Echoes

Sometimes It Won't Work (III)

2009-12-29T00:30:00.000+02:00

on kde and some other stuff

- kde respects bugs. bugs in kde3 have their equivalent in kde4. rule of thumb in developing kde is 'we do not fix bugs. ever.' the worst part is that important bugs in kde3 were not fixed in several years. it's been two years now and kde4 doesn't even provide the features kde3 did (oh yes, instead it is providing hundreds of new features, which all make it a very productive environment - especially if you know how to kill kdm every 2 hours)

- here's the routine when working in kde4:

1. type your username and password
2. change the last desktop environment from gnome to kde
3. now make your mouse search for that ENTER button which doesn't exist
4. take your right hand (if you're a right-handed person, otherwise take your left) off the mouse and press Enter
5. you are now logged in
6. open the web browser and navigate to a web page
7. (this happens only 50% of the time) open a terminal and kill your web browser
8. restart kdm (and goto 1)

- i wonder why didn't anybody bothered to make a 'satanic' edition of kubuntu? (yeah, i know, but don't smile, it's sad but true)
- for some strange reasons sound will cease to work at some point

- the killer app (that's amarok) is no longer - it is a fiasco, a shame, an app which opposes to any possible usability rules from every aspect, it is full of bugs, it is non-intuitive, it is stripped from every single useful feature, and it does this successfully for two years now

- (instead let's take a look at rhythmbox which, in order to play a song will require you to: 1. type alt+s; 2. type the name of some song; 3. wait for 5 seconds (for over 10,000 songs collections); 4. at this point the song is listed and (obviously) you'll want to play it, but surprise! enter does not work; 5. so move your dirty lil' fingers to the mouse and double-click the song; 6. What a funny experience! there is actually a song playing 7. but now you want to change the song, aye? 8. remember: press alt+s again, ctrl+a to delete the search filter; 9. now where is my song? 10. press ctrl+j and there you go!)

- the same thing in amarok: oh wait, you can't do it from the keyboard (now that's a standard application, and they had two years to do a simple search 'n play thing)

- kde4: we want equalizer! we want equalizer! kde4 is all about innovation, but they say that phonon (what's that?) doesn't support equalizer! oh crap... and i thought linux was ready for the desktop... ever since... 2002?

we are the creators of ubu-vista.com, ubu-vista.org, ubu-vista.net and maybe also ubu-vista.etcetera (just hit refresh on that domains until we register them)

we had the idea of bringing the ubu-vista operating system to you, and it features:
- full desktop environments like aero-gnome (parachuters included)
- several addictive games which don't crash (only 20 openend-bugs!)
- video editeur (to start it and see the crashing output in the console)
- audio editeur (it kind of works but... it crashes when it comes to proprietary formats and strangely it doesn't have support for Ogg Vorbis or flac)
- shell commander: that thing which can be replaced with synaptic if you know what you're doing
- the 'olive', 'goat's shit' and 'you can't stand me' themes (upcoming 'i shit my pants' on its way)

Each and every new release of firefox is faster, less memory-hungry and more powerful! (actually this is true and non-ironical, except for the faster and memory parts)

rules of thumb:
- do not use flash (unless you have a script to save session, kill fx and start a new session every... (well, this depends on the fx version, if you have the latest updated 2.x you'll have the chance to work for 3 hours uninterrupted, for the 3.5 i warmly recommend to just not use a web browser (i'm sure in 2010 we could use dillo, or, still better, lynx)))... was that 45 seconds?

back to the point:
- i like how kde 4 improved in the last two years, but for some strange reason those windows are always 200x200 pixels when a single widget inside them is bigger

Sometimes It Won't Work (II)

2009-08-27T03:25:00.003+03:00

Linux user for a couple of years. Only Linux and I love it. Still, some things are wrong, they are wrong, and unfortunately, as I see it, they will always be wrong (yes I'm paid by Microsoft to say this; and yes I get the big bucks from them; and yes that's true, and unfortunately it seems like it's true for a long time now :(

subtitles green red blue and pink
(i'm waiting for when they're making them black on grey background)
change the volume, subtitles don't work
encrypted dvds usually work
non-encrypted dvds don't :)
do not request a bug to be fixed, the software comes with no warranty
each and every bug (from the tens of tens you discovered) will be fixed in the next version
new version -> happy -> sad (no fixes)
linux programmers are professionals = each and every one are biologists, botanists, geographists, working in their spare time (i wonder where the "computer science" guys are working at - either in their spare or working time)
do not, under any circumstances plan to uncompress a big archive and use another application in the same time, not even on high-end pcs
we have a completely modern os, but don't do anything else while deleting or copying a 4 GB single-file
release early - release often = great practice, but why the hell tag applications as 'stable' when they're not even in alpha working state?!
new distro available, here are the brand new amazing features:
- full desktop environments like airo-gnome (parachuters included)
- 3 games which don't crash (only 20 openend-bugs!)
- free office suite - be thankful we provide 30 DEBs to install it
- video editor (to start it and see the crashing output in the console)
- audio editor (it kind of works but... it crashes when it comes to proprietary formats and strangely it doesn't have support for Ogg vorbis or flac)
- hdd editor (you can erase your entire drive if you like, if you don't we'll do it for you for free)
- shell commander: that thingy where you have to type those strange thingies, just make sure not to press Shift for more than 3 seconds
- the 'olive', 'goat's shit' and 'you can't stand me' themes (upcoming 'i shit my pants' on its way)
- we always loved to innovative, but how: mess up a boot manager, and do not ever provide help for fixing and getting to know it (something tells me 1000 posts on a specific forum will be posted in October)

Oh and by the way, how I love this "if you don't like it, do it yourself" thing. So I was submitting a bug for what was (and is) supposed to be a "stable" distro and the answer was "does it happen in the new version of..." . It's great to see such wonderful tools and so much work going to nothing just because we get to "freeze" things up. I think freeze it's a nice word for what is going on. Make every interface possible as amateurish as possible, respect the DFSG as good as possible, even if that means "ship a 'stable' system, even if that means to ship a still crappy system'". Each and every time I open Amarok 1.4 I enjoy to see how Wikipedia doesn't work in a so-called 'stable' distro. Especially since 2.x is a state-of-art piece of software. Vision for the future, but everything is broken. And it's been 2 years already. Great work!

Stay tuned, for parts 3, 4, 5 and 6 will come soon :)

P.S. Do you still think we can fix bug number 1? and P.S.2 that was a lame post, but I doubt it wasn't true. Some things can be ignored, and there is a lot of great, awesome work going on. Take the entire KDE desktop. Wonderful. Open an application. Why do you have to resize everything? Why do you have to open a konsole and kill a plasma widget? For fuck's sake, a simple action like open a new tab, copy a file over a file and uncompressing in the same time an archive doesn't work sometimes. Drag and drop a file and resizing a window doesn't work sometimes. Sometimes you won't even get sound out of your player, even though the so called drivers should work. Sometimes just searching in a listbox will freeze the system. Sometimes previews don't work. Sometimes just opening a save file as box won't even show the files of the same filetype. We have the powerful file utility but there are still problems when trying to compile a .c file source if it doesn't have the .c extension. We have two good ways (and logical) of copying, by selecting and by using a clipboard. Do they work well in some desktop environment? Neah, they don't. We have so many libraries doing all the work. And 10 applications which use those libraries. If there is one, one single bug hard to fix in any of them, it won't get fixed. There still is a bug in KDE3 which didn't get fixed because of "Qt3 issues". (multicolumn view mode, navigating by arrows jumped files by a rule). So, we get open source software which can be modified, but that bug never got fixed, although it could've been. Is this an OS? Beause if that's an OS I'm curious how can anybody be productive working with it.

How-To: Enable Last.fm Song Submission in CMus in Debian and Ubuntu

2009-04-26T16:20:00.005+03:00

CMus is a very powerful audio player for the console with a ncurses-based interface, support for themes and highly configurable.

Although (at least in Debian) CMus does not come with Last.fm song submission support by default, there is a script available here as a patch, which you can apply to the source, compile CMus again and enable Last.fm support.

Here's what you have to do:

1. Enable sources repositories
Edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file as root with your favourite text editor (e.g. nano /etc/apt/sources.list or kdesu /etc/apt/sources.list) and make sure you have a line which starts with deb-src, as in the example below:

deb-src ftp://ftp.ro.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free

You can replace the TLD with the one of your country (e.g. instead of ro use fi for Finland, de for Germany etc.) Next, update the packages list as root:

apt-get update

2. Get the CMus source code
Type, as normal user:

apt-get install git-core

Now issue the command:

git clone git://repo.or.cz/cmus.git

3. Get the Last.fm patch
Go here and download the patch (direct link here). Save it inside the cmus directory. The file is called as.patch

4. Apply the patch
To apply the patch, make sure the current working directory is cmus and type:

patch < as.patch

5. Install CMus dependencies
To install the needed libraries for the compilation, type as root:

apt-get install libncurses5-dev
apt-get build-dep cmus

6. Compile and install CMus
Just type the usual:

./configure
make
make install

The last one as root.

7. Enable the Last.fm song submission script
You can either copy the following three lines inside the ~/.cmus/rc file:

set as_enable=true
set as_user=Lastfm_USER
set as_pass=Lastfm_PASS

Or run the same commands in CMUS like this:

:set as_enable=true
:set as_user=Lastfm_USER
:set as_pass=Lastfm_PASS

Just make sure to replace Lastfm_USER and Lastfm_PASS with the appropiate values.

Review: Amarok 2.0.2 - Better Than 1.4?

2009-03-30T16:32:00.003+03:00

Amarok always had the reputation of being the most popular and powerful audio player available on the Linux platform, and it really deserved that position. I myself am a fan of Amarok for over three years now, and there was nothing I could think of which Amarok 1.4 did not have.

Usual instance of Amarok 2.0.2 playing

For this review I used Amarok 2.0.2 (which was released to the public on March 5), included in Kubuntu 9.04 Beta (with all the upgrades to date) and I scanned several Ogg Vorbis and FLAC albums, all of them with correctly filled-in tags. I also included a compilation with several artists, which from the start messed up the entire playlist. That is, the albums from a single artist were correctly displayed, while the compilation album was spread in the entire playlist (see the screenshots below). In fact, Amarok only tries to organise tracks on the compilation depending on the artist. So if we have three artists with two songs each, they will be spread in the playlist, sorted by artist's name. Although I like how the single-artist albums are displayed in the playlist, when it comes to compilation this approach tends to mess things up and look inconsistent.

A compilation album including several different artists is spread in the entire playlist

The current version of Amarok 2 does not include all the features 1.4 had, like the equalizer, statistics or queue manager, however it is a new foundation for the releases which will follow. The introduction of widgets is very useful if you ask me, and I also liked the new interface. I know there were a lot of people complaining that the central widget space is a waste and takes up too much of the area when the playlist could have been, but I think it's useful this way. The new approach gives Amarok a more organised look and a logical way of finding all the information one needs at any given time.

Last.fm configuration

Another thing which I miss from Amarok 1.4 series is the ability to go directly to the next and previous tracks in the tag editor. That was a cool feature which made Amarok my audio tag editor of choice. Still, it allows for mass-tagging, which is a good thing. Of course, I'm sure these things will be implemented in the future.

Amarok correctly auto-detected the covers inside the albums' directories and displayed them in the middle panel, which proves to be very useful if used with a lyrics widget, for example.

The collection tab resembles pretty much the one in 1.4, however instead of organizing artists from the compilation albums inside that album's title, they are spread all over the place. This can get extremely annoying if you have large compilations of, say, 50 or more artists, and only a few songs from each of them. Or at least, I liked more the approach in 1.4. After an application restart Amarok did not remember the position of the left tabs, which were disabled (the Collection, Internet, Playlist and Files tabs).

The Add Media... option in the Playlist menu will only allow to add files to the playlist, so I had to use the right-click menu option Load (or Append to Playlist) from the Collection or the file manager tabs.

Some of the old features are still available, like the cover manager (which hasn't changed a bit) and the file manager. I was happy to see the old bug which froze Amarok (at least on Debian Lenny - stable) when right-clicking on a song and going to Edit Track Details in the file manager disappeared. Well, since it was rewritten it is normal to be this way.

A whole bunch of other features are now included in Amarok. Except for the widgets, the Internet tab provides access to no less than seven services, like Last.fm song submission and integration, music from Magnatune.com and Jamendo.com, OpmlDirectory (for lists of podcasts) or Shoutcast Directory (for lists of online radio stations). The script manager also allows to download other scripts from the Internet directly from within Amarok, and they are installed automatically, just like in 1.4 (and with a refined interface, cutting off the additional - and useless - steps when you had to click twice OK - once when the script was downloaded and the second time to notify you that the script was successfully installed).

Amarok now uses only QtScript, so all the scripts for 1.4 had to be rewritten. No more support for languages like Perl, Python or Bash.

Conclusion
As an Amarok 1.4 fan, I must say I also liked Amarok 2 a lot, but there are a lot of things which really need to be fixed and features to be added. What I like the best is the new approach (yeah I know there are a *lot* of people who don't like the new look), but it seems to me the way the widgets are organised and the space management is much more compact and useful now. The playlist is definitely another plus, since it looks twice as good as that simple list in Amarok 1.4 and offers a more clear view on which album belongs to which artist. It is visually more appealing. Instead, it really needs a fast way to jump to song using the keyboard.

Amarok 2.0.2 and KDE desktop effects enabled

I'm looking forward to Amarok 2.1 and I hope only for the best from the team behind this loved and popular player.

Additional screenshots

Cover manager - nothing new or changed here

The new splash screen

Last.fm integration, together with song submission and radio stations access

Magnatune.com music

New and improved script manager

Round-up: Most Popular Posts in 2008

2009-01-14T03:07:00.001+02:00

9 File Managers for Linux
A brief review containing no less than nine file managers for Linux, from Konqueror or Nautilus to PCManFM, Xfe or Midnight Commander.

25 Essential KDE3 Applications - Review
Started as a review of 20 applications for KDE3, reached the number of no less than 25 applications which I considered essential for daily use.

What Makes Amarok the Most Popular Audio Player for Linux?
Although Amarok has far more features, this article lists 7 reasons why Amarok is the most popular audio player on the Linux platform.

Why Is It So Hard for Windows Users to Understand That Linux Is Not Windows?
A short essay (if you like) on the Linux vs. Windows debate. I tried to keep it clean and "non-laming".

Top 10 Best GTK Applications Not Included in GNOME
A review of 10 applications built in GTK which do not come with GNOME.

10 Reasons to Love Debian
What makes Debian such a loved and popular distribution? Here are 10 reasons from my point of view.

11 Video Players for Linux - Review
A review of 11 video players for the Linux platform: from SMPlayer or Kaffeine to Totem or VLC.

10 Best KDE Applications Not Included in KDE
A review of 10 applications built using Qt but which do not come by default with the K Desktop Environment. Note: Only KDE3 applications in this review.

12 Web Browsers for Linux - Review
An article which briefly reviews 12 web browsers for Linux, both with graphical or CLI interfaces. Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, Kazehakase, w3m, lynx... they are all here.

Xfe Review - Wonderful File Manager
Review of the lightweight but powerful enough file manager, Xfe.

One of My Favourites - Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
A review of the beautiful and popular online shooter, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.

SMPlayer Review - One of the Most Powerful Video Players for Linux
As the title suggests, this article reviews SMPlayer, a popular video player built in Qt 4 with lots of features and highly configurable.

Test Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 in Debian Without Changing Your Existing Installation

2008-10-26T01:40:00.000+03:00

Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 was released on October 14, 2008 and it currently comes in 36 fully-localised languages. This beta is based on Gecko 1.9.1 layout engine and according to the official website, this release features "significant changes to improve web compatibility, performance and ease of use". You can read the release notes on the official website, here.

Debian Lenny comes with Iceweasel 3.0.3, which is actually Firefox with a changed name and a few minor changes. If you have Iceweasel 3.0.3 installed but want to test this new beta without changing anything to your system, just follow the steps below.

Download Firefox 3.1 Beta 1
Get the Firefox .tar.bz2 archive from here, then uncompress it using:

tar -xjf firefox-3.1b1.tar.bz2

Next, move the firefox directory wherever you want it, for example in your home directory, or in ~/apps etc.

Run it using a new profile
Firefox uses the default profile whenever you run it without specifying another profile using a parameter. To run it using a different profile than the default one, use this command after making sure your current working directory is firefox:

./firefox --no-remote -P new_profile

As you can see, we used the name new_profile for our profile. The --no-remote parameter will not connect Firefox to a running instance, so you will be able to run both your current version and 3.1 Beta 1.

Select new_profile (or whatever the name of your profile is) and click on Start Firefox:

You will be prompted to accept the EULA, then Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 will start and you will be able to test it.

A small window should appear prompting you to choose the profile to use. Click on the Create Profile... button, then follow the instructions as in the screenshots below. You will notice you won't even have to close Iceweasel 3.0.3 if you have it running.

Currently there are no available themes for Firefox 3.1, so you'll have to use the default until they are updated.

Wine 1.1.7 Review - First Steps of Direct3D 10 Implementation

2008-10-25T22:22:00.001+03:00

I think Wine is one of the most promising and useful applications, especially for those who need to run Windows programs in a Linux environment. A new development release is put up every two weeks or so, and improvements are visible from each version to another.

Wine is the project which makes possible to run games like World of WarCraft, Counter-Strike, Half-Life 2, WarCraft III and so on. And Wine is also the project which makes possible for web developers to test how their web page is viewed under Internet Explorer. Not to mention hundreds of other applications which work very well or well enough with it.

Ever since the first release tagged as 'stable' was put out for the public after 15 years of development, the Wine project continued development and now the latest version is 1.1.7, which brings numerous improvements and additions.

According to the official announcement, one of the highlights for this release is that the first steps were taken to implement the Direct3D technology, which is part of the DirectX API from Microsoft. The open and widespread competitor for Direct3D is OpenGL, the Open Graphics Library.

It's well-known that Wine works awesome with games like WoW, Counter-Strike or Half-Life 2.

A while ago I ran and installed the new Google Chrome web browser through Wine, since a Linux port is not available yet, and the result was very satisfying: with the exception of a little interface slowness, it behaved very well.

For this release, I installed Google Chrome following the tutorial I wrote for 1.1.6. I had to run it as:

wine ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/profiles/USERNAME/Local\ Settings/Application\ Data/Google/Chrome/Application/chrome.exe --new-http --in-process-plugins

And replaced USERNAME with my username. Chrome displayed all the web pages I tried, including this blog, Digg.com, YouTube.com (with the Flash plugin too) and the WineHQ homepage, but scrolling a page is extremely slow and choppy until the web page is completely loaded. I never tested Google Chrome on Windows so I can't compare exactly the behaviour.

I also installed Adobe Flash Player using the browser instead of winetricks. Below are some screenshots running Chrome through Wine. As you can see, Flash is enabled:

Wine provides an application database on their homepage, which classifies applications depending on how well they run and perform: platinum, gold, silver. The nice thing is that each application has detailed information on how to set it up in order to work best, in what conditions it was tested and it also includes user comments. Usually, if a game or application is known to work through Wine but you couldn't set it up, have a look at the comments posted and a solution will surely be provided.

As I already mentioned, one of the most popular games which worked perfectly for me in Wine is World of WarCraft:

World of WarCraft

I was glad to see the mIRC scripts editor does not crash the application anymore, but instead I couldn't make it connect to another network but the default QuakeNet, so you will have to use the /server command. Otherwise, mIRC 6.35 works pretty well, and if you really really need it and can't re-write your scripts for a native Linux client you can use it through Wine. Still, I suggest using a native IRC client like XChat, Konversation or Irssi.

I also tried the last version of Winamp, 5.541, and I installed the Lite version. It works very well, although I did not test it for long. It plays music.

It's true, I don't think Linux needs to run a player like Winamp, when we have powerful and full-featured, native and open-source audio players like Amarok, Banshee, Rhythmbox, Songbird or XMMS. But maybe someone still finds a use for it, or it can help those who just switched from Windows and can't get used to another player.

Also, here is a top 25 applications/games which run in Wine, by votes.

Overall, the Wine project does what it has always done, bringing Windows games and applications to Linux. It's great to see games like WoW, HL2, CoD4, StarCraft, WarCraft III running very well.

Sometimes It Won't Work

2008-10-12T05:56:00.006+03:00

A few annoyances, and I really hope this will be fun. I wrote it last night. Some things which don't work as they are supposed to, or some things which may be annoying - Linux forever, I love it, but sometimes it's not so funny fun as it should be.

Things which you mustn't do
- don't open 3 tabs in firefox in less than 5 seconds
- don't install linux on a system with one sata and one ide drive (adding a hard disk will confuse it even more)
- don't try to install linux on a computer without an internet connection - don't believe me? try installing sarge on a pc without internet, after selecting don't configure network at this time
- movie subtitles must be green, pink, red or yellow, no matter if it's a DVD or a SRT/SUB subtitle
- don't run a task which would take 30 minutes then leave. an error will occure
(if an error doesn't occure, a warning will be issued)
(if the error doesn't occure, are you sure you didn't do something wrong?)
- no, they don't have games on linux
- ...and quake too
- complain if it's closed-source, don't use it if they changed the license to GPL
- a font size of 7 looks normal, but 8 is bold and big. for 6 you will need KMag.
-
open-source projects, use Flash for the homepage; also make sure Firefox uses 100% CPU when browsing your homepages
- ask questions twice, notify a user of some update and newly installed script twice

Particular Private License #0:
I don't want to show you my code!
Particular Private License #1:
It's mine!
Particular Private License #2:
I really hate my neighbour :-)
Particular Private License #3:
Where is my money?

- don't complain, for you did something wrong like not editing some config file of an app which had a bug filed since 2005 and which can't be fixed unless somebody rewrites a whole library which was licensed under a proprietary license and now is free but still wait for a new version to appear and when it's out test it for two more years and you'll find the bug fixed but guess what? the feature is not there anymore

CLI applications are as follows:
- the ones from GNU, which are standard
- the ones from other projects, some of which are great
- the ones which give an error when ran as 'app --version' or 'app --help'
(they all are included in heavy distros)

Who or what is evil?
- Microsoft is evil
- Apple is evil
- Since Canonical offers Linux support for money, I'm sure they are evil too
- Mono, Java too

Bug fixing squad:
If you decide to fix bugs, first put them there so you know what to fix
Choose carefully the bugs you will fix, for some of them you won't know the fix

Start a new distribution, the rules:
- use packages from an older distribution
- do not ever fix bugs
- choose a desktop environment, then start 3 more distros using other desktop environments
- add great features to applications, which will act as follows:
1. use an infinite loop no matter if the user clicks yes/no
2. make it impossible to close the application
3. teach the user how to use ps
- high hopes: 10 goals in a short time, come up with 1 which is terribly done anyway
- yeah, a new wallpaper and an iso image makes a new distro - burn fire burn, evil inside etc

- handle with care - that is: don't start an application unless you know it previously worked before
- an error means you did it wrong
(no, it's not a bug, you just have to configure it 2 hours in order to make it work)

How-To: Compile and Install xine-lib 1.1.15 in Debian Lenny and Ubuntu 8.04

2008-09-12T12:28:00.006+03:00

Xine is an engine which allows to play audio CDs, DVDs, VCDs, various audio and video formats like AVI, WMV, MOV to list a few. The last version of xine-lib is 1.1.15, released on August 14, 2008.

Installation in Debian Lenny
To compile from source and install xine-lib 1.1.15 in Debian Lenny you'll have to follow the steps below.

1. Enable the sources repositories
Make sure you have a line like the following in your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb-src http://ftp.ro.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free

Then update the packages list as root:

apt-get update

2. Install the dependencies
As root, type:

apt-get build-dep libxine1

This will install the development packages and the tools needed to compile Xine.

3. Download the source, compile and install
Download the last xine-lib version from here, uncompress it and compile as usual:

./configure
make
make install

Last one as root.

xine-lib should be now installed in /usr/local/lib/.

Installation in Ubuntu 8.04
Ubuntu Hardy comes with libxine 1.1.11, so if you want to update to the latest version, you need to follow the steps above, with the exception of preceding the commands which need root privileges with sudo. For example:

sudo apt-get build-dep libxine1

./configure
make
sudo make install

With your user's password.

Video players using Xine
I can recommend Kaffeine and Xine-UI, both these players use the Xine engine.

Kaffeine 0.8.6

Updated: Sep 12, 2008

How-To: Install Video Codecs and DVD Support in Ubuntu/Kubuntu 8.04 'Hardy Heron'

2008-09-10T16:11:00.003+03:00

Medibuntu is a project somewhat similar with debian-multimedia.org for Debian, providing packages which are not included in the official Ubuntu repositories due to legal issues. In order to make use of the packages included in Medibuntu (including the non-free video codecs w32codecs and libdvdcss2 for watching ecrypted DVDs), you will only need to follow several easy steps explained below.

1. Add the Medibuntu repository address to /etc/apt/sources.list
Edit as root the /etc/apt/sources.list file (e.g. sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list or kdesu kate /etc/apt/sources.list) and add the following two lines:

deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ hardy free non-free
deb-src http://packages.medibuntu.org/ hardy free non-free

2. Update the packages list
Issue the following command:

sudo apt-get update

3. Install the w32codecs and libdvdcss2 packages
To install those two packages, just type in the command:

sudo apt-get install w32codecs libdvdcss2

It should be done now. The codecs will be installed in /usr/lib/codecs/ and the DVD library in /usr/lib/libdvdcss2.so.2.0.8.

Another way to install libdvdcss2 is to first install the package libdvdread3:

sudo apt-get install libdvdread3

And then running the command:

sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh

As video players, I recommend SMPlayer and Kaffeine, the first using the MPlayer engine, while the latter uses the Xine engine. They both have subtitle support and many powerful features (like remembering video position and settings after closing the application in SMPlayer), and Kaffeine also reads DVD menus.

SMPlayer 0.6.0 running in Kubuntu 8.04

To install either of those, use one of the commands below:

sudo apt-get install smplayer
sudo apt-get install kaffeine

Updated: Sep 10, 2008 (Created: Sep 10, 2008)

How-To: Make UT2004 Use OSS on Debian Lenny

2008-08-31T17:22:00.003+03:00

Some of us playing Unreal Tournament 2004 may be familiar with the error open /dev/[sound/]dsp: Resource temporarily unavailable. This is usually caused because the sound system is busy (for example, you have an audio player opened, or a paused movie).

The simplest way to get over this problem is to install the alsa-oss package, which contains the aoss wrapper to allow the use of ALSA OSS library. In Debian, type as root:

apt-get install alsa-oss

Then run UT2004 like this:

aoss ut2004

Or:

aoss /usr/local/games/ut2004demo/ut2004-demo

Depending on where your game is installed. The good thing about this is that you can now listen to music in a player separate from the one included in the game and also hear the UT2004 sounds.

Banshee 1.2 - 1.x Series Getting to Maturity

2008-08-12T13:32:00.000+03:00

The new Banshee 1.2 includes several new features over the last stable release, like the equaliser or the music recommendations panel. The full list of new or improved features is here. For those who didn't hear about Banshee yet, it's a pretty powerful audio player for GNOME which received more and more attention lately, featuring things like a media library, support for Last.fm, podcasts, cover fetching, plugins and many more.

Banshee 1.2.0 playing

I was enchanted to try the so-called 'Amarok Migration' feature, which, according to the official website, lets you import ratings, play counts and podcasts from Amarok. Well, I have Amarok 1.4.9.1 using SQLite but Banshee crashed when I tried to import those using the Media -> Import Media dialogue, already having a media library in Banshee. I tried deleting the file ~/.config/banshee-1/banshee.db and this time the import feature worked flawlessly, and Banshee didn't crash anymore.

Importing the Amarok media library

The equaliser works very well, except that there are no default presets. I think several default presets like 'Rock', or 'Full Bass' would be nice instead of letting the user setting those.

The new equaliser

I was still disappointed to see that the cover fetching plugin doesn't look inside the song's directory for local files like cover.jpg or front.png, but the retrieval of covers from the Internet works pretty well. All of the covers for albums which don't have additions like [2004 Remaster] or [Limited Edition] were correctly fetched.

Plugins

Banshee looks more improved with every version and it's definitely a very promising player. Compared to 1.0.0, this new release it's much more stable (no more crashes when clicking on the Last.fm tab for example), but I think it still needs some work at cover fetching, and the Last.fm integration won't show all the images for recently played tracks. Last.fm changed the layout recently so I'm not sure whether this is Banshee's fault at all.

Last.fm integration - Banshee features song submission too

Although the 1.0 release was also accompanied by a new, professionally designed website, work at the Wiki seems to be still in progress.

Although I'm not a GNOME or GTK fan, I can warmly recommend Banshee to any audiophile using this desktop environment. It's almost full-featured, and stable enough now, the 1.x series showing real signs of maturity now.

About

How-To: Compile and Install Banshee 1.2.0 on Debian Lenny

2008-08-10T18:13:00.007+03:00

Banshee is a powerful audio player written using GTK, featuring audio and video libraries, support for podcasts and much more. The last version, 1.2, was released on July 30, 2008.

1. Install the necessary dependencies
As root, type:

apt-get install build-essential
apt-get build-dep banshee

For the last one, make sure you have sources repositories enabled in your /etc/apt/sources.list file (there is a line which starts with deb-src).

2. Download the source tarball
Download the source tarball from here, under the Source releases, then change the current working directory to where you saved the archive, and uncompress it:

tar -xjf banshee-1-1.2.0.tar.bz2

Change the working directory to banshee-1-1.2.0, and proceed to the next step.

3. Compile Banshee 1.2.0
In the banshee-1-1.2.0 directory, issue the usual:

./configure
make
make install

The last command as root. Banshee 1.2 should be now properly installed. Run it as banshee-1 from command line or pressing ALT+F2 and typing the name in the run dialogue that appears.

Running Banshee 1.2.0

Most Popular Posts - July

2008-08-10T17:58:00.007+03:00

SMPlayer Review - One of the Most Powerful Video Players for Linux
SMPlayer is a complete video player built in Qt 4.4.0 and based on the powerful, open-source MPlayer.

XChat 2.8.6 Review - A Great Graphical IRC Client
XChat is a very powerful IRC client written in GTK who has been around for years and is now feature complete, low on resources, with a powerful scripting interface and support for C plugins.

Why Is It So Hard for Windows Users to Understand That Linux Is Not Windows
A short essay on what makes Windows users who try to switch to Linux have the impression that Linux is harder to learn or use than Windows.

5 Reasons to Use CLI over GUI
First, I must say that using CLI is not always faster, not necessarily. There are tasks which can be done faster and easier using some GUI application rather than typing a whole bunch of commands. But, nevertheless, command line is still very powerful and it's more appropriate to use it for certain tasks.

4 Ways to Rip DVDs on Linux
Review of 4 graphical applications to rip DVDs on Linux: K9Copy, AcidRip, DVD::Rip and Thoggen.

10 Best KDE Applications - Reloaded
Review of 10 KDE applications, a continuation to the 10 Best KDE Applications article I wrote a while ago.

Xfe Review - Wonderful File Manager
Review of the Xfe file manager for Linux written using the FOX toolkit.

12 Web Browsers for Linux - Review
A review on 12 graphical and CLI web browsers for Linux, including Firefox, Konqueror, Kazehakase, lynx and several more.

IRC Clients for Linux - A Review

2008-07-27T14:26:00.002+03:00

Since I'm an IRC addict and I always liked to spend time learning new stuff on IRC, here is a review of several IRC clients for Linux. Some of them are well-known and popular, like XChat, Konversation or Irssi, and others are not so widely used or known, but nevertheless, they deserve mentioning.

KVirc
KVirc is a powerful client for KDE focusing on an apealing interface, providing its own scripting language called KVS (KVirc scripting language), with lots of options for configurating it, and much more. Among all the clients I tested, KVirc was the most bloated, trying always to include as many options as possible and be user-friendly in the same time, but sometimes it felt like not all of those were needed. For example, the Ignore As... menu includes all the possible combinations for ignoring a person. I think it would have been wiser to include only 2 or 3 and eventually provide a dialog window so the user can enter it manually, with a brief explanation for how it works.

KVirc 3.4.0 'Virgo'

I also found the CTCP option not useful when on a channel, since if you CTCP VERSION or PING, all the users on that channel will get the CTCP request. On a large channel that can lead to a ban, or lag, and it's just not useful.

Anyway, back to the good stuff that KVirc provides. Each release has a nice codename, like the one in the last version, 'Virgo', with a suggestive picture to emphasise it.

Although I didn't test the scripting language much, it looks pretty much the same as the one mIRC has, so for those who are switching from Windows, KVirc should be a good choice. KVS is accompanied by complete documentation which can be accessed from the Help -> Help Browser menus (you can open it in two different ways, as a separate tab or as a panel). It also supports themes, addons, or the possibility to save different configuration profiles.

KVirc help browser

KVirc scripting menu - the system is somewhat similar with the one of mIRC

Overall, although this particular version (3.4.0) was a little slow for me, KVirc is complete, powerful and it looks very good.
Official website

Configuring KVirc

XChat
XChat is a very popular graphical client for Linux, including powerful scripting support in Perl, Python, Tcl, C plugins, powerful configurability using /SET variables and many other. XChat is built in GTK, and a version using GNOME libraries, called xchat-gnome, is also available.

XChat usual look

Some of the features I love about XChat besides the powerful scripting support: logging system allowing to name your path and files using date specifiers (like %b for month or %d for day and so on), the interface is simple and clean, yet all the options I need are available using /SET, including the conference mode. The Linux version doesn't receive as much attention like the Windows one (probably because the Windows one is paid), but XChat is already complete.

XChat preferences

Online documentation is very abundant, and tutorials on how to write scripts and plugins are very helpful and useful.
Official website

Default look for xchat-gnome

Irssi
Irssi is a command line client which includes a simple yet very effective way of navigating through channels/queries. You'll have to read the manual if you use it for the first time, but once you get used to shortcuts (most of them being Emacs-like), Irssi gets pretty easy to use, and shortcuts can be customised too. It supports Perl scripting and the official website contains hundreds of them, can be customised in each and every way using commands explained in detail in the documentation. For me, Irssi wins at all the chapters if it is to compare it with Weechat, Epic4 or TinyIRC.
Official website

Irssi running inside Konsole

Konversation
I noticed Konversation received more and more attention over the last years, since it's a client aimed towards persons new to IRC, and strives to be user-friendly. And it succeeds, having all the necessary options in the configuration window. As default though, the interface lacks a toolbar menu, which can be enabled using the Settings -> Show Toolbar menu, and shortcut icons can be added there. As every decent KDE application, Konversation allows editing shortcuts, it can be embedded in the system tray, it includes configurable notifications, it has a basic logging system and an option to load logs in a new tab and perform searches. When joining a new channel or opening a new query, a backlog will be displayed with the last lines of the previous discussion (if any).

Konversation 1.0.1 - 1.1RC1 has been released too

Konversation only lacks event-based scripting, and that's a must-have for a scripting language in my opinion. Otherwise, it comes as default with several powerful scripts, like the now playing script (supporting the major audio and video players for KDE), or a weather script, or system info. The first release candidate for version 1.1 is now available.

Konversation configuration

I warmly recommend Konversation to users who want to try IRC for the first time, but XChat or KVirc would be good choices too.
Official website

Default Konversation scripts

Pidgin
I must say, I rarely use Pidgin or Kopete for connecting to an IRC network, but you can find it useful if you don't care much about having a powerful, dedicated client especially for IRC. Pidgin is widely known for being the GNOME IM (Instant Messaging) client first, but it can also be used as a basic IRC client if you are looking to only get on IRC, without all the options advanced clients provide.
Official website

Adding a new IRC account with Pidgin

Pidgin on IRC

Kopete
Just like Pidgin, Kopete is the KDE IM client and provides a basic IRC client too. The advantage both Pidgin and Kopete provide is that if you use IM a lot (for example you have both Yahoo and MSN accounts) and want to get on IRC, you can use a single application for it, without the need of opening a new application just to chat on IRC.
Official website

Kopete IRC account

#debian @ Freenode on Kopete

As mentioned above, there are many more clients available, like the popular BitchX, the lightweight Weechat, the classic Epic4 or TinyIRC (official website?) to give a few.

Listen 0.5 - Yet Another Good GTK Audio Player

2008-07-25T14:07:00.001+03:00

Listen is a not so widely known audio player written in Python and using the GTK toolkit, with an interface similar to the one of Rhythmbox, and including features like a music library, podcasts support, lyrics fetching, Wikipedia integration, and Last.fm song submission.

Playing Metallica and visualisation

The interface is divided into several sections for the currently selected action. For example, if you select Current from the actions list, Listen will display all the albums by the currently playing artist, favourite songs and recently played songs by the same artist.

Context tab

I really missed the option to sort the playlist by song location, but otherwise, it includes mostly all other criterias. You can sort by artist, title, album, bitrate, play count, date, year, genre, track number and so on. I'm not sure what the 'Feeds' sorting option does, since it has no visible column in the playlist.

I liked the Wikipedia integration, the browser offers several basic functionality options, like searching for album, artist or song, opening in an external web browser, but it doesn't include an option to specify what browser you want to use. It also has back and forward buttons.

Wikipedia information

The Context tab will show favourite albums, songs and last played songs. Listen automatically detects cover images in the currently playing song directory and shows them whenever possible: in the context tab, in the library at the albums section or in the now playing area. It also allows you to search for default or specific names on Amazon.com and Google Images, but the Amazon search currently doesn't work. It works fine for Google Images though. Allowing you to enter a custom search term is useful in case you don't find what you want but you want to put any other cover or image instead of it.

Cover fetching from Google Images

Listen can be customised different ways using the Preferences window. To mention a few settings you can change: splash screen, start minimized, visualisations, OSD (on-screen display).

Preferences

Last.fm integration

Populating playlists doesn't seem to be very intuitive. For example, after creating a new playlist and going to Music -> Import Folder, the playlist remains empty. However I could do it by selecting all the songs from the Media Library with CTRL+A and dragging them over the playlist name.

Overall, I found Listen to be pretty nice and rich enough in features, but I missed statistics and the option to sort the playlist by location. Otherwise, it's very nice, with a clean layout, and offers a very good audio experience.

About

Official website

How-To: Compile and Install Code::Blocks from Source in Debian Lenny

2008-07-24T09:51:00.000+03:00

Code::Blocks is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for C and C++, built using the wxWidgets kit.

The latest version is 8.02, available for download from the official downloads page. To install the dependencies, use:

apt-get install build-essential
apt-get install libwxgtk2.8-dev wx-common libgtk2.0-dev

Next, uncompress the source and issue the usual:

./configure
make
make install

Last one as root. You can launch Code::Blocks by running codeblocks in a shell or typing ALT+F2 and type codeblocks in the run dialogue.

Codeblocks 6.02

12 Web Browsers for Linux - Review

2008-07-16T09:41:00.000+03:00

The GUI browsers

Firefox
Mozilla Firefox gained more and more popularity since its initial release in November 2004, and today is the browser of choice for the majority of Linux users. Although relatively new compared to other browsers which date for over 10 years, Firefox became a myth in the web browsers world, not only on Linux, but on Windows too. It uses the open-source Gecko rendering engine, it's well-known for being very secure, it manages passwords and cookies very well, it can be expanded by using various add-ons, it supports themes, and those are just a few of its features. The new release, 3.0, also brought several usability improvements, like a new location bar, which makes it easy and fast to find the address you are looking for. It's also highly configurable, and the options which are not available in the Preferences window can be set using the about:config command in the location bar. In my opinion, its only minus is that it takes a considerable amount of time to load, it occupies a lot of memory, and the interface is a little bit slow. Otherwise, probably the best browser available on the Linux platform.
Official website

Opera
Built using the Qt toolkit, Opera is closed-source, but it compensates introducing many features, like a BitTorrent and IRC clients, tabs for most of the actions available (like the transfer window), widgets, plenty configuration options, a cool default interface (the black one in Opera 9.50 and 9.51 really looks awesome if you ask me), system tray integration. And those are just some of the highlights. Opera probably offers the most usable graphical browser to date, and it's definitely a feature-complete browser.
Official website

Konqueror
Using the KHTML engine for displaying web pages, Konqueror is the well-known browser (and not only) for KDE. Although not as powerful at displaying pages as Firefox, Konqueror uses less resources, it has very good KDE integration, allows previewing of audio, video and image files, it integrates well with KGet, a powerful download manager, it supports plugins, it offers spell-checking, and it's highly configurable. For KDE users, Konqueror should be the right choice.
Official website

Epiphany Browser
Epiphany is the default web browser in GNOME, built in GTK and using the Gecko layout engine. Epiphany has a simple and clean interface, it doesn't look bloated, and it can take advantage of plugins. Some say it uses less resources than Firefox, although I wouldn't bet on it, the difference to me doesn't look significant. Nevertheless, Epiphany is a good alternative to Firefox, especially that it integrates very well with the GNOME environment.
Official website

Dillo
The first time I bumped into Dillo was when I tested a version of Damn Small Linux from the 3.x series. I remember I didn't like it at the beginning because it just didn't look to provide the features I needed. But since it's so small, Dillo is actually a great little graphical browser which is worth a try.
Official website

Galeon
Yet another GTK application, Galeon is pretty powerful and includes all the important features you would expect from a web browser.
Official website

Kazehakase
An interesting browser, Kazehakase can use the Gecko engine, it supports mouse gestures, it allows three different levels for interface, Beginner, Medium and Expert (called UI Levels, depending on which one is selected the interface offers less or more options and menus). Kazehakase also supports tabs, and allows you to modify its interface by editing the /etc/kazehakase/kz-ui-UI_LEVEL.xml files, where UI_LEVEL is either beginner, medium or expert.
Official website

The CLI browsers

lynx
lynx is one of the well-known and full-featured web browsers for command line.
Official website

links
Another CLI web browser, links has mouse support.
Official website

w3m
w3m is another popular and powerful browser for command line with support for tables and frames.
Official website

elinks
elinks is a fork of the links web browser, running only in text mode, with mouse support.
Official website

links2
Similar to lynx, this web browser supports background downloads, and can be run in graphical mode using the links2 -g command.
Official website

Updated: Jul 16, 2008 (Created: Jul 16, 2008)

Exaile Music Player Review - A Good Choice for the GTK Fans

2008-07-16T06:06:00.000+03:00

Introduction
Exaile is an audio player built in GTK, and although it's not as popular as Banshee, Rhythmbox or Audacious, it's feature-complete and offers a unique concept by using multiple tabs for showing several playlists, each one in its own tab, and other dozens of good features which an audiophile will definitely find useful.

Exaile 0.2.13 playing

Interface
The common interface is similar to the interfaces of other GTK players, with the tabs for collection, playlists, radio and file browser to the left, and the playlist itself occupying the space left. The thing I liked best about Exaile is the ability to open multiple playlists in the same time in different tabs (see screenshot below) and even song information will be displayed in a new tab instead of a new window secondary window. You can populate playlists directly by dragging and dropping files from the file browser or search for music using the common syntax.

Exaile opens several playlists and song information in separate tabs

Features
I'll start with a minus here, not necessary related to the features, but usability. The big problem with Exaile is that it becomes extremely slow, unresponsive and practically unusable when used with large collections. For example, searching for a file in my over 3000 tracks collections makes Exaile unresponsive for several seconds, and that's with 1 GB DDRAM2 and Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHz. For this, I can't recommend Exaile to audiophiles who listen to a large quantity of music very often, since it just won't keep up, the speed being very low.

Last.fm song submission

That being said, Exaile has its strong points too. It's true, there is nothing unseen before, but it supports plugins, Last.fm song submission, it can sort the playlist by any information available (like bitrate, location, play count, year and so on), it fetches covers from Amazon (but doesn't offer close results when the exact album was not found). And the beautiful thing is that not only it looks for covers in the song's directory, but you can also specify the names for which to look (default ones are cover.jpg, folder.jpg, .folder.jpg, album.jpg, art.jpg) so I only had to add my cover.png format to the list and voila! It works very well, and you can also use wildcards (tested for * only), so if you put *.png it will fetch any PNG image that it finds first.

File browser - you can drag and drop files to playlist

Scanning 1500 Ogg Vorbis files took around 35 seconds on my Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHz, which is not bad at all. There are players who just hang in there forever even if you feed them with less than 1000 audio files, so Exaile performs OK at this chapter.

Preferences - you can add custom names for local covers

You can burn tracks to audio CDs with the possibility to choose which application to use, edit audio tags, set ratings. Exaile also includes visualizations and equalizer, with pre-defined sets.

About

Conclusion
Overall, Exaile is a very good alternative to the more popular Banshee or Rhythmbox players. Except for the search slowness, this player is full-featured, includes enough configuration options, has Last.fm song submission, equalizer, multiple playlists available in different tabs. Really nice and useful features which make Exaile definitely a good audio player, at least for the GTK fans.

Official website
Download
Forum

Short guide for installing on Debian Lenny

How-To: Compile and Install Exaile 0.2.13 from Source in Debian Lenny

2008-07-16T05:03:00.003+03:00

Exaile is an audio player built in GTK which aims to provide the same features as the popular Amarok for KDE. The last stable version is 0.2.13, released on April 2, 2008, which fixes cover art fetching from Amazon.

In order to compile Exaile on Debian Lenny, first make sure you have sources repositories enabled, that is, you have a line which starts with deb-src in your /etc/apt/sources.list file, like the one below:

deb-src ftp://ftp.ro.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free

Next, install the necessary dependencies:

apt-get update
apt-get build-dep exaile

Download the source tarball from the official website here, uncompress it, change the current working directory to exaile-0.2.13 (or whatever your package is called) and issue:

make
make install

The last one as root. Exaile should be now installed in /usr/local/bin/exaile.

9 File Managers for Linux

2008-07-15T13:34:00.002+03:00

Konqueror - Default file manager in KDE3, Konqueror was replaced by Dolphin in KDE4. Very powerful, Konqueror supports profiles, split windows, several view modes, plugins and much more features.
Official website

Krusader - Another powerful file manager for KDE, Krusader has an interface similar to Midnight Commander, starting by default with two panels (the so-called 'twin panel' mode).
Official website

Dolphin - The new file manager in KDE4, Dolphin aims to be easy to use and provides basic features for file management. Although the official homepage claims that Dolphin focuses on usability, I found it harder to use than Konqueror or Xfe, for example. But since I don't use it much, I guess that's just because I'm not used to it yet.
Official website

Nautilus - Default file manager in GNOME, praised by some and criticised by others, Nautilus has a simplistic interface, being powerful enough in the same time. Although currently it doesn't support tabs, Nautilus includes lots of other useful features and it can be extended through scripts.
Official website

Xfe - A nice little file manager rich enough in features, with an intuitive interface, the X File Explorer is built with the FOX graphical interface toolkit. Full review here.
Official website

Thunar - Default file manager in Xfce, in my opinion Thunar is just like Nautilus in every way.
Official website

ROX-Filer - Although ROX-Filer has a minimal interface, it provides many features and configuration options.
Official website

PCManFM - Built in Gtk, PCManFM is clean and features tabs, which makes some users prefer it over Nautilus. Full review here.
Official website

Midnight Commander - File manager using TUI (Text User Interface) which means it doesn't need X to run. I honestly never saw the point in using a file manager when in command line, but some prefer it over plain commands.
Official website

PCMan File Manager 0.4.5 Review

2008-07-15T09:07:00.001+03:00

Two days ago I reviewed Xfe, a pretty good file manager built using the FOX toolkit, so today I'll continue in the same fashion reviewing PCMan FM, a GTK file manager with a simplistic interface and basic features.

PCManFM - list view

PCManFM has a left tab providing directory tree view and location view, including bookmarks, and the file view section which occupies the most of the remaining space. You can select in the View menu which one (directory tree view or location view) you want to be displayed by default. It also allows sorting files and directories by several rules, like name, size, modification date, type, permissions and owner. Files and folders can also be displayed as icons, compact list (which is similar with Konqueror's multi-column view), or detailed list (which shows detailed information about each file).

PCManFM also includes tabs, which at the current date is a plus over Nautilus, the default file manager in GNOME. Nautilus is expected to get full tabs support in the next GNOME release, 2.24. It also has a menu entry for compressing and extracting compressed archives, supporting gzip, bzip2 and zip.

Preferences

It includes only basic configuration options, like sizes for icons or thumbnails, no split views, profiles support or integrated terminal.

About

In essence, PCManFM is a great file manager for those who like a clean and simple interface, which provides tabs and enough features to be fully-functional and pretty useful. Some even prefer it over Nautilus due to its ability for tabs.

How-To: Compile and Install PCMan FM 0.4.5 in Debian Lenny

2008-07-14T03:25:00.002+03:00

PCMan FM is a basic GTK file manager with a simple interface, providing features like tabs, compression menu (bzip2, gzip, zip), or bookmarks. The last version is 0.4.5, and to install it issue as root:

apt-get build-dep pcmanfm
apt-get install intltool

Next, download the source from SourceForge.net, here. Uncompress it and follow the usual commands:

./configure
make
make install

The last one as root.

How-To: Compile and Install BasKet from Source on Debian Lenny

2008-07-13T13:15:00.006+03:00

BasKet is a powerful and fully-featured notes-taking application for KDE3, and there are also plans to port it to KDE4 (read about it here). The current version included in Debian Lenny's repositories is 1.0.2, however the last stable release is 1.0.3.1, so if you want to compile it from source, all you have to do is:

1. Make sure you have sources repositories enabled
Edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file and make sure you have a line similar with the one below:

deb-src ftp://ftp.ro.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free

2. Install the needed dependencies
Use apt-get build-dep as root to install BasKet's dependencies:

apt-get build-dep basket

3. Download the source
Get the source tarball for the latest BasKet release from the official homepage.

4. Compile and install
Uncompress the tarball, change the current working to basket-1.0.3.1 (or whatever version you may have), and issue the usual:

./configure
make
make install

The last one as root. BasKet should be now properly installed.

BasKet 1.0.3.1 - Even better!

I recently wrote a full review of BasKet, you can read it here.

Xfe Review - Wonderful File Manager

2008-07-13T09:39:00.006+03:00

Introduction
The first impression Xfe gave me was of a solid, full-featured, powerful and good-looking file manager. I have to admit, I was really impressed by this application, and I've never used it before. Since I'm a KDE guy, my file manager of choice was always Konqueror and I was never able to get used to Nautilus, Krusader, Thunar or ROX-Filer. But Xfe is a completely new and pleasant experience. Let me tell you what I've found so nice about it...

Xfe usual interface using the GNOME2 theme

The interface
First, it supports many themes and allows you to change the interface fonts from within the Preferences window. It looks very solid, and each item, menu or icon seems to be just in the right place, making it an intuitive and easy to use interface. Xfe is built using the FOX toolkit, which is a light toolkit for developing graphical interfaces written in C++. Basically, Xfe as default comes with a tree-view tab to the left and the browsing section in the rest of the area, making it easy to navigate throught the directory structure.

Xfe comes with several nice default themes

Features
According to the official website, Xfe (which stands for X File Explorer) "aims to be the file manager of choice for all light thinking Unix addicts", it is also lighter than other 'heavier' file managers, and comes with an impressive amount of features, from which I'll only review a few here (read about the main features here).

You can hide toolbars which you don't want in order to make the interface even more simple, change the size of icons, sort files and directories by name, type (or even extension), size or modification time. Even thumbail previews for image files are available. I tried it for JPG and PNG, but it doesn't show previews for SVG files.

Usability
I must say, there is something about Xfe which just makes it feel right and logic. I'm not sure whether it's the fact that everything seems to be logically put in place, or the clean interface, or the way it handles file management, but it seems pretty nice to me. It has integrated 'Add to Archive' service menu, allows file filters, easy and intuitive 'Open with...' menu. You can find all the key bindings in the help file coming with the package.

The Properties dialogue

I wasn't able to find a shortcut for the location bar though (CTRL+L doesn't seem to work).

Xfe also comes with integrated text editor (Xfw - X File Write) text viewer (Xfv - X File View) and image viewer (Xfi - X File Image) and DEB/RPM package viewer, installer and uninstaller. Very useful for those who prefer to install packages in a graphical way.

Two panels mode - you can set different settings for each of them

It provides shortcuts for several view modes, like one panel mode, tree view and one panel, two panels, tree and two panels, but they didn't work in KDE (tested in KDE 3.5.9), probably because of the way KDE handles shortcuts. Also, Xfe is a little slow when thumbnail mode is on and there are many image files in the current directory.

Conclusion
In my opinion, Xfe is just awesome. If you never tried it until now, you really should take it for a spin, no matter what desktop environment you are using. Themes will make it fit well in any of them, it's fast, it provides powerful enough features, it has a great clean and intuitive interface, and in my opinion it's the simplest to learn from all the file managers I tried up to date. A great piece by all means, which can surprisingly become the file manager of choice after one single try.

Official website
Download Xfe
Online documenation

10 Iconic Linux Logos

2008-07-13T07:08:00.005+03:00

I decided to leave out logos of Linux distributions, since including two or three of those would not be appropriate when there are hundreds of good distributions out there.

1. Tux, the Linux mascot

2. GNU logo

3. Glider - the hackers' logo

4. Wikipedia logo

5. Apache logo

6. KDE logo

7. GNOME logo

8. GIMP logo

9. Open Source logo

10. OpenOffice.org logo

How-To: Install xine-lib 1.0.14 from Source in Debian Lenny

2008-07-13T06:31:00.005+03:00

Xine is an engine used by various video players on Linux, like the popular Kaffeine. According to the official website, the last stable release, 1.0.14, adds Xv port and type selection and improved content type detection for HTTP streams.

To compile the last version on Debian Lenny, you will need the dependencies, so make sure you have sources repositories enabled in your /etc/apt/sources.list file and issue the following command as root:

apt-get build-dep libxine1

Next, download the source from here. Uncompress it, change the working directory to xine-lib-1.0.14 (or whatever version you may have) and type:

./configure
make
make install

The last one as root. xine-lib should be now properly installed in /usr/local/lib/.

How-To: Install the Crystal Window Decoration for KDE3 in Debian Lenny

2008-07-13T04:58:00.003+03:00

Crystal is a KDE window decoration theme, and the last version available for download is 1.0.6. Crystal features desktop semi-transparency, it looks very nice and it's highly configurable. To compile and install it, first get the needed dependencies:

apt-get install build-essential libqt3-headers kdebase-dev

Download Crystal 1.0.6 from the KDE-look.org page, here. Uncompress it, compile and install it:

./configure
make
make install

Last one as root. To set it as a window decoration, open KControl (ALT+F2 and type kcontrol in the Run dialogue that appears), then go to Appearance & Themes -> Window Decorations and select Crystal from the drop-down list. You can configure it in any way you like there.

Crystal allows you to set the transparency level (including tint colour), buttons styles (including Vista or Kubuntu Dapper), border size and several more settings.

10 Best KDE Applications - Reloaded

2008-07-13T00:42:00.004+03:00

This article is a continuation of the 10 Best KDE Applications Not Included in KDE which I wrote a while ago. In the first article I reviewed Amarok, KTorrent, K3b, Gwenview, KVirc, Kaffeine, KDevelop, Kid3, DigiKam and Yakuake. In this second part I'll add 10 more applications which I consider to be full-featured and to have a high quality. I included the screenshots at the end of the article. So, here goes the list...

1. BasKet - beautiful and powerful notes-taking application, in my opinion BasKet deserves the name of the best notes-taking application for Linux.
Official website

2. Krusader - very powerful file manager for KDE3 with an interface similar with the one of Midnight Commander. Krusader 2.0.0-beta1 for KDE4 was released recently.
Official website

3. K9Copy - DVD ripper for KDE with advanced options. You can read a full review here.
Official website

4. KWord - KWord is the word processor application included in the KOffice suite. It's lighter than OpenOffice.org, yet offering many options and support for the OpenDocument format. Work is in progress for the KDE4 port too.
Official website

5. KDiff3 - a file differences and comparing tool.
Official website

6. Konversation - currently at version 1.0.1 for KDE3, Konversation is a very user-friendly IRC client with lots of options, highly configurable, but lacking event-based scripting. Konversation 1.1 for KDE4 is in the works.
Official website

7. kdetv - KDE TV viewer with support for Teletext. (Download from here if official website is down)
Official website | Official website

8. Krita - Krita is the image editor included in KOffice. Although not as popular as the GIMP, Krita includes many effects and several powerful tools for image manipulation.
Official website

9. KPlayer - powerful KDE video player based on MPlayer, with support for subtitles and TV.
Official website

10. KMyMoney - personal finance manager for KDE including most of the powerful features needed for managing your finances.
Official website

Screenshots

KPlayer 0.6.3

BasKet 1.0.2

Krita 1.6.3

Krusader 1.90.0

Konversation 1.0.1

KWord 1.6.3

K9Copy 1.2.3

kdetv 0.8.9

KDiff3 0.9.92

KMyMoney 0.8.9

10 KDE Audio/Video Players

2008-07-12T10:15:00.009+03:00

Kaffeine - Kaffeine is a video player for KDE3 (work is in progress at a port for KDE4 too) which uses the Xine engine and can play pretty much any video format. Last version is 0.8.7.

Amarok - The most popular audio player for Linux, Amarok features everything one can ask from an audio player, from powerful collection management, to support for devices, lyrics fetching, scripts and many more. Heavy work is put in the Amarok 2 for KDE 4 port, which will feature among others a completely new interface and widgets.

JuK - Another audio player for KDE, JuK offers only basic features, but it's lighter and faster than Amarok.

kdetv - Although I prefer TVTime, kdetv is a nice TV viewer for KDE3 providing many configuration options. The official website was down at the time of writing, but you can download it via kde-apps.org, here (try here also). Also, I'm not sure but development since to have stopped.

Noatun - KDE audio and video player based on aRts. Noatun is included in the kdemultimedia package.

KsCD - the KDE audio CD player, KsCD also allows CDDB fetching of song information.

Codeine - this is a small video player for KDE3, with support for playing DVDs and VCDs too, along with usual video formats. The port for KDE4 is called Dragon Player.

KMPlayer - Powerful KDE video player which allows you to choose which backend you want to use, like Xine, GStreamer, MPlayer.

KPlayer - KPlayer is yet another complete KDE video player, which can also play TV if you have a TV Tunner card.

SMPlayer - SMPlayer is not exactly a KDE application since it doesn't use KDE libraries, but it's built in Qt 4. It uses the MPlayer engine, and overall is one of the most powerful video players I've used. Also, I noticed MPlayer performs better than Xine (considering CPU resources), at least when playing high resolution movies.

How-To: Install Wiki-Lyrics for Amarok 1.4.9.1 in Debian Lenny

2008-07-12T09:40:00.004+03:00

Wiki Lyrics is a complete Amarok script which allows fetching of song lyrics from various websites, like AZ Lyrics, Leos Lyrics, Lyrc, Jamendo and several more.

First you will need to install the dependencies, so issue one of the following commands:

apt-get install ruby1.8 libqt0-ruby1.8
apt-get install ruby1.8 libgtk2-ruby1.8
apt-get install ruby1.8 libtcltk-ruby1.8

Only one of those is needed. Next, open Amarok and go to Tools -> Script Manager, press Get More Scripts, select Wiki-Lyrics from the list that appears and click Install.

After the script is installed, select it in the Script Manager and click on Run.

Wiki-Lyrics should be installed now.

4 Ways to Rip DVDs on Linux

2008-07-11T10:44:00.002+03:00

This article contains 4 applications for ripping DVDs on Linux: K9Copy, dvd::rip, acidrip and Thoggen.

K9Copy
K9Copy is a KDE application which allows ripping DVDs to many formats and it includes the possibility to rip to exact size (for example, rip a DVD into 2 files with 700 MB each). I wrote a full review here.

dvd::rip
Currently at version 0.98.8, dvd::rip is a powerful tool built in GTK, with support for many video codecs, like Xvid, ffmpeg, or divx.

acidrip
acidrip is yet another powerful graphical ripper built in GTK with many codecs available and the option to select the file size of the output.

Thoggen
Thoggen will generate Ogg Theora video files from your DVDs, having the option to rip ISO images or to access DVD data from a directory. You can also set the quality or size of the output video file.

How-To: Create CD/DVD ISO Images with K3b

2008-07-11T08:34:00.002+03:00

Here's a tutorial for beginners on how to create CD/DVD ISO images using K3b, the popular burner for KDE. This tutorial assumes you have K3b and the genisoimage tool installed. genisoimage is a fork of mkisofs, a command line tool used to create ISO9660 images and K3b uses it for creating images.

Step 1
Open K3b and select either New Data CD Project or New Data DVD Project, depending on what image you want to create. Then drag and drop all the files and directories you want in your image to the Data CD/DVD tab at the bottom.

Step 2
Click Burn (or alternately go to Project -> Burn or hit CTRL+B) and in the window that appears, tick Only create image. Your image will be saved by default in /tmp/kde-YOUR_USER/image_name.iso, however if you want to change the location, go to the Image tab and change it from there (see screenshots below).

Step 3
Hit Start and that should do it.

Updated: Jul 11, 2008 (Created: Jul 11, 2008)

5 Tips to Make Working with the Shell Easier

2008-07-10T23:25:00.002+03:00

1. Use Emacs-like shortcuts
^N calls next command, ^P calls previous command
^U deletes all the text entered to the left (use it when you wrote a wrong command and want to delete it fast instead of using Backspace or ^H)
^K deletes all the text entered to the right (from where the cursor is all to the end of line)
^F moves cursor forward one character, ^B moves it backwards
^A jumps to the beginning of the line
^D logs you out (closing the terminal application too if no other session was started inside it - the same with exit)
There are plenty more, here is a list.

Note: ^ is the Ctrl character, hence ^U means press Ctrl+U at the same time.

2. Copy/paste text using middle mouse button or SHIFT+INSERT
To paste some text in the terminal just use the middle mouse button (press the scroll wheel). If you don't have such a button, press left and right buttons at the same time. SHIFT+INSERT does exactly the same thing, just be careful what you copy/paste.

3. Easily count lines, words and characters in a text file with wc
wc -l file.txt will count lines
wc -w file.txt will count words
wc -m file.txt will count characters
You can also feed its input, which comes in handy when you have an essay for example and you want to know how many words it has in it. Type

wc -m

Then paste your text and press ^D when you're finished (End of File).

4. Make aliases to only type brief commands
Aliases make your job easier by creating a custom, short command which will do the work of several commands. Example:

alias dup='sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade'

A full tutorial on how to create aliases is here.

5. Create scripts and put them in a directory in your $PATH
You can create handy scripts for whatever tasks you need (for example I use those for audio encoding/decoding, mass-renaming of files and several more). Just make sure to make your script executable and put it in a directory in your $PATH. On Debian for example, directory ~/bin/ is detected and added automatically to the $PATH. Otherwise, you can add it by editing ~/.bash_profile and adding:

PATH=~/bin/:$PATH

Updated: Jul 10, 2008 (Created: Jul 10, 2008)

K9Copy - DVD Backup Tool

2008-07-10T04:51:00.006+03:00

K9Copy is a DVD ripper for KDE. The last version for KDE3 is 1.2.3 and you can install it from the debian-multimedia.org repositories. A version for KDE4 is also available for download on the official website.

To install K9Copy in Debian Lenny, first add the debian-multimedia.org repositories to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ lenny main

Run apt-get update as root and install it:

apt-get install k9copy

K9Copy 1.2.3

K9Copy offers many codecs to use for ripping your DVDs, like Xvid, x264, WMV 7, WMV 8, RealVideo and several more. It also allows you to set the size for the output video, for example you can select to rip a DVD on two files with around 700 MB each.

Ripping a DVD using 2x700MB files

Several other DVD ripping tools are available for Linux, so you can also try dvd::rip (package dvdrip), acidrip, or thoggen, which will rip DVDs to Theora video. dvdrip and acidrip are available in the debian-multimedia.org repositories, while thoggen is in the official repositories. They are all built using GTK.

Updated: Jul 10, 2008 (Created: Jul 10, 2008)

How-To: Use cdparanoia to Rip Audio CDs

2008-07-08T03:32:00.005+03:00

cdparanoia is a command line tool which reads audio CDs and allows you to rip the tracks to WAV files. You can then take those and compress them as FLAC or using a lossy format like Ogg Vorbis or MP3. The last stable release is cdparanoia III 10.0, which is included in Debian Lenny's repositories. To install cdparanoia on Debian, issue the following command as root:

apt-get install cdparanoia

The easiest way to use it is to insert an audio CD and rip all the tracks to default WAV format:

cdparanoia -B

The default output files will be located in the current working directory, under names like track01.cdda.wav, track02.cdda.wav, and so on.

Ripping an audio CD with cdparanoia

Alternately, you can rip only a single track or several tracks:

cdparanoida -B 5

Will rip only track 5, while:

cdparanoida -B 3-7

Will rip all the tracks from 3 to 7, including them. You can also rip a track starting at a certain time up to a certain time. For example, to rip track 2 from seconds 35 up to minute 2 and 30 seconds, you would issue:

cdparanoia "2[:35.00]-2[2:30.00]"

There are plenty more arguments which cdparanoia accepts and for more options see cdparanoia --help and man cdparanoia. You may also find useful the FAQ on the official website.

Updated: Jul 08, 2008 (Created: Jul 08, 2008)

How-To: Use apt-file to See What Files a Package Installs

2008-07-08T00:14:00.007+03:00

Install apt-file

apt-file is a tool which allows you to see what files contains a package in the repositories, without the need to necessarily install it. It also allows searching for files inside packages. To get it on Debian Lenny, type as root:

apt-get install apt-file

Next, update the cache:

apt-file update

This will take a while.

Using apt-file

1. Search for a specific file in all the packages

apt-file search file_name

For example, try this:

apt-file search ogg123

ogg123 is a command line player for Ogg Vorbis included in the vorbis-tools package on Debian. However, if you don't know the exact name of the package but you know the tool's name (in this case, ogg123), you can search for it. Here's the output:

$ apt-file search ogg123
irssi-scripts: /usr/share/irssi/scripts/ogg123.pl
python-pyvorbis: /usr/share/doc/python-pyvorbis/examples/ogg123.py
vorbis-tools: /usr/bin/ogg123
vorbis-tools: /usr/share/doc/vorbis-tools/examples/ogg123rc-example
vorbis-tools: /usr/share/man/man1/ogg123.1.gz

So you can see that the package vorbis-tools contains the binary which will get installed as /usr/bin/ogg123.

Using apt-file to search for a specific file without knowing the exact package name

2. List files in a given package
Let's try to list all the files which a specific package will install. Here are the first entries from the output of the command apt-file show vorbis-tools:

$ apt-file show vorbis-tools
vorbis-tools: /usr/bin/ogg123
vorbis-tools: /usr/bin/oggdec
vorbis-tools: /usr/bin/oggenc
vorbis-tools: /usr/bin/ogginfo
vorbis-tools: /usr/bin/vcut
vorbis-tools: /usr/bin/vorbiscomment
vorbis-tools: /usr/bin/vorbistagedit

3. Purge the cache
To purge the cache generated by apt-file update, use:

apt-file purge

As root. You will have to create the cache again with apt-file update.

# apt-file purge

$ apt-file show amarok
E: The cache directory is empty. You need to run 'apt-file update' first.

For more details about apt-file, use the help and the manual page:

apt-file --help
man apt-file

Updated: Jul 08, 2008 (Created: Jul 08, 2008)

An Introduction to IRC on Linux for Beginners

2008-07-07T19:37:00.009+03:00

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a protocol for text-based internet chat created by Jarkko Oikarinen in 1988. Ever since it was developed, IRC gained more and more popularity and currently it's one of the standard ways for projects and distributions to provide online help, for developers to meet and discuss aspects regarding their work.

Two of the well-known networks dedicated to free software and Linux in general are Freenode and OFTC, the latter being the network of choice for the Debian distribution, which switched from Freenode a couple of years ago.

IRC supports private conversations, channels (sometimes called chat rooms), notices, file transfers through the DCC protocol, and some networks even implement channel/nick or username registration.

To connect to an IRC server, you will first need a client. There are several good IRC clients for Linux, however I will discuss here the basics for two GUI (Graphical User Interface) clients: XChat and Konversation, and one CLI (Command Line Interface) client, and that's the powerful Irssi.

Introduction
The IRC protocol as a concept is very simple: you send in raw lines of text, the server interprets them and eventually performs some action, such as giving a channel list, or sending your message to the users in an entire channel etc. The IRC client is here to ease your work, so instead of sending a little more complicated command in order to send a private message to someone, you will only have to type something like /MSG [nickname] Hi there, what's up? (it doesn't matter if it's case sensitive or not, you could have written /msg as well).

Anyway, the basic commands which will usually work on any IRC client out there are these:

/connect network_address_here
/server network_address_here

Both commands do the same thing, they connect you to the specified server using the default port (6667). Example:

/connect irc.freenode.org
/server irc.oftc.net

Once connected, you will want to join a channel:

/join #debian

You can try this for your distribution (given you are connected to Freenode):

/join #gentoo
/join #ubuntu

When in a channel, you will only have to type your message and press enter in order to be sent to the channel. Alternately, you can type this from any tab in your client:

/msg channel|nickname your message here

Either a channel name or a nickname. If you put a nickname, the message will be sent to the respective user and that's a private conversation. OFTC also implements SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), so the messages will be sent encrypted instead of plain text.

To send a notice to someone, you would issue:

/notice channel|nickname enter message here

You can send notices to channels too, in which case they'll get to all the users on that channel, but unless you are an operator, I strongly advise against using it. Usually it will only get you kicked out of a channel, since nobody wants to be disturbed with mass messages.

To leave a channel, /PART should do it. To quit your IRC client, type /QUIT, some clients may also quit on /EXIT.

A little about the clients...

XChat
XChat uses GTK and is one of the most powerful graphical IRC clients for Linux. Here's a review I made a couple of days ago. The power of XChat stands in the ability to script in Perl, Python, Tcl and to create C plugins. You can expand it to your likings and make the best application for a pleasant IRC experience.

XChat on #bash @ Freenode

If you want to register your nickname on Freenode or OFTC, use:

/msg nickserv register your_password your_email

Make sure to enter a password, not your nickname.

Konversation
I recommend this KDE client for any IRC newbie. Although it doesn't currently support event-based scripting (which can be a good reason for advanced users not to use it), Konversation has all the options a beginner needs, from selecting colours, fonts, to choosing where all the messages go, if notices go to the active window or not, etc.

Server list in Konversation

Konversation on #debian @ OFTC

Konversation is highly configurable via Settings -> Configure

Konversation 1.1 for KDE3 is still in development, and the latest stable version is 1.0.1.

Irssi
Irssi is the only CLI client I ever used, and it's very powerful, configurable and it supports Perl scripting. When it starts, just type:

/connect irc.freenode.org

Or

/connect irc.oftc.net

To get on OFTC, where the official #debian channel is located.

Move from one query to another using ALT+1, ALT+2, and so on, or using the Emacs shortcuts ^N and ^P.

I found Irssi to be the most flexible and powerful IRC client up to now, and that's because it is highly configurable through variables and you can make scripts in Perl for anything.

All of the clients here allow connections to multiple servers.

Conclusion
As an IRC addict I recommend this protocol to anyone. I often read that people learn more in 30 minutes from IRC than in two whole hours in forums and I consider that to be true, real-time chatting can be of great help sometimes.

There are several more clients for Linux, like KVirc, epic4 and the basic clients included in IM (Instant Messaging) applications, like Kopete or Pidgin (previously known as Gaim). You can try any of those and see which fits your taste.

Updated: Jul 08, 2008 (Created: Jul 07, 2008)

How-To: Compile and Install Kaffeine 0.8.7 in Debian Lenny

2008-07-07T05:58:00.008+03:00

Just a few days ago I reviewed Kaffine 0.8.6, which was supposed to be the last release for KDE3. However, according to the official website, there is more work at the KDE4 port so a new version, 0.8.7, was released for the stable KDE3. This new release includes several fixes and DVB features.

Kaffeine 0.8.7 on KDE 3.5.9

I noticed the bug crashing Kaffeine when clicking the Play Audio CD button when there is no audio CD in the drive is still there. Anyway, follow the steps below in order to compile and install Kaffeine on Debian:

Compile and install
This version will probably get in Lenny's repositories in about one week or so, however if you want to compile it by yourself, install the dependencies first:

apt-get build-dep kaffeine

Running the configure script

As root. Also, make sure to have the sources repositories enabled in /etc/apt/sources.list and the build-essential package installed. Next, download the source, uncompress the Kaffeine tarball and issue the usual:

./configure
make
make install

The last one as root. Kaffeine should be now installed in /usr/bin/.

Updated: Jul 07, 2008 (Created: Jul 07, 2008)

How-To: Mass-Rename Files Using an Easy Method

2008-07-07T05:40:00.003+03:00

You may find this useful to rename MP3 or image files in a directory, so they will all look the same.

The following script will work on directories with less than 100 files of the same type, and will rename all of them to file01, file02, file03, ... and so on.

j=1; 
for i in *; do
 if [[ $j -lt 10 ]]; then
   mv "${i}" "file0${j}";
 fi;
 if [[ $j -ge 10 && $j -lt 100 ]]; then
   mv "${i}" "file${j}";
 fi;
 j=$(($j+1));
done

You can only use it for certain types of files in a directory, like this:

j=1;
  for i in *.ogg; do
    if [[ $j -lt 10 ]]; then
      mv "${i}" "audio0${j}.ogg";
    fi;
    if [[ $j -ge 10 && $j -lt 100 ]]; then
      mv "${i}" "audio${j}.ogg";
    fi;
    j=$(($j+1));
  done

This will rename all the Ogg files in a directory to audio01.ogg, audio02.ogg, audio03.ogg, and so on. You can test it for whatever files you like, however make a back-up first, since you can accidentally rename files or even directories which you don't want renamed.

Updated: Jul 07, 2008 (Created: Jul 07, 2008)

How-To: Install Ubuntu Human Icon Theme in KDE3

2008-07-07T03:57:00.005+03:00

Following the short tutorial on how to install KDE4 Oxygen icons in KDE3, here is how to get the default Ubuntu Human icons in KDE3.

First, download the theme from the kde-look.org page, here.

The only problem with this theme is that it's incomplete, and the Inherits field contains Tangerine, Tango and Gnome, and usual KDE icons which are not included in the theme will look ugly if you don't have any of those themes installed. So, before installing it, I recommend to uncompress the theme and edit the index.theme file, and change the line which says:

Inherits=Tangerine,Tango,gnome

With this one:

Inherits=hicolor,Tangerine,Tango,gnome

So that KDE will use default icons for the missing ones in this new theme. Then, compress the theme back to .tar.gz and proceed on installing it.

Open KControl (type ALT+F2 and enter kcontrol in the Run dialogue that appears), then go to Appearance & Themes -> Icons, and click Install New Theme. Select the Human_KDE.tar.gz file (or whatever you named the newly created archive) and click OK. Click Apply in order to use it, and eventually log out and back in for all the icons to be replaced.

Installing Human for KDE

This theme will also replace the classic K in the KMenu with the Ubuntu human logo.

Preview of several icons

Updated: Jul 07, 2008 (Created: Jul 07, 2008)

13 Command Line Tools for Audio on Linux

2008-07-06T20:07:00.005+03:00

cmus
cmus is a music player using the ncurses interface, with a Vi-style of maneuvering it. For example, you will type :a ~/music/ to add directory ~/music/ to the playlist, and :q to quit.

For those who like the Vi editor, cmus will probably make a great CLI audio player

ogg123
Official Ogg Vorbis player included in the vorbis-tools package, this nice command line player will also read Vorbis tags and play your audio files encoded as Vorbis.

mpg123
This is the well-known command line MP3 player.

oggenc
Official tool from xiph.org capable of encoding from FLAC or WAV to Ogg Vorbis. It takes many options as arguments, like bitrate or quality.

flac
flac will encode and decode FLAC files (Free Lossless Audio Codec), and also convert FLAC to WAV and vice-versa. It has many parameters available and you can also select the compression level. FLAC is a format which lately got popular since it offers lossless audio quality at lower compression sizes than WAV, and it's completely free.

vorbiscomment
Included in the vorbis-tools package, this tool allows to edit or remove any tag(s) from an Ogg Vorbis file. You can also add any tag name and value. I use this in scripts to perform several edits on tags, like the one below, which clears all the tags in an Ogg Vorbis file:

#!/bin/bash

echo "OGG Tag Remover"
echo "Creating empty file..."
touch file

echo "Starting to remove all tags in OGG files..."
for i in *.ogg; do
echo "Executing command 'vorbiscomment -w \"$i\" -c file'..."
nice -n 15 vorbiscomment -w "$i" -c file
done

echo "Removing empty file..."
rm file

echo "Done! All tags removed."

cuebreakpoints
Used together with shnsplit, cuebreakpoints helps you split FLAC or WAV files according to a CUE file.

shnsplit
From the manual page, shnsplit "is a command‐line utility to view and/or modify WAVE data and properties". Use it with cuebreakpoints to split WAV or FLAC files like this:

cuebreakpoints audio_file.cue | shnsplit audio_file.flac

mp3blaster
mp3blaster is a popular MP3 and Vorbis player with a TUI (Text User Interface).

ogginfo
Shows detailed information about Ogg files.

mpd
The Music Player Daemon is a server that allows to play audio files, like FLAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WAV and AIFF. You will also need a client, like mpc for CLI or Sonata for GUI.

ripit
According to the manual page, ripit is a 'Perl script to create .flac .ogg .mp3 or .m4a (aac) files from an audio CD.'

music123
music123 is a CLI audio player which can play Ogg, MP3, WAV and it behaves pretty much like mpg123 or ogg123.

Conclusion
As a conclusion, you may ask if these are really useful considering there are so many good-looking and full-featured GUI audio players out there. Well, yes, they are! I use oggenc, ogginfo and flac all the time, I like those over any GUI frontend. mpd can prove very useful for those who like to have a music server on their own PC or remotely connect to it from another. mp3blaster is just great if you want to use less resources, and eventually leave the player somewhere in a console window. As for mpg123 and ogg123, well I used those heavily in the past on an old AMD K6/2 with Debian 3.1, when I used to work a lot only in command line, without starting the X Window System.

Not to mention frontends like soundKonverter, where those powerful tools are used for encoding/decoding and converting between formats.

Here is a tutorial I wrote on how to use flac, oggenc, shnsplit, cuebreakpoints and vorbiscomment for manipulating audio files.

Updated: Jul 07, 2008 (Created: Jul 06, 2008)

See What Are Your Most Used Shell Commands

2008-07-06T14:09:00.004+03:00

This script looks into history and prints up the 10 most used commands issued in the shell:

history | awk '{print $2}' | awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"}{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail | sort -nr

Example output on my system, freshly installed for about a week:


    55 ls
    37 cd
    27 apt-cache
    14 su
    10 j=1;
    10 file
     9 ps
     8 killall
     8 dcop
     8 clear

The script itself was taken from here. UbuntuForums is a great resource for these kinds of scripts, and there are several threads there about it too.

Updated: Jul 06, 2008 (Created: Jul 06, 2008)

Best Tools to Get Your Work Done in Linux

2008-07-06T13:23:00.000+03:00

GIMP - powerful image editor
Also known as the GNU Image Manipulation Program, GIMP is a powerful image editor using GTK and providing the necessary tools and effects for complete image manipulation. Documentation is also abundant, and the web is full of tutorials and tips on how to use it. This is by far the most complete image editor for Linux, and it's licensed under the GPL. If you are looking for a KDE editor, you may also want to try Krita, included in the KOffice suite.
Official website

Scribus - desktop publishing application
Scribus is a complete desktop publishing application built in Qt 3. It allows publishing in PDF and provides advanced tools, being completely free of cost. It also allows creation of SVG images. The last version is 1.3.3.12.
Official website

Blender - 3D animation
Blender became more and more known lately due to the free movies which were developed using it, Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny. A game based on the characters in Big Buck Bunny is also on its way. Blender's interface is implemented in OpenGL and it has a nice, pleasant futuristic design. It provides 3D modelling, animations, rendering and many other features.
Official website

OpenOffice.org - office suite
OpenOffice is the most popular free office suite for Linux. It's very powerful, feature-complete, it supports the OpenDocument standard and is the main rival for Microsoft Office on the Windows platform. Although slow and pretty much bloated, OpenOffice is definitely the office suite of choice for a person who creates advanced documents.
Official website

Audacity - sound manipulation program
Audacity is a sound manipulation program which includes many effects like the noise removal tool (default values provided offer great results too), possibility to save as FLAC, OGG Vorbis, MP3, import/export files, record sound and many other features. I tested it recording an old cassette with Bob Marley's Birth of a Legend album, and the noise removal tool really impressed me. For audio manipulation, Audacity is the best in my opinion.
Official website

Cinelerra - video manipulation application
Although it has a little unusual interface which might be confusing at first, once you get used to it, Cinelerra becomes a powerful tool for manipulation of both audio and video.
Official website

Emacs - integrated development environment
There are very powerful IDEs out there, like KDevelop, Eclipse or Anjuta, but I decided upon Emacs since it's one of the most popular, and probably already a symbol for most programmers out there. It runs in both CLI and graphical mode, it includes highlighting for many languages, extremely powerful configuration options, good indentation support, comprehensive help, Lisp scripting. These are just a few. Emacs still is one of the most popular IDEs, and once you get to know how to work with it, it becomes faster than any other application for programming out there.
Official website

Inkscape - vector graphics application
Inkscape is a vector-graphics application which allows saving in PDF, SVG, PostScript and several other formats. It's written in GTK and provides many tools and effects.
Official website

K3b - CD/DVD burning application
This is a must-have tool in order to write CD/DVDs, audio CDs or burn CD images. It is the most complete KDE application for doing it. Two alternatives I can think of is Brasero or the closed-source Nero for Linux (which offers only a trial version anyway), but neither of them look to me as friendly and feature-complete as K3b.
Official website

Updated: Jul 06, 2008 (Created: Jul 06, 2008)

Opera 9.51 Released

2008-07-06T00:32:00.004+03:00

Opera 9.51 for Linux has been released on July 3, 2008, and you can download the Linux version from here.

As I said in the Opera 9.50 review a few weeks ago, I like that the official website offers packages for many distributions, and the support is great. Packages are offered for Ubuntu (from 4.10 Warty Warthog up to 8.04 Hardy Heron), Debian (Etch, Sarge, and even Potato), Fedora Core, Gentoo, Linspire, Mepis, Slackware, SuSE, Mandriva and several more.

According to the changelog, this new release includes several fixes at user interface, mail/news, display and scripting, security, several more others. A 64-bit package has been made available too.

For those who have never used Opera before, it's a complete and powerful web browser for many platforms, including Linux, built using Qt 3. Unfortunately, it's closed-source. Some of the features are widgets, the use of tabs for mostly any task (transfers, IRC and BitTorrent client), powerful configuration options, new search bar, and many more.

Opera 9.51 running on Debian Lenny and KDE 3.5.9

Installation on Debian Lenny
You can download the deb package for Ubuntu 8.04 and install it as root:

dpkg -i opera_9.51.2061.gcc4.qt3_i386.deb

Or whatever your package is called. The package for Debian 4.0 is the same, so you can download either of those. If the fonts are too small, you can configure both size and font type via the Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Fonts tab.

Updated: Jul 06, 2008 (Created: Jul 06, 2008)

A Collection of Top Debian Websites

2008-07-05T20:27:00.004+03:00

Official
http://www.debian.org/ - The official Debian website - it contains very much documentation, mailing lists, download locations, security advisories and mainly everything official related to Debian
Sub-categories:
http://www.debian.org/distrib/ - Download Debian stable
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ - Download Debian testing
http://www.debian.org/doc/ - Official documentation: this is important, read it
http://www.debian.org/MailingLists/ - Debian mailing lists

Anything related to Debian
http://debian-news.net/ - Debian news from all over the web
http://forums.debian.net/ - Debian user forums
http://planet.debian.net/ - Debian Planet: blogs about Debian
http://women.debian.org/home/ - Debian Women Project
http://xlife.zuavra.net/ - Life in X: Not necessarily only Debian-related, but contains useful Linux tutorials, reviews and articles
http://www.debian-administration.org/ - Debian administration resources: configuration, tutorials, how-tos and much more
http://www.debianadmin.com/ - Tutorials, articles, and more Debian-related stuff
http://debianhelp.co.uk/ - Debian tutorials
http://www.debian-art.org/ - Debian art, same style as kde-look.org, gnome-look.org, kde-apps.org or gtk-apps.org
http://www.debiantutorials.org/ - Just as the title suggests, the website contains Debian tutorials and articles related to Debian
http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/ - Debian KDE Team

Note: This list is opened for suggestions, so please leave a comment if you have some website you think is worth to put in here. Blogs are welcomed too, as long as they have original content.

Updated: Jul 07, 2008 (Created: Jul 05, 2008)

Audio KDE Applications - Review

2008-07-05T17:35:00.009+03:00

A nice useful application for editing tags in your audio collection is Kid3, which currently is at version 1.0 and it offers support for all the major formats like OGG Vorbis, FLAC, MP3 or MP4. The good thing about Kid3 is that it allows you to edit tags for several files at once, instead of editing one file, saving and then starting over with the next file.

For listening to music, managing collection and many, many more, Amarok is the right choice. In my opinion Amarok is the most feature-complete and stable audio player not only for KDE, but for Linux in general. And there are strong reasons for being so: Amarok gained its huge popularity because it is complete by any means. The latest stable version is 1.4.9.1 for KDE 3.x, but development is in progress at Amarok 2, which is a complete rewrite (currently in alpha stage) for KDE4, with a new concept, a new interface, and integration of widgets to mention just a few. By the way, if you find editing tags easier to do with your audio player of choice, than Amarok can prove as good as Kid3, since it practically offers the features Kid3 has regarding tag editing.

Other notable players for KDE would be JuK and Noatun, both included in the KDE 3.x packages by default.

For listening to audio CDs any video or audio players. Amarok and Kaffeine both play audio CDs. And there is also KsCD, with the only purpose of playing audio CDs and fetch CDDB data. KsCD is included in the kdemultimedia package in KDE.

For ripping audio CDs, KAudioCreator proves very useful. It allows to rip to OGG Vorbis, FLAC, WAV and MP3, with the possibility to pass command line arguments for specific options that you may need. It's also light in resources, but does a great job ripping your audio CDs.

Although I like to use command line tools like flac and oggenc for ripping and converting audio files, another nice application for converting between various audio formats is soundKonverter, which supports OGG Vorbis, MP3, MP4, FLAC and several more.

Updated: Jul 05, 2008 (Created: Jul 05, 2008)

How-To: Install Codecs and DVD Support in Debian Lenny

2008-07-05T08:15:00.001+03:00

Note: This is a classic how-to intended for beginners and it describes how to install video codecs and DVD support on Debian Lenny in several easy-to-follow steps.

1. Add debian-multimedia.org repository to your sources.list file
To edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file, type as root:

nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Next, add the following two lines:

deb http://debian-multimedia.org/ lenny main
deb-src http://debian-multimedia.org lenny main

Save the file with ^O (CTRL+O) and close Nano with ^X.

For additional information about the debian-multimedia.org repository, visit the website.

2. Install debian-multimedia-keyring and update the list of packages
As root, type:

wget http://debian-multimedia.org/gpgkey.pub -O - | apt-key add - && apt-get install debian-multimedia-keyring

Then, to update the list of packages type:

apt-get update

3. Install w32codecs and libdvdcss2

apt-get install w32codecs libdvdcss2

That should do it. Next, you will need a video player, and I recommend one of VLC, SMPlayer or Kaffeine.

To install either of those, use:

apt-get install vlc
apt-get install smplayer
apt-get install kaffeine

That's it, you should be done now.

Updated: Jul 05, 2008 (Created: Jul 05, 2008)

5 Reasons to Use CLI Over GUI

2008-07-05T02:28:00.005+03:00

First, I must say that using CLI is not always faster, not necessarily. There are tasks which can be done faster and easier using some GUI application rather than typing a whole bunch of commands. But, nevertheless, command line is still very powerful and it's more appropriate to use it for certain tasks. I for one use probably 90% GUI tools and applications and only in 10% of the cases CLI. So, you may ask, what's the scope of this? Well, in the first place, this article is about the reasons I believe to be noteworthy for using CLI in several situations, and what advantages it has.

Some prefer GUI, others CLI, and others (including me) prefer both. In the future I'll probably make an article listing 10 reasons to use GUI over CLI, but until then, here are the main reasons I use my share of CLI applications.

1. Complete control over the system. This may vary. What I'm trying to say is that I got used to do some task using some CLI tools instead of a graphical application. Now using that application makes me wonder whether it will pass exactly the arguments I wanted to the command line tool or use some defaults which I don't want. Not once I saw a graphical application based on some CLI tool which only implemented half of its options, so I wasn't able to make it what I actually wanted.

2. Powerful for many tasks. CLI is often more powerful than GUI applications for specific tasks. For example, consider having a directory with hundreds of different file types in it. Moving, copying, eventually renaming them would be very hard in a GUI file browser. Selecting almost each of them with the mouse while pressing CTRL is not easy for such a big number of files and it also takes up more time. While on CLI, you can use one single command in order to perform whatever task and it's done.

3. Ability to use scripts. I have several small scripts in my ~/bin/ directory, which in Debian is detected and included by default in the $PATH. So I can run specific commands over some files in just one command and a parameter. This is very useful if you have some specific need or want a specific behaviour with some tool, which is not implemented in any graphical application.

4. Less memory. For whom it matters, using command line won't make the system load additional libraries which are not already loaded for some GUI application.

5. Ability to use aliases. Aliases are a great feature implemented by shell applications which allow a user to perform one or more commands using one simple, easy to write command, called an alias. The ability to use those often makes work easier.

Please share your advantages (if any) you may think of for using CLI whenever a GUI alternative is available.

Updated: Jul 05, 2008 (Created: Jul 05, 2008)

Why Is It So Hard for Windows Users to Understand That Linux Is Not Windows

2008-07-04T18:56:00.005+03:00

This is just a rant (hopefully it will be regarded as pertinent and non-'laming') on why Windows users try Linux and return frustrated to Windows after several hours or days. I won't praise Linux and the way it works, I won't even compare and say 'here Linux is easier because ...', instead I have a few questions for all of you who blame Linux for not being and behaving like Windows.

The following issues address the problem to the Windows users who had their first computer with Windows pre-installed and were simple beginners not only in the computing world, but in Windows as well.

Installing software. How many of you didn't install an application or game at least once directly into directory C:\, messing the entire directory structure, not being able to find your music or pictures since all the C drive had over 100 folders? I know I did, and that was after around 1 week of playing with Windows.

Partitioning. When did you do your own partitioning on your own? I'm sure you didn't use fdisk or Partition Magic in the first three days of your Windows experience, when even the term 'booting from CD-ROM' was unknown to you.

Drivers. How much did it take until you fixed drivers for a sound card or modem on a Windows Me/Windows 98 installation after something went wrong?

Mounting ISO images. Don't tell me you knew about Daemon Tools the first day you used Windows. I know I didn't, and it took a while only to find out about CD images and that they can be mounted as a virtual drive. Note for Linux: it can be done not only using CLI as root, but with a graphical menu in your file manager of choice, and you don't have to use an entire application for it.

Video and codecs. Was it long before you settled upon a video player and a codec pack of choice, like the Classic Media Player and K-Lite Codec Pack combination? Lately I tried Vista on my mother's laptop, and surprise: you still have to install codecs!

And the list goes on...

Again, it's not my intention to disrespect the Windows users, it's only to point out, once more, that Linux is not Windows. Installing software is different than in Windows, getting drivers is different than in Windows, gaming is different than in Windows, mostly everything which works some way in Windows is done in another, different way on Linux. Which leads to the conclusion that you need to invest time and a learning curve in order to use Linux, just like you did first, when you started with Windows.

As a final advice: don't make the switch with the philosophy that in Linux you'll find a free Windows, and that's the only difference. You'll find a completely new operating system, working in a completely new different way.

Updated: Jul 08, 2008 (Created: Jul 04, 2008)

NoteFinder - Small Notes-Taking Application Written in Python

2008-07-04T18:01:00.008+03:00

Review
This is the third notes-taking application I review, after the splendid BasKet and Tomboy for GNOME. The latest version is NoteFinder 2.5, and you can download it from here.

NoteFinder is written in Python and it uses the Qt 4 libraries. The main difference between the other applications for taking notes is the interface, which includes a big calendar by default occupying half of the main window.

Although the version number might give the impression that this is a complete application, NoteFinder offers just basic features and no configuration options. I liked that taking notes is handled in two ways: you can add your notes in a rich text format or using the wiki source style. Which got me a little confused over this feature's usefulness.

Edit: As pointed in a comment, Notefinder provides shortcuts for new entries (CTRL+N), removing an entry (CTRL+R), importing, exporting, and searching for related notes.

As a conclusion, when I saw the screenshots on kde-look.org I was enchanted to try it out, but after using it for about 10 minutes I came to ask myself whether it's useful or not. It's obviously it's still in development and it misses a lot of features and functionality. Anyway, if you want to give it a try, follow the steps below.

Installation on Debian Lenny
Note: This how-to may also work on Ubuntu and other Debian-based distributions. For other distributions, just search for python qt4 and install the library with your package manager.

First, install the python-qt4 package as root:

apt-get install python-qt4

Next, download the source from here. Uncompress it, and run the install.sh script inside the notefinder-2.5 directory as root:

./install.sh /usr/local/

It's better to keep the prefix to /usr/local/ instead of /usr/.

However, as pointed in the comments, installing in /usr/local/ will raise some icon problems. The screenshots above were taken with NoteFinder installed as:

./install.sh /usr/

Run it as notefinder from any terminal application or type ALT+F2 and enter notefinder in the Run dialogue.

Updated: Jul 04, 2008 (Created: Jul 04, 2008)

Apricot - Open-Source Blender Game

2008-07-04T15:16:00.005+03:00

Apricot is the newest project from the Blender Institute with the goal to build an open-source game instead of a Blender video this time. The characters used in the game are from the Big Buck Bunny movie, the latest free movie developed using Blender under the name Project Peach.

The other two projects developed by the Blender Institute are project Orange and project Peach, which developed the free short-length movies Elephants Dream and, respectively, Big Buck Bunny.

Project Apricot official website

The game is currently under heavy development, however a playable demo and a video have been made available on the official website.

To quote from the official website, "The team will work on a cross platform game (at least Linux, Windows, OS X), using Blender for modeling and animation, Crystal Space as 3D engine and delivery platform, and Python for some magic scripting to glue things together."

You can watch the video here and a discussion forum is available here.

Updated: Jul 04, 2008 (Created: Jul 04, 2008)

How-To: Convert NRG to ISO in Debian Lenny

2008-07-04T13:53:00.004+03:00

NRG is a proprietary format used by the Nero Burning ROM closed-source application to create CD/DVD images. A port for Linux is also available, but I recommend using K3b, a very powerful and open-source burner for KDE. In this tutorial I'll explain how to use nrg2iso and iat, two command line tools for converting between various images in Linux.

As a note, Ubuntu users just precede the commands which have to be run as root with sudo.

Using nrg2iso
There is a simple command line tool which converts NRG Nero CD images into ISO images. The tool is called nrg2iso and it's included in the repositories, so to install it type as root:

apt-get install nrg2iso

In order to convert a NRG image to ISO use it like this:

nrg2iso cd_image.nrg cd_image.iso

It also provides a progress bar.

Using iat
Another handy tool is iat, which allows you to convert many image formats to ISO. According to the manual page, iat supports the following images: BIN, MDF, PDI, CDI, NRG, B5I. Although I only tested it on NRG, I'm sure it works for all the formats mentioned above. It's included in the Debian repositories, so install it using apt-get install iat, and use it like in the following example:

iat cd_image.nrg cd_image.iso
iat cd_image.bin > cd_image.iso

Updated: Sep 11, 2008 (Created: Jul 04, 2008)

Kaffeine 0.8.6 Review

2008-07-03T05:19:00.010+03:00

Introduction
Up to now I reviewed SMPlayer and 11 video players for Linux, and in this article I'll take a look at Kaffeine 0.8.6, the last version for KDE 3.x, and also a well-known video player for KDE.

When it comes to video players, Kaffeine is my favourite, several reasons for it being that it plays anything I feed it with, it has good subtitle support and the interface it provides is clean and simple to use. Well, the interface is more a matter of taste, since most of the video players have it the same, no matter if they are for KDE or GNOME. But I prefer the players which only use a single window over the ones who come with a main window for controls and menus and another one for playing the movie itself. As I said, only a matter of taste.

Remember it?

Features
Anyway, Kaffeine plays audio CDs, DVDs and VCDs, and all the popular video formats out there, given that all the necessary codecs are installed. It uses the Xine engine.

However, I noticed that playing both Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny at 1080p takes up 100% CPU resources on Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz, the sound stops for a while sometimes, and there are obvious FPS drops. This didn't happen with SMPlayer, which uses the MPlayer engine by default and the CPU was at around 20% for most of the time, with the movie and sound running pretty smooth, screen resolution at 1280x1024 and both Xine and SMPlayer using xv as the video output driver. I noticed the same behaviour with Xine-UI too.

Big Buck Bunny 1080p in Kaffeine

Otherwise, I had no problems with any other movies or DVDs. Kaffeine also plays DVD ISO images without problems.

A bug in the latest version is that when I clicked the Play Audio CD button and there is no CD in the drive it crashes. Currently, it looks like this is the last version for KDE 3.x, and since development started at a port for KDE 4, I wouldn't expect a fix for it.

Big Buck Bunny information

Kaffeine can be embedded in system tray, it pauses automatically the video when it's minimized to taskbar and provides options to configure the Xine engine.

Community and development
The last stable version is 0.8.6 and development is in progress for Kaffeine for KDE4. The official website provides a forum and a FAQ for help, and it also includes random tips in a bar located in the upper side of the web page.

Conclusion
To sum it up, this still is my video player of choice for me, although some good pieces are out there too, like SMPlayer or VLC. Even if you already have a favourite player and never tried Kaffeine, it's definitely worth a try.

Updated: Jul 03, 2008 (Created: Jul 03, 2008)

How-To: View and Convert CHM Help Files to PDF in Debian Lenny

2008-07-03T03:01:00.000+03:00

View CHM files using Kchmviewer
CHM is a proprietary file format from Microsoft used for help files. You can view these files with Kchmviewer, which is quite a good application for KDE, offering a lot of options. To install it, just do the usual apt-get install kchmviewer as root.

Kchmviewer 3.1

You can configure font sizes, how it behaves, what engine to use for displaying the HTML files. You can add bookmarks or even see the HTML source for the currently viewing page. It also has an option to extract HTML files into a directory of your choice, breaking the whole CHM file into HTML files readable with a usual web browser.

Settings

The last stable version of KchmViewer is 3.1, and the development release at the time of writing is 4.0beta3.

Converting CHM to PDF using the chm2pdf tool
For converting the file to PDF, there is an open-source tool called chm2pdf included in the repositories as well. To install it type apt-get install chm2pdf as root, and to use it, all you have to do is:

chm2pdf --webpage chm_file.chm

A PDF file with the name chm_file.pdf will be generated, readable with any PDF reader like KPDF. The tool provides many other options for the newly generated PDF file, for a complete list see man chm2pdf.

Updated: Jul 03, 2008 (Created: Jul 03, 2008)

XChat 2.8.6 Review - A Great Graphical IRC Client

2008-07-02T19:48:00.005+03:00

IRC is one of the most used protocols for text chatting and most major projects and distributions have several IRC channels to offer help or discuss development or any other issues.

XChat is a very powerful IRC client written in GTK who has been around for years and is now feature complete, low on resources, with a powerful scripting interface and support for C plugins.

Usual XChat instance, connected to the OFTC network, channel #debian

The interface doesn't seem to be very complex, but the true configuration power of XChat stands in scripts and /SET variables, which allows you to make it behave in any way you like. One good thing about XChat is that it doesn't copy other clients' interfaces, and it provides its own, simple and clean. Although not necessary very intuitive at start, once you get used to it, XChat comes to behave the way you like it. A GNOME version of XChat is available too, but I decided upon the original client.

When it first starts, XChat will pop-up the network list, allowing you to set the desired nickname, user, real name and select to which network you want to connect. This dialogue can be disabled in the future.

First start - enter the nickname and select the network

You can also configure the behaviour to automatically connect to several network at start-up and also send several commands when it does (which can also be listed in a text file inside ~/.xchat/ directory), although I recommend doing this in a script and just loading it when XChat starts.

The default list of channels is tree view, but you can switch it to the more common tab view in the View -> Channel Switcher -> Tabs menu.

As I said before, the true power of XChat lies in the /SET variables (just type /SET to see a complete list, or visit this website to see what they all do), in scripting and support for C plugins. Scripting is available by default in Perl and Python, and a plugin makes available Tcl too. The good thing about the scripting interface is that it's fully documented on the official website, so what you'll only need in order to extend XChat is basic programming knowledge in Perl or Python and a little documentation reading. If you know basic C, you'll also be able to create plugins for XChat. It supports event-based scripting. Here is my work in this matter and I'm not a professional programmer.

Connected to multiple networks - OFTC and Freenode

Some of the /SET variables are really useful, like irc_whois_front (to see /WHOIS information in the current active window) or irc_conf_mode (to hide the join/part events - the conference mode). The conference mode can also be enabled by right-clicking on the channel tab and ticking Settings -> Hide Join/Part Messages.

XChat has support for connecting to several networks at the same time, a powerful logging system which allows not only to select the path, but also to use date specifiers like %b or %d for the filenames with your discussions. Practically, you can make any format possible using the specifiers.

Very flexible logging system

You can configure keyboard shortcuts, it has an auto-replace feature and also spell checking, which really is very useful if your English is not that good.

This new version also has a new entry in the Logging tab inside the Preferences window, which allows to enable/disable the scrollback from previous discussions. This option was available in the previous release with the /SET TEXT_REPLAY 1|0 variable.

The Preferences dialogue

XChat also features system tray integration, although in KDE the icon can sometimes be too big (that depends what size the panel with the tray icons has). One feature I couldn't find and I really miss is start minimized, and I really hope it will be implemented in the future.

The system tray icon can also be configured to highlight whenever a special event occurs, you can do it through the Settings -> Preferences -> Alerts dialogue.

Documentation is very abundant, and as for the community, the project offers both a forum and an IRC channel, #xchat on Freenode.

XChat 2.8.6 - the very last release for Linux

Overall, I can only say that XChat is probably the most complete, powerful and popular graphical client for IRC on Linux. It implements everything an IRC client should have, and the options you miss can be easily implemented using scripts or plugins. There are lots of them on the official website. This was my favourite client for a very long time, and I warmly recommend to any person who uses IRC, regarding if it's an IRC addict or not, a beginner or a more experienced user.

Of course, if XChat doesn't fit you, other powerful graphical clients are KVirc and Konversation, and for CLI there is the lovely Irssi, which I found myself using more and more lately.

Official Website
Documentation
Forum
Scripts & Plugins
/SET Variables
My XChat Scripts & Plugins

Updated: Jul 02, 2008 (Created: Jul 02, 2008)

Most Popular Posts - June

2008-07-02T17:20:00.005+03:00

What Makes Amarok the Most Popular Audio Player for Linux?
An article/review about 7 reasons for which Amarok is the most popular audio player on Linux.

10 Best KDE Applications Not Included in KDE
A review of 10 best KDE applications which don't come with KDE alone, including Amarok, K3b, KTorrent, Kaffeine and KDevelop.

10 Best GTK Applications Not Included in GNOME
A review of 10 best GTK applications which don't come with GNOME, including the GIMP, XChat, Inkscape, Banshee and Deluge.

Wine 1.0 Review
Review of the first 1.x release of Wine. Tested applications are World of WarCraft, mIRC, Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike.

Review of the New Banshee 1.0 Audio Player
Banshee is a powerful audio player which integrates with GNOME, and the new 1.0 release features a whole bunch of new stuff.

3 BitTorrent Clients for Linux
This article reviews KTorrent, Deluge and Transmission, which are three of the most used BitTorrent clients in Linux.

Updated: Jul 02, 2008 (Created: Jul 02, 2008)

How-To: Use Profiles in Konqueror 3.5.9

2008-07-02T15:26:00.005+03:00

Konqueror is the default file manager in KDE 3.x and most KDE-based distributions still use it over KDE 4.x since at the current date it's more feature-complete and more stable. Another powerful file manager for KDE is Krusader, and the new default in KDE 4.x is Dolphin, which aims to provide good functionality and be only a file manager, but although I used it for a little, I only saw a file manager that lacks features with no advantage over Konqueror. That's supposed to change, but until then, Konqueror with KDE 3.5.x still remains a winning combination.

Anyway, this short tutorial will show how to add two profiles in Konqueror, one for file management with two tabs opened in two different locations, and one for web browsing.

1. Create the file management profile
Open Konqueror and eventually set the path in the current tab to your home directory. If you like, you can open another tab and set the location to another path, or split the window left/right or top/bottom. Mainly, the profile will remember any settings you did in this Konqueror session. Next, go to Settings -> Configure View Profiles... and add the name for your profile, for example Configured FM. You can tick the Save window size in profile too if you want the window size to be remembered. Click Save.

Saving a new profile in Settings -> Configure View Profiles...

Tab split left/right using the Configured FM profile

2. Create the web browsing profile
Just repeat the steps from 1, except this time use a web address in the location bar (and eventually do whatever other things you may find useful to be automatically loaded when you start Konqueror - open more tabs etc). Save it, say as Configured Web Browsing.

3. (Optional) Run Konqueror by loading any of those profiles
To run Konqueror using any of those profiles, just hit ALT+F2 and type:

konqueror --profile "PROFILE NAME"

For example, for the Configured FM profile:

konqueror --profile "Configured FM"

And for Configured Web Browsing:

konqueror --profile "Configured Web Browsing"

4. Add desktop shortcuts
In order to start it faster, just create two plain text file on the desktop with the following lines:

For the file management profile:

[Desktop Entry]
Exec=konqueror --profile "Configured FM"
Icon=konqueror
Name=Konqueror (FM)
Type=Application
Comment=File Manager

For the web browsing profile:

[Desktop Entry]
Exec=konqueror --profile "Configured Web Browsing"
Icon=konqueror
Name=Konqueror (Web Browser)
Type=Application
Comment=Web Browser

And that's it. You can now easily access Konqueror easily as file manager or web browser using those two shortcuts. And don't forget to check out the default profiles, they might be useful too.

Updated: Jul 02, 2008 (Created: Jul 02, 2008)

How-To: Compile and Install the QtCurve Style for KDE3 in Debian Lenny

2008-07-01T09:01:00.002+03:00

Note: This how-to may also work on Ubuntu and other Debian-based distributions.

QtCurve is a beautiful and highly configurable style for KDE. It's mature and bug-free, so if you want to give it a try, download the source for KDE 3 from the KDE-Look.org page . Next, install the dependencies:

apt-get install build-essential cmake kdebase-dev cmake lsb-cxx

Then, issue the following commands in the QtCurve directory:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
make install

The last command as root. Your style should now be installed. To apply it and configure QtCurve, run KControl (hit ALT+F2 and enter kcontrol), go to Appearance & Themes -> Style, and select QtCurve from the Widget Style drop-down list.

Updated: Jul 01, 2008 (Created: Jul 01, 2008)

SMPlayer Review - One of the Most Powerful Video Players for Linux

2008-07-01T03:02:00.003+03:00

SMPlayer is a complete video player built in Qt 4.4.0 and based on the powerful, open-source engine MPlayer.

The version I decided to test in this review is 0.6.1 from SVN. SMPlayer basically plays anything video or audio, including DVDs, VCDs or DVD ISO images, audio CDs, MPEG, AVI or ASF. SMPlayer can also play DVD ISO images or mounted images by pointing to the directory which contains the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS directories, or even videos from a given URL location.

Playing Big Buck Bunny at 1080p

One of the great features SMPlayer has is the ability to resume a movie after you closed it and restarted the application. This really is useful and time-saving in case of a reboot, logout or a restart of the X server, or just in case you will need to close it in order to free up memory and CPU for some other task. Settings are saved separately for each video file, but currently it doesn't seem to support resume for DVD images.

Usual instance when SMPlayer is started for the first time

Among the other features it comes with are the OSD (On-Screen Display), very detailed information about the currently playing movie, support for subtitles (which, by the way, are displayed very nice and clean and allow font resizing to anything it fits you better), support for DVD chapters, and a whole bunch of video effects, like rotating or filters. You will have to select the CD/DVD drives in the Options -> Preferences window.

SMPlayer is highly configurable, allowing to change the icon theme, the language (it has full support for many languages, see the screenshot below) and many more. You can select the output video driver too. I liked the support for configuring the interface: besides the language or icon theme, you can also change the style or the default font the application uses. This allows you to make SMPlayer look just the way you want it to.

SMPlayer - the interface is completely available in many languages

You can also change the shortcuts for mostly all of its functions, and also have the mouse behave differently. For example, double-click will toggle fullscreen mode, while you can set single click to anything, like play/pause or mute. The middle button and wheel are also configurable.

SMPlayer is highly configurable

Subtitle support is also powerful: SMPlayer allows any subtitle sizes, it provides the possibility to automatically load subtitles which match a specific criteria, the position of subtitles on screen and the language encoding to use.

I noticed that MPlayer takes up quite some CPU resources when playing a movie with a big resolution, and it was around 20% when playing Big Buck Bunny at 1920x1080 encoded as MP4, on my Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz running Debian Lenny. Also, I encountered a crash on MPlayer when trying to play a DVD from the drive, but the second time it ran just fine.

Since it uses Qt 4, integration with KDE 4.x is very good and the interface blends smoothly in the environment. As for speed, comparing to players for KDE 3 like Kaffeine, it is a little slower (I'm referring to the interface's response only), but I hope this will get fixed as the time passes though.

To sum it up, SMPlayer is a very impressing application and one of the most powerful video players for Linux, together with Kaffeine or VLC.

Official Website

Updated: Sep 15, 2008

Review of the Last.fm Open-Source Client for Linux

2008-07-01T03:00:00.000+03:00

Last.fm is an open-source application licensed under the GPL, allowing you to listen to Last.fm radio stations and submit the songs in the same time. For those of you unfamiliar with Last.fm, it's a great social music community, allowing you to submit songs you currently listen to, statistics, forums for bands or music styles (or even more: Amarok has a group, most major distributions also, and you can start your own group about anything, match people and discuss), together with information for each artist, open for anyone to edit, just like the Wikipedia style.

The application is also included in Debian's repositories (and probably most other distributions), and it can be downloaded alternately from the Tools page on Last.fm. What I liked is that they also offer an online Debian repository for it here, although I recommend using the official package in Debian's repositories. But if you want the latest version, the repositories they provide are fine.

Main interface after logging in

The client is built using the Qt 4.3.4 libraries since April 2, 2008, so the integration with KDE 4.x should be just fine. You will also need a Last.fm account in order to use it.

Features
The left tab contains most of the important links for the Last.fm radio, like recently played, loved or banned songs, tags, friends, neighbours or history. You can love, ban or skip songs (but unfortunately I couldn't find any 'pause' button). You can also start your own radio station and add favourite songs there.

Listening to radio

It integrates with the system tray, and it's available in several languages, like English, French or Italian.

It also offers several configuration options, like the audio engine or the icon in the system tray.

Configuration

As a conclusion, the Last.fm client can prove very useful for persons who like to listen to internet radio a lot, unless you prefer to do it in your own audio player of choice. Overall, another nice free application for our delight, and these projects should really be encouraged and supported.

Updated: Jul 01, 2008 (Created: Jul 01, 2008)

11 Video Players for Linux - Review

2008-06-30T16:06:00.003+03:00

SMPlayer
SMPlayer is a fully featured video player built using the Qt 4 libraries. It basically plays anything, including DVDs and ISO images, but it skipped the menus when reading DVD ISOs. It's complete and it offers plenty configuration options, including for subtitles and the interface itself, allowing to choose the icon set and the style used. You can also configure the language SMPlayer uses for its interface, including English, Romanian, Polish, German and many other. I was impressed to see translations are pretty much complete.
Update: Full review here.

Kaffeine
This is one of the best KDE video players, currently at version 0.8.6 using Qt 3. Work is in progress for the Qt 4 port too. It plays anything and it handles very well any kind of movie formats. It uses the Xine engine, offering powerful configuration options for it.

VLC
Used to be called the Video Lan Client in the past, this just might be the most popular player on Linux. Although I use it rarely, it handles all the formats out there without problems (including DVD ISO), performing better sometimes in case your video player of choice won't work with a specific file.

Totem
The GNOME default video player, Totem failed to play some DVD ISOs considering all the other players handled them OK. It doesn't load subtitles by default and I wasn't able to make it recognise a SRT subtitle and load it. Totem is good enough, but most of the other players are better if you ask me. It also offers several plugins.

Codeine
This is a video player with basic options and a basic interface, which uses the Xine engine. It doesn't offer much configuration options and it's not very stable, but otherwise it offers support for all the video formats. It fails to play DVDs properly. The port for KDE4 is now called the Dragon Player.

RealPlayer
RealPlayer 10 is based on the Helix engine, however I couldn't make it play several formats or DVD ISOs. It offers favourites, many plugins and plenty configuration options, providing also a simple and intuitive interface.

KPlayer
Although it crashed when trying to load files which are not multimedia ones, KPlayer does a pretty good job playing most of the video formats. It can also play TV, but the quality is not that good like in TVTime. It offers support for subtitles and enough configuration options to tweak it to your likings. KPlayer is powerful enough but it's not very stable, crashing pretty often.

Noatun
This is KDE's video player and there is not much to say about it, except that it's simplistic and basic. It plays most of the formats but it won't support subtitles. Can be embedded in the system tray. If you watch movies very often, and especially if you need to configure your player and need subtitles, this player won't fit you probably.

Kaboodle
Kaboodle is yet another basic player for KDE, which crashed after several seconds of play with the error 'sound server fatal error: CPU overload'. It doesn't support DVD ISOs, but can play many other formats.

MPlayer
MPlayer is a very powerful command-line player. It's used by many other video players which build frontends on top of it.

Xine-UI
Xine-UI (User Interface) is a frontend for the Xine engine. Xine itself is the backbone of several powerful audio or video players, like Kaffeine or Amarok.

Updated: Jul 01, 2008 (Created: Jun 30, 2008)

How-To: Install MythTV in Debian Lenny

2008-06-30T00:24:00.005+03:00

Add the Debian multimedia repositories into your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://debian-multimedia.org/ lenny main
deb-src http://debian-multimedia.org/ lenny main

Next, fetch the dependencies needed to compile MythTV:

apt-get update
apt-get build-dep mythtv

Download the source from here, uncompress and issue the usual:

./configure
make
make install

The last one as root.

Updated: Jun 30, 2008 (Created: Jun 29, 2008)

How-To: Install RealPlayer in Debian Lenny

2008-06-29T16:45:00.004+03:00

RealPlayer is a video player, native for Linux and based on the Helix engine.

To install RealPlayer, you will first need the Debian multimedia repositories enabled. Just edit file /etc/apt/sources.list as root and add:

deb http://debian-multimedia.org/ lenny main

Adding Debian multimedia to the repositories

Next, issue this command as root:

wget http://debian-multimedia.org/gpgkey.pub -O - | apt-key add - && apt-get install debian-multimedia-keyring

Then update the list of packages and install RealPlayer:

apt-get update && apt-get install realplayer

That should do it.

RealPlayer 10.0.9.809

Tomboy - Yet Another Notes-Taking Application

2008-06-27T05:27:00.000+03:00

A few days ago I reviewed BasKet, the wonderful KDE application for taking notes, so today I decided upon Tomboy, which is an application for GNOME.

Tomboy 0.10.2

Tomboy does not provide as many features as BasKet, but it might be the right choice for those using GNOME. It provides global hotkeys, spell-checking while typing, and several options for formatting the text, like highlighting. It can be embedded in the system tray and it uses a low amount of resources.

Formatting text in your notes

Another feature are the extensions, called add-ins in Tomboy, like the Export to HTML or Backlinks, which allows to link between notes. It also allows searching in all your notes.

Tomboy add-ins

Preferences

Running in KDE with the default browser set to Konqueror won't open any links (I noticed this at many GNOME applications which run in KDE) but it's OK if you have Epiphany installed.

As a conclusion, although it's not as feature-rich as its KDE counterpart, Tomboy is pretty good for taking notes in a rapid fashion, considering you don't need advanced options.

TVTime - Television on Linux

2008-06-26T17:12:00.000+03:00

TVTime is a nice application for those of us who own a TV card, and it is known to offer the best quality from all the applications with the same goal.

Of course, it doesn't compete with the programs manufacturers provide, but given that they are only available on Windows, TVTime will be a good solution for watching TV on Linux. It offers basic features, like settings for contrast and brightness, together with easy to use shortcuts for taking screenshots or the fullscreen mode.

Actually, the simplistic approach is what impresses me, but I really miss a recording feature. It works very well with my Leadtek TV2000 XP Deluxe card, and you can find a complete list of supported cards on the official website, here.

You can also find a FAQ and a complete list of shortcuts available to TVTime.

How-To: Add New Web Shortcuts in Konqueror

2008-06-23T06:24:00.009+03:00

Web shortcuts are a useful feature allowing you to search on many websites only by typing a short keyword in Konqueror's address bar. For example, typing wp:linux or gg:linux will automatically search for Linux on Wikipedia and, respectively, on Google, and display the results.

Konqueror comes with many web shortcuts, allowing you to search on several popular websites. You can see the default ones via the Settings -> Configure Konqueror -> Web Shortcuts tab. However, if you want to add some of your own, just do this:

Get the address First, open the website which you want to add and search for a specific term, say FOOBAR. Next copy the address provided in the location bar, then open the Web Shortcuts tab and click on New....

Fill in the necessary data In the window that appears, enter any name in the Search provider name field and copy the address from the previous step into the Search URI field. Then, replace FOOBAR with \{@} and finally, enter the URI shortcuts, separated by comma (a single shortcut should be enough). Those are the shortcuts you will use in order to search on that specific website (like gg or wp from the above example).

Enable the new shortcut Hit OK and make sure you tick it in order to be enabled. It should work now.

Example
Here's an example showing how to add a search on http://www.google.ro/:

First, I searched on http://www.google.ro for FOOBAR, and the address is:

http://www.google.ro/search?hl=ro&q=FOOBAR&btnG=C%C4%83utare+Google&meta=

Next, in the Web Shortcuts tab, I enter data like in the image below, replacing FOOBAR with \{@}.

Replace FOOBAR and enter the desired shortcuts

And now it's done. Just don't forget to tick it in order to have it enabled. Typing ggr:konqueror will search for Konqueror on Google.ro. Use this method for any other websites you want to add.

You can get more help about web shortcuts in Konqueror by typing help:/kcontrol/ebrowsing/index.html in the location bar.

Updated: Jun 23, 2008 (Created: Jun 23, 2008)

BasKet - The Complete Notes-Taking Application

2008-06-23T00:09:00.007+03:00

I was lately impressed by a nice application I recently included in the 20 Essential KDE Applications article. I'm talking about BasKet, a full-featured and complete notes-taking application for KDE.

Usually, when thinking of an application for taking notes, one may have in mind at most a basic and precarious text editor which sits in the system tray and just allows you to put things you've bumped into in it, in plain text mode. Well, BasKet is much more than just a simple notes application, having amazing features like importing text notes files and several other file types, highlighting different notes by importance, tagging by priority (for example, you can tag notes as 'to do', 'work', 'personal', 'funny', 'code' and much more).

BasKet 1.0.2 usual interface

BasKet has an appealing interface, and when it first starts it offers a welcome page made in BasKet itself, with help and most common topics related to it.

BasKet will come very handy especially when you bump into some quote, or a tip, or a helpful discussion on IRC or on forums. But you can practically use it for any notes, and even entire articles and tutorials you want to keep in an archive and come back to check it out when needed.

Cleverly importing a text file with notes

It's highly configurable: you can completely change the appearance of your notes (fonts and colours), animate changes, configure shortcuts and global shortcuts (those are needed to invoke BasKet very fast with a key combination when the focus is set to another application - extremely useful). When you don't need it, it allows to be embedded in the system tray.

Default notes example file - BasKet also allows to divide the notes pages into sections

The official website is well maintained, offering a tour of BasKet, highlighting its features and screenshots.

I must say, one great piece, which makes way more than it's supposed to do. Highly configurable, with a nice interface and great functionality, BasKet is the best application for taking notes by far.

BasKet 1.0.2 About window - the last version is 1.0.3

Official website

Updated: Jun 23, 2008 (Created: Jun 23, 2008)

What Is the Best Way to Learn Linux?

2008-06-22T21:26:00.005+03:00

There are many ways to learn Linux, and I can't think of one as being the 'best'. Of course, something may work for some users while failing miserably for others. There are users who prefer to ask a friend or get their answers fast on a forum, either because they are too lazy or they just don't have enough time to learn something new: they want it to work in their own way. Well, that's not quite an option, since there is no universal program which will fit any user's way of doing things.

I remember that when I started I made some very dumb questions on forums and IRC, but I always liked to read documentation, which is by far the best way of learning Linux in my opinion. There is a saying which goes like 'give a man a fish and he will have food for one day, teach the same man how to fish and he will have food for his entire life.' Well, not exactly like this, but you got the point. I think keeping asking questions rather than reading manuals and tutorials first will get you out of trouble for the moment, but there will always be problems in the future which need to be taken care of.

A thing I recently observed was how most of the IRC channels and forums handle beginners: on IRC there is usually a topic and a helpful bot, and on the forums are the stickies which contain detailed information for newbies. The only problem is that this kind of help reached a level of automation: not once I saw well-intentioned persons on IRC who just give a command and a channel robot will show some help regarding that specific problem. Now, I really don't know how much a newcomer understands from help provided this way, but I can't think of a better way to do it either. Users who are new and ask the same question over and over again are countless: in forums, threads like this are always on the front page, and there is a big percentage of similar threads on the entire forum.

Too few users search, and too few read the helpful stickies. This is a common problem actually: usually (and it's just a natural thing) somebody wants a fast answer to his problem, and prefers to post on a big forum like Gentoo forums or Ubuntu forums to get a fast answer rather than reading ten pages of FAQs and an entire thread specially made for this kind of problems. But what is the gain in this? It's true, a little annoying, but the user gets his answer usually. But is this the right way to learn doing things? If that same user would have read the manual page (painful for a beginner, i know - how many even know how to quit the manual page after reading it?), he would have earned much more than asking in a forum or a mailing list. This process is part of learning how to learn.

Not to mention the satisfaction: at least I know how happy I am when I troubleshoot something on my own, without going to ask more skilled users on how to handle something. And the gain is bigger: a manual read well offers 10 times more general knowledge about a certain issue than an answer to a single, specific question.

If new users understand that it's better for them to first do the reading, then Linux and the Linux community will make one step ahead.

Updated: Jun 22, 2008 (Created: Jun 22, 2008)

Review: Firefox 3.0

2008-06-22T18:05:00.008+03:00

With a lot of fuss and a new downloads record, Firefox was launched just the other days, filling the headlines of all the news websites throughout the Internet.

The interface itself didn't change much, except for a small change here and there, like the address bar or the way the add-on manager handles newly installed themes. The add-on manager will show recommended add-ons, allowing you to select first from a bunch of add-ons you probable didn't even know they exist.

Firefox, using default theme and running in GNOME 2.22

One of the best things I like about Firefox is the password manager and the way cleaning privacy history and cookies is handled. For example, you can set the password manager to remember all the passwords and usernames you enter in forms, and set the privacy manager to only clean up cookies, browsing history, cache, authenticated sessions etc, without deleting the passwords. This way, even though you cleaned up all the cache and cookies, Firefox will still remember usernames and passwords.

Cleaning up private data - you can select what you want to keep

After installing a new theme, the add-ons manager will automatically select it and offer a Restart Firefox button so you can start using it. You have the option to let Firefox remember the last used tabs so it can load them again after the restart.

Firefox add-ons - new theme is used automatically after restart

After the successful launch of Firefox 3, which benefited of around 8.4 million downloads, several news websites reported that a critical security issue was found in the 3.0 version, allowing code to be executed with user permissions on the host computer.

The official website offers several pages showing the new features in Firefox 3.0, like this one. Well, the password manager is not a new feature, I know this one from way back in Firefox 1.x. As Mozilla provides, other new features would be smart location bar, full zoom - by using CTRL++ and CTRL+-, you can zoom in and out of a web page, a very nice feature if you really need it - one use I can think of is the case in which the fonts are too small and you haven't set yet a minimum font size. It probably helps websites not so well designed which offer horizontal scroll too (you know, those annoying websites which make you scroll horizontally in order to read the whole line to the end). You can zoom out on those and read them all at once.

The address bar

Regarding the speed, Firefox looks to load faster (or is just a false impression?), but the interface reaction is as slow as it was in previous versions. Mozilla says the Gecko layout engine (used to render web pages and the Firefox interface) was improved and it is now faster.

Using the Past Modern theme for Firefox 3.x

As for documentation, Firefox 3.0 currently offers help online, on the official website, contrary to Firefox 2.x, which also offered a comprehensive and easy to understand offline help.

Overall, Firefox is what it already gained throughout the years: the most popular browser on Linux. I couldn't even think that 3.0 will be anything but a good release, even though with one great accomplishment (the big number of downloads), also came a security vulnerability.

Updated: Jun 22, 2008 (Created: Jun 22, 2008)

Top 10 Best GTK Applications Not Included in GNOME

2008-06-22T01:15:00.009+03:00

1. The GIMP - image editor
GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program, and is the most complete image editor on Linux. It supports various file formats and it features many effects. I usually read complains about GIMP regarding the fact that it's not as 'good' as Photoshop. Well, I'm not a graphics passionate, and I only use GIMP for basic image manipulation (cut, crop, basic effects, resize etc), but I think it's the best tool out there to use with images. The current stable release is 2.4.6.
Official website

2. XChat - IRC client
In my opinion, this is the best graphical IRC client for Linux. Its strength is in support for scripts in Perl and Python, together with an easy to learn plugin interface (given that you know basic C). It offers event-based scripting too. Most of the configuration options are available via the /SET variables, instead of the Preferences window. The logging system allows filenames which can use date specifiers, so you can store your logs in whatever way you want. The Windows version usually ships earlier than the Linux one, but that's not quite an issue, since the client is already complete for several years now.
Official website

3. Inkscape - vector graphics editor
This is a complete vector graphics editor made in GTK. You can save the projects in many formats, like SVG or PDF.
Official website

4. OpenOffice - office suite
Although some say OpenOffice is too bloated and prefer Abiword in GNOME, this still is by far our most fully-featured office suite. It's true, OpenOffice is very slow and it takes some time to load, especially on older PCs, but it's complete and fully supports the OpenDocument format. Besides, it's the best response to Microsoft's Word. I'm not bashing any application here (I actually use a word processor maybe once a month), but I'm sure that Abiword and not even KOffice can compete with OpenOffice at features chapter. As for the speed, yes, they are both faster and use less resources.
Official website

5. VLC - audio/video player
VLC is the kind of video player that usually does not fail to play something when other players can't manage to do it (given that all the codecs are correctly installed). Very powerful and very configurable.
Official website

6. Firefox - web browser
The most popular browser on Linux, Firefox uses the Gecko engine not only for rendering web pages, but for the entire Firefox interface. It eats up a lot of resources, but it displays correctly most of the pages and can be extended using add-ons (there are hundreds of add-ons on the official website). It also supports themes. The last Firefox version is 3.0, just recently launched.
Official website

7. Banshee - audio player
Together with Rhythmbox and Audacious, Banshee is one of the top audio players for GNOME. Although the last version, 1.0, is not very stable in my opinion, Banshee is nevertheless a good audio player. It features audio and video libraries, podcasts, Last.fm integration and a configurable playlist to mention just a few. The new website is also well organised and it also looks very well designed.
Official website

8. Deluge - BitTorrent client
Although Linux benefits of many BitTorrent clients, Deluge is one of the best graphical ones, together with Azureus and KTorrent. It features everything a BitTorrent client should have, yet it still has a clean interface.
Official website

9. LinuxDC++ - Direct Connect client
This is the Linux port of the famous DC++ for Windows. It's a bit slow in my opinion, especially when joining very large hubs, but otherwise, it's a complete Direct Connect client.
Official website

10. Geany - text editor and IDE
Not only a text editor, Geany can be also used as a small IDE (Integrated Development Environment), featuring indentation, highlighting for many languages, support for projects, printing to file (PostScript or PDF) and plugins. Those are not all its features though. It's a very good alternative to Gedit.
Official website

Updated: Jun 22, 2008 (Created: Jun 22, 2008)