Sweet Home 3D : Prevent crashes and change icon

Sweet Home 3D is the best interior design application that I have found so far for Linux. It is easy to place your furniture on a house 2D plan, and render the whole scene in 3D.
The website gives you the possibility to run the application online without installation, as being written in Java.
Unfortunately there are two points that bothered me for a while and that I fixed finally:

1. The application crashes every time you choose the preferences or the 3D rendering from the menu.
2. The application icon has a very low resolution and looks awful when rendered by the application launchers.

Install instructions

Sweet Home 3D can be installed from the GetDeb application repository, execute the following in the shell:

sudo -v
# Enable GetDeb Application repository:
sudo echo "deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu oneiric-getdeb apps #GetDeb repository extends the official repositories" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/GetDeb-Apps-oneiric.list
# Add the repository GPG key
wget -q -O- http://archive.getdeb.net/getdeb-archive.key | sudo apt-key add -
# Update package information
sudo apt-get update

# Install Sweet Home 3D package
sudo apt-get install sweethome3d

Prevent crashes

Sweet Home 3D checks whether computing off-screen 3D images is supported by Java 3D on your computer, but the detection test itself makes Sweet Home 3D crash!

A special flag can be passed to the Java command line inside the launcher script.
The following shell commands change the original script, and leave a backup.

sudo -v
sed -i.bak 's/java /java -Dcom.eteks.sweethome3d.j3d.checkOffScreenSupport=false /' /usr/bin/sweethome3d

Change icon to higher resolution

Higher resolution icons can be found inside the source code, the following shell commands replaces the low resolution one with a higher one:

sudo -v
cd /tmp
wget -q http://sweethome3d.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/*checkout*/sweethome3d/SweetHome3D/src/com/eteks/sweethome3d/viewcontroller/resources/help/images/sweethome3d.png
sudo cp /tmp/sweethome3d.png /usr/share/pixmaps/sweethome3d.png

Video Edition for Linux

You have some nice vacation video in your Camcorder and want to edit it on your Linux system.
It seems, that Windows user are more luckily, lots of video edition software exists (for example ULead), but Linux users also can edit their videos with free software.

In this post, I'll comment about three applications, which are powerful and easy to use.

Kino

Kino is a non-linear digital video editor which supports many basic video editing and assembling tasks.
But its main feature is the import from raw AVI and DV files, as well as capture footage from digital camcorders using the raw1394 and dv1394 libraries, and export to camcorders using the ieee1394 or video1394 libraries.
During import, it detects scene changes (when you stopped grabbing) and can split the scenes into separate files.

For me, its the application which works best when passing my videos from the digital camera onto the hard drive, without frame dropping.

Install instructions

sudo aptitude install kino

or click here to install it from the browser.

Troubleshooting

A normal user doesn't have privileges to the RAW 1394 device, which is used to transfer data from the camcorder to the computer. You would have to launch Kino as superuser or execute the following commands:

sudo modprobe raw1394
sudo chmod a+rw /dev/raw1394

To make these changes permanent:

sudo echo "install raw1394 /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install raw1394 $CMDLINE_OPTS ; \
                sleep 0.5 ; \
                /bin/chmod a+rw /dev/raw1394" > /etc/modprobe.d/raw1394.modprobe

OpenShot

OpenShot is a video editor for GNU/Linux, being simple but yet powerful. It has all functionality one would need for day-to-day video cutting and assemblage.

Its interface supports themes, is very eye-candy and integrates well with Gnome.
You can see a list of features on its website.

Install instructions

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonoomph/openshot-edge
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install openshot openshot-docs

or see instructions here if you don't use Ubuntu Karmic.

Kdenlive

Kdenlive is an intuitive and powerful multi-track video editor, including most recent video technologies.
It has tons of video and audio effects and video snippets can be arranged visually on the several tracks.
The resulting video can also be exported to DV devices, or written to a DVD with chapters and a simple menu.

Where Kino's importing feature is more powerful, Kdenlive is so much better when editing and creating the "final cut".

Install instructions

sudo aptitude -y install kdenlive

or click here to install it from the browser.

DVD Authoring

You should install the following additional programs, so you can export the video from Kdenlive to a DVD folder which can be burned to DVD directly.

sudo aptitude install ffmpeg lame mjpegtools dvdauthor

Access Subversion from Emacs

Emacs is a feature-rich text editor, with perhaps, more editing commands than any other editor or word processor

There exists lots of documentation in Internet about this great editor, for example the following links are very useful:

• Wiki about Emacs
  (here you can find lots of material, extensions)


• Oficial web page
  

Integration with Subversion

There exist several plugins for the integration of Emacs with Subversion
, but the best one is Svn Status Mode. It's work is based on previous plugins, like vc-svn and dsvn.

Installation

You can get the very latest version with any of the following commands:

1. sudo svn export http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/contrib/client-side/emacs/psvn.el /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/psvn.el




2. sudo wget -O /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/psvn.el http://www.xsteve.at/prg/emacs/psvn.el




3. sudo wget -O /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/psvn.el http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/contrib/client-side/emacs/psvn.el

Add the following line to your ~/.emacs

(require 'psvn)

How to use

From now on, you find a new menu entry Tools-->SVN Status in the XEmacs.

• You can also launch the command Alt-x svn-status directory .
  


• It opens a new buffer *svn-status* where you can see all files controlled by Subversion, with flags that indicate there state.


• Inside the XEmacs you have a menu which gives you access to all kind of commands for commiting and more, if not, just have a look at the mentioned Wiki or issue the command Ctrl-h m.