Firefox 3.5 - A Really Impressive Release

Firefox 3.5 was released just a couple of hours ago and it comes with great new features and a new version of Gecko, the rendering engine. Firefox is currently the most popular browser on the Linux platform and the top choice on Windows after Internet Explorer (although there are statistics showing it beats IE in terms of popularity in some countries).

Firefox 3.5 running in Ubuntu 9.04

Maybe the most important new feature in this release, at least for the open-source community, is the support for the video and audio tags, which make possible to view movies in the open video format Ogg Theora. These can be embedded in web pages just like YouTube videos are, but without the need of Flash. Besides, you can also directly download the video by right clicking on it. Mozilla has put up on their homepage an example of how this works.

Firefox 3.5 comes with support for open video formats - notice that you can save the videos to your computer

Another new feature is the presence of a plus sign next to the tab to the left, just like Google Chrome and Opera 10 have, this button allowing you to open a new, empty tab.

New tab button

According to the official website, 3.5 is twice as fast compared to 3.0.x, and that is due to the new version of Gecko, the rendering engine used by Firefox, which reached now version 1.9.1.

Another new feature introduced in Firefox 3.5 is the private browsing mode (accessible via the Tools -> Start Private Browsing menu entry), which allows you to browse the web safely, without leaving any browsing history behind after exiting this mode.

Private browsing - another new feature of 3.5

Another new feature is the ability to clear just the browsing history of the last couple of hours, which is very useful when you want to get rid of this history, but keep things like the number you accessed a web page for faster access in the awesome bar.

Firefox gets more powerful with each new release, and this one made no exception. To mention some other cool features, there is the RSS reader, over 60,000 available add-ons on the Mozilla add-ons site, the awesome bar which makes accessing web pages very fast, the integrated search engines (available via Ctrl+K), support for themes, session restore, spell-checker, not to mention a huge community and available documentation.

I liked Firefox 3.5 very much, especially the open video format support, and the fact that it didn't get more bloated with this new release.

Tip of the Day: Make a Memory Usage Script

Here's a simple memory usage script made in Bash, which will use the parsed output of free -tom utility. First, here is what the -tom argument stands for:

-t displays a line containing the total amount of memory (physical memory + swap)
-o disables the display of a buffer line
-m displays sizes in MB

Here goes the script, which outputs the total, used and free memory:

#!/bin/bash

# total memory
memt=$(free -tom | grep "Total:" | awk '{print $2}')
# used memory
memu=$(free -tom | grep "Total:" | awk '{print $3}')
# free memory
memf=$(free -tom | grep "Total:" | awk '{print $4}')
echo "Total memory: $memt MB"
echo "Used memory: $memu MB"
echo "Free memory: $memf MB"

You can put this in a file of your choice, say memory.sh, make it executable (chmod 755 memory.sh), put it inside ~/bin (or a directory of your choice) and then include that directory in your $PATH, so you'll be able to run the script just by typing memory.sh.

How-To: Compile and Install Amarok 2.1.1 in Ubuntu 9.04

Amarok 2.1.1 was released on June 17th and it includes several bug fixes and a few new features compared to 2.1. Among the new features worth mentioning: there is available support for compilations with over 60 artists, there is an option to hide the context view now. For a full list of changes and bug fixes, have a look at the announcement on the official website.

Kubuntu 9.04 ships with 2.0, so to get the latest Amarok you can either use the PPA repository (which can be a little delayed) or compile from source. Here are the steps you need to follow in order to compile 2.1.1 from source:

1. Install the development libraries
In Konsole or GNOME Terminal, type:

sudo apt-get build-dep amarok

This will fetch and install the development packages needed to compile the latest Amarok release. Also, install these packages too:

sudo apt-get install libtag-extras-dev libmysql++-dev libgdk-pixbuf-dev libgtk2.0-dev

2. Get the source tarball
Download the Amarok source tarball from here, then uncompress it:

tar -xjf amarok-2.1.1.tar.bz2

3. Compile and install Amarok
You may need to remove your existing Amarok installation first:

sudo apt-get remove --purge amarok

(Notice that this will erase your entire Amarok settings, scripts, ratings etc. *Skip* this step if you want to keep those!)

rm -rf ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/
rm ~/.kde/share/config/amarok*

Then, make sure the current working directory is amarok-2.1.1 and type:

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr
make
sudo make install

For the last command you will need to enter your user password. This should be all, just fire up Amarok and 2.1.1 should be running now.

Yakuake - Great Quake-Like Terminal Application for KDE4

A while ago I wrote an article called 13 Terminal Emulators for Linux, where I briefly reviewed all those popular shell-like applications and a few flavours of xterm or rxvt. In this article I will talk about Yakuake, a powerful terminal application for Linux, and also the KDE counterpart of Tilda in GNOME.

Yakuake running in Kubuntu 9.04

Yakuake is a Quake-like terminal, which means it behaves just like any console in Quake or usual first-person shooter games. It supports global keybindings and can be invoked with F12 and hided with the same keyboard shortcut when you finished your job with it. This way it will run in background but it won't eat your taskbar or system tray space.


Among the features Yakuake ships with are:
- global keybindings (F12 shows/hides the console)
- the ability to inherit Konsole's settings
- transparency effects, it also supports backgrounds
- it supports profiles
- configurable size and animation


Yakuake currently has an updated page on kde-apps.org, but the other homepage doesn't seem to be maintained at the moment (here). Just use the kde-apps.org page for now. In Kubuntu, you can use sudo apt-get install yakuake to get version 2.9.4.

Yakuake is a powerful and pretty popular terminal application for KDE, and maybe the perfect alternative to Konsole. It doesn't stay in the way of the user and it can inherit the settings of Konsole too.

How-To: Compile and Install digiKam 1.0.0 Beta 1 in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

digiKam is a free photo management application for KDE, and probably the best alternative to Picasa from Google. digiKam includes many photo retouching and photo manipulation functions, and it allows to organise your collection into albums.

Kubuntu 9.04 comes with version 0.10 for KDE4, but in the first beta of version 1.0 was released on June 9. Here are several easy steps for compiling digiKam from source and installing it on a Ubuntu/Kubuntu Jaunty machine.

1. Install the needed dependencies
In a terminal window, type:

sudo apt-get build-dep digikam

This command will fetch all the needed development libraries and the meta package build-essential, which includes compilation tools.

2. Get the source code
Next, download the source code from the official homepage of digiKam, then uncompress it:

tar -xjf digikam-1.0.0-beta1.tar.bz2

3. Compile and install digiKam
Make sure the current working directory is digikam-1.0.0-beta1, then type the following:

cmake .
make
sudo make install

For the last command you will need the user password. Compilation may take a while, so have patience. Once the installation is over, you can start digiKam by either typing digikam in a terminal window or pressing Alt+F2 and typing digikam in the run box that appears.

digiKam 1.0.0 Beta 1 running in Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

digiKam homepage
Download digiKam source from SourceForge.net project page

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

SMPlayer uses the mplayer engine for displaying videos and it's one of the most powerful and popular video players out there. Built using the Qt 4 toolkit, SMPlayer offers great features and it's highly customisable.

The latest version is 0.6.7, which brings experimental support for DVD menus and several other improvements and bug fixes over the previous release, 0.6.6. Here are several steps to follow in order to build SMPlayer from source in Debian Lenny:

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

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

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

apt-get update

2. Install the needed dependencies
As root, type:

apt-get build-dep smplayer
apt-get install devscripts

This will install the tools needed to build SMPlayer and also the development libraries on which it depends.

3. Download the source tarball and uncompress it
Get the latest source for SMPlayer (which is 0.6.7 at the time of writing) from the official website (the file is called smplayer-0.6.7.tar.bz2). To uncompress it, make sure the current working directory is the one where you saved the source and type:

tar -xjf smplayer-0.6.7.tar.bz2

4. Compile and install SMPlayer
Change the working directory to smplayer-0.6.7 and issue the commands:

make QMAKE=/usr/share/qt4/bin/qmake

And to install it type as root:

make install

This should be all. SMPlayer should be inside /usr/local/bin/smplayer.

Miro 2.0 - Watch TV Podcasts and Videos in HD

Miro is an open-source and cost-free application for watching Internet TV in high definition quality. It's available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

The latest release is 2.0.5 and it was released on June 25, and some of the features it comes with are:
- watch Internet videos in HD, subscribe to many, completely free podcasts
- resume playing to where you stopped a video last time
- support for many video formats (including MKV, AVI, Quicktime)
- it allows the creation of video playlists
- support for the BitTorrent protocol
- support for audio podcasts
- Miro can search and download videos from sites like YouTube or Yahoo!

Usual interface when Miro starts

Beside being an Internet TV application, Miro can also play various video files, including AVI, WMV or MPEG. It also supports Matroska MKV video files, but it won't play SWF ones.

Miro playing an MKV video file

Miro comes by default with several HD podcasts, for example Wild Life or INSERT, so you can start downloading and viewing them immediately. One of the drawbacks is that Miro doesn't seem able to play Shockwave Flash videos (SWF), so you will have to use a player like mplayer for those.

Watching a Wildlife video podcast in HD

Miro also allows to download torrents and also to subscribe to torrent feeds, then access them from within Miro. The default website included is LegalTorrents, which provides completely legal and free audio and video torrents.

Download torrents from within Miro and watch them

I think Miro is just great for watching TV podcasts. You can download entire videos and even make personal collections depending on your preferences. Another plus is the support for BitTorrent protocol.

Official Miro homepage

Eschalon Review: Commercial Role-Playing Game for Linux

Eschalon is a turn-based RPG (role-playing game), which tries to reproduce the feeling of classic RPG games. It's closed-source, available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, and it comes with a demo too. The full version is available as a download for $19.95.

The currently available version is Eschalon Book I, and you can download the demo from the official website. To start the game, uncompress the tarball and run it as ./Eschalon\ Book\ I\ Demo from a terminal or just double-click the Eschalon Book I Demo executable.

The game uses OpenGL and a native resolution of 800x600, which is also the only resolution available. It can be run in either windowed mode or fullscreen.

The Launch menu - you can select the graphics renderer and toggle the windowed/fullscreen modes here

Upon starting a new game, you will get to choose a character, including its origin, axiom and class (e.g. healer, rogue, fighter etc.). You can also spend skill and attribute points for adding certain skills or increasing attribute. For example, you can buy skills like Light Armor or Survival for 3 skill points each, and increase attributes like Strength, Speed or Wisdom for 1 point each. After selecting your character and deciding on what to spend the points, the actual playing part begins.

The character editor - choose a character and spend skill and attribute points

Playing the demo

In my opinion, the major drawback of Eschalon: Book I is the low resolution. 800x600 just doesn't cut it anymore these days, and it can look a little ugly on big screens or too small when ran in windowed mode. On the other hand, the good thing is that Eschalon provides a demo. Book II is also on its way, and, according to the homepage, it will provide a native resolution of 1024x768.

As a conclusion, Eschalon can be a good solution for those who like RPG games and don't care about a high resolution. The price is not high, it comes with a manual in PDF format, and it's addictive once you grasp the way to play it.

6 Bash Productivity Tips

1. Use !!
Typing !! followed by Enter will bring back and execute the last command (same as Ctrl+P followed by Enter).

2. Use Emacs-like shortcuts
Emacs-like shortcuts make use of the Ctrl and Alt keys, and the big advantage of navigating and manipulating text in a Bash prompt is that you won't have to move your fingers away from the typing position (to access the arrow keys, or the Home, Page Up and Page Down keys). Notice that most of those work well inside manual pages too, or when using the Nano editor, or the less and more pagers.

Ctrl+D - or EOF (end-of-file) will quit the current Bash session
Ctrl+P - bring back the last command executed
Ctrl+N - bring the next command executed
Ctrl+U - delete all from the cursor to the left
Ctrl+K - delete all from the cursor to the right
Ctrl+B - go back one character
Ctrl+F - go forward one character
Alt+B - go back one word
Alt+F - go forward one word

3. Make manual pages coloured
I think this tip is a productivity tip because once a manual page is shown coloured, it is easier, clearer to read. Just add the following inside the ~/.bashrc file, where ~ is your home directory (notice that each line starts with export):

export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$'\E[01;31m' # begin blinking
export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[01;38;5;74m' # begin bold
export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m' # end mode
export LESS_TERMCAP_se=$'\E[0m' # end standout-mode
export LESS_TERMCAP_so=$'\E[38;5;246m' # begin standout-mode - info box export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m' # end underline
export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[04;38;5;146m' # begin underline

Then, type:

source ~/.bashrc

And try any manual page (e.g. man bash). Here's how a coloured man page looks like using the presets above:

Coloured man page

4. Use your own scripts
If you have basic knowledge of Bash scripting, you can create scripts and put them in a directory included in your $PATH. You can use something like ~/bin or ~/usr/bin, where ~ is your home directory.

5. Copy/paste using Shift+Insert
Although this one is not Bash-specific, it's very useful when you need to quickly copy/paste some text in your terminal. The same can be accomplished using the middle-click mouse button.

6. Use aliases
One of the powerful features of Bash is that it makes use of aliases. Those are usually short commands which perform some associated, longer command or commands. For example, to update and upgrade your Ubuntu installation you would type sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade, and to create an alias for it you would only have to add something like the following inside the ~/.bashrc file:

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

Now, each time you type update, the command inside the single quotes will be executed.

Have some other tips that others may find useful? Please share them in the comments below.

How-To: Compile and Install Kaffeine 0.8.8 in Debian Lenny

Kaffeine is a powerful video player for KDE, using the Xine engine. The latest KDE3 release is 0.8.8, which fixes some bugs and introduces S2 support.

These are a few steps to follow in order to compile Kaffeine on Debian Lenny (which ships by default with 0.8.7):

1. Make sure the sources repositories are enabled
Edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file as root (e.g. su; nano /etc/apt/sources.list) and make sure a line which starts with deb-src and looks like the one below is available:

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

Next, update the sources lists:

su
apt-get update

2. Download the source code
Get the source from the official homepage, here, then uncompress it:

tar -xjf kaffeine-0.8.8.tar.bz2

3. Install the needed dependencies
As root, type:

apt-get build-dep kaffeine
apt-get install libcdio-paranoia-dev

The library libcdio-paranoia-dev is needed in order to get rid of the error ERROR: Could not find cdparanoia headers.

This will install build-essential and the development libraries needed to compile Kaffeine.

4. Compile and install Kaffeine
Just follow the usual steps:

./configure
make
make install

The last one as root. If you want to install Kaffeine as local user, use:

./configure --prefix=/home/USER/usr
make
make install

No root required for the last command. This should do it.

Opera 10 Beta - Preview and Screenshots

The last time I had a look at Opera 10 it was in alpha state, meaning no new features were introduced, and only the rendering engine was replaced with a newer one compared to 9.x series. This first Opera 10 beta comes with various new features.

According to the announcement on the official website, the new rendering engine is 40% faster, the speed dial has been improved, the design was changed compared to 9.64, there is now a resizable search field, and a new browsing mode for slow connections, called Opera Turbo.

The first thing that jumped in my eyes was the new interface, Opera 10 beta using a blue theme, different from the black one used in 9.6x. Here's how it looks:


Opera allows now for tabs to be resized, and previews of the web pages loaded in them are shown in the tab space. Here's a screenshot to make this clearer:

Resizable tabs

Presto, the rendering engine used by Opera, has also been improved, and if we take into account what the official website says, it should be up to 40% faster compared to older versions. The Acid3 score for Opera 10 was maximum, 100/100, while Firefox 3.0 got 72/100 and Google Chrome unstable for Linux got 99/100.

Opera Acid3 Test - 100/100

The location bar (also called search field) can also be resized, leaving more space to the fast search box to the right.

Opera 10 has support for widgets too, just like older versions. Here's a crossword game, running inside Opera:

Crossroad widget running in Opera

As always, Opera provides packages for various Linux distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE or Mandriva.

Opera 10 beta comes with all the additional features its users are already used with: integrated BitTorrent, IRC and email clients, support for widgets, a sidebar which provides access to stuff like bookmarks or even notes. On top of this, Opera is highly configurable, allowing you to configure each and every aspect of it, from keyboard shortcuts to the user agent. Just like Firefox, it comes with an about:config configuration utility.

Opera 10 already looks very promising, and it's just in beta phase. Though closed-source, it always managed to keep its marketshare throughout the years, it provides very good Linux support (really, I don't know many - even open-source - projects who provide installation packages for so many distributions), it comes with Flash by default, and it's very fast at rendering web pages.

Minirok 2.0 - Minimalist Audio Player for KDE4

Introduction
Written in Python, Minirok is a minimalist audio player which ships with a simple and intuitive interface, which kind of resembles the Amarok 1.4 interface, except all the major features were removed.

The latest version was released on June 1st, and it is the first release for KDE4. If you want the KDE3 version (although it is rather poor when it comes to features), you can download and install release 0.9.2 from the official homepage.

What does it do?
First of all, it plays music. Minirok is very lightweight when it comes to resources and if you need a simple player with basic features for KDE4 you're tired of Amarok or JuK, then probably it's time to give Minirok a try.

Minirok can't compete with a player like Amarok in terms of features, but it definitely is a good player for its category of small, fast and non resource-hungry applications.

Minirok 2.0 - clean and simple

The playlist is simple, resembling the one from Amarok 1.4, and you can choose which fields are to be shown and which not. Available fields are Track, Artist, Album, Title and Length. At the moment Minirok does not provide a way of sorting or saving the playlist, but the last playlist used is loaded automatically when Minirok is restarted.

It even supports Last.fm song submission, but you will need to install and configure lastfmsubmitd, a daemon which runs in the background and can be used by other players too (like MOC for example, which I reviewed here).

Minirok supports global keybindings, it allows songs queuing, random mode, repeat track or playlist, stop playing after a certain track. This release is still the first one in the 2.x series, so several features are still missing. For example the Configure Toolbars dialogue is empty, while adding music is done only via keyboard, by typing the path to the music directory in the drop-down text box on the left.

Update: There was a problem with the play/pause and stop buttons, which were not visible in the environment in which I tried Minirok, Kubuntu 9.04 with KDE 4.2 and all the updates to date. I'll come back with more info on this as soon as I get to try it again. (Thanks go to Adeodato Simó, the Minirok author, for pointing this out for me)

Configuring Minirok

Installation
You should be able to run Minirok easily. After downloading the minirok-2.0.tar.gz package from the homepage, uncompress it and run the minirok.py script, which is already executable. On Ubuntu for example, you may need to install two packages, python-mutagen and python-gst0.10:

sudo apt-get install python-mutagen python-gst0.10

With your user password. Then run python.py by either double-clicking on it or in a Konsole using:

./python.py

Conclusion
If you only want to listen to music and you don't care about advanced features, then give Minirok a try. It's definitely not bloated, it ships with a clean interface integrated into KDE4 and provides the minimum options needed to manipulate the playlist.

Fire.fm - Firefox Add-on for Last.fm Radio and More

I've recently started to make a post every two or three days (well, except for the period the blog was inactive) in which I review a potential useful Firefox add-on. Today I decided upon Fire.fm, an add-on which will integrate Last.fm in Firefox and will allow you to play music directly from within your browser.

For those of you who are not familiar with Last.fm, it is a music service which allows you to listen to custom radio stations, submit the music you listen to, make friends, talk on forums, create and join groups of listeners and discuss various music topics, and much more. I think its the greatest music service available today, and it's free (well, except for the radio subscription which was recently introduced).

Fire.fm toolbar and integration into Firefox

Fire.fm is a free, BSD-licensed add-on for Firefox . You can download and install it from the Mozilla add-ons page, restart Firefox and grant permission to login into your Last.fm account.

Fire.fm allows you to select which radio station you want to play, it controls the volume, and it also creates a Last.fm toolbar which you can enable or disable, just like the one for StumbleUpon. Fire.fm is customisable and will also create a Tools menu entry, for quick access the all the functions it provides.

Preferences

I warmly recommend Fire.fm to those who listen to Last.fm radio and don't need an audio player (or their client), preferring instead to use the web browser.

The menu entry

Download and Install Fire.fm from the Mozilla add-ons page
Official website

Amarok 2.1 Review - New Features, But Still Lagging Behind 1.4

One of the new additions which are noteworthy to mention for Amarok 2.1 is the introduction of the classic playlist (the one from 1.4) and also the playlist editor.

Amarok 2.1 - Changed widgets interface

The playlist can still be a mess, with songs from albums mixed throughout the entire playlist or compilations which are shown separately for each individual artist. Still, there is no keyboard shortcut to search through the playlist (like Alt+E in Amarok 1.4). There is now an Update Collection option under the Tools menu, just like in 1.4, so you won't need to rescan the collection each time you add some new music to it.

The good thing about this release is that users who liked more the older, classic playlist can switch to it now. Besides this, there is also a playlist editor available, which lets you decide which fields are shown and which not:

Playlist Layout Editor

Classic playlist

The interface is more appealing now, and the blue really looks very good. The central widget is better organised now, offering easier access to lyrics or Wikipedia information.

Lyrics and Wikipedia widgets

Amarok 2.1 comes with 7 different internet services, including Jamendo and Magnatune music stores, Last.fm integration and Podcast Directory. The podcast directory integration is really great and useful, and it will fetch large lists of podcasts from various domains. Notice that you'll have to drag the selected podcast in order to add it to the playlist (although good functionality, this should be available in a context menu too when right-clicking the podcast). Also, for me every podcast refused to play, and Amarok issued the error "Too many errors encountered in the playlist. Playback stopped". Adding a large number of podcasts can make it freeze and render it unusable.

Podcast Directory service

The Last.fm integration is very good, and it provides your profiles information directly inside Amarok. You can listen to Last.fm radio, submit the tracks you are playing, see neighbours and friends (and play their personal radio), love and skip tracks.

Last.fm inside Amarok

I noticed Amarok won't fetch covers from local folders, and the Amazon cover fetching seems to be pretty poor. Also, I have albums with names which go like Dark Side of the Moon [Twentieth Anniversary Edition] or Let There Be Rock [2003 Remaster] and the covers are not retrieved for those ones. This is where local cover fetching would be very useful, just like in 1.4.

Bottom up, Amarok still lacks several major features, not to mention usability, but it's obvious that 2.1 has made some progresses compared to 2.0. There is no equalizer, many bugs, the playlist can get a little messy. As most of Amarok's fans know by now, Amarok 2.x can't be compared with 1.4 in terms of features yet, but (hopefully) these will be implemented. It's just that it takes way too much time.

Tip of the Day: Rip DVDs With Thoggen

Thoggen is a DVD ripping application built in GTK, featuring a simple and easy-to-use interface and allowing the creation of Ogg Theora video files. That's the nice thing about Thoggen: it creates videos using a completely free video codec.

Thoggen can work with DVDs, but it also supports opening DVD ISO images or reading a DVD directory which contains the VIDEO_TS folder. Notice that for encrypted DVDs you may need libdvdcss2. To install this library on Debian you can use the debian-multimedia.org repositories, and on Ubuntu you can use the repositories provided by Medibuntu.

Select which titles you want to rip (each title will be placed in a separate output file)

The latest release of Thoggen is 0.7.1 and you can install it using:

- in Ubuntu, with your user password:

sudo apt-get install thoggen

- in Debian, with root password:

su
apt-get install thoggen

Thoggen will allow you to select the size of the desired output file or its video bitrate, you can edit the Title and Comment tags and will also allow to resize the video. Very simple but efficient. It doesn't support subtitles though, so if you need a more powerful ripper, use dvd::rip (or K9Copy in KDE).

Available settings for the output file

Ripping can take a while

3 Ways to Install Latest Wine in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

I decided to put up this guide which shows how to install the latest Wine release in Ubuntu 9.04 using 3 different methods. The default Jaunty repositories come with Wine 1.0.1, but the latest release is 1.1.24 and a new version is available every two weeks, so here is a tutorial which explains how to get the last Wine release in Ubuntu or Kubuntu Jaunty.

I. Using the Wine PPA
A PPA (Personal Package Archives) is a separate repository which ships newer packages for various applications. You can use a PPA repository for installing newer versions of Amarok, or Wine, or Banshee etc. These repositories are hosted on Launchpad.

In order to get the latest Wine available, you can follow these easy steps:

1. Add the Wine PPA repositories to the /etc/apt/sources.list file
Open the /etc/apt/sources.list file as root with your favourite text editor (e.g. gksudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list or sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list) and enter your user password. Then add the following two lines to this file and save it:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-wine/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-wine/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

You can also use Shift+Insert here. Then make sure to save the file and update the sources lists:

sudo apt-get update

After updating, this warning may appear:

W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net jaunty Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 5A9A06AEF9CB8DB0
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

You can either ignore it, or (optionally), install the trusted key for these repositories. In order to get the key, follow the instructions from here. Notice that this is an optional step, so you can skip it or add the key later.

Then, install Wine:

sudo apt-get install wine

Press Y when it asks to install packages from untrusted sources. This should be all, the latest Wine should be now installed (at the time of writing, the version available in this PPA is 1.1.23).


II. Compile and Install Wine from Source
This method needs more time, but this way you get to compile your own version of Wine, without using any additional repositories. Here's what you have to do:

1. Install the needed dependencies and compiling tools
First, make sure you have the sources repositories enabled, that is, a line which starts with deb-src and looks like this:

deb-src http://ro.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty universe multiverse

Notice that in Jaunty these are enabled by default, so, unless you deleted this line from the /etc/apt/sources.list file, you don't have to add anything here.

Next, type the following:

sudo apt-get build-dep wine

This command will fetch all the needed development libraries for compiling Wine, including the package build-essential, which is a meta-package consisting of tools needed to compile C/C++ sources like g++.

2. Get the Wine tarball from the official website
Download the Wine source from the official website (direct link here) and uncompress it (e.g. tar -xjf wine-1.1.24.tar.bz2).

3. Compile and install Wine
Make sure the current working directory is wine-1.1.24 (or whatever version you have), and issue the following commands:

./configure
make depend && make
sudo make install

This should be all. Notice that you can also use a different path and install as normal user:

./configure --path=/home/USER/usr
make depend && make
make install

This will install Wine inside the /home/USER/usr directory (replace USER with your username). In this case, make sure /home/USER/usr/bin is added to your $PATH variable, preferable before the other paths.


III. Using the WineHQ Ubuntu repositories
This is yet another method of getting the latest Wine on Ubuntu. It is similar with the first method, but instead of adding a PPA repository we'll add the WineHQ repositories. Follow the steps below:

1. Add the repositories to /etc/apt/sources.list
Add the following repositories to your sources.list file:

deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt jaunty main

2. Update the sources lists
To update the sources lists use:

sudo apt-get update

With your user password.

3. Install Wine
To install Wine, just type:

sudo apt-get install wine

And this should be all.

Songbird 1.2.0 - 10-band Equalizer Now Included

It's been a while since I had a look at Songbird, and that was when 1.0 came out. The new release was put out a little earlier this month and comes with a brand new equalizer, a new mode to auto-organise media files included in the collection and Last.fm radio integration.

However, the most awaited feature is probably the 10-band equalizer and it is available using the Controls -> Equalizer menu option (or Ctrl+E). Here's how it looks:



As you can see, unfortunately there are no default presets available, but maybe the next version will include some.

A pre-compiled Linux version is available for download on the official website, so you can just uncompress the file you downloaded, copy the Songbird directory somewhere inside your home folder and run the songbird script to start it.

Songbird 1.2.0

The metadata editor is somewhat similar with that of Amarok 1.4, and you can use Alt+N and Alt+P to switch to the next and, respectively, previous track:

Editing tags

A very useful add-on for Songbird is the mashTape extension, which retrieves various information about the currently playing song: mashTape show Last.fm artist biography, reviews from various specialised websites, news, photos and even videos.

Some other noteworthy features which come with Songbird are:

- the ability to fetch album covers
- integrated, fully functional web browser based on the Mozilla browser
- support for themes, called 'feathers' by Songbird
- Last.fm and Shoutcast radio (available through two add-ons which can be installed when Songbird starts for the first time or afterwards, from the official website)
- Songbird displays concert dates for artists on demand
- it offers a huge number of fields to sort the playlist
- integrated 7digital music store

MashTape configuration

Still, there are several drawbacks which don't look like they have been fixed: the fonts are too small and it doesn't seem to be a method to increase their size; the cover art is not retrieved from local folders.

Overall, 1.2.0 is a new step in the development of Songbird and it surely cannot dissapoint its users.

Official homepage

FlashGot: Yet Another Extension for Downloading Media Files in Firefox

It's been a while since my last post. This article is about FlashGot, another Firefox extension which is similar to DownloadHelper, and allows to download all the links, video and audio files from a web page.

The great thing about FlashGot is that it correctly detects and uses various download managers installed on the system. For example, it detected the KDE3 download manager on my machine, KGet. However, I think it's better to use the browser built-in downloader.
FlashGot can be configured to download only certain types of files, or fetch only media files, the menu entries are configurable so you can add or remove specific options. Below are several screenshots:

Downloading media files from YouTube

Choosing default download manager

About FlashGot

Install FlashGot from the Mozilla Add-ons page
Official homepage