Recently in KDEnlive Category

I haven't loaded up an IM client since I upgraded from Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) to Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic).

But I did today, and neither Pidgin nor the new GNOMEish Empathy would run. (Whether this matters or not, I upgraded from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10, as opposed to doing a reinstall.)

I started both IM clients in the terminal to see if I could determine what the problem might be:

steven@toshiba-ubuntu:~$ pidgin
ERROR: Could not load classifier cascade /usr/share/opencv/haarcascades/haarcascade_frontalface_alt2.xml
Illegal instruction
steven@toshiba-ubuntu:~$ empathy
ERROR: Could not load classifier cascade /usr/share/opencv/haarcascades/haarcascade_frontalface_alt2.xml
Error re-scanning registry , child terminated by signal
Run 'empathy --help' to see a full list of available command line options.

(empathy:2527): empathy-WARNING **: Error in empathy init: Error re-scanning registry , child terminated by signal
steven@toshiba-ubuntu:~$

At least both apps seem to be suffering from the same problem, and luckily there is already a bug (#459940) on it in Launchpad. The bug is for the package opencv, and

According to notes on the bug, other GNOME applications affected by the problem include the Totem video player, the Brasero disc burner and Rhythmbox music player.

I can confirm that on my system, every one of those apps will not run.

I also confirmed that the XML file in question is NOT on my box:

steven@toshiba-ubuntu:~$ cat /usr/share/opencv/haarcascades/haarcascade_frontalface_alt2.xml
cat: /usr/share/opencv/haarcascades/haarcascade_frontalface_alt2.xml: No such file or directory

One of the comments in the bug report says:

Thomas DEBESSE wrote on 2009-10-29: #6

seems to appear when installing frei0r-plugins (example: for kdenlive). When removing frei0r-plugins from my karmic I've no error messages at all, and totem (and other apps) runs fine.

Hey, I do have KDEnlive on this laptop. I would've removed the offending plugins package, but I decided first to do a software update to see if Ubuntu's package maintainers took care of the problem.

I opened a terminal and used aptitude to do it:

steven@toshiba-ubuntu:~$ sudo aptitude update
[sudo] password for steven:

Reading package lists... Done

(listing of mirrors hit has been removed for brevity)

steven@toshiba-ubuntu:~$ sudo aptitude upgrade
W: The "upgrade" command is deprecated; use "safe-upgrade" instead.
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
binutils brasero empathy empathy-doc f-spot libbrasero-media0
libempathy-common libempathy-gtk-common libempathy-gtk28 libempathy30
nvidia-common python python-minimal ubuntu-xsplash-artwork xsplash
15 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 5,715kB of archives. After unpacking 160kB will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?]

That seems like it would take care of the problem, but the missing file still hadn't shown up. Would a reboot fix things?

After the software update didn't solve the problem, I decided to go into the Synaptic Package Manager and reinstall the opencv packages, which I guessed were libcv1, libhihgui1 and libcvaux1.

That didn't work either.

The next step would be either removing KDEnlive or the offending package, frei0r-plugins.

I went into Synaptic and removed frei0r-plugins.

Nothing changed.

I reinstalled the three opencv libraries (libcv1, libhihgui1 and libcvaux1).

That worked. I was able to run Pidgin, Empathy (which has a nice dialog that offered to import my Pidgin settings, an offer I accepted), Rhythmbox, Brasero and Totem once again.

And KDEnlive seemed to be working, too. It at least loaded.

Let's review: If Pidgin, Empathy, Rhythmbox, Brasero and Totem are not running on your Ubuntu 9.10 system, first update the box, then use the Synaptic Package Manager to remove frei0r-plugins and reinstall libcv1, libhihgui1 and libcvaux1.

I'm a bit surprised that the software update alone didn't fix the problem. While the fix is easy, it's a little bit of "dependency hell" for a package-management system (apt) that is not supposed to suffer from that particular malady.

While I've solved my X issue and now this in 9.10, I probably should have waited an extra month or so before upgrading so these bugs could be shaken out.

Bug #459940 should be closed eventually, but at present it appears that the removal of the offending package and the replacement of those the offender affected is the way out of this problem.

I do have a Launchpad account (I had to create it in order to buy stuff at the Canonical U.S. shop), and I subscribed to this bug so I can keep an eye on it.

I've seen a lot of comments directed at me and others in regard to reporting bugs, and following this bug is hopefully a step in that direction for me personally as a Ubuntu user.

This is total guerrilla video. Ilene made it with our many-years-old Casio 1.3-MP digital camera (which shoots .avi video) and edited it in iMovie on the iBook G4. (Follow Ilene on Twitter for tips on food, health, vegetarianism and avoiding eating stuff that can kill you.)

We output the iMovie "project" as a Quicktime video and then uploaded it to YouTube, which takes care of the Flash encoding.

This is no big deal if you're accustomed to dealing with video, but for a couple of people who don't do this all that often (or ever), it shows how relatively easy it is to shoot, edit and distribute a video with whatever 5+year-old equipment you happen to have laying around.

Where I'm going: My near-future plans for video entail trying to edit it in a FOSS environment, and that means looking at the various video-editing solutions for Linux and BSD.

I tend to favor software that's not in perpetual alpha mode, has a relatively large user base and isn't prone to crashing. I also favor cross-platform applications.

For this reason, I'm focusing on Blender, which is mainly for 3D animation but will also serve as a video editor.

At first glance, Blender appears to be an excellent project with an active community centered around an application that runs not just on Linux, Windows and Mac OS but also in OpenBSD, and probably every other BSD as well.

I have had Blender installed on both my OpenBSD and Ubuntu systems for the past many months but haven't yet figured out how to use it.

Cutting video with KDEnlive: If you're OK staying in Linux and using KDE apps, KDEnlive looks like it's shaping up to be an excellent video editor. There's currently no KDEnlive port for OpenBSD but there is a port in FreeBSD. (Even though I'm not running OpenBSD at this particular moment, I'm still keeping an eye on what will and won't run in it ...)

I'm very interested in following the progress on KDEnlive as it becomes a more "mainstream" portion of the KDE software bundle. I've said before that this is the one app that could bring me over to the KDE camp (I'm currently partial to GNOME and Xfce on the FOSS desktop). Not that you can't run a KDE app without the full KDE desktop, but it somehow seems so "wrong" (and yes, I should probably get help for this).

To that end, reader arochester sent me a link to this Nixie Pixel video about editing with KDEnlive.