I've successfully upgraded to Drupal 6.1.

The upgrade to Drupal 6.0 went fine, although I missed out the step about disabling contributed modules before the upgrade. So I had about an extra 30 minutes going through sorting out the results of my mistake.

This site is now running Drupal 6. The upgrade wasn't entirely painless (partly my own fault), but it's running smoothly now. There are some contributed modules that haven't yet been upgraded to Drupal 6, so I expect some features to be missing at the moment.

In a previous article, I discussed looking for a desktop blogging tool. I tried Ecto until the end of the trial period. I liked it, I found that it did help me post (but I actually posted more on this site's sister site). I found some issues, generally quirky formatting every so often but nothing that was too troublesome. It was still better than using Drupal's own interface. Tags and images were slightly odd as well.

I'm noticing some strange behaviour to do with connecting a USB drive to the HTPC. Mainly, the front USB ports stop responding when I try to format it using GParted. At least, I think it's just the front ports. Currently I've got a USB keyboard and the USB harddrive in two separate front sockets and a USB wireless mouse receiver in the rear, but unfortunately I'm now stuck in an application that will only respond to keyboard.....and the keyboard and HTPC have stopped talking to each other.

ATI have released some newer drivers, namely the AMD Catalyst 8.01 Linux Driver, but we're still without XV support for x1250 integrated graphics.

Also interesting is possible 3D support for the RS690 chipset which I think use the X1250 IGP. In this particular case, I'll happily admit to losing track of which chipset is which.

I've been trying to find a better way to write and edit posts for this blog. I'd been using Smultron as a plain text editor, but I always have to tinker with the posts when I get them into Drupal. I've tried TinyMCE over at awardsounds.co.uk but I've never been really happy with it. Possibly because I use Safari as my primary browser and that's not fully supported with TinyMCE.

Background
I've been trying to use free software for video editing, mainly for editing the background in a green-screen. So far I haven't had much success, best results coming from Cinelerra primarily due it having the best combination of user interface and functional features. Some had better user interfaces, but lacked the specific green screen features I required.

New PSU
Wow, what a difference a decent PSU can make. The original spare-part PSU I had came bundled with a cheap case. Get what you pay for. It just about did the job of powering the HTPC, but being a cheap 300W PSU wouldn't boot with anything connected to the front USB ports. Not really a problem since it stayed on most of the time, just meant I had to unplug the USB devices, then plug them back in once it was on.

I've been trying to use Cinelerra on and off for a couple of days. And I've had some success. I've also had a few failures as well.

The aim
I want to get as far as I can with a short movie using free applications. I'm also including commonly-bundled software in the free section.

The scenario
I have a short movie, about 5 to 7 minutes long for which I've finished the main shooting, composed, recorded and exported the score, know what I want to do with titles, but I'm stuck at one point.

I want to change the green screen background for moving images.

The Beginning