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Time lapse (or stop-motion) video is really cool, and this post explains how to make a simple time lapse style video in Linux using entirely free open source software.

There is more than one way to skin a cat and when I was searching for how to do this I came across many different methods and suggestions but not really anything that suited what I wanted. Andrew Wells suggests making a movie and then processing it with ffmpeg to only store 1 in every n frames. That seems a neat solution but I wanted to take a series of still shots and string those together into a movie. Tim Nugent published a teaser of some nice looking time lapse software he wrote but as yet there is no published source or binary. There were various other suggestions dotted around the web but each one I tried had some problem or other. So here's how I did it.

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This guide shows how to use Amazon S3 with duplicity to make secure GPG encrypted automated daily incremental backups (snapshots) of a Linux server or desktop. I have been using this method on various servers for several months and it has proved to be a reliable, secure, cheap, and robust method to create automated backups.

I have used this method on Fedora, YDL, and CentOS but the instructions should equally apply to other Linux distributions including Debian and Ubuntu. It will even work on OS X using the MacPorts version of duplicity.

Aims of this guide

This guide explains how to create a simple wrapper script for duplicity that allows you to automatically create GPG encrypted incremental backups that are saved to an Amazon S3 bucket. The script is designed to be executed as a daily cron job so that incremental snapshot backups are created each day. The script creates a full backup set on the 1st day of each month (or when an appropriate full backup cannot be found) and then creates incremental backups on subsequent days.

This guide provides a walk-through of how to create the GPG encryption key, and provides full scripts and example usage for both backup and restore. You could easily adapt the backup script so that it makes full backups each week, or otherwise adjust it to suit your individual needs.

This guide is written with the general Linux user in mind: you do need some understanding of basic linux concepts such as cron, permissions, and directory structures.

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This guide will help you through all the steps necessary for installing Fedora 10 on a MacBook Santa Rosa. This guide is currently aimed at Fedora 10 x86_64 but will also work on i386 version (adjust as necessary). Most of the steps equally apply to pre-Santa Rosa models too.

These instructions will work with the MacBook 3,1 (Late 2007) and newer but will NOT work with the new aluminium MacBooks since they have different hardware (especially the graphics card). These instructions are not suitable for the MacBook Pro either!!

This guide is based largely around my previous guide for Fedora 8, and again much credit goes to the people who created the original Ubuntu wiki guide.

What works and what doesn't?

There are a few things that need fixing (covered in detail below) but the following all work "out of the box" with Fedora 10: video/graphics, compiz effects, firewire, CD/DVD reading and writing, function keys (brightness, volume etc), sound, and ethernet. Even the new "plymouth" graphical boot screen works fine once activated.

I have yet to try the infrared or connecting an external monitor. Everything else works with the tweaks described below, except for suspend and hibernate which seem generally pretty broken in F10 (as it was in F9 too). Update 7 November 2008: Suspend and hibernate are fixed with 2.6.27.7-134 kernel and newer. See bug report.

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RPMs for the Broadcom 802.11 STA Wireless Driver are now available from the rpmfusion.org repos for Fedora 8, 9 and 10.

This is an official-release of Broadcom's IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n hybrid Linux device driver for use with Broadcom's BCM4311-, BCM4312-, BCM4321-, and BCM4322-based hardware. This driver also supports the incorrectly identified BCM4328 chipset which is actually a BCM4321 or BCM4322 chipset.

Previously I explained how to build the Broadcom STA driver from source but now the installation and updates can all be taken care of using yum and the rpmfusion non-free repository. Just follow these two simple steps:

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