[141000010010] |<title>K3b Review</title>
[141000010020] |<img/>The days when burning CDs in Linux was only for scientists are gone.
[141000010030] |Linux users have several user-friendly and, let's not forget, free burning applications.
[141000010040] |Some of these are K3b, KonCD and X-CD-Roast.
[141000010050] |NeroLinux is also supposed to be free, but only if you buy the MS Windows version of Nero.
[141000010060] |Most of the free applications make use of a lot of software, very well known by old school people who used to burn discs in console mode.
[141000010070] |On the other side, NeroLinux has all the necessary functionality for burning already built in.
[141000010080] |The current review will have in the spotlight K3b v0.12.10, which in my opinion is the best application for burning CDs and DVDs.
[141000010090] |This application has the best functionality and eye candy too!
[141000010100] |The project is actively maintained and the application gets better and better every passing month. 
[141000010110] |<b>What can K3b do for you?</b>
[141000010120] |Well, if you just want to burn discs, K3b does it very easy.
[141000010130] |The first thing you see after everything loads is the project part of the program.
[141000010140] |Here are four options available: Audio CD Project, Data CD Project, Data DVD Project and Copy CD.
[141000010150] |Very intuitive, isn't it?
[141000010160] |Clicking any of these buttons will take you to an area composed of two panels: one where you browse the hard disk and other where you drag and drop the files to.
[141000010170] |I guess this sounds familiar.
[141000010180] |Even someone that never burned a CD before can easily manage to do it.
[141000010190] |On other burning applications under Linux… it is not quite the case.
[141000010200] |The support for burn free is available and if from some particular reason you want to disable it, it can be done.
[141000010210] |You can also manually set the writing buffer size.
[141000010220] |You might think that similar MS Windows applications can manage a lot more projects types, but this is not true.
[141000010230] |In the File -> New Project menu there are many other types of projects like Mixed Mode CD, Video CD, Video DVD, eMovix CD, eMovix DVD.
[141000010240] |After compiling any project, if you want to be able to add more files later, the project can be saved in a proprietary format.
[141000010250] |The Tools offers options to copy CDs and DVDs, burn ISO images, erase rewriteables, see the disc info and you can also Encode Video.
[141000010260] |Honestly, I don't know another burning application for Linux that can do this. <img/>
[141000010270] |<img/><b>The Options</b>
[141000010280] |Under the Settings menu you can Configure K3b.
[141000010290] |On the left side of the window that opens are buttons from where you can setup different options.
[141000010300] |These are very simple to understand and require a minimum knowledge from the user.
[141000010310] |From the Writing button I've setup the option to "Allow overburning", because you never know when you put your hands on one of those 705 MB CDs or when you just want to squeeze an extra mp3 in the compilation.
[141000010320] |The Devices option displays your drives and if it happens not to see one of them you can manually add it.
[141000010330] |I don't think it will be the case because I am an old user and this never happened.
[141000010340] |The Programs option is where K3b gets its power.
[141000010350] |Without adequate stuff here you will not be able to do much.
[141000010360] |Actually it doesn't even work at all without some of them.
[141000010370] |Others are for eMovix, VideoCD and other stuff.
[141000010380] |For the advanced users there is an option to add special parameters to the installed programs in this section.
[141000010390] |K3b has support for CDDB and also a panel for the configuration of this feature.
[141000010400] |This feature will be appreciated by people who like to write the Audio CDs with the CD-TEXT option.
[141000010410] |Three notifications are available and they can be extensively configured.
[141000010420] |Personally, I like to hear a sound when the application successfully burns a medium but there are also a lot of other notification methods.
[141000010430] |The plugins that come preinstalled with K3b are all related to audio.
[141000010440] |Some of this gives Audio CD Project the option to handle multiple different audio file formats, like OGG and FLAC.
[141000010450] |Hopefully in the future more plugins will be available.
[141000010460] |A cool feature that improves the eye candy level is the theme support.
[141000010470] |As the popularity increases, I am sure that a lot of themes will become available because they are very easy to create.
[141000010480] |<b>The Good</b>
[141000010490] |There are a lot of things on the good side, the most important being the ease of use and the very good functionality.
[141000010500] |The DCOP interface allows the control of K3b from other software or from the distribution.
[141000010510] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000010520] |K3B doesn't have an option to burn bootable CDs and I find this a very big inconvenience.
[141000010530] |Another thing that I don't like is that it doesn't warn you to install the appropriate dependencies to convert from mp3 when burning audio CDs.
[141000010540] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000010550] |K3B is the best option for every user because it is both easy to use and powerful.
[141000010560] |The only place where is not suitable is when you need to write files over the network or make bootable CDs.
[141000020010] |<title>MPlayer Review</title>
[141000020020] |<img/>These days DVDs are very popular and banished the clunky old video tapes from the realms of video rental stores.
[141000020030] |DVD drives are no longer the expensive beasts they once were.
[141000020040] |The software to turn your everyday Linux box into a home entertainment system is becoming increasingly popular.
[141000020050] |The current review takes a look at one of the best video players available to Linux.
[141000020060] |By default, MPlayer doesn't come with a GUI.
[141000020070] |There are a bunch of front-ends available for MPlayer and you might have thought that some of them were standalone programs when you previously encountered them but you should know that are just front-ends. 
[141000020080] |The next step after installing mplayer was to install gmplayer, because this is, sort of, the default front-end.
[141000020090] |Everybody uses one to be able to comfortably work with the player, as by itself, MPlayer is not that user-friendly.
[141000020100] |MPlayer is very versatile and supports a lot of features like an onscreen display (OSD) for status information, nice big antialiased, shaded subtitles and visual feedback for the keyboard. 
[141000020110] |It plays almost any multimedia file you can imagine.
[141000020120] |The most common formats you can watch are VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5 and even WMV!
[141000020130] |Using the right plugins, the list can go on and on.
[141000020140] |One important thing for most of us, when we like to relax watching a movie on the PC, is the looks of the software's window(s).
[141000020150] |I find the default skin of MPlayer a bit ugly and unoptimized.
[141000020160] |The good news is that you can find on the site a lot of very nice and even some wide-known skins.
[141000020170] |<b>The functionality</b> <img/>
[141000020180] |<img/>After installing gmplayer you can find a shortcut in the K or Gnome menu.
[141000020190] |When the program starts you will see that the interface is suggestive though is not very nice.
[141000020200] |Of special interest is the menu that appears when you right click the movie window.
[141000020210] |From there you can load your media, go to the preferences window, open the equalizer, browse skins and do many other actions.
[141000020220] |A nice feature that is not very common in Linux multimedia software is the possibility to play video streams, both via http and mms.
[141000020230] |If you want to play DVDs you have to install libdvdcss, libdvdnav, libdvdplay, libdvdread.
[141000020240] |On my Fedora 4 the menu of the DVD didn't work correctly and I had to manually select the title because when the menu should have appeared the movie stopped.
[141000020250] |Another problem that I encounter with DVDs is that when I changed the subtitle or audio language, the movie started from the beginning of the chapter.
[141000020260] |I think that this second issue shouldn't bother very much because people don't just change the language in the middle of the movie.
[141000020270] |One of the nicest things is that you can rewind the movie just using the scroll of the mouse and when you are doing that, the OSD shows the progress.
[141000020280] |You will also note that in MPlayer the movies rewind very fast.
[141000020290] |Another thing that I liked is the equalizer which works well and is particular useful for those of you who don't have a state of the art audio system.
[141000020300] |The thing that I didn't like about it is that the preferences menu is mostly for advanced users, but on the other side I liked that there are enough options to make it work if something is not just the way it should.
[141000020310] |From here you can select the audio and video drivers and also the settings for Subtitles
[141000030010] |<title>XMMS Review</title>
[141000030020] |<img/>Recently, Linux started to be more and more used by home users, due to the increased availability of distributions that work out of the box.
[141000030030] |In terms of multimedia, the problems that we had a few years ago have been pretty much solved. 
[141000030040] |I don’t think there is a person that does not enjoy listening to music when the environment allows it.
[141000030050] |For example, you are at home and your PC has Linux installed, either because you like the philosophy of free-software or you just don’t afford an expensive OS.
[141000030060] |It is very likely that you have used WinAmp before and most certainly you liked it.
[141000030070] |The good news is that you have a similar software package in Linux, called XMMS.
[141000030080] |The abbreviation stands for X MultiMedia System.
[141000030090] |XMMS parallels Winamp in both the ease of use and the interface, meaning that also the shortcuts are the same.
[141000030100] |The sound engine that XMMS should use can be selected from the preferences window.
[141000030110] |I prefer ALSA, and to be honest with you, ALSA always performed better than DirectSound, at least for those low-end Realtek built in audio chips, that most of us have.
[141000030120] |The XMMS user interface has three windows: The Main Window, Graphical Equalizer and the Playlist Editor.
[141000030130] |All of them have the ability to dock together so that you have a well bounded program.
[141000030140] |From Preferences you can also set the distance at which the windows snap together.
[141000030150] |The default value is 10 pixels, the same as Winamp, and this also facilitates the transition because you will not have to get used with a different behavior.
[141000030160] |<b>The Windows</b>
[141000030170] |The main window is the only one that starts when XMMS is first loaded.
[141000030180] |From here you will be able to control all the playback functions and also open the other two windows.
[141000030190] |Actually I can’t think of anything that Winamp 2’s main window has and this one hasn’t in terms of design and of functionality.
[141000030200] |In the equalizer you can see (and hear) some differences.
[141000030210] |While in Winamp, the equalizer is useful to obtain better audio quality, this one is useful for the optimal sound calibration related to the speaker type.
[141000030220] |The equalizer in XMMS also supports Winamp’s presets.
[141000030230] |There’s not too much to say about the playlist window, because it is very intuitive and I can’t think of something that you can’t figure out on your own.
[141000030240] |The only thing I want to mention is that the file info will be loaded much faster than in windows.
[141000030250] |You will be amazed.
[141000030260] |<b>Other functions</b> <img/>
[141000030270] |<img/>XMMS can play CDs, WAVs, MP3s and MOD files predominantly, but also WMA, Ogg-Vorbis and a lot more if you download the appropriate plugins from the net.
[141000030280] |For those who listen to on-line radios, you should know that XMMS has support for audio streams.
[141000030290] |You can also use the common playlist formats.
[141000030300] |In the standard package there are available three visual plugins and three for audio effects, but a lot more can be downloaded from the project’s site.
[141000030310] |Some of them are really nice and others are quite useful.
[141000030320] |Speaking of plugins, you can find some on the XMMS website that really capture your imagination.
[141000030330] |I strongly advice you to check it out.
[141000030340] |Some of them allow the use of an IR remote control, the output to an external LCD, shutting down the PC at a certain hour, the control of the player from a webpage, and the list can go on and on.
[141000030350] |The preferences window, which opens with the classical Ctrl+P key combination, is quite useful, thought it can’t be resized and is not well optimized.
[141000030360] |From here you can activate/deactivate the plugins, change different settings to them, but also alter parameters which control the player’s behavior. 
[141000030370] |I almost forgot to mention that XMMS supports skins, a bunch of them actually.
[141000030380] |One thing that I don’t like though is that the Visualization window doesn’t support skins and also the jump to file window is deprived of this feature.
[141000030390] |Yes, it also has Jump to File.
[141000030400] |<b>The Good</b>
[141000030410] |The similarity to Winamp is good.
[141000030420] |The first things that come in my mind is what made Winamp so popular: ease of use, light interface, support for audio streams, availability of plugins and skins.
[141000030430] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000030440] |It’s not as heavily maintained as Winamp, doesn’t have a standardized support for visualization and the skins are not applicable to several windows (Preferences, Jump to file and Visualization).
[141000030450] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000030460] |Currently, for the users that are switching from Windows to Linux, XMMS will sweeten the transition, even though it still doesn’t have all the functions, the media library for example.
[141000050010] |<title>KDE Kontact Review</title>
[141000050020] |<img/>It is reasonable to say that most people need to get organized.
[141000050030] |That is why we have on our computers software that allows us to do just that, organize. 
[141000050040] |For this purpose, KDE provides us with the KDE PIM project.
[141000050050] |Its goal is to provide an application suite to manage personal information.
[141000050060] |This includes mail, time, people and more.
[141000050070] |The result is KDE Kontact, and this is an article which should be read by GNOME fans too.
[141000050080] |Kontact is an application which is made up of several other individual components, which are still a part of the same project.
[141000050090] |These components will be explained one by one, below.
[141000050100] |<b>The Summary Component</b>
[141000050110] |This component is especially made for KDE Kontact.
[141000050120] |It provides both an overview of the other components and a selection of information gathered from the Internet, such as weather info and news headlines.
[141000050130] |Any RDF feed can be added from the Internet, or you may choose some of the ones already included, by just adding them from the configure panel.
[141000050140] |I find it a very nice feature. 
[141000050150] |Imagine that you arrive at the office and open Kontact.
[141000050160] |Now you have a display of Appointments, To-Do List, New Mail Messages and, of course, News.
[141000050170] |To get the courage to start doing some real work, maybe you should read some news.
[141000050180] |When you'll realize how many things are happening in the world, maybe the mood for working will come.
[141000050190] |All this information is displayed very nicely.
[141000050200] |When, let's say, an appointment is in progress, it becomes highlighted.
[141000050210] |The information has a link that opens a properties window.
[141000050220] |From here you can modify the progress of the work, the time of the appointment and so on.
[141000050230] |<b>The Mail Component</b> <img/>
[141000050240] |<img/>The mail component is provided by KMail, the KDE mail client.
[141000050250] |Even though it's not too fancy, it is a straight forward mail client that comes with all the features you would expect. 
[141000050260] |One thing I like about it is that it has spell checking (like most of the stuff in KDE).
[141000050270] |When a message arrives, KMail shows a colored bar indicating the type of message (Plain text / HTML / OpenPGP).
[141000050280] |There is also the possibility to import mail from other clients.
[141000050290] |The list is extensive and, to be honest, there isn't a client that I know of which is not supported. 
[141000050300] |The developers of KMail claim that it has anti-spam functions, but I don't find it that useful since is hard to effectively configure them.
[141000050310] |It is a wizard which uses tools that do spam detection and configures KMail to work with them.
[141000050320] |About a year ago I knew some such tools but at this moment I can't seem to remember any. 
[141000050330] |Another thing that it takes time to get used to is the filter function, but if you receive piles of email and sometimes you need to dig hard to find an old one, filtering can really help you.
[141000050340] |When it comes to security, you should know that you can login with SSL, TSL or DIGEST-MD5 and it is also possible to encrypt e-mails using PGP or GnuPG.
[141000050350] |We can clearly say that security is pretty much covered in KMail. 
[141000050360] |After the good side, I must say that not everything is prefect.
[141000050370] |If you need to send formatted e-mails you must tick "Formatting" in the options menu.
[141000050380] |Now the most common options appear and they are enough for the most of us.
[141000050390] |While playing with formatting I noticed that some fonts don't support the italic style correctly.
[141000050400] |Anyway it is not a big deal and I am sure it will be fixed sometime soon. 
[141000050410] |I must mention one last thing about KMail.
[141000050420] |When a HTML message arrives, the program asks if you trust the sender and if you want to display it as HTML, because the email may contain malicious code.
[141000050430] |Viewing HTML messages as plain text also worked good for me.
[141000050440] |Overall, I must say that KMail is nice both for first time and for hardcore mail users.
[141000050450] |I wanted to say something about the looks of this application but I don't know what's to say... it's just user friendly... but not extremely good looking.
[141000050460] |<b>The Contacts Component</b> <img/>
[141000050470] |<img/>Guess what: this component manages your valued contacts.
[141000050480] |The application providing this component is KAddressbook, a program that is deeply rooted into KDE.
[141000050490] |On the project site they say that it was integrated in KMail and KOrganizer even before the KDE Kontact project was started.
[141000050500] |For the home users I guess that the nicest feature is that you can import and export to nearly every address book standard.
[141000050510] |This will help a lot to make the transition to Kontact and also from Kontact to another place (even PDAs).
[141000050520] |For enterprises, the best thing is that supports multiple LDAP servers and when the servers are well configured you'll be amazed how useful this feature is.
[141000050530] |No need for a special memo where you have written down tons of e-mail addresses, phone numbers, addresses, some notes about that person and whatever you can imagine it is required to know.
[141000050540] |Kontact remebers it all.
[141000050550] |If you really want to demonstrate that there is a feature missing in this component, you can't, because it has the option to add "custom fields".
[141000050560] |You may say something about Active Directory, but keep in mind that this is Linux applications we are talking about.
[141000050570] |However, I guess it's just a matter of time and, in a year or two, this will be also possible as well.
[141000050580] |<b>The Calendar Component</b>
[141000050590] |KOrganizer is the calendar component from this suite.
[141000050600] |It is coming from a very long period of development and now it has reached maturity.
[141000050610] |This feature-rich program is so easy to use and intuitive that you will quickly adopt it as your personal organizer.
[141000050620] |The only requirement is that you need it.
[141000050630] |Some users don't have anything close to a fixed schedule.
[141000050640] |For the others, this application can do miracles. 
[141000050650] |According to your preferences, this application can discretely highlight the working hours for every day in your calendar.
[141000050660] |It has several views of the schedule allowing you to see only the current day, the working week days, the whole month and others.
[141000050670] |A new event can be easily added and it can be modified with the same ease.
[141000050680] |You can edit and move around events, print them or send them via e-mail to a colleague.
[141000050690] |You can setup reminders for each event and it can individually be configured to notify you a number of customizable minutes in advance.
[141000050700] |An attendees list is also available and for each one you can set a Role and a Status.
[141000050710] |Imagine that this list is synchronized with the Contacts component and you will have the option to select the name from a list.
[141000050720] |This is useful because the application automatically emails an invitation to them.
[141000050730] |KOrganizer can be extended with groupware functionality and it can boost the communication within every workgroup.
[141000050740] |The range of supported groupware servers is broad.
[141000050750] |Most of them have features for calendar, addressbook, free/busy status and e-mail.
[141000050760] |Microsoft Exchange is also supported but it only has the option to share the calendar.
[141000050770] |For the rest of features a codebase exists and is subject to further enhancement.
[141000050780] |If you would like to publish events, meetings or tasks on the Intranet or on the World Wide Web, it can easily be done because KOrganizer can export webpages.
[141000050790] |This makes it easy to let your colleagues know about upcoming meetings, publish events like lectures and football games or just let you access your calendar from everywhere where you have access to the Internet or Intranet.
[141000050800] |Other export options are iCalendar and vCalendar.
[141000050810] |The first one is an open standard for calendar data.
[141000050820] |Both standards are supported by a variety of other calendar programs and also some devices like mobile phones and PDAs.
[141000050830] |Speaking about this program could never end but I'll have to let you discover the rest by yourself.
[141000050840] |<b>The To-Do List Component</b>
[141000050850] |Are you that type of person that never forgets what they have to do and when?
[141000050860] |If this is the case, then just skip this section.
[141000050870] |For those of you who are not that perfect, KOrganizer provides a To-Do list which helps to organize the things you have to do.
[141000050880] |You can assign priorities, set due dates, invite attendees, define categories of to-do's, arrange tasks that depend on each other in hierarchical lists.
[141000050890] |While completing some of the work you can set the percentage of the work done.
[141000050900] |If it is not ready until the due date, it becomes highlighted in red (life is not always easy).
[141000050910] |Once completed, you can check and remove the To-Dos with a single click of the mouse.
[141000050920] |<b>The Notes Component</b> <img/>
[141000050930] |<img/>This is some sort of a post-it program.
[141000050940] |It is very user friendly - just right click and add a new note.
[141000050950] |You should be able stick them on your desktop and they should stay visible even after closing KDE Kontact.
[141000050960] |On my 0.5 version of Notes, I can't figure why the notes are not saved and aren't displayed on my desktop.
[141000050970] |This might be a bug that only appears on my computer, but I would really like to use it because sometimes I need to write down some random stuff and the pencil is outdated.
[141000050980] |<b>The Journal Components</b>
[141000050990] |Take a wild guess!
[141000051000] |Yes, it facilitates the writing of journals.
[141000051010] |It is so easy, that the only knowledge required it is to know how to write.
[141000051020] |You will just have to click a link and you can begin to write.
[141000051030] |I feel that this component still needs some work, though as it doesn't have spell checking support and I don't think it has any type of export options.
[141000051040] |It can be very frustrating if you write a year of your experiences and then everything just gets lost.
[141000051050] |Maybe in the future this component will be a little more advanced.
[141000051060] |<b>The Feeds Component</b> <img/>
[141000051070] |<img/>The feed reader is actually Akregator.
[141000051080] |It allows you to browse through thousands of Internet feeds without the hassle of using a web browser.
[141000051090] |Instead of checking all your favorite web sites manually for updates, Akregator collects the content for you.
[141000051100] |What I like the most about Akregator is that it imports feeds in a very simple manner.
[141000051110] |When I browse a website that supports RSS with Konqueror an icon appears in the down-right corner and clicking it allows me to import the feed directly into Akregator.
[141000051120] |I also have the possibility to view the articles in a separate tab.
[141000051130] |Unfortunately, a bug is "available" here too: if Akregator is already running in the sustem tray, trying to automatically import feeds doesn't bring it in the foreground.
[141000051140] |<b>The Sync Component</b>
[141000051150] |I can't say much about this component because I don't have a PDA or a high tech mobile phone (but this day will hopefully come for me too).
[141000051160] |On Kontact's homepage is stated that "KitchenSync, KDE's universal syncing application provides a framework for syncing with all kinds of devices.
[141000051170] |On one side it will have a plugin based interface with your mobile devices, like: PDA's and smart phones.
[141000051180] |On the other side it has conduits for connecting with other KDE Kontact components and external applications.
[141000051190] |The Sync component, provided by KitchenSync, is currently being implemented, therefore KitchenSync is not yet considered to be stable.
[141000051200] |Till the day that KitchenSync takes over we have two very nice applications that seamlessly integrate with KDE Kontact: KPilot for syncing with Palm compatible devices and Kandy for syncing with several mobile phone types.
[141000051210] |Eventually, KitchenSync will become a universal syncing framework."
[141000051220] |<b>The Good</b>
[141000051230] |I think that Kontact's best part is the calendar component.
[141000051240] |I find it awesome from the point of functionality and ease of use.
[141000051250] |It is also very good looking.
[141000051260] |I think that the developers of Kontact did a very nice job because they managed to integrate all these applications very well. 
[141000051270] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000051280] |Sometimes you can't have it all.
[141000051290] |Some bugs are still present.
[141000051300] |This kind of drives some of the away users from using Kontact.
[141000051310] |Some components, such as the Journal and Notes are not in their top shape either.
[141000051320] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000051330] |Kontact can be used both by home users and by companies and it will definitely increase productivity.
[141000051340] |The only requirement is to get used with it and you will the benefits if getting organized.
[141000051350] |I strongly advise you to take an hour or two to give it a try and see what it is capable of.
[141000070010] |<title>Mixxx Review</title>
[141000070020] |<img/>Before I begin presenting Mixxx it is very important to know something about what makes advanced music software products possible in Linux: JACK.
[141000070030] |It is a low-latency audio server that can run on almost everything based on UNIX.
[141000070040] |It can connect a number of different applications to an audio device, as well as allowing them to share audio between themselves.
[141000070050] |JACK was designed from the grounds up for professional audio work, and its design focuses on two key areas: synchronous execution of all clients, and low latency operation.
[141000070060] |It is a must when you use advanced audio applications in Linux.
[141000070070] |I also suggest that you use a frontend like qjackctl. 
[141000070080] |Mixxx might be the best DJ software for Linux.
[141000070090] |The subject is open for discussion however, because of another software product, Ultramixer 2.
[141000070100] |Mixxx is designed for semi-professional and beginner users, but not for professionals.
[141000070110] |Professional needs are not satisfied by this software.
[141000070120] |But hey, it is Linux what are we talking about here, not Pioneer's CDJ-1000.
[141000070130] |<b>Configuring Mixxx</b>
[141000070140] |Mixxx gives you the option to configure the sound quality and the latency.
[141000070150] |The lower the latency, the higher the sound quality is and more processing power is needed.
[141000070160] |If you use JACK, it is important to know that the latency is now controlled by it.
[141000070170] |To achieve a low latency you must run it with root privileges.
[141000070180] |Other sound APIs are supported as well, such as ALSA and OSS.
[141000070190] |OSS is very stable and it is very likely that is will work in any situation.
[141000070200] |The turnover is that it has lower performances than ALSA.
[141000070210] |Unfortunately, the support for ALSA is preliminary, has to be enabled at compile time and you have to make a special device that it can use.
[141000070220] |I would go for JACK.
[141000070230] |Don't forget to check it out!
[141000070240] |In the GUI tab, there are several useful thins to set.
[141000070250] |You can control how much pitch shifting is allowed with the rate slider.
[141000070260] |Furthermore, you can control the increment in speed by the temporary and permanent pitch buttons.
[141000070270] |A very useful thing in some cases (depends on the music you are mixing) is that you can set Mixxx to display an average BPM (beat per minute) or the instant BPM of the track.
[141000070280] |Mixxx can also be used as a desktop media player when coupled with Prokyon3.
[141000070290] |In Mixxx you can select as input device a joystick, two mice and also other hardware.
[141000070300] |I hope that in the future there will be support for some DJ Consoles, like the very popular Hercules DJ Console.
[141000070310] |<b>DJ'ing with Mixxx</b>
[141000070320] |In Mixxx you can have several playlists to organize your tracks and I find the playlist manager very useful.
[141000070330] |Playlists can be easily created with drag and drop or can be imported using the common “.pls” format.
[141000070340] |If you don't feel like spending time to create playlists, you can just browse the hard disk in a tree view and select the content from your music directory.
[141000070350] |A nice feature of Mixxx is that it supports MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Wave and Aiff.
[141000070360] |Unfortunately I didn't manage to play a WMA file.
[141000070370] |To the right of the tree view is the tracklist.
[141000070380] |I like that the vertical bar separating them can be moved so you have more room for the one you require.
[141000070390] |I also like that comments can be added for each track in the playlist.
[141000070400] |I use it to set some hints about songs or to store cue points because Mixxx doesn't keep them in memory.
[141000070410] |The bitrate is displayed for each track and after it was played once, also the BPM.
[141000070420] |I like this a lot, because BPM is a must in any DJ'ing application.
[141000070430] |Loading a track in the player can be done with drag and drop or by right clicking and selecting the player you want.
[141000070440] |Each player has several playback modes that can be controlled from a widget located near the position bar.
[141000070450] |After the song reaches the end it will either stop, load the next song from the playlist or loop the current one.
[141000070460] |You can setup a cue point by right clicking the play button.
[141000070470] |To go to that cue point, just click the cue button.
[141000070480] |Fortunately, Mixxx has several shortcuts that make it possible to create really good mixes: “set cue” is SHIFT+D (SHIFT+K) and “go to cue” is F (L).
[141000070490] |There are two shortcuts, one for each of the two decks.
[141000070500] |Mixxx has the ability to play music backwards.
[141000070510] |This is a very neat feature and not so common for software applications.
[141000070520] |Very common are the adjustments for pitch and tempo.
[141000070530] |In Mixxx it is nice that you can do very fine adjustments when you operate them with right click.
[141000070540] |Pitch and Tempo also have shortcuts (F1 – F8).
[141000070550] |The only application for DJ'ing I've ever seen in Linux to have a waveform display is Mixxx.
[141000070560] |And the very cool thing is that is not just a display.
[141000070570] |When you are in playback mode and drag the waveform either forward or backwards the tempo changes temporary.
[141000070580] |Unfortunately it doesn't perform quite well and can't be really used in live mixing.
[141000070590] |When the music is stopped the dragging of the waveform is faster and allows better searching through a track.
[141000070600] |Right clicking the waveform displays a zoomed view which is allows precise positioning of the cue point.
[141000070610] |An automatic beat estimation is performed during the playback and displayed in the waveform view in a very practical manner.
[141000070620] |This waveform display is wonderful.
[141000070630] |Mixxx can also help you by providing a Sync button that does the automatic beat matching.
[141000070640] |As I said before Mixxx estimates the BPM and also provides a hint about how much this estimation can be trusted.
[141000070650] |If the BPM background color is an intense green then the value can be trusted.
[141000070660] |If it is a dim green, then you might want to keep an eye on the waveform display.
[141000070670] |Mixx has built in an adjustable flanger effect.
[141000070680] |It will make me very happy if a future version of the program has much more effects.
[141000070690] |Mixxx also has three knobs to control the low, medium and high frequencies.
[141000070700] |Even though they can be adjusted using the mouse and then reset to the default value with a right click, very practical shortcuts to kill them are implemented on the numpad.
[141000070710] |Keep in mind that you will use the numpad a lot because shortcuts for sync and flanger are also there.
[141000070720] |We like shortcuts, and fortunately they can be easily changed editing a file.
[141000070730] |It is located at /usr/share/mixxx/keyboard/Standard.kbd.cfg
[141000070740] |<b>The Good</b>
[141000070750] |Mixxx has a great waveform display, BPM matching, a nice and intuitive interface and also the feature that guesses how trustworthy is the detected BPM.
[141000070760] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000070770] |I don't like that I have only the flanger as a sound effect, that scratching is impossible and that there aren't too many skins for it.
[141000070780] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000070790] |Even though Mixxx is wonderful I don't think it’s “there” yet.
[141000070800] |It's one of the best, but in the Linux world there aren't too many similar applications.
[141000070810] |Hopefully, the forthcoming Mixxx 2.0 will be an even better product.
[141000070820] |They say that Mixxx 2.0 is going to bring some major new features, including waveform summary displays, new sound effects, and support for pitch independent time stretch.
[141000080010] |<title>GIMP Review</title>
[141000080020] |<img/>The GNU Image Manipulation Program, commonly known as GIMP, is a freely available and very versatile graphic editor comparable to Adobe Photoshop and Jasc Paintshop Pro.
[141000080030] |This powerful program can refine photographs, generate animated images, and create graphics suitable for the Web and print. Gimp runs under three platforms: Linux, OS X and Windows.
[141000080040] |I am far from being a professional when it comes to graphic, but GIMP is very easy to use and you don't have to be to begin with it.
[141000080050] |Gimp's capabilities are mostly limited by your imagination.
[141000080060] |It can be used as a paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.
[141000080070] |GIMP has colorful icons and superior aesthetics of GTK2.
[141000080080] |All dialogs (Brushes, Layers, Tool Options, etc.) can now be detached from the main window and shown in a separate window, added to an existing dialog window, or hidden from view.
[141000080090] |The software saves all changes you make to your view preferences, so that when you next go to work, your tools remain laid out as they were during your last session.
[141000080100] |The resizing of the main window performs very well.
[141000080110] |This allows you to create the perfect environment so that your needs are satisfied. 
[141000080120] |<b>What I like most about GIMP</b>
[141000080130] |It has an advanced scripting interface that allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.
[141000080140] |I like Plug-ins because they make programs expandable and extensible.
[141000080150] |GIMP is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything.
[141000080160] |<b>A common use of GIMP</b> –fixing and editing pictures
[141000080170] |Sometimes, if you are not a professional, some of your digital camera pictures aren't exactly right.
[141000080180] |The good news is that Gimp can fix them.
[141000080190] |Maybe the image is overexposed or underexposed; maybe rotated a bit; maybe out of focus: these and a lot more other are all common problems for which Gimp has good tools.
[141000080200] |While trying to perform “the fix” I am sure that you will find a lot more other tools that apply special effects to your pictures.
[141000080210] |You will definitely be fascinated by some of them. <img/>
[141000080220] |<img/>The basic operations are painting operations (very useful when designing a web page template), but I will not discuss them because they can be easily discovered.
[141000080230] |The next type of operation are a lot more related to digital photography, which is the subject of this current review.
[141000080240] |You should know that it is often possible to enhance the impact of an image by trimming it so that the most important elements are placed at key points.
[141000080250] |I saw once on Discovery Channel that the maximum impact is obtained by placing the center of interest one-third of the way across the image.
[141000080260] |For this you can use the crop tool.
[141000080270] |Sometimes you might like to tilt the picture in an angle, either for correction or for the fun of it.
[141000080280] |For this we have the rotate tool.
[141000080290] |With you can precisely chose the angle you think is right.
[141000080300] |Gimp gives you a variety of tools to correct colors in an image, ranging to automated tools that run with a simple button-click to highly sophisticated tools that give you many parameters of control.
[141000080310] |There are a bunch of them and you will definitely love them.
[141000080320] |Please remember that Ctrl+Z makes an instant Undo.
[141000080330] |You will use Undo a lot in this software.
[141000080340] |A very cool automatic tool is Equalize.
[141000080350] |It tries to spread the colors in the image evenly across the range of possible intensities.
[141000080360] |Sometimes it is bringing out contrasts that are very difficult to get in any other way, other times can do radical changes to a picture that after this with some post processing you can get an amazing effect and other times it will just mess up the picture.
[141000080370] |For underexposed images you can use Normalize.
[141000080380] |It adjusts the whole image uniformly until the brightest point is right at the saturation limit, and the darkest point is black.
[141000080390] |This is what it does in theory.
[141000080400] |Sometimes is not the best choice because it can give bad results and other times nothing happens. <img/>
[141000080410] |<img/>It can often happen that you don't like the exposure of you pictures.
[141000080420] |It can be easily corrected using the Brightness/Contrast tool which sometimes does the job easy and fast, but keep in mind that GIMP also provides professional tools like Level Tool and Curves Tool.
[141000080430] |With this last too, you can obtain very fine tuned pictures but also some radical ones that have cool special effects with amazing look.
[141000080440] |The curves tool is the most powerful of all.
[141000080450] |It can replicate any effect you can achieve with the first too.
[141000080460] |This tool allows you to click and drag control points on a curve, in order to create a function mapping input brightness levels to output brightness levels.
[141000080470] |This tool is most effective when you use a layer that serves as a control layer for the layer below it.
[141000080480] |If your image has to much of a color (a color cast) it can easily be corrected using the Levels tool, which allows you to setup the amount of color individually on the red, green, and blue channels.
[141000080490] |Using Hue/Saturation tool, which gives you three sliders to manipulate, for Hue, Lightness, and Saturation, you can obtain some astonishing special effects and also adjust the restricted color channels of your picture.
[141000080500] |If you would just like to obtain natural vivid colors, don't use the Hue slider.
[141000080510] |Sometimes, if your camera doesn't have a very fast shutter or if the focus is not done correctly, the image can become blurry.
[141000080520] |Usually you will be able to correct this defect, but remember that you are not in movies and you shouldn't expect to fix even the most messed up pictures.
[141000080530] |The most generally useful technique for sharpening a fuzzy image is called the Unsharp Mask.
[141000080540] |I use it all the time because it works much better than sharpening and this one from GIMP has all the adjustments I need.
[141000080550] |Even though Sharpening can be effective sometimes, other times it amplifies noise more and also distorts the colors.
[141000080560] |It is a fact that some low to mid quality cameras sometimes take a grainy picture.
[141000080570] |Usually this happens because low light, because of fast exposure and also because the chip that processes the image is low end.
[141000080580] |To fix it you now have to use the opposite of sharpening, you will have to blur the image.
[141000080590] |Most of the job can be done with the classical Blur filter but sometimes it requires extra help.
[141000080600] |It can be done with the filter called Selective Blur or with the Despeckle filter.
[141000080610] |The truth is that the Despeckle filter can sometimes give very strange results, but used correctly it can be great.
[141000080620] |I'm sure you have seen a picture or two where people have the eyes red.
[141000080630] |You should know that they are not wired or something like that.
[141000080640] |It happens because the iris of the eye reflects the light of the flash.
[141000080650] |GIMP can't easily fix this using a “red eye” plug-in.
[141000080660] |You will have to use one of the several techniques known by photo artists.
[141000080670] |It usually works by painting the red of the eye with a natural color.
[141000080680] |You can also select the area around the eye, feather the selection and then use the Hue-Saturation filter.
[141000080690] |With these techniques you can paint normal eyes, nails, etc. in a different color. 
[141000080700] |One of my favorite tools is the clone tool.
[141000080710] |It does exactly what the name suggests.
[141000080720] |It copies parts of an image in another image.
[141000080730] |Somehow it has the features of a brush.
[141000080740] |I can remove a boat from the see by just copying the horizon from another part of the Image.
[141000080750] |Generally you can also use it to copy/remove small things to/from surfaces that look a lot alike.
[141000080760] |Because GIMP is a very featured program I am going to let you discover the rest of it.
[141000080770] |It will take some time.
[141000080780] |<b>The Good</b>
[141000080790] |I can say that everything is on the good side for this program.
[141000080800] |I like the quality of filters, the possibility to use plug-ins and the nice GTK2 interface.
[141000080810] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000080820] |I can't fink of much that this software is bad at.
[141000080830] |All I can say is that it would have been nice if it was the possibility to choose between the classical interface of GIMP and another interface that is more alike to Photoshop / Photoimpact.
[141000080840] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000080850] |The first time I saw GIMP I wasn't very interested in it.
[141000080860] |I knew it was a great program but I didn't have time to discover the features.
[141000080870] |When I started to discover it's features I became fascinated by GIMP and I will definitely use it to any photo editing task.
[141000080880] |<b>Check out the pictures below:</b>
[141000090010] |<title>Mozilla Firefox Review</title>
[141000090020] |<img/>What are you doing now?
[141000090030] |I guess you are browsing the Internet!
[141000090040] |What browser are you using?
[141000090050] |Well, it doesn't really matter if you are in Linux.
[141000090060] |Why is that?
[141000090070] |That's what I am going to explain in this review.
[141000090080] |The old days when I was browsing the Internet from console using the Links textmode browser are way gone.
[141000090090] |In these days we need powerful, fast and reliable Internet browsers.
[141000090100] |The coolest browsers in Linux are in my opinion Firefox, Opera and I would also say Dillo, even if it's a whole different flavor.
[141000090110] |Konqueror and Epiphany are also also good browsers, but I am not going to mention them because they are part of larger projects like KDE
[141000090120] |'s browser was very popular.
[141000090130] |I don't know exactly why, but at some point, the popularity started to drop.
[141000090140] |Mozilla had a much larger suite then, which is still under development, but people needed something simple, fast, small and reliable.
[141000090150] |Because Mozilla had a long lasting experience with web browsers, it successfully managed to materialize this needs in the form of Firefox.
[141000090160] |<b>What do we like about Firefox?</b> <img/>
[141000090170] |<img/>I like the support for tabs, but I can't say I'm amazed because in Linux most browsers support tabs.
[141000090180] |A very practical thing that Konqueror doesn't have is the ability to drag and drop and rearrange open tabs to keep related pages together.
[141000090190] |Also you can bookmark a set of tabs automatically and it creates a separate folder in bookmarks.
[141000090200] |All the tabs from a folder can also be opened at once.
[141000090210] |You can also define a set of tabs as your “home page.” 
[141000090220] |This is useful if you have a set of web sites that you check every day. 
[141000090230] |Because most of the Internet is about information and finding that information fast some of the best features of Firefox might be the integrated search.
[141000090240] |It is composed of there search features: the drag and drop search, the address bar search and the find in bar search.
[141000090250] |The first one allows you to select text on a web page, and drag and drop it onto the search bar. Search engines are configurable and one can be added with just two clicks.
[141000090260] |I added IMDB.
[141000090270] |The address bar search uses Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” search tool.
[141000090280] |Here you just type something like “debian download” and takes you directly to the download page of Debian.
[141000090290] |I should get used to using this feature because it works almost every time.
[141000090300] |Sometimes, you need to find something into a page.
[141000090310] |For this you can use the shortcut Ctrl+F.
[141000090320] |At the bottom of the page it opens a discrete (it doesn't open in the middle of the window) and efficient search bar that highlights the first word as you type.
[141000090330] |If you would like it has also the possibility to highlight all the words that match. 
[141000090340] |Mozilla has implemented a smart caching system on the forward and back buttons, so the pages you are most likely to visit are preloaded withought having a visible performance impact. 
[141000090350] |An interesting feature is the Clear Private Data tool.
[141000090360] |If you have something to hide, with a single click, you can delete all personal data, including browsing history, cookies, Web form entries and passwords.
[141000090370] |Sometimes is nice to have privacy.
[141000090380] |A unique feature is live bookmarks.
[141000090390] |First time I heard about them I didn't pay much atention but now I really find them useful.
[141000090400] |When it detects feeds on a page it allows you to create a live bookmark that sows a dropdown list with all the latest feeds.
[141000090410] |The problem is that doesn't have the ability to manual add a feed, but if you really want, you can edit an existing live bookmark to fetch another feed.
[141000090420] |Works just fine.
[141000090430] |Firefox has also a built in pop-up blocker that works pretty good and also a tool that detect and installs flash and updates, that works... sometimes.
[141000090440] |Even if all this are very nice features that greatly improves the web experience, Firefox will be nothing withought the simple and nice interface.
[141000090450] |It has nothing more and nothing less than it needs.
[141000090460] |<b>The Good</b>
[141000090470] |On the good side of the libra are the integrated search features and live bookmarks. 
[141000090480] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000090490] |On the bad side is that the support for mouse gestures is not integrated in Firefox.
[141000090500] |Opera is the only browser that supports mouse gestures.
[141000090510] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000090520] |Firefox is a great alternative browser and I strongly recommend to give it a try.
[141000090530] |I think that the interface and features provide just the right amount of functionality most people need without making the browser too heavy.
[141000100010] |<title>AbiWord Review</title>
[141000100020] |<img/>Most of us, form time to time, need to write a document which has a little bit of formating, some tables, maybe some bullets, a picture or two, and most of the time this is just about it.
[141000100030] |To do this job, the simplest text editor aren't enough.
[141000100040] |Most of the people focus their attention to Open Office.
[141000100050] |Well, I think that Open Office might be to much.
[141000100060] |Open Office is the mother of all office suites.
[141000100070] |When it comes to just writing some documents from time to time, AbiWord of KWord does the best job.
[141000100080] |For now, lets talk about AbiWord.
[141000100090] |<b>Why do I like AbiWord?</b>
[141000100100] |First of all, it's very easy to install it if you download the Linux Autopackage.
[141000100110] |The file is just 3.4 Mb, so it doesn't take unnecessary space on the HDD and also gives us a hint about how lite this program can be.
[141000100120] |Don't get me wrong, Open Office is a great program (will be subject for a future review), but maybe sometimes you don't need 100 Mb of fantastic features for just writing a document.
[141000100130] |For this we have AbiWord.
[141000100140] |It is an excellent software that will do the job for most average users.
[141000100150] |AbiWord was designed to be the first of a full suite of applications.
[141000100160] |Other design factors can't be commented because we will have to talk about Windows XP.
[141000100170] |One of the things that make it usable is that it can open and save most of the common formats, such as OpenOffice documents, Microsoft Word documents, WordPerfect documents, Rich Text Format documents, and even more.
[141000100180] |Soon it will be established a standard open source format for documents and I hope that AbiWord will support it.
[141000100190] |Things that make AbiWord cool are tables, bullets, lists, images, footnotes, endnotes and styles.
[141000100200] |You should know that AbiWord has advanced document layout options.
[141000100210] |All this are very easy to use and I'm sure no user will be put in difficulty.
[141000100220] |I like that you can select a text and drag and drop it in a different location.
[141000100230] |For some, it can be more practical to drag and drop a text in a different location, than cut an paste, mostly when you want to rearrange your thoughts.
[141000100240] |You can easily switch back an forth between the number of columns with the help of the three buttons situated in the main toolbar.
[141000100250] |Text can also be aligned using the classic method, either by clicking the icons or just using the well known keyboard shortcuts.
[141000100260] |With this features you can easily obtain very professional documents.
[141000100270] |It is incredible, that even if it has a small size, AbiWord also has a set of useful templates that you should take into account.
[141000100280] |Even though at first sight I wasn't impressed, after opening a few I noticed that the templates really correspond to standards.
[141000100290] |Those are really helpful when you want to make a CV or a memo letter.
[141000100300] |AbiWord also has a fancy feature called Mail Merge.
[141000100310] |It automates the job of writing form letters by hand.
[141000100320] |Special fields inserted into a template document can automatically be replaced with data coming from a variety of sources, such as Relational Databases, Comma Separated Text files or Tabbed Text files.
[141000100330] |As I said before, AbiWord it is a light program, with a lot of features, but it also has support for plugins to add even more functionality.
[141000100340] |AbyWord comes as default with an English grammar checker and not everyone in the world speaks the same language.
[141000100350] |Unfortunately, even in English, it doesn't work very good and sometimes it can be annoying.
[141000100360] |Also the grammar spell checker consumes a lot of processing power.
[141000100370] |If you want to disable it remember that it can be found in the plugins section of AbiWord.
[141000100380] |Fortunately, you can download from the Internet dictionaries for over 30 different languages.
[141000100390] |Even if your language is Hebrew or Arabic, you can easily use AbiWord because it supports right-to-left, left-to-right, and mixed-mode text.
[141000100400] |For some strange characters you can use a tool similar with “character map” from Windows that comes built in with this software. 
[141000100410] |<b>The Good</b>
[141000100420] |I love the fact that is light, because it can work well on some of the oldest computers available.
[141000100430] |The interface is nicely optimized and features don't stand in your way.
[141000100440] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000100450] |When I tried the print preview of a complex document I had the feeling that the application crashed.
[141000100460] |The sometimes very important print preview is very slow.
[141000100470] |It would have been very bad if the application crashed because it doesn't have document recovery.
[141000100480] |Remember to save!
[141000100490] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000100500] |The truth is that I use Open Office, but it's just because I write documents every day, because my hard drive has 120 GB free space and because I am an old user of Open Office.
[141000100510] |If this is not the case for you, don't hesitate to give AbyWord a try.
[141000110010] |<title>tvtime Review</title>
[141000110020] |<img/>This review isn't just for those of you who have a TV Tuner, is for all Linux users.
[141000110030] |If you don't have a TV Tuner don't run away from this page, because this review might convince you to acquire one.
[141000110040] |Software for watching TV in Linux is becoming really good.
[141000110050] |I can easily say that is better than the one in Windows.
[141000110060] |On my desktop from home I use a bt878khf based TV Tuner and a legacy bt848 video capture card.
[141000110070] |In Windows XP I hardly managed to make the sound work for the TV Tuner and the capture card only came to live after my sister installed a strange driver that had nothing to do with it !!!
[141000110080] |Well, in Linux 2.6.12 everything worked better than I expected.
[141000110090] |Both cards where just waiting for a software to drive them.
[141000110100] |The legacy card has two RCA video inputs and another S-VIDEO input.
[141000110110] |They all worked perfectly in Linux, but with the strange driver, in Windows, one of the RCA "played dead". 
[141000110120] |Several good programs are available in Linux, for this purpose.
[141000110130] |In this category i would like to mention tvtime, KDETV, MythTV and Freevo.
[141000110140] |While the first two are dedicated to watching television, the last two are extremely full featured.
[141000110150] |The last two are designed for home cinema boxes.
[141000110160] |Because I don't have a dedicated system for home cinema I'll discuss about my favorite TV application, but because I have a remote control attached to my computer their time will come.
[141000110170] |When I just want to waste some valuable time, I watch some TV, using tvtime.
[141000110180] |What I like about tvtime?
[141000110190] |The first thing that draw my attention was the OSD.
[141000110200] |It's a transparent smooth looking OSD, and all the function of the program can be setup entirely from there.
[141000110210] |It can be controlled either with the mouse and the keyboard. tvtime can display various information, like time and channel, using closed caption text.
[141000110220] |Closed captions are rendered and composited with a high quality font for maximum readability.
[141000110230] |An ugly black background would have been disastrous for this beautiful application.
[141000110240] |Second, the program resizes easily, withought slowing the system down.
[141000110250] |You can set tvtime to stay always on top, resized in a corner, and carry on with other stuff while still watching the news or favorite show.
[141000110260] |If your computer is slow, don't worry, because you have a lot of video processing options, and some take more resources but give a better image quality and others, return the processing power in the deficit of quality.
[141000110270] |Even on fast machines you don't need quality when the program is kept in a small box, in a corner of the screen.
[141000110280] |If you don't know what some of the deinterlacing modes mean, you just have to read the description and you will figure out which one suits your needs.
[141000110290] |At this section, filters are also available, and with the use of a projector, the mirror filter could turn out to be useful. 
[141000110300] |Unfortunately I don't have a game console, but imagine GT3 on the PS2 in 16:9 mode or tune Mario64 for progressive output. tvtime can bing this experiences to life, and even more.
[141000110310] |I use 16:9 all the time when watching on my imaginary plasma.
[141000110320] |Every field is deinterlaced to a unique frame for television quality and beyond. tvtime uses the best deinterlacers from DScaler.
[141000110330] |This is awesome because DScaler is an excellent deinterlacer.
[141000110340] |It has 2-3 pulldown detection and correction for full resolution film.
[141000110350] |For those of you who don't know what this means, I can tell you that it will greatly improve the image quality.
[141000110360] |The biggest difference can be seen with scrolling text.
[141000110370] |If you want to know more about deinterlacing , check out scanline.ca .
[141000110380] |tvtime also does overscan.
[141000110390] |This means that you can push some of the visible image outside the visible frame.
[141000110400] |This is helpful when you have a stripe with noisy signal.
[141000110410] |Some people also want to get rid of the black borders that some TV channels broadcast to keep the original aspect ratio of a movie.
[141000110420] |I wouldn't like to see "The Great Escape" in 4:3 .
[141000110430] |If you have a wide screen, tvtime can also apply a matte.
[141000110440] |It supports all the formats I know.
[141000110450] |<b>The Good</b>
[141000110460] |When it comes to the quality of image, tvtime does the job perfectly.
[141000110470] |When it comes to fulfilling it's job as an application for viewing TV it's i the top of the list.
[141000110480] |The OSD is one of the best, both nice looking and practical.
[141000110490] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000110500] |When it comes to reading anything on the teletext, tvtime can't help you.
[141000110510] |I doesn't have teletext support.
[141000110520] |If you have any type of remote control, keep in mind that even if this type of devices are not supported in tvtime, the support isn't really necessary because the menu can be navigated with only 4 keys so lirc could definitely do the job.
[141000110530] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000110540] |If you just want an application just for TV, tvtime is definitely it.
[141000110550] |Accommodation with it last just a few minutes and the TV experience is great because of the high picture quality.
[141000110560] |If you want a media center application with DVR and lots of other stuff go for MythTV or Freevo.
[141000120010] |<title>Comix Review</title>
[141000120020] |<img/>Comix is an image viewer that was specially designed for viewing comic books.
[141000120030] |Even though the special comic book format is rare, some people who are collectors might have large archives.
[141000120040] |I located some of them on torrents, but downloading was hard.
[141000120050] |I find this software very useful for collectors because they can scan the comic book collection share and also look at them over and over again, without depreciating the comic books.
[141000120060] |It is not a sophisticated viewer but it has some neat features.
[141000120070] |It reads images in zip, rar or tar archives (also gzip or bzip2 compressed) as well as plain image files.
[141000120080] |Pretty cool huh?!
[141000120090] |When you open a file from a directory it displays thumbnails for all the files in that directory in the left part of the program.
[141000120100] |In the right part you can see the picture either in the original size, fit to window or two pages in the same view.
[141000120110] |You also have a cool option to only display a single image in double page mode if that image consists of two pages.
[141000120120] |The program assumes that an image consists of two pages if it's width is greater than it's height.
[141000120130] |Sometimes this option can be great.
[141000120140] |The program has the possibility to display pictures in fullscreen and also has F11 as the default shortcut for this.
[141000120150] |It would be nice if in future versions it will be able to play pictures as a slide show.
[141000120160] |Even though when reading comic books this in not useful, it would be great when this software is used for viewing various pictures.
[141000120170] |One of the unique features that I find very cool, is the magnifying lens.
[141000120180] |For comic books enthusiasts this one is a must and for others it is an interesting tool.
[141000120190] |The lens has the default magnifying factor set to two, but it can be set to magnify up to five times.
[141000120200] |I think this is more than enough.
[141000120210] |One if the things I noticed is that the lens magnifies the scaled image, not the original one.
[141000120220] |I guess in some cases this can be good and in other, it can be bad.
[141000120230] |Anyway, we can modify the ratio if we are not satisfied.
[141000120240] |In Comix you have the ability to add bookmarks in just a second, with a click of a mouse.
[141000120250] |Unfortunately you can't rename the bookmarks and in a large archive, it can be tricky to manage them.
[141000120260] |The program automatically names the bookmark the same name as the directory the picture is in and it also adds the number of the page.
[141000120270] |I hope in the future, the developer will enhance this feature because it has a lot of potential.
[141000120280] |This program also has some basic transform capabilities which gives the ability to rotate and flip pictures.
[141000120290] |Even though this aren't sophisticated tools they really come in handy (mostly with pictures taken with cameras) and sometimes saves us from using other sophisticated tools software, like GIMP.
[141000120300] |Comix supports four modes for scaling and the reason for this is that some are faster in detriment of picture quality and others are slower but provide the best pictures.
[141000120310] |I guess it all comes down to your personal choice, because options are for every needs.
[141000120320] |In previous versions of this software you had the ability to hide menubar, toolbar, statusbar, scroolbars and thumbnails and in the 2.8 version, it has been added also the option to hide all.
[141000120330] |I like this because it helps me unclutter the programs window and concentrate on the picture.
[141000120340] |Anyway, let's not forget about full screen!
[141000120350] |<b>The Good</b>
[141000120360] |I like the fact that it handles pictures from directories and displays them in thumbnails.
[141000120370] |I also find pretty cool the magnifying lens.
[141000120380] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000120390] |Regarding comic books I thing it would have been nice if you had the ability to scale images to a given resolution and also save them at that resolution.
[141000120400] |I also think that the fact you can't edit bookmarks is a minus to this feature.
[141000120410] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000120420] |In some way, this software is unique.
[141000120430] |Even though is designed for comic books, it can easily be used with normal pictures.
[141000120440] |In fact that is why I'll use it for, because I'm not into comic books, and this is an excellent picture viewer.
[141000130010] |<title>LMMS Review</title>
[141000130020] |<img/>Have you ever considered to give it a try in the music industry?
[141000130030] |Are you looking up with admiration at music producers like Armin Van Buuren, Paul Oakenfold or Carl Cox?
[141000130040] |Maybe you didn't went after this dream because you considered they produce this music in very expensive studios and you will never be able to match the quality and the functions of professional hardware synthesizers.
[141000130050] |Well, you can just give it a try with music production without spending a dime out of your pocket.
[141000130060] |In Linux there are several free music production software, and the best are LMMS and Rosegarden.
[141000130070] |This review will be about LMMS, because it installs the easiest and will not give you headaches about a bunch of missing libraries and jack.
[141000130080] |With a little bit of talent and a little bit of luck you will become a star in no time. 
[141000130090] |At first you will notice a splash screen and then a window where you can setup LMMS.
[141000130100] |The most important settings are related to the buffer size, window behavior, sound and midi interface.
[141000130110] |One thing that I like is that when you move the buffer slider it shows how many frames are buffered and also what impact this has on the latency.
[141000130120] |Another nice thing is that you can make the program's interface display it's windows in a centralized interface or in separate windows just like in GIMP.
[141000130130] |The last two are self explanatory.
[141000130140] |Note that you will not have to use jack with this program, but I still recommend it.
[141000130150] |Unfortunately I wasn't able to test the midi interface, because I don't have a midi keyboard.
[141000130160] |About LMMS interface I can say only one thing.
[141000130170] |I love it!
[141000130180] |It has a very good usability and it also looks nice.
[141000130190] |Applications like this are rare in Linux.
[141000130200] |When you fire up LMMS you will see two main windows: the song editor and the beat+bassline editor (I would have used the term “baseline” but I don't want to upset the developers).
[141000130210] |Another versatile tool you will definitely play with is the piano-roll tool.
[141000130220] |<b>The Song Editor</b> <img/>
[141000130230] |<img/>From the song editor you can add beats/basslines and sample tracks.
[141000130240] |Those are very nicely displayed in a timeline.
[141000130250] |They can be repositioned, resized and copied with amassing ease.
[141000130260] |With this basic operations you will arrange your sound passages in a song.
[141000130270] |Segments can be renamed and the color can be changed.
[141000130280] |Imagine how easy is to manage your project.
[141000130290] |Tracks can be turned on and off with just a click of a mouse and they can be cloned with two.
[141000130300] |With double-click or single right click you can rename them.
[141000130310] |In the little drop-down box that shows the amount of zoom, left-clicking increments the zoom and right-clicking zooms out the timeline.
[141000130320] |This allows fast and precise aligning.
[141000130330] |I wonder what you can't do in this window?!
[141000130340] |When adding sample tracks you should know that this software supports a fair amount of audio formats, but doesn't support the most common ones: mp3 and wma.
[141000130350] |I really can't figure out why those two are left out.
[141000130360] |Audio samples are displayed as waveforms in the timeline and the piano segments are displayed as patterns.
[141000130370] |Neat!!!
[141000130380] |The rest of the magic happens in the beat+bassline editor and in the piano-roll window.
[141000130390] |<b>Beat+Bassline Editor</b> <img/>
[141000130400] |<img/>In this editor you add most of your samples.
[141000130410] |They can be found in the left pane, in My Samples tab.
[141000130420] |For each sample are 16 steps set by default.
[141000130430] |Clicking this buttons you can easily make a pattern with beats.
[141000130440] |The number of steps can be easily customized.
[141000130450] |You can add between 1 and more steps you can count.
[141000130460] |There is an option to freeze a beet pattern or even a piano roll pattern.
[141000130470] |When those are frozen any modification you make to the pattern only applies after you unfreeze them.
[141000130480] |A sample can be opened in piano-roll.
[141000130490] |This gives a lot of versatility to the program.
[141000130500] |In the piano-roll tool you can configure easily how long a note lasts, how intense the sound is and a very advanced pattern for the notes.
[141000130510] |Even though the sound can't be very real, the ways you can play with this tool are out of this world.
[141000130520] |The tool has nine octaves and imagine that you can play all the notes in the same time with a different length time for each note and a different intensity.
[141000130530] |WOW!
[141000130540] |You will fully understand the power after you use it.
[141000130550] |For a better idea of what it can do open Bach's Preludium and Fuge that comes with LMMS.
[141000130560] |For those of you who have a keyboard, Piano-Roll can record notes from a midi device.
[141000130570] |<b>Instrument Plugins</b> <img/>
[141000130580] |<img/>You can drag and drop the plugins into the Beat+Bassline Editor, Song Editor or into a channel window to start using them.
[141000130590] |There are for available plugins: AudioFileProcessor, BitInvader, PluckedStringSynth and TripleOscillator.
[141000130600] |The AudioFileProcessor is sort of the default plugin.
[141000130610] |It is a simple sampler, but with it you can make a lot of good samples.
[141000130620] |You can't cut and paste in the sample, but you can easily set a start and an endpoint and you can also amplify, reverse and loop the sample.
[141000130630] |For most people it can be more than enough.
[141000130640] |One of my favorite plugins is BitInvader.
[141000130650] |It is a wavetable synthesizer.
[141000130660] |I like synthesizers and about this one I like that it is highly hands-on configurable.
[141000130670] |PluckedStringSynth tries to be also a synthesizer, but unfortunately it's quality is not satisfactory for me.
[141000130680] |As the name suggests, the last one, TripleOscillator, contain three oscillators.
[141000130690] |They are very powerful and highly configurable because they can modulate each other and because they support eight types of wave.
[141000130700] |No wonder that sometimes this plugins can suck some processing power out of your computer.
[141000130710] |The secret of getting some out of this world sounds is to use the Envelope, LFO and Filter functions.
[141000130720] |Those are very powerful and can be used with any of the plugins.
[141000130730] |There are also options for Chords and Arpeggio, but I don't know much about them.
[141000130740] |I guess I should have attended the music classes more.
[141000130750] |You can save any configuration you make to the plugins and you can also load some of the many preset, the program comes with.
[141000130760] |Using Ctrl you can drag and drop most of the things that pass through your mind: knob-values, track objects and even whole tracks.
[141000130770] |You can also drag and drop MIDI-files, samples, instruments and presets.
[141000130780] |<b>The good</b>
[141000130790] |Well, the software is not perfect, but it's pretty good, maybe the best in Linux.
[141000130800] |I like those of powerful synthesizers and samplers in a modern, user-friendly and easy to use graphical user-interface.
[141000130810] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000130820] |A big inconvenient of this program is that you can't import mp3 files.
[141000130830] |Imagine what mixes you can do with this software.
[141000130840] |I'm sure you still can, but you would have to convert the mp3 to ogg or other supported format.
[141000130850] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000130860] |This program goes in the direction of FL Studio formerly Fruityloops.
[141000130870] |If the direction in which this program goes doesn't change, this program could be one of the reasons to switch to Linux.
[141000130880] |It is a very good music production software, especially for home users who just want to have fun creating cool sounds and loops.
[141000130890] |It is a free software and Linux it is also free and the quality of this software doesn't really justify paying money for other software, if you are not a professional.
[141000130900] |I really believe that you can use it with a hardware mixer in live acts.
[141000150010] |<title>Mozilla Thunderbird Review</title>
[141000150020] |<img/>Mozilla is a very well known vendor for products like Mozilla Firefox, then because of the very mature Mozilla Suite (all-in-one Internet application suite) and last but not least because of the Thunderbird e-mail client.
[141000150030] |Their products are characterized by ease of use, combined with functionality.
[141000150040] |In this review will see if the mail client can rise to the quality of the web browser.
[141000150050] |What is Thunderbird all about?
[141000150060] |First of all it is a full-featured, easy to use and in the same time powerful e-mail client.
[141000150070] |When I first started Thunderbird, after a very long time, the first thing that stroke me was the option to setup accounts for RSS and Newsgroup.
[141000150080] |Even though this is not a rare, being a user of KMail, I was nicely surprised.
[141000150090] |It is very easy to setup an RSS account with the Linux Software Reviews :) .
[141000150100] |When it comes to how the main window changed from version 1.0 to version 1.5 you can't only some subtle differences.
[141000150110] |Mainly, it has some improvements regarding the behavior of the main window when it is resized.
[141000150120] |The milestone improvements regard the addition of an automated updates, a spellcheck as you type, Kerberos authentication, new autocomplete sort features and Mozilla suggests they also included a phishing detector that tells you when it thinks a message might be a scam.
[141000150130] |This new features brought Thunderbird in the line with other top e-mail clients.
[141000150140] |Despite the fact that in other clients configuration is more advanced, Thunderbird excels at simplicity and ease of use.
[141000150150] |The message filters are very easy to comprehend and when managing large volumes of mail they can really come in handy.
[141000150160] |This client also supports filters for spam.
[141000150170] |And guess what?
[141000150180] |They are easy to use.
[141000150190] |If you see some junk mail you should right click it and mark it as junk.
[141000150200] |Each time you mark messages as spam, Thunderbird improves its filtering.
[141000150210] |You also have the possibility to disable the adaptive junk mail filter and you can also use mail headers set by SpamPall or SpamAssasin.
[141000150220] |This is great because this way you can spend more time reading the mail that matters. <img/>
[141000150230] |<img/>Because Thunderbird is designed to make the experience with e-mail more personal and user friendly it also supports themes.
[141000150240] |Themes install very easy and you can make Thunderbird look like a well known mail client from Windows, from Mac OS and even like KMail.
[141000150250] |On I can't think of other e-mail client that makes the migration so easy.
[141000150260] |Besides a bunch of themes, there are also available over 170 extensions for Thunderbird.
[141000150270] |With extensions you can add mouse gestures support, dictionary search, a tool that can switch between multiple proxy configurations and a lot more.
[141000150280] |Just imagine how powerful can become this light e-mail client.
[141000150290] |When it comes to security Thunderbird doesn't make a fool of itself because it's featureas include S/MIME, digital signing, message encryption, support for certificates and security devices.
[141000150300] |Most of the people never use this, but for those of you who don't need very fancy security I think Thunderbird does the job.
[141000150310] |This mail client also has a built in address book in which, of course, you can easily import address book entries.
[141000150320] |What I like about this one is that autocomplete results by how often you send e-mail to each recipient.
[141000150330] |Because printed material is still part of every day's life, you can print a single card or the entire address book.
[141000150340] |<b>The Good</b>
[141000150350] |The best thing about Thunderbird is that combines both ease of use with usability and functionality in a seamless way that only the modern Mozilla products can accomplish.
[141000150360] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000150370] |In this version of Thunderbird are two annoying issues that hold this client down.
[141000150380] |The program doesn't remain in the tray to check my mail from once in a while and another easily fixable issue is that it's nice icon isn't displayed in the taskbar or in the upper frame border.
[141000150390] |The first thing obliges you to manually open the program to check e-mail and feeds and the second makes the program a little harder to distinguish in the taskbar.
[141000150400] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000150410] |Thunderbird has reached to the level of the best mail clients out there and I guess that at this moment is only a matter of personal preference of what mail client you use.
[141000150420] |The combination between Firefox and Thunderbird will really make the Internet experience more pleasant.
[141000170010] |<title>MetaMonitor Review</title>
[141000170020] |<img/>Logs are very important because that's where info about things we are doing on the system are stored.
[141000170030] |If we login or fail to login, if we change the password, information regarding these actions is stored in a log file.
[141000170040] |From logs you can see actions that take place on your machine or, if properly configured, on other machines.
[141000170050] |I rarely read logs and when this happens is because of software crashes or malfunctions and I want to know why they occured. 
[141000170060] |The thing with logs is that they are not very easy to read and that most of the times logs regarding security issues are read to locate the cracker and not to prevent the cracking.
[141000170070] |The ones who actually break into your system will definitely remove entries from log files that imply their presence in your system.
[141000170080] |Well, this is just a fantasy because, if you are an average user, it is very unlikely to be hacked on a Linux machine.
[141000170090] |<b>What does MetaMonitor ?</b>
[141000170100] |MetaMonitor reads actions that come in syslog's or metalog's log file and pops a window that displays the latest entries.
[141000170110] |This is very useful because you can monitor the log files in realtime.
[141000170120] |You will instantly see when someone logs in or out your system, creates or removes users and a lot more.
[141000170130] |Some of the info is good and some of it is junk, but I know for a fact that some people will find this application useful.
[141000170140] |After installation, MetaMonitor stays minimized and clicking the tray icon displays the last messages that came in the log file.
[141000170150] |This is cool because if you set a small lifetime to the pop-up window you can still read the messages easily.
[141000170160] |<b>Configuring MetaMonitor</b>
[141000170170] |The most important setting is to choose which file to monitor.
[141000170180] |You have options to monitor either the file used by syslog, metalog or a file of your choice and for those you can set an update interval.
[141000170190] |Then follows a section from where you set behavior related to pop-ups.
[141000170200] |Triggers is what saves and even gives some magical powers to MetaMonitor.
[141000170210] |You can configure them so that junk messages never reach your desktop.
[141000170220] |Also you can configure it to display different events in different ways.
[141000170230] |This means different fonts, icons, pop-up life time and sound for each trigger you set.
[141000170240] |This just makes the software beautiful but in "Other" tab you have the option to run a command.
[141000170250] |Well, this makes this software very powerful.
[141000170260] |If some action that shouldn't take place on your machine is detected you can fire up a script or a program that takes care of the problem or alerts you.
[141000170270] |I think that one of the things that made this program popular is the glass theme.
[141000170280] |It is a very nice transparent theme.
[141000170290] |Even though I am not very fond of transparency to everything because sometimes it's not very practical, this theme is very nice and I appreciate it.
[141000170300] |Also available is another theme with a semi-transparent background.
[141000170310] |I appreciate this one even more because of the usability with any background.
[141000170320] |A very good thing is that on the website there's a tutorial that explains how to create more themes.
[141000170330] |Advanced settings are maybe a little too advanced for most of the users.
[141000170340] |And I don't mean the setting related to sounds or the ones from where you choose between predefined expressions of syslog and metalog.
[141000170350] |The headache begins when you try to configure Custom RegExp.
[141000170360] |I hardly managed to display some of the info from a custom file.
[141000170370] |It would have been nice if it had an option to read the last line added.
[141000170380] |<b>The Good</b>
[141000170390] |This program is unique and the thing that gives its power is the ability to assign triggers.
[141000170400] |Some log info is plain useless and you can set MetaMonitor not to display it, while other log entries are critical and the program can warn you in realtime; with some skills you can even take action to prevent disaster.
[141000170410] |Let's not forget the support for the beautiful themes.
[141000170420] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000170430] |While this program excels at reading syslogs and metalogs, it doesn't quite handle other files that good.
[141000170440] |One thing that I really miss is the option to read the last line of a file.
[141000170450] |This option would bring new opportunities to this program.
[141000170460] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000170470] |The truth is that this program is unique and that even though I have never used it before, I think it is an excellent way to monitor those logs in real time.
[141000170480] |I already started to plan how I will use it on my machine and I am also thinking to include it in the very limited list of applications of the NimbleX distro, which is just 180 MB.
[141000180010] |<title>Maxemum TV-Guide Review</title>
[141000180020] |<img/>If you are addicted to some TV shows or to TV in general you will most certainly find Maxemum TV Guide a very useful application.
[141000180030] |It can do a very nice listing of the programs, it has a search function and, more importantly, a reminder.
[141000180040] |The downside of this program is that it doesn't install that easy.
[141000180050] |It is based on QT and uses XMLTV as its backend to grab listings.
[141000180060] |XMLTV is somehow a standard when it comes to TV listings.
[141000180070] |In my opinion it supports a fair enough number of countries.
[141000180080] |Maxemum tries to explain all this things but I think that is a little too complicated to get things running, mostly because of XMLTV.
[141000180090] |Another issue is that you might encounter difficulties to retrieve TV listings for some countries if the links program uses change.
[141000180100] |For example, at this moment, XMLTV has broken links for Romania and this makes the program useless to those who live in this country.
[141000180110] |<b>What can Maxemum TV-Guide do for me?</b>
[141000180120] |It can display TV listings and arrange them by some criteria you set.
[141000180130] |In the right part of the program are displayed all the channels from your country.
[141000180140] |Most certainly you like only some of them.
[141000180150] |In this list you can select the channels you watch and in the left pane of the program are displayed shows, grouped default by the time.
[141000180160] |From here you can sort by Show, Duration and Channel.
[141000180170] |In this list it is displayed the time when the show starts, the name of the show, the duration and the channel.
[141000180180] |This can be easily rearranged with drag and drop.
[141000180190] |Shows that already started are displayed on an orange background and for each one there is a progress bar that tells you how much of a show consumed.
[141000180200] |The lame programs can be easily blocked and the cool ones can be added to favorites.
[141000180210] |The advantage of blocking a program is that it isn't listed anymore.
[141000180220] |Adding programs to favorites makes them highlighted in the color you choose from settings.
[141000180230] |A couple of minutes before one of your favorite shows starts, a pop-up box is fired and reminds you to watch it.
[141000180240] |You can also configure the alarm to execute a command.
[141000180250] |Could be easily configured to start the TV Tunner application.
[141000180260] |This is one of the best features of the program.
[141000180270] |Even though you could easily add events in Koraganizer for this type of functionality, with Maxemum TV-Guide is much easier and you also have listings of other programs.
[141000180280] |An interesting feature of the program is the search for additional information regarding a show.
[141000180290] |Unfortunately this didn't work for Italy.
[141000180300] |I suspect that is the fault of the links in XMLTV.
[141000180310] |Maybe some day this backend will really provide us a trustworthy standard.
[141000180320] |Until then I'll rely on the information provided by Internet websites.
[141000180330] |Right clicking the main window displays options to view only shows from that day, spanned on several days, only favorite shows and also a search view.
[141000180340] |The search tool really comes in handy sometimes.
[141000180350] |For the additional infos I was talking about earlier you can also search in the description.
[141000180360] |<b>The Good</b>
[141000180370] |I like that I can easily choose between different listing views, that I can add favorites that alert me and I can easily search a show.
[141000180380] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000180390] |I wasn't able to get listings for Romania at this moment.
[141000180400] |Install can be tricky and when I consider that the program shows TV listings, maybe it just isn't worth the bother.
[141000180410] |I suspect that detailed information about shows is rarely displayed.
[141000180420] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000180430] |The truth is that this software is not exactly there.
[141000180440] |Not necessary because of it, but also because of the functionality of XMLTV.
[141000180450] |It's still room for development both in the area of XMLTV and Maxemum TV-Guide.
[141000180460] |The bottom line is that for people addicted to television this program can really be useful, but for others that watch TV occasionally a web guide does the trick just fine.
[141000190010] |<title>xine Review</title>
[141000190020] |<img/>xine is mainly a free, high-performance multimedia playback engine.
[141000190030] |Xine is also a pretty good multimedia player and for this purpose uses its engine.
[141000190040] |You might ask: Why do I care about the engine?
[141000190050] |The only thing that matters to me is the player.
[141000190060] |Well, you should care because there are only a few engines available in Linux.
[141000190070] |Most commonly known are xine and mplayer.
[141000190080] |At least they are very good open source engines.
[141000190090] |Most of the other popular video players are actually frontends, or let's say software based on powerful APIs.
[141000190100] |The default frontend that comes with xine is xine-ui.
[141000190110] |This is the software we are currently reviewing.
[141000190120] |Other popular frontends are kaffenie (for KDE) and totem (for Gnome).
[141000190130] |There is also a “console frontend” for xine called toxine.
[141000190140] |I like this idea, because some people just love the console at extremes. :)
[141000190150] |<b>A few words about the engine</b> <img/>
[141000190160] |<img/>xine engine is actually a shared library (xine-lib).
[141000190170] |A cool thing about it is that it can be compiled very easy because the only required dependence is zlib.
[141000190180] |Sometimes satisfying dependencies can be very annoying, but is not the case at all here.
[141000190190] |Anyway xine can't do much in this form.
[141000190200] |You must also install a bunch of other dependencies to be able to play any known format of multimedia files.
[141000190210] |Don't run away, because I haven't installed them manually.
[141000190220] |In mainstream distros the dependencies are satisfied automatically.
[141000190230] |The video engine of xine is responsible for synchronizing audio, video and overlays.
[141000190240] |I like that it supports a well implemented On Screen Display. xine also supports fast MMX, MMXEXT, 3DNow! and SSE memory transfers and high performance communication functionality.
[141000190250] |Because of this, the data moves more efficiently across plugins without requiring extra copies to be made.
[141000190260] |And that's not all of it: xine also has support for multi-threading.
[141000190270] |When it comes to what media this engine handles, I can easily say it has it all covered, all the domains: audio/video formats, hardware devices, streaming protocols, video drivers... everything.
[141000190280] |The engine is absolutely great.
[141000190290] |Competition would die for an engine like this.
[141000190300] |If the default frontend (xine-ui) could rise to the quality of the engine it would have definitely been a winner application.
[141000190310] |Fortunately, other good (maybe better) frontends are also available and some of them are in heavy development. 
[141000190320] |<b>The Interface (xine-ui)</b> <img/>
[141000190330] |<img/>The first thing you notice is that the GUI really looks nice.
[141000190340] |The frame where the movie is played even has a nice animation.
[141000190350] |This type of animation can also be seen in kaffeine.
[141000190360] |Guess why!
[141000190370] |The frame for controls actually looks like a DVD decoder, or something like that.
[141000190380] |It combines perfectly a nice complexity with the ease of use. 
[141000190390] |The interface is fully skinable.
[141000190400] |And it gets even better!
[141000190410] |If you want to apply other themes you don't have to go through a meticulous process to use a new theme.
[141000190420] |All you have to do is press Ctrl+D and a window that displays the available skins on the official website appears.
[141000190430] |It provides a preview of the skins and if you like it, go ahead and click the Load button.
[141000190440] |In the OSD is displayed the process of the download.
[141000190450] |This is rare functionality and really does the trick.
[141000190460] |<b>xine setup</b> <img/>
[141000190470] |<img/>The setup window disappointed me a little.
[141000190480] |First of all, it looks very legacy.
[141000190490] |I don't know what programming language was used but I can tell you that it is not suitable at all for a multimedia player.
[141000190500] |Most of the people, when they go for a little multimedia entertainment, just want a nice clean interface.
[141000190510] |This one is an ugly dark gray.
[141000190520] |It reminds me of the original UNIX system or of Sun's OS. Spearing of this, xine supports UNIX, Solaris and OS/2.
[141000190530] |The developers were very inspired when they added the option to configure the experience level.
[141000190540] |Saves a lot of people from having headaches.
[141000190550] |The default beginner experience level should do the trick in more than 90% of the cases.
[141000190560] |I don't advise you to be mister fix-it and set the level to “master of the known universe”.
[141000190570] |If you modify parameters just to see what they do it is very likely to break the player.
[141000190580] |The only good thing that can come out of this is the new knowledge you will gain when documenting about the various parameters you modified.
[141000190590] |Because developers implemented this experience level, I am not going to explain more.
[141000190600] |As a last comment regarding setup I must say that under heavy loading it crashed once or twice and that the looks are just wrong for this beautiful application.
[141000190610] |<b>Some Additional Notes</b>
[141000190620] |This is the first DVD player for Linux that supports navigation through menu.
[141000190630] |I was pleasantly surprised when the menu behaved just like it should on the DVDs I tested.
[141000190640] |I really don't want to say that the ugly aspect of the navigation menu has the tendency to hold you down from using it.
[141000190650] |I just hope the developers will make some changes in this direction.
[141000190660] |<b>The Good</b>
[141000190670] |When it comes to speed this engine/player excels.
[141000190680] |When it comes to the media it can handle, it's one of the best.
[141000190690] |Skin support is great.
[141000190700] |What bad things can hold you down for using it?
[141000190710] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000190720] |Software is not perfect and xine is not an exception. 
[141000190730] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000190740] |xine is a great video engine.
[141000190750] |It could even be the best with some extra work.
[141000190760] |For the tome being though, xine didn't convince me to make the switch from mplayer.
[141000190770] |It might be a matter of personal preference, but I will still use mplayer.
[141000200010] |<title>Quanta Plus Review</title>
[141000200020] |<img/>Linux is a great platform for developers because of the stability of the OS and free development environments like KDevelop and Gambas.
[141000200030] |In the area of web development is not that popular, because software similar to FrontPage and Dreamwaver is not yet available.
[141000200040] |If you want to build websites in Linux, the only way is to write code by hand.
[141000200050] |Some web developers prefer this approach because it gives them a lot more flexibility but inexperienced users just want to make something quick and with no pain at all. 
[141000200060] |But remember an old saying: "No pain, no gain!"
[141000200070] |Believe it or not, Emacs is a very powerful editor, which, on the other hand, is for console and can be used for web development.
[141000200080] |I know "console web development environment" sounds kind of wired, but that's just one of the things you can do with Emacs.
[141000200090] |Anyway, Emacs is complicated and it's not user friendly.
[141000200100] |We need something for the GUI, user friendly, powerful and why not free.
[141000200110] |For this we have Quanta Plus.
[141000200120] |This is a WYSIWYG editor appropriate for people that are not complete newbies.
[141000200130] |When I first started the interface, I saw that the buttons of the main toolbar are very much like the ones of classical text editors from KDE.
[141000200140] |Below the main toolbar are some tabs.
[141000200150] |In this tabs are buttons which you can use to format text.
[141000200160] |I was surprised how easy is to generate a simple HTML page using buttons to generate HTML tags.
[141000200170] |While you are creating your simple page you can use Quanta's dual editor.
[141000200180] |In the upper part of the screen is a VPL editor and in the lower part is the source editor.
[141000200190] |In the VPL editor you theoretically can format text without writing any code, but when things get a little more complicated this editor is just not enough.
[141000200200] |If you intend to use a little more advanced code you can say goodbye to the PVL editor because it will not be able to display any more text.
[141000200210] |Anyway I still appreciate it and I hope that as time passes it will get better.
[141000200220] |The source editor is what you will use most of the time, but, before digging a little deeper into it, let's discuss more about Quanta in general.
[141000200230] |<b>What's cool about Quanta?</b>
[141000200240] |Quanta supports several DTD (Document Type Definitions).
[141000200250] |Some of them are HTML, XHTML, XML, WML, CSS and also Docbook XML.
[141000200260] |While you might say that this is cool, you must also consider that support for Javascript and PHP DTD is missing.
[141000200270] |At least syntax highlighting is available for these two.
[141000200280] |Actually syntax highlighting is available for many programming languages and even for other stuff like database and config files.
[141000200290] |Because Quanta is based on KDE, it means that the application is network transparent.
[141000200300] |You can use KDE KIO slaves from file dialogs and in project settings.
[141000200310] |You can also use Kommander to visually build dialogs that integrate with Quanta.
[141000200320] |These applications communicate using the Desktop Communication Protocol (DCOP).
[141000200330] |Here it pays off the good design of architectural foundations.
[141000200340] |Quanta can really speed up your work a lot because it has anticipatory behavior.
[141000200350] |For example, when you start typing tags, a drop down list appears and you can choose the one you need.
[141000200360] |The tags are automatically closed by Quanta.
[141000200370] |Very nice feature because this way it saves some keystrokes.
[141000200380] |There are also some wizards available and they can be of real help.
[141000200390] |When it comes to creating a table, for example, the wizard can generate all the code necessary that otherwise will take some time.
[141000200400] |The last table I created took only 5 minutes and the code was generated in about 50 lines.
[141000200410] |Quanta supports code folding.
[141000200420] |After creating the table, the program gave me the option to fold all the code related to the table and in this way my workspace becomes uncluttered.
[141000200430] |Code folding is available with many languages.
[141000200440] |If you usually use tags for which Quanta hasn't implemented buttons or if you want to make a tab with the ones you use most often, Quanta Plus gives you the ability to make your own tab menu.
[141000200450] |Besides tags you can also use buttons like Preview in Opera and even make one of your own that starts the XMMS.
[141000200460] |This feature is fantastic because it gives you the ability to greatly optimize your workspace.
[141000200470] |Right clicking a tag or a function shows several options.
[141000200480] |The most interesting is the Context Help.
[141000200490] |It opens a tab where is displayed a fair amount of documentation.
[141000200500] |This is very useful because it's impossible to remember all the attributes or how to manipulate everything.
[141000200510] |In Quanta Plus you also have the ability to save web pages as templates.
[141000200520] |Just design the skeleton, save it as a template and carry on with your work.
[141000200530] |When you have to do something similar take the template and reuse it.
[141000200540] |This often happens in the real world and web designers will definitely appreciate this.
[141000200550] |<b>The Good</b>
[141000200560] |I mostly like Quanta because of the anticipatory behavior, custom tabs and because of contextual help.
[141000200570] |Things like wizards, code folding and the ability to save as templates are also great and improve the quality of the work greatly.
[141000200580] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141000200590] |VPL editor is not powerful enough to make Quanta accessible to complete newbies and if you insert some small scripts that Quanta doesn't support, the VPL editor will not display anything.
[141000200600] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141000200610] |Quanta is an excellent WYSIWYG editor.
[141000200620] |It might be the only one you can use for production purposes in Linux.
[141000200630] |The fact that Quanta is free and that Linux is also free might be a good place to start earning some money without investing any but also to get you started with webdesign.
[141000200640] |If you like to contribute with documentation to KDE, Project Quanta is a real help when making those XMLs.