Linux RA

Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2003 16:08:00 -0800 (PST)
From: Francis F Steen <steen@commstds.ucla.edu>
To: Kristoffer Ehlers <kehlers@ucla.edu>
Subject: Linux RA

<snip and modified>

If you'd like to help out and learn Linux, I'm interested in having you work two or three hours a week on a regular basis; let me know if you'd like to formalize this and we'll talk to Jane Bitar, the MSO in CommStudies.

In the short term, I need help installing Linux on my iPAQ 3750 PDA; see details.

I also want to install Debian on my third server machine, cyberspace.ucla.edu, currently running SuSE 7.3. The hardware is identical to spello, currently running Debian, excepting the harddrives.

Next, I need to establish a sensible system of users and permissions on all three machines, and testing that all the video programs are running well -- that's above all kino (dv editor and player), dvgrab (command-line capture utility), transcode (compression engine), mplayer (dv and divx player), and some suitable program for making annotations, likely openoffice (or Amaya or Mozilla). Task: to create a well-functioning environment for students and RAs, requiring minimum training.

Three further projects are primarily a matter of developing expertise -- hopefully the actual implementation will be trivial! At any rate, it will require some trial and error and testing.

A. Establishing Lisa, the LAN Information Server, between those three machines (and perhaps also sigillo, my laptop) -- it may be trivial but I don't know how to do it.

B. Establishing transcode in cluster mode, so that a single compression job can be shared among the three machines. While the perl script libraries that do this are set up for DVD::rip and transcode, I imagine we can use them for transcoding dv files directly. The latest transcode makes use of CPU optimizations and turns dv into divx at around 5 fps; theoretically, we should be able to get around 12-15 fps out of the three machines. With the addition of a future 64-bit server, we should easily get realtime transcoding.

The last link is a guide in French, useful because it assumes a setup very close to what I already have. The following have some useful information on transcode -- it may be that my current setup can be improved on for going from dv to divx, and we should experiment with xvid and ogg.

C. Establishing an ether1394 network between the three machines; as we discussed, this will hopefully give us a very fast local network.  Much of the development on the ether1394 driver appears to be taking place againt the 2.5 kernel, which is still very experimental.

It may be that establishing a firewire network is trivial, and that we just need recent drivers -- the current kernels might even be good enough.

There are some related projects that are worth looking into:
D. Setting up frame grabbing -- this is not high priority, but it would be good to get to this at some point.

Finally, there'll be stray stuff like "how do you use sync to synchronize two filesystems or directories?", doing minor modifications of programs, and troubleshooting. You should learn how to use checkinstall to make deb packages out of tarballs, how to update the machines, and so on.

There may be other tasks along the way, but this is the kind of thing I have in mind. Please keep this list and just let me know when you're ready to tackle any particular item; we can discuss the details on Monday.

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