I was assigned to record a screencast for demonstrating look-and-feel of a portal. By the way, my laptop is Ubuntu right now. I don't want to find another machine to do this job so I have to find a way to record my screen effectively. I found How to Create a Screencast in Ubuntu. This is a good article which helps me realize additional capability of ffmpeg. Anyway, the standard ffmpeg does not support this functionality so I have to recompile ffmpeg by myself. Well, I do not like this idea because I will have two versions of ffmpeg in different directory. So I continue finding and finally found how to rebuild ffmpeg in proper way. As a result, I combined 2 approaches as follows.

I encountered a bandwidth problem. It seems international bandwidth was quite low so I can't run even "apt-get update" successfully in reason time. Anyway, I really want to update package repositories to make everything up-to-date. So I looked for interim solution like proxy server to help me pass through this obstacle as quick as possible. I have other hosts with fast access to international sites and this host also is accessible so fast from my host. It should be possible to run a kind of web proxy there.

Today I managed to temporarily solve sound driver problem in Ubuntu by just plugging a new USB sound device. It is Comodow PD552. It is very small and so cheap even for me, 450 THB or approximately 11 USD. It works on my Ubuntu's laptop just fine. Whenever I plugged it, Ubuntu notified me immediately about the new audio playback device and let me configure it at the same time.

After I switched my laptop to Ubuntu, I can only here silence. That's motivation to find interim solution until sound driver being improved. The first solution is to buy a USB sound card. Not too bad but I have to bring this new gadget everywhere I go. In addition, I have to paid for it. Luckily, it is Ubuntu. EsounD is a sound server software which is available on many platform including Lnux, Mac OS X and Windows. Ubuntu does support EsounD and it is installed by default. So, I just need to redirect all sound sent to EsounD to other EsounD on remote server. Sound good! How to do it?

Since I'm a Ph.D. student and a researcher at the same time, I often present my works through LCD projector. Now my laptop is Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Dapper Drake. I have to configure it for easily presenting. One thing I like the most of laptops and recent video drivers is dual monitor aka dual head. In particular, you are able to extend your laptop screen to external monitor via standard VGA out port. This is not a complex capability. Most laptops support this scheme out of box. In Ubuntu, we are not able to configure dual head via GUI. In fact, we can but need some modification to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

My most favorite editor is always Vim for 10 years. One of reason I switched my laptop to Ubuntu is that I can use Vim anytime I want. Anyway, I use RedHat-based distribution more than 5 years. Switching distribution for personal use just likes a painful process. I don't know much about Debian-based distribution like Ubuntu. Luckily, most things work out of box. I have just found one thing different in Ubuntu an in Fedora Core. Vim in Ubuntu didn't restore my last cursor position.