LinDesk

As promised, I installed Fedora 9 - and promptly moved back to Fedora 8. The problem is not Fedora - its KDE. KDE 4 is not yet ready for normal use. And if you are a KDE user, I would suggest that you stay away from Fedora 9.

The purpose of KDE 4 is to make KDE compactable with Qt4. Its not for actual use. Sure, it could be used as a desktop, but it will lack many features that you expect in KDE.

I am surprised that Fedora decided to include KDE4 - despite its ‘alpha-ness’. But they have their reasons

Problems With KDE4

Customizable Panel

I could not find any options to customizing the panel - KDE 3.5 have a lot of options.

Many Options/Settings are missing.

It will be coming in the future releases - but its missing now.

Desktop Icons have no consistency

Some icons are bigger than others. On the other hand, you can rotate these icons - but I fail to see any practical application for that.

And many more…

Random crashes, dolphin, irremovable ‘Add Plasmoid’ option on the desktop, etc.

Long story short, I am back in Fedora 8. And I will be on it until Fedora 10 is out. And even then, I’ll wait some time before upgrading.

Links

Fedora 9/KDE4 Positive Reviews

• Fedora 9 Review
• Fedora 9 and the road to KDE4
• Review Roundup: Fedora 9
• Fedora 9: Leading edge or bleeding edge?
• Hats off to Fedora 9
• 5 Reasons Why You’ll Love Fedora 9
• aseigo: talking bluntly
• KDE 4.0 - why now?

And the Negative Ones…

• Fedora 9 (The unfair review)
• FedoraForum - Fedora 9 and KDE 3
• Is KDE 4 a Huge Step Backwards?
• Ten Things I Hate About KDE4 RC2+
• KDE 4.0.0: Sweet Follows Sour

I am taking a break from the regular MP3 Players Series for a special announcement. The first stable version of Frees has been released. Frees is a GUI tool that shows the Hard Disk space usage. It is written in Python using the GTK2 framework. This will only work in linux as it depends on the ‘df’ command. Frees just parses the output of df and shows it in a graphical format.

Download

Features

Simple/Easy to use

Frees features a very simple interface. Granted, some of the columns like Device, Type and Mount Point may sound a bit geeky - but hey, you are using Linux. Its supposed to be geeky.

Ability to Remove Drives from the List

There may be some drives that you want to hide in the list. Like, say you have a 10 mb /boot partition - you have no user-level use for that. In Frees you can hide that partition in the list. Go to Preferences > Drives and check off the drive you want to hide.

Shows Total Space

The last item in the list is the ‘Total’ row. It shows the total space of your harddisk. Note that this shows the total of all mounted drives - so it may not be an accurate measure of your total HDD space.

Competition

KDiskFree

There is an alternative to this program - KDiskFree. Its a KDE App…

KDiskFree displays the available file devices (hard drive partitions, floppy and CD drives, etc.) along with information on their capacity, free space, type and mount point. It also allows you to mount and unmount drives and view them in a file manager.

I was not all that satisfied with KDiskFree - that’s why I created Frees. These are the advantages Frees has over KDiskFree…

• KDiskFree cannot hide drives in the list.
• KDiskFree includes mounted images, CD ROM/DVD ROM devices as list items. Frees ignores these items.
• KDiskFree does not show the file system types for all drives - many are shown as ‘?’
• Frees have the ‘Total HDD Space’ feature - KDiskFree does not have that.

But KDiskFree has one advantage over Frees - you can mount drives from within the application. You cannot do that in Frees.

df Command

The other alternative to Frees is the ‘df’ command. Here is the man entry for df…

df displays the amount of disk space available on the file system containing each file name argument. If no file name is given, the space available on all currently mounted file systems is shown.

df is not ‘user friendly’ in the classical sense of the term - its a terminal application. Unlike KDiskFree, I do not consider df to be a competition to Frees. As a matter of fact, Frees uses df command internally to get the space usage data.

Frees Links

• Frees - See Hard Disk Space Useage in Linux
• Frees Project Page at Sourceforge
• Download Page
• Browse Code in Subversion Browser (its in Python/GTK, by the way)

Now, your job is to download this application and try it out. Send me any bugs you find and your suggestions.

I expected my MP3 player series will end with the last post - but the comments pointed to some other players. Two players stood out - so I decided that I will review them as well. The first one is Listen. Its a Gtk player written in Python.

Features

• Supports Shoutcast Webradio
• Supports Podcast
• Multiple Display modes
• Wikipedia Integration
• Native Lyrics Support

Disadvantages

No Global Shortcuts

At least, none that I could find.

“Interesting” Layout

The layout is kinda different from the standand layout of amaroK, Exaile, Rythmbox etc. I am still getting used to it. But once you get the hang of it, it could turn out to be a better system than the one that the other players use.

Advantages

OSD

Shows up on mouse hover and track change.

Tray Icon

Supports play/pause with middle click.

Music Library

Listen has a music library - but it supports only a single folder as its library folder.

More Information

• Listen
• Listen Features

There are no shortage of audio players in Linux. It has everything from command line MP3 players(mpg123) to RAM eating GUI players(like Amarok). With easily available codecs, linux supports almost all available formats.

This is the final post on a series about MP3 Players in linux. This series focuses on dedicated audio players - not video players that can handle audio as well(like mplayer). Without further ado, presenting the top 10 Linux MP3 players…

1. Amarok

amaroK is currently the player of my choice - it rocks. Everything I ever wanted in a MP3 Player and more. It is the clear winner in this field. In my opinion, there is nothing that beats amarok even if you look at Windows and Mac MP3 players as well.

• Amarok MP3 Player
• Five Amarok Tips and Tricks
• 5 Improvements for Amarok

More Information on Amarok MP3 Player

• Official AmaroK site
• Wikipedia Entry
• AmaroK Blog

2. XMMS

A Winamp clone. Simple and user friendly, it is very popular on linux. It does not have a large feature set - but I am going to give it second place due to its popularity.

• XMMS - X MultiMedia System
• Global HotKeys For XMMS using KHotKeys

Official Sites for XMMS Player

• XMMS
• XMMS - Wikipedia

3. RhythmBox

Rhythmbox Music Player is a music player and library for tagged files, that support various music formats. It was inspired by Apple’s iTunes. Although it is designed to work well under the GNOME Desktop, I had no issues with it in KDE.

RhythmBox - Gnome Music Player

Official Sites

• Rhythmbox - The music management application for GNOME
• RhythmBox - Wikipedia

4. Exaile

Exaile is a music player aiming to be similar to KDE’s Amarok, but for GTK+ and written in Python. It incorporates many of the cool things from Amarok (and other media players)

Exaile - Music Player for Gtk+

Official Sites

• Official Site
• Review: Exaile Media Player
• Exaile Media Player

5. Audacious

Audacious is not among the ’star media-players’ in Linux - so many people never try it out. But those who have tried it out like it. For the sake of the article, I installed it - and I liked it. I even considered switching from amaroK to Audacious.

Audacious Media Player

Official Sites

• Audacious
• Features of Audacious
• Audacious Media Player

6. Banshee

Banshee is an MP3 players for Gnome. You can import, organize, play, and share your music using Banshee’s simple, powerful interface.

Banshee - Music Management and Playback for GNOME

Banshee Official Sites

• Banshee
• Banshee (music player)

7. SongBird

SongBird is an MP3 player built on the XUL framework. It’s a desktop media player mashed-up with the Web.

SongBird - The Firefox of MP3 Players

Official Sites

• SongBird Official Site
• Songbird (software)

8. Juk

An audio jukebox that supports collections of MP3, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files. It is a part of the kdemultimedia package.

Juk

9. mpg123/mpg321

mpg123 is a fast, free, minimalist, console MPEG audio player software program for UNIX and Linux operating systems.

mpg123/mpg321 - The Command Line MP3 Players

Official Sites

• mpg123 Homepage
• mpg123 Wikipedia Page
• mpg321 Homepage
• mpg321 Wikipedia Page

10. Other MP3 Players and Media Software…

Instead of putting the last MP3 Player here, I am going to list the MP3 software that did not make it to the list…

• Beep Media Player
• X-platform Music Multiplexing System 2 - XMMS2
• SnackAmp
• Decibel Audio Player
• Aqualung
• Cactus Jukebox

So, which is your favorite MP3 Player? Leave a comment…

Update: I reviewed two more players…

• Listen - Gtk MP3 Player
• MPD - Music Player Daemon

If you are using Fedora 8 with KDE you may have noticed an interesting bug. Once you open some Gnome apps(for example, Exile, all the fonts in the KDE applications becomes one size smaller.

If this happens, the only way to fix it is to restart the X server - or so I thought. At first, I thought it was the issue of just one application - namely RhythmBox.

But I just found that there is a simple fix for this problem…

• Run the command ‘gnome-appearance-properties’
• Go to the ‘Fonts’ Tab
• Click on the ‘Details’ Button at the bottom
• Change the Resolution to 96 Dots per Inch(DPI)

That should solve your problem.

This issue appears only if your screen resolution is bigger than normal - mine is 1440×900.

Exaile an amarok clone for Gnome - and I have to admit - I am impressed.

Exaile is a music player aiming to be similar to KDE’s Amarok, but for GTK+ and written in Python. It incorporates many of the cool things from Amarok (and other media players) like automatic fetching of album art, handling of large libraries, lyrics fetching, artist/album information via Wikipedia, Last.fm submission support, and optional iPod support via a plugin.

Features

It has many features that make amarok great…

• Automatic fetching of album art
• Handling large music libraries
• Lyrics fetching
• Fetches Artist/Album information from Wikipedia

And some features that amarok does not have…

• Tabbed playlist interface
• Song Blacklist Manager

Disadvantages

• I could not find the Global Hotkeys feature

Download

If you want to try exaile, you can download exaile and install it yourself.

Related Links

• Official Site
• Review: Exaile Media Player
• Exaile Media Player

Banshee is one of the best audio players for Gnome. It has most of the things I want in an MP3 software…

• Stays in the system tray
• Simple interface
• Media Library
• Ability to control the player using shortcuts without accessing the player(Multimedia Keys Plugin)

Unfortunately, I could not run this software in my system - it is showing a ‘No Codec’ error for all the files I tried to play. I tried to fix this problem by myself - I even tried reinstalling the software. Still no luck. I am sure that is is a configuration error on my part - I don’t think it is an issue in banshee.

Anyway, since I could not try out this software, I stop now. If I could fix this issue before my series on MP3 Players for Linux is over, I will come back and post the details on this page.

amaroK is currently the player of my choice - it rocks. Everything I ever wanted in a MP3 Player and more.

Global Shortcuts

I must be able to control some functions in the player like Play/Pause, Next/Previous song etc. with the keyboard without having to open the software. For example, you are banging away at your keyboard creating the next big thing. Suddenly someone calls you - but you can’t make out what they are trying to say because you are playing music at volumes that makes it audible to a deaf man halfway round the world. Now you have to open up the player, find the pause button(in some winamp skins, they are nearly impossible to find), pause the song and then try to listen to what someone was screaming about.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just press a keyboard combination from any app and your player pauses? Winamp(version 5 onwards) had this feature if you enabled a plugin called Global Hotkeys. amaroK supports this feature natively - amarok->Settings->Configure Global Shortcuts.

Stays in the System Tray

Another must have feature - when I listen to music I don’t want to see the application that plays it. I don’t want to see some any stupid visualizations. I don’t want to see any dancing pixies. In short, all I want from a player is hear the music - not play some animation that’s eating my CPU cycles.

The best way to make sure of this is if the app stays in the system tray(or status bar). And amaroK does that. Some basic operation(play/pause, stop, etc.) are available from the right click menu of amaroK icon in the system tray.

There is also a hidden feature - just bring you mouse over the amaroK icon in the system tray any scroll the mouse wheel down - this reduces the volume!

But I have one complaint about that - there is no way I can know what song is playing. In the XMMS Status docklet, the name of the currently song will popup if you hover over the icon for some time. That is not possible in AmaroK.

Update: Amarok has this feature - but in Fedora, its disabled. Some bug, I guess

Other Cool Features…

• Media Library
• Fetches Lyrics/Artist Info from the Web
• Supports Podcasts
• Inbuilt Bulk MP3 Tag editor
• Able to access MP3 players(the hardware players - you know - like iPod)

For More Information

• Official AmaroK site
• Wikipedia Entry
• AmaroK Blog

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just press a keyboard combination from any app and your player pauses? Winamp(version 5 onwards) had this feature if you enabled a plugin called Global Hotkeys. You can’t do this in XMMS - but you can set up KHotkeys or Input Action to do it for you.

This is an extremal cool feature of KDE(sorry - no support for Gnome). You can access this feature by opening up Control Panel->Regional & Accessability->Input actions. You could configure it to give some commands to XMMS when you press a shortcut key.

The Examples group already have a XMMS action - next. Follow the format of that example to set the shortcuts for other actions in XMMS. I have 3 action in my system…

• Play/Pause - Ctrl+Alt+Home
• Previous Song - Ctrl+Alt+Page Up
• Next Song - Ctrl+Alt+Page Down

Working of KHotkeys

For this example, I am going to create the Next Song action for XMMS. Click on the New Action Button at the bottom.

First you have to set the action type - the simplest is ‘Keyboard Shortcut->Keyboard Input’. This type simulates a specified key input in a given application when you press the shortcut trigger. For example, when you press ‘Ctrl+Alt+Page Down’ KHotkeys will send the key ‘b’ to XMMS - that is the shortcut in XMMS to go to the next song.

In the next tab, you can set up a shortcut trigger(Say Ctrl+Alt+Page Down).

The ‘Keyboard Input Settings’ tab does all the major work - it decides the key to be send and the application to which the key must be send. In our example, the Keyboard Input is ‘b’(XMMS Shortcut for the next Song).

Next click on New->Simple Window in the Window section. Now open XMMS, click on the ‘Autodetect’, and then click on XMMS. This will populate the fields of the Window popup. We only need the ‘Window Class’ - change the drop down to the ‘Is’ option.

Now click the Apply button.

That’s it - open up XMMS and play any song. If you press Ctrl+Alt+Page Down, XMMS will skip to the next song.

Try doing other things with KHotkeys - it is a powerful tool.

There are no shortage of audio players in Linux. It has everything from command line mp3 players(mpg123) to RAM eating GUI players(like Amarok). With easily available codecs, linux supports almost all available formats.

I am going to do a series on the diffrent audio players available for Linux. This will focus on dedicated audio players - not video players that can handle audio as well(like mplayer).

The most popular audio players for linux are…

XMMS

A Winamp clone. Simple and user friendly, it is very popular on linux.

Amarok

Amarok is the most feature rich player on Linux right now. It is a KDE app.

Audacious

Another Winamp clone - this is actually a fork of beep-media-player.

Banshee

Music management and playback for Gnome

Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox is an integrated music management application, originally inspired by Apple’s iTunes.

JuK

An audio jukebox that supports collections of MP3, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files. It is a part of the kdemultimedia package.

SongBird

Songbird is a desktop Web player, a digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up.

Exaile

Exaile is a music player aiming to be similar to KDE’s Amarok, but for GTK+ and written in Python.

mpg123

A fast, free console based MP3 audio player for Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Hpux and near all other UNIX systems.

I will explore XMMS in more detail in the next post.