Episode: 2015
Title: HPR2015: Linux in the Church
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2015/hpr2015.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 13:20:27

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This is HPR episode 2015 entitled Linux in the Church.
It is posted my first time post-show and in about 19 minutes long, the summary is how
I'm using Linux for many of my projects at Church.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
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Hello Hacker Public Radio family, Joe Salino here.
This is my first recording for Hacker Public Radio.
I just finished listening to recording and how someone recorded their band and Linux.
It got me thinking I've been using Linux for quite a while, I've been doing a lot with
it at my church and I thought maybe this would be helpful for others.
So let me introduce myself, I'm Joe Salino, I live in Upstate New York, I am an Evangelical
Christian which might be a little foreign to listeners, especially those in Europe, but
I lived quite a crazy life up until the age of 30 and decided that I needed something
deeper to guide my life and so I jumped into faith in Christ and haven't looked back
since, best decision I've ever made.
You don't have to park your brain at the door when you believe in God.
There's many good sites out there, I would suggest for those of you who are skeptical
of God or faith, a couple of them would be reasons to believe science, perspective on faith,
reasonable faith, that's a philosophical ministry that really has, I probably thousands
of articles and great podcasts on philosophical understanding of the world today and faith,
stand to reason, many, many sites out there for those who are open-minded and would like
to look into how faith can really be a thoughtful way to live your life.
But anyway, let me get onto the subject at hand, I wanted to discuss how I've been
gently introducing my church to Linux.
I've been using Linux since the late 90s, I started out with Mandrake Linux, it was
the only distro I could get to recognize most of my hardware on my computer and I really
enjoyed Mandrake, that was an awesome distribution.
The only problem I had with it was Lilo, it bore itself every once in a while and I couldn't
boot it.
So Mandrake had an option to create a floppy disk, emergency boot, floppy disk and that
was great because I would keep three or four of those in my desk drawer and whenever Mandrake
wouldn't boot I'd just throw that in and I could boot back into it and that was great.
I tried Red Hat, I think back in the late 90s also and that was also Lilo, Boot, Grubb
really was a great way to boot later on.
I didn't use Linux exclusively at that time, I just couldn't use it regularly and reliably
because of hardware issues and all that but as soon as Ubuntu came around I jumped
right on Warty Warthug back and I think that was 2005 and from that time on I never
looked back, I ditched Windows and exclusively used Linux.
Enjoy Linux, let me confess, I am not a coder, I am not a hacker in the traditional sense
but I love hardware, I love tearing down computers, I love anything digital playing around
with digital creation and stuff like that.
So Linux just fit me like a glove and I love it.
Unfortunately in my present situation I'm the technical director at my church, Windows
is just a way of life in most churches and so I've had to learn to accept that and I
do use Windows at church but as I said earlier I'm gently introducing Linux to my church
family and to my tech team and I haven't really run into any pushback, I use Linux Mint,
Mate version, Cinnamon, both of those and I set it up so that the desktop looks so much
like Windows as far as the GUI using it, keep the start menu down at the bottom.
I just kind of set it up so that everybody is familiar with the whole paradigm of the
old gnome days with the start menu at the bottom and applications on the desktop stuff
like that.
So that hasn't been a problem, some of the things that I'm using Linux for at church,
I started out by using it as just a backup computer which store all our files on there
and then we moved out of the analog world on our soundboard and moved into the digital
world by purchasing a Barenger X32.
Let me just say for those of you who are into sound production, the Barenger X32 is
an awesome board for the price.
I'm kind of late to the world of sound, I just got into it in my later years as a volunteer
church and then gradually learned more because I was just so into it and the analog world
was very foreign to me, it was very difficult to learn the operation of the board.
We had an old Mackey that we used and when we purchased the Barenger X32 with motorized
faders, layered channels, all kinds of good stuff, digital recording, all that, it was
a lot easier for me to use the Barenger board because it was basically a giant computer,
I mean it operated very much like a computer, it has all its onboard effects right there
and the board, so we didn't even need our outboard effects units anymore, so I really enjoyed
the X32 and it really motivated me to learn a lot more about sound.
Let me make a plug for a fellow who's put a lot of tutorials on YouTube, Drew Braschler,
really awesome videos he puts up there about the X32 and how to operate, I learned quite
a bit from him, so there's a shout out to Drew, thank you for all those video tutorials
you produce.
So anyway, next is, we started experimenting with multi-track recording and when we would
want to record our bands, rehearsals or even some of the services, worship services,
I started out trying our door on Linux on my laptop, just coming in with off the board
on an analog plug-in but the results were not very good and with the board the X32 came
a software package called Traction and we installed that on our Windows computer, that works
very well.
I later found out by just kind of doing a little research that Traction is, I believe
it's Linux, it's open source software, but it's sold for Windows but Barronzger gives
it away free when you buy an X32.
So when I researched the Traction software on their website, I realized that they gave
away the Linux version, they don't make it actually very easy to find it on their website
and you don't get the latest version but they do give away the Linux version of Traction
and I highly recommend that it's good software for doing multi-track recording, it's a different
GUI than like Pro Tools or some of the others but it's fairly intuitive, easy to get a handle
on.
So we used that at church and I've installed it on Linux and works fine, we used Jack
Control Kit as the background driver and works well.
Also we record our sermons through the Barronzger X32, it has built in to track USB.
When we're done recording, I just throw that recording on our Linux backs in Open Audacity
and edit it, mix it down to MP3 and use a great plugin and fire facts to upload through
FTP to our servers, I think it's fire FTP is what I use, a great little piece of software.
And when we have people come in and ask for a CD of the sermon, we used to exclusively
use CDs and burn all our sermons to CDs and now since we've gotten the X32, it does
have the USB recording which makes things much easier.
But we do have people that still want CDs, so I use Percero and Linux to burn them CDs,
works very efficiently, can burn them CD very quickly.
Also in the church environment, when people walk in you have a little bit of time before
service starts, so we like to play a little walk in music, you know, five to ten minutes
before service starts and the band starts playing, we will use VLC or normally we'll use
Clementine, beautiful media player, I really like Clementine, it did have some issues with
memory early on when they first started using it, but I haven't noticed that lately, so
I believe they work that out in the newer versions.
But Clementine is a great piece of software, I enjoy it and we use that to play back music
that I've ripped to my computer, I'll use a CD player sometimes, but usually I'll use
the computer to play back, walk in music soft and music playing in the background as people
walk in.
Now, one thing I failed to mention when I edit the sermons, before I upload them to
our servers, I do tag them with a piece of software called Puddle Tag, one of many tagging
pieces of software out there, very easy to use, I haven't gotten into some of the more
detailed things you can do with it, but it meets my needs, so works great, so I tag it,
throw a picture on there of our church, upload it to the server, and then of course when
it's downloaded, the sermon title date, our pastor's name, and a picture of churches is
right there on the MP35.
Recently, I was looking for a solution to broadcast our services live, I had played around
with the idea of broadcasting our services with video, doing the YouTube thing, but one
thing I've seen is you don't really get a big bang for your buck doing that thing, there's
not a whole lot of people that take advantage of video feed in a mid-sized church, such
as ours, and so it's a lot of work for little gain, actually.
So I decided to go with the sound, live sound, I didn't want to incur any costs to the
church, so I had known of icecast, I had tried it on my own computer at home a couple of
years ago, and found that it was fairly easy to use, like everything else in Linux, it's
a file, everything works in a configuration file, and like I said, I'm not a coder, but
I can work configuration files and a few bash scripts and stuff like that.
But anyway, I had tried Dark Ice, some of the other pieces of software that go along
with icecast, a broadcast, and I found a nifty piece of software called Butt, B-U-T-T, broadcast
using this tool, the guy's at church got a kick out of that acronym there, and anyway,
Butt is a very nice piece of software that goes along with icecast to take your live feed
and stream it to icecast out to the internet, and it's working wonderfully for us.
I had, I spent about two or three weeks with a dry run, asking people to just listen
and let me know how the quality was, and if over a two or three week period I would kind
of tweak things here and there.
We have it running just fine now, we don't have a whole lot of listeners, but I'm sure
as people find out about it, it'll be utilized more.
Just another way of using Linux to expand the church's resources and ministries and help
move the church out of the proprietary software mindset.
Like I said, we still use Windows, one of the things we have to use Windows 4 is Pro
Presenter, that's presentation piece of software exclusively for churches, and it's a great
piece of software.
Love it, does a lot of things for you, you know, presents your slides, gives you the
ability to overlay images, present your lyrics, play videos seamlessly, with PowerPoint,
which we were using previously, I had to re-encode every video I played back to WMV before
I could play it in PowerPoint, it was a real pain, and now I can play just about any
kind of video in Pro Presenter.
Unfortunately, like I said, it does run on Windows, there is open source presentation software
out there, but Pro Presenter is a great piece of software, so we're using that and enjoy
it.
I'm just about to start a new project that will be shooting videos, I've done some minor
stuff today, but we're going to be jumping into that in a bigger way, and for videos right
now, for small projects, I use OpenShot, you know, it's sufficient, it's a nice piece
of software, I don't really do a whole lot of video editing right now, I'll probably
be learning how to do a lot more of that, I'll be doing more videos, so I'll need something
probably a little more feature rich than OpenShot, but OpenShot's a good piece of software,
it does the job, I've used Kaden Live, and I think that's probably what I'll move to when
I start doing more videos and need some more elements, but, yeah, videos are going to
be, I'm looking forward to doing those, they're going to be a great asset to our church
and to encouraging people, so that's what that's about.
Another thing that I've started doing is a podcast for our church, I went out and I picked
up a $100 mixer, the baringer, Xenix Q1202 USB mixer, I like it, the only thing it doesn't
do, it only lets you record two tracks over USB, and I wish I had looked more into that
before I bought it, I would have liked to have been able to record at least four tracks,
if I record analog, I can do what I need to do, we've recorded quite a few podcasts now,
exploring the connection between worship music and the active worship that was one of our themes,
also looking at volunteering, the aspect of volunteering in a church, the demands on people,
their lives are so busy now, how do they find time to volunteer, why do they do it,
those types of things, right now we're moving into a theme on leadership, I'm interviewing
people about that aspect of church life and ministry, so it's been very fruitful, people
have enjoyed it, we don't have a lot of listeners, but like everything else, if you stick with it,
it will grow, it will expand, and it'll be fruitful, I truly believe that, and so we'll stick with it,
and it's about it, I found Linux to be a great asset to our church, people have not given me much
pushback, they just use it, a lot of people don't even realize that much of a difference,
most people don't understand the whole philosophy behind the open source movement,
free and open source, it's something that just doesn't enter their mindset, that's one
reason I do like to use Linux is the idea of free and open source, I'm not as ardent as somebody like,
you know who I mean, I do use proprietary software when I have to, so for me it's more of a
pragmatic thing, if I need something, I use it, but I prefer to use Linux, so thanks for listening,
hope you will consider some of the things I've said in the beginning of the recording,
I hope that maybe some of the things I discussed about using Linux in church is helpful to you,
and love hacker public radio, listen to it all the time, so hang in there, and take care.
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