Today I played around a bit with the stuff done by the Wii homebrew/hacking community, which is far more advanced than I had expected.

I had the game Twilight Princess borrowed by a friend. For those who don't know, using this game you can run homebrew software on the Wii without the need of a modchip.

The way this works is that first you install a modified savegame for Twilight Princess, afterwards you can install the Homebrew Channel. The Homebrew Channel will stay in the main Wii Menu and you'll be able to run various stuff from there. While looking around the various webpages covering the topic, I found that wiibrew.org is a good place to find documentation and links to the appropriate projects. So look there for the details.

The gc-linux project (originally porting linux to the gamecube) has a simple Linux image available.

A warning: Nintendo released a new firmware that stops this method to work, so if you wanna have fun, don't update your Wii. And the obvious warning: Everything you do is at your own risk.

Update: Seems the Firmware update is no longer a problem.

Phoronix has just published an article about the development of xorg and they have a statistics of contributors from Distributions.

I'm listed there on the Gentoo part with 0.01 % contributions to Xorg. Yay!

Sometimes in the past I had the wish to produce some simple videos, e. g. from political actions. Though I was looking for some free software solutions for video editing.

I asked around but it seemed that most people didn't use free solutions. I never did any video editing before, so I had no comparison on what proprietary tools are able to do. My requirements where not that advanced, basically I wanted to be able to cut some videos together, fade them in and out, add some text over them. Beside, I wanted to be able to display images for some seconds.

I knew of three free video editing tools for linux, Kino, PiTiVi and Cinelerra. Kino and PiTiVi are quite simple to use, they have an intuitive interface. But I soon came to the conclusion that they are far too limited in features. So Cinelerra is left.

Cinelerra is not a simple tool, it's interface is not intuitive. So this was keeping me away from using it for a long time. But the good news is, Cinelerra has all the features I wanted and can do much more. As I said above, I don't have any experience with commercial tools, but I think Cinelerra can do pretty much everything one will need when doing professional video editing.

To learn how to use Cinelerra, there are some great video tutorials at the_source. It's a (CC-by licensed) video show about free software and video stuff and they did four Cinelerra tutorials in their show. You should at least watch the first three and try the stuff out between the tutorials, but that will give you the basic knowledge to get started with Cinelerra.

So, the first Cinelerra-produced video by me should be available here within the next days.

Beside, I just bumped the Cinelerra package in Gentoo, so emerge it and have fun.