How to have a fully multimedia capable and webcam working PC

Our suggestion to have all codecs and multimedia features needed by digital artists, game developers and web content creator in a GNU/Linux environment:

• Download and Install Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx
• Update your installation using the Ubuntu Update Manager
• Add Medibuntu repository in order to have latest version of multimedia codecs
• Install ffmpeg and some proprietary codecs with this Terminal command:
  

  sudo apt-get install ffmpeg libavcodec-extra-52

How to install Java, Eclipse and Processing on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

We will install Java Development Kit using the Ubuntu package system and the rest of tools inside the /opt/ folder in order to have them system wide available. You may put everything in your HOME folder but in this way only your user will be able to access these tools.

If you change the /opt permission to 777 you’ll have it done but it’s the “dirty way”. In order to grant permissions to just a group you have to understand the *nix File System Permission mechanism…

• We will install the OpenJDK using the Terminal:
  

  sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk

• Now we download from the Official Processing.org website the latest version for Linux
• Uncompress Processing .tar.gz file into your /opt/
• Set execution permission on the processing binary file:
  

  chmod 755 /opt/processing/processing

• Now download your favorite version of Eclipse: Processing team suggest to use the Java version
• Uncompress Eclipse into your /opt/
• Don’t forget to add a Applications menu entry manually (right click on the Applications menu and “Edit Menus”…) or learn something about xdg-desktop-menu and hack your own .desktop file for future installations!

Advanced Topics and Suggested readings

• HOWTO: Easily enable MP3, MPEG4, AAC, and other restricted encoding in FFmpeg
• How to setup the webcam with Processing
• Fully understand and play with some cool ffmpeg “pipes” just modifying, for example, this interesting Capture2File GSVideo Library sketch (if you install the Processing gsvideo library correctly you can find inside the Processing IDE itself!!!)
• How to install Processing libraries
• How to develop Processing libraries using Eclipse IDE
• Overview of File System Hierarchy Standard (FHS)