to the printer. It is particularly useful for disk less Linux workstations and embedded devices that have a printer hanging off them. Sounds ideal for my NSLU2

• http://p910nd.sourceforge.net/

Timo posted a follow up comment about p910nd in an unrelated blog since he couldn’t find anywhere else to send feedback. So I’ve created this post so I can put his comment somewhere sensible

Installing Adobe AIR 1.5 on Ubuntu

If you’re interested in trying to get BBC iPlayer Desktop for Linux installed the see my notes below.

Installing BBC iPlayer Desktop for Linux on Ubuntu

I have been using Profiles in gnome-terminal to manage my ssh connections, which is fine but requires I already have a terminal open to initiate a new server connection.

Enter SSHMenu, a GNOME panel applet that keeps all your regular SSH connections within a single mouse click. Perfect

I couldn’t be arsed adding up a new repo for one application, so here are my quick and dirty install steps.

wget http://sshmenu.sourceforge.net/debian/dists/stable/contrib/binary-all/sshmenu_3.15-1_all.deb
wget http://sshmenu.sourceforge.net/debian/dists/stable/contrib/binary-all/sshmenu-gnome_3.15-1_all.deb
sudo gdebi -n sshmenu_3.15-1_all.deb
sudo gdebi -n sshmenu-gnome_3.15-1_all.deb

I have taken to using ‘gdebi’ to install local deb packages as it resolves and installs dependencies.

Now just add SSHMenu to a Gnome panel and configure your ssh connections. If SSHMenu isn’t listed in the Gnome panel applets yet, then you can force a refresh with the rather heavy handed…

killall gnome-panel

wxCam is a webcam application which supports video recording to uncompressed and Xvid avi files. It supports both video4linux 1 and 2 drivers. I have only tested it with my webcam currently, as I have yet to decide what video capture device to get, but it works a treat.

There is a .deb package of wxCam 1.0 which “works for me ™” on Ubuntu 7.10.