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

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.

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.

Numlock is something that should be always on. I don’t understand why it is often off at start up. If that is the case for your system, this page will help you to turn on the Numlock as system start up in Linux.

BIOS

There is an option in BIOS that lets you set the status of Numlock at start up. You will have to search around for this one - it is located in different places in different BIOS versions. Make sure that it is on.

KDE

If the BIOS trick did not solve the issue, KDE has a configuration option where this can be set. That’s why I love KDE - whatever you want, there is an option for that…

Control Panel -> Peripherals -> Keyboards

numlockx

It you still have the problem, install the program called ‘numlockx‘. This will turn on the Numlock at start up.

I have very specific tastes about how my system should look. I prefer the lean and fast appearance. This is one of the main reasons why I like KDE so much - you can customize the system to perfection. Gnome does not have this much options.

To modify the looks and shortcuts for the system, take KDE Menu->Control Center. Go Wild!!

This is how I have set up my system…

Appearance & Themes

Launch Feedback

• Busy Cursor = Passive Busy Cursor

Screen Saver

• Start Automatically = Off

Style

• Widget Style = MS Windows 9x
• Enable Tooltips = Off

• Effects

  • Enable GUI Effects = Off

Window Decorations

• Window Decorations = KDE2
• Draw Titlebar stipple effect = Off
• Draw Gradients = Off

• Buttons

  • Show window button tooltips = Off
  • Use custom button positions = On
  • Button Order = Menu, All Windows, Above others, Title, Minimize, Maximize, Close

Desktop

Behavior -> General

• Show tooltip = Off

Multiple Desktops

• I like 8 desktops

Panels

• Arrangement -> Size = Normal (Bigger Main Panel)

Menus

• Quick Browser Menu -> Maximum number of Entities = 25
• Quick Start Menu Items -> Maximum number of Entities = 0 (Hides the ‘Recently used software’ at the top of the KDE Menu)

Appearance

• Enable icon Mouseover effects = Off
• Show Tooltips = Off

Taskbar

• Show Windows from all desktops = Off
• Sort alphabetically by application name = Off
• Group Similar tasks = Never

Window Behavior

• Titlebar Actions

  • Titlebar Double-Click = Maximize

• Moving

  • Display contents in moving windows = Off
  • Animate minimize and restore = Off

• Advanced

  • Active Desktop Borders -> Only When moving windows = On

Regional & Accessibility

Keyboard Shortcuts

• Too many changes to list.

Sound & Multimedia

• System Notifications -> Turn Off All ‘Sounds’

Konqueror is one of my favorite Linux applications. But as a File manager, it has a slight problem - the sidebar. I have never used it. I cannot understand why it is turned on by default. It is easy to hide it by pressing F9 - but I want to turn it off permanently.

• First, open a folder using Konqueror.
• Window->Hide Navigation Panel(F9)
• Settings->Save View Profile(File Management)
• Overwrite the existing File Management profile
• Restart Konqueror - this time the sidebar will be hidden.

If you want to see the sidebar again, just press F9.

As a web developer good FTP clients are a necessity for me. I have to upload the scripts to the server. I used to use gFTP for this. Good client - clean interface, easy to use. But not as powerful as I wanted. Then I found FireFTP - the extension for Firefox - it is a good client. But recently I found that my favorite application, Konqueror, can do it much better than all the other clients.

Didn’t know konqueror could be used as a FTP client? Just copy and paste this FTP URL into the address bar of Konqueror and see for yourself…
ftp://checksoftware.com/

Advantages

The main advantage of using Konqueror as the FTP client is that you are very familiar with it. All the shortcuts, the tricks, you use when browsing through your files are available when you connect to a remote server as well. Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V? The FTP client has got it. What if you want to browse two folders in the remote server at the same time? Konqueror can do it.

2 Pane View

Like many other FTP Clients, you can split Konqueror into two panes(Window->Split View Left and Right). This is perhaps the best way to use Konqueror as an FTP Client.

X Pane View

Unlike other FTP Clients, Konqueror goes further than just 2 panes. You can keep on splitting a window to make it ‘just perfect’ for you.

Tabbed View

If paned view is not enough, just open up a new tab - and continue splitting it.

Multiple Protocols - FTP/SFTP/FISH

Konqueror supports many protocols - among which these three are the most important to us…

fish

You can use fish if you have a shell account on the remote server. For example, fish://admin@linkdesk.com would open a connection for user binnyva to a remote server ‘linkdesk.com’.

ftp

File Transfer Protocol - you should be knowing this if you have come this far

sftp

Secure FTP.

Problems

So far I have found only one issue with it - I was not able to configure Konqueror to act as an FTP client properly when I was behind a proxy. I have reasons to believe that it was my fault - but I did spend some time trying. Could someone else confirm this?

Conclusion

Konqueror is the best FTP Client there is. Period.