danboid

I've now installed the 'Free' version of RealVNC server which includes vncserver-x11 which seems to be absent from the open source version. You need a license off them and its restricted to 5 desktops. Anyone found an open alternative to vncserver-x11? We actually only need its ability to show (and approve/block if required) existing connections.

I have installed vnc4server from the Ubuntu 12.04 repos and its working great except for two things: * We are using VNC to share one (KDE) desktop between multiple users and we really need an easy way to be able to see when there are other VNC users logged onto the session. Looking at the docs for the enterprise, non-free version of VNC server I can see it has a system tray icon/menu that should tell us this. This menu doesn't seem to be available in the open source vncserver - or is it? Maybe there is an alternative like a KDE plasmoid that does serves a similar purpose? I've not tried the 'free' RealVNC server as it requires you get a license and I also prefer to use apps from distro repos where possible but maybe that does have a desktop menu? * We have been accessing the vncserver mainly using RealVNC viewer under Windows but copy/paste doesn't work and I'm under the impression that recent VNC versions should support this. Maybe this is another limitation of the free server, maybe we should use a different viewer or am I missing something else? Thanks!

Hi Cam! If you're a Vegas user you should feel right at home with KDEnlive, which often gets Vegas comparisons. A lot of people like Openshot but I prefer KDEnlive which seems more mature. The other good options are using the blender VLE or waiting for Lightworks but LW will be overkill for many (schools).

Bananas! Whoah! Chill out on the 3GP thing please! I'm just giving a few free software hints and tips mate! You seem to be right though - I thought there was a res or bitrate restriction on 3gp but a quick scan of its wiki makes no mention of such restrictions. Nonetheless, 3GP is not a format I would recommend anyone ever intentionally transcode to, mainly due to its limited support on both hardware and in software. xvid/avi is best for compat where quality is not a priority then I'd encode to webm if you want better quality and smaller file sizes but the file only has to play on computers. webm is my video format of choice because its open source, royalty free, high quality, good compression ratios AND You can play webm files under FF and Chrome without any extra plugins, so there! EDIT Remember to only use xvid and webm for distributing your final edits - you should avoid lossy formats like these during editing!

Bananas - Thats a shame to hear about Lightworks beta not opening your movs - you should report that as a bug if you've not already. I presume they play fine under VLC or whatever you normally use do they? 3gp is such poor quality I'm not surprised Lightworks aren't bothered about supporting that as its unusable for any semi-serious purposes - I wouldn't waste their time asking about it personally. As for converting your files- there is winff which is free for both Windows and Linux as is Lincoder, which should run on OSX too I'd imagine as its just a Java front end for mencoder. Achandler: Sony Vegas may be cheap but KDEnlive is not only totally free, its fully open source too and if you did have some Linux machines then its installed with one simple command under all popular Linux distros hence very easy to install and learn/use. I'm waiting for Lightworks to get released for Linux before I try that but I expect KDEnlive will be easier to use for beginners and kids (and everyone else too). KDEnlive is more than powerful enough for teaching kids the basics of video editing so I'd recommend anyone who's not locked into Windows for their video editing check it out.

Arthur: OK so its just GPL 3 software thats incompat. with the MS market then is it? I wouldn't know as I've never used it and I obviously never read any corrections to the article I linked to. Regardless, having spent most of my 3 decades using and observing MS I've seen all their tricks which they continue to pull and I as a result I only ever use or implement MS where there is no other realistic option. Truth of the matter is that even if MS did fully open source Windows 8 (never going to happen) I would still have zero interest in MSs warped concept of where computing should be headed. Win 8 is just ONE (big) example of how MSs dominion over IT frustrates me but I could provide a sizeable tome of moans over probs with MS apps that I know will never be fixed and there is no option for myself or a 3rd party to fix the sinking ship MS as there is with FOSS. If you like MS and their treatment of you and your machines - you have every right to carry on subjecting yourself to it and paying dearly for it - I'm not trying to convert anyone here, I'm just explaining how I see it. MS xenix I was aware of and it proves nothing - have we forgotten about the SCO cases which was basically a front for MS trying to prove they owned unix too? Anyway, lets drop the MS bashing as they don't need any help in making themselves look bad - back to virtualisation! Archipel looks promising but its it beta and seems to be trailing most of the other solutions mentioned here as its web page states it doesn't have HA clustering yet, which is one feature I do want. Cloudstack and openstack seem to offer more features than say proxmox but they're obviously aimed at large enterprise deployments of 1000's of hosts and vms - they sound like a pain to set up and I don't think I'll need all those features if I'm only managing say 20-30 guests over a 2 or 3 hosts. There is stackops.org which claims to be an easier to install distro of openstack but I've not found many details or any comparisons of that to say proxmox. Purely going off feedback, comments and reports given across the web, in forums etc. it would seem proxmox is the easiest virtualisation solution to set up and maintain as I've heard nothing but praise for it which I cannot say about vmware, hyper-v, rhev and xenserver.

Here's a pretty recent example of MS's hostility to free software beyond just free software that doesn't run on Windows. MS prohibits GPL and equivalent free software and libraries from its Windows marketplace: Microsoft bans open source from the Marketplace | ITProPortal.com

bossman: I know you like Xen but from all the benchmarks I've looked at KVM has the edge over Xen in most cases Also, Redhat are the big boys in Enterprise Linux and they've put their money behind KVM and so when they get a management inteface that us Linux and Mac users can use too without resorting to having a VM just to run IE in then I'll take them much more serioiusly as a competitor - but I may well be swayed on RHEV yet if CyberNerd tells me what I'd like to hear about the alternate interface. vmware also have little love for Linux admins too its seems - lunacy when you consider how prevalent the penguin is in the server room!

Totally closed view of the world? OSX, Android, Linux etc etc = unix variants Its MS that is the walled garden that doesn't want to know, because if you do see their secrets they may lose their monopoly! MS aren't quite as hostile as they used to be towards unix, linux and free software but its still a very real threat. I'm not a fan of any sort of lock in and digital chains so I try to avoid MS as they are the masters of pinning you down- if its not Apple but I prefer OSX to Windows if I have to pick a prison! xenserver would be no good if I was more the Mac fanboi and the same problem applies to RHEV - proxmox and opennode def sound the best on paper to me so far.

CyberNerd: So if IE gives you the plague or you're running a decent OS/browser, what are your options for managing RHEV under 3.0? I've heard the alternate method, whatever that is (cli/java?) is unsupported in EV 3.0. Does the alternate manager work well enough to use on a daily basis already or are we waiting on 3.1 for a sane (post MS;) management setup?

RHEV 3.0, like Xenserver, is a bit of a joke to me because its management console still requires IE and hence Windows. I know this is because RH aquired another company but this is such a gaping flaw to its cred that they should've held out for its java port to stabilise instead of rushing out a product thats dependent upon their biggest rivals platform! Also, anything that requires IE to me is a software engineering fail of the highest order as its still the most standards lacking browser. I admit it has greatly improved in its compliance in recent years but it still stinks compared to its open source rivals. Since my last post to this thread, I've discovered opennode which seems to be a better looking, centos-based alternative to proxmox although I don't know how they differ feature-wise yet. Has anyone here tried both proxmox 2.1 and opennode 6 yet?

IE 'comes with wine in ubuntu'? I dunno what version of Ubuntu you're using but it can't be an official release if your wine package includes IE as I'm sure MS wouldn't be too pleased with that! I've not tried IE under wine but appdb says that IE6 is about the only one that runs in any kind of semi-usable way, which is kinda sad/strange when Office (2007 at least) and Photoshop work so well under wine these days. However, there does seem to be a FF ActiveX plugin although I've not tried it: Esker Software We have some Axis IP cameras and I have successfully recorded its raw stream to HD with vlc under Linux like so: cvlc rtsp://user:[email protected]/axis-media/media.amp :sout='#std{access=file,mux=ts,dst=/home/dan/Videos/test.avi}' I'd expect that command would only be sure to work for Axis cameras and of course you'd need to replace user and password and the dummy IP address/ output path EDIT Thats how you'd record from the terminal but if you just wanted to view an Axis IP camera under VLC you would use VLC's open network stream feature, select RTSP and then enter the rtsp://user:[email protected]/axis-media/media.amp Bit. As before, that says 'user : password' but without any spaces if the forum is parsing the : and p together as a smiley again!

As for other great free video editors, Linux users can enjoy KDEnlive which has been compared to Sony Vegas and soon both Windows and Linux users will be able to get Lightworks, the original profressional video editor dating back to '89 used for many feature films, soon to be open sourced!

I'm disappointed no-one has mentioned Blender yet as it has a perfectly capable and really quite easy to learn and use video editor built in, its totally free and open source and available for all major and minor operating systems- you do not need to know how to use any of Blenders 3D modelling or compositing features to edit video with it although it all helps. What blender lacks is an easy way to do simple animated 2D video titling but I solved this prob using GIMP + GAP - Linux users can compile the latest gap git easy enough but we're waiting on a new GIMP GAP release for windows afaik so that you can export pngs or tiffs with transparencies then import the frames into Blender to do credits etc. without having to master Blender in full. Maybe there is a different, free app for video titling that could be used under Windows to accompany Blender? I suspect you could pull it off with a paint app and ffmpeg with some command line fu and patience but thats not such a kiddy and consumer friendly solution as GIMP/GAP which lets you point and click your creation.

Free webcam recording software with a capital F you say? In that case its guvcview for you! GTK+ UVC Viewer but thats only of use to those running a Free OS, otherwise: Recording webcam videos with VLC Media Player « Dan Newcome, blog

Thanks to everyone who has shared there virtualisation experiences so far! I know I mentioned ovirt before but I'm not so sure about that now. They only seem to create 'official' packages for Fedora 16 and if I was going to use a RH based OS it will be RHEL or Scientific. I have found a 3rd party RHEL/SL 6 ovirt repo but if I do go the RHEL route I expect I'd use their official tools for the job. The main thing that has put me off is that it sounds like a nightmare to get it running under Debian/Ubuntu and sounds like you won't get the real deal and do a lot of hacking to just get it to run. opennebula looks good to me and is in the Debian, Ubuntu and Suse repos at the very least but from what I read the virtualisation solution to beat now is Proxmox VE which is Debian/KVM/OpenVZ based, open source, supposedly very easy to set up and maintain and has advanced features like HA. A very experienced vSphere admin I know says it wipes the floor with vsphere in many respects! Proxmox - Comparison Any proxmox users here? EDIT A quick search of theses forums reveals that at least @cpjitservices has already had proxmox rox his box!

I've been a Linux user since '96 and its the only OS I run at home and work. I get paid to support Windows although I'm def. more at home under Linux so as long as setup is reasonably well documented (or it has good IRC support) I should be OK and I think extra setup time is a fair price to pay for better performance (is it? For Windows servers?) and lower costs but these of course aren't the only factors. Ease of management and stability are important factors too. I'm not ruling out any of the other XEN/KVM offerings here either like Oracle VM except I don't like that Xenserver (its config console) only runs under Windows clients!?! Whaaa? Hyper-V of course will only run under/ be configured by an MS OS and I don't rate MS as a server platform provider- you cannot streamline Windows as much as Linux for one and we all know how reboot happy MS still is. Hyper-V is just another avenue for MS vendor lock-in in my eyes with no advantage over the alternatives other than it comes with 2008 as standard.

I've been a Linux user since '96 and its the only OS I run at home and work. I get paid to support Windows although I'm def. more at home under Linux so as long as setup is reasonably well documented (or it has good IRC support) I should be OK and I think extra setup time is a fair price to pay for better performance (is it? For Windows servers?) and lower costs but these of course aren't the only factors. Ease of management and stability are of course important factors too. I'm not ruling out any of the other major offerings here either like Oracle VM but I don't like that Xenserver (its config console) only runs under Windows clients!?! Whaaa? Hyper-V of course will only run under an MS OS and I don't rate MS as a server platform provider- you cannot streamline Windows as much as Linux for one and we all know how reboot happy MS still is.

I'm currently researching my options for virtualising a number of Windows and *nix servers, but more Windows than nix. The problem is that all the benchmarks I've found so far that compare any of the different hypervisors have only benchmarked open source apps like Apache, dovecot and Postgres etc. running under Linux guests when what I need to discover now is how a vitualised Server 2008 guest (64-bit) runs AD, Exchange, SQL server, IIS, Sharepoint, SMB under the main competing virtualisation technologies compared to bare metal. I'd expect such a benchmark, if it exists, would utilise the PV/ virtio or whatever drivers each virtualisation solution provides for Windows Server so as to give the optimum results but other than that the test guests should be identical of course. As it stands it looks like KVM has a slight performance edge over both Xen and VMware and ovirt seems to be the management console of choice for KVM but Xen and VMware are generally regarded as safer bets dur to their relative maturity. Hyper-V seems to be the also-ran only for the most devout MS shops. Also, if there is anyone reading this who is familiar with both KVM and VMWare - are there any features that VMW has that KVM/ovirt doesn't that would make you consider shelling out all the extra cash required to go the VMWare route over the free and allegedly better performing KVM? Yes, I know about ESX but KVM and XEN seem to do a lot more for zilch quid.

I have just wrote a guide for this very purpose, hope it helps! http://www.edugeek.net/forums/how-do-you-do/90648-howto-set-up-active-user-manager-auto-create-user-home-folders.html

I have just added a HOWTO for this very task to the EduGeek forums here: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/how-do-you-do/90648-howto-set-up-active-user-manager-auto-create-user-home-folders.html

HOWTO set up Active User Manager to auto-create user home folders One of my most frequently performed tasks under Active Directory is creating new users. Every time I do this I used to have to manually set/create the users home folder and ensure they were a member of the appropriate groups and other repetitive things that MS sadly neglected to simplify for Server 2008. This is no longer the case thanks to Active User Manager, a very useful and free tool that I have successfully used under both Server 2003 and 2008. AUM also lets you import batches of users from a csv file. I haven't tested this aspect of the app yet although I should expect that these instructions will also work when importing and creating multiple users from csv but I'd certainly recommend getting it working with just one test user first. Obviously, the first step is to make sure you have Active User Manager (AUM) installed. If you don't, you can download it for free here: Mikey Magic's Web Site - Active User Manager for Windows 2000 & 2003 Active Directory (AD) Once installed, start AUM and open Preferences - which is under the Action menu. On the main preferences page it was necessary for me to untick 'Use OU structure when creating users folders' to get home folders created where I wanted them but if you have a more conventional set up than I do then you may need to keep this ticked hence finding the correct setting for this may just be a case of trial and error if you are unsure. I leave the other three check boxes on this page ticked. Next, click the 'Set Up User Defaults' button which is under Preferences and this will open the 'Global Default User Settings' window. You will notice it defaults to opening with the 'Profile Folder Settings' tab being displayed. We use local profiles here hence using AUM to create profiles is a feature I have not yet tested and hence will not be covering in this guide. If your organisation also uses local profiles then you will likely want to untick all the check boxes on this tab like I have then click on the 'Home Folder Settings' tab. In the field labelled 'User Home Folder Path' within the Global Default User Settings 'Home Folder Settings' tab you must enter the network path to the server and share which contain your users home folders so you would enter something like: \\server\homefolders Make sure that the user who will use AUM has the correct permissions to create and modify folders within this share else AUM will not be able to create the home folders for you. Ensure that 'Create user home folders' under this tab is selected and you will likely also want to have 'Delete User Home Folders' checked also. I have both user home share options unticked because this is not a feature we require. Now click on 'Folder Permissions' and tick 'Full Control' for Active User then click 'OK' to close the folder permissions window. Finally, we shall click on the 'User properties' button under the Global Default window to configure our default user properties. First, go to the 'Profile' tab under Default Properties and choose a drive letter that will be used to mount the users home folder but DON'T enter a network path in the adjacent field as AUM will fill this out for you when you create a new user. Switch to the 'Member of' tab and add in any groups that you require new users be added to by default such as 'Domain Users'. In my case at least that is all I need to configure to have AUM successfully auto-create home folders for new Active Directory users created with it. I have been in touch with the author of AUM and unfortunately he is no longer able to work on or support this handy app so if AUM fails to work for you you may have to find another solution although I have had no problems with it once I figured out how to configure it correctly with thanks due in no small part to the authors much appreciated assistance in doing so. Thanks again MM for the help and for giving away what is in my opinion the tool that should've been used by default for user management in Server 2008!

Its also important to note that, with such a script there would be no real need for LDAP or AD auth. to be set up on the Linux box - if you don't mind any old person using said boxes you could just have a regular, non-root user set up with an easy password - logging out of such an account is enough to sever the connection to their smb share.

I've not got round to looking at what fogprep does to Windows 7 installs yet but I pretty much got the whole imaging of Windows 7 using the Linux cli thing sussed out and so I released my own custom version of SystemRescue CD complete with cim (create NTFS image) and im (restore NTFS image to /dev/sda1) to make the imaging of XP and Windows 7 as quick and easy as possible: cim imaging | Free software downloads at SourceForge.net

I have a very simple solution to this, if your setup happens to match ours at least. I've not actually implemented this myself yet because my proposal to introduce a few Linux machines to our school network was knocked back but I'm confident this could be made to work well enough. I don't know how your school runs things but here everybody has swipe cards with an ID number. This ID number is also both their username and the name of their AD network home folder hence user 1234's home folder is located at //server/homefoldershare/1234 Hence, you can avoid all that nonsense of likewise, samba configs, AD authentication and pam_mounts by simply having a link to either a zenity or kdialog (depending on if you run GNOME or KDE) script that basically prompts the user for first their choice of server (if you have multiple DCs/ samba shares) and then asks them for their username and password then all the script does is run: thunar smb://$username:$password@server or nautilus smb://$username:$password@server or dolphin smb://$username:$password@server Before mounting the share it should warn the user to remember to log-off to unmount their share to prevent others accessing their otherwise private files. I'm sure someone will beat me to it as a zenity script to do this would be easily less than 30 lines worth of code - I'm busy today but I'll do it soon if no-one else does!