I love MusicBrainz Picard. It keeps my music collection organized, tags and renames them, and heck even fetches the cover art for (almost) all songs. Picard is just brilliant.
And the icing on the cake – its FOSS & cross platform. And it was working fine – till couple of days ago.
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LiveCDs are a great way to try out (new) Linux distros on your system. 
Unfortunately CDs get scratched pretty easily, and can turn into a coaster pretty soon.
With prices of USB pen drives at rock bottom, they’re probably the best way to try out LiveCDs. Generally its not that easy to make a bootable LiveCD using USB pen/flash drives. If you’re a Fedora lover then here’s a very easy way to create a bootable USB pen drive.
It’s the season of Linux distribution releases! Ubuntu was released about 3 weeks ago, and now it’s time for Fedora 9, aka “Sulphur”. So What’s new?
Much Like Ubuntu’s Add/Remove Programs, Fedora gets a similar one, known as “PacakgeKit”.PackageKit is a cross-distribution package management solution that has a complete yum backend. It has been designed to make installing and updating software on your computer easier, and aims to unify all the graphical package management tools used in different distributions.
As with Ubuntu 8.04, GNOME 2.22 will power Fedora 9. GNOME 2.22 features lots of new features and improvements, such as a new Nautilus that uses GVFS as its backend. GVFS makes it possible to fix shortcomings of Nautilus such as the inability to restore files from trash, pause and undo file operations, and will make it possible to escalate user privileges for certain operations using PolicyKit for authentication. It also brings a significant performance boost to many operations.
KDE 4.1 Alpha 1 was just released, and it looks very promising indeed! Here’s what bastion of PolishLinux had to say:
Desktop
First thing worth noticing is the new looks of KRunner. Unfortunately, on the current stage, it behaves in an unpredictable manner. In some cases after typing one letter I had to wait a few seconds for KRunner to catch it and prompt me with a list of available choices. What is more, it randomly hung up completely, exceeding the maximum response time, forcing KWin to kindly ask me to kill it.
Last week, the openSUSE team announced the first Beta release of openSUSE 11.0! Some of the many enhancements and features in the new release include the incredibly fast package management (libzypp), KDE 3.5.9 and 4.0.3, GNOME 2.22.1, a beautiful new installer, live CDs and much more.
Some good news for Konqueror fans like me! Peter Penz reports that Tree View will be back in action in Konqueror for KDE 4.1! According to Peter, a complete rewrite of QT4′s Interview(a model-view-controller framework for tree structures ) was the reason for Tree View to be MIA.
Although they had intended to bring it out under the KDE 4.0 release, the above mentioned rewrite meant that it had to be omitted, and will be back in action for the 4.1 release. Interestingly, as Konqueror uses Dolphin’s KPart for file management capabilties, this would mean that Dolphin would also feature Tree View. Peter Penz however mentions that it will be turned off by default under Dolphin and will have to be turned on manually. It has to be noted that at the moment Tree View is not completely glitch-free and has few minor bugs, however you can expect it to get fixed soon.
For all those people who miss Amarok badly while on Windows, well fear not, your dream has come true….almost.
With the release of KDE4.0 which uses Qt4 framework, which has been GPL’d and available for Windows and MacOSX, a lot of effort has been put in to port KDE4 for Windows, which allows Amarok to be run under Windows as well.
At the moment, just a tech preview has been released, and you can get the steps required to install Amarok under Windows over at KDE techbase. Being a tech preview release, it’s rather buggy. In fact the developers have asked users not to submit any bug reports, because they’re busy working on the obvious ones. So don’t expect miracles. In fact, don’t expect Amarok not to crash.
If you’ve ever followed KDE 4 development then you’ve probably heard about Marble. Marble is a virtual globe which displays the earth. So Marble can be used as a nice digital replacement for your desktop globe at home where you can look up places.
But wait! There’s more to it: Actually these days Marble can also display flat maps (thanks to Carlos Licea), can show different “map themes” and can serve as a Qt4-widget as well as an application! This means that as a programmer you can use Marble in your very own project as a map widget (License: LGPL). Marble was designed to run on any device and on any operating system supported by Qt4 without any further requirements. You can download the latest version of Marble together with KDE 4.0.1 here (It’s part of the KDE-EDU module).
How Marble stores texture data
If you start Marble you might realize that the startup time is pretty good: It usually takes maybe 2-5 secs to start Marble (and we are working on improving that dramatically). If you zoom into the earth you might notice that Marble doesn’t get slower while zooming in. Looking at the amount of memory being used up you will also see that memory numbers don’t change either. No matter how much you zoom in it’s as little as 65-100MB which is pretty lean compared to other virtual globes.
Among other concepts this is being accomplished by loading the map piece by piece. Marble uses a concept that is very popular among virtual globes: Quadtiles.
Continue reading at torsten rahn’s blog
Nokia, one of the leading cell-phone manufacturers will acquire Trolltech as announced by Nokia today. Trolltech which designed the Qt toolkit, on which KDE is based upon.
As per the Press release,
Espoo, Finland and Oslo, Norway – Nokia and Trolltech ASA today announced that they have entered into an agreement that Nokia will make a public voluntary tender offer to acquire Trolltech (www.trolltech.com), a company headquartered in Oslo, Norway and publicly listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange. Trolltech is a recognized software provider with world-class software development platforms and frameworks. In addition to the key software assets, its talented team will play an important role in accelerating the implementation of Nokia’s software strategy.
Nokia will offer NOK 16 per share in cash. The board of directors of Trolltech has unanimously recommended that its shareholders accept Nokia’s Offer. Holders of 35,024,830 shares, representing approximately 66,43 % of Trolltech’s issued shares and votes have as of January 27, 2008 irrevocably undertaken to accept the Offer. Haavard Nord, Vuonislahti Invest AS (controlled by Eirik Chambe-Eng), Teknoinvest and certain funds managed by Index Ventures are among the shareholders who have agreed to tender their shares to Nokia.
The acquisition of Trolltech will enable Nokia to accelerate its cross-platform software strategy for mobile devices and desktop applications, and develop its Internet services business. With Trolltech, Nokia and third party developers will be able to develop applications that work in the Internet, across Nokia’s device portfolio and on PCs. Nokia’s software strategy for devices is based on cross-platform development environments, layers of software that run across operating systems, enabling the development of applications across the Nokia device range. Examples of current cross-platform layers are Web runtime, Flash, Java and Open C.
Interesting news! Will KDE make it to Nokia’s cellphones? What will be the future of Trolltech I wonder
With the new year beginning we kick start major development into the next version of openSUSE: openSUSE 11.0. A very early alpha version, Alpha 1, is now available for download and testing.
Despite many other products being developed in parallel to Factory,
we have seen a heavy stream of development on it, so it is really worth
a try if you have time for testing. Note, however, that it is not
suitable for production systems.
We have seen 1026 package check-ins since Alpha0 and countless bugs fixed. The main changes against Alpha0 are:
Due to the huge amount of changes, there are also several noticeable bugs:
Please refer to software.openSUSE.org/developer for direct links to all the available media.
Have a lot of fun!
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