:: [dyne:bolic] state of the art
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Skribent: Richard Hamel-Smith
Dato:  
Til: dynebolic mailinglist
Emne: [dyne:bolic] state of the art
Hey Jaromil, Jah love, bro.

Greetings from the Third World.

Trinidad, actually, West Indies.

Don't know if you have a lot of correspondents from these parts, but
reaching out in love and appreciation.

A few words. I love this distro and it is a work of art. True love, true love.

The thing is, I have this meet set up with this lady artist on
Saturday. Her and the project manager for this ghetto project. I'm
trying to sell them on the concept you are sharing. She does work
sharing skills among the youth, so I think your distro would be a GOOD
THING for her to use.

So I've been going through the apps and trying to figure them out.
It's been a rough ride. The quality of the user interface varies so
much from app to app. It really brings the whole thing down.

I realise you personally are not responsible for all the apps. And I
don't really have a solution.
But just so you know, this is the score for the day :-

Xawtv works with my webcam, an Ezonics EZ-306. But when I try to
record to an .avi file, it produces nothing at all. It does put
something into the .wav file but since I don't have a microphone
attached, I have no idea what it's really doing.

Mplayer crashed - now I've used mplayer on other systems, so this
looks like a configuration problem to me. I'm not a mplayer expert by
any means, so I'm not sure what gives.

Xine kinda worked, but then I got an error message "The amount of
dropped frames is too high, your system might be slow, not properly
optimized or just too loaded". I KNOW my system can run xine coz I've
used it under Slackware already. Not sure what's going on here.

gTranscode may work but it doesn't give any info about what kind of
files it can process. Again, not your fault, but the look-and-feel is
so different to the rest of the general environment, that it's a shock
to look at. It seems so amateurish.

Cinelerra looks really promising, but desperately needs a tutorial.

Blender. What can I say about Blender? If ever there was a program
that needed a demo and a step-by-step tutorial, it's Blender. The hell
that one goes through to learn how to do ANYTHING, scares people
anyway. And the horror is, that this is what this artist lady does. So
I'm sure she's going to freak.

On the plus side, Amarok just rocks. But your gift is about
production, not playback.

The learning curve is the killer. I know you just do GPL and I support
that. But just bundling is not going to cut it.

I'm thinking that it might be better to do simpler isos with just one
app and a BUNCH of demos and tutorials, neatly integrated. I know your
fans have been able to go from startup to full radio station, but
brother, I'm just one guy trying to push this distro done here. I'm
copying and distributing to anyone I even think has any interest in
production, but I feel it's too big of a jump for most people.

Ok, I know I'm ranting here, but years ago, my daughters had this CD
put out by Crayola. Yeah, I know it's non-free, but the concept
introduced them to making little cartoon movies.

One of the mothers in their school, put together a little Powerpoint
presentation with photos of the kids in the class and background music
from some hit song. Very effective stuff.

You've got all the tools here, but no way some school mom is going to
figure out how to tie it altogether.

Desperately searching for the light.

Blessings,
Richard