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Multimedia with dyne:bolic 2.5

By Rebecca Sobol
September 26, 2007

Multimedia creation is one area where free software still lags behind proprietary software. The dyne:bolic GNU/Linux distribution does a pretty good job of filling in that gap, and the recently announced 2.5 release has narrowed it further.

Dyne:bolic is easy to use and comes as a live CD full of software for multimedia production, all of it Free Software. Simply copying the /dyne directory from the CD to the users hard disk will install the distribution, without destroying the existing OS. Artists are often not technically inclined, so dyne:bolic strives to make it easy for them to get creating without having to understand the technical aspects of hardware detection and operating systems.

Denis "Jaromil" Rojo is the creator of Rasta Software and dyne:bolic:

while ( love & passion ) {
  for( fight = 0 ; rights < freedom ; rights++ )
    fight = standup( rights );
  free( babylon );
}

Jaromil has been joined by an international community of artists, teachers and developers, all of whom help to adapt dyne:bolic to a variety of uses. The core code, bug tracking, and developers lounge can be found at dyne.org. This core is an important part of dyne:bolic, of course, but the additional applications make it a full-featured distribution. Dyne:bolic includes MuSE for streaming audio, FreeJ for realtime video manipulation, and HasciiCam which makes it possible to have live ascii video on the web.

This version of dyne:bolic also has updated versions of Ardour2, Gimp, Audacity, Nicotine+, Pidgin, Ktorrent, Rox and toolkit libraries such as Gtk, Cairo and Wx. New software in this release includes Ekiga, Guarddog and Wireshark plus all the GtkPython and WxPython libraries. Text console usage has been enhanced by a fully functional mail setup with Mutt, Msmtp, Fetchmail, Procmail and Spamassassin. There's also the text based presentation tool TPP and the Rtorrent download client. A graphical desktop repair button and a mount utility for SSH accounts are also new in this release.

As if all this wouldn't be enough, the dyne:bolic community is
blossoming several specialized modules, developed by and for musicians
and media artists ___  _ _ 
                      ____  ___   _  _ http://lab.dyne.org/DyneModules

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Page editor: Rebecca Sobol
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