TimburyDotOrg » review

Reviewed: Pandora Console

TuxRadar — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 16:03:54 +0000

If you're familiar with the original GP2X and GP2X Wiz, the Linux-based handhelds produced by Korean techno-alchemists Game Park Holdings, you'll be acutely aware of just how close they came to greatness; both consoles suffered from compromises that prevented them from truly fulfilling their potential. Interestingly, some of the guys in charge of distributing these two machines internationally felt the same way and back in 2008 they set about creating their own dream machine that would avoid the pitfalls that afflicted those two consoles. Read on to discover whether it was worth the effort.

Reviewed: KOffice 2.2

TuxRadar — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:01:28 +0000

Over the last 12 years KOffice has grown in scope and ambition pushing out both good and bad iterations and occasionally suffering from hyperbolic claims that it had no chance in hell of satisfying.

Version 2.2 of the suite, which comprises KWord, KPresent, KSpread, KPlato (project manager), Krita (image editor) and the prodigal Kexi (database), comes into a very changed world. Desktop applications now face serious competition from cloud-based offerings, Microsoft no longer seems indomitable, and mobile has become a vital platform. We put KOffice 2.2 through its paces - read on to find out more.

Crafting Digital Media: A Book Review

Dave Phillips — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:38:02 +0000

I don't usually write book reviews, but this one is special. My friend and colleague Daniel James has written an introduction to the world of media production with Linux, or as the subtitle describes it, "A manual for creative media on a modest budget". I'll put the spoiler right up front: This book is wonderful and is an essential read for all artistically-inclined Linux users. Read on to find out why I think so. more>>

Review: Amarok 2.0.2 – Better Than 1.4?

Craciun Dan — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:32:00 +0000

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

Craciun Dan — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 01:07:00 +0000

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.

Wine 1.1.7 Review – First Steps of Direct3D 10 Implementation

Craciun Dan — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 19:22:00 +0000

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.

Banshee 1.2 – 1.x Series Getting to Maturity

Craciun Dan — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 10:32:00 +0000

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

IRC Clients for Linux – A Review

Craciun Dan — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 11:26:00 +0000

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

Craciun Dan — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 11:07:00 +0000

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

12 Web Browsers for Linux – Review

Craciun Dan — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 06:41:00 +0000

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)