Linux

Recently, I bought a pair of those new Western Digital Caviar Green drives. These new drives represent a transitional point from 512-byte sectors to 4096-byte sectors. A number of articles have been published recently about this, explaining the benefits and some of the challenges that we’ll be facing during this transition. Reportedly, Linux should unaffected by some of the pitfalls of this transition, but my own experimentation has shown that Linux is just as vulnerable to the potential performance impact as Windows XP.

A lot of our developers are using Linux, obviously they want to listen to music while they’re coding away and looking at the feedback we get it appears that they’re not the only ones. So today we’re pretty happy to present a preview version of Spotify for Linux. Built by our brilliant developers during hack days and late nights, it shares most of the same features as our Windows and Mac OS X desktop applications.

A whole linux distro, Slackware based I believe, to train you in the dark arts. This distro is deliberately insecure, containing out of date packages, mis-configured apps, and loads of training material. It comes as a live dvd download, so you can run it up as and when you want to practice your skills. via Damn Vulnerable Linux. Will be interesting to check it out.

digiKam supports watermarking, this feature is hidden so well that you might not even realize that it’s there. This is because the watermarking function in digiKam is tucked under the Batch Queue Manager tool which you can use to watermark multiple photos in one go. Here is how this works in practice. Choose Tools | Batch Queue Manager (or press the B key) to open the Batch Queue Manager tool.

Mixxx is described as a complete package for amateur and professional DJs alike, providing everything you need to create and perform live mixes. It can run without connecting turntables and mixers, which makes it a replacement for traditional DJ setup. For professionals, it supports advanced features like comprehensive MIDI controller support, vinyl control, and multi-core CPU support. via Virtual DJ Software for Linux: Mixxx | TechSource. Seems nice. Packages are available only for Ubuntu, though.

1: The pager I am always shocked at how few people actually use the Linux pager. It’s been around forever and has always served the same functionality — it offers the user multiple desktops to keep the desktop better organized. I employ the pager like this: With four workspaces, I dedicate each workspace to a different use. My layout looks like this: Desktop 1 is for networking tools. Desktop 2 is for writing/office tools.

openSUSE India IRC Channel LIVE ! This is to notify all Lizards ;-) (openSUSE Lovers) that the openSUSE India Channel on IRC Freenode–> #opensuse-in , is now Live and registered . So if you have something to ask, share or want to spend some time with openSUSE Indian users , do visit :-)</blockquote

A quickie: I wanted to change the default application from Banshee/Totem for my media files to VLC ( since I didn’t have proprietary codecs installed, and VLC does). Searched all of YaST/Settings and couldn’t find where to change the default application. The solution was pretty simple, just right click the file(type), click on Properties, and Open-With tab Just choose the default application, or click on Add and select VLC, and you’re done!

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. Eager to try out the RC of the upcoming 4.4 release of KDE, I upgraded it. Later on I got a bunch of music files from Ankit, and I set to tag ’em correctly.

I’ve owned a Sony Ericsson HBH-DS970 for nearly 2 years now ), and my current iPhone 3G. I also use it occasionally on my laptop. It has worked fine in Windows XP, Vista & Windows 7. Getting it to work with Linux, however has been an EPIC FAIL. The last time I tried it was probably a year ago, and I just gave up in frustration and continued to use my EP-630 as the earphone.