Episode: 753
Title: HPR0753: ILF 2011: Interview with Klaatu of Slackermedia
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0753/hpr0753.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 01:55:36

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music
Hello everybody, this is Russ, otherwise known as K5,
recording for a hacker public radio from the inaugural Indiana Linux Fest,
2011 in Indianapolis, Indiana, and I'm about to talk to somebody that everybody
knows. I know Ken Fallon was wondering if Klaatu had royally pissed off the HBR
community, but I'm guessing that's not really the case. He's just been in
communicado, but this is Klaatu, the well-known podcaster, well anyone, everyone
knows Klaatu, but today we're going to talk to Klaatu about his project that he
works on quite a bit, one of the projects that you work on quite a bit called
Slacker Media, and we're going to find out everything there is to know about
Slacker Media because Klaatu thought everyone knew what Slacker Media was, but
it turns out not everyone in the world actually does. So why don't you give us a
little introduction to Slacker Media? Hello everybody, so Slacker Media is my
little tutorial project really, it's just, you know, I was sitting down
configuring my Linux system to do all the neat multimedia kinds of things that I
wanted it to do, and I realized I should really write this down so I can do it
again, and then it kind of dawned on me that I really ought to write it down, put
it in nice words and stuff, so anyone can do it again. So basically it's just how
to set up Slackware for multimedia stuff. Okay, does it use anything in
particular, like any kind of software platform or plug-in or application
that people might be familiar with, or is it just kind of a homegrown, this is a
Klaatu feature at called Slacker Media? Well, it's designed, you know, like
Slackware is to be very unicy, and part of that would be maintain modularity.
So the idea is that you should be able to take the normal distribution of
Slackware, put it onto your computer, and then decide what kind of programs
you need for your art, whether it's video art, audio, production, graphic design,
page layout, writing, you know, whatever, whatever it might be, and then you can
use that knowledge and kind of build your own multimedia distribution so that
it's custom tailored to exactly what you need to do, because I mean there are a
lot of multimedia distributions out there, but I've always felt like they never
quite fit, you know, I always had, I would like something about it, not like
another thing, I thought, I just need to build this myself, and so that's the
idea of a hindsight or media, it takes, it says, okay, put Slackware on your
computer, and then let's go through every application right now that I use, but
as I use more, I'll obviously add notes on even more, but I think you get a good
feel for it nevertheless, and it's just, here's what you have to do to set up
like a video editing environment, here's what you have to do to get a audio
editing environment with, with Q-track, or in Q-synth and fluid synth, and here's
how to set up soft synths, and here's how to pipe them into Q-track, or all kinds
of stuff, so it's really, it's good information I think that any artist who's
coming to Linux is really going to need, or people who just kind of want to
dabble around in, you know, artistic applications on Linux could really use,
because half of the battle, I think, is understanding how it's, how it all
talks to each other, and how it's supposed to work, once you get that, you got it.
Okay, so it sounds to me at least listening to your description of it, that you're
talking about Slackware the distribution, a Linux distribution, and using it
for media production, and you're basically creating a tutorial for that, so
would you call it a documentation project, or a documentation project? Yeah, I
would say, this is exactly what it is now that you know that you put it into
words like that. Yeah, it's a documentation project, it was really directly
inspired by Linux from scratch, because I thought, wow, this is really cool,
there's like this distribution out there called Linux from scratch, but it's not
a distribution, you just download the PDF and build your own distribution, so
that's exactly what it is, it's just, it's Linux from scratch, except instead
of from scratch, it's from Slackware, and instead of a general distribution,
you're very specifically building a multimedia distribution. So in the end,
you start with Slackware and you come out with a digital audio workstation
that's custom tailored to your media production needs, however, somewhere in
the description back a few minutes ago, you were saying that you say that you
pick out applications that you need, and then this will teach you how to set
them up in the way that you want, but how do you pick the applications that you
need? Thank you, good question. Yeah, so again, kind of designing, you know,
basing my sort of workflow or the way that I'm designing this idea off of
already really successful things. Slackware, when you're installing it, it comes
with like these software sets, and so like the set, they just have letters, and
so set E, for instance, is Emax, so if you know you want Emax, you can say,
yes, install set E for me, and it'll give you Emax, and the Emax documentation,
and stuff like that. Maybe you want the X set, which would be all of your
Zorg, kinds of utilities, and all these other things. So it kind of divides
all these things into little pre, you know, little boxes, and you can say,
oh, I want that one, and that one, and that one, and then you end up with that
little environment that you've just kind of designed. So for Slackware media,
I basically said, you can choose, you know, what area of art you're going to be
doing, audio, video, graphics, writing, whatever, and for all the tools that are
associated with those kinds of art projects, I gathered a whole bunch of
dependents, you know, the typical dependencies and libraries that really you
should have on your system. Like, I mean, you might not really think that you're
going to need, for instance, Lib QuickTime, you might not really want it, but I
guarantee you when a client or someone comes by and says, hey, will you edit
this QuickTime file for me, you're going to need it. So you might as well build
it in. So, you know, you kind of draw from these little pre-packaged, really
just lists their lists in plain text of all the dependencies, and then you can
use like Slack builds or SBOPKG to just kind of install those for you, and then
you can install all the different applications that you want to use. Because
obviously, even if you say, yes, I want to be an audio editor. Well, what is that
mean? You just want audacity, or do you want Q tractor, or do you want our
doers, so you kind of have to choose the sort of the front-end applications as
well, and install those. And I take you through every step of the way and tell
you how to compile it, tell you anything that you might need to know about
compiling it, you know, something that might be a little bit tricky, or what
kind of different options you have, you know, just really kind of help you
through the process. And really, it's just based off of what I find myself
always forgetting, you know. I mean, how many times have I compiled Q tractor?
And yet, I keep having to go back to Slack, or media, and reading up on my
notes on how to do it, so. Okay, well, back a little bit towards the beginning,
and I don't mean to say that you're jumping ahead, but I'm just trying to get
this straight in my own mind. But do you go back to the point of, if somebody
says they want to do audio production, they want to be an audio engineer, or
actually do audio media, do you help them out with choosing between something
like audacity in our door, or do you kind of leave that up to the individual
person? That's a really good point, actually. And no, I don't feel like I'm doing
a whole lot yet to help them choose what they're doing. I think that's probably
something that the book is lacking. Like right now, it sort of like drops, it
kind of skips over a lot of the install part of Slackware, because I figure,
well, there's already other things covering how to install Slackware. So kind
of assumes that you know how to install Slackware, which isn't necessarily a
safe assumption, but you know, it kind of says, hey, look, if you don't have to do
that, you should back up, go look at Slack book, and install Slackware, kind of
get comfortable with it, and then come back to Slackware media. So then after
that, it kind of assumes that you already have some idea of the typical
applications that are available to you, which again, isn't necessarily the case.
You might know about audacity, and you might know about our door, and you might
know about QTector, but I mean, if you haven't really used them and played around
with them, then how do you know which one you really should be installing? I
don't know. So I could, I could do more on that, actually, more explanation
about, hey, here's what you might be looking at. You know, if you're really
doing like live music production, probably audacity isn't going to be the
thing you're going to want to look at versus if you're just taking in stuff
and remixing it and stuff like that. Yeah, audacity might be fine. So no, I
don't think I, I help people decide yet. Okay, well, that's a good question
then, and maybe in the future, that will become part of the documentation
project, and don't make me do it. That's all I have to say, because documentation
is not my strong point. Now, there's audio production and there's video
production, of course, in media. Is there anything else you help out with,
graphic design, things like that? Yeah, I kind of, the way that I structure it
right now is I have three different sets, like the A set, which is the audio,
the AV set, which is audio and video, and then the the graphics set, I forget
what I call that, I think AVG or something like that. Anyway, so you've got
like these primary ways of, you know, these big disciplines audio video and
graphic, but then there's also a whole section on the writing, like actually
writing tools that you can use, because they're actually, you know, you'd think,
oh, writing, what do I need? I mean, a text editor, and that's it. But I mean,
if you're really writing and you're doing a lot of writing, there's a lot of
tools out there for you and kind of steps that you might want to take to
integrate, you know, your favorite spell checker with your special, your,
your favorite text editor and just little things like that. So it's audio
video graphics writing, and I want to say there might be one more that I kind of
call out, but that's primarily what it is. And then graphics, of course, is kind
of a big area, because are you a graphic designer, or are you more of a layout
artist, a graphic layout kind of person, or are you a graphic artist where
you're taking pictures and cutting them up and stuff like that. So, but I think
generally speaking, you don't have to get that specific. If you know you're
going to be working with images, then install the graphics stuff. If you know
you're going to be working with moving images, go for the video and the audio,
just audio, just go for the audio stuff like that. Okay, and I know I have some
insider information, because I have talked to you before, listen to a few of
your talks about using applications like Blender, but you use them for
video production, not necessarily 3D modeling, which is what the program was
really designed for. So once you get somebody set up with a particular set of
tools, that's kind of where you leave off, right? You leave them to their own
devices at that point. It's not like you're doing a tutorial on how to use
Blender or anything like that, correct? And I mean, I don't think I want
Slacker Media to be about that. I feel like Slacker Media is about designing
the studio, and hopefully they can kind of figure out then what they want to do
with that little environment that they've built themselves. Again, that's kind
of biased because that's exactly why I made it for myself. I was at the point of
okay, I've tried enough stuff to know that these are the tools I want to use. I
can't find a distribution that packages them the exact way I want to, or allow
me to package them differently each time if I want to do it that way. So I'll
build my own. But I feel like I do enough
documentation, like I've got tutorials online, I do a, you know, the new World
Order podcast and stuff like that. I think if people really want to know more
about like, gee, how do I use Blender for video editing or whatever or Q
tractor, you know, then they can probably find out more from me just
external of Slacker Media. Well, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, it's
nice that you're kind of filling in a little bit of a niche without reinventing
the wheels on both end. It's like you don't tell people how to install Slackware
because there's already plenty of documentation on that. You don't tell people
how to use Blender or Audacity because there's plenty of documentation on
that. It's just how do you get from a plain vanilla Slackware installation to
a usable solution for your media production needs. And then assuming that
somebody may have come from another place like they use video production tools
on Windows or Apple or something like that, how could you do this in an open
source way? You get them to that point and then kind of leave them to their
own devices as far as figuring out how to translate their knowledge of Adobe
Photoshop into BIM or something, something along those lines. Yeah, you've just
said exactly what I've actually been trying to say, but you said it very
succinctly. So yeah, exactly. That's exactly what I'm trying to do. Now you did the
project for yourself, but you put it out there for other people. Would you be
interested? Would there be any desire on your part to have other people contribute
to your project and kind of make it a little more worldly? Actually, yeah, I mean
honestly, people have already done that. Like Thoth has has has written a couple
of things. I mean, not he no one's written the the paragraphs, the words, but
people have sent me like notes and comments and hey, did you know about this
application? Just little things like that. So I guess, yeah, I mean anything I do
online is generally, I mean, especially within the open source community, it's
kind of like, yeah, I'm writing it down, but it's probably because someone
already told me, you know, about something. So it's very collaborative, even
though I don't always even know who exactly collaborated with me. But everyone
I've just talked to, I generally learned something from. So yeah. Well, that's
excellent, because coming from my perspective, I hate documentation. I love
documentation from the consumer part. I love being able to read the
documentation, but as far as producing it, I can't stand doing that. And it's
good to know that there are all different kinds of human beings and and a few
aliens. And some of them actually like to write things down. So that's
that's always good from my perspective. So is there anything else you want to
tell us about the Slacker Media project? And if not, at least let people know
where they can contact you about it and and where to get the the information
that you provided? Yeah. Actually, okay. So slacker media.info would be the
website. And I recently kind of did a little bit of a re a an overhaul on it.
And I've got now a PDF version of the book. It's about 80 pages. Some parts
could be expanded, but right now I consider it a version 1.0. So it's PDF
e pub HTML. And you can also just get the doc the doc book sources itself and do
whatever you want to with it. So there's that. And then on the downloads
page, there's a whole bunch of like little tools, just random little tools
or scripts and things like that. And some even free content that you can
download and reuse for yourself. So it's I like to think of it as a proper
little resource that you can go to slacker media.info.
Have you ever thought about creating a wiki of the information and maybe
having it updated that way? Is that something you'd be interested in doing
or do you read? Would you rather keep the information semi proprietary?
Well, I am providing the doc book sources on a get torious repository. I
just happen to really hate wikis. Honestly, I just I don't like the way
that they structure the data. I don't find them intuitive or useful.
They seem to be a lot to maintain. I mean, I at least with a get repository,
I don't have to, you know, I don't have to go through and read out spam
messages and stuff like that. You know, so I mean, it's there. People can
collaborate with me if they have great ideas or tips and stuff like that.
I'm fine with that. But wiki, I just I honestly don't I don't believe in
wikis really. I don't like them. So I mean, it's a great concept. I just don't
think it's really all that great. Well, that's fine. Everybody has an opinion.
But what about those of us who don't know anything about doc book? Oh,
I did a whole episodes or two on doc book season five and the beginning of
six on the new world order. So don't don't, you know, go go for it.
You can learn all about it. I see you're making me go listen to your
podcasts just so I can get some information on doc book. That's very,
very clever of you. Well, you can email me information. I will rewrite it or
whatever. I mean, I have no problem with that. I just I don't think the wiki
part really works. Okay, we'll tell us about the new world order where
everybody can download that. And I guess we'll wrap up. Okay,
new world order is located at augcastplanets.org,
augcastplanet.org slash new world order. All right. Well,
everybody check out the new world order and download the documentation for
slacker media if you're into any kind of media graphics or video
production. Thank you very much. Clot to you for sitting down and talking to
us and being a participant once again in hacker public radio. We really
appreciate it. Thanks. See you around. This has been Russ K5 from the Indian
Linux Fest, 2011 and talking with clot to you about the slacker media
project and hope everybody has a wonderful day and we'll catch up with you
next time.