This is going to be update multiple times over the weekend. My software needs are quite specific. Most of them relate to work: I need a good browser that can handle Zotero and WordPress (Firefox) and one that can handle webkit and Strut (chromium). The odd thing out is Revman, which still runs on Java 6. Which is why my servers all run Xubuntu: Revman works on it.

But Ubuntu is going into a hole: like Google, they are becoming “one ring to rule them all” and that leaves me with some problems. Debian works quite well on one of my laptops — the ultralight one — but revman does not. The more general and heavier machines have been tried with fedora (which has a new feature I do not like: when you agree to an update it reboots itself. I prefer yum, pacman or apt-get: I want to see what is going on).

I like Arch: I prefer rolling distros, and I do not like eye candy on the desktop: I would rather use the pixels to sort out photos. Now, getting Arch up can be done, but it is difficult: and although Sabayon forked from them as did Foresight, I have not had good experiences with both.

Enter Manjero and a project.

The project is around podcasting talks that I do. My department IT and multimedia person is using screenflow on a mac pro to record my talks (which run in impress.js — that is from a browser) with me talking (using the webcam from the mac pro) and a microphone.

The trouble is that I managed to fill his SSD. Twice. Well the lecture is 90 minutes long, includes about 15 minutes of embedded video, and multichannels. (Which is in part why it is behind a firewall at the University — I am within the fair use rules for the academy, but I’m less sure about the real world.

But I want to record my lectures and post them up, behind a firewall, for students. Preferably using open source: I deliberately do not use prezi. And I have an old Toshiba that needs updating…

So this is the weekend project.

1. Download the openbox version and install it onto my test machine.
2. Ensure that I can get the software I need running.
3. Test the robustness of updating.
4. See if I can get multimedia and photog tasks running on three year old hardware, for simple software saves the hardware budget.
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UPDATE 1.

I downloaded the most recent 64bit version from the website — it still fits on a CD at under 700 MB.
My test machine is a Dell Inspiron. The install on this is incredibly fast, defaults to wiping the hard disk and starting again (which does not matter on the test machine, but ensure any real data is backed up.

This is what you are left with — I have just changed the wallpaper to a nicer version than the black and green default, running openbox.

There is but 700 packages, but these include scripts for installing multimedia, a graphical software manager (which you will need unless you are familar with pacman, video drivers and libreoffice It installs Java 7 as part of the multimedia package. You can turn the repositories into standard ARCH if you so choose, which is a useful option, as is being able to downgrade the system if it is unstable. A manual update using packman was painless. So far I have a basic system, but it will need customization.

Once I had the graphical interface up, I installed Firefox, Chromium, and Thunderbird. Thunderbird is very good at handling multiple mail accounts, and I recommend it.

UPDATE II — installing Revman.

If you use the scripts to install multimedia you get a java kit, and, suprisingly, Revman can work with it. This is revman installing.

[To do this, download the programme from Revman: I put things in a Download folder in my home directory (which is automatic in Manjero, and then, in that directory, type ‘sh ‘. You an see this in the screenshot.

However, in openbox you do not get a menu: it is hidden in /opt/RevMan5. If you go there, you can run it — I have it open to the point it connects to Archie.

UPDATE III: Webcams.

This is where it gets interesting. The two commonly used programmes — < href="https://launchpad.net/kazam">kazam and recordmydesktop don’t work that well at present — in part because they depend (as far as I can see) on kde and gnome.

There is no audio from the integrated webcam on the test laptop, so one would have to use an external USB style webcam to make this work or an external microphone. Finally, the quality of the camera is not that good, as you can see in the screenshot.

So the next part of this has nothing to do with Manjero, but around findino hardware to see if one can get a reasonable quality video — before processing it, probably in VLC. That will be another post: in the meantime I will leave Manjero on the test machine for a few weeks and see if it is stable enough for production use.