[141000140010] |<title>Krusader Review</title>
[141000140020] |<img/>Krusader is an advanced twin panel file manager for the graphical interface.
[141000140030] |If you are not exactly sure what this is try to remember Midnight Commander, or maybe Norton Commander rings a bell.
[141000140040] |They are for the text mode and Krusader is for the graphical interface.
[141000140050] |The most popular twin panel file manager in windows is called Total Comander.
[141000140060] |For Linux we have Krusader.
[141000140070] |<b>What does Krusader?</b>
[141000140080] |First of all, if you take a little time to get used with it the time for managing files is greatly reduced.
[141000140090] |All of you who have previous experience with this type of software already know this.
[141000140100] |The rest of you maybe didn't use this type of software because of commodity.
[141000140110] |Some love the mouse!
[141000140120] |When I'll tell you what it is all about you will see this software can be used by anyone.
[141000140130] |Krusader has an incredible functionality built in and despite that, it is very fast in everything it does.
[141000140140] |One of the coolest things is that it can easily navigate through archived files and also through ISO files.
[141000140150] |Yes, you heard right you can go through the files in an ISO just as in a folder from your computer.
[141000140160] |Some of you would say that is not a big deal.
[141000140170] |You can just mount the ISO as a loop device and it has the same effect.
[141000140180] |Well it's true, but when using Krusader is at lest ten times faster.
[141000140190] |And when it comes to archives, it's not over yet.
[141000140200] |Krusader can easily search through archived files.
[141000140210] |It supports every format I know, except .cab .
[141000140220] |I'm just kidding about .cab!
[141000140230] |It is the format that Microsoft uses on their installation disks.
[141000140240] |KruSearcher it allows many different ways to quickly find the files you're looking for. <img/>
[141000140250] |<img/>Even though this program is full with a lot of incredibly cool stuff, most of the time you will use the panel for listing files.
[141000140260] |This panel shows the contents of one directory which can be local or remote (accessed via FTP, Samba or Fish).
[141000140270] |In this panel you can do almost anything that you can do in Konqueror or Galeon and even a lot faster.
[141000140280] |It also supports the use of links like settings:/ and system:/ in the location bar. Below the location bar it is a discrete information label that shows how much free space is physically available on the file system, the file system capacity and where the path is.
[141000140290] |Other file managers hardly do this and I find this information very useful.
[141000140300] |Below are the very common column headers that allows you to change the sort order of the files and directory.
[141000140310] |In the file list view you can use a quick search function to search for files by typing the first few characters and then going from one to another with up and down arrow keys.
[141000140320] |Below it is a label that displays the size of the selected files and the total files in that folder.
[141000140330] |At the end of this label, it is a magical button that opens a pop-up panel.
[141000140340] |It has built in a Tree Panel, Preview Panel, Quick Panel, View Panel and Disk Usage Panel.
[141000140350] |The most spectacular are the View Panel and Disk Usage Panel.
[141000140360] |I was amazed when I saw that the View Panel can show me the context of almost any file (kontact files, text documents, picture, mp3s, etc.) using the default software built in my KDE.
[141000140370] |Though Disk Usage Panel it is very nice, it's functionality is very limited.
[141000140380] |Below are the Folder Tabs.
[141000140390] |Even though I never use this function, I think it has some real functionality.
[141000140400] |To switch through tabs use the Shift + Left/Right Arrows.
[141000140410] |I love the fact that I have a command line in Krusador and that I can execute it's output in an external Konsole, and another big plus is that I can open inside the program, a small terminal emulator (console) that will follow my active window!
[141000140420] |Great feature for those of us that like to do some of the work with the console.
[141000140430] |At the bottom of program's window is the Function Keys Bar.
[141000140440] |This provides the well known functionality. <img/>
[141000140450] |<img/>When editing and viewing Krusader uses an internal viewer/editor called KrViewer, which is actually a part of Konqueror.
[141000140460] |By default, I think it uses Kedit and for this reason it supports syntax highlight.
[141000140470] |I think it is very well implemented and can really help you out when you are editing some script or something like that.
[141000140480] |By default it opens every file with the text editor, but if you configure the mimetypes accordingly you can view any file that Konqueror supports.
[141000140490] |KrViewer supports tabs and using the shortcut Shift+F3 you can view a remote file from ftp or http.
[141000140500] |What more can we ask?
[141000140510] |Well maybe a little integration with Kompare (the program that compares files by content) would be nice.
[141000140520] |I don't think this is possible soon because those are mostly libraries from KDE and modifying them every time this libs update is not that easy.
[141000140530] |Maybe sometimes KDE will support an integration between KEdit and Kompare.
[141000140540] |Will be really helpful to a lot of people, not only developers.
[141000140550] |<b>The Good</b>
[141000140560] |It is an excellent piece of software that can greatly improve the speed you handle files.
[141000140570] |You have an Advanced Search, support ti connect remotely, the “magical button” for the pop-up panel, the nicely integrated terminal emulator, Kompare, and last but not least the internal viewer with support for tabs.
[141000140580] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000140590] |The only bad side of this program is that by default KrViewer opens pictures, mp3s and other files that are not text as a binary.
[141000140600] |Because you are not a computer, you can't really edit this files in this manner so it hasn't a lot of functionality this way.
[141000140610] |Anyway you can set it to work accordingly, but it would be nice if it was this way set by default.
[141000140620] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000140630] |Krusader is a very mature and full featured twin panel manager.
[141000140640] |The truth is that before I started this review I wasn't a big fan of twin panel file managers for the graphical interface, since I started to use it I am becoming more and more addicted to it.
[141000140650] |I will definitely install it on my computer from home.
[141000140660] |I am a long time user of mc (midnight commander), but for the GUI I wasn't really using a twin panel manager.
[141000140670] |Now, Krusader is part of my desktop experience!
[141000140680] |Look at the screenshots below:
[141000360010] |<title>Gentoo Linux Review</title>
[141000360020] |<img/><b>What is this Gentoo?</b>
[141000360030] |Linux is an open source operating system and almost all of the software packages are open source.
[141000360040] |Some are distributed under licenses that can be considered even more “free” than the GNU GPL licenses, while some are given away without any kind of license.
[141000360050] |Having the source code of the Linux kernel and the source code of thousands of software packages is the obvious reason why anyone can start putting together their own personalized Linux distribution by compiling it from source code.
[141000360060] |Perhaps there’s no need to go that far, thanks to Gentoo.
[141000360070] |Gentoo is a source distribution.
[141000360080] |While there are various “stages”, which have different levels of already compiled binary packages included, the main idea is building every package from source code.
[141000360090] |There are GRP packages, which reduce the need of compiling certain packages that take a very long time to compile.
[141000360100] |The creation of this distribution was inspired by the ports system of FreeBSD, there’s even an experimental stage with a FreeBSD kernel and the Gentoo “portage” called Gentoo/FreeBSD.
[141000360110] |Well, so far we’ve talked about the fact that Gentoo can be compiled from the source code.
[141000360120] |There are numerous advantages, but there are also problems.
[141000360130] |Among the advantages, compiling from source code and installing packages only with the desired dependencies can reduce the size of the operating system and might increase the overall speed.
[141000360140] |The fact that packages are compiled from the source code can also be a disadvantage, for example, compiling an entire system, with a desktop environment and all other programs can take a very long time, from a few hours up to a few days or even more, depending on how much software you want to install.
[141000360150] |A way of getting around this issue is the usage of ccache and distcc.
[141000360160] |While Ccache caches the compiled object files, distcc distributes the compilation process across many computers, which can save a lot of time, depending on the number of machines, their CPU speeds and the number of processors.
[141000360170] |This can be very useful, but mixing high end computers with very old computers, like a few computers which have Pentium 4 CPUs and older machines which only have Pentium 2 class CPUs, won’t speed the process up, actually, it will slow it down.
[141000360180] |Beside this problem, compiling packages with distcc and mixing different GCC versions isn’t recommended, using GCC 3.3.6 on some machines and GCC 3.4.4 on others will often result in broken or unstable packages.
[141000360190] |Only versions from the same release series can be mixed, for example, it would be fine if there are some machines that use GCC 3.3.5 and others use 3.3.6.
[141000360200] |Ccache can be described as a tool that automatically and transparently saves the work that has already been done for later retrieval and usage.
[141000360210] |Distcc uses the parallelization part of GNU Make and by specifying the right number of jobs (-jN, where N is the number of CPUs that are compiling with distcc) to compile simultaneously on many computers.
[141000360220] |Gentoo is great in case you want to build a custom operating system with the packages that you want and without anything else.
[141000360230] |In case you want to learn more about the development of the Linux distributions, Gentoo should provide both tools and information on how to get most things done.
[141000360240] |Some want to install Gentoo because they heard it is very fast, others want to learn more about the development and the inner workings of Linux distributions, while some are hardcore tweakers.
[141000360250] |There are lots of HOW-TO guides on Gentoo’s Wiki system.
[141000360260] |For more information and help, questions can be asked on the Gentoo forums. <img/>
[141000360270] |<img/>Before the release of Gentoo 2006.0, the only way to install it was by doing many things manually, without any kind of help from a graphical user interface and that’s one of the things that some users didn’t like and why they didn’t go for a Gentoo install on their system.
[141000360280] |Gentoo was an operating system that would be a bit hard to start with for the first time, but as soon as it was installed and working, things would get a lot easier.
[141000360290] |Installing additional software packages was easy, usually, the only thing that has to be done in order to install an app is to issue a command like this: “emerge package-name” and the install procedure would start, the source code is retrieved, unpacked, patched, if there are any patches for it, configured and then installed.
[141000360300] |Some packages might also need additional configuration editing, so emerging a package isn’t always the whole picture, for example, if you install the Apache web server, you’ll have to configure it in order to have it set up the way you need it to be, some virtual hosts might have to be added and other such things.
[141000360310] |In other cases, it’s the other way, you install a package that needs certain variables to be set, at the configuration phase, compilation or install phase and portage won’t be asking you to set those variables.
[141000360320] |For example, if you install GCC by using emerge gcc, portage will run ./configure make and make install with the right parameters.
[141000360330] |That’s because the Gentoo developers that handle the package creating tasks have taken care of all this; they create the so called ebuild files which configure, compile and install the packages for you.
[141000360340] |Furthermore, you don’t even have to check dependencies, portage checks them for you and also installs other required packages. <img/>
[141000360350] |<img/><b>Gentoo is hard to install, what about the new installer?</b>
[141000360360] |The classic way of installing Gentoo wasn’t very appealing for beginners and for some of them, getting it to work was a big issue.
[141000360370] |After they would go through the entire install procedure and tried to boot the resulting system, their installed Gentoo didn’t boot at all or errors showed up.
[141000360380] |Obviousky, they did something wrong at a certain point, but they don’t always realize where.
[141000360390] |This and the fact that people complained about the hard to perform install process and other reasons have lead to the development of a graphical and text mode GLI.
[141000360400] |GLI stands for Gentoo Linux Installer.
[141000360410] |This GLI can be found on the Live CD disc that contains the completely compiled stages (the so called “stage 3”) and the precompiled software packages.
[141000360420] |This Live CD contains a Gnome desktop environment and after the computer boots and starts Gnome, two shortcuts appear.
[141000360430] |These are the two versions of GLI, the text mode and the graphical user mode.
[141000360440] |The Gentoo Linux Installer, the version which has a GTK+ front end is the graphical user interface for the GLI.
[141000360450] |As soon as you click on the corresponding shortcut on the desktop, it starts and it displays a greeting message and some information about the GLI and about the GTK+ front end.
[141000360460] |Press forward once and the installer asks you to configure the network, a configuration that is going to be used during the install process.
[141000360470] |Configure your network adapters and, in case you use a proxy, the proxy information, then press forward once more.
[141000360480] |Before doing so, you might want to load additional modules, if you use a SCSI controller or other hardware that you might have to load a module for in the “misc.” section.
[141000360490] |The following section enables you to partition your hard disk.
[141000360500] |If you have other partitions on your computer on which you have data which you want to keep, you will have to take care when partitioning the hard drive.
[141000360510] |If you also have other operating systems installed, there’s even more, you will either have to keep the current boot loader in the MBR (master boot record) or install a new boot loader and configure it to handle the booting of the other operating systems.
[141000360520] |In case you started with a clean hard drive, without any data or with a hard drive which you want to be wiped entirely, you can just press “recommended layout”.
[141000360530] |The recommended layout contains 3 partitions, a boot, a swap and a root partition.
[141000360540] |Obviously, the boot partition is small, around 100 MB, the swap partition’s size can be up to 512 MB and the remaining space is allocated to the root (/) partition.
[141000360550] |The following section is the network mounts section, here you can define NFS mounts.
[141000360560] |This can be used to mount one or more remote directories by using NFS.
[141000360570] |As the developers have said, one of the many uses that it has is mounting an /usr/portage from a different computer and avoiding running “emerge --sync” locally, thus saving space.
[141000360580] |This can have many advantages, you don’t have to do emerge --sync on each machine and you need to run emerge --sync only once for many computers.
[141000360590] |Beside the mentioned advantages, this would also respect the Gentoo nettiquete, which says you should “emerge --sync” only once a day from a mirror, to save bandwidth and let others synchronize their portage tree.
[141000360600] |The next section is important, here’s where you get the chance to decide how long it will take to install Gentoo on your PC.
[141000360610] |The stage 3 install with GRP Install and Dynamic turned on will be the fastest install.
[141000360620] |It’s obvious that installing from stage 2 takes longer than installing from stage 3 and installing from stage 1 takes even more.
[141000360630] |In case you decide to perform that stage 3 with GRP Install and Dynamic turned on, you should be aware that you’ll be needing a lot of patience, don’t perform anything else other than this install if you need to use your PC as soon as possible.
[141000360640] |For example, if you choose to compile OpenOffice.org from sources later in this installer, you will have to wait for a very long time, depending on the speed of your CPU, whether it is or not an SMP machine and if it is, on the number of CPUs.
[141000360650] |On slow single CPU machines it can even take two or three days.
[141000360660] |If your PC is very slow, like a Pentium 2, the install process takes far too long to complete and you shouldn’t perform anything else than the stage 3 that I recommended.
[141000360670] |There’s one way of getting around these long compilation periods, I’ve mentioned it earlier, using ccache and distcc.
[141000360680] |More about that will follow later.
[141000360690] |After you chose the install stage of your choice, you get to the Portage tree selection.
[141000360700] |Here’s where you get to say which portage tree snapshot should be used.
[141000360710] |Obviously, you have to put the link to the desired snapshot in the “Portage URI” box.
[141000360720] |That link doesn’t necessarily have to be a link to the Internet, it can also be a local file.
[141000360730] |Those who took my advice and chose the stage 3 installed with the two options enabled should skip this section, as it is completely disabled, all the settings have been made based on your stage 3 choice, the files are going to be used directly from the CD. <img/>
[141000360740] |<img/>The next section is “make.conf”.
[141000360750] |Here’s where you’re going to perform the so called optimization of the system and specify things like the USE flags, CFLAGS, ccache and distcc.
[141000360760] |The architecture is, obviously, the CPU type you have in your PC, if you have a Pentium 4 CPU, you can choose Pentium 4 as the architecture; if you have an Athlon XP CPU, you can choose the Athlon XP architecture.
[141000360770] |If you don’t know what CPU you have or if you want to migrate this Gentoo install to a different computer with a different CPU type, you might want to leave it on “i686”.
[141000360780] |The following setting is the “Optimizations”.
[141000360790] |You shouldn’t use O3 as it takes longer to compile, the generated code will be sometimes faster, sometimes slower and almost always larger.
[141000360800] |For example, a program that was compiled with the O2 level of optimization is 250KB large and is quite fast, the same program compiled with the O3 level of optimization can take more time to compile, produce a larger binary, depending on the code, even 500-700KB large and it can be slower or faster.
[141000360810] |Therefore, the O3 optimization level isn’t recommended.
[141000360820] |Use O2 if you need the best optimization without adding the risk of obtaining large binaries, which need a long time to be loaded before being executed and are not always faster.
[141000360830] |Using the “unstable arch” is not recommended, as it can ruin your Gentoo install.
[141000360840] |Build binary packages can be used to generate and store binary packages for later install on a different machine.
[141000360850] |Distcc handles the distribution of the compilation process and ccache caches the compiled source files.
[141000360860] |I recommend using ccache, I would also recommend using distcc, but it hasn’t been implemented in this GTK+ front end, distcc can only be used if you use the command line GLI.
[141000360870] |That means that ticking the distcc box won’t make any difference, it’s not working yet, perhaps it will work in the next release of Gentoo, 2006.1.
[141000360880] |The makeopts option should not be ignored, especially if you know you have an SMP machine.
[141000360890] |For example, if you have a dual core CPU, you might want to specify the number of simultaneous jobs.
[141000360900] |This means that you can compile more than one source file at once and compile packages faster if you have more than one CPU.
[141000360910] |The setting that affects the number of simultaneous jobs is “-jN”, where N is number of CPUs.
[141000360920] |That means you write –j2 if you have a dual core computer.
[141000360930] |It’s obvious that the compilation process is even shorter if you have many CPUs.
[141000360940] |The “custom” text box shouldn’t be ignored either, I personally recommend leaving –pipe where it is, this disables the creation of temporary files during the compilation and generates only the final compiled object files.
[141000360950] |Instead of the temporary files, it will use pipes.
[141000360960] |What other things should end up in this custom box?
[141000360970] |Well, thinking that the more options you add, the faster the system will be, won’t do any good.
[141000360980] |Probably it will be very fast, but extremely unstable, which isn’t a desirable thing.
[141000360990] |Using some additional custom flags like -s –DNDEBUG would be a great thing.
[141000361000] |The –s flag strips additional data from the binary object file, things that won’t affect the functionality of the resulting binary object, the –DNDEBUG flag prevents the compiler from generating debugging information for the binary object.
[141000361010] |This improves performance because the debugging routines won’t be included and the program is likely to execute a lot faster.
[141000361020] |Some may wonder why I mentioned the -s flag if I included the -DNDEBUG flag, well, the debugging information isn’t all that the -s flag strips, there are more sections inside the object file, like comment and version, which can be removed in order to save some space and gain some extra performance.
[141000361030] |Some might also say that not generating debugging information is useless, because it can be stripped by using the strip flags variable in make.conf and that some programs will loose all the information that could be used to track down a bug.
[141000361040] |Generating the debugging information takes time, because the compiler has to compile the debugging code, so it’s better to not compile it at all rather than stripping it later.
[141000361050] |The fact that the resulting binaries won’t be quite debuggable isn’t an issue to normal users, it affects developers - normal users usually don’t have anything to do with the debugging process.
[141000361060] |The USE flags, which can be found above all of these settings, are disabled if you perform a stage 3 install like I recommended.
[141000361070] |These USE flags configure packages, meaning that you can instruct your Gentoo system to build or not to build certain features of some packages.
[141000361080] |For example, you can specify in the USE flags that you want to have mpeg2 support in applications that can support it, include support for special CPU instructions, like MMX, SSE, SSE 2 and many other things. 
[141000361090] |The following section is about selecting the kernel.
[141000361100] |Here you can choose the kernel that should be installed onto your machine.
[141000361110] |Those who are concerned by security can choose from grsecurity-sources and hardened-sources.
[141000361120] |These two kernel sources are patched for security and offer better security; this is not normally required for a desktop computer, they’re more like server oriented.
[141000361130] |The other three options are gentoo-sources, vanilla-sources and livecd-kernel.
[141000361140] |The vanilla kernel sources represent kernel sources without any other patches, just like it’s available for download from www.kernel.org. The Gentoo kernel sources represent the same vanilla sources with a lot of patches for performance.
[141000361150] |The third one just copies the kernel from the live CD, without compiling it or including the sources in the installed system.
[141000361160] |If security isn’t a concern, you can go for the gentoo-sources, a kernel built from these sources will be quite stable and fast.
[141000361170] |There’s no point in choosing a hardened or grsecurity kernel if you have a desktop computer.
[141000361180] |If you don’t want to wait at all for the kernel to be compiled, the live cd kernel can be copied and you’re done.
[141000361190] |This choice has a catch, you won’t have the kernel sources in your system.
[141000361200] |You can also make this live CD kernel choice if you plan to emerge some sources later, patch them and compile manually your own kernel.
[141000361210] |If you liked that little boot splash that was displayed during the start up of the live cd, you can include support for such boot splashes into your kernel just by turning the setting on, “enable bootsplash support”.
[141000361220] |The following section is delicate, you have to take great care here because you can render your old operating system, which was installed on your PC, unbootable, obtain an unbootable installation of Gentoo, or both.
[141000361230] |Depending on your hardware and the way your data is stored on your hard drive(s), you can install the boot loader into the MBR or not.
[141000361240] |If you added a new empty hard drive for the new Gentoo system, you can install the boot loader into the MBR of that hard drive, if you install Gentoo on a hard drive that had a different operating system, you might want to consider if you should install it to the MBR or not.
[141000361250] |Both lilo and grub support other operating systems, even those which are proprietary, therefore installing the boot loader to the MBR and configuring it to boot the other operating system as well is the way to go.
[141000361260] |Options can be passed to the kernel; for example, you might want to pass the option “quiet”, which would force the kernel to stay silent, it won’t make any output regarding hardware and all of the messages you would normally get before the Gentoo scripts start running.
[141000361270] |This results in smaller boot times and in the lack of information regarding the current status of the kernel - this might prevent you from realizing what went wrong during the boot phase.
[141000361280] |After you made up your mind, you can go on and choose the timezone in the following section.
[141000361290] |If your location is available on the list, you can choose the nearest location.
[141000361300] |The following section regards networking configuration.
[141000361310] |Take your time to fully configure the network and double check it, you don’t want to have any bad surprises when you’ll try to install some package and realize that you can’t because the network wasn’t properly configured.
[141000361320] |Next, you get to choose to choose the cron and system logger daemons.
[141000361330] |It’s recommended that you stick to the default ones, vixie-cron and syslog-ng. 
[141000361340] |Another important section follows - extra packages.
[141000361350] |If you’re performing a desktop install, you’ll want to check xorg-x11, at least one window manager and some of the other custom packages.
[141000361360] |You might also want to install some of the software packages that are GUI applications for X11, because you also need functionality from your operating system, not just a desktop environment to stare at.
[141000361370] |More packages can be installed after the install has been done, even here, you can install extra packages by adding them to the text box below the extra packages selection box.
[141000361380] |Please note that this will take additional time to compile and will have to be downloaded.
[141000361390] |Those who are doing the stage 3 install I keep talking about can see GRP near the name of some packages, that means the package is available on the live cd as a precompiled package, ready to be installed and used.
[141000361400] |As a general rule, you should also install UFED, which is a USE flag editor, it’s the app that I mentioned earlier, it can be easily used to change the flags and recompile the system later with added or removed features.
[141000361410] |Please note that the GNOME environment is available for installation from a binary package.
[141000361420] |KDE fans might want to compile KDE later, because compiling KDE takes a long time.
[141000361430] |The next section is the place where you get to configure the start up services, in other words, the daemons that are started each time your computer boots up.
[141000361440] |If the system you’re installing Gentoo on is a desktop one, you should choose alsasound to be started automatically.
[141000361450] |The next section is used to set up some xorg related settings.
[141000361460] |You can set the display manager, which is that nice window which appears and kindly asks you to login into the system, the clock, wether it is UTC or local time, the keymap and the default XSession.
[141000361470] |The default XSession is the default window manager that is started when you start the X.org X11 server, those who install the gnome environment should choose gnome, those who install KDE should choose KDE and those who chose to install something else should choose whatever window manager they installed. <img/>
[141000361480] |<img/>The next section is the users section, here’s where you can set the root password and create other users.
[141000361490] |Please note that you should create at least one other user beside root, because it’s not safe to use your system as the superuser.
[141000361500] |You can use su whenever you need root rights.
[141000361510] |The passwords that you choose should be easy enough for you to remember and complex enough in order to be very hard to be guessed, especially if you’re installing on a computer which will be used as a server.
[141000361520] |This is it, the last section before the install process; you can save your chosen settings to a file for later usage or review, or for performing another install with these settings or slightly modified ones.
[141000361530] |Before pressing the Install button, make sure that you configured the system correctly and that you considered each setting you made and that you double checked each, you don’t want to obtain a fresh non-working Gentoo install, lose all of your data, or both, do you?
[141000361540] |This is all, you press install and the process of getting Gentoo on your computer is started.
[141000361550] |Depending on your choices, sooner or later you should obtain a working Gentoo install.
[141000361560] |The other Gentoo installer version, the GLI in text mode looks like an ncurses-based application.
[141000361570] |It can be used in two modes: load the configuration from xml files or create a new one.
[141000361580] |If you create a new one, you can go through a wizard or set your options one by one in dialog boxes.
[141000361590] |In order to use distcc and ccache, you should enable ccache and distcc features, in this order, “ccache distcc” and then set the hosts on which you’d like to compile this system.
[141000361600] |Please note that you cannot mix various versions of GCC and that you should burn multiple copies of the Gentoo LIVE CD in order to be sure that you have exactly the same version of GCC as the one which will be used to compile your new Gentoo system.
[141000361610] |You will also have to configure a small network, the other computers should be up and running, and distccd started.
[141000361620] |In order to configure distccd, you’ll have to edit the allow hosts line in the /etc/conf.d/distccd file and insert the network from which they will be accessed in order to perform the distributed compilation, then distccd should be started by issuing the command: “/etc/init.d/distccd start”.
[141000361630] |The classic way of installing Gentoo can still be used, those who don’t like the installer, can install Gentoo the same way they did before, the way it’s described in the classic Gentoo handbook.
[141000361640] |In order to update your Gentoo system you must do the following: synchronize the portage tree, emerge world.
[141000361650] |Issue the “emerge --sync” command in order to update the portage tree, “emerge --ud world” (this will take quite some time, make sure you’re using ccache, if you can use some disk space for the cached data).
[141000361660] |The next step would be “emerge --depclean” and “revdep-rebuild” (which is a part of the gentoolkit, it has to be emerged before it is used).
[141000361670] |If you changed your USE flags, you’ll have to “emerge -ud --newuse” instead of “emerge –ud world”, so support is added or removed, depending on the new set of USE flags.
[141000361680] |When I installed Gentoo, I used ccache and distcc to speed up the compilation process, still, the duration of the compilation process of KDE was very long, even with two computers, one Pentium 4 with hyper threading and one Athlon XP, which both had 1GB of RAM memory.
[141000361690] |Sometimes, distcc would compile on the second PC, but most of the time, it didn’t compile anything.
[141000361700] |Passing the localhost on the second place in the list of hosts for distcc didn’t seem to help either.
[141000361710] |It’s best to exclude localhost and compile on other computers, that way the main computer will always be ready to serve new files for compilation.
[141000361720] |The KDE version that was available for compilation was 3.4.3, which is a lot older than the version most distributions use.
[141000361730] |<b>Why Gentoo?</b>
[141000361740] |Those who are busy, impatient or just don’t want to go through all of this, should choose a ready to be installed distro.
[141000361750] |Gentoo may be easier to install now, but it’s still not as up to date as some other Linux distributions and it still takes a lot of time in order to be updated.
[141000361760] |Those who like to perform updates daily and have lots of packages installed will have to get used to updating less often then they used to do on binary Linux distributions.
[141000361770] |Gentoo can sometimes be unstable, depending on the settings you make and the packages that you choose to install.
[141000361780] |Installing experimental packages, beta versions and other such things can make your system unstable.
[141000361790] |Trying to over-optimize your Gentoo system by tweaking the CFLAGS and adding unsafe, insane flags will definitely make your system unstable, errors and strange things can happen in this case.
[141000361800] |If you want to learn more about the development of Linux distributions and start developing yourself such a distribution, Gentoo can be the place where you can learn some of those things.
[141000361810] |Those who are just wondering what Gentoo is and can consider themselves as impatient persons, should not choose it.
[141000361820] |If you just want to test drive Gentoo and see how it is like, I don’t recommend messing with your computer just for this.
[141000361830] |You could add another hard drive and perform all of these tests, or install Gentoo into a virtual machine software.
[141000361840] |The second option is recommended if you don’t intend to run Gentoo as a real operating system.
[141000361850] |People who like to use Linux distributions which are up to date, distros that have GCC 4.1, the newest kernels, the newest KDE and don’t want to wait for the packages to be compiled should use something like Fedora Core 5. 
[141000361860] |The fans of Gentoo, old and new ones, people who want to learn and all those who want to start using Gentoo can start installing it right away.
[141000361870] |While they download this Live CD or the minimal CD, they can create a new user account on the Gentoo forums and, last but not least, have fun using Gentoo.
[141000361880] |<b>Distro target:</b> Desktop computers, Servers, OS Development, others<b>Supported platforms:</b> - Minimal cd: amd64, hppa, alpha, PPC 32bit, PPC 64bit, sparc64, x86
[141000361890] |- Live CD: x86<b>Recommended to:</b> Home users, Linux beginners, Developers, Advanced users, Experts<b>Operating system features:</b> Great<b>Performance:</b> Good<b>Hardware support:</b> Good<b>Operating System configuration:</b> Good<b>Documentation:</b> Great
[141000361900] |<b>Follow the editor on Twitter <a>@mariusnestor</a></b>
[141000450010] |<title>Kover Review</title>
[141000450020] |<img/>A few days back I wrote a review for gLabels, a nice program for making labels and covers.
[141000450030] |It is very easy to use and it has a lot of features.
[141000450040] |I thought I will never say this, but I found one that is even easier to use.
[141000450050] |It's not as fully featured, but when it comes to making covers for keeping track of what data or songs are on each CD, Kover might just be the fastest and the easiest way to do the job.
[141000450060] |<b>The Interface</b>
[141000450070] |The GUI is very intuitive.
[141000450080] |On the left side you have two text forms.
[141000450090] |In the first one you enter the title of the compilation and in the second you type in the contents.
[141000450100] |What you type in this text forms is displayed in a nice graphical manner, in real time, in the right side of the program.
[141000450110] |For each of these text forms you can format the text, selecting the desired font, font style, font size and the color of the font.
[141000450120] |With this easy to use and simple interface you will be able to get nice results with the smallest effort ever.
[141000450130] |Unfortunately, in version 2.9.6, the lower toolbar will be sometimes displayed incorrectly.
[141000450140] |This can be easily fixed but until the next version you should know that all the buttons that appear in the lower toolbar are also be available in the Kover menu.
[141000450150] |Some other bugs regarding the toolbars are available in Kover and I suggest you don't change the orientation of the toolbars because you might loose them from sight.
[141000450160] |Kover also supports CDDB (Compact Disk Data Base), which is very useful for the retrieval of album title and track listings for Audio CDs.
[141000450170] |By default, Kover uses the freedb.org database but if you prefer another one it can easily be set from the configuration window.
[141000450180] |I advise you to leave this setting on default, because freedb.org is probably be the biggest database out there.
[141000450190] |A pretty large one is gracenote.com but from my experience, freedb.org can yield better results.
[141000450200] |You can also query the database by entering the CDDB id manually.
[141000450210] |You have another option to insert content in the text boxes, by reading information bundled in CD-TEXT.
[141000450220] |Images can be embedded on the covers.
[141000450230] |The program lets you use a either a single image for both sides of the front cover or different images.
[141000450240] |Regarding the back cover you can choose if the image will also cover the sides or not.
[141000450250] |The appearance for each image can be set to centered, tiled or stretched.
[141000450260] |The lack of the ability to manually position the image on the cover is a minus regarding the versatility of the program.
[141000450270] |Shortcuts may be assigned to every task this program can do.
[141000450280] |This is more a feature of KDE, not a feature of Kover, but without the will of the programmer this wouldn't be available.
[141000450290] |<b>The Good</b>
[141000450300] |Simplicity is often very good when you need to do, let's say, CD covers.
[141000450310] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000450320] |The bugs present in this simple program might sometimes turn out to be annoying.
[141000450330] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000450340] |If you want the simplest program out there for making CD covers this might be it.
[141000450350] |If you want something a little more versatile you will have to take a look at KoverArtist or gLabels.
[141000450360] |Here are some screenshots:
[141000910010] |<title>WengoPhone Review</title>
[141000910020] |<img/>I've spoken before about the importance of VoIP, when I reviewed <a>Ekiga</a>.
[141000910030] |Now, another application is up for review- the much younger WengoPhone.
[141000910040] |WengoPhone 2 has many interesting features that might make it a really popular piece of software.
[141000910050] |Before mentioning those new features I'd like to say that sometimes you'll not be very lucky and running WengoPhone correctly will not be possible from the start.
[141000910060] |On my first try, I just downloaded the binaries on a Fedora machine and I fired a shell script that opened WengoPhone.
[141000910070] |The program started but most of the features didn't work as it should.
[141000910080] |Since I didn't have any compilers on Fedora, I moved on the SuSe machine, I downloaded the sources, compiled and then fired WengoPhone.
[141000910090] |That's a lot more like it because now I can see an interesting working application.
[141000910100] |They shouldn't be condemned very much because there is a small warning that says that WengoPhone 2 is for advanced users.
[141000910110] |Perhaps the coolest latest feature of WengoPhone 2 is the interconnectivity with Yahoo, MSN, Jabber and AOL messengers.
[141000910120] |I think that WengoPhone borrows this feature from GAIM and this is very cool since GAIM is a great messenger client for Linux and also for Windows.
[141000910130] |The support for multiple messaging protocols will attract a lot of crowds because even though most of these people prefer to use VoIP, many of them still use GAIM or Kopete.
[141000910140] |Maybe someday, WengoPhone or GAIM will have support for voice over all this popular protocols.
[141000910150] |Wengo's interface is based on Qt, which is good news, and more good news come when you think that the VoIP engine uses several high-end projects that are implemented in such way as to provide an easy to use call control API.
[141000910160] |One of the advantages is that you can use login names in the contact list, allowing you to ignore the long default SIP numbers.
[141000910170] |The audio quality provided by the engine is pretty good, but you'll still need a fairly good Internet connection, unlike Skype.
[141000910180] |As any modern Internet application, WengoPhone also works through NAT.
[141000910190] |This is absolutely required for a software that wants to provide quality services to everybody and some good softwares don't function correctly because of this but from what I've tested, WengoPhone works correctly.
[141000910200] |As I created my WengoPhone account I got 2€ worth of landlines communication.
[141000910210] |Yes!
[141000910220] |You can call land lines or mobile phones and even send SMS with WengoPhone but you'll need some credits.
[141000910230] |I saw the rates that they use and I must say that I can't see how it can be any cheaper for some countries.
[141000910240] |For others it can be somehow expensive so you'll have to check it out for yourselves to see if it's worth it in your case.
[141000910250] |Anyway, with the credit I got from Wengo, I wasn't able to call my cell phone but I was able to call the fixed line and the quality was better than expected.
[141000910260] |WengoPhone docks nicely in the system tray and allows you to close the application while it is still able to receive phone calls or messages.
[141000910270] |Right-clicking the tray icon provides a fast and easy access to some of the features so I guess that here, things are pretty good.
[141000910280] |One of the best things about WengoPhone is that the project is open source.
[141000910290] |This allows fast improvements to the software and some peace in mind knowing that they can't do things to the software that can pass unnoticed.
[141000910300] |Unfortunately, I somehow expected an encrypted chat with other Wengo users but no encryption is available in this version.
[141000910310] |I know from my own experience that unencrypted chat can be spoofed easily with a software like Wireshark.
[141000910320] |<b>The Good</b>
[141000910330] |Things like cross instant messaging, video calls and excellent VoIP support with possibility to call phone lines and send SMS are excellent assets for this software.
[141000910340] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000910350] |WengoPhone is hard to install making it a software for the advanced user in Linux.
[141000910360] |Other downsides regarding this software aren't really there for mentioning at this point.
[141000910370] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000910380] |WengoPhone is probably the best software out there for communicating with other people.
[141000910390] |I was very impressed with this software but I'm more of a person that communicates over the mobile phone.
[141000910400] |At some point I'm sure I'll start using VoIP on a daily basis and the first software that I will look into will be WengoPhone.
[141000910410] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141000910420] |<b>Follow the editor on Twitter <a>@mariusnestor</a></b>
[141000940010] |<title>Yum Extender Review</title>
[141000940020] |<img/>One of the most important things a Linux distribution is based on is security.
[141000940030] |And to be secured, a Linux distribution needs to be updated as often as possible.
[141000940040] |Being up-to-date is so important that every major Linux distribution comes with its own update program like Ubuntu has Synaptic, SuSE has YaST, Debian has apt-get and Fedora has Yum.
[141000940050] |Some of these update programs have a GUI interface that makes things a lot easier for the novice or even the expert users themselves.
[141000940060] |Not all the time you want to use the command line for updating and installing programs because of the sometimes very long commands and also because less information can be shown in a text console rather than in a GUI interface.
[141000940070] |Yum Extender is an update program for Fedora Linux that has the GUI interface I was talking about earlier.
[141000940080] |Installing, uninstalling and updating are easy and everyone should be able to do it.
[141000940090] |However, it's wrote in Python and GTK+ which makes it very, very resource consuming.
[141000940100] |To make an impression about just how resource consuming Yum Extender is, on a simple update process, Python (the language Yum Extender is written in) will use about 200MB of RAM.
[141000940110] |That's A LOT for a single application.
[141000940120] |And this isn't all.
[141000940130] |From what I've noticed, the more you use it in a day, the slower and more RAM consuming it gets.
[141000940140] |So, aren't there any less resource consuming alternatives?, you may ask.
[141000940150] |Well, yes and no.
[141000940160] |The other GUI interfaces to Yum are fresh started projects and don't have even half of Yum Extender's features.
[141000940170] |As for other package managers, there was a long time ago something similar to Yum for Fedora, called up2date but it was very bugged; I'm not sure it even exists anymore. 
[141000940180] |When you'll first run it, you'll notice it takes a rather long time before actually use the program.
[141000940190] |This happens because Yum is initializing the repositories (places that contain software for your distribution) and building the package list.
[141000940200] |But if you think about just how many packages Yum has to read at start-up (almost 10.000), you'll have the impression it doesn't take THAT long to start.
[141000940210] |After the repositories initialization, Yum offers a list of available updates for programs already installed and, for those who don't know what every program does, a brief and simple description for every program.
[141000940220] |You will probably notice the Changelog and files tabs not showing anything.
[141000940230] |There is an option in the menu enabling those tabs but it's really NOT recommended to select that option as it takes ten times longer to load all the repositories.
[141000940240] |If you want a specific file or program you were using in a previous version of Fedora, click on the “Install” button, then type part of the name in the Filter and it will list similar or the exact program.
[141000940250] |From there, installing is pretty straightforward.
[141000940260] |Just select the check box next to the name, press “Add to Queue”, then press the “Queue” button, and finally, “Process Queue”.
[141000940270] |Another great (and new) thing about the Queue section is that the selected packages stay there until successfully installed or manually removed.
[141000940280] |Why is this a good thing?
[141000940290] |Well, let's say you select about 50 packages to install, and one of them is missing a dependency; the package stays in queue.
[141000940300] |In the past versions, if an error occurred (eg, missing a dep), the package would have been automatically removed and you would have to pass through choosing the packages all over again.
[141000940310] |In the past, installing programs was a real headache, even the best of us might have had problems with dependencies (programs or files required to install another program).
[141000940320] |Without those dependencies, the program won't install at all so, we would have to lose some more precious time to find those dependencies and finally install the program.
[141000940330] |Removing programs in the 'Remove' button is just as easy.
[141000940340] |If you don't know the exact name, type what you remember in the Filter and it will find the exact or similar name of the program.
[141000940350] |Next, you have to check the program you want to remove and press “Remove”.
[141000940360] |Repositories are a central place where data is stored and maintained and where Yum Extender is looking for updates and software for your system.
[141000940370] |There are many repositories available for your choosing, but rather than manually editing other's configuration files, Yum Extender makes it very easy.
[141000940380] |When you have located a new repository site and want to use it, you have to left-click a repository in the “Repos” button, click “Edit”, choose Repositories, then add a name and the website address. 
[141000940390] |The “Output” section just lets you know if a program was properly installed or updated.
[141000940400] |If sometime, you bump into an issue or you miss a dependency, you will be notified in that section with a message stating exactly what went wrong and what could be done to repair the issue.
[141000940410] |Another thing about Yum Extended you'll probably notice is the “Group” section.
[141000940420] |This section works with groups that are defined by the repository provider.
[141000940430] |The group section is split into two windows, the Group Window and the Package Window. 
[141000940440] |The group window contains all the groups available.
[141000940450] |If right next to the group name is shown a disk, it means that every package in that group is already installed.
[141000940460] |You can add the whole group to queue for installation by right-clicking on its name. 
[141000940470] |The package window has a Mandatory, Default and Optional tab.
[141000940480] |Each tab contains the list of packages for the currently selected group.
[141000940490] |Right next to every package’s name, there is a check box that shows if the package is already installed.
[141000940500] |You can easily add packages to queue for installation by right-clicking on the package name.
[141000940510] |<b>The Good:</b>
[141000940520] |Thanks to it, installing, updating and removing software in Fedora are now easy tasks.
[141000940530] |It has a nice output section that prints exactly what happens at the time, so any issue can be easily repaired and because of the Queue feature, you will not lose the selected packages.
[141000940540] |<b>The Bad:</b>
[141000940550] |Because it's written in Python, it uses way too many resources.
[141000940560] |By default, the Changelog tab is not showing any information, although it can be activated at the expense of increasing the load time with about thirty minutes.
[141000940570] |<b>The Truth:</b>
[141000940580] |For the moment, Yum Extended is the only usable package manager for Fedora Linux.
[141000940590] |Until a lighter alternative (with at least the same features), we really don't have a choice. 
[141000940600] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001010010] |<title>Gaim Review</title>
[141001010020] |<img/>Gaim is a popular, multi-platform instant messaging client that supports every popular instant messaging system.
[141001010030] |It was primarily designed for Linux, but now, Gaim is available for all common platforms.
[141001010040] |It was released under the GPL license, therefore, it's free.
[141001010050] |Gaim is able to handle AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, IRC, Jabber, Zephyr, and Gadu-Gadu protocols all at once, but it's not supported or affiliated with any of them.
[141001010060] |Gaim has many features commonly found in other instant messaging clients like file transfer, away system or typing notification but has also its unique features like Buddy Pounces, which give the ability to notify you, send a message, play a sound, or run a program when a specific buddy goes away, signs online, or returns from idle; and plugins, consisting of text replacement, a buddy ticker, extended message notification, iconify on away, spell checking, tabbed conversations, and more.
[141001010070] |Also, Gaim integrates with Gnome, KDE or Windows, allowing sending it to system tray when you're not using it.
[141001010080] |This way, it won't stand in your way when you're working and you need all the free desktop and taskbar space you can get.
[141001010090] |Another important feature Gaim has is the ability to import buddy lists very easily with just a couple of clicks.
[141001010100] |But since most of - if not all - networks store everyone's buddy lists on their servers, the import is done automatically on the first run.
[141001010110] |To help you easily differentiate your friends, each buddy has its own icon, depending on the network he's currently using.
[141001010120] |And to make things even easier, Gaim allows you to assign custom aliases for each buddy you have.
[141001010130] |Gaim can be easily configured through a friendly preferences window using check boxes and values.
[141001010140] |From the preferences window, you can configure a couple of shortcuts, sounds, some privacy options, select the smiley theme you like most and more, but nothing really fancy.
[141001010150] |When engaging in a discussion, you find all the typical IM features one would expect to find.
[141001010160] |Custom fonts can be used, as well as font size and color.
[141001010170] |Moreover, the emoticons change according to which IM network is being used.
[141001010180] |And, of course, here are also some small and basic features like spell-checking, setting custom away messages or blocking messages or ignoring buddies.
[141001010190] |You can also initiate, if you want, a conference with several buddies.
[141001010200] |Moreover, Gaim has the ability to ignore custom font colors, sizes and fonts.
[141001010210] |This way, you don't have to deal with the people who change the background color and everything.
[141001010220] |All your messages will come across however you want them to.
[141001010230] |Besides flawless integration with system tray, Gaim introduces another feature for those obsessed with desktop space or for those with millions of buddies: tabbed chatting!
[141001010240] |This means that you can chat separately with several buddies from the same IM window. 
[141001010250] |Privacy wasn't left aside either.
[141001010260] |You can chose who is allowed to contact you: all buddies, only those on a specific list of users or just buddies on your list.
[141001010270] |The same goes for blocking users.
[141001010280] |Conversations can also be logged for future reference or just as a souvenir.
[141001010290] |To check a buddy's away message, it's enough to hover your mouse pointer over their name and a tool tip will appear containing his name, alias and current status.
[141001010300] |A cool feature I've noticed for Yahoo! network buddies is the Get Info button.
[141001010310] |If you right-click a Yahoo! user and select Get Info, a window will pop-up containing basic Yahoo Profile information like name, picture, the last time his profile was updated and a link to his complete profile.
[141001010320] |Some basic extensibility is provided through a plug-in system, although I've found very few actual Gaim plugins and the few plugins that are available, provide some extra, not so useful, features like MSN-style graphical notifications, idle options, transparency and so on.
[141001010330] |Gaim allows Perl and Tcl scripting, so we'll probably see more plugins in the near future.
[141001010340] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001010350] |Gaim is an easy to setup and use IM application.
[141001010360] |It combines all messengers in one and uses tabbed chatting so it doesn't take up all the free desktop space and computer resources.
[141001010370] |And of course, it's free.
[141001010380] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001010390] |Gaim has a lot of features but is missing two of the most important: webcam and sound support.
[141001010400] |So basically, you can use Gaim to chat in plain text; if you want to talk through a microphone and watch the other's webcam, then… you have to use another application.
[141001010410] |Or wait until Gaim develops such features.
[141001010420] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001010430] |Overall, Gaim is a useful application for those with IM accounts on several networks.
[141001010440] |It comes with a lot of handy features which makes conversations very pleasant, although there's no support for video or sound but this may be added in the future, making Gaim one of the best, multi-protocol, full-featured IM applications.
[141001010450] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001340010] |<title>KrawlSite Review</title>
[141001340020] |<img/>A web crawler is an application that allows you to download a web page or even an entire website so you can navigate through it once the program has finished its job.
[141001340030] |This kind of software is also known as web spiders or offline browsers.
[141001340040] |You may ask yourself, what's the point of this type of programs?
[141001340050] |Well, it could come in handy when your Internet connection barely stays alive and it takes forever to load a single page.
[141001340060] |At that point, you can run the web crawler application, let it run for a couple of minutes/hours and when you return, you will be able to browse through your favorite website faster than browsing on a broadband connection.
[141001340070] |Unfortunately, web crawlers are often used to steal web content or perform other illegal actions.
[141001340080] |If you decide to use a web crawler for malicious reasons, it will be your responsibility and you'll even risk court actions being taken against you.
[141001340090] |KrawlSite is one of the few web crawlers for Linux which allows you to crawl a given website up to any link depth.
[141001340100] |It's part of the KDE project and can be run either as a unique application or can be embedded into Konqueror or any KPart-aware application.
[141001340110] |To install KrawlSite, you'll have to download the source package and follow the generic installation instructions.
[141001340120] |You'll simply have to uncompress the archive, cd to the newly created directory and type ./configure ; make ; make install.
[141001340130] |However, in order to successfully install KrawlSite, your system has to meet all its requirements.
[141001340140] |It shouldn't cause any problems on a system with KDE environment correctly installed.
[141001340150] |Once compiling and installing was completed successfully, KrawlSite can be run by opening a terminal and executing the krawlsite command.
[141001340160] |You'll notice that KrawlSite has a simple design, being also straight to the point in functionality.
[141001340170] |The main window is divided into four sections: the toolbar section in the upper part and the status bar in the lower part.
[141001340180] |The most important aspect of the application will be in the middle.
[141001340190] |This section is divided in two smaller ones: on the left you'll notice a basic local browser, while the remaining right part will consists of links discovered in the currently selected website.
[141001340200] |The local browser allows you to easily switch to an existing directory or create a new one; either way, the selected directory will be used as a download location for the files discovered on the crawled website.
[141001340210] |The toolbar contains buttons for easy access to KrawlSite's main functions.
[141001340220] |The Settings button will open a small window, which will enable you to rapidly switch some of its options.
[141001340230] |Next, you'll see the Archive button which will create a web archive file (.war) containing one of the discovered html files.
[141001340240] |Also, you'll find the Log button which will open a window containing KrawlSite's last actions and messages and the Configure button which will open the main configuration window.
[141001340250] |Next, there's the Drop target button which will open a new drop target icon, the History button which will show the last crawled websites and the address bar.
[141001340260] |Finally, the last buttons allow you to control the crawling itself.
[141001340270] |These buttons will enable you to add or delete URLs, personalize the crawl and of course, start, pause and stop the crawl.
[141001340280] |The status bar shows the crawl mode, the download size and the current download speed.
[141001340290] |Moreover, you'll notice three progress bars in the statusbar: one which shows the progress for the current file, one for the discovered links and one for the discovered images.
[141001340300] |All three of them help you develop an idea about how much time the crawl will take.
[141001340310] |The Configure window contains four sections.
[141001340320] |The first, Crawl Mode, allows you to select the crawl mode.
[141001340330] |It can either be Simple, which will save the files as downloaded, Offline Browser, which will modify links to point to files in local storage or Leech Mode which unfortunately, isn't yet implemented.
[141001340340] |From the same Crawl Mode section, you can set the crawl depth.
[141001340350] |This option will select how many links KrawlSite will follow, downloading all found content.
[141001340360] |The next section, Url Bar allows you to configure the url location bar settings, such as whether to save the location url and how many urls to save.
[141001340370] |The Local Directory section enables you to select the default base directory used for saving discovered files.
[141001340380] |The last section, File Types acts as a filter and allows you to choose which file type to be ignored and which to be included in the parsing stage.
[141001340390] |Also from this section, you can select the dynamic html file extensions.
[141001340400] |These file types denote dynamic html content and each remote url will be translated into a local file after parsing.
[141001340410] |If an url that contains dynamic content is encountered more than once, the older instance will be deleted, accommodating the newer content.
[141001340420] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001340430] |KrawlSite is a simple and easy to use web crawler/spider/offline browser.
[141001340440] |It offers most of the features needed for website crawling and can be used by anyone, regardless of their knowledge level, thanks to the simple interface design, based on functionality.
[141001340450] |There's also a tray icon which offers easy access to the application's functions.
[141001340460] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001340470] |It wouldn't hurt if KrawlSite offered more control over the crawl process through a more advanced filter, for example.
[141001340480] |Also, KrawlSite's HandBook (Documentation) hasn't been revised since 2001 and doesn't help almost at all.
[141001340490] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001340500] |Even if it still misses a few things, KrawlSite still is a good web crawler and you should give it a try when you'll need one.
[141001340510] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001420010] |<title>Sonata Review</title>
[141001420020] |<img/>Multimedia applications available nowadays can collect, organize, store and play digital music files and their number increases every day.
[141001420030] |Unfortunately, choosing one to use regularly isn't an easy job, considering that most of the players are really good ones.
[141001420040] |So all you can do is try different ones and see which of them you like best.
[141001420050] |For what is worth, I've always enjoyed the combination between MPD (Music Player Daemon) and GUI for the simple reason that I can listen to my home music from any PC connected to the Internet.
[141001420060] |MPD also makes a good desktop media player, particularly if you either don't use X at all or frequently restart it.
[141001420070] |MPD also has a variety of front-ends which communicate with the server using a custom protocol over a TCP connection.
[141001420080] |One of these clients (probably the newest) is called <b>Sonata</b>.
[141001420090] |It's a lightweight GTK+ music client for the Music Player Daemon, which aims to be efficient, user-friendly and clean.
[141001420100] |It doesn't come bloated with toolbars and, most importantly, it has been released under the GPL license, which means it's free.
[141001420110] |Sonata has been forked from the Pygmy project (another MPD front-end) in order to fix bugs, add new features and proceed down a different path.
[141001420120] |Sonata can be installed in various ways but first, you have to install several dependencies:• PyGTK 2.6.0 or newer • GTK+ 2.6.0 or newer • MPD (optional) • gnome-python-extras or PyGTK 2.10.x for system tray support (optional) • taglib and tagpy for editing metadata (optional) • SOAPpy for lyrics support (optional) • GCC (building only)• python-dev (on some distros; building only)Most, if not all dependencies are available in the software repository for each popular Linux distribution and you can install them using your package manager (yum, apt-get etc).
[141001420130] |However, the packages might be found under different names on each repository; for instance, SOAPpy can be found in Fedora repository as "SOAPpy", while in Ubuntu repository, it's called "python-soappy".
[141001420140] |After all required packages are installed, you can proceed with Sonata installation.
[141001420150] |Even if it's possible to find it in the software repository, you might find an outdated version there, so it's recommended to get the latest version of the source code package and install it.
[141001420160] |You won't have to do much, except open a terminal, extract the source code package, change to the new created directory and type <b>python setup.py install</b>.
[141001420170] |Before starting Sonata for the first time, you must make sure that MPD is installed, configured, running and its playlist consists in music files.
[141001420180] |Finally, in order to run Sonata, either type the command <b>sonata</b> in a terminal window or look for the Sonata shortcut in the Gnome/KDE menu, under Multimedia.
[141001420190] |The first time you run it, it will open the Preferences window, where you can configure the MPD IP, port, the eventual password and the music directory.
[141001420200] |Moreover, you can choose whether to connect on startup and enable crossfade.
[141001420210] |There are also buttons for Connect and Disconnect to/from the MPD server.
[141001420220] |From the same Preferences window, but in the second tab called Display, you can toggle several interface options, such as whether to enable playback buttons, volume button, statusbar, system tray icon or album art.
[141001420230] |There's also the possibility to enable notification on song changes through popups.
[141001420240] |The next tab, Behaviour, allows you to change window and miscellaneous behavior options, such as whether to show window on all workspaces, keep it always on top, minimize to tray, update MPD library on start, stop playback on exit and play enqueued files on activate.
[141001420250] |The last tab, format, allows you to customize how the song name appears, using various tags which are listed and explained in the same tab.
[141001420260] |The main window can be collapsed into a mini view or expanded by clicking on the small arrow, next to the current song.
[141001420270] |Various information like song tags, album info and lyrics are available in a secondary window which can be brought up by clicking on the album image in the top left, or by right-clicking anywhere in the top of the player and choosing "song info".
[141001420280] |While expanded, Sonata's interface allows you to browse through your current playlist, library, saved playlists and streams.
[141001420290] |The current playlist tab consists of the current tracks enqueued for playing, the library tab lists all the media files available on the MPD server, while the playlists tab consists of any eventual playlists you would have saved.
[141001420300] |The streams tab contains all media streams you added.
[141001420310] |Unfortunately, it doesn't have a function that will fetch all streams from the soutcast website, so you'll need to manually add each one of them.
[141001420320] |Most actions for these tabs can be accessed through right-click popup menus.
[141001420330] |In order for Sonata to support system tray, PyGTK or gnome-python-extras are required.
[141001420340] |Moreover, for the ability to edit song tags, your system needs to have tagpy and tablib installed.
[141001420350] |Moreover, for automatic lyrics fetching, you'll need to have SOAPpy installed.
[141001420360] |Other features you might find while using Sonata: Remote Artwork function allows Sonata to automatically search the amazon website for cover art and display the best match if one is found.
[141001420370] |You can also browse amazon for alternatives, or specify your own search terms, by right-clicking on the album art/cd cover and choosing "Use remote image".
[141001420380] |The Local Artwork feature allows you to select an image from the local disk and set it as an album art/cover.
[141001420390] |Moreover, Sonata can search for a cover.jpg or folder.jpb in the song's directory, or, if there's just an image file in the music directory, that image will be used as the cover art.
[141001420400] |You can also drag an image from the hard driver and drop it in the art/cover image space.
[141001420410] |As for tag editing, Sonata provides a pretty powerful tag editing interface, as long as you have taglib and tagpy installed.
[141001420420] |You can select several files or even folders to which you want to apply your changes.
[141001420430] |Searching through files can be done either by pressing Ctrl + F and then typing some keywords, or by starting typing a few letters and your result (if available), will be highlighted.
[141001420440] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001420450] |Sonata is a nice GUI interface to the Music Player Daemon (MPD) and not actually a music player itself.
[141001420460] |It can organize music files and streams in playlists.
[141001420470] |Depending on which requirements you've installed, Sonata can also fetch album covers and lyrics from the web, it supports tag editing and library searches.
[141001420480] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001420490] |It can cause problems if the MPD server is firewalled/filtered.
[141001420500] |Also, I personally don't really enjoy Python applications as there's always a missing module or something not working as it should.
[141001420510] |It also couldn't hurt to see some added features and functions to that small interface.
[141001420520] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001420530] |Sonata is perfectly suited to people that can't listen to music when at certain locations, because of various reasons such as firewalled network or no Internet connection at all.
[141001420540] |It allows you to both listen to music files stored on the home computer, as well as use Sonata as your desktop music player.
[141001420550] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001490010] |<title>Swiftfox Review</title>
[141001490020] |<img/>Every person that spends an important amount of time on-line has at least heard of Firefox.
[141001490030] |Given the features, security level and availability for different platforms, it should come as no surprise that many users and organizations are actively using this browser.
[141001490040] |Firefox is available for Linux as well, and is a huge help for new Linux users that have been using Firefox in Windows and that aren't yet ready to use a rather complex Linux browser such as Konqueror.
[141001490050] |Another good thing one will notice about Firefox is its speed.
[141001490060] |Given how fast it is, it would seem unlikely that things could get any better than this.
[141001490070] |But fortunately, this has come to pass. Linux Firefox users (those that haven't yet heard – very few) will be thrilled to find out that there's an even better Firefox available, called appropriately enough, Swiftfox.
[141001490080] |Swiftfox is a binary optimized build of the Firefox browsers for Linux.
[141001490090] |It was created by Jason Halme and is a freely downloadable application.
[141001490100] |And for the optimization level to be even higher, specific builds for each of the supported microprocessor architectures have been created separately.
[141001490110] |The current version of Firefox is available, as well as the development version, each having specific builds.
[141001490120] |Moreover, the extensions, plugins and themes one has used with Firefox are fully compatible with Swiftfox.
[141001490130] |If both browsers are used within the same Unix user, the add-ons will be shared from one another, removing the need to re-install them all over again when switching to Swiftox or back to Firefox.
[141001490140] |<b>So what is <u>specifically</u> optimized in Swiftfox?</b>
[141001490150] |<b>Binary code optimization.</b>
[141001490160] |The Swiftfox executable has been compiled with the highest level of compiler optimization, rather than optimization for binary size.
[141001490170] |The compiler supports various flags that will perform different optimization levels during the compilation process.
[141001490180] |Firefox is compiled with <b>-Os</b> flag (which enables only the optimizations that don't increase code size and also a few optimizations designed to reduce code size), while Swiftfox is compiled with <b>-O3</b> flag, which basically turns on all available optimizations.
[141001490190] |Binaries incorporate additional instruction sets supported by and also optimization specific to the microprocessor architecture.
[141001490200] |Moreover, Swiftfox has been compiled with a newer version of the compiler program (GCC v 4.0.4), while Firefox uses v 3.3.2.
[141001490210] |<b>Increased security</b>.
[141001490220] |Swiftfox offers better protection against buffer overflow attacks as a result of using -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 while compilation.
[141001490230] |Firefox has been compiled with an older version of GCC, which doesn't support this.
[141001490240] |<b>Removed or disabled features</b>.
[141001490250] |Pango is not included, allowing Unicode fonts to remain supported, but without certain extra features provided by it.
[141001490260] |Pango is an open source computing library for rendering internationalized texts in high quality, integrated into GTK+ 2.
[141001490270] |Moreover, Ipv6 DNS lookups are disabled.
[141001490280] |<b>Changed default preferences values</b>.
[141001490290] |HTTP pipelining is enabled by default.
[141001490300] |This is a technique in which multiple HTTP requests are written out to a single socket without waiting for the corresponding responses but unfortunately, it's only supported in HTTP/1.1, not in HTTP/1.0.
[141001490310] |The pipelining of requests results in dramatic improvement in page loading times, especially over high latency connections such as a satellite or wireless Internet connection.
[141001490320] |However, this preference can be enabled in Firefox 2.0 or one can use an extension called Fastefox, which provides a GUI to adjust these settings. 
[141001490330] |<b>Hmm, whatever you say.
[141001490340] |But will I feel these changes?</b>
[141001490350] |Several magazines have evaluated Swiftfox in the context of the fastest browsers.
[141001490360] |But this isn't really the case.
[141001490370] |With or without pipelining, Firefox has the tendency to render pages a bit slower than Konqueror or even Internet Explorer.
[141001490380] |However, Swiftfox has been reported to have a shorter loading and page rendering time.
[141001490390] |So bottom line: Swiftfox is faster than Firefox, both in loading speed and website rendering.
[141001490400] |Unfortunately, the leader still is Konqueror running within KDE with times lower than both Firefox and Swiftfox.
[141001490410] |Swiftfox comes with XForms extension and libunixprintplugin.so plugin preinstalled.
[141001490420] |Most of microprocessor architectures are supported but there are, however, a few unsupported, such as Pentium w/ MMX and PRO, K6, K6-3 and furthermore, a build for dual core processors hasn't been developed.
[141001490430] |The chart of supported processors shows that for dual core processors we should use the Prescott build but wouldn't it be even better if a separate build was to be released?
[141001490440] |Just a thought, I might be wrong though.
[141001490450] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001490460] |Swiftfox is a binary optimized build of the Mozilla Firefox web browser for Linux.
[141001490470] |Each supported microprocessor architecture has its own separate specific builds.
[141001490480] |Each build has been compiled with the highest level of compiler optimization and has additional instruction sets incorporated within.
[141001490490] |Overall, it does decrease the loading and page rendering times compared to Firefox.
[141001490500] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001490510] |Although the loading and page rendering times are lower compared to Firefox, the difference between them mostly depends on the Internet connection.
[141001490520] |Furthermore, not all architectures are supported, so Swiftfox can't be used on all Linux systems.
[141001490530] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001490540] |If you are a Firefox addict and you're running Linux, you should give Swiftfox a try.
[141001490550] |It will definitely amaze you.
[141001490560] |More or less however, depending on your cpu architecture and Internet connection. 
[141001490570] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001790010] |<title>KChart Review</title>
[141001790020] |I'm sure you all are familiar with the KOffice suite for the K Desktop Environment.
[141001790030] |Primarily designed for the Unix operating systems, KOffice uses by the default the OpenDocument format and includes: KWord, a word processor with style sheets and frame-support for DTP-style editing of complex layouts, KSpread, a spreadsheet application, KPresenter, a presentation program, Kivio, Karbon12 vector drawing application, Krita, Kugar, KFormula, Kexi, KPlato and KChart report and chart generator. 
[141001790040] |Today I will tell you about Kchart.
[141001790050] |As the name suggests, it can be used for drawing diagrams using some given data or the data from the KSpread cells.
[141001790060] |Almost all aspects of a chart are customizable, including the legend, footers, headers, chart title, font, color, and background.
[141001790070] |KChart comes with two major advantages: one would be the much improved, modern default formatting and the second would be the charts' size, which can be significantly expanded.
[141001790080] |You can use it also to embed charts into your KOffice documents.
[141001790090] |Despite the penurious look, this little application might exceed your expectations through its ease-of-use and high power of configuration.
[141001790100] |The provided chart types are not many, but they cover very well the most used prototypes.
[141001790110] |You could be impressed by its layout flexibility; for example, the legends do not have a fixed position on the chart, they can be placed in the center, or at an edge or up/down in one of the four corners.
[141001790120] |However, the default configuration is not bad at all.
[141001790130] |The default values for all the parameters are relative to the window size.
[141001790140] |A bad aspect in KChart and actually in more KOffice applications, would be the fact that it moves really slow.
[141001790150] |As I was saying earlier, the user's interface looks quite poor and has nothing to impress one.
[141001790160] |Even from the start-up you can make an idea of it.
[141001790170] |The application opens with a welcoming dialog and there you can choose between two templates or open a recent chart document.
[141001790180] |I usually need the default template, the Bar Chart, to be more specific.
[141001790190] |If you choose it, you will notice it has already some example data filled in by default.
[141001790200] |One of the tools I found useful at this application is the Chart Wizard.
[141001790210] |In a few steps one can easily and quickly set up options such as chart type or labelling.
[141001790220] |Another indispensable tool would be the Data Editor, used when the application runs as standalone.
[141001790230] |It can be started by following the Edit -> Edit Data path or by clicking on the Edit data button on the toolbar.
[141001790240] |In the Data Editor you'll define the number of rows and columns and you'll also set all the values you need.
[141001790250] |Here you can change the names for columns and rows, by clicking on them.
[141001790260] |However, in the case of data entry I have noticed that you can switch between cells by using tab, but when it goes to the next cell it does not highlight the current default value so you can overwrite it.
[141001790270] |Thus, you'll have to be careful and delete that value by yourself, otherwise you won't get the expected result due to incorrect input data.
[141001790280] |One thing I like about KChart is that it offers pretty much useful configuration options for one chart.
[141001790290] |Therefore, by selecting Format -> Chart you can select the way your chart will be drawn.
[141001790300] |There are eight patterns from which to choose, including Bars, Pipes, Areas, Lines, Rings or, my favorite, Polar.
[141001790310] |You will be able to choose the data interpretation, by using either rows or columns.
[141001790320] |Here is the place where you'll edit the title and subtitle too, for each of them using a different font type, size or color.
[141001790330] |Here you can also custom the X,Y axis and also use the 3D parameters in order to get a 3D effect on the chart.
[141001790340] |In order to do that, just go to the Bar tab in the Format data dialog box and fill in your options.
[141001790350] |Regarding the previous releases of KChart, I've heard many complaining about the way it prints out the chart.
[141001790360] |But this is no longer true for this version.
[141001790370] |A chart can be exported as a graphic file.
[141001790380] |In order to do that, choose File -> Export and then select the file format you need.
[141001790390] |You can choose between graphic formats such as: SVG, PNG, JPEG, Krita, Gimp etc.
[141001790400] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001790410] |KChart benefits from a highly flexible integration.
[141001790420] |It is used by KSpread to create diagrams and charts, but it can also be used as a standalone application.
[141001790430] |The embedding goes much further and a chart can be inserted in many of the KOffice components. 
[141001790440] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001790450] |I find KChart a nice program especially due to the fact that it can be easily used.
[141001790460] |There are many aspects about it that I do not like, though.
[141001790470] |And the most outstanding example would be the shabby GUI.
[141001790480] |The interface plays an important role in the way a user interacts with an application.
[141001790490] |KChart's UI looks very primitive and somehow reminds me of the obsolete programs from the '90s.
[141001790500] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001790510] |A useful KOffice component, KChart is a good charts-drawing program.
[141001790520] |It allows the user to create many types of charts and also allows links to the underlying data, so when the applications involved are open, a data change in one is reflected in the others.
[141001790530] |Please enjoy the KChart screenshots below:
[141001840010] |<title>MPlayer Review</title>
[141001840020] |Do you love movies?
[141001840030] |Of course you do, but when you really want to enjoy your favorite movie, and the applications with which you want to watch it start to crash or don't support subtitles, or God knows what else, then you're in big trouble.
[141001840040] |What to do, what to do?
[141001840050] |MPlayer is the answer, my friends!
[141001840060] |It is the most widely used video player on Linux platforms all over the world.
[141001840070] |It has the ability to play back almost any video format out there, such as: DVD, SVCD, VCD, AVI, DIVX, XVID, ASF, WMV, RealVideo, OGG, MPEG-1/2, MOV, MP4, Matroska and many more.
[141001840080] |MPlayer can also play back most popular audio formats, such as: MP3, OGG, WMA, RealAudio.
[141001840090] |Even if it doesn't come installed by default, MPlayer is very easy to install on popular distributions.
[141001840100] |However, after installation, you have to decide what frontend to use, because the player comes with one old and kinda ugly GUI (graphical user interface).
[141001840110] |Don't you worry about what user interface to use, 'cause there are many MPlayer GUIs out there to choose from, like KMplayer, SMPlayer, KPlayer or GNOME MPlayer.
[141001840120] |Ubuntu users can install MPlayer by opening Synaptic Package Manager; after you did that, search for mplayer, click on it to mark it for installation and hit the Apply button.
[141001840130] |After you install MPlayer, you can find it in KMenu -> Multimedia -> MPlayer Movie Player (for KDE users) or Applications -> Sound & Video -> MPlayer (for GNOME users). MPlayer can also be installed via Automatix2 on Ubuntu or Debian systems. Come to think of it, this is the preferred method, because you can also install all the multimedia codecs you'll ever need, the desired graphical user interface and the proper Firefox mplayer plugin, at the same time.
[141001840140] |When the program starts, it will open two windows: one is the video playback window and the other one containing the player's control functions (Play, Stop, Rewind, Forward, Pause, Skip and Volume).
[141001840150] |Two windows?
[141001840160] |This is yet another handicap of the default graphical user interface, but to think of one good aspect, it's great that you can right click on both windows in order to access other advanced functions (select chapters, audio streams on DVDs, aspect ratio, load media files, load or drop subtitles) or the Preferences window.
[141001840170] |Talking about the Preferences window, when you first open it, a warning message will pop-up which lets you know that some options will take effect after you restart the player.
[141001840180] |I have to warn the new users, that the settings are mostly for advanced users, especially those from Audio and Video tabs.
[141001840190] |So, if you don't have audio and/or video, I recommend to select 'alsa' on the Audio tab and 'xv' on the Video tab.
[141001840200] |Moreover, in the Codecs & demuxer tab, it would be a very good idea to check the 'Rebuild index table, if needed' option and in the Misc tab, be sure to check the 'Enable postprocessing' option.
[141001840210] |Yet another bad thing about the default GUI is that it still keeps those old paths to the optical device drive.
[141001840220] |Therefore, if you insert a DVD-Video, SVCD (Super VideoCD) or VCD (VideoCD) and you want to play it with MPlayer, then you must find and set the correct path to the optical drive.
[141001840230] |Seeking backward and forward through the video you're watching has never been easier than this, as MPlayer allows you to quickly search what you're looking for, just with the mouse wheel.
[141001840240] |The best part of MPlayer's seek function is that you will also have audio while searching through the video stream, function that you'll not see in many video players.
[141001840250] |Another great thing I liked about MPlayer is that it allows you to enter full screen mode, just by double clicking with your mouse on the video window.
[141001840260] |And if we're talking about controlling the MPlayer, you should know that it has a command-driven control layer which allows you to use the keyboard, mouse, joystick or a remote control (with LIRC).
[141001840270] |MPlayer has the ability to automatically mount and play CUE/BIN images, TiVo live streams, DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting), SDP, MPST, MMS, PVR, as well as TV and Radio channels.
[141001840280] |It is also able to read popular subtitles such as MicroDVD, SubRip, OGM, SubViewer, Sami, VPlayer, RT, SSA, AQTitle, JACOsub, PJS and DVD subtitles (SPU streams, VOBsub and Closed Captions).
[141001840290] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001840300] |It's a very smart video player application, which can read many (almost all) video file formats, even the latest 720p and 1080p video streams.
[141001840310] |You can easily search back and forward through the video, with the mouse wheel.
[141001840320] |And best of all, it never crashed on my machine.
[141001840330] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001840340] |I definitely don't like that default graphical user interface (GUI), because it's inaesthetic (even with the right skin) and old (it doesn't highlight all its functions).
[141001840350] |<b>The truth</b>
[141001840360] |I said this before, but I have to say it again: MPlayer is, was and will be the best video player Linux ever had!
[141001840370] |And most of all, with the right graphical user interface (GUI) it really rocks!
[141001840380] |I recommend this player to all Linux newbies and gurus.
[141001840390] |Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
[141001840400] |<b>Follow the editor on Twitter <a>@mariusnestor</a></b>
[141001960010] |<title>Scribus Review</title>
[141001960020] |You've started your own business and you want to print some training manuals for your employees.
[141001960030] |Besides that, you want to create a newsletter and inform your clients about your new products and services.
[141001960040] |What about the business cards?
[141001960050] |You'll need those too, so people can get in touch with you.
[141001960060] |If we add the fact that you own a newspaper or magazine, you will surely need a DTP program.
[141001960070] |There are some apps out there, but most of them just don't do all you want quickly and easy.
[141001960080] |Don't get discouraged, because Scribus is here to help you!
[141001960090] |The situations I described above are only a few that might take place in the real world.
[141001960100] |There are many other tasks that require a desktop publishing application, such as interactive PDF forms for presentations or cgi/php form submission through PDF. 
[141001960110] |I've installed Scribus by using its Debian and Ubuntu repository.
[141001960120] |Thus, whenever a new version is available, I can simply update Scribus.
[141001960130] |To add the repository, I opened up Synaptic and went into Settings -> Repositories.
[141001960140] |Here I selected the Third Party Software tab, where I clicked on the "Add" button.
[141001960150] |The next thing I did - and you'll also do, if you use Ubuntu Gutsy - was to add the following line in the window that appeared:
[141001960160] |<b>CODE</b><code>deb http://debian.scribus.net/debian/ gutsy main non-free</code>You will have to repeat the same thing with this one too:
[141001960170] |<b>CODE</b><code>deb http://debian.tagancha.org/debian/ gutsy main non-free</code>When you close the Repositories window, don't forget to click on "Reload".
[141001960180] |Wait until the process finishes and then open up a terminal and type these commands, to import the GPG key.
[141001960190] |<b>CODE</b><code>gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net --recv-keys EEF818CFgpg --armor --export EEF818CF | sudo apt-key add -</code>After these two things, run apt-get update to check that the key was installed correctly.
[141001960200] |If everything goes well, go back in Synaptic and search for Scribus.
[141001960210] |Install all the packages from the search results, besides scribus-ng, scribus-ng-doc, scribus-template.
[141001960220] |These three are for the development branch of Scribus, and I don't think you want a not-too-stable application running on your system.
[141001960230] |Okay, so we've installed Scribus.
[141001960240] |What's next?
[141001960250] |Let's start it and see what it can do for us.
[141001960260] |In Ubuntu, you'll find it in Main Menu (or Applications) -> Office.
[141001960270] |A blue splash screen is the first thing you will see when you launch Scribus.
[141001960280] |It looks very clean and neat, but it's disappointing that it contrasts with the rest of Scribus.
[141001960290] |The next thing you get is a "New Document" window, where you can choose from four different document layouts or open an existing document.
[141001960300] |I selected the Single Page layout for the beginning.
[141001960310] |By playing around, I've noticed that an image cannot be scaled to the image frame's size.
[141001960320] |This can only be done by using an external image editor, like GIMP.
[141001960330] |If you might need to add bar codes to your products or ISBN codes on books and magazines, you will be glad to know that Scribus has such a feature.
[141001960340] |It can automatically produce 18 different bar codes, and to add another good thing to that, you can change the color of the bars, text and background.
[141001960350] |When the code is generated, you can drag and drop it wherever you want in your project.
[141001960360] |For those of you who like to add their own features to Scribus, without too much editing, I have some good news: you can extend Scribus with Python scripts which can help you out in the future.
[141001960370] |There are already two default scripts included in Scribus, CalendarWizard and FontSample, which can be used as inspiration for your scripts.
[141001960380] |A neat thing I found out is the distance measuring tool which is very useful for a better precision in positioning the elements of a page.
[141001960390] |You can also opt for a fast and fine way of distribution and alignment, by using the "Align and Distribute" tool located in the "Windows" menu.
[141001960400] |In case you're not satisfied with it, you can move the images, text boxes, shapes, etc. manually, by dragging them on the page.
[141001960410] |A complementary feature is the grid, which can be really helpful in the exact positioning of the things you make.
[141001960420] |The developers implemented some sort of clipboard, if I could call it this way, that bears the name "Scrapbook".
[141001960430] |The Scrapbook is used for retaining elements you use often.
[141001960440] |They are not cleared from the Scrapbook unless you delete them, which could turn out as a good thing, if you create different projects and you want to use previously created shapes, text boxes, etc.
[141001960450] |Speaking of shapes, I hardly found a way to change their background.
[141001960460] |Actually it was so simple that I didn't notice it!
[141001960470] |I only had to right click on the shape and go to Properties, a menu that's full of neat options, like changing the looks, colors, borders, opacity, etc., which really impressed me.
[141001960480] |It turns out to be good for professionals and for beginners too.
[141001960490] |After playing around, I tried to save from a pre-defined template already made by Scribus' team.
[141001960500] |Although I used a stable version, I received a message that's telling me I was using a development version, and the template was made in version 1.2.3 or lower, which could render the document useless in the older version.
[141001960510] |Anyway, I've saved the document and moved on. 
[141001960520] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001960530] |Scribus is one of the best DTP solutions available at this moment, and if you think about the fact that it's free, a sincere "WOW!" might slip out of your mouth.
[141001960540] |Another white ball for Scribus: it runs on the most used platforms at this moment, Linux/Unix, MacOS X and Windows.
[141001960550] |Not to mention the fact that it can be used by both professionals and novices.
[141001960560] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001960570] |From my point of view, the worst thing about Scribus is it's aspect.
[141001960580] |The splash screen is way too beautiful, but the rest looks old.
[141001960590] |It has a few themes included, but they all look gray and depressing.
[141001960600] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001960610] |There is more work to be done to Scribus, but it's the best app you may find at this moment.
[141001960620] |There is commercial software which can do the same things as Scribus, but why should you pay for something that doesn't even have all of Scribus's features?
[141001960630] |Also, the commercial ones might be targeted only at professionals and the beginners get left out.
[141001960640] |Here are some screenshots with Scribus in action:
[141002190010] |<title>Ubuntu Review</title>
[141002190020] |In only a few years of existence, Ubuntu reached a very high level of popularity.
[141002190030] |With the slogan "Linux for human beings," Canonical clearly aimed to provide a smoother transition for the regular desktop users who wanted a change in their everyday computing experience.
[141002190040] |Though some may question Ubuntu's true contribution to open-source innovation, one cannot deny its important part in popularizing GNU/Linux and freeing a lot of users from proprietary software restrictions and high costs. 
[141002190050] |Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) respects the established six-month release schedule and provides enough reasons to make you update from older versions.
[141002190060] |If you want to find out how Ubuntu evolved, below we offer you an in-depth review of the most popular Linux operating system to date.
[141002190070] |We've tested Ubuntu 9.04 for a period of two weeks, on the following hardware: 
[141002190080] |<strong>Installation</strong> 
[141002190090] |Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope comes in a standard CD ISO for both 32- and 64-bit architectures.
[141002190100] |There is either the option of downloading and burning the images manually or, by request, Canonical can ship users a CD for free.
[141002190110] |We decided to first try the Live version on our test machines, before messing around with existing partitions, and install from there. 
[141002190120] |After enjoying the redesigned bootsplash, the Live environment loaded and everything went perfectly fine on 5 of our computers.
[141002190130] |Even the resolution was set to the maximum value for our monitors.
[141002190140] |However, on the first machine in the above list, things went haywire with Nautilus entering into a continuous crash/restart loop, forcing us to reboot and choose the direct installation option (and yes, the CD was checked for defects beforehand). 
[141002190150] |Either way, the seven Install steps are identical.
[141002190160] |You must admit that the new timezone map is eye catchy.
[141002190170] |Though the automatic zoom from previous versions was no longer there to annoy me, it was still quite hard to "land" where I wanted from the first try.
[141002190180] |No worries though, as you can scroll through the now-separated "Region" and "City" drop-down lists until you find what you need, which definitely speeds the entire installation process.
[141002190190] |The next page features another improvement: Ubuntu automatically and correctly detected the keyboard layout.
[141002190200] |However, the option of manually selecting it is still there. 
[141002190210] |The partitioning step has been also improved a lot, especially when you want to dual boot with a Microsoft Windows operating system.
[141002190220] |Ubuntu 9.04 sticks to the EXT3 filesystems for the default installation, so if you want to try out the new EXT4, you will have to manually partition your hard drive.
[141002190230] |We would also recommend this method for another reason: by default, Ubuntu will create only one partition (besides the swap), and having a separate /home partition is always a safer bet.
[141002190240] |More and more Linux distributions will do that automatically, so it's a shame Ubuntu still creates only the root partition. 
[141002190250] |On one of the machines we've had Windows operating systems on the HDD, and the Migration Assistant asked if we wanted to import some of the settings and preferences, like instant messaging accounts, Firefox bookmarks, desktop wallpaper or documents.
[141002190260] |The installation completed without any errors, and within a reasonable time frame –8 to 13 minutes.
[141002190270] |All in all, the installation is still as easy as it can get and most users should encounter no problems. 
[141002190280] |<strong>First impressions</strong> 
[141002190290] |With the installation out of the way, it's time to enjoy Ubuntu 9.04.
[141002190300] |After a quick boot process (about 37 seconds –from grub to a working desktop –on our slowest machine), we were delighted to see a completely redesigned black and dark red login screen.
[141002190310] |Probably expecting a brand new desktop too, some of you might be quite disappointed with yet another brownish wallpaper and the same weathered Human theme set as default.
[141002190320] |Fortunately, a quick look in the appearance window will revive that smile on your face, as Ubuntu comes with three brand-new themes (New Wave, Dust, Dust Sand) and an extra wallpaper.
[141002190330] |The best part however is the fact that the fonts are not automatically adjusted and they look quite nice.
[141002190340] |Of course, as for any modern Linux desktop, we had to enable the 3D effects, a process that gave us no headache. 
[141002190350] |<strong>Ease of use</strong> 
[141002190360] |After a great start with Ubuntu 9.04, the time came to dive deeper into the operating system and see how it performed.
[141002190370] |Though the GNOME desktop environment has been updated to version 2.26.1, there aren't major changes, so everything was exactly as it had been on the Intrepid Ibex (Ubuntu 8.10); two panels, two workspaces, the usual menu bar and notification area.
[141002190380] |Speaking of which, Unbuntu 9.04 boasts a brand-new and modern notification framework, which we've yet to encounter in any other available distributions, at the moment of the review.
[141002190390] |That will certainly increase the coolness factor of any Linux machine.
[141002190400] |And not only that, but the new notifications are quite useful and will unify otherwise separate elements of Ubuntu.
[141002190410] |Pidgin instant messages, update notifications, new emails, Transmission events, volume control and much more will appear in the same form: a really slick black box in the top right of the screen, complete with corresponding icons.
[141002190420] |It will stay on the screen for a few seconds and then fade away.
[141002190430] |When we first heard about this new feature, we were worried that it would turn out to be intrusive, covering buttons and other controls.
[141002190440] |Fortunately, that wasn't the case, as when one hovers the mouse on top of a notification, it will become almost transparent and let you have full access to whatever is underneath it. 
[141002190450] |With this new notification framework there is also a new icon on the top panel showing a small envelope.
[141002190460] |Here's a quick example of its functionality: when someone comes online in Pidgin, a green dot will appear in the corner of this envelope –clicking on it will open a menu from where you can quickly open a new conversation with said contact.
[141002190470] |Cool!
[141002190480] |Coming with GNOME 2.26.1, the default sound server is now PulseAudio.
[141002190490] |To complement it, the new volume control applet is more intuitive and easier to grasp. 
[141002190500] |Setting up Ubuntu the way we liked was quick and easy through the <em>System --  Preferences</em> menu.
[141002190510] |Resolution, themes, keyboard shortcuts, power management, preferred applications or startup applications, they are all there for quick customization.
[141002190520] |In a short amount of time, anybody can make Ubuntu work in the best way for them.
[141002190530] |I know that many users can perfectly live with their Ubuntu installation without ever touching the terminal, but more advanced tasks (and users) require typing a few commands in the Linux console, so we're still waiting for Canonical to include the handy "Open in terminal" Nautilus script in the right-click context menu by default. 
[141002190540] |All the entries in the "System Preferences" and "Administration" categories are pretty much self-explanatory so most users will immediately know where to go in order to change various settings.
[141002190550] |"Sessions," for example, is now called "Startup Applications," to remove any confusion.
[141002190560] |Ubuntu also makes it really easy for users to keep their systems up-to-date through Update Manager and its notifications (which, by the way, no longer sit quietly in their corner; a window pops to urge you to update your system whenever it is necessary).
[141002190570] |For a real headache-free experience, there is also an option to automatically install security updates without asking for confirmation. 
[141002190580] |<strong>Testing of various hardware</strong> 
[141002190590] |First of all, you should know that our Intel-based HP 550 laptop listed at the beginning of the article had no issues at all with the driver installed in Ubuntu 9.04 and the Compiz Fusion effects.
[141002190600] |It worked out of the box! 
[141002190610] |Ubuntu's number of supported hardware devices is continuously increasing and we're happy to report that most of our peripherals were instantly recognized and were ready to use in no time.
[141002190620] |Multimedia keys present on a lot of keyboards these days work perfectly with Ubuntu's default audio player, Rhythmbox; extra mouse buttons are also usable.
[141002190630] |Speaking of mice, the scroll wheel speed is still not configurable, but most users should be perfectly happy with the default speed. 
[141002190640] |We had an HP Deskjet 3845 printer and its recharged cartridges refused to leave any "traces" on the paper with the default, normal quality setting selected.
[141002190650] |Lowering it to draft yielded the expected print. Note that this problem is not Ubuntu-exclusive as it occurred in all Linux distributions that we used with that printer.
[141002190660] |A new cartridge will work with all the settings, but as Linux sees the recharged ones as almost empty, printing with the default quality doesn't work.
[141002190670] |The other printer that we tested, a Canon Selphy CP-740 is recognized by Ubuntu, but only if the user installs some packages and manually adds the printer.
[141002190680] |We also had an entry-level Trust TB-4200 graphical tablet that was far from performing as intended.
[141002190690] |The little light flashed to tell us that it was active, but hovering the stylus over the tablet didn't move the pointer (we had to actually push on the surface while dragging to move it), tapping on the tablet had no result and the other two buttons didn't work.
[141002190700] |What bothered us was the fact that the same tablet used to work just fine on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex).
[141002190710] |Sad! 
[141002190720] |On the brighter side, upon plugging in any other device, be it a digital camera, a USB stick or a mobile phone with a memory card, Ubuntu recommends actions for the different types of content and conveniently places corresponding icons on the desktop during the time they are mounted.
[141002190730] |Other than that, regular and USB headsets as well as most webcams play nicely with the Jaunty Jackalope. 
[141002190740] |In conclusion, we had no major problems that could not be easily fixed, with the hardware posted at the beginning of the review. 
[141002190750] |<strong>Testing of various applications</strong> 
[141002190760] |Ubuntu's software repository is known to be one of the biggest out there, with a very large collection of both Canonical-maintained and third-party applications.
[141002190770] |The default Jaunty installation comes with a great selection of open-source software.
[141002190780] |As you probably already know, the GNOME desktop environment chose to use Brasero as the default CD/DVD burning tool.
[141002190790] |Throughout the countless disc burning tasks that we performed, Brasero never failed us.
[141002190800] |It's speedy, it has all the features one needs, including file and image checksum, normalize option for Audio CDs and a basic cover editor. 
[141002190810] |In the office environment, Ubuntu 9.04 can be put to work right after installing it.
[141002190820] |With Evolution 2.26.1 being dramatically improved to support Microsoft Outlook formats and the popular OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 office suite, there's little reason to not be happy with Jaunty Jackalope.
[141002190830] |Unfortunately, just as it happened six months ago with Intrepid, OpenOffice.org was updated to version 3.1.0 a short while after Jaunty was released, so, most likely, users will have to either manually install the new version or wait for Karmic Koala.
[141002190840] |The default web browser is, as expected, Mozilla Firefox 3.0.
[141002190850] |Though not at its latest version, the first set of updates will include the most recent security and bug fixes.
[141002190860] |We're curious if Canonical will decide to upgrade it when the 3.5 version comes out... 
[141002190870] |Other Internet tools include Pidign 2.5.5 instant messaging client, Transmission 1.5.1 BitTorrent client and Vinagre 2.26.1 / Terminal Server Client 0.150 for remote desktop capabilities.
[141002190880] |The powerful Ekiga SIP and VoIP software is also there.
[141002190890] |There is a new utility in the Administration area: Computer Janitor, which will clean the unmaintained packages or erroneous files in your system.
[141002190900] |The integrated archive utility (File-Roller) was also improved and supports the powerful LZMA compression algorithm.
[141002190910] |For basic graphics and photography work, GIMP 2.6.6 and F-Spot Photo Manger will please just about any skilled or amateur individual. 
[141002190920] |Compiz, a major ego-scratcher for Linux users out there, was updated to a new version and we were delighted by the fact that finally GNOME and Compiz get along much better.
[141002190930] |In Ubuntu 8.10, having Compiz enabled would cause some really nasty graphical glitches when hovering the pointer over the window controls.
[141002190940] |Now, users don't have to install Emerald just to run away from that bug, as the new Compiz fixed it and you can fully enjoy Jaunty's great new themes. 
[141002190950] |<strong>Multimedia (Audio/Video)</strong> 
[141002190960] |Multimedia capabilities are clearly mandatory on a desktop operating system and Ubuntu had always been friendly with all kinds of video and audio formats.
[141002190970] |Still, for a full multimedia  experience, users should install the ubuntu-restricted-extras package from the repositories, which will ensure support for most formats. 
[141002190980] |As for the ever-popular Adobe Flash format, it evolved quite nicely in the last period of time and behaves much better than it did a few years ago.
[141002190990] |However, we've found a nasty problem with Adobe's Flash Player in the 64-bit edition of Ubuntu 9.04, because the 32-bit version is installed by default and you are unable to play most of the flash videos, such as the ones from YouTube and other popular video sharing websites.
[141002191000] |However, removing the 32-bit flash player and manually installing the 64-bit one (which right now is in alpha state), gives you a working flash player. 
[141002191010] |Though there are still some performance issues, especially when enjoying a Compiz-enabled desktop, Flash in Linux is undoubtedly on the right path. 
[141002191020] |<strong>Games</strong> 
[141002191030] |All work and no play makes Ubuntu a dull boy, therefore Jaunty Jackalope, just like its brothers, comes with the same GNOME game collection for your regular 5-minute fun.
[141002191040] |But, some of us often need more than Mahjongg and Four-in-a-Row to quench our video game thirst, and the Linux gaming scene still has a looong way to go until it reaches a respectable status.
[141002191050] |Nonetheless, slowly but surely, more and more games are becoming available on our beloved platform and developers are starting to hear our desperate prayers.
[141002191060] |Some of the more popular examples are "On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness" and "World of Goo," two great games that saw the light of day on the Linux platforms too.
[141002191070] |So, if you're a mad gamer, you will find a very attractive selection of open-source games available in Ubuntu's repositories, such as Sauerbraten, Open Arena, Nexuiz, Warsow, Warzone 2100. 
[141002191080] |Curious to see how Jaunty handles the pressure, we installed a bunch of them (including the demos for World of Goo and On the Rain-Slick...) and we really have no complaints.
[141002191090] |They all worked flawlessly.
[141002191100] |Moreover, World of Goo for Linux seemed to perform even better than its Windows version on the same hardware.
[141002191110] |Still, there are a lot of Windows-only games that we want to play and if you don't dual boot, the only option is to use Wine in order to enjoy your favorite games.
[141002191120] |Wine can easily be installed from the Ubuntu repositories and its supported game collection is growing every day.
[141002191130] |Unfortunately, on our older, less powerful systems, recent game performance in Wine makes them unplayable, at framerates well under the hardware's real capabilities.
[141002191140] |Still, there are many games that behave unexpectedly well, so it's a mixed bag. 
[141002191150] |<strong>Bugs</strong> 
[141002191160] |Unfortunately, on our systems (and from what we could gather, on many others), a quite annoying bug makes the PC speaker beep every time we shut it down.
[141002191170] |Disabling the alert sound and muting the corresponding control doesn't solve the problem.
[141002191180] |Most likely, this will get fixed pretty soon, as the submission on Launchpad shows a large number of affected systems. 
[141002191190] |Brasero, as great as it is, is plagued with a weird bug: whenever there's an active burning task in progress, keeping the little progress window not minimized will remove any keyboard functionality on the desktop.
[141002191200] |To better explain, clicking on the desktop will not make the window lose focus, thus the keyboard commands will only affect Brasero's interface.
[141002191210] |The workaround is to minimize the application into the notification area using its own icon. 
[141002191220] |Even if it's not the default filesystem, tested on five of our computers, the EXT4 filesystem performed quite pleasing.
[141002191230] |However, on the sixth machine there were some weird freezes when permanently deleting files.
[141002191240] |We had a quick look over Jaunty's release notes and apparently that is a known issue: <em>"In some cases, deleting files from an ext4 filesystem is reported to cause soft lock-ups in the kernel (330824).
[141002191250] |Investigation of this problem is ongoing, and it is expected that a fix for it will be made available as a post-release update."</em> 
[141002191260] |Another documented known issue consists of performance regressions on Intel graphics cards.
[141002191270] |And though there are many users reporting such problems, our Intel graphics powered HP 550 Notebook worked perfectly and was 3D-enabled right from the Live environment.
[141002191280] |For less fortunate users, there are some workarounds, but most would be better off with downgrading the driver. 
[141002191290] |<strong>Conclusions </strong>
[141002191300] |Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jacakalope) is no doubt worthy of the hype that surrounds it.
[141002191310] |Though far from being a massive overhaul (Karmic Koala will most likely take care of that), there are a lot of under-the-hood improvements and tweaks that allow Ubuntu to keep its Linux distro "crown."
[141002191320] |It's definitely not the perfect operating system but it appears that Ubuntu is on a clear ascending path. Hopefully, Canonical will be quick to fix some of the more obvious issues that could keep some from hopping on the Jaunty bandwagon.
[141002191330] |But for most, upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04 is a no-brainer.
[141002191340] |You'll get more speed, more stability, a better look, modern notifications and up-to-date software.
[141002191350] |Our final conclusion is that Ubuntu 9.04 is the perfect solution for daily office tasks and for most home users, except hardcore gamers (of course).
[141002360010] |<title>Ubuntu Review</title>
[141002360020] |Right after Ubuntu's fifth birthday it was time to celebrate once more, because a Karmic Koala was released, and it brought with it a lot of reasons to upgrade.
[141002360030] |If Ubuntu 9.10's smart looks haven't convinced you yet, maybe the fast boot times and overall enhanced performance will.
[141002360040] |You still don't know what Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) is all about?
[141002360050] |Then read on, we will clue you in.
[141002360060] |While writing this review, I tried to put myself in the "shoes" of a new Ubuntu user.
[141002360070] |This meant that I didn't go on to installing my favorite programs or setting up everything as I like right after installing the operating system, but instead I tried to make do with what Ubuntu provides in the default installation.
[141002360080] |Also, I tried to stay away from the terminal and, largely, succeeded in doing so.
[141002360090] |We've tested Ubuntu 9.10 over a period of one week on the following systems:
[141002360100] |<strong>Installing Ubuntu</strong>
[141002360110] |So, you download this freshly-prepared ISO image, write it to a CD, then you pop that back into the disk drive and reboot your computer.
[141002360120] |Assuming that your BIOS settings are correct, Ubuntu should start loading and, after a while, present you with an almost empty GNOME desktop.
[141002360130] |If you just want to see what this operating system is all about, you're free to wander around the menus and try out the applications –since this is a live session, the chances of doing something that will alter or destroy valuable data are slim to none.
[141002360140] |But if you're talking business, the Install icon is right there on the desktop, waiting for you to double click it.
[141002360150] |The average installation takes about 15 minutes, depending on the language options that you select and whether you have an active Internet connection or not, but you can be done with it in less than 10 minutes if you install from a USB drive.
[141002360160] |Most of the complicated partitioning schemes, like dual booting setups, are greatly automatized, and if you want to dedicate an entire hard drive to Ubuntu then your installation will be trouble-free for sure.
[141002360170] |Softpedia has covered the changes that the latest Ubiquity installer incorporates, and I think that the <a>feature slideshow</a> is a great addition that gives a brief but diverse overview of what Ubuntu has to offer, just perfect for new users as it may serve as a quick "which application does what" rundown.
[141002360180] |If you have installed previous Ubuntu versions, you won't have any problems in getting 9.04 on your machine.
[141002360190] |<strong>First impressions</strong>
[141002360200] |When the (short) installation process is done, restart the machine and get a real feel for the new and very polished boot process.
[141002360210] |At first you will get a minimalistic-looking splash screen with the Ubuntu logo in solid white on a black background, but after a few seconds the new X-based bootsplash will kick in.
[141002360220] |The developers were hoping to design a streamlined boot process that would be able to start XSplash very early and they nearly did just that in Alpha 6, but the kernel output was destroying its smooth and professional look so they decided to cover up the text with a (albeit short) USplash session.
[141002360230] |If you didn't enable automatic logins while installing, GDM (GNOME Display Manager) a.k.a. "the login screen" will disrupt the smooth journey to the desktop by asking you to pick a username and provide a password.
[141002360240] |The overall look is in line with the USplash theme, rendering a minimalistic and unobtrusive appearance, albeit a little too dark for my taste.
[141002360250] |After the credentials have been supplied, XSplash will return for a little while, which can be quite annoying.
[141002360260] |There is a good side to XSplash's extended presence on your screen.
[141002360270] |By the time GNOME has finished loading in the background, the X-based bootsplash will fade out and you will be given access to a completely ready desktop environment, no hidden load times here.
[141002360280] |The view to the wallpaper is unobstructed, the graphic itself being quite an improvement over the abstract and brownish ones that were included in previous Ubuntu versions, or the animal themes in the last few releases.
[141002360290] |At least for me, the golden sand dune can be too bright at times, but that can be mitigated by lowering the Gamma value in your video card control panel or by simply changing the wallpaper altogether, because you have a wide choice of stunning backdrops right from the get-to.
[141002360300] |The new icon set complements the minimalistic look that is present throughout various components, and the libnotify popups integrate well with everything else, sporting smooth fades and transparencies.
[141002360310] |<strong>Initial setup</strong>
[141002360320] |Probably the first thing that you notice and which you are familiar with is the Firefox icon on the top panel, next to the Help launcher.
[141002360330] |By using it you can quickly access a browser session, provided by Firefox 3.5.3 (version 3.5.4 was made available three-four days after the official release).
[141002360340] |As you're probably well-accustomed to this web browser, I won't go on about its security features and the customization possibilities.
[141002360350] |All you need to know is that it's there, and it's ready to be used.
[141002360360] |Let's see what the Ubuntu developers included for instant messaging.
[141002360370] |In the Internet menu is the Empathy IM Client, it can't be more obvious than that.
[141002360380] |You start it up and a wizard appears.
[141002360390] |I was expecting to configure my XMPP account in one go, but apparently Empathy's creators thought that everyone would be using Jabber.org's service, so they didn't provide a way to enter an alternative address in the wizard.
[141002360400] |The good thing was that the Network Error notification that followed suit had a big "Edit Account" button on it, but unfortunately the server setting was hidden under yet another "Advanced" group.
[141002360410] |After you've configured Empathy and your Contact List gets filled with your buddies, it's time to drop them a line and, preferably, some emoticons to express your feelings about this operating system that you have installed.
[141002360420] |Well, calling the chat window simple would be an overstatement; it's stripped down to the bare basics in fact.
[141002360430] |There are no formatting controls and, well, no buttons in it.
[141002360440] |If you want to insert an emoticon (not type one), you will either have to right-click the text area or click the "Conversation" menu and go into the "Insert Smiley" list.
[141002360450] |For me, that is pretty limited and cumbersome.
[141002360460] |When you close the Contact List, it simply disappears.
[141002360470] |You can access it from the Indicator Applet, but it takes a while to get used to not having a dedicated IM icon in the notification area.
[141002360480] |Aside from the lack of features, chatting in Empathy works as expected, and I didn't encounter any problems.
[141002360490] |Evolution Mail, on the other hand worked flawlessly.
[141002360500] |I started it up and I was greeted by a setup wizard through which I configured everything, quickly.
[141002360510] |My e-mail setup requires SSL, and it was right there, along with all the other relevant options.
[141002360520] |Upon finishing the wizard, my e-mails loaded up and, surprisingly, even my folders and starred items were correctly set up.
[141002360530] |However, there was no way I could convince Evolution to import my feed list, or to act as a feed reader.
[141002360540] |Thunderbird is quite a good aggregator, but Ubuntu's default e-mail client is simply not capable of doing that (there is a plugin, but it's not installed by default).
[141002360550] |After noticing Empathy's behavior when closing the Contact List, you would think that Evolution works in the same way.
[141002360560] |In fact it doesn't; once you close the window it's gone for good, and there appears to be no way you can configure it to remain active in the background.
[141002360570] |If your e-mail client stays opened all the time, like mine, you're stuck with a big window and with an entry in your taskbar all the time.
[141002360580] |<strong>Productivity applications</strong>
[141002360590] |With all communication problems sorted, let's figure out how Ubuntu can help us get some work done.
[141002360600] |In the Office menu you will find a dictionary application, Evolution and the well-known OpenOffice.org software suite.
[141002360610] |We knew for quite some time that Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) would incorporate OpenOffice.org 3.1.1.
[141002360620] |This office suite will take care of word documents, presentations, and spreadsheets, and after you get used to it you will see that it's as good as any other alternative office suite and in some cases better.
[141002360630] |Proprietary formats are well supported, and the faster startup times will cut down on the waiting period between clicking a document and actually starting to work on it.
[141002360640] |I'm not a big fan of Evolution GroupWare, but it seems that it is preferred in corporate environments to the detriment of other similar solutions or software suites.
[141002360650] |While it lacks some features that would come in handy, it balances them out with the easy setup, no-surprises interface, great stability and low resource usage.
[141002360660] |It incorporates a calendar, a task organizer and a memo manager, and users can import vCards, .csv, vCalendar files directly.
[141002360670] |Evolution works with all versions of Microsoft Exchange Server, with the exception of Exchange 2007.
[141002360680] |It can be synchronized with Palm Pilot devices with gnome-pilot, and OpenSync enables it to be synchronized with mobile phones and other PDAs.
[141002360690] |For graphics work we have an old-time classic that has been included in Ubuntu since the get-go.
[141002360700] |I was hoping that GIMP 2.8 would be ready in time for inclusion into Ubuntu 9.10, but that didn't happen, so instead we have the latest stable version, GIMP 2.6.7, which is about two months old.
[141002360710] |While it still doesn't feature layer grouping, it is the best free software alternative for graphics and image editing.
[141002360720] |Of course, since we are talking about productivity apps, including a good Solitaire card game application is a must.
[141002360730] |If you're a purist and you want to port your Windows habits to Ubuntu, you will find AisleRiot Solitare to be much more advanced than its proprietary counterpart.
[141002360740] |It features more than 20 different card games that you can play by yourself, including FreeCell, and if you get bored with it you can choose something else from the collection of logic, puzzle and action games that Ubuntu ships with.
[141002360750] |<strong>Multimedia support and connectivity</strong>
[141002360760] |After all this setting up it was time to relax a bit, maybe even watch a video or two on YouTube.
[141002360770] |So I started up Firefox and I didn't get anywhere fast, because there was no Abobe Flash support.
[141002360780] |Ubuntu worked on integrating a Firefox plugin that searches and installs the Adobe Flash Player with the package manager, but it appears that YouTube's custom scripts override that function, and instead it will point you to the official Adobe Flash download page.
[141002360790] |That complicates things a bit, because it misleads a new user into manually installing packages.
[141002360800] |If the user happens to stumble onto another page that doesn't have any custom scripts, Firefox's Adobe Flash plug-in finder will work correctly and you will be able to choose which Flash support package you want (Adobe's, of course) to install, enter your password and that's it.
[141002360810] |The speculation that Banshee will replace Rhythmbox circulated intensely during the initial development of Karmic Koala, but Rhythmbox remains the default music player and media management application in Ubuntu, for now.
[141002360820] |It is a fairly capable program that can accommodate both novice and more demanding users, and it features play queue and playlist management, multiple playback modes, Audio CD creation and import, podcast support, Last.fm scrobbling and, last but not least, device sync and management.
[141002360830] |Since some audio formats are restricted, if you load up an MP3 file you will be prompted to start a search for suitable codecs, then you can install them.
[141002360840] |However, Rhythmbox refused to play the file even after taking those steps, and it was necessary to quit and then run Rhythmbox again for it to work.
[141002360850] |Personal Media Players that use the MTP protocol for connecting to the computer have been a constant source of problems, but getting them to work is quite easy if you know where to look.
[141002360860] |If you plug one of these players into one of your computer's USB ports, you will see that Ubuntu itself recognizes the device and offers a variety of actions for it, but Rhythmbox doesn't appear to detect it.
[141002360870] |To get it to work you need to enable "Portable Players - MTP" in Rhythmbox's "Configure Plugins" Window, then your will be able to copy music to your player.
[141002360880] |MSC devices, those that can be manipulated like a regular USB drive, work without a hitch.
[141002360890] |One particular problem with Ubuntu's setup is that MP3 files, and possibly others, are set up to open with Totem, the video playback application, instead of Rhythmbox.
[141002360900] |I think the system is configured this way so that you can preview or listen single files quickly, and if you think they should be part of your collection you will copy them to your music folder.
[141002360910] |This mode of operation isn't fully configured either, because you will need to configure a music folder in Rhythmbox and eventually enable the new file detection in it.
[141002360920] |However, you can choose to open a file with another application by tweaking its properties.
[141002360930] |Although Totem has a simple interface, it is a powerful multimedia player.
[141002360940] |When the codecs required to play a file are missing, you will be prompted to install them in the same way that Rhythmbox does.
[141002360950] |Although I tend to think of media applications as video and audio players, Totem can do a bit of both.
[141002360960] |It's not a media management utility, but it supports playlists, subtitles, and when you're listening to music it can even display visualizations.
[141002360970] |A variety of formats are supported, even High-Defintion videos, such as H.264 encoded ones or the popular MKV container.
[141002360980] |If you plug in a digital camera, Ubuntu will detect its presence and a helper will be displayed, offering to open a Nautilus window to browse the photos on the camera, or to start up a very functional piece of software called F-Spot.
[141002360990] |This digital photography management application includes a set of very useful features that allow you to organize, tag, correct, export and, of course, view your photos.
[141002361000] |Although its interface can get quite busy, with the toolbar, sidebar and filmstrip all occupying a section of the screen, the number of functions packed in F-Spot is well worth it.
[141002361010] |The timeline slider and the extensions that can upload your photos to various online services definitely deserve being mentioned, and if you need extra functionality, the included extension finder may be able to help.
[141002361020] |Large file downloads, like ISO images, are being increasingly delivered through peer to peer networks like BitTorrent.
[141002361030] |Ubuntu bundles the Transmission application for torrent downloads.
[141002361040] |While it is a neat and simple to use application, Transmission could be enhanced by adding a first run wizard that will help new users set their download and upload limits so that the torrent traffic doesn't interfere with VoIP or web browsing.
[141002361050] |Once you downloaded one of those large ISO images, you will probably want to write it to a DVD or some other optical media.
[141002361060] |Simple disk creation and duplication tasks like image burning or data backup can be handled by Nautilus, which features a context menu entry for ISOs and a "Send To" item that enables you to add files to a data disk.
[141002361070] |More complicated tasks, like Audio CD or Video DVD mastering, can be done with the Brasero Disk Burner.
[141002361080] |It has a very intuitive interface and a lot of useful usage indications, but you won't find any multimedia editing features like DVD menu creation.
[141002361090] |Also, the annoying "Image Checksum" plugin is still enabled by default, initiating an integrity check of the written data immediately after finishing the burn process.
[141002361100] |Since most of today's computers and optical drives/disks are reliable enough, I think that the checksum plugin could be disabled by default, or even made to display a prompt asking if you want to check the written data.
[141002361110] |<strong>Ubuntu on notebooks</strong>
[141002361120] |Most of the notebooks on which we tested the new Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) had Intel chipsets, but even so, the level of out-of-the-box functionality is impressive.
[141002361130] |On both the HP ProBook 4510s and the Fujitsu-Siemens AMILO M1475G all the components were correctly recognized, the hotkeys worked, power management was a breeze, and not even using the hardware wireless switches was a problem.
[141002361140] |The volume wheel and the remote control on AMILO required no additional setup, and I was happy to see that the Bluetooth module on the HP ProBook was already set up and ready to be used.
[141002361150] |A very useful feature for notebook users is the home folder encryption option that is available when installing the system, since the data stored on laptops is more valuable than the device itself in most cases.
[141002361160] |Encrypted Private Directories was introduced in Ubuntu 8.10, but it wasn't enabled by default and, to actually secure data, the files had to reside in a special folder if they were to be encrypted.
[141002361170] |However, this approach relied on the user to store sensitive data in the private folder, and configuration files like Pidgin's logs or account settings were still vulnerable.
[141002361180] |Ubuntu 9.04 extended the encryption to cover the whole /home folder, but it still had to be set up manually.
[141002361190] |In Ubuntu 9.10, this feature is available at install time, and I must agree that it's a very efficient way of protecting your data.
[141002361200] |Instead of wasting precious resources by encrypting or decrypting common system files that are of no particular interest, it only secures the place in which the user stores its files, the /home folder.
[141002361210] |You need to take some precautions when you use the Encrypted Home Folder feature, to ensure that your data won't be rendered useless.
[141002361220] |By enabling it, the password that you set during setup is used to initially decrypt a much stronger passphrase, which in turn is used to decrypt the data.
[141002361230] |This generated passphrase is presented to you upon first boot, and it's recommended that you write it down or otherwise store it in a secure place, because it is vital to the recovery of the data, should something go wrong.
[141002361240] |If you forget your password and lose this passphrase, your files will be locked, and the chances of recovering them with a brute force attack are slim.
[141002361250] |<strong>Application management</strong>
[141002361260] |Since there is no feed aggregator preinstalled and Evolution can't do us the favor of fetching the news, the only choice left is to install one.
[141002361270] |If you have been paying attention to the images on Ubuntu's installer, then you know about Ubuntu Software Center.
[141002361280] |Add that to the fact that this program is accessible directly from the Applications Menu, and it's not that hard to guess where a new user will go when looking for software to install.
[141002361290] |So, let's see if Ubuntu Software Center can help us get a feed aggregator.
[141002361300] |Do a search for "feed," pick one of the listed applications, and in the information page there is an "Install" button that needs to be clicked.
[141002361310] |After you enter your password the application is installed –it couldn't get much simpler than that.
[141002361320] |When the idea of replacing "Add/Remove Applications" first appeared, some voices argued that Ubuntu already had too many different ways to access the repositories and that they should be consolidated.
[141002361330] |That didn't happen at this time (maybe in later versions), but "Add/Remove Applications" was definitely replaced with a worthy successor.
[141002361340] |Ubuntu Software Center is a friendly application that has well-defined software categories, built-in search and detailed package information.
[141002361350] |The Synaptic Package Manager is still included, but its interface and features are aimed at the advanced crowd, so the Ubuntu Software Center is a great resource for new users.
[141002361360] |<strong>Bugs</strong>
[141002361370] |I must say that I consider Empahty to be a serious "bug."
[141002361380] |Although its inclusion into this release is probably similar to the way PulseAudio was adopted, Empathy is seriously lacking in some respects.
[141002361390] |The audio/video chat function is often unstable or unusable, the configuration options are spartan at best and the account manager and creation tool is complicated and often unintuitive.
[141002361400] |The latest Pidgin developments have initial multimedia chat support, and the available plugins make it an extremely versatile tool that shouldn't have been replaced so easily.
[141002361410] |<strong>Conclusion</strong>
[141002361420] |If you read this review from top to bottom, you will see that many of the software installation/customization tasks were related to the lack of support for some technologies, like Adobe Flash or the MP3 audio format.
[141002361430] |Support for them, along with many other useful things like fonts, a Java virtual machine and DVD playback can be added to the system by simply installing the Ubuntu Restricted Extras package, with the Ubuntu Software Center app.
[141002361440] |All those separate knick-knacks could be done away with a single move if the Ubuntu developers created an after-installation prompt that would clearly lay out the associated licensing problems and through which the Ubuntu restricted extras package could be installed at the press of a button.
[141002361450] |Aside from that, Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) is a great operating system.
[141002361460] |The hardware support is excellent, and the resource requirements are lower than in many commercial operating systems.
[141002361470] |The bundled software package is quite useful and it perfectly fits the needs of a novice or business-oriented user.
[141002361480] |If you're familiar with the previous incarnations of this operating system, Ubuntu 9.10 will appear to you as a mere visual overhaul over its predecessors, but there are many more subtle changes under the hood.
[141002361490] |Taking a look at the bigger picture, the Ubuntu family of operating systems is expanding.
[141002361500] |You can now base your distributed server infrastructure on the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, and if you own a Dell netbook you can even try out the Ubuntu Moblin Remix.
[141002361510] |Last but not least, I personally hoped that Lubuntu, the lightweight XFCE-based community-developed distribution, would be accepted among the officially supported editions, but it looks like we will have to wait until <a><strong>Ubuntu 10.04</strong></a> for that.