alll about linux

Seen the latest Amarok ‘Fast Forward’ 1.4.4 featuring music store and the new VW logo. VW has decided to implement latest Amarokin their new cars and also sponsored this particular release of Amarok … !

Coming to serious facts, the latest release comes with the addition of an integrated DRM-free music store with full-length mp3 previews. Amarok 1.4.4 may very well be our closest to being bug free release ever! Over 100 bugs have been closed for this release, thanks in no small part to the tireless effort of our development team.

You don’t need a Ph.D. in scientific visualization to have some fun with three-dimensional data. Whether you’re searching for an unused nook in a cramped disk partition, or trying to find the bloated temp/ folder that’s crashing your system, sometimes the flat folder view of a traditional GUI file browser is little help. Luckily, Linux offers a variety of 3-D filesystem that can make your disk usage statistics come alive.

Take File System Visualizer (FSV), for instance. When you launch FSV, the view port brings up a 3-D palette representing the current working directory.

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Applications is what will bring people to Linux. It already has stability and security. Stable eye candy isn’t far away with XGL-Beryl/Compiz and such. I’m sure Linux has seen a rise in popularity partly due to Firefox. I can’t count the number of people who discovered Amarok audio player, and never wanted to leave Linux purely for this reason. The OS (regardless of distro) still has a little way to go with usability for the average user who knows just enough to be dangerous on a computer, but beyond that things are shaping up just fine.

But Firefox and Amarok aren’t the only apps to wow people with. The open source world looks to be succeeding in the e-mail realm as well. Introducing Kontact, KDE’s Personal Information Management application. Not only does this app blow the pants off other open source e-mail efforts (Thunderbird and Evolution), but it blows the pants off Outlook.

The layout is user friendly, the memory utilization is great (unlike evolution and Thunderbird), and functionality is top notch. The art work seems to be great and eye pleasing as well. Though the main toolbar icons could use a little more work to help tell the difference between then all when they’re set to small. I’m quite surprised this application hasn’t made the buzz that say amarok has, or firefox, or even gaim for that matter.

Complete Review

P.S.> HOW can I compose e-mail in HTML format by default in KMail (like in Evolution). I prefer to send and receive e-mails in HTML rather than plain text. Can someone guide me on this issue.

If you still haven’t managed to find compiled RPM of Firefox 2 for your SUSE 10.1 or SLED 10 from their main update repositories, then here are the corresponding links for respective distros from mozilla dedicated repositories:

SUSE 10.1 (i586) | SLED 10 (i586)

The dependencies, mozilla-nss and mozilla-nsrp, are available from the same links.

And on dessert here is the comparison by Google Trend on Firefox 2 and IE 7 (just for fun)

Quote from their website:

WebSphere® Application Server Community Edition V1.1 — a free, lightweight Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application server built on Apache Geronimo technology. Available at no charge, it harnesses the latest innovations from the open source community to deliver an integrated, readily accessible and flexible foundation for developing and deploying Java™ applications.

WebSphere Application Server Community Edition is built on Apache Tomcat and other best-of-breed open source software such as OpenEJB, Apache Axis, and IBM Cloudscape (based on Apache Cloudscape).

New features in this version include:

• Support for IBM JDK 5.0, to permit the use of Java SE 5 language innovations.
• Improved deployment capabilities, including support for redeploying applications through the console and command line, hot deploy for compressed JARs, and in-place deployment for exploded J2EE modules.
• Eclipse plug-in, now supporting the Eclipse Web Tools Platform 1.5, for creating, deploying, and debugging your WebSphere application.

More information

“Two years ago, you all put Firefox on the map. One year ago, you helped tens of millions of users get Firefox 1.5 with improved privacy features and a kickass security update system. This year, as the world is waking up to the idea of browser choice and a reinvigorated Web, we are going to see Firefox cross the chasm and become a household name! “
Firefox 2 is reported to have over 2 million downloads in the first 24 hours with demand as high as 30 downloads a second at times. The Firefox team is well on the way to overshadowing the 3 million in 4 days that downloaded IE7. It takes a few days to update the statistics, as they need to get the figures in from the mirror sites, the company said.

Of course download statistics don’t equal users. Some people may need to download the browser simply to test their web sites with, others may be curious to try the browser out but then go back to their usual browser, others may download multiple copies for multiple machines and others may just download one copy and share it with many.

However, one thing the statistics show is that interest in Firefox 2 remains strong, although the download figures will spike in IE’s favour once the automatic updates kick in during November, reads the post over at Browser Den.

It’s also interesting to compare the Firefox download statistics to the initial IE7 download statistics. Going by downloads alone (2M/day vs. 0.5M/day), one would expect Firefox to be more popular. However, one thing the stats show is that interest in Firefox 2 remains very strong, although the download figures will spike in IE’s favour once the automatic updates kick in during November.

The concept that Linux is only for network administrators and small groups of users is contradicted every day with a handful of software that covers almost any area in the IT industry. I found a lot of good Linux software designed for sound related tasks.

An audio editing solution is Audacity, a cross-platform software which doesn’t impress at first sight, but is in fact a complex program, very good at editing sounds. You can also use it for multi track mixing but it doesn’t exactly shine at this because it lacks indicators for track levels and record levels. Because of this, proper level strength will have to be established with care using your own ears, and of course, the waveform display.

The Audacity developers have been busy with many new features over the past year. We’re pleased to announce Audacity 1.3.2 (beta), which contains dozens of new features and capabilities. Because it is a work in progress and does not yet come with complete documentation or translations into foreign languages, it is recommended for more advanced users. For all users, Audacity 1.2.5 is a minor bug-fix update that addresses some problems with Audacity 1.2.4, but does not add any significant new features. It is complete and fully documented. You can have both Audacity 1.2.5 and 1.3.2 installed simultaneously. Also, we have just made available a set of 92 LADSPA plug-ins for Windows (for both Audacity 1.2.x and 1.3.x).

Audacity Homepage | Downloads

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 supports dual monitors. To learn how to configure this multiple display and give yourself a little more room, follow the steps below.

1. Click My Computer.
2. Select Control Center.
3. Select Graphics and Card Monitor.
4. Enter the root password, when prompted.
5. Click Continue.
6. In the Dual Head Mode section, check Activate Dual Head Mode.
7. Click Configure.
8. Click Change to specify the vendor and model of your secondary monitor.
9. Click OK.
10. Set the resolution for the monitor by selecting it from the Second Monitor Resolution pull down menu.
11. Select a dual monitor mode.
    1. Select Cloned Multihead to mirror the primary display.
    2. Select Xinerama Multihead to span the display across multiple screens.
12. Select an arrangement of monitors that matches your physical arrangement.
13. Click OK and then OK again.
14. Log off the computer and log back in again to see the new settings.

To see a flash demonstration of this tip, click the link below.

Flash Demo

- Cool Solutions

The value of data stored in MySQL grows exponentially. For companies who are using MySQL in production, loss of data can be catastrophic, resulting in lost revenues, lost customers and lost reputations. Setting up a backup and restore process for MySQL databases typically takes up a lot of a DBA’s time and attention.

The Challenge

For our 15-minute challenge, we will backup a MySQL 5.0 database on Linux. We will only use freely downloadable open source software for the solution.

Complete HowTo

In this exclusive 90 minute interview, Slackware creator Patrick Volkerding talks about the history of Linux and why Slackware is the oldest surviving distribution. He addresses some of the so-called shortcomings of Slackware and goes into why he still loves what he does. Definitely worth a listen.

OGG   |   MP3