"LinuxBBQ is proud to announce the immediate availability of 'Cream', an installable live session that features no less than 76 window managers, untouched and vanilla from the developers' sources. Cream is an easy and quick way to test window managers, even those obscure ones that have never been featured in other Linux distributions before. We made sure to create a uniform look and feel, while staying on the light side in resource usage. Cream runs smoothly on any IBM-compatible PC with at least 256 MB of RAM. The live ISO image weighs in at 478 MB, so it can be put on a small USB stick or on CD. As an extra, there are framebuffer, tmux and TTY sessions included, as well as the Enlightenment desktop environment."

LinuxBBQ is a multi-purpose operating system based on Debian's "unstable" branch and spiced up with kernels and tools from siduction, Grml and Linux Mint. LinuxBBQ offers different flavours and desktops which are released as "editions" (with no version numbers) and which can be customised and remixed by the user. The individual editions are built to include most major desktop environments (with the exception of GNOME) and there is a special edition offering a choice of no fewer than 53 window managers - everything from aewm to xmonad.

"Superb Mini Server version 2.0.7 released (Linux kernel 3.10.41). After almost 8 months we have a new release with LTS 3.10.41 linux kernel, many server upgrades and security fixes, including OpenSSL 1.0.1h. The main reason for the delay, was four hard disk failures. Although I couldn't prepare a release, updates were right on time, regarding security and regular packages updates, so those who track the 'Current' tree will have little to upgrade. For this release we had a dilemma for our web server, to either switch to PHP 5.4 or stay with PHP 5.3. We decided to stay with 5.3 for now, but there is a 'php54' package in extra, built for httpd 2.2.27, if someone wants to upgrade their PHP package, but beware to remove php package first."

Superb Mini Server (SMS) is a Slackware-based server distribution with web, DNS, DHCP, file, print and fax servers, iptables firewall, mail server with spam filter and anti-virus scanner, and BitTorrent station. It also includes Webmin, a web-based administration tool, but no graphical desktop. SMS, which comes with Slackware's text-mode system installer, is built using Linux-Live scripts (from Slax) and can be used as a live CD for testing purposes. 

Part 1 of this series shows how to create a video or slide show from a set of image files using ffmpeg, a command-line tool. This post describes Imagination, a GUI-based tool, which offers some fancy animation features in slide show creation.

To install Imagination on a Debian Linux system:

     
$ apt-get install imagination

After installation, open Imagination, and follow the steps below to create a slide show:

1. Create a new project.
   
   • Click New in the Slideshow menu.
   • Select the Video Format. Available video formats are VOB (DVD video), OGV, FLV (Flash video), and 3GP (for mobile phones). If you require something else (e.g., MP4, AVI), you can convert the video to such format later using ffmpeg.

     
     $ ffmpeg -i movie.vob -strict experimental movie.mp4
     

   • Select the Video Size. Various high definition, and standard definition sizes are available.
2. Import the Pictures.
   • Click Import Pictures in the Slideshow menu.

     Note that the input picture files should reside in the same folder.

   • Navigate to the folder containing the picture files.
   • Multi-select the picture files.

     To multi-select, click the files while pressing the Ctrl or the Alt key.

   
3. Rearrange (if so desired) the order of pictures to appear in the slide show.

   The thumbnails of the imported pictures are displayed horizontally at the bottom of the screen. The order in which the thumbnails are displayed is the same order they appear in the slide show. You can easily change the order by dragging and dropping the individual thumbnails.

4. Select single or all pictures.

   You can configure individual slides, or you can apply the same property to multiple or even all slides. To select all slides, press the Ctrl-A keys. To select individual or to multi-set a subset of slides, click on the corresponding thumbnails.

5. Modify Slide Settings.
   

   After selecting the slide(s) to work on, you are ready to make some changes. Minimally, you should change the Slide duration in sec. I modified the duration from 1 second (default) to 3 seconds.

   By default, there is no transition effect between slides (Transition Type is set to None). If you feel artistic, you can choose from a rich set of transition effects to assign to the slides. Click here for a live sample of all available transition effects.

6. Add Slide Motion (Optional).

   You can apply the pan and zoom effect to a slide (aka the Ken Burns effect) by adjusting the Slide Motion properties.
   

   • Drag the Zoom slider to select the desired zoom level.
   • Pan the image by clicking and dragging the left mouse button until you are satisfied with the picture in view.
   • Set the duration for the slide motion.
   • Click Add to add a stop point.
   • Repeat the steps to add as many stop points as you want.
7. Add Slide Text (Optional).

   You can add a subtitle to a slide by modifying the Slide Text properties.
   

   • Enter the subtitle text.
   • Adjust the font, including its size, and color.
   • Select the subtitle position.
8. Add a sound track (Optional).

   Click Import music in the Slideshow menu, and select the music file.
   

   Once imported, the music file is listed in the Audio tab with its duration in clear display. Note: if the audio duration is longer than that of the video, the audio and ultimately the slide show stop when the video stops. The video does not loop back.

9. Export slideshow.
   • Click Export in the Slideshow menu.
     
   • Enter the output file name including the extension (e.g., fashion.vob).
   • Select the aspect ratio: 4:3 versus 16:9.

   The slide show is created in the video format specified earlier when you created the project (e.g., .vob).