I’ve made up a wiki page to present myself. If anyone feels the urge, please add a testimonial to the page! Thanks.

This is especially exciting as it’s only 59 days till OggCamp 11! Get them from http://oggcamp.org/promotion

There’s also a twibbon you can get hold of from http://twibbon.com/join/OggCamp11

http://oggcamp11.eventbrite.com

If we get enough people signing up to the waiting list, then we’ll try and work out something with the venue to accommodate more people too. It’s really worth your while to join the waiting list if you want to come to OggCamp on the 13th and 14th August!

If you want more information about OggCamp, the biggest, best and boldest community-run FLOSS conference in the UK, please visit the website at http://oggcamp.org.

I hope that lots of the people who signed up to come are getting their thinking hats on about what they would like to see at the event and how they can make it happen. Whether that’s a talk, a workshop, demonstration or just a big chat, please come along to OggCamp with something to make happen in your back pocket.

With four months to go, it’s going to be a lot of work to get the event together, but right now I’m fired up for it like you wouldn’t believe…

OggCamp 11 is happening on the 13th and 14th August 2011 at the Farnham Maltings, Farnham Surrey

OggCamp is the biggest and best community-run FLOSS conference in the UK. And because it’s an unconference, you can make it the event you want it to be. Want to bring along some cool stuff to show off? Do it! Want to tell people about something that you’ve been thinking about? Come along and offer a talk!

You can find out more from the website and if you can come, sign up on the eventbrite page for free: http://oggcamp11.eventbrite.com/ Download the latest Linux Outlaws or Ubuntu Podcast episodes to find out more. Spread the word and let’s make this the best darn event this side of Wolverhampton!

Click on the image to see it full size.

A couple of weeks ago we did the first episode of Season 4 of the Ubuntu Podcast, broadcast live as we recorded it. It was an immense amount of fun, trying to make sure it all hung together as a live show. A couple of technical slips and a couple of stumbles aside, it all went very well. The rush of a live performance is great and two weeks seems such a long time between shows! In the meantime I’ve been working on a bash script called cartwall to help with the show and updating the podcast website.

This Tuesday, the 15th March we’ll be doing it again. Make sure you head over to http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org before 8:30pm to listen live and join in the conversation.

We will be broadcasting the recording of the show live from 20:30 UTC (8:30pm UK local time) accessible via the website at http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org. This means that you can listen along as we record the show. We experimented with live streaming towards the end of the last season and really enjoyed getting feedback whilst we were still recording a segment. If you listen live you can also join the #ubuntu-uk-podcast IRC channel on irc.freenode.org. Again, there will be a big button on the website which will make it dead easy to join in if you’re not familiar with IRC.

We will still be releasing the episode as normal on a Wednesday so you can still download and listen at your convenience and send us your feedback via any of these means:

Leave a voicemail via phone: +44 (0) 203 298 1600, sip: podcast@sip.ubuntu-uk.org and skype: ubuntuukpodcast
Follow our twitter feed http://twitter.com/uupc
Follow us on Identi.ca http://identi.ca/uupc
Find our Facebook Fan Page
Discuss in the Forums

• The expensive hardware (I’m not much of a sucker for shiny things)
• The lack of enterprise-quality management applications (I know how much hard work running a 100 seat Mac network is)
• The Terminal.app
• Those missing keys on the keyboard
• The smug religious fervour that the latest Mac products and iDevices generate in fanboys and girls
• The retirement of the XServe and XRaid in favour of the rack-mounted Mac Mini(!?)
• I find using the Mac OS X UI much harder than Ubuntu and Windows, between which I regularly switch

Despite all that, I’ve been considering buying one. Why? Photos.

For the past few years I’ve used F-spot to help me collate and process my photographs. F-spot is now only supported by the Ubuntu community, having been replaced as the default photo management application last year. After upgrading to the latest release of Ubuntu, F-spot started exhibiting a sudden and severe memory leak which all but crashed the PC each time I tried to browse my collection. I soon found posts on Launchpad and the Ubuntu forums from people with the same or similar issues and spent a few evenings trying to narrow down the cause, dumping and repairing the sqlite database on the way. (It turned out that it was something to do with metadata in RAW files.) I eventually found that there was an updated version of F-spot in a PPA which fixed the issue.  However the extensions I use, like RAW+JPEG, no longer worked with the newer version of F-spot. There were no updates available and no useful links on the F-spot website. Also, F-spot had been getting increasingly slow to browse my collection as I added to it: I don’t think it likes having to process the larger files from my 5DMkII.

I had been without access to my photo catalog for over a week and had had enough. I looked at the alternatives.

Shotwell just isn’t sophisticated enough for my needs at the moment. It doesn’t support multiple versions of the same image and doesn’t have the bulk-processing options of the more sophisticated applications. RawTherapee has the advantage of being available in the main Ubuntu repositories, but the UI is sadly underdeveloped and clunky. It was also very slow to load the test images I imported. Darktable looks promising, although I found it totally unintuitive to use. I tried to watch the tutorial screencasts but the site was unresponsive and none of the download links worked. New users need this sort of hand-holding through the early stages, especially with complex applications like this.

I was recommended a proprietary program called Bibble and I spent a lunch hour watching the tutorial videos. Don’t rat me out to RMS but at this point I’d happily pay for a proprietary application that Just Worked. The Pro version of Bibble runs on Mac, Windows and Linux. There’s even a choice between 32 and 64-bit packages. It looked fast, flexible and designed to deal with large numbers of large photos. It’s fair to say I was a bit excited.

Having downloaded and installed the handy .deb file, I spent the evening searching for reasons why it wouldn’t run. I poured over forum posts and mailing list entries. I checked the graphics driver version and reconfigured X. I installed and removed other libraries. I reconfigured Qt. I ran a failsafe X session. Whilst searching I found lots of messages relating to crashes and bugs; whilst exporting, whilst printing, whilst saving, with plugins. It was all horribly, horribly reminiscent of my experiences with F-spot. It turned out the problem was a conflict the real-time processing used by JACK, the audio toolkit. To give the Bibble developers the credit they deserve, they replied to my tweets about the issue and even pointed me to a newer development version of Bibble which seems to have addressed the issue. I also appreciate that they support their application on Linux, unlike some other companies making photo software, and packaging it even just for Fedora and Ubuntu must be a challenge.

Underscoring all of this is the lack of a decent colour management application. I have an i1 calibration device and the software supplied with it is very simple to use. (I’ve tried it on Windows and it is the same UI on a Mac too.) A few clicks and a short pause later, one has a calibrated display. On Linux we have LProf, which supports the same calibration device but lacks any of the simplicity, usability and stability of the closed-source equivalent. Instead it has a myriad of confusing screens filled with confusing buttons and it doesn’t even support TFT panels.

Throughout all of these trials there have been a number of people on Twitter and elsewhere suggesting Macs. “Use Lightroom, Aperture, Photoshop,” they tease. “Get a Mac, join the dark side.” I’m tired of it being much harder work to process my photos on Ubuntu than it is for my Mac-using friends. Spending extra time keeping my photo management application working is not time well spent. If it was my day job, it simply wouldn’t be the sensible choice to keep using Ubuntu.

Y’see, here’s the thing: I love using Ubuntu. It’s stable and fast and I most of what I want to do Just Works. Networking, wireless, 3D graphics, e-mail, web browsing, audio applications, printing and office applications are all there. I really don’t want to have to change my OS, the platform I have seen grow and develop over the last few years, for one use case. It’s really only colour management, photo management and workflow that are the issue.

I’ve used the GIMP for editing single photos for years and it continues to improve. I have sworn and sweated over audio and video applications on Linux in the past, but we finally have some open source contenders which meet my needs. I’ve mixed the Ubuntu Podcast using Ardour for the last three years, including the fancy-pants effects we used in our Christmas pantomime. I made a whole documentary using kdenlive in 2009 and video editing has only got stronger since then.

I don’t have the space for two PCs, so having a Mac for photos and an Ubuntu system for everything else isn’t an option. Dual-booting between Mac OS X for photos and Ubuntu for everything else would suck. (Any bets on whether I’d end up spending more time in Mac OS X because it does everything Ubuntu does, plus the bits it doesn’t currently do for me?)

I think both Bibble and Darktable deserve some more experimentation, but the black roll-neck shirt-wearing devil on my shoulder is hard to ignore.