Running Linux, 5th Edition - Matthias Kalle Dalheimer [155]
Complete the transaction. The accounts window should show the results of your hard work.
You've had the car for about a month and now it's time to pay the payment. A quick look at the lender's amortization table shows that $300 of your payment goes to interest and $100 goes to principle. Here's how to record that:
Open the Checking Account register.
Start a new transaction. Use today's date and enter Car Payment in the description field. Click the Split button to begin a split transaction.
Your payment is $400, so enter Payment as the description and Assets:Current Assets:Checking Account as the account, and withdraw $400.
$300 goes to interest, so enter Interest as the description and Expenses:Interest as the account (click Yes and OK after tabbing off the field to create the subaccount), and deposit $300 into the account.
The rest goes to principle. The $100 balance should already appear in the Deposit field, so just enter Principle in the description and Car Loan for the account. Press Enter to complete the transaction.
Looking at the accounts window, you see that the Car Loan account has decreased by $100 and the Expenses account has increased by $300, exactly as it should be. No longer will you have to consider all of your car payment as an expense, some of it goes to decreasing liability (and therefore increasing net worth), and now you can see it happening every month!
The preceding transaction is an excellent example of one that should be scheduled to recur every month, saving you the hassle of typing it in every time. With each payment, be sure to change the interest and principle amounts as the amortization table indicates.
Chapter 9. Multimedia
This chapter is about multimedia on Linux. Multimedia is a rather vague and much abused term. For the purposes of this chapter, our loose definition is anything related to sound, graphics, or video.
Multimedia has historically been one of the more challenging areas of Linux, both for developers and users, and one that did not receive as much attention from Linux distributions as it should have, perhaps because Linux was initially embraced by so many as a server operating system. It was only recently that Linux has been seriously considered as a desktop solution for mainstream users. To be successful at attracting users from other popular operating systems, multimedia support is a requirement.
The good news is that, unlike a few years ago, most modern Linux distributions automatically detect and configure multimedia hardware for the user and provide a basic set of applications. And despite its historic use as a server, for a number of reasons Linux is well suited to audio and other multimedia applications.
We start off this chapter with a quick overview of multimedia concepts such as digital audio and video, and a description of the different types of multimedia hardware devices. Those familiar with the technology may wish to skip over this section. If you don't really care about how it all works or get lost in the first sentence of this section, don't worry, you can get applications up and running without understanding the difference between an MP3 and a WAV file. The section "Movies and Music: Totem and Rhythmbox" in Chapter 3 describes the basic playback tools offered on most Linux desktops.
We then discuss some of the issues related to multimedia support at the kernel level, which is a prerequisite for using the hardware. We then move on to applications, first those offered by some of the popular desktop environments, and then a sampling of more specialized applications broken down into different categories. If you want to develop your own applications, we briefly cover some of the popular toolkits and development environments. Finally, we wrap things up with a list of references in print and on the Web where you can find information that is more detailed and current.
Keep in mind that multimedia is an area where Linux development moves rapidly and new technologies quickly move from primitive prototypes