Ubuntu Reaching Out To 16,000 Anime Lovers 293
shadowmage13 writes "After months of planning, I am happy to announce finally that the Ubuntu Massachusetts Local Community Team will be preparing a booth at the upcoming 2010 Anime Boston convention. We need support from the community to secure a booth and print materials, including copies of the Ubunchu! manga. I really believe the Anime fandom is a perfect match for Ubuntu, as they are by nature very much in line with open source and remix culture."
Seems like (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:There is one problem, though (Score:2, Insightful)
I Had to Read This 5 Times... (Score:5, Insightful)
...but now I think I get it: You're asking us to donate money so that your local Linux User Group can have a booth at your local anime convention.
Did I get that right? If so, props for chutzpah, my brother...
Re:Seems like (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok. So, what would Ubuntu Massachusetts Local Community Team do in he mean time that would be more productive? I'm sure there are plenty others more qualified to do the fixing of 9.10.
I disagree that stopping the evangelizing would be more productive than evangelizing at this point, even if 9.10 is buggy. (I.e. I don't think it's buggy enough to hide from the public completely.)
Maybe I just got lucky with my installs on my hardware.
Re:Yeah, right! (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, total world domination, or even some sort of world domination would have to include some clueless, facebooking, twittering and oh-so-creative metrosexuals too. Besides, maybe some of the clueless, facebooking, twittering and oh-so-creative metrosexuals will show their newly found OS to some not so clueless, facebooking, twittering and oh-so-creative metrosexuals. Sure, the clueless, facebooking, twittering and oh-so-creative metrosexuals aren't the most important movers and shakers, but you do what you can. Any convert could send ripples of Freedom through our culture.
Re:There is one problem, though (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, well, I'm glad that most of the anime culture has one thing in common, despite the (impressive, indeed) diversity - a sense of humor. Humor, which is present in all but the most serious and gloomy works, and often expressed in making fun of the work itself
Besides, if you bothered to read the second sentence of my post, you could've even realized that it doesn't belong strictly on the "linux side".
Re:Yeah, right! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:There is one problem, though (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact that the first comment was about hentai and tentacles just shows you how daft of an idea that is. I'm all for exposing Ubuntu to a wider audience, but association with non-mainstream media is what they're trying to avoid.
Re:Seems like (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:News? (Score:3, Insightful)
The "for nerds" part. That lowers the threshold for trivia related to anime or Linux; both together means bonus points.
If Star Trek was involved as well there'd be a lot of monitors in need of wiping down...
Re:Seems like (Score:0, Insightful)
Hello, everyone! can I have your attention? Ok, please stop your work right now. mxh83 wants Ubuntu 9.10 fixed before we can continue with our lives.
So, everyone please start hacking now. If you can't program, please just wait quietly and don't interrupt the developers, this shouldn't take long.
Problems for anime fans with Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
There's also gaming, with the exception of Onscript based games, very few visual novels play well with Linux and most Tohou/doujin shooters are Windows only.
Re:Seems like (Score:4, Insightful)
Hello. Anime fan here.
They need to fix SOUND in general in Linux, so it, like, just works. I have a dual boot system (WinXP64 and Kumubtu 9.10), and if there's one thing I'm having trouble with it's getting sound working on any video player. Regular system sound is fine, Amarok can play, too. But I haven't been able to get a video player that has a good interface, decent playback abilities for the latest codecs and subtitle formats, and sound working all at the same time. Some of this has to do with mplayer waiting forever to release a new "official version" so distributors would update their packages. Maybe some of it has to do with me using a USB audio device, but in general it's application and the O/S not working together on working with the "default" audio output setting in preferences and not supporting other methods (ALSA/PulseAudio/etc.) without config tweaking.
I can download and run VLC for Windows and it works as soon as it's installed, it should be the same on Linux, especially since all the VLC developers are Linux developers and not really focused on Windows.
Getting sound to work in video players (or audio players, web browsers, etc) has been a trial for me going back years.
Re:There is one problem, though (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that's probably just the typical stupid joke.
I mean, these days, who hasn't heard of Naruto, One Piece, DBZ or Pokemon? That makes for most of the anime people see. It's not particularly deep, but that's the mainstream kind of it. There are much more interesting things to watch, but they're very niche in comparison to what I listed.
Re:Problems for anime fans with Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
To say ripping and playing a blu ray at the moment is a bit inelegant is an understatement. It simply doesn't compare to popping a disc in and having the disc play almost instantly.
Using Linux as a HTPC box involves lots of little extra hurdles or putting up with minor glitches. With Windows I can sit down and enjoy a game or film without needing to worry about 'preparing' them beforehand.
Re:Problems for anime fans with Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
I played for weeks trying to get Ubuntu to work as a HTPC. All the media players I found in the repository either had horrid tearing problems, jerky motion, no audio, crashed constantly, or could not display the subtitles in a sane size on my plasma TV -- either tiny scribble or humongous letters, despite changing the settings I could find for the subtitle font. (Not to mention that the SB card defaulted to digital out and no peep on analog, and good luck finding that switch in the GUI...) Put Vista on it, downloaded CCCP, everything works fine -- it even had native drivers for my ATI Remote Wonder II, which never worked under Ubuntu either. Also, setting up SMB workgroup in Ubuntu is akin to waterboarding -- there needs to be a decent GUI or even text-based setup for that, and integration into system accounts and passwords. All of this can presumably be fixed, but when someone who uses CentOS for a living at work gives up after two weeks it can't be much easier for the average teen who just wants to watch anime. Okay, done ranting ;-)
One day.... (Score:1, Insightful)
One day I will invent a time machine and go back in time and destroy anime before it was ever created.
Yay! Stereotypes! (Score:4, Insightful)
To all the slashdotters with snide comments... (Score:1, Insightful)
Japanese entertainment is as much a part of geek culture nowadays as American comics and video games, so it's not a stretch to think otaku would be interested in Ubuntu. In fact, one of my students goes to Anime Boston every year, and I just sent him a link to this
Besides, I think it's cool to have Ubuntu manga out there, especially cost-free and under a CC license.
Re:There is one problem, though (Score:4, Insightful)
Whether you like it or not doesn't have to do with whether it's mainstream.
If you think Pokemon is adult, you sure have low standards for what adult is.
Really, this obsession with adult anime people have is odd. It's like trying to reject the entire cinema medium based on the existence of porn movies. I've got friends that have bookcases full with hundreds of anime DVDs, and there's no porn in there.
Re:Anime on Ubuntu? Seriously?? (Score:4, Insightful)
You sound like you never heard of mplayer. I have been watching anime on Linux weekly for years, in several formats like mpeg, divx, realmedia and mkv!
B.S.
Softsubs were relatively recently properly implemented in Mplayer. (Though "couple of years" technically is "for years" too.)
Likewise, proper MKV support is also very young. Before Mplayer wasn't demuxing the files properly nor could switch between audio/subtitle channels on the file. Due to bogus demuxing audio skips were also common.
I'm not an Ubuntu user, I love the simplicity of elden distros like Debian and Slackware. Maybe it's just that Ubuntu doesn't have an mplayer package, or has its very own "Super Cool Ubuntu Media Player" that overshines it. Could anybody enlight me?
Getting Mplayer never was a problem. In past I was often even compiling it myself. No big deal.
The problem is getting the rest of it to work: audio and video.
Audio on Linux is a total mess, unless of course you are lucky to have single sound card in your PC (and distro of your choice hasn't succumbed to PulseAudio madness). Many have at least two, since modern MBs have some primitive card always on-board. Managing two sound cards under Linux is still a must, since most applications (Mplayer included) do not integrate with KDE or Gnome and bypass most of the configuration.
Video and video acceleration is much cleaner on Linux. In sense that it is completely absent. And to smoothly playback H.264 files of 720p/bigger resolutions one need either H/W accelerated video playback (which is mostly absent) or properly optimized H.264 decoder (and forked ffmpeg of Mplayer isn't).
If you would limit you statement that you have watched DivX/XViD anime for years then I might believe you. Otherwise - B.S.
Next on Slashdot: Linux is way too hard to develop on, it doesn't have a Visual Studio alternative!
Don't be idiot. I develop for *NIX and my WS is a Linux. For past 10 years (I have started on SuSE 6.2 in 1999). The problem is that kernel team refuses to manage kernel related libraries and interfaces and in Linux scape there not a single entity dealing with multimedia issues. Thus the chaos and frustration - due to lack of organization. Developer are there. But with distros being openly anti-multimedia not much can be done about it.
Re:Yeah, right! (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it could be more the implication that because you have Facebook, you must have, at some point, had friends who'd want to keep in touch with you, thus disqualified as a true Slashdot Geek/Geekette.... Because we all know that everybody on slashdot is a basement-dwelling, never-bathing, man child who subsists on Sarah Michelle Gellar porn... that's just not compatible with the kind of person who's got friends, or might not actually be male...
Signed, a Facebook-using, "oh-so-creative" person who enjoys writing and drawing in her spare time... to my credit, I avoid Twitter like the plague, and it's kinda hard to be "metrosexual" when you're actually gay....
Re:There is one problem, though (Score:1, Insightful)
association with non-mainstream media is what they're trying to avoid
The Japanese MS marketing team have a good idea of what their mainstream is. People lined up outside stores to get the Windows 7 with added anime mascot.
As a video encoder/editor from way back when Real Media was a common format and anime fansubs were distributed on tape, I find the anime fan community has actually played a big part in bringing FOSS encoding and viewing tools to where they are now on Windows. I recently came back into video encoding more recently and found that a number of newer resources and 'how-tos' even had screenshots of the tools and usage with anime in them.
The tools on Windows to facilitate softsubbing and nice font support is so far ahead in of what is available in linux. Avoid the community that would push advancement? No wonder the subtitle and encoding application support is so good in Windows apps.
I tried to switch to Ubuntu two years ago and my main requirement was that the videos with subs have to look good, at least as good as the windows equivalent software. The apps in linux were terrible, the fonts were horrid, the placement skrewed up (failure to render on multiple lines).
I'm still using Windows, because it just works (with help from many FOSS apps that only run on Windows). Accept the community and you'll get more than just hentai jokes.