Sure, I was able to install Audacity on my Eee PC, but what good is an audio editor without an audio input devices? I figured if worse came to worse, I could always pop the SD card out of my Zoom H4 audio recorder, throw it in the Eee PC's SD card slot and edit audio that way.
But it turns out the Eee PC has some pretty excellent hardware support for a Linux machine. When you plug the H4 into a PC, you can either use it as an external SD card reader or as an audio I/O device. That means you can speak into the H4's microphone and record audio on the PC, or plug devices into the XLR/quarter inch jacks. I didn't really expect this feature to work on my new Xandros-based laptop, but it does!
Here's a picture of my Eee PC running Audacity and recording audio from the Zoom H4 mic. The Eee PC also has a built in webcam with a microphone, so if you're not looking for professional audio quality, you don't really need an extra device. But as a radio journalist, I can fit the Zoom H4, the Eee PC, and a couple of cables and mics in a bag that's barely large enough to carry a full sized laptop.
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OK, it turns out there's an easy way to install Audacity, and there's an easy way. I showed you the hard way already. Now let's take a look at the easy way.
- Go ahead and open a terminal by starting the file manager (located under the Work tab) and selecting "Open Console Window" from the Tools menu.
- Now type "konqueror" to bring up the KDE file manager/web browser. If you want to avoid entering your password down the line, try typing "sudo konqueror."
- Select Applications
- Select System
- Select Synaptic Package Manager
- Under Settings, select Repositories
- Click add and enter "deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main"
- Click the Search button and enter Audacity, GIMP, or any other program you're looking for.
- Click on the check box next to the program you want to install and select Mark for installation
- Click Apply and you're all set.
My primary plan for my Eee PC is to use it a mobile blogging tool. But I just had to see if I could install some audio editing software. It turns out the answer is yes. Yes I could.
Color me a little bit shocked that I managed to do this on my first day with my new toy. I had kind of sworn to myself that I wouldn't install any new software until I had played with everything the Eee PC had to offer out of the box. But where's the fun in that?
When you first power up the Eee PC, there are about 40 programs installed. One is a sound recorder, but that won't get you very far if you're editing podcasts or radio stories. Ardour might be pushing it a bit, so I figured I would try to install Audacity. There's a simple add/remove programs dialog included, but right now there are only a handful of programs that you can download and most of them are actually just updated versions of the applications that ship with the Eee PC.
Continue reading Installing Audacity on the Eee PC at Eee Site.