[141000040010] |<title>amaroK Review</title>
[141000040020] |<img/>I was never a fan of music management software like Rhythmbox or Banshee.
[141000040030] |I always used to manage my music by myself, the old fashion way, in a lot of folders, by my own criteria.
[141000040040] |Then I just imported it in a light and very easy to use player like XMMS.
[141000040050] |It got stuck with me forever.
[141000040060] |I have always seen the AmaroK icon in the KDE menu, but it never aroused my curiosity until now.
[141000040070] |The first time I clicked the icon, a very nice wizard appeared and guided me into setting it up to be able to just play my music after that.
[141000040080] |When I saw this I just said WOW!
[141000040090] |If you point the wizard in the right directions, the tracks are automatically imported in the music collection.
[141000040100] |<b>The Interface</b> <img/>
[141000040110] |<img/>The music collection appears in the left pane of the program, in an explorer-like style.
[141000040120] |It is absolutely practical.
[141000040130] |From here you have to put them in a playlist and the best part is that it allows you to create such lists very quickly and with no hassle at all. 
[141000040140] |The playlist is located in the right side of the program and has a lot of advanced features such as "Smart Playlists".
[141000040150] |There is very nice feature called Dynamic Mode which enables AmaroK to automatically removed played items and add new ones that suit your taste.
[141000040160] |One of the most important things that the developers haven’t forgotten is the eye candy.
[141000040170] |This is one of the best looking applications in Linux.
[141000040180] |Usually people who develop in Linux put accent on usability and features.
[141000040190] |AmaroK has seven different graphical analyzers which bring joy to my eyes.
[141000040200] |We should not forget the OSD, which is definitely the coolest I have ever seen in Linux.
[141000040210] |Every time the track is changed it displays the artist and song name and in the left side of the screen (it can display the cover of the album as well).
[141000040220] |It is highly customizable and also supports translucency.
[141000040230] |AmaroK has built in “Global Shortcuts”.
[141000040240] |Suppose that you are working hard in KDE’s Desktop number 2 and AmaroK is minimized in Desktop 1.
[141000040250] |Suddenly a song that you don’t like just starts to play.
[141000040260] |All you have to do to put an end to this and go back to work without much distraction is to press Win+B and it skips to the next song.
[141000040270] |On the very left side there are several tabs that switch between Context, Collection, Playlists, Media Devices and Files.
[141000040280] |Under the Context the first thing that appears is the Current tab.
[141000040290] |Here are listed things like Album cover, how many times the song was played, last time played, favorite tracks and albums by the current artist.
[141000040300] |If you take a closer look, the Lyrics and Artist tabs will catch your attention.
[141000040310] |From the Lyrics tab you can fetch the lyrics and if they are not found, the program shows some suggestions, but there is still some work to be done here.
[141000040320] |The Artist tab shows what information is available on Wikipedia.
[141000040330] |I like this feature a lot, because on Wikipedia you can find out about a lot of stuff related to a subject.
[141000040340] |<b>Other things you should know</b>
[141000040350] |AmaroK has built in support for iPod and it is really easy to use.
[141000040360] |Click the Media Device button, then the Connect button and here you go.
[141000040370] |Start transfer music to have it on the go.
[141000040380] |AmaroK is very scriptable and a lot of the scripts can be downloaded from the internet.
[141000040390] |They will make the player much more powerful than it is out of the box.
[141000040400] |Two of the sound engines from which you can choose are some of the best, GStreamer and xine.
[141000040410] |Both of them are actively maintained, support cross-fading and equalizer.
[141000040420] |In theory, these two sound engines support every format known to man.
[141000040430] |<b>The Good</b>
[141000040440] |On the good side is the interface that doesn't get in your way, the eye candy, the support for portable MP3 players and the possibility to choose from several sound engines.
[141000040450] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000040460] |With the Dynamic Mode switched on I managed to crash amaroK quite often.
[141000040470] |Also, the lyrics search engine is not that good.
[141000040480] |I hope that in the feature versions these inconveniences will be fixed.
[141000040490] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000040500] |I can honestly say that I find AmaroK the best music management software on all operating systems.
[141000040510] |There might be a better one, but I haven’t found it yet.
[141000040520] |It is certainly worth it to give a try.
[141000060010] |<title>KTorrent Review</title>
[141000060020] |<img/>I think that everybody heard about torrents.
[141000060030] |Anyway, I feel obliged to explain what this is. BitTorrent is a protocol for distributing files.
[141000060040] |It identifies content by URL and is designed to integrate seamlessly with the web.
[141000060050] |Its advantage over plain HTTP is that when multiple downloads of the same file happen in the same time, the downloaders upload to each other, thus making it possible for the file source to support very large numbers of downloaders with only a modest increase in its load.
[141000060060] |In this way, you contribute with bandwidth every time you download a file, making it less expensive for the publisher of that file because of the decrease in the costs required for bandwidth.
[141000060070] |To be able to download files from torrents you will need a client that is able to do it.
[141000060080] |There are notable differences between different BitTorrent clients and is important to find one that fits your needs.
[141000060090] |KTorent is one of the best clients for Linux and will be the subject of this review.
[141000060100] |<b>What can KTorrent do for me?</b> <img/>
[141000060110] |<img/>The most important thing is that it can download files, using the BitTorrent protocol.
[141000060120] |But this isn't enough, because for this purpose we have the classical BitTorrent client.
[141000060130] |Thank God this one does much more.
[141000060140] |It has a very nice interface with an increased functionality.
[141000060150] |The application doesn't close when you close the main window and instead it stays minimized, displaying an icon which supports tooltips with information about the speed and size of download and upload.
[141000060160] |To start downloading, you can both paste the URL of the torrent or open the torrent file.
[141000060170] |When the download starts you are asked where it should download the file.
[141000060180] |This can be avoided by setting a default download directory.
[141000060190] |A torrent file can also be configured in such way to download a directory that contains more than one file.
[141000060200] |When this situation is encountered, KTorrent asks you which files should be downloaded.
[141000060210] |Sometimes this is useful.
[141000060220] |For example, when you are downloading a distribution and you don't need the sources which are on 3 CDs this can prove to be very useful.
[141000060230] |KTorrent displays in the upper part of its window a list of files and individual information for each one regarding the size, the speed, the progress, the time left and the number of pears to which the client is connected.
[141000060240] |A little lower you can see four tabs. 
[141000060250] |The status tab shows some additional information regarding the selected file and also something similar to progress bars that shows the available chunks and the downloaded chunks.
[141000060260] |Chunks are actually segments of the files you download, which are split this way by the protocol.
[141000060270] |Lower in the window is displayed additional information about chunks. 
[141000060280] |The second tab is a list of files that regard the selected torrent.
[141000060290] |I like the fact that files can be removed from the download list and selected back for download.
[141000060300] |This also sort of allows you to download them in a certain order or upload only specific files. 
[141000060310] |The third tab displays the pears.
[141000060320] |In this list are available the IP address, the client, speed of download an upload, and some other stuff.
[141000060330] |If you weren't able to do anything here this would have been absolutely useless info.
[141000060340] |Even though, you can ban any pear with just a click a mouse, I don't see a real reason for doing that. 
[141000060350] |The last tab is the one that shows a list of the chunks you are downloading.
[141000060360] |The truth is that its practical use is inexistent and for this reason you can't use it in any way, but at least it is a nice display of some extra information.
[141000060370] |Fortunately for those who are all about usability, the last two tabs can be removed from Info Widget, which is located in the Preferences window.
[141000060380] |The best thing I like about Ktorrent is that it can perform searches on several torrent search engines and you can even add some of your own.
[141000060390] |I particularly like this one because I was able to find almost anything using this feature.
[141000060400] |Now I don't have to waste precious time going through several websites.
[141000060410] |KTorrent is expandable using plugins.
[141000060420] |I like programs that support plugins because you can extend functionality to fit your needs without making the software too heavy.
[141000060430] |Some plugins can add compatibility with UPnP devices or an IP blocking filter.
[141000060440] |Another one shows the log of the program in the main window.
[141000060450] |Most users don't need them and because of that they are disabled by default.
[141000060460] |From the preferences window you can set limitations for upload and download speed and also for the maximum number of downloads.
[141000060470] |When you are behind NAT (have an IP like 10.x.x.x, 172.16.x.x or 192.168.x.x) it is recommended to set ports so that they can be forwarded.
[141000060480] |In KTorrent you can set these ports.
[141000060490] |Ask the network administrator more about this because it is sensitive stuff.
[141000060500] |If you are making the transition from another client you should know that another plugin can be used to import partially downloaded files.
[141000060510] |<b>The Good</b>
[141000060520] |I especially like the search function.
[141000060530] |Personally I find it very useful.
[141000060540] |I also like the interface, it is very nicely optimized.
[141000060550] |Developers did a good job.
[141000060560] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000060570] |I miss the possibility to schedule a download.
[141000060580] |Sometimes I want to download a big and not so important file late at night so that my bandwidth doesn't have to suffer.
[141000060590] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000060600] |The truth is that out there is also Azureus, another BitTorrent client which is very good as well, but it is written in Java and if you don't have Java it simply doesn't work.
[141000060610] |At the moment, I find KTorrent the best client for Linux.
[141000060620] |Check out the screenshots below.
[141000310010] |<title>LimeWire Review</title>
[141000310020] |<img/>There are many ways to share files with other people.
[141000310030] |Gnutella is a big and popular file sharing network, where you can find a lot of things if you connect.
[141000310040] |Moreover, it is a true peer to peer network because files are transfered directly between users and there is no central server.
[141000310050] |The search queries are passed in a round robin fashion from one node to another. 
[141000310060] |LimeWire is a client for the Gnutella network, which claims to be the "The Fastest File Sharing Program on the Planet".
[141000310070] |It is a free and open-source program written in Java so it runs on computers which have the Java Virtual machine installed.
[141000310080] |Download an rpm package and install it but remember you need Java.
[141000310090] |If you don't have it installed get it and install it before Lime.
[141000310100] |One the installation is complete run it by typing limewire in the command line.
[141000310110] |The program will ask you what folder to use for saving files.
[141000310120] |To search for something type in the name in the search box.
[141000310130] |You can choose to search only images, documents, programs and video or audio files and the search results come in pretty quickly. 
[141000310140] |To change something about LimeWire go to the Tools menu and choose Option.
[141000310150] |The main configuration window will appear.
[141000310160] |Here you can set your connection speed and the percentage of your bandwidth used for download so that Limewire can optimize performance.
[141000310170] |You can also specify the number of simultaneous downloads.
[141000310180] |LimeWire will automatically share the files you've downloaded. 
[141000310190] |Lime also has another interesting and useful option.
[141000310200] |If you want to download all the music files in the same place or all the movies in a folder named "movies", you can specify a download location for each media file.
[141000310210] |This will keep downloaded files more organized on your hard disk. 
[141000310220] |If there are files in the queue for many days or weeks and they don't seem to make any progress, you can specify a number of days after which LimeWire will automatically delete old incomplete download files.
[141000310230] |Set Lime to automatically connect at start up if you want to use it daily.
[141000310240] |You can also configure the shutdown behavior.
[141000310250] |If you do not want to download other files then the ones which are already up for download you can have LimeWire to shutdown after transfers are complete.
[141000310260] |The possibility to configure searches can be handy.
[141000310270] |For example if you want a file right away, you can set it to only show results with the speed of T1 line.
[141000310280] |The Search Result Quality setting refines results even more.
[141000310290] |You can choose to show only four star results.
[141000310300] |This means that only users which are not behind a firewall and have free slots will be shown.
[141000310310] |Lime has a nice look and feel to it.
[141000310320] |One of the cool stuff is that it has an integrated media player.
[141000310330] |I tried it and it works.
[141000310340] |If this player isn't enough for you, Lime can use your system's default player.
[141000310350] |If you're a geeky kind of guy and you are interested in seeing some technical info, Lime can show you some statistics.
[141000310360] |You can see stuff like the total number of incoming upload requests or the total of outgoing responses. 
[141000310370] |If you are now wondering "Why do some files take so long to download?" remember that this has nothing to do with LimeWire.
[141000310380] |The speed at which downloads take place depends on your bandwidth and on the bandwidth of the unloader.
[141000310390] |In addition to this, some users may impose limits on the speed at which they will upload files for the sake of saving bandwidth. 
[141000310400] |LimeWire allows you to search for multiple files in the same time.
[141000310410] |If you use a client for DC (the direct connect protocol) and do a search, then immediately a new one, you will not get result because hubs have a search limit.
[141000310420] |For example, you can search after a time period of 30 or 60 seconds.
[141000310430] |Lime does not have this limitation so you can search all you want.
[141000310440] |The program works fine behind firewalls.
[141000310450] |I used it in this situation with the default settings and I had no problem downloading files or uploading them.
[141000310460] |LimeWire can use UPnp (Universal Plug'n Play) to configure your router if the router supports this.
[141000310470] |If there are conflicts change the port LimeWire uses for incoming connections.
[141000310480] |<b>The Good</b>
[141000310490] |This is one of the best peer to peer clients you can find.
[141000310500] |Its interface is easy to use, and it's quite a good thing the fact that it's made in Java, this makes implementing it much easier in different OS platforms.
[141000310510] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000310520] |Maybe it takes a little too long to load.
[141000310530] |It crashed once, but besides this there are no major problems.
[141000310540] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000310550] |Limewire is one of the most used Gnutella clients.
[141000310560] |Its network is big and getting bigger, so you will surely find what you are looking for.
[141000310570] |View some screenshots below:
[141000320010] |<title>eyeOS Review</title>
[141000320020] |<img/>Sometimes there's a need for centralized data, something you can reach from anywhere by means of the great network named "Internet" and that is protected by a username and a password.
[141000320030] |Maybe there's a set of phone numbers that need to be accessible from anywhere, or a list of websites that need storage somewhere.
[141000320040] |eyeOS can be used for such data storage, you can use it, for example, to store information on a computer that is accessible from the Internet, but there are many other uses it can be put to.
[141000320050] |<b>What is this so called eyeOS anyway?</b>
[141000320060] |eyeOS is a set of PHP scripts which make up what can be called a web application.
[141000320070] |These scripts give you the possibility of having something that is called an operating system which runs in your web browser.
[141000320080] |Basically, you have an interactive website that represents the desktop, with icons of the "installed applications".
[141000320090] |As soon as one of these buttons is clicked, a window appears on that desktop; it's an eyeapp and this window can be moved around just as if it was an ordinary window of an operating system.
[141000320100] |eyeOS is a multi user environment and each user can upload and run eyeapps (.eyeapp extension files).
[141000320110] |This can be a security breach if you have many users, but it is possible to restrict the application uploading section in order to allow access only to the superuser.
[141000320120] |Installing eyeOS is easy, you just have to upload it to a webserver by using an FTP client and then make small modifications.
[141000320130] |The entire process is described in the documentation, which can be found on the official website.
[141000320140] |<b>What eyeapps does this eyeOS provide?</b>
[141000320150] |eyeBoard is, like the name says, a message board which can be used to post messages.
[141000320160] |Each user can post messages and others may view them.
[141000320170] |eyeCalc is, obviously, a calculator, you can use it the same way you would use any other calculator.
[141000320180] |eyeCalendar is a calendar application that allows the association of a block of text with a certain day of a given month.
[141000320190] |This can be useful for things such as remembering birthdays and other such things.
[141000320200] |eyeHome can be used to upload text files, images, links and other such files, which are viewable directly in the web browser.
[141000320210] |eyeMessages can be used to send messages to other users of the same eyeOS installation.
[141000320220] |eyeNav is, basically, a browser within a browser.
[141000320230] |You can browse the Internet with it.
[141000320240] |Note that eyeNav uses the bandwidth of the server that hosts eyeOS for you, some web hosting services might not allow such behaviour from the applications that you host on their web servers.
[141000320250] |You might want to double check before allowing eyeNav to run on a server that is hosted by a third party. eyeNav can be useful if it runs on a server with a different ISP.
[141000320260] |In case you cannot reach a page from your ISP, you might reach it by using eyeNav on a different hosting server.
[141000320270] |eyeOptions can be used to change the eyeOS theme, upload and set a new wallpaper and for changing your password.
[141000320280] |eyePhones can be used to store contacts, which can have many fields of information for each contact.
[141000320290] |eyeEdit, which is basically a word processor, can be used to write documents.
[141000320300] |Perhaps we'll get to see an export and import option to and from very popular document formats, like those of OpenOffice and so on?
[141000320310] |eyeInfo provides information about eyeOS, like version number and all the developers, collaborators, etc.
[141000320320] |More apps (files with the .eyeapp extension) can be downloaded from the Internet and uploaded to eyeOS, depending on your account type.
[141000320330] |If someone else gave you access to a server that runs eyeOS, you might not be allowed to upload and run your own apps.
[141000320340] |<b>The good:</b>
[141000320350] |eyeOS can be a great way to share information, store various data as text, upload photos, save links and more.
[141000320360] |It is pretty easy to install, there's even a miniserver kit that can be used to perform a quick install on a Windows machine (although I personally recommend hosting this application on a web hosting server that runs Linux or another *NIX system, there might be some that might want to do a quick test). 
[141000320370] |<b>The bad:</b>
[141000320380] |eyeOS isn't a complete OS yet, it still doesn't offer a way of letting users run their own apps without leaving an open door to the operating system.
[141000320390] |Custom apps can be written to access the filesystem.
[141000320400] |This is why there should be something like a virtual filesystem.
[141000320410] |This problem could be solved by running the web server in a chrooted environment, thus reducing the risk of accidentally letting someone in.
[141000320420] |<b>The truth:</b>
[141000320430] |It's a useful application, you can use it to share photos with relatives that live in a different country, store contacts, do some quick word processing and more.
[141000320440] |And all of this is accessible from anywhere, as long as you provide eyeOS with the right username and the right password.
[141000320450] |<b>Follow the editor on Twitter <a>@mariusnestor</a></b>
[141000340010] |<title>GeeXboX Review</title>
[141000340020] |<img/>Most people have watched a DVD film, a show on TV, listened to favorite songs, watched a video tape that was made during holidays or just looked at a photo album.
[141000340030] |How much knowledge does one person need to do the things mentioned above?
[141000340040] |Well, that depends, if a computer is going to be used, an operating system would have to be installed or otherwise ran; other needs include a multimedia player for DVD films, regular video files and audio files, plus an application for the TV tuner.
[141000340050] |That might sound too complex for some people and they might not want to go through all this.
[141000340060] |What if I had a DVD player, a TV and a VCR?
[141000340070] |Operating those devices would be easy.
[141000340080] |Well, running GeeXBoX on a computer that has a TV tuner and an optical unit that is capable to read DVD discs gives the same result.
[141000340090] |There's no need to install a system, just put in the bootable disc and start using it (that is only half true, but we'll talk about it later).
[141000340100] |How hard is it to start using GeeXBoX?
[141000340110] |There are three options: simply download the image and burn it to a disc, generate an ISO image file with the GeeXBoX ISO Generator or compile from the sources package.
[141000340120] |<b>One ISO straight from the server</b>
[141000340130] |Users that just want to testdrive GeeXBoX can download the ISO image straight from the website; it's available for i386 (x86) and PPC (PowerPC) architectures.
[141000340140] |There's no point in running GeeXBoX on an underpowered computer, that's why the first thing the user should do is to download this ISO, burn it to a rewritable disc and boot it on the target computer.
[141000340150] |Once it's clear that the computer that's going to be used as a mini home theater PC is powerful enough for GeeXBoX, one can go on and configure GeeXBoX further on, add a configuration file for LIRC, add a list of TV channels for a TV tuner or the configuration for a DVB card.
[141000340160] |From the official website of GeeXBoX, I've found out that the slowest CPU that should handle media playback pretty well was a Pentium 2 at 400 MHz.
[141000340170] |Those that have a spare old PC lying around in the closet or in their attic might have a computer that is even slower than that optimistic Pentium 2 clocked at 400 MHz, so I wanted to test it on a slightly slower CPU, a Pentium 2 at 333 Mhz.
[141000340180] |The old PC has gone through a lot trying to playback a DivX file; although it did play it, it was playing at 25% of its real speed.
[141000340190] |That's not even close to the playback performance I hoped that GeeXBoX would be capable of.
[141000340200] |In case your PC is a bit more powerful than the one I used during these tests, let's say something like 450-500 MHz, any CPU from the Pentium 3 series, you can go on and start creating a customized ISO by using the GeeXBoX Generator, which is available for i386(PC) and PPC(MAC) platforms.
[141000340210] |<b>One ISO with a custom theme, remote control configuration and more</b>
[141000340220] |The standard ISO that is available for download straight from the official website isn't exactly the way everyone would want it to be.
[141000340230] |That means you can add in a custom theme, change the menu language, choose another font for the menu, configure the sound card and so on.
[141000340240] |In case some of you were wondering if GeeXBoX can be used with a remote control, yes, you can use GeeXBoX generator to choose from the available remote control configurations.
[141000340250] |The generator can also be used for configuring the network, be it wireless or Ethernet (wired).
[141000340260] |Since we talked about networking, GeeXBoX must offer some kind of services, right?
[141000340270] |The generator can configure an FTP server, a telnet server and a webserver.
[141000340280] |While this may not make sense at all in the beginning, it does make sense, you can share files that can be found on the machine that has GeeXBoX running and even more, it can detect all by itself the UPnP devices on the network.
[141000340290] |Add-on packages can be downloaded using GeeXBoX Generator and integrated into the final ISO image.
[141000340300] |Proprietary codec packages that are supported by the Generator can be downloaded just by selecting them and then clicking on the "Download" button, and that's it!
[141000340310] |The new package is integrated into your final GeeXBoX.
[141000340320] |Beside codecs, the Generator can download supported packages that contain Wi-Fi firmware, DVB firmware and asian fonts.
[141000340330] |After setting everything up in the Generator, only two operations remain before the customized ISO is obtained: clicking the "Compile" button and burning the generated ISO file to a blank CD media.
[141000340340] |The Compile button might be confusing at first, but people should know that it really doesn't have anything to do with the traditional package compiling process, it just puts together the whole show.
[141000340350] |While this Generator will be what most of the people will use, there might be some that want to manually modify and tweak GeeXBoX.
[141000340360] |Things that go beyond the Generator, can be done by using the development package.
[141000340370] |<b>One custom "baked" GeeXBoX made from the source code</b>
[141000340380] |While the other two ways of getting GeeXBoX on you computer will be used by most people, this option of compiling everything from source code and configuring GeeXBoX by modifying text configuration files, is reserved to those who have enough patience to go through the whole process or those who really know what they are doing and know what compiling from the source code means.
[141000340390] |This process isn't always finalized as it should be, it can fail, depending on the distribution you are using, on the settings that you make in the configuration files and so on.
[141000340400] |Even if it finalizes correctly and you do obtain your very own customized ISO file, you will have to wait for this as it will be compiled from the source code, a process that will take some time.
[141000340410] |GeeXBoX isn't very complex, once you have set it up, you can configure it to use a TV tuner, so you can watch your favourite TV shows, configure it to watch digital TV by setting up a DVB card, make a slideshow from those pictures that you took during your holidays, playback that film you recorded during the same holidays, or watch a DVD film that you just bought.
[141000340420] |GeeXBoX is easy to use once it is configured.
[141000340430] |<b>The Good:</b>
[141000340440] |It's very small, the standard ISO which can be downloaded from the website, for the i386 PC architecture, is around 7 megabytes.
[141000340450] |The Generator allows you to configure the sound card, set up networking, choose a different theme, configure a remote controller and a receiver and many more.
[141000340460] |The Generator is available for i386(PC), for Windows and Linux operating systems, and for PPC, which means it also runs on MAC OS.
[141000340470] |As I mentioned earlier, GeeXBoX itself is available for PPC and i386 platforms, so users of MAC and PC computers can enjoy GeeXBoX.
[141000340480] |<b>The Bad:</b>
[141000340490] |Setting up a TV tuner or a DVB card requires manual editing of configuration files, which isn't the ideal way of doing this.
[141000340500] |Some people might be using GeeXBoX to make things easier in the first place, so why should a tool, which is easy to use, be harder to configure than use?
[141000340510] |The minimal configuration for playing back various media files is a 400 MHz Pentium 2, but I would recommend a Pentium 3 CPU.
[141000340520] |Perhaps there is something that can be done to lower the requirements.
[141000340530] |<b>The Truth:</b>
[141000340540] |GeeXBoX can be a great way of turning a computer into a mini home theater PC (or HTPC).
[141000340550] |A remote controller can be used together with a receiver, a feature that's even more HTPC oriented.
[141000340560] |Even the classic home made serial LIRC receiver is supported, along with one of the remote controllers, if the remote you want to use isn't supported directly by GeeXBoX, a LIRC config file can be searched on the Internet.
[141000340570] |GeeXBoX can be customized to your tastein terms of looks, language of the menus and fonts.
[141000340580] |<b>Follow the editor on Twitter <a>@mariusnestor</a></b>
[141000560010] |<title>Evolution Review</title>
[141000560020] |<img/>The days when sending letters was done through conventional mail are long gone, at least for most of us.
[141000560030] |This is part of the evolution of the human specie.
[141000560040] |I'm convinced that everybody who is reading this review now has at least one e-mail address.
[141000560050] |Some use the webmail, others use an installed mail client and some of you use both.
[141000560060] |The first mail client I used I think it was mutt.
[141000560070] |For those of you who are not familiar with it, you should know it is for command line and that I still use it on rare occasions.
[141000560080] |To be honest, I think I was fascinated at that point.
[141000560090] |Sending “letters” was far more easier, and the speed was incredible.
[141000560100] |The problem was that the only person I knew that had an e-mail address was the guy that created mine.
[141000560110] |This is a funny situation.
[141000560120] |Anyways, conventional mails I wasn't sending because the whole trouble just wasn’t worth the effort.
[141000560130] |Evolution is something interesting.
[141000560140] |What I'm talking about now, it's an e-mail client with a twist for the GNOME desktop.
[141000560150] |It provides cutting edge technology for integrated mail, address book and calendaring functionality.
[141000560160] |At first sight, Evolution looks like a pretty simple and easy to use email client which is just what most users need from one.
[141000560170] |The truth is that it a little more, and could easily satisfy the needs for almost anyone.
[141000560180] |Because today mail can come from just about anywhere, we all need to control the junk mail.
[141000560190] |Evolution can do this easily.
[141000560200] |All we have to do is mark an e-mail as junk.
[141000560210] |The button for this is in the main toolbar and clicking it once should be enough for a lifetime.
[141000560220] |Evolution uses Bayesian spam filtering which is starting to be a standard in this area. <img/>
[141000560230] |<img/>This type of <b>spam filtering is based on Bayes' theorem</b> which, in the context of spam, says that the probability that an email is spam, given that it has certain words in it, is equal to the probability of finding those certain words in spam email, times the probability that any email is spam, divided by the probability of finding those words in any email. 
[141000560240] |I apologize if you lost me there.
[141000560250] |Just ignore Bayes, and it's theorem because the only real life situation in which it can be useful is a statistics exam and in my case it wasn't even in that case, because I failed it faster than you can say 3.
[141000560260] |Other useful things that Evolution has are the facts that all users that receive large volumes of mail include <b>filters</b> for automating the organizing of mails and the <b>fast search</b> feature.
[141000560270] |Filters allow you to bundle sort and distribute mail into various folders.
[141000560280] |A combination of different filters can be used to sort your mail just the way you want.
[141000560290] |Searching is very fast because Evolution indexes all messages and locating a mail requires only to know what you want to locate.
[141000560300] |In other words, the machines are taking over some of our boring responsibilities so we can focus our attention to other tasks.
[141000560310] |Something interesting is <b>support for web calendars</b>.
[141000560320] |This allows you to see someone’s schedule inside Evolution.
[141000560330] |This can be a very good practice in various environments.
[141000560340] |Several websites are using web calendars for listing events and even TV schedules.
[141000560350] |As far as I know, this is starting to be popular among Mac users and a lucky guess is that it will be popular in general, because the idea is good and the framework is good too.
[141000560360] |Any e-mail client that respects itself and hopes to be used in all kinds of environments needs to have <b>support for collaboration servers</b>.
[141000560370] |Evolution is among those that currently support Exchange and GroupWise servers.
[141000560380] |None of them are open source.
[141000560390] |At this point, I feel obliged to mention that GroupWise is Novell's alternative to Microsoft Exchange, and that Evolution is also powered somehow by Novell.
[141000560400] |Others would be nice to have on the list, but if everything was perfect, it wouldn't have a direction to evolve and the name of the software wouldn't make sense.
[141000560410] |Because the Internet isn't what it used to be, <b>security</b> is a must have in an e-mail client.
[141000560420] |In this one signing and encrypting is possible with GPG keys and S/MIME certificates.
[141000560430] |This is not state of the art encryption support, but for the average user that sends confidential information trough mail it should be enough.
[141000560440] |Evolution comes with a data server that facilitates the integration with GNOME.
[141000560450] |It allows using applets in GNOME panel for showing appointments and tasks and also to add buddies in Gaim from evolution contacts, when Gaim is patched.
[141000560460] |Speaking of contacts, I want to tell you that if you want to easily populate your contact list, there is an option in mail preferences to automatically create entries in addressbook, when responding to mail.
[141000560470] |To easily access the contacts just press Ctrl+2 and Evolution will switch to contacts view and when you want to go back in e-mail view press Ctrl+1.
[141000560480] |The addressbook is LDAP compatible and when it is deployed in large environments this will be of real help.
[141000560490] |I almost forgot to mention, but you should keep in mind that Ctrl+3 switches to calendars, Ctrl+4 to tasks and Ctrl+5 to the memos view.
[141000560500] |All this are almost hidden from the eye and I find ti an interesting approach.
[141000560510] |It keeps the software clean and full featured in the same time.
[141000560520] |<b>The Good</b>
[141000560530] |The simple and easy way to use interface and the effective features such as searching filters and junk mail support make this e-mail client one of the best e-mail clients from all operating systems.
[141000560540] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000560550] |Evolution is a little slow.
[141000560560] |Since it is supposed to be the standard e-mail client for GNOME, and since GNOME 2.14 is incredible for speed, I am expecting in some way the same behavior from Evolution.
[141000560570] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000560580] |The truth is out there in the review.
[141000560590] |Evolution is powerful, robust and easy to use.
[141000560600] |Currently I'm using it as my default e-mail client for the GNOME desktop and I am very satisfied.
[141000560610] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141000630010] |<title>Dillo Review</title>
[141000630020] |<img/>Powerful web browsers like Firefox and Opera are well known, but if you have a very old PC it's a certain thing that you will not be able to run smoothly their latest versions.
[141000630030] |Using that old PC is almost out of discussion even for navigating on the Internet.
[141000630040] |This is not necessary the case, because there is a browser out there that's amazingly small in size, fast and RAM friendly.
[141000630050] |It is Dillo!
[141000630060] |I should start perhaps by saying what the system requirements are.
[141000630070] |For running it, you'll need a PC that is able to run X. That's just about any PC.
[141000630080] |A Pentium with 32 MB RAM can successfully run X and Dillo is so light that will not make much difference even for this kind of PCs.
[141000630090] |Considering that Dillo can run on this, I think that it would make a great browser for embedded environments.
[141000630100] |The web browser is a 350Kb file, so I guess this is not heavy on storage.
[141000630110] |Secondly, you should know that if you have an acceptable PC you'll not use Dillo as the main browser, because it can't display many web pages correctly.
[141000630120] |It displays correctly W3C and WDG validated pages.
[141000630130] |I think it's actually a heavy supporter of these standards, and I think that in this case standards are essential.
[141000630140] |Frequently, a non standard web page is displayed differently among different browsers, and standardizing the web is the right way, not standardizing the browser.
[141000630150] |You should spread the word!
[141000630160] |One of the greatest features of Dillo is the integrated bug meter.
[141000630170] |This shows the number of detected bugs inside a web page and with just one left-clicked, you can see the line where they occur.
[141000630180] |This is a great feature that web designers or site owners should greatly appreciate because it can provide valuable hints.
[141000630190] |You'll see that the popular errors are the nesting tags errors that are easily fixable in most cases.
[141000630200] |A web page can also be validated by right-clicking the bug meter, and choosing between the W3C or WDG validation that's actually very similar.
[141000630210] |A big downside of Dillo is that it has no support for javascript and https.
[141000630220] |I think these two features are essential for a web browser.
[141000630230] |Other downsides include bad support for frames and a poor support for downloading files.
[141000630240] |Main features include support for searching the web through Google, an integrated search through the webpage, support for tabs and bookmarks.
[141000630250] |The search engine's URL can be changed, allowing the use of virtually any search engine.
[141000630260] |To do this, you should go in the preferences window at the last tab.
[141000630270] |Managing bookmarks is very interesting in Dillo.
[141000630280] |It is hone through the browser's window.
[141000630290] |Sections can be added and deleted, and the functionality is similar to some web interface.
[141000630300] |I must admit I like it.
[141000630310] |If options could be also modified in a similar way, it would be even nicer.
[141000630320] |<b>The Good</b>
[141000630330] |The speed, small size and low dependences requirements make Dillo a good browser for PCs that are considered condemned.
[141000630340] |The bug meter makes it a useful web designer's tool.
[141000630350] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000630360] |Support for javascript and a good downloading is essential for a usable web browser.
[141000630370] |A lot of websites use javascript for opening links in a pop-up window, for redirecting to another site and for a lot of other things.
[141000630380] |Dillo hasn't any support for javascript.
[141000630390] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000630400] |The truth is that I really like this software, but, unfortunately, it's not practical for using on a daily basis.
[141000630410] |These days, the web is a lot more than just html code.
[141000630420] |It has a javascript, flash, stream, secured connections and a lot of nonstandard ones.
[141000630430] |Dillo can't be used with all this great stuff.
[141000630440] |The screenshots below will give you a hint of how rendering is done:
[141000810010] |<title>Ekiga Review</title>
[141000810020] |<img/>The world is changing and we are changing with it.
[141000810030] |The way we communicate has changed a lot recently.
[141000810040] |The most common form of telecommunications is still the telephone and it will be for many years to come, but not in the way it was conceived 150 years ago.
[141000810050] |The first type of telephone, and still very common, is the wired one that has physical connections that usually run underground.
[141000810060] |The second is wireless, generally cellular, phone.
[141000810070] |The newest type is the VoIP one; it transmits voice over the Internet Protocol using various technologies.
[141000810080] |VoIP is a very promising technology because it can provide virtually free communications anywhere in the world.
[141000810090] |For a small fee you can subscribe to different services, mainly for connecting the VoIP phone to wired and wireless phones.
[141000810100] |Today I'll speak about a software VoIP phone designed especially for the Gnome desktop - Ekiga, formerly known as Gnome Meeting.
[141000810110] |Ekiga supports both popular VoIP protocols, H.323 and SIP.
[141000810120] |The strength of H.323 was the relatively early availability of a set of standards and actually I think that it was the first VoIP standard used to transport audio and video over IP networks.
[141000810130] |SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) is a proposed standard for user sessions that involve multimedia elements such as video, voice, instant messaging, online games, and virtual reality.
[141000810140] |Since SIP was accepted in 2000 as part of 3GPP, it got implemented in more and more environments and I'm confident it will become famous in a couple of years.
[141000810150] |If you don't have a SIP address you should go to www.ekiga.net, get a free one and then you'll be able to communicate using VoIP.
[141000810160] |Ekiga is very easy to configure.
[141000810170] |The first time you start it you can see a configuration druid that takes you through ten steps where you'll be asked simple questions that will configure your VoIP account and then Ekiga.
[141000810180] |The best thing about the configuration druid is the automatic detection of the NAT Type.
[141000810190] |If you're behind a firewall then probably the best choice is to just enable the STUN support.
[141000810200] |The large network I'm in is behind two firewalls and I encountered a very strange behavior at some point and I really don't know why.
[141000810210] |As a last comment about the configuration assistant you'll see that at step eight you should choose your video manager.
[141000810220] |If you don't own a webcam select "picture" as your video manager.
[141000810230] |Now you're set, all you have to do is place a call.
[141000810240] |You can see dialpad which is there mainly to give the telephone look and feel to the application.
[141000810250] |Generally the keyboard will be used because it's easier and even though any user has a numerical number attached, it is easier to remember the username.
[141000810260] |If the person you want to call has an account on the same domain you do, it will not be necessary to fill in the registrar because Ekiga automatically presumes it's the same as yours.
[141000810270] |You can see that in the left side of the window several buttons are available.
[141000810280] |The first one opens and closes the chat window between the users.
[141000810290] |The problem is that both users should open their chat window because if one sends a message the other will not be notified.
[141000810300] |I think there is a bug in version 2.01 because I find the chat feature to be very limited by this issue.
[141000810310] |The chat supports basic HTML formatting and as many remote users as you wish.
[141000810320] |They can be called from the chat window using the address bar on the top. 
[141000810330] |The second button is for changing the view mode.
[141000810340] |One mode displays the softphone, another is for the videophone and the third one displays both.
[141000810350] |From the view menu you can choose to view either the local video, the remote video and you also have several modes of displaying both.
[141000810360] |Ekiga has an address book which can be accessed either from the third button or from the Tools menu.
[141000810370] |In the address book you can see that contacts are organized in two categories: remote and local contacts.
[141000810380] |For managing remote contacts LDAP and ILS servers can be used.
[141000810390] |As far as I know ILS is a legacy Microsoft product but an open source version for Linux is also available on the net.
[141000810400] |This feature greatly facilitates the deployment of Ekiga in companies where there aren't enough resources for hardware VoIP telephones.
[141000810410] |Several address books can be added to keep the contacts well organized and adding a local contact is a snap.
[141000810420] |An Ekiga White Pages address book that uses LDAP is available by default and it is not difficult to add others.
[141000810430] |From the Call menu you can suspend either video or audio any time during a conversation.
[141000810440] |Call can be put on hold and can be transferred. 
[141000810450] |At the bottom of the screen you can see several tabs.
[141000810460] |The dialpad is selected by default, but I don't find it very useful; I prefer to look at the statistics tab, which shows what the connection is doing.
[141000810470] |The other tabs available are related to audio and video.
[141000810480] |They're useful for setting the preferred levels for the microphone and speakers and for adjusting the video.
[141000810490] |Ekiga docks very well in the Gnome panel and right-clicking its icon opens several options that maximize its usability.
[141000810500] |While docked, Ekiga can receive calls if set on available or auto-answer, reject or forward them if set on "do not disturb" or forward.
[141000810510] |<b>The Good</b>
[141000810520] |Ekiga is easy to use, has an optimized interface and support for both H.323 and SIP.
[141000810530] |The support for LDAP in the address book is a great addition and the docking function is excellent.
[141000810540] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000810550] |Bugs are still present and they can be annoying in some cases.
[141000810560] |This would be a great software package for working in kiosk mode but unfortunately kiosk mode isn't supported.
[141000810570] |There is no support for various USB phones.
[141000810580] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000810590] |Ekiga is a mature program that successfully does the job.
[141000810600] |It doesn't have fancy features but it has all the useful stuff.
[141000810610] |A PC-to-Phone Account can be created and I think this should sponsor the project enough to keep updated.
[141000810620] |Considering also the large availability of other similar software I can say that this software does pretty well and it's on the top of my list, performing better than Linphone and kphone.
[141000810630] |The screenshots below show Ekiga in action:
[141000870010] |<title>KIconEdit Review</title>
[141000870020] |<img/>Perhaps most of you who know how to use KDE noticed at some point that, if you install the graphics package, you also get the software necessary to edit icons.
[141000870030] |There is a lot of good software out there suitable for creating icons, but this one is specially designed to edit them.
[141000870040] |We are trying to decide now if it's still worth to be in the graphics package from KDE or if it's time the developers let it go. 
[141000870050] |In theory, KIconEdit is designed to help creating icons for KDE using the standard icon palette.
[141000870060] |First of all, if I want to create an icon, the best thing to do would be to use a full featured software like GIMP, Inkscape or Krita and to design the icon at a high resolution.
[141000870070] |Then, a simple scale down and perhaps a conversion to the standard icon palette will result in having my desired icon.
[141000870080] |There are many advantages in using this technique and perhaps the most important is that you can make your icon in many different sizes and even use it as a logo, if needed.
[141000870090] |In KIconEdit the approach is different.
[141000870100] |You select the desired size and then paint your icon using very basic tools, and most often by painting each pixel individually.
[141000870110] |This isn't a very efficient method and I doubt people are still using it. 
[141000870120] |I see KIconEdit as a software similar to KolorPaint, only that it has less features, more bugs and only a few enhancements that make it an appropriate application for working at the pixel level.
[141000870130] |Let's take a look at its interface and, at the same time, get through its most important features.
[141000870140] |To begin with, you should know that this software supports a fair amount of formats and that I was actually surprised by the presence of some of them - like JPEG - that are not really appropriate for icons, and by the lack of .ico.
[141000870150] |As you'll see later, this is the last of my worries.
[141000870160] |If you choose to create a new icon, you can either design it from scratch or use some templates.
[141000870170] |I got a little excited when I saw the availability of templates, but when I went through them, I saw that there were actually only three icons you had to edit in order to get something out of them.
[141000870180] |In fact, the templates are useless and there is very small chance you'll use them at all.
[141000870190] |In the left hand side of the screen you'll see the tools that are available in KIconEdit.
[141000870200] |These seem like basic tools that you can see in all basic drawing programs similar to the notorious Paint from Microsoft.
[141000870210] |The tools present in KIconEdit are a lot more basic than the tools in KolourPaint, and even though you'll generally use the freehand tool, the rest are badly needed.
[141000870220] |For example, you can't see any size of any of the tools.
[141000870230] |The fact that I can't select how thick the freehand should be, the line, or the eraser gets pretty annoying.
[141000870240] |There is no easy way to draw a rounded rectangle, or borders to some of the shapes (like the rectangle or ellipse) and I don't have an eraser to erase only one color.
[141000870250] |Considering all these features, I can't really think of anything to like about this tool.
[141000870260] |In the right hand side of the screen you have an area that displays your icon in a thumbnail, one that shows the system colors used for your icon and, if it's the case, there is another area that shows your custom colors.
[141000870270] |I'm very satisfied with the rendering quality in the thumbnail.
[141000870280] |In a way it's better than what you have in KolourPaint and here, what you see is what you get.
[141000870290] |About the use of custom colors in your icons, I think you're pretty safe and - if you need them - use the custom colors and don't worry: your OS will most certainly be able to display your icons correctly.
[141000870300] |Perhaps the most important feature of a software of this type is "undo / redo".
[141000870310] |Unfortunately, in KIconEdit "undo" doesn't work.
[141000870320] |It is quite weird, but it seems to delete random pixels when you try an 'undo'.
[141000870330] |For this reason alone this software can't be used.
[141000870340] |At last, I want to say that there are actually some things that I like, and if those were implemented in KolourPaint, it could easily take over KIconEdit.
[141000870350] |I'm talking about the configuration options, especially options regarding the checkerboard.
[141000870360] |In KolourPaint it doesn't overlap well with the grid, but here it does it perfectly.
[141000870370] |In KIconEdit you can also select custom colors, even the size of its squares, and this is excellent when working at the pixel level.
[141000870380] |<b>The Good</b>
[141000870390] |This software has some good parts and here I think I can easily mention the thumbnail preview and the options related to the checkerboard.
[141000870400] |Generally, I try to find a generous good part in any software, but for this one I can't really think of more.
[141000870410] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000870420] |The undo feature works terribly and this makes it unusable.
[141000870430] |With no undo to a software like this, there is almost no usability left.
[141000870440] |There is no support for ICO and not even a basic support for SVG.
[141000870450] |There are only a few tools and this technique of creating icons is obsolete.
[141000870460] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000870470] |The truth is that, at this stage, this software is useless.
[141000870480] |I can't really see a reason for its place in KDE's graphics package and I think that letting it go would be the right thing to do.
[141000870490] |With minor improvements, KolourPaint could take its place in terms of functionality and nothing would be lost.
[141000870500] |I don't think further development to it would be of much help because it has reached a time when people do things differently.
[141000870510] |Check out this screenshots of KIconEdit:
[141000870520] |<b>Follow the editor on Twitter <a>@mariusnestor</a></b>
[141000950010] |<title>rTorrent Review</title>
[141000950020] |<img/>BitTorrent is the name of a peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution protocol that lets users share files between peers, without the use of a central server.
[141000950030] |Unlike similar P2P applications, BitTorrent is designed to widely distribute large amounts of data, so that the more peers who host the file, the faster the file can be downloaded and shared with others. 
[141000950040] |One problem with using BitTorrent under Linux, however, is that I've never really been very happy with the clients available for this OS.
[141000950050] |In the past, I've had to choose between either a resource hogging client like Azureus, or something really scaled-back like Bittornado.
[141000950060] |Moreover, sometimes I need to use a client that I can control remotely through a terminal, but Azureus doesn't have a curses mode and Bittornado's console mode is not so robust.
[141000950070] |For instance, I can't have multiple torrents to recognize a combined maximum upload rate.
[141000950080] |A couple of days ago, I've found a client that combines the best of both clients into a single one, called rTorrent. rTorrent is written in C++, has a simple curses interface (this means it's a console client), an extremely low resources footprint and a large variety of features to choose from.
[141000950090] |According to its homepage, it's still a bit unstable (I've never felt it, though) but it's surely a viable alternative to many popular torrent clients available on Linux.
[141000950100] |I heartily recommend trying it if you love some of the features Azureus has to offer but you're tired of its bloat every time you use it.
[141000950110] |Once you decide to give rTorrent a try, arm yourself with a lot of patience and prepare for a nasty installation process.
[141000950120] |The tricky part isn't installing rTorrent itself, but installing its dependencies. rTorrent needs the libtorrent library, which needs the libsigc++ library and this could go on forever if you run a unusual or simple Linux distribution. 
[141000950130] |After the installation process is successfully completed, it's time to fire it up for the first time.
[141000950140] |Keep in mind that rTorrent is being used only through key combinations.
[141000950150] |There aren't any colorful buttons, neat menus or an animated mouse cursor.
[141000950160] |At first, you will most likely be very confused, but once you get the hang of it (or read the manual), rTorrent just may become your number one torrent client. 
[141000950170] |The main window is also the most important considering it shows the current leeching or seeding tasks, speeds and peers statistics.
[141000950180] |If you run rTorrent for the first time, your first screen will be blank so, obviously, you’ll need to load a torrent file.
[141000950190] |Simply press the “Backspace” key, type the location of the torrent file and press “Enter”.
[141000950200] |The new task will show-up somewhere in the upper portion of the screen.
[141000950210] |From now on, connecting to peers, downloading the files and everything else is being done automatically. 
[141000950220] |You may also notice some values in the lower part of the screen.
[141000950230] |Bandwidth Throttle is the maximum allowed download and upload speed, Rate shows the actual cumulated speed and the Port displays, of course, the port used for transfers.
[141000950240] |Every value can be modified easily using key combinations.
[141000950250] |For example, if you want to increase the maximum cumulated upload speed with 5 KB, just press the 's' key, to increase the download speed with 5 KB, press the 'Shift' + “s” key.
[141000950260] |To lower the values, just press the 'x' and 'Shift' + “x” keys.
[141000950270] |In the lower right of the screen, you notice a few other confusing numbers.
[141000950280] |Those are the peers’ statistics showing how many people share the same file you do and so on.
[141000950290] |To get to the next window, you have to select one of the loaded torrents by pressing the up and/or down arrow keys. 
[141000950300] |Next window is called the peers screen and can be reached by pressing the right arrow key.
[141000950310] |The peers screen shows a list of IPs and ports you are currently connected to.
[141000950320] |Also, in this window, you can see detailed statistics about every IP, like current download and upload speed, what client does every peer uses and so on.
[141000950330] |Pressing again the right arrow takes you to the third and last window, called the file list window.
[141000950340] |In the file list window, you see what files are currently being downloaded.
[141000950350] |Additionally, you can change the priority for each or all files by pressing the 'space' key.
[141000950360] |The priority can be High, normal or Off.
[141000950370] |If set on High, that specific file will be completed faster than the rest.
[141000950380] |Contrary, if you set a file on Off priority, that file will never be downloaded completely. 
[141000950390] |As I've said before, rTorrent may become your favorite torrent client for Linux and I hope reading this review brought the possibility one step closer to reality.
[141000950400] |<b>The Good</b>
[141000950410] |rTorrent is a BitTorrent client for Linux based on libTorrent library which focuses on high performance at very low resource usage costs.
[141000950420] |It's a fully-featured and efficient client with the ability to run in the background using screen with session management and fast resume support.
[141000950430] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000950440] |The interface is not very good looking and actually quite confusing at first.
[141000950450] |The configuration and usage are made through key combinations which you’ll have to learn for a proper usage.
[141000950460] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000950470] |rTorrent is a simple, yet powerful torrent client.
[141000950480] |It comes with every feature most of the clients have but, unlike those, it has very low resource requirements.
[141000950490] |It's probably the best torrent client for Linux.
[141000950500] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141000990010] |<title>Konqueror Review</title>
[141000990020] |<img/>Konqueror was developed to be a universal file manager, web browser and file viewer for the K Desktop Environment.
[141000990030] |It was released to the world on 14 June, 2000.
[141000990040] |At that time, it was described as "the next generation web browser, file manager and document viewer".
[141000990050] |This isn't very far from the truth as you well know it, if you're using a recent version of KDE.
[141000990060] |Konqueror came a long way since its first public release and now it's reached a point where some final modifications are made and the few remaining annoyances are being removed. 
[141000990070] |<b>The Web Browser</b>
[141000990080] |As any other web browser, Konqueror has its good and bad parts.
[141000990090] |However, the bad parts are very few compared to the good ones.
[141000990100] |Let's start with the good ones.
[141000990110] |It's fast.
[141000990120] |Very fast.
[141000990130] |The fastest.
[141000990140] |It starts-up faster than any other browser as it's part of the KDE GUI which is already running.
[141000990150] |It loads the recently visited web pages faster and also, it renders the pages more accurately, excepting the pages with malformed HTML, which drives Konqueror crazy and reaches very high load times.
[141000990160] |But this is the web page's fault, not Konqueror's.
[141000990170] |It uses KHTML as the layout engine and it's compatible with the most relevant open standards like HTML, JavaScript, CSS, SSL and so on.
[141000990180] |Moreover, it has plugin support, so rendering QuickTime movies or Flash Player animations won't be a problem.
[141000990190] |Konqueror has several web shortcuts which make Konqueror a powerful web search tool.
[141000990200] |For instance, to search Google from the nav bar, enter this code: gg:[search terms].
[141000990210] |Another example, to search for a movie on the IMDB website, you can use the following code: imdb:[movie name].
[141000990220] |Konqueror integrates perfectly with KDE so it can be used simultaneously with other KDE applications.
[141000990230] |RSS and Atom feeds are automatically detected and new subscriptions can be set directly in Akregator.
[141000990240] |Also, files can be downloaded with KGet and audio streams played in AmaroK.
[141000990250] |Another great feature is the tabbed browsing support.
[141000990260] |Yes, every serious web browser supports this, but Konqueror went even further and introduced split windows.
[141000990270] |Every window can be split vertically or horizontally or even both, offering the possibility to keep an important window opened at all times.
[141000990280] |Now for the bad parts.
[141000990290] |Apparently, Konqueror has certain issues with "Web 2.0" sites.
[141000990300] |Websites like Yahoo, Gmail or Goolge Calendar don't identify Konqueror unless you set the browser identification to Firefox or IExplore.
[141000990310] |This way, you won't have any problems with other Web 2.0 sites. 
[141000990320] |So, don't believe reviews that say Konqueror can't read those websites.
[141000990330] |Check the screenshots below that prove the functionality. 
[141000990340] |Another shortcoming I've noticed is the extension support, but no extensions can actually be found.
[141000990350] |<b>The File Manager and Viewer</b>
[141000990360] |At first, Konqueror looks like an ordinary file manager.
[141000990370] |But the first impression can be deceiving.
[141000990380] |It has the same features as any other file manager and even more.
[141000990390] |A lot more.
[141000990400] |It supports thumbnail preview of images, can read TXT, PDF, audio, and a lot more file types, can even browse through ISO images.
[141000990410] |Usually, common file types are recognized and passed to the appropriate handler.
[141000990420] |Additionally, Konqueror uses KIO (Konqueror I/O plugin system) to extend its browsing capabilities beyond the common HTTP and FTP protocols.
[141000990430] |It can read archive files such as zip, tar, gz, can access Windows shares, Audio CDs, even browse another site using SSH or Secure FTP.
[141000990440] |For example, to manage files on another server through SSH, go to nav bar and type the following code: fish://user@hostname:port
[141000990450] |For quick access to GNU Info pages or MAN pages, use the codes: info:program-name or man:program-command.
[141000990460] |Basically, Konqueror is one single application to be used with all kinds of files over the Internet.
[141000990470] |The features I've talked about earlier are only the most important ones, there are a lot more advanced features Konqueror has to offer anyone using the K Desktop Environment.
[141000990480] |<b>The Good:</b>
[141000990490] |Konqueror is a universal file manager and viewer, as well as a web browser.
[141000990500] |It has all the features needed to make an easier life for anyone using KDE. 
[141000990510] |<b>The Bad:</b>
[141000990520] |For the moment, Konqueror has a few troubles with "Web 2.0" sites and some web applications.
[141000990530] |Some of them will eventually work if an advanced option is set, but some will not work at all until, probably, a future version.
[141000990540] |<b>The Truth:</b>
[141000990550] |While using KDE, Konqueror is the one application you need for browsing the Web and managing local or remote stored files.
[141000990560] |It still has some flaws but overall, it's an excellent application.
[141000990570] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001410010] |<title>Beagle Review</title>
[141001410020] |<img/>A user's personal file space is sacred and usually reflects that person.
[141001410030] |Can you remember how many times you found yourself in front of a desktop almost full of icons and other useless things?
[141001410040] |It's most likely for the rest of the file space to be the same, different types of files everywhere, disordered and scattered across the whole filesystem.
[141001410050] |But what if your own computer is like that?
[141001410060] |Wouldn't you need a powerful search tool to find that file you need so badly?
[141001410070] |You do, and therefore, you should really give Beagle a try.
[141001410080] |Beagle is a desktop search tool for Gnome but if you're a KDE user, you will be glad to know that you can also install Kerry, which is a KDE front-end for Beagle.
[141001410090] |To install both of them, open a root terminal and type: apt-get/yum install beagle kerry.
[141001410100] |(Drop 'kerry' if you're only using Gnome).
[141001410110] |As you're probably used to by now, installing software in Linux only takes a few moments, unlike on other operating systems, where you would need to go to some random website, download an installer, pray it doesn't have a couple hundred viruses included with the executable, double click the installer, click 'yes, I do agree with all these exaggerated license terms and I don't mind that it includes spyware and adware', click Next, Next, Finish and finally reboot the computer a few times.
[141001410120] |The whole idea behind Beagle is to make it easier to find certain files through thousand other insignificant ones.
[141001410130] |Once installed, the beagle daemon runs as an unprivileged user, and will actually refuse to run as root.
[141001410140] |It can search based on the file name, as well as on the contents of the many file formats it understands.
[141001410150] |And the whole searching process is unbelievably fast.
[141001410160] |You can also choose which type of files to search for.
[141001410170] |It can index your emails, documents, web history, RSS feeds and many more.
[141001410180] |The initial indexing doesn't take very long, but it mostly depends on the number of files your space consists of.
[141001410190] |And of course, on your system resources but it doesn't require that much.
[141001410200] |What makes Beagle quite impressive isn't the speed of searches, but its integration with other programs as well as with the Gnome desktop.
[141001410210] |The results are displayed in Google style, logged conversations over IM applications also mark the status of the conversation participants.
[141001410220] |There's also at least one plugin for Firefox that will index web pages as they are viewed, creating a massive web history index.
[141001410230] |Unfortunately, that's not the case with the search results.
[141001410240] |It's kinda missing stuff, like really obvious stuff.
[141001410250] |Fortunately, only about one search out of ten or something like that.
[141001410260] |It appears that Beagle is using a pattern of some kind while searching for files but I couldn’t find it during the exhaustive five seconds while I've examined it.
[141001410270] |Both search clients (Beagle search for Gnome and Kerry for KDE) can be a little customized.
[141001410280] |Except for choosing which category of files to show while searching, you can also choose how the results are sorted: by date modified, name or relevance.
[141001410290] |Moreover, you can open the Preferences window from the Search menu found in the main window.
[141001410300] |There aren't many options to change here.
[141001410310] |Related to search preferences, there are three options: whether to start searching and indexing services automatically, whether to index data while on batter power and if to automatically start searching after you've stopped typing.
[141001410320] |The index preferences include only two functions: first one allows you to choose which directory to search in and second, which to exclude from the search.
[141001410330] |The KDE client can also be configured to use global shortcuts for a couple of actions, thanks to the KDE integration.
[141001410340] |However, the main configuration of Beagle is done through the <b>beagle-config</b> executable.
[141001410350] |Some of the commonly used options are:
[141001410360] |- eagle-config daemon AddStaticQueryable /path/to/index: To query a static index (built using beagle-build-index), the path to the index needs to be added to beagled.
[141001410370] |- beagle-config daemon DelStaticQueryable /path/to/index: Removes the index from beagled.
[141001410380] |- beagle-config daemon ListStaticQueryables: Lists the static indexes added to beagled.
[141001410390] |- beagle-config daemon ToggleAllowStaticBackend: If enabled, the disable all static queryables, else vice versa.
[141001410400] |- beagle-config daemon AllowBackend b: Enable backend b.
[141001410410] |- beagle-config daemon DenyBackend b: Disable backend b.
[141001410420] |- beagle-config daemon ListBackends: List the currently enabled backends.
[141001410430] |- beagle-config indexing AddRoot /path/to/root: Add a directory tree (including subdirectories) to beagle for indexing.
[141001410440] |- beagle-config indexing DelRoot /path/to/root: Remove a root from the list of current roots.
[141001410450] |- beagle-config indexing ListRoots: Lists the current roots.
[141001410460] |- beagle-config indexing IndexHome: The home directory of any user is a root by default.
[141001410470] |This option can be used to toggle the setting.
[141001410480] |<b>How to search.</b>
[141001410490] |Beagle-search is a graphic interface (GUI) to the beagle-query command line tool.
[141001410500] |You can find it in the Gnome menu, more exactly inApplications / Accessories / Search.
[141001410510] |Kerry is a front-end for the Beagle search daemon as well, except it was written for the KDE environment.
[141001410520] |You can find Kerry under Utilities in the KDE menu.
[141001410530] |Both work in the same way, basically: type your query key words and click Find now.
[141001410540] |The searches are case insensitive.
[141001410550] |First 5 results will be displayed and for more results (if available), you'll have to click on the Show next results button.
[141001410560] |You can interact with each found item by right-clicking on it.
[141001410570] |Moreover, you can use advanced search syntax for any of your search attempts.
[141001410580] |For instance, to search for specific phrases, place the words in quotation marks ("search key words"), while to exclude a word or phrase from your search, prefix it with - (eg: Beatles -George will find items containing Beatels but not George).
[141001410590] |To indicate that certain words must be in the results, prefix them with +.
[141001410600] |And eventually, you can specify a file extension with ext:mp3 to search for mp3 files.
[141001410610] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001410620] |Beagle is a very useful tool that allows you to search both for files by their name, as well as by their content.
[141001410630] |It supports many file formats, it's very fast and can index things like emails, documents, web history (virtually any text file), as well as images and music files (by their meta data).
[141001410640] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001410650] |Beagle searches through files by following a certain pattern.
[141001410660] |If you understand that pattern, you will be able to search in such a manner that you only get what results you need.
[141001410670] |If you don't get it, then you probably won't get the right results or any at all and you'll end-up thinking it's a week piece of software.
[141001410680] |Also, many of Beagle's options can be changed through the command line, which can be a little frightening for some users.
[141001410690] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001410700] |Beagle is doing a great job at searching files, there's no doubt about it.
[141001410710] |But not many of us need a file searching tool to find what we are looking for.
[141001410720] |Moreover, Beagle was written in C++, using mono (a.k.a .NET), which uses a bit more resources than one would consider 'acceptable'.
[141001410730] |And finally, because it's an active piece of software (it's working most of the time - indexing files), it could empty your laptop battery a lot faster.
[141001410740] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001530010] |<title>GProFTPD Review</title>
[141001530020] |<img/>ProFTPd is a FTP server promoted as stable and secure, when configured properly on a website.
[141001530030] |It's also promoted as highly configurable, GPL-licensed FTP server software.
[141001530040] |The ProFTPd server can easily be used by both home-users and large corporations without too much effort.
[141001530050] |To get an idea about how popular and secure ProFTPd is, the software is used by very large sites such as SourceForge, Samba.org. Linksys, Slakware and so on.
[141001530060] |And to make it even more easier to configure, anyone can use GproFTPd, a graphical configuration tool for Linux desktop environments. 
[141001530070] |GproFTPd is an easy to use GTK+ administration tool created for the proftpd standalone server.
[141001530080] |It provides admins with access to virtual hosting, 8layers of security including chrooted users and encrypted transfers on both the data and/or control channels.
[141001530090] |It's ideal for both standalone ftp serving and webhotes. 
[141001530100] |GproFTPd can easily be installed using the packages created especially for your distribution.
[141001530110] |Packages are available for Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Mandriva, Gentoo and of course, the source code package.
[141001530120] |To install each one of them, fetch them to your disks and use your distribution's package manager to install it (rpm, dpkg etc).
[141001530130] |If you follow this method, first make sure your system has python and GTK+ installed.
[141001530140] |You can also use directly the package manager to search, fetch the dependencies automatically and install all required packages. 
[141001530150] |Once installed, you can find its shortcut under the 'Internet' section in KDE or Gnome menu, or you can run it by typing gproftpd in a terminal.
[141001530160] |Keep in mind however that proftpd binary uses the /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf configuration file, while GproFTPd uses /etc/proftpd.conf.
[141001530170] |The first time you start GproFTPd, you'll see in the upper right part of the window that FTP daemon's status is deactivated.
[141001530180] |You have to make some adjustments to the configuration before you can start the FTP daemon.
[141001530190] |The first one, if your system's hostname isn't listed in /etc/hosts file, you will get an error reporting no valid servers configured.
[141001530200] |To get through this error, simply add your current hostname (type hostname in a terminal) to /etc/hosts file with a line that looks like this: 127.0.0.1 your.current.hostname. 
[141001530210] |The GproFTPd main window is divided into several tabs, each containing different configuration variables.
[141001530220] |From the Servers tab, you can add different FTP servers that will run either on virtual hosts, or on different ports.
[141001530230] |For each selected server, you can configure its IP, its name, either NAT routing is enabled, the admin email address, and a lot more directives in the lower half part of the main window.
[141001530240] |Also from this tab, you can set the default home and upload directory, the HTML statistics file path and the user and group the server is running as. 
[141001530250] |From the next tab, Users, you can manage existing users or add new ones.
[141001530260] |For each user, you can modify its username, password, group, home directory and which shell to use.
[141001530270] |Moreover, you can set whether the account is locked, as well as if the FTP server will require a password for that specific user, whether to show it in statistics.
[141001530280] |Also, you can add the directories the user is allowed to, set the maximum logins value and which hosts or IP addresses to allow logins from. 
[141001530290] |The Transfers tab displays the total transfer rate, the total incoming and outgoing rate and the list of currently active users.
[141001530300] |From this tab you also have the ability to kick or kickban one or more users.
[141001530310] |The next tab, Disc, only lists the currently mounted filesystems and several details regarding them, such as the total space, the space used and available.
[141001530320] |The Files tab will list the last transferred files, as well as whether if they were uploaded or downloaded, the path they were saved to, the hostname they came from or going to and the date when the transfer started.
[141001530330] |The Security tab will only tail the /var/log/secure file to display various errors or security related events.
[141001530340] |The last tab, Configuration, contains a basic text editor which opens the /etc/proftpd.conf file and allows you to manually edit any directives from the configuration file.
[141001530350] |When you're done editing it, simply press the Save button and the FTP daemon is rehashed to apply the new settings.
[141001530360] |The main GproFTPd window shows a toolbar in the upper section which contains buttons linked to various actions.
[141001530370] |From the toolbar, you can activate, deactivate or shutdown the FTP daemon, apply the changes, open a short help window, open the about dialog and quit the application.
[141001530380] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001530390] |GproFTPd is a tool which allows you to configure your ProFTPd server quick and easy.
[141001530400] |It doesn't require extended knowledge as the default settings are working just fine.
[141001530410] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001530420] |The error reporting isn't detailed enough.
[141001530430] |I had to run proftpd with extended debug options to find out why the daemon won't start.
[141001530440] |Also, using a different configuration file than proftpd daemon could be a little confusing.
[141001530450] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001530460] |You should definitely give GproFTPd a try, especially if you think about running a FTP server but are afraid you won't be able to configure it properly. 
[141001530470] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001560010] |<title>UFRaw Review</title>
[141001560020] |<img/>All digital cameras designed for professional use can produce RAW images, which are files that contain minimally processed data produced by the image sensors.
[141001560030] |Photographers use RAW format when additional computer processing is intended because this format permits much greater control than JPEG for several reasons.
[141001560040] |Otherwise, RAW files are automatically processed by the digital camera, using settings for white balance, color saturation, contrast and sharpness, which are either automatically selected by the camera or are manually set by the photographer before taking the picture.
[141001560050] |However, RAW files have a larger size, about 2-6 times than normal JPEG files so fewer images will fit on a given memory card.
[141001560060] |It also takes longer for the camera to write those RAW images to the card, so fewer pictures can be taken in quick succession.
[141001560070] |So taking pictures in RAW or JPEG has its own advantages and disadvantages and choosing either format is only up to the photographer and what he's trying to shoot.
[141001560080] |Usually, cameras that support RAW files come with proprietary software for converting their RAW format to JPEG of TIFF format but it's less likely for the software to be compatible with GNU/Linux operating systems.
[141001560090] |Fortunately for photographers that occasionally use RAW format but only have Linux installed, a portable open source program is available for them, called dcraw.
[141001560100] |This program is able to read several RAW image formats and can also convert them into the PPM and TIFF image formats.
[141001560110] |It's also used as a basis for numerous RAW applications, such as viewers and converters.
[141001560120] |UFRraw (Unidentified Flying Raw) is a utility based on dcraw which is used to read and manipulate RAW images from digital cameras.
[141001560130] |It can be used as a stand-alone program or as a Gimp plugin, but it can also be used for batch processing using the command line interface.
[141001560140] |It also supports basic color management using Little CMS, allows users to apply their own color profiles.
[141001560150] |Nikon users can enjoy UFRaw's ability to read the camera's tone curves.
[141001560160] |Even if you don't own a Nikkon, you can still apply a Nikkon curve to your images.
[141001560170] |Installing UFRaw was a quick and easy process as my system had all the required programs already installed, except for the Gimp libs development package which was quickly installed with apt-get install libgimp2.0-dev.
[141001560180] |The UFRaw package was installed by running ./configure, make and make install in its folder.
[141001560190] |For Ubuntu users, UFRaw is available in the Universe repository and can be installed with apt-get install ufraw, which also installs its dependencies, but unfortunately, the repository offers version 0.9.1, while the sources package has reached the 0.11 version.
[141001560200] |Also, packages for various distributions are available for download.
[141001560210] |However, if you're planning to use UFraw as a Gimp plug-in, you'll need to install Glib 2.0 or higher (2.2 recommended).
[141001560220] |Alternatively, if you plan to use UFRaw's stand-alone tool, there's no need to have Gimp installed, but the Gimp Tool Kit (GTK+ 2) is however still needed.
[141001560230] |Also, there's no need to install DCRaw since its code is integrated into UFRaw.
[141001560240] |UFRaw offers a graphical interface so you can easily modify the controls and experiment with them to see how they affect the image.
[141001560250] |First, you'll notice the raw data histogram, which shows the reed, green and blue curves, and which allows you to see how the raw data will be converted to the final image.
[141001560260] |Right clicking on the histogram shows a menu that gives you control of the scaling and size of the histogram.
[141001560270] |Under the raw histogram, there's the exposure slider which allows you to change the original exposure.
[141001560280] |Note that increasing the exposure will also increase the noise in the image.
[141001560290] |While setting the exposure, you can clip the highlights completely, guarantying that there will be no artifacts from the highlight restoration.
[141001560300] |The auto exposure is calculated according to the white balance and color management settings so every time you change these settings, the auto exposure gets recalculated.
[141001560310] |The controls are grouped into several tabs: WB, Base, Color, Corrections, Zoom and EXIF.
[141001560320] |The WB (White Balance) tab controls the ratio between three-color channels.
[141001560330] |You can set here the color temperature, making the image warmer or colder.
[141001560340] |Since the temperature adjustment controls the ratio between the red and blue channels, naturally the second adjustment will control the intensity of green.
[141001560350] |There's also the ability to use spot white balance and a list of WB presets you can choose from.
[141001560360] |The reset WB button will reset WB to the initial value with which the image was loaded, as opposed to other reset buttons that reset their controls to UFRaw's default values.
[141001560370] |The Base tab offers functionality for the Nikon's tone curves.
[141001560380] |For Nikon NEF files, you can choose Custom curve if you want to use the curve that's embedded in the file.
[141001560390] |You can also create your own curves, which can be controlled either using the mouse or the keyboard.
[141001560400] |The next tab, Color, enables you to change the Color management, either to use color matrix, the gamma and linearity settings.
[141001560410] |The Corrections tab allows you to change the image's saturation level, as well as whether to use a manual or linear curve.
[141001560420] |The controls right next to the curve editor are used to control the black point.
[141001560430] |If the picture looks foggy, the auto-adjust button might fix it.
[141001560440] |The Zoom tab enables you to zoom in or out the picture, while the EXIF tab shows basic information.
[141001560450] |Under the tabs, you'll see the Live histogram of the preview image, which is also updated when the settings are changed.
[141001560460] |Below it, you should see several statistics and also, right clicking it will pop-up a menu that gives you control on the type, scaling and size of the histogram.
[141001560470] |All the options that aren't related to the images, are grouped into the options dialog.
[141001560480] |This dialog is divided into several tabs as well.
[141001560490] |In the first tab, you can delete profiles and curves already saved.
[141001560500] |The Configuration tab shows the data that will be saved to ID files and the resource file .ufrawrc.
[141001560510] |From there you can also save the configuration right now.
[141001560520] |The log tab will show technical information, while the last tab, About, will display a short description of the program and its author.
[141001560530] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001560540] |The program can be used as a stand-alone software or as a Gimp plug-in.
[141001560550] |It allows photographers to change various controls before saving the image as ppm, TIFF or JPEG.
[141001560560] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001560570] |The configuration dialog is basically a text editor and you have to change the values of some options in a text file.
[141001560580] |It would have been a lot easier if the preferences dialog had had some drop-down menus, sliders and so on.
[141001560590] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001560600] |UFRaw is a free program which allows photographers to convert and manipulate raw images from digital cameras.
[141001560610] |If you can't stay away from Linux but you are taking pictures in RAW format, UFRaw is one of the best, if not the best program you can use in Linux.
[141001560620] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001570010] |<title>Kino Review</title>
[141001570020] |<img/>If you thought there is no powerful video editor for Linux, think again.
[141001570030] |Kino hasn't ceased to impress a lot of people from its first release up until now.
[141001570040] |And reaching the 1.0 final version, Kino has shaped up to be a great free and open-source alternative to various (proprietary or not) programs such as Microsoft Movie Maker and so on.
[141001570050] |It offers easy and reliable digital video editing, for the GNU/Linux desktop and works well with IEEE-1394 to capture digital video and provide video tape recorder control.
[141001570060] |Kino can easily be used by both beginner, as well as professional users in their line of work.
[141001570070] |Anyone can use Kino to load several video clips, cut and paste pieces of video or audio and save it as an edit decision list in SML XML format.
[141001570080] |Besides various DV formats, Kono can also export to a variety of other video formats, such as MPEG-1,2,3 and WAV, MP3.
[141001570090] |Ogg, Vorbis.
[141001570100] |It can also export still frames in most common image formats.
[141001570110] |Kino has reached version 1.0 a couple of days ago, so you won't be able to install this version using your distribution's package manager just yet, so to get this version, either wait for an update in the repositories, or download and compile the source package.
[141001570120] |I've chosen the second option, but during compilation, I had to install a few dependencies which terminated the configure process.
[141001570130] |The packages were libdv-dev, libavc1394-dev, libiec61883-dev and libglade2-dev.
[141001570140] |However, those dependencies may differ on various systems, depending on which packages you have or don't have installed.
[141001570150] |Kino also supports transferring videos from a camcorder to a PC through an IEEE1394.
[141001570160] |To do this, connect your camcorder to the PC by IEEE1394 and run the command kino from any terminal or from the Alt+F2 dialog.
[141001570170] |Its interface is easy to understand.
[141001570180] |For instance, if you want to capture video, click the Capture tab on the right.
[141001570190] |Before starting a capture, it's best to check your preferences.
[141001570200] |Click on Edit menu and select Preferences.
[141001570210] |In the provided dialog, set Normalization, Audio and Aspect Ratio according to your camcorder.
[141001570220] |Also, parameters depend on the camcorder model and the country where you bought it from.
[141001570230] |For instance, the NTSC standard is used in USA, Canada and Japan, while the PAL standard is used in Europe and basically everywhere else.
[141001570240] |Also, captured frames can be stored in three formats, RAW .dv and two kinds of .avi files.
[141001570250] |After setting the preferences, press Capture and enter a filename for the captured video but without using an extension.
[141001570260] |Go to 1-2 seconds before the position where you want to start and click the Capture button.
[141001570270] |Kino will then start the camcorder and capture your video.
[141001570280] |Press Stop at any time to stop the capturing process.
[141001570290] |You'll see the transferred videos in the scene list on the left part of the Kino screen.
[141001570300] |When the capture process is done, you can start editing the video but this is, however, an optional step.
[141001570310] |But if you really want to edit your video before saving it to disk, you can choose from a multitude of effects.
[141001570320] |Some of the built-in effects include color video generator, gradient video generator, generate video from stills, video noise generator, audio gain envelope, audio dub, audio fade in or out, monochrome, sepia, inverse, blur, soften, flip, mirror image, kaleidoscope and many more.
[141001570330] |For editing you can also use the split function in order to separate frames and then insert a video transition effect between them.
[141001570340] |Moreover, you can use the Trim function, which fixes problems with the first or last frames in a scene.
[141001570350] |To use Trim, select the scene in the Storyboard and click Trim.
[141001570360] |You should then see a scrub bar and two text boxes, the left one being labeled IN, while the right one is labeled OUT.
[141001570370] |When everything is put together, you can render the edited movie.
[141001570380] |You can also export the movie as a file or a set of files.
[141001570390] |Kino, with additional programs, provides a DV file that stores the movie in a new file format, which can be used further for compression and exporting without the Kino interface.
[141001570400] |Stills save the movie as a sequence of images in JPEG format.
[141001570410] |MPEG codes the movie to MPEG or DIVX.
[141001570420] |Audio lets you save only the audio tracks, while the DV pipe gives you a nice tool to create your own method of saving movies.
[141001570430] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001570440] |Kino is a free, non-liner DV (digital video) editor for GNU/Linux.
[141001570450] |It provides integration with IEEE-1394 for capture, VTR control and recording back to the camera.
[141001570460] |Also, it can load movies and export the composite movie in a number of formats: DV over IEEE 1394, Raw DV, DV AVI, still frames, WAV, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, DivX and more.
[141001570470] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001570480] |Kino lacked a few functions in past versions, but with 1.0 release, it makes a good replacement for many proprietary programs.
[141001570490] |Nothing bad about this version.
[141001570500] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001570510] |Kino is a good replacement for Windows Movie Maker and such programs so if you're one of the people who switched from Windows to Linux and need a software like Movie Maker, than you should really give Kino a try.
[141001570520] |You'll be really impressed.
[141001570530] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001610010] |<title>Baobab Review</title>
[141001610020] |Not long ago, I was downloading a Linux distribution CD image (ISO) and suddenly, the downloader gave an error saying there is no more free space available.
[141001610030] |And there I was, wondering where did all the free disk space go, considering that /home directory had only 1% used from the total hard disk space.
[141001610040] |So I started checking other directories for their size to look for files I don't use anymore.
[141001610050] |Unfortunately, the structure tree for each Linux system consists of a lot of directories and small files and it will take forever to delete a few hundred files in order to free just ten mb of space.
[141001610060] |Fortunately, I found a program that will list the whole directory tree and display the disk usage percent for each directory a system has.
[141001610070] |This way, you'll be able to go straight to the directory that's occupying the most disk space.
[141001610080] |The program is called Baobab.
[141001610090] |It also features an advanced search engine that will scan the whole filesystem for the keywords you provided.
[141001610100] |To install Baobab, you must follow one of the few install instructions provided by the author, depending on your distribution.
[141001610110] |For example, to install Baobob on your Debian system, run the apt-get install baobob.
[141001610120] |You can use the same command to install Baobob on Ubuntu Dapper but that's about it.
[141001610130] |For other Debian-derivative distributions, you'll have to use the provided .deb package for now.
[141001610140] |However, at the time of writing this review, the ftp server hosting the .deb package was down, so I was forced to use the source package, another installation method, to install Baobab on my Ubuntu Edgy system.
[141001610150] |I don't really enjoy installing a program from source package as there is a high probability it will require unknown preferences, the compile process will fail for various reasons and so on.
[141001610160] |Somehow, this was the case here, as the configure process required an impressive list of dependencies which I had to manually search for and install using Synaptic.
[141001610170] |After that, everything went smoothly.
[141001610180] |Once the program is installed, it can be run either from Gnome main menu / Applications / Accessories, from a terminal window or from Nautilus "Open with…" context menu (it only works for directories).
[141001610190] |When started from Gnome menu, Baobab remains in idle mode, waiting for your action.
[141001610200] |You can either start a full scan, select a specific directory branch to search, select a remote directory to search or search for a file.
[141001610210] |You can also set the program's preferences from the File / Preferences window.
[141001610220] |Once the program is launched using the Open with method, it will display the requested tree.
[141001610230] |You can either browse the tree, sort it alphabetically or by directory size.
[141001610240] |Running the application from the Gnome menu or from a terminal will require you to scan either the whole filesystem, or a selected directory.
[141001610250] |The directory tree results will skip the /proc dir, nor any file size that is not related to a "plain" file.
[141001610260] |Symlinks, character blocks and device blocks will also be skipped from the directory size. 
[141001610270] |Right-clicking on a directory from the main tree will pop-up a context menu which allows you to either open the directory in the default file browser, list all files in selected folder in the program's search window, draw a graphical treemap of the folder or more the directory to Trash.
[141001610280] |Moreover, Baobab will display sizes in the directory tree as allocated space, which means that the displayed size refers to the actual disk usage rather that the apparent directory size.
[141001610290] |If you want to view the apparent file size, check the Allocated space box in the toolbar.
[141001610300] |Also, if you need to scan a remote folder, Baobab can connect to a server through ssh, ftp, smb, http(s) and display your directory.
[141001610310] |The file search dialog box offers full and easy to use file-searching capability.
[141001610320] |The filename text box allows wildcards such as * or ? and also allows exact or extended search.
[141001610330] |The first search type will return only results that match completely, while the second will return results that are partly matching the keywords.
[141001610340] |The search results can also be sorted by name, size, type or date.
[141001610350] |Another interesting feature is the folder graphical map option, which will open a full-screen window with the graphical treemap of the selected folder.
[141001610360] |You can open as many graphical maps as you want.
[141001610370] |This function shows exactly how space is allocated and what is occupying the space, even if it's a directory located several depth levels down.
[141001610380] |The depth level can be configured from the toolbar which also offers buttons for zooming, taking a screenshot and refreshing the graphical map.
[141001610390] |Unfortunately, the preferences dialog offers only two preferences, which devices to be included during system scan (/dev/hda1 etc) and whether to enable auto-detect monitoring of home directory.
[141001610400] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001610410] |Baobab allows you to analyze disk usage in any desktop environment by scanning either the whole filesystem tree, or a specific directory branch (local or remote through ftp, ssh, or http) specified by the user.
[141001610420] |It also includes a complete file-search functionality and can also automatically detect any changes made to your selected directory.
[141001610430] |There's also a full graphical treemap function available for each selected folder which will generate a graphical map of the selected directory and its subdirectories located at a customizable depth level.
[141001610440] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001610450] |There's only one thing not quite right with this application: whenever I try to scan through SSH a remote directory located on a server that runs the SSH daemon on a different port, I get an error saying the directory does not exist.
[141001610460] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001610470] |Whenever you want to retrieve some free disk space by deleting huge old files, Baobab will guide you right to the directories with the highest percent of disk usage.
[141001610480] |For each directory and file their actual size on disk is displayed and the usage percent of the total disk space.
[141001610490] |Baobab also allows you to delete any file or folder right from the application's interface.
[141001610500] |You can also use this program as a search tool. 
[141001610510] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001770010] |<title>NeroLINUX Review</title>
[141001770020] |The disc authoring practice has become quite wide spread these days.
[141001770030] |Once the optical units became affordable for anyone, they have also become a vital need for most users as the hard-disk capacity limitation is one of the most annoying problems when it comes to computers.
[141001770040] |I am one of those users who have experienced messages such as "not enough disk space" many times, therefore burning CD-s and DVD-s is a task I perform almost daily.
[141001770050] |I could say that the main role in a disc burning process is played equally by the authoring unit as well as the application you use for that purpose. 
[141001770060] |A quite nice burning application I've dealt with was Nero Linux.
[141001770070] |It is made by Nero AG (previous Ahead Software) and I must say that it is worth most of the popularity gained from its MS Windows-designed "brother".
[141001770080] |The latest Nero Linux 3 release of which I intend to tell you about in this review, is yet a beta version and it was first introduced at CeBIT 2007.
[141001770090] |With a decent user interface, based now on the GTK2 graphical toolkit, the newest Nero Linux release works with a lot of the CD-image formats, including ISO image and also brings in the ability to burn Blu-ray and HD DVD discs.
[141001770100] |Many might get disappointed to hear that, despite the tricky name, Nero Linux is not a free software.
[141001770110] |However, the EUR 19,99 price for the serial number is not exactly a huge amount reported to the quality of this application.
[141001770120] |Actually, Nero Linux and <a>K3b</a> were the only burning applications I've really enjoyed working with.
[141001770130] |The only difference between the two programs would be that K3b is free.
[141001770140] |They have a nice and easy-to-use UI and they came with some clever default configurations so that the end user will not have to worry too much about confusing check boxes or options lists.
[141001770150] |According to its user guide, Nero Linux comes with almost all of the necessary functionalities already built-in.
[141001770160] |There are a few packages, for special features, which Nero does not bring in, as they should be already installed on your system.
[141001770170] |There is no problem though if your system misses one of those packages, as Nero Linux will inform you about the missing package name and an URL where to get it.
[141001770180] |Another major specification I found in the "requirements" section is that Nero needs at least a 2.4 kernel version.
[141001770190] |Regarding the fact that most of the Linux distros are based on the 2.6 version, the kernel should not be a problem.
[141001770200] |Leaving the more "technical" details aside, let's go straight to its basic functionalities.
[141001770210] |The first thing you encounter in program start-up will be a dialog asking you about the compilation you want.
[141001770220] |You can choose from a rich list of options, according to your need, the CD/ DVD type, either Audio, Data.
[141001770230] |Mixed, Video, Boot, ISO a.s.o.
[141001770240] |This new version also includes a new Audio Plug-in Manager for decoding/encoding WAV, MP3, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC audio files.
[141001770250] |Just as any respectable application, Nero Linux will not affect any system files or directories directly on your computer.
[141001770260] |It creates instead a virtual file system representing only a prototype of the disc you want to create.
[141001770270] |The incorporated browser is a bit advanced in this 3.0 beta version compared to the previous one.
[141001770280] |You should now receive a context menu when you right-click a certain file which provides you editing options such as copy, rename, delete etc.
[141001770290] |I was expecting also to have a clue of some common shortcuts such as the Delete key for deleting a file, or Ctrl + C for copying, but I think this is a bit too much to ask from it.
[141001770300] |Also the cut, copy and paste options from the context menu do not behave as expected.
[141001770310] |I've tried to copy a file from one folder to another, but nothing happened, and I've got the same result when I was trying to move it.
[141001770320] |When you click on the copy option, it actually activates the copy content to clipboard, but when I've tried to paste that content elsewhere, I had no result.
[141001770330] |However, the Create new folder and Delete options, the ones I use the most, worked just fine.
[141001770340] |Too bad their shortcuts were missing though.
[141001770350] |But the aspect I don't like is counter-balanced by the Precaching feature.
[141001770360] |What does it do more exactly?
[141001770370] |Well, it comes very handy when you deal with old CDs you want to make copies of.
[141001770380] |Most of the recorders are known to expect a certain raw stream, that cannot be assured by the CD-ROM device if the CD is too worn out.
[141001770390] |In order to enable the preacaching option you can hold down your right mouse button when dragging the files/tracks to the Track Editor.
[141001770400] |The nice user interface I've mentioned above is similar to the look and feel of the current Nero Burning ROM 7 edition.
[141001770410] |One thing I don't like about it is the Options panel, which deals with too much miscellaneous-like options, while the more advanced ones are not so easily accessible.
[141001770420] |On the burning side, I think you already know what I am about to say.
[141001770430] |Everything goes as smooth as possible.
[141001770440] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001770450] |I could give a lot of credit to Nero Linux for being a solid application which does exactly what it said it would do.
[141001770460] |I must say that while using it, I did not encounter any crashes, which I don't happen to see very frequently when dealing with more complex programs. 
[141001770470] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001770480] |One thing that disappointed me was the lack of a CD speed writing tool.
[141001770490] |I've looked for an option list where to select a specific writing speed, but I wasn't able to find any.
[141001770500] |Moreover, the fact that I have to pay for this program is not exactly something I like about it; usually when I say Linux, I think of free and open source software.
[141001770510] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001770520] |This is a beta version of NeroLinux, therefore it is still under development and it might need some improvements and corrections.
[141001770530] |However, it is one of the few applications of its kind that manages to do its job in a perfectly nice and easy manner.
[141001770540] |Please enjoy the screenshots below:
[141002140010] |<title>AXIGEN Mail Server Review</title>
[141002140020] |Email, e-mail or eMail, however you may prefer to call it, has been around since the beginning of the Internet era and is now, understandably, even taken for granted.
[141002140030] |The protocol for sending emails, SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), became an Internet Standard 10 since 1982.
[141002140040] |Early emails were composed using the ASCII character set and we all know what they look like today.
[141002140050] |Photos, sounds, animations, videos or virtually any file format out there can be attached to an email and safely arrive, in a matter of minutes, to its destination. 
[141002140060] |Expecting it to just work, we rarely think about the technology behind it and the constant struggle to deliver e-mails almost in real time, while keeping inboxes as clean as possible.
[141002140070] |That being said, I think we will all agree that e-mail is a great and extremely useful technology these days.
[141002140080] |And for that reason we decided to review the very backbone of your e-mail addiction: an e-mail server.
[141002140090] |We chose a product created by the well-known Romanian company Gecad Technologies –some of you may remember their popular RAV AntiVirus solution that was sold to Microsoft back in 2003.
[141002140100] |Since then, Gecad refocused on providing new, revolutionary messaging platforms under the name AXIGEN. 
[141002140110] |The AXIGEN Mail Server comes in four "flavors": Business Edition, Enterprise Edition, Service Provider Edition and the Office Edition, which is completely free.
[141002140120] |Each of the aforementioned editions is scaled according to customer needs, and the prices range from approximately 275 Euros with 25 mailboxes to 2930 Euros for the full-blown, 5000 mailboxes –ISP edition.
[141002140130] |However, if your company needs more than 10,000 mailboxes, AXIGEN can provide you with such large scale solutions too. 
[141002140140] |<strong>Installation</strong> 
[141002140150] |Being accompanied by comprehensive documentation, the AXIGEN Mail Server installation is a pretty straightforward process and can be done by almost anybody, provided they have at least some base Linux terminal knowledge, as it needs su privileges.
[141002140160] |And knowing that this product is mainly for IT professionals, the command-line installation is as easy as it can be.
[141002140170] |Leaving that aside, it is also very fast and you will be ready to configure your settings in no more, probably less, than two minutes.
[141002140180] |After the install process is finished, the services won't start automatically, as you must do the initial configuration: setting the admin password, primary domain, SMTP and POP3 interfaces etc.
[141002140190] |Fast forward, and you are ready to start your mail server, but not before shutting down other web or mail services (Apache, Sendmail, Postfix, IMAPD, Dovecot) that could interfere with AXIGEN.
[141002140200] |That being done, simply run the following two commands "sudo /etc/init.d/axigen start" and "sudo /etc/init.d/axigenfilters start" and you have a working mail server ready to be further tweaked to your needs using the simple, clean and efficient web interface. 
[141002140210] |<strong>The Web Interface</strong> 
[141002140220] |After typing in the password, you enter the WebAdmin panel and everything is exactly where you would expect it to be.
[141002140230] |The left pane displays all the categories, the middle pane shows the settings for the selected subcategory, and on the right, Contextual Help is available for quick understanding of what's going on in that page.
[141002140240] |Also, in the upper-right hand corner of the interface, a "Home" icon will appear if you leave the first page.
[141002140250] |Near it, a useful "Contact Support" link will accompany you on every screen, facilitating a quick access to assistance. 
[141002140260] |The first category is "Global settings" in which you can view your Primary Domain and the SSL Random File.
[141002140270] |Under that, another panel will display license information like the numbers of machines and mailboxes that are managed, the Tech Support provider, currently installed addons and other details regarding the limitations of the license you bought. 
[141002140280] |The Services category is where you start, stop, restart and configure all of AXIGEN's mail services (POP3, IMAP, SMTP, etc.).
[141002140290] |The very thorough configuration subcategories allow you to customize your server to the finest details.
[141002140300] |A simple Log Level slider exists in almost all settings pages and will instruct AXIGEN to either log everything or only critical events.
[141002140310] |The Flow control will allow you to limit the number of simultaneous connections and the maximum connections per x seconds, minutes, hours or days.
[141002140320] |Error control will close sessions after a number of invalid commands received from clients or failed authentication attempts.
[141002140330] |This number can range from 0 to 100.
[141002140340] |There is also support for the StartTLS technology –a quality Encryption and Authentication method and Thread Management for normal or overload situations.
[141002140350] |You can even set the Greeting message for the POP3 and IMAP services.
[141002140360] |Another "safety net" provided by AXIGEN is Email Loop Protection that will reject emails that have more than "X" received headers. 
[141002140370] |The Domains & Accounts control panel is pretty self-explanatory, letting you manage your domains, accounts, groups, mailing lists, public folders and account classes. A nifty feature that you'll come across when adding a new account, group, mailing list or account class for multi-domain servers comes in the form of an autocomplete field that will filter domains while you type, saving precious time or just helping you through a memory lapse.  
[141002140380] |<strong>Security and Filtering</strong> 
[141002140390] |With huge amounts of spam, malware and viruses coming 24/7 from all over the world, the true power of a mail server solution might just stand in its ability to filter out these pests constantly while still allowing legit emails to get through.
[141002140400] |AXIGEN is able to work with several applications to address these issues.
[141002140410] |Support for SpamAssassin, AVG, AVAST, ClamAV, Commtouch, amavis is available, along with the more generic aximilter interface, which enables connecting to even more security or filtering products.
[141002140420] |All these solutions will attempt to clean infected emails and if that's not possible it's your choice what to do next.
[141002140430] |You can either still deliver them, move them to trash or just discard them.
[141002140440] |The same goes for emails marked as suspicious.
[141002140450] |The AntiSpam configuration features two 0-10 thresholds with 0 meaning not spam and 10 being spam.
[141002140460] |After receiving a score from SpamAssasin, the messages will either be sent to the SPAM folder or deleted, according to the readout on the threshold.
[141002140470] |For example, if you set the "move to spam" threshold at 5 and the "delete" threshold at 8, all messages that get a 5 or higher score will be moved to the spam folder and those with an 8 or higher score will automatically be deleted.
[141002140480] |Very, very helpful and so easy.
[141002140490] |Of course, you can always integrate your favorite AntiVirus solutions and create Whitelists and Blacklists for specific addresses.
[141002140500] |Other anti-spam methods include country filtering (in collaboration with MaxMind geolocation service), Sender Policy Framework, Domain Keys, DNS BlackLists and DNS Check. 
[141002140510] |<strong>Status and Monitoring</strong> 
[141002140520] |AXIGEN Mail Server offers a comprehensive reporting service and has the ability to create charts for an easy overview of the server's load and activity.
[141002140530] |You can enable SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) and add listeners for it, collect domain and domain object data (with the option of renewing samples at an interval ranging from 0 to 848 weeks) and set the logging level. 
[141002140540] |When creating a new chart, you are asked to name it and add it to an existing group, or create a new one.
[141002140550] |Next, set the start/end time and dates, choose the data you want to be used, play around with the colors if you don't like the default ones and that's it.
[141002140560] |It will start monitoring and you can, at any time, download the collected data summary either as a CSV or an XML file. 
[141002140570] |The storage chart will give you a quick look at how much space is being used, but you can also view a detailed version of it, which provides more in-depth information.
[141002140580] |Note that AXIGEN Mail Server will only use what it needs to use, with an auto-expanding storage size (of course, within the limits imposed by you). 
[141002140590] |In the logging subcategory you can decide whether you want to separate service logs or centralize them in a single file.
[141002140600] |You can also view saved logs (.txt extension) right from the interface. 
[141002140610] |<strong>Migration and Back-up</strong> 
[141002140620] |AXIGEN offers automatic and manual migration solutions through IMAP.
[141002140630] |All domains, accounts and mailboxes from any mail server platform can be migrated seamlessly; it will even copy the server's login credentials and create an exact replica of it.
[141002140640] |You simply cannot ask for a simpler tool.
[141002140650] |The AXIGEN team also included a complete Back-up
[141002140660] |'s email services with features like: 
[141002140670] |·Localized WebMail clients ·Mobile WebMail ·Personal organizer ·Address book ·Multiple skins ·Printer friendly emails ·Out-of-office messages and much more. 
[141002140680] |<em><strong>The Good</strong></em> 
[141002140690] |Fast installation and configuration, quick understanding of all the functions under a very clean and efficient Webadmin interface and a plethora of settings that can be tweaked are some of AXIGEN Mail Server's strong points.
[141002140700] |Add those to stability, almost unbeatable security and great overall performance and you get this high-class mail server solution. 
[141002140710] |<em><strong>The Bad</strong></em> 
[141002140720] |Newer Linux distributions are not fully supported.
[141002140730] |The AXIGEN mail server refused to start automatically at bootup on Ubuntu 8.10, which was released quite a while ago.
[141002140740] |But this is definitely not a huge problem and, knowing that Gecad updates the server quite often, I'm sure this bug will be addressed in no time. 
[141002140750] |<em><strong>The Truth</strong></em> 
[141002140760] |Whether you are an admin or an end-user, working with or under AXIGEN's mail server is bound to make you a lot more efficient and a lot less worried.
[141002140770] |Yet another great product from a company worthy of its reputation. 
[141002310010] |<title>AQEMU Review</title>
[141002310020] |Virtualization is a pretty important part of today's server market, and it is expanding even onto desktops.
[141002310030] |For the free operating systems there are many choices, ranging from the well-known VirtualBox to the business-oriented VMware.
[141002310040] |However, there are certain disadvantages for these bigger and sometimes clunkier software packages, and that's why some of us prefer to use the lighter and more flexible QEMU, or, with adequate hardware support, go right near the bare metal with KVM. 
[141002310050] |QEMU and KVM, although very powerful virtualization solutions, lack a graphical user interface, which can be quite annoying when you just want to test something and you don't have the time to research obscure command-line switches.
[141002310060] |That's why different graphical front-ends have been created, and you might be familiar with QEMU Launcher or QEMU Manager.
[141002310070] |Today we are going to review a "younger" and less known application that provides a virtualization GUI. 
[141002310080] |AQEMU is Qt-based, and it is currently available only as source code.
[141002310090] |Compilation is pretty easy and it certainly pays off, just follow the age-old "configure, make, make install" recipe.
[141002310100] |I don't know if my unstable Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 6 was to blame, but AQEMU's configuration script failed to detect the presence of Qt 4.5.2, so I had to remove the part that did the checking from the script, and then the compilation worked without a hitch. 
[141002310110] |When you first start the application, you will be greeted with a wizard that gives you the opportunity to set the language, the folder in which virtual machine data will be stored, whether "Device Manager" mode is active or whether VNC will be used to embed the emulated display into AQEMU's window.
[141002310120] |The next step will look for and configure QEMU and KVM, but if you have customized set-ups you can enter them manually.
[141002310130] |That's it, after completing that short first run wizard, AQEMU will be ready to handle your virtualization tasks. 
[141002310140] |The management functions are quite useful, since you don't have to remember the particular settings and resources for every virtual machine.
[141002310150] |Adding a VM is easy, you just have to name it, and an entry with that label will be added to the list.
[141002310160] |Then you are free to change all the settings at any particular time, for any of the listed machines.
[141002310170] |I did find the "Apply" button a little confusing, since there's no indication of its utility: does it act on a tab-by-tab basis or globally?
[141002310180] |Because pressing it every time you do a small change can be annoying. 
[141002310190] |Of course, if you're using the QEMU backend you have an option for most (if not all) this application's settings.
[141002310200] |There were quite a few things that I didn't come by when I virtualized computers from the command line.
[141002310210] |If you are a true power user, because you would have to be one to keep multiple QEMU revisions installed, you can even choose the particular version that a virtual machine will run, along with the usual architecture, memory and peripheral settings. 
[141002310220] |Creating and formatting hard drive images is certainly a whole lot easier, because qemu-img functionality is integrated and all the basic options are there for you to choose from.
[141002310230] |The "Format" button behaves just like "Create", at least I didn't see any difference, but they both seem to work equally well.
[141002310240] |If you use VirtualBox, there is a striking resemblance between this application's CD/DVD-ROM configuration section and the one in AQEMU. 
[141002310250] |The network can be configured in two ways, either by using the "Basic" GUI or the "Native" one.
[141002310260] |Although the latter appears to have less options cluttered in that space, it is indeed more complicated than "Basic", but it also allows for more intricate network set-ups.
[141002310270] |If you only need to test out an operating system before doing a real install, the preset options will work just fine. 
[141002310280] |You only need to fiddle in the "Ports" tab if you are doing some development work that requires a serial or parallel port, or if you want to connect USB devices to your virtual machine.
[141002310290] |However, USB access failed on the particular machine that I tested on, suggesting that my kernel had no proc filesystem support, so all the options were grayed out.
[141002310300] |That might be a consequence of the fact that AQEMU was running under an unprivileged account. 
[141002310310] |If you were used to booting a kernel directly from QEMU, you will have to visit the "Other" tab to be able to do that here.
[141002310320] |You can also control VNC and hardware virtualization support, and even load up optional images, like boot ROMs or Secure Digital cards. 
[141002310330] |One of the ideas that I liked in AQEMU is the way that the configuration options for the program are split into General and Advanced.
[141002310340] |I felt that some of the options in one place belong in the other though, since you can hardly consider the screenshot format and save location as something "advanced". 
[141002310350] |<em><strong>The Good</strong></em> 
[141002310360] |AQEMU gives access to a lot of virtualization options and features, while trying to offer usable defaults for users that aren't very well familiarized with the technologies and concepts involved. 
[141002310370] |<em><strong>The Bad</strong></em> 
[141002310380] |The interface could use more refining.
[141002310390] |Grouping settings into tabs is a good idea, but some options could be moved into their own sections.
[141002310400] |For example, hard drive and CD/DVD images could be moved into a single tab, with individual sub-groups. 
[141002310410] |<em><strong>The Truth</strong></em> 
[141002310420] |AQEMU is something that an intermediate user could be comfortable with.
[141002310430] |The novices are probably better off with QEMU-Launcher.