[141001390010] |<title>TorrentFlux Review</title>
[141001390020] |<img/>The BitTorrent protocol has grown to be one of the most popular file distribution protocols used all around the world.
[141001390030] |What made it so popular was its ability to widely distribute large amounts of data without incurring the corresponding consumption in costly server and bandwidth resources.
[141001390040] |For one to start downloading a file through the BitTorrent protocol, he will need to download the torrent file first and open it with a torrent client.
[141001390050] |Such clients are available in different forms, shapes and for every operating system.
[141001390060] |One of these clients is called "TorrentFlux" and it's a little more special than the others.
[141001390070] |What makes it special is the fact that it's a PHP based client that runs on a web server, allowing users to manage all their torrent downloads through a browsers, from any computer connected to the Internet.
[141001390080] |To install TorrentFlux, your system will need to have a web server installed, with PHP and MySQL support.
[141001390090] |You'll also need to have Python installed (at least 2.2).
[141001390100] |Installing it is a very simple process, you'll only have to extract the TorrentFlux package into your web server root directory, create the mysql database and change the config file.
[141001390110] |However, for more detailed instructions, follow this Softpedia guide: <a>Installing TorrentFlux and XAAMP</a>.
[141001390120] |The first time you'll access the TorrentFlux web client, you'll be prompted for a username and a password.
[141001390130] |Currently, there's none set so keep in mind that whatever login details you use now, they will be stored and related to the administrator's account.
[141001390140] |The next time you login, you'll have to use the same login details used now.
[141001390150] |After the login step, you will be presented with a list of preferences, each with a green or red glowing button right next to them.
[141001390160] |The green button indicates that the current setting is correct, while the red one will obviously indicate that something is wrong.
[141001390170] |The first setting allows you to configure the destination path where the downloaded files will be stored to.
[141001390180] |Make sure that the directory is chmoded to 700 unless you want a red button glowing.
[141001390190] |You are now able to start using TorrentFlux by downloading files through the BitTorrent protocol.
[141001390200] |To do this, you'll have to load the torrent file, which contains the metadata about the files to be shared, and about the tracker, which is the computer that coordinates the files distribution.
[141001390210] |To load a torrent, either use the upload filed, which enables you to load a torrent file you already have on your hard drive, or, upload a torrent file from a specific web location.
[141001390220] |There's also the possibility to search for torrent files using one (or more) of the search engines such as Google, isoHunt, TorrentSpy and so on.
[141001390230] |The best thing about this feature is that the results will be included into the application and you will be able to immediately load the torrent files, without opening new browser windows and so on.
[141001390240] |Once the torrent file has been uploaded, you'll need to start the download by clicking on the blue "Begin download" button.
[141001390250] |This button will open a new window where you can fine tune the download's options.
[141001390260] |You can change options like the maximum upload and download speed, the request interval, the port range and which files to download if several are available.
[141001390270] |Once you press the "Run torrent" button, TorrentFlux will attempt to connect to peers and download the files.
[141001390280] |In the main window, you'll see the download details: the torrent size, its status (download speed and progress completed), the estimated time until completion and three administration buttons: torrent details, stop/start and delete.
[141001390290] |Underneath the torrents list, you'll see the global download and upload speed, how much free space is remaining and the server load.
[141001390300] |The main page will automatically refresh in 60 seconds (default value) to update the values.
[141001390310] |TorrentFlux also offers a file browser which allows you to browse through your download directory.
[141001390320] |Through it you can download the finished files, as well as the whole directories, which are first zipped into a zip or tar archive.
[141001390330] |To access the file browser, click on the 'directory' button at the top of the main page.
[141001390340] |From the same navigation menu, you can access the history page which will list your activity for the past 30 days, the profile page, where you can modify your password, theme and language.
[141001390350] |The next button, messages, will take you to your messages page, where you can read and manage the received messages, as well as compose new ones.
[141001390360] |Finally, the last button, admin, will take you to the administration page, which is divided into several other sections.
[141001390370] |The admin section will list the activity for all users for the past 30 days.
[141001390380] |Next section, settings, will allow you to change various preferences, some of them from the start torrent page.
[141001390390] |The queue section will allow you to enable or disable the queue manager, as well as set the maximum number of torrents each user is allowed to run, maximum user threads and the polling interval.
[141001390400] |Next sections include search settings, activity, link and user management, as well as the backup section which will send you the zipped file of your TorrentFlux database.
[141001390410] |There's also the possibility to insert a torrent RSS feed, which will be available through the RSS torrents button from the main page.
[141001390420] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001390430] |TorrentFlux is a web based torrent client which runs on a web server, allowing you to manage your torrents from any computer with Internet access.
[141001390440] |It has all the basic features one would expect to find in a torrent client, and more.
[141001390450] |For instance, you'll have the ability to manage the queue for each user, as well as RSS support and detailed event history.
[141001390460] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001390470] |Unfortunately, a very large number of trackers require user authentication before downloading and using their torrents; so, in order to use torrents from those web sites, you will need to both download the torrent and load it in a client from the same computer (IP).
[141001390480] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001390490] |For what is worth, TorrentFlux is a great torrent client, as long as you use it to download torrents from public trackers.
[141001390500] |Loading torrents from private trackers in TorrentFlux could prove a difficult task for inexperienced users, so for them, it's probably more recommended to use a normal torrent client.
[141001390510] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001400010] |<title>PDFedit Review</title>
[141001400020] |<img/>It's quite commonly in the business world for people to receive various documents in electronic format, which need filling out and returning.
[141001400030] |Those files can have various extensions, but the most commonly used are plain text and doc files.
[141001400040] |However, it's also possible that those files be sent as PDF format.
[141001400050] |Unfortunately, editing PDF files in Linux can turn out to be a rather challenging task.
[141001400060] |If the document was created with proper form fields, you can add text to it with the free version of Adobe Acrobat and print it but you can't save it, therefore you can't send it.
[141001400070] |Moreover, an Adobe Pro license is quite expensive and there isn't a version ported for Linux (only Windows and Mac versions are available) so you won't be able to use it except through an emulator, which can create a whole new set of problems.
[141001400080] |KWord, which is a word processor from the KOffice suite, can open PDF files and even edit them but again, saving them is the problem.
[141001400090] |Of course, you could eventually find a PDF editor but it's unlikely it will be able to edit a PDF file, while maintaining all the fine typographic details in it.
[141001400100] |Basically, the PDF format is a soft of universal format, which makes it rather hard to edit. 
[141001400110] |Fortunately, PDFedit will not only enable you to edit, erase, mark and add test to an existing PDF, but also allows you to create your own scripts or plugins that will automate the editing process.
[141001400120] |And because everything is based on scripting engine, every operation can easily be personalized by editing the respective script.
[141001400130] |Moreover, every invocation of scripts from the menu will echo the command in the command line, so the user can learn how to do things from the menu, directly from the command line if he wants.
[141001400140] |QSA is used for scripting, which is based on ECMAScript standard (if you don't know what ECMAScript is, it is basically the same syntax as JavaScript).
[141001400150] |To install PDFedit, your system has to have the following libraries installed: QT3, Boost, xlib, along with their headers.
[141001400160] |Moreover, PDFedit uses Xpdf for low level processing so you'll need that installed as well.
[141001400170] |Next, you'll need to execute the three basic install commands (./configure , make, make install) to get PDFedit up and running.
[141001400180] |PDFedit has a GUI version, as well as a command line interface.
[141001400190] |While using the command line version of the program, you can specify any number of filenames as parameters and one window will be opened for each file specified.
[141001400200] |If no file is specified in the command line, the editor will be loaded initially empty.
[141001400210] |The GUI's main window is divided into five basic parts: Menu, Toolbars, Command console, Page space and Objects tree with Property editor.
[141001400220] |The purpose of these window parts is to enable complete control over pdf objects and structure.
[141001400230] |It shows raw pdf objects in a user friendly way with the possibility of traversing the objects using the three-like structure, select special category of operators an perform operations on resulting set, seeing exactly which operators were selected using the graphical selection tools.
[141001400240] |PDFeditor will allow you to gain full control over the PDF file, almost making it a PDF creator software.
[141001400250] |PDFedit also allows you to rotate pages and extract text.
[141001400260] |Moreover, it offers some basic drawing functions.
[141001400270] |For instance, you can draw lines and rectangles anywhere in the PDF file, as well as add text (which, of course, supports changing the font, color and highlight color) normally or stroke through.
[141001400280] |PDFedit also supports revision control: when a document is changed, it can be saved either as a new copy, or as the old file.
[141001400290] |The latter option saves all changes made to the document, while the history of changes is embedded into the document itself.
[141001400300] |You can choose which revision we want to have displayed.
[141001400310] |PDFedit can be configured through its Options dialog, which can be found under the Tools menu.
[141001400320] |A new window will appear which is as well divided into several tabs.
[141001400330] |The first tab, Editor, consists of various options: Advanced mode allows you to see more advanced options but this will increase the damage potential the file will take.
[141001400340] |The Allow editing read-only proprieties will allow you to edit proprieties marked as read-only in the mode.conf file.
[141001400350] |Other preferences are available, which are pretty self-explanatory.
[141001400360] |PDFedit can easily transform pdf into xml files.
[141001400370] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001400380] |PDFedit is one of the few functional PDF editors for Linux.
[141001400390] |It allows you to edit, erase, mark, add text and draw objects to a new or existing PDF file.
[141001400400] |Moreover, every managing task is completed through scripts, which can be personalized and improved by editing them.
[141001400410] |It also allows you to rotate pages, insert pages from other documents, transform PDF into XML and many more.
[141001400420] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001400430] |Unfortunately, PDFedit freezes for a few seconds every time an object has been edited.
[141001400440] |I don't know if this is because of my system or it's just the way PDFedit is.
[141001400450] |However, if this is a problem caused by PDFedit, imagine you'll have to waste a few seconds, even minutes, every time you add a new object, move it or delete it.
[141001400460] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001400470] |PDFedit isn't the perfect PDF editor out there, but it's for sure one of the very few available.
[141001400480] |So whether you like it or not, if you need to edit PDF files, you'll have bare using it until other (better) application is available or, a newer and improved version of PDFedit gets released.
[141001400490] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001440010] |<title>KLinkStatus Review</title>
[141001440020] |<img/>KLinkStatus is a link checker for KDE.
[141001440030] |It allows you to search internal and external links in your entire web site, just a single page and choose the depth to search.
[141001440040] |It supports several protocols such as http, ftp, ssh (fish or sftp) and local files.
[141001440050] |A number of other protocols are also supported, thanks to its ability to use KIO.
[141001440060] |KIO (KDE Input/Output) provides access to files, web sites and other resources through a single consistent API.
[141001440070] |This allows programs that support KIO to operate files stored on remote servers in exactly the same way as they operate on those locally.
[141001440080] |The ability to use KIO makes KLinkStatus a highly versatile and powerful link checker.
[141001440090] |KLinkStatus is part of kdewebdev module for KDE so you'll have two ways of installing it.
[141001440100] |Either through your package manager by selecting it in the web development group, or by downloading the source code, compiling and installing it.
[141001440110] |I'm running Fedora core 6 and chose the second method to install.
[141001440120] |But I got a surprise: a few moments after running 'make', I got an error and the build process exited.
[141001440130] |Fortunately, it was only a minor bug: the aclocal.m4 file has been generated with version 1.9.3 of automake, while I had version 1.9.6 installed.
[141001440140] |Although this shouldn't have caused the build process to quit, I finally forced it to continue by editing the aclocal.m4 file and replacing the version numbers.
[141001440150] |When the build was finally over, I ran the application by typing <b>klinkstatus</b> in a terminal.
[141001440160] |Its main window with a basic interface appeared.
[141001440170] |At first, it looks pretty easy to use, as every function and button is self-explanatory.
[141001440180] |The upper part of the window had the command section with its well-known menus: File, View etc.
[141001440190] |Right under the command menu, there's the toolbar with a few buttons, each linked to a separate action.
[141001440200] |First three buttons allow you to control the checking process by starting, pausing and stopping it.
[141001440210] |Next is the export button, which enables you to generate a HTML report, once the process is finished.
[141001440220] |The last three buttons are linked to misc functions: hide the search pane, reset search options and toggle the urls auto-scrol function.
[141001440230] |Under the toolbar, you'll see the search pane which consists of the search url field and several options.
[141001440240] |Those options allow you to configure the search process: whether to check pages recursively, whether to check external links, which regular expressions not to check and whether to check parent folders.
[141001440250] |Once the search process has started, you'll see a list of URLs and their status, as well as the URL labels.
[141001440260] |You can interact with any of the URLs by right clicking them and choosing whether to edit it in Quanta, Open the URL or referrer in the default browser, copy URL, Referrer link or cell text.
[141001440270] |Finally, under the URLs list, there's the process status (checking or stopped), a progress bar and the elapsed time.
[141001440280] |KLinkStatus can be configured through the configuration dialog, found under the Settings menu.
[141001440290] |This dialog is divided into three tabs: Check, Results and Identification.
[141001440300] |From the first tab, you can configure options such as the number of simultaneous connections, timeout, number of items in URL history, toggle recursive and set its depth, toggle checking parent folders and external links and whether to use preview prefix in Quanta.
[141001440310] |The second tab allows you to change the view: tree or flat, while the third tab enables you to change the identification sent to http/ftp/etc server.
[141001440320] |Other features you'll find in KLinkStatus are its ability to use authentication while checking restricted documents, fragment identifiers, tabbed checking, which allows multiple link checking sessions at the same time, filter checked links by good, broken, malformed or undetermined and its good integration with Quanta Plus.
[141001440330] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001440340] |It's very small, fast, easy to use and it offers a large number of advanced features.
[141001440350] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001440360] |KLinkStatus is an application that checks for bad links in a webpage and it does its job very well.
[141001440370] |Except for the part that it didn't compile flawlessly, I have nothing to complain about.
[141001440380] |However, it won't hurt if, at some point, this application will offer more advanced searches and checks.
[141001440390] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001440400] |KLinkStatus is a fast and easy to use link checker.
[141001440410] |You can use it as a webmaster or webdeveloper to check any broken links on your site.
[141001440420] |Too bad regular users can't find a purpose for it, as it's always nice to use clean and easy to use applications.
[141001440430] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001460010] |<title>PCMan File Manager Review</title>
[141001460020] |<img/>In most cases, I'm glad to see potential alternatives for the software I use on a daily basis.
[141001460030] |For example, file managers: whenever I find a possible Konqueror or Nautilus replacement, I download and install it right away, even if the chances to really replace them are almost inexistent.
[141001460040] |Today again was the case with PCMan File Manager.
[141001460050] |Its description said “GTK2 fast, lightweight, easy to use file manager, supports tabbed browsing etc” so I thought this could be a possible replacement for Gnome's default file manager.
[141001460060] |Unfortunately, this wasn't the case.
[141001460070] |And if I think more about it, I realize that both Gnome and KDE have a specific file manager set as default for a reason: because there are no better file managers that most people would like.
[141001460080] |However, this doesn't mean that this file manager won't get to be used by some people.
[141001460090] |Even if it can't be considered better than Nautilus, PCMan File Manager does have some impressive functions that can't be ignored.
[141001460100] |But in order to enjoy PCManfm's features, you'll need to install it.
[141001460110] |Unfortunately, this file manager can't be found in either Fedora or Ubuntu's repositories so it's a long shot you'll find it for other distribution.
[141001460120] |This leaves you with one option: to install it from source.
[141001460130] |Another downside to this type of installation is that the dependencies aren't automatically resolved, downloaded and installed by the package manager, leaving you to manually do it.
[141001460140] |So, before starting to build PCManfm, first check if you have the following packages and if not, install them:• automake >= 1.9 • libgtk2.0-dev >= 2.6 • libglib2.0-dev >= 2.6 (2.10+ is highly recommended) • libgamin-dev or libfam-dev (libgamin is better) • libstartup-notification0-dev • libhal-dev (Required when --enable-hal configure option is used) • libdbus-1-dev (Required when --enable-hal configure option is used) • libhal-storage-dev (Required when --enable-hal configure option is used)
[141001460150] |Now, go to <a>PCMan File Manager</a> page on Softpedia and download the source package.
[141001460160] |Finally, extract the tarball you downloaded, open a terminal and change to the extracted directory and execute the popular installation commands, one by one: ./configure, make and sudo make install.
[141001460170] |To run PCMan File manager, from the same terminal, run the command pcmanfm.
[141001460180] |You'll see that it starts by listing the directories and files from your home directory.
[141001460190] |However, you might think it's a little empty or 'naked', so open the side pane from the View menu.
[141001460200] |The side pane can either show the location pane or the directory tree.
[141001460210] |The items in the main window can only be viewed as icons or as details, which might seem a bit limiting.
[141001460220] |Also from the View menu, you can sort the items by various proprieties, toggle the show hidden files option or perform a refresh on the current directory.
[141001460230] |There are some other actions that can be performed from the application's menus.
[141001460240] |The File menu allows you to open a new window, a new tab or close a tab, create a new file or directory, show selected file proprieties or quit the program.
[141001460250] |The Edit menu offers easy access to cut/copy/paste/delete/rename actions and to the preferences dialog.
[141001460260] |It doesn't have many options to change, except the encoding, where to open the bookmarks, the size of big and small icons, the maximum thumbnail size and which is the default application for terminal.
[141001460270] |The bookmark function allows you to preserve saved locations as bookmarks, which will also show-up in the side pane, when set to Location.
[141001460280] |There's also a Tool menu which has only two options: to open terminal and to open directory as root.
[141001460290] |Finally, the Help menu doesn't offer any help at all except for an about dialog, but who will need help anyway for such a simple application.
[141001460300] |Overall, PCMan File Manager is a very fast and easy to use file manager which supports tabbed browsing.
[141001460310] |It's simple, standards-compliant, resource-careful and fits the minimal requirements to be a file manager.
[141001460320] |Its interface is clean, nice and self-explanatory.
[141001460330] |The toolbar provides buttons for default actions such as new tab, back, forward, up, refresh, home and a toggle button for the side pane.
[141001460340] |There's also an address bar where you can manually type the folder address you want to list.
[141001460350] |Drag
[141001460360] |'s default browser, Nautilus.
[141001460370] |It offers tabbed browsing, basic thumbnail and bookmarks support.
[141001460380] |Its interface is very clean and can show a side pane with the current location and a bookmark list or a directory tree view.
[141001460390] |It's written in GTK2 which enables it to perfectly fit into Gnome.
[141001460400] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001460410] |Besides the fact that its features are rather limited, it also has some annoying ones: for instance, whenever a file is deleted, instead of moving it to Trash, it deletes it flat out.
[141001460420] |Also, while running the program as root, you'll see a bar that says you're in user mode and that it won't go away, no matter what you do.
[141001460430] |I know that beginner users shouldn't use file managers as root but what about the more experienced ones?
[141001460440] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001460450] |PCMan File Manager is the perfect application for users looking for a fast and easy to use file manager, with basic functionality.
[141001460460] |It also makes a perfect application for managing files on very slow or old computers that can't handle anything more advanced.
[141001460470] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001470010] |<title>KYum Review</title>
[141001470020] |<img/>One of the best practices against hackers, viruses, spyware and so on is to keep your operating system's components up to date.
[141001470030] |Although there is no such thing as viruses or spyware as far as Linux is concerned, there still are a few threats once a system is connected to the Internet.
[141001470040] |One of these threats are people with low IQs that call themselves 'hackers' and believe it's 'ubercool' to break into outdated Linux systems and cause damage to the files stored on them, use the systems as flood and hack tools and so on.
[141001470050] |These people, also known as 'scriptkiddies' don't have the mental ability to do it on their own, so they use various programs and scripts written by others.
[141001470060] |Running them doesn't require extensive knowledge about Linux's security whatsoever, only access to a Linux shell and a couple of commands to be written in the command line.
[141001470070] |Basically, these scripts exploit vulnerabilities found in older versions of software that provide various services to Internet users (ftp, http etc).
[141001470080] |So, keeping a system up to date will reduce the chances of some kid breaking into your system and messing around with it. 
[141001470090] |Nowadays, every modern Linux distribution has a package manager integrated, which can update your system in a few moments, with only a few clicks or commands.
[141001470100] |Fedora's package manager is called <b>yum</b> but unfortunately, it's a command line only application.
[141001470110] |Many Linux users, especially the new ones, don't really enjoy using the command line, therefore, a few graphical front-ends to yum have been developed.
[141001470120] |One of these front-ends is called <b>KYum</b>. 
[141001470130] |KYum is a graphical front-end for the yum manager, released for the KDE desktop, under the GPL license.
[141001470140] |It allows you to run yum commands like update, install, search in a convenient way, just with a few mouse clicks.
[141001470150] |It can also be used to modify the repository files, as well as the yum configuration file. 
[141001470160] |To install KYum on a Fedora system, simply open a terminal, type <b>sudo yum install kyum</b> and hit enter.
[141001470170] |This will be the last command you execute in the command line to install software on your Fedora system.
[141001470180] |Once installed, you'll find KYum in the Kmenu, under the Administration menu. 
[141001470190] |On its first run, KYum will conduct a test to make sure every repository is correctly configured.
[141001470200] |My yum.conf had a repository defined inside and when KYum started, it asked me if I wanted to have a separate file for that repository inside the yum.repos.d directory.
[141001470210] |Next, you'll see its main interface, which is basically a large window with four tabs.
[141001470220] |Under each tab, you'll notice various buttons and functions, which are linked to yum's functions. 
[141001470230] |From the Actions tab, you can list all the packages available for installation, all the updates available or all the installed packages.
[141001470240] |The Find function will open a dialog which allows you to search by the name or description, or by a file it provides.
[141001470250] |This is useful if some program you're trying to install has required a library file and you don't know which package it's part of.
[141001470260] |The listed packages can be sorted by name, version, architecture, repository, size or summary.
[141001470270] |Once you click a listed package, you'll see a context menu which allows you to view changelog, show dependencies or remove from list.
[141001470280] |Moreover, if the results list is very long, you can use the search list, which allows you to search inside the search results.
[141001470290] |Also in this tab, there are buttons that allow you to remove or install the selected package from the list, as well as a button for updating the whole system.
[141001470300] |At the bottom left, you'll see the yum output or the yum log, while at the bottom right, you'll see the description for the selected package.
[141001470310] |The Groups tab has four buttons: List available, list installed, remove and install selected.
[141001470320] |In the left, the package groups will be listed as a tree structure.
[141001470330] |In the lower half of the screen, you'll see the yum output.
[141001470340] |The yum.conf tab allows you to edit all the directives available for the yum configuration file.
[141001470350] |Underneath it, there's the description box which displays what every directive does, while in the right, you'll see a preview of the modified file.
[141001470360] |To save the changes, click the Save button on the toolbar (which also saves the changes made to the repositories).
[141001470370] |Finally, the last tab called Repositories will list all the available repositories and will allow you to select which of them are active by activating a checkbox right next to them.
[141001470380] |You can also add a new repository by clicking the New button in the toolbar or from the context menu, once you right-click the repositories list.
[141001470390] |Also, from this context menu, you can edit, delete or import public key for a repository.
[141001470400] |Underneath the list, there's a preview box that shows how the code for the selected repository would look.
[141001470410] |KYum provides a few other functions inside the main menus.
[141001470420] |The File menu allows you to save a profile and to load it later.
[141001470430] |An unlimited number of profiles can be defined, allowing you to easily reload it later, instead of tediously modifying all the repository and yum conf, sometimes over and over again.
[141001470440] |The Actions menu allows you to abort the running process, clean yum's cache or generate a RSS.
[141001470450] |I couldn't however generate one due to the fact that KYum uses a syntax unsupported by yum.
[141001470460] |The settings menu leads to KYum preferences window, which are very limited: you can only choose a color for normal text, for errors and for additional information.
[141001470470] |You can also choose whether to: remove packages from list after successful installation, monitor for external modification or show confirmation dialog when yum.conf and repositories have been saved.
[141001470480] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001470490] |KYum is a front-end to yum, the package manager for rpm-based Linux systems (mostly Fedora/Red-Hat).
[141001470500] |It provides easy access to most, if not all, yum functions.
[141001470510] |It also provides an advanced search feature which allows you to search by the package's name and description, as well as by a file it contains.
[141001470520] |You can even search through the search results.
[141001470530] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001470540] |What's really annoying is the lack of a progress bar, or at least something that will prove KYum hasn't frozen.
[141001470550] |Searching through repositories and installing files takes a rather long time, while all you can do is look at it and pray it's still responding.
[141001470560] |Moreover, it has an RSS generating button which, from what I've noticed, it executes a command that makes yum respond with Command line error: no such option: --rss-filename.
[141001470570] |Finally, it wouldn't hurt if its interface would have been a little friendlier. 
[141001470580] |The Truth</b>
[141001470590] |Even though it provides easy access for most, if not all of yum's functions, I'll stick to yumex (YUM Extender) for now as it provides almost the same functions, but looks a lot better.
[141001470600] |And has a progress bar.
[141001470610] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001480010] |<title>Listen Review</title>
[141001480020] |<img/>People use computers for a million things but most of them will do them while… listening to music.
[141001480030] |And in order to play your music, you need an audio player.
[141001480040] |But here comes the hard part: which audio player to use?!
[141001480050] |There are tons of music players available for Linux only, some are rather simple and focused on specific tasks while others will do all kinds of things.
[141001480060] |Here's one a little more complex, but with a straight-forward name: Listen.
[141001480070] |Listen music player is also a music manager and has been mainly developed for the Gnome desktop but this won't stand in your way if you want to use it in KDE or other environments.
[141001480080] |Besides playing and organizing music, Listen can also manage your iPod and podcast, generate playlists, automatically download album covers, burn audio CDs and more!
[141001480090] |Listen is written in Python and GTK+ so in order to install it, your system has to meet a pretty long list of requirements:GTK+ version 2.8.xPython >= 2.4pygtk >= 2.0python-dbuspython-gnome2python-gnome2-extraspython-gst >= 0.10.1Mutagen (>= 1.8)python-musicbrainz2
[141001480100] |'ll only need to run a command in the terminal.
[141001480110] |I'm running Fedora Core so I had to type yum install listen.
[141001480120] |A few moments later, I found this great music player in the Kmenu, under Multimedia.
[141001480130] |Later on, I’ve tried to install it on a freshly installed Kubuntu system, which turned out to be a little bit difficult.
[141001480140] |For starters, the Listen package and its dependencies don't reside in the default repositories, so I had to manually update the sources list. 
[141001480150] |Unfortunately, if your system was installed a short while ago and you never played mp3 files on it, you'll notice that Listen isn't able to play this popular audio format.
[141001480160] |This is due to copyright laws that prevent shipping mp3 support with each Linux distribution.
[141001480170] |Several other formats aren't supported by default such as DVD playback or wi-fi cards out-of-the-box support.
[141001480180] |So, before enjoying Listen Music Player, you'll need to install several gstreamer plugins (gstreamer-plugins-ugly offers mp3 support) the same way you installed the player before it will be able to understand and play the mp3 (and other) file formats.
[141001480190] |On its first run, it won't ask you anything regarding your media directory and so on, like other music organizers do.
[141001480200] |It just starts and in order to add media to it, you'll have to import a file or directory from the File menu.
[141001480210] |Its main interface is divided into three sections: the left section holds the player with its playlist and play buttons, the middle section contains tabs that allow you to choose a sub-section for the left section.
[141001480220] |The tabs are: Context, Current, Lyrics which will show the last played songs, the favorite songs sorted by the number of listening and the favorite albums, which sorts the loaded albums also by popularity.
[141001480230] |The Current tab shows the album which the currently playing song is part of and it also lists more songs by that artist.
[141001480240] |The Lyrics tab will show the lyrics for the current song, if available.
[141001480250] |The lyrics, as well as the information in the next tab, Wikipedia, are both fetched from the Internet.
[141001480260] |The Library tab will list all the available media and offer the ability to arrange them by genre, artist or album.
[141001480270] |Other tabs include a Last.FM tab, Podcasts and Radio. 
[141001480280] |For each media file listed under Library, there's a context menu available once you right click on a song.
[141001480290] |That menu allows you to play the file, enqueue, remove or move it to trash.
[141001480300] |It also allows you to fetch the lyrics for that song.
[141001480310] |Listen fetches the lyrics from an online lyrics database service but unfortunately, most of the time, it will provide the wrong lyrics.
[141001480320] |I'd rather get a message like “couldn't find the lyrics for selected song” than to get the lyrics from a God-knows what song, which doesn't have the slightest relation with my current song.
[141001480330] |The cover fetching feature will, however, work rather well.
[141001480340] |I haven't seen it fetch a wrong cover, not even once.
[141001480350] |And even if, at some point, it will fetch the wrong cover, you can at any time pick a cover from the local drive.
[141001480360] |The Radio tab in version 0.4.3 will only list whatever Internet radio stations you manually add, while the 0.5.0 version will fetch all the available radio stations from Shoutcast and arrange them by genre. 
[141001480370] |To configure Listen, go to File menu and click Preferences.
[141001480380] |You'll notice the preferences dialog, which is also divided into five tabs.
[141001480390] |The first tab, General, allows you to change various basic settings, such as whether to: show splashscreen, start minimized, close to tray and a lot more.
[141001480400] |The Podcast tab allows you to choose a podcast directory and whether to refresh on startup.
[141001480410] |The Audioscrobber tab only consists a username and password filed for authentication to Last.FM, while the OSD tab allows you to choose if to enable notification and if yes, how and where to display it.
[141001480420] |The last tab, Web service, acts like a filter and allows you to add and remove words that will be skipped from the web service queries. 
[141001480430] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001480440] |Listen is considered by many people (including me) better than Rhythmbox.
[141001480450] |Well, at least the 0.5.0 version of Listen is better.
[141001480460] |It offers more features and it's more straight-forward to use. 
[141001480470] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001480480] |First of all, because it's a Python application, it will most definitely have speed problems.
[141001480490] |Moreover, Python applications will always cause errors and warnings and will crash out of nowhere.
[141001480500] |On the other hand, there are some annoying functions inside it, such as the inability to drag the ODS to a right or right position on a desktop as it will only work up and down. 
[141001480510] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001480520] |Listen is a good music player and organizer.
[141001480530] |Well, at least it's better than many.
[141001480540] |It is, however, in its early developing stages but this won't stop anyone who wants to try a new player for Gnome.
[141001480550] |However, don't use it if you're not a Python fan. 
[141001480560] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001510010] |<title>BasKet Note Pads Review</title>
[141001510020] |<img/>Every once in a while, I bump into an URL or some valuable piece of information which might be useful later so I save it in a text file somewhere on the hard drive.
[141001510030] |And I'm sure most of the people do it too.
[141001510040] |They put aside documents, pictures and such just to have it available later.
[141001510050] |Not long ago, I ran into a program called BasKet which was supposed to easily take all sorts of notes and keep track of them in a smart way, using an advanced organizing technique.
[141001510060] |At first, I've said to myself no more text files, documents and screenshots all over the desktop and documents folder so I've started using it right away. 
[141001510070] |Installing BasKet is a relatively simple task and anyone should be able to do it.
[141001510080] |Unfortunately, not as easy as using apt-get or yum because the latest BasKet package isn't available in any of the repositories (except maybe fedora's) but as easy as opening a terminal and typing one command.
[141001510090] |BasKet's source archive has a script which does all the work for you. 
[141001510100] |When I first installed it, I was thrilled about finding such an application at last.
[141001510110] |Unfortunately, the more I was using it, the less excited I was getting about it.
[141001510120] |This doesn't mean BasKet is a useless application.
[141001510130] |No, not at all.
[141001510140] |It has a clean and easy to use interface which makes the program very usable, while its note-taking software and great organization makes it easy to use for inexperienced users.
[141001510150] |Moreover, if you're already used to other note-taking applications, you'll be glad to find out that BasKet can import data from KNotes, KJots, Tuxcards, Sticky Notes or Tomboy.
[141001510160] |And don't worry about your data if you're not going to keep BasKet as the default note-taking application, as it makes no modification to the data itself, so it can easily be imported back to the program it came from, while the new notes can be exported as HTML.
[141001510170] |BasKet can even export the whole archive to a HTML page while keeping the formatting.
[141001510180] |But this doesn't mean you can start using it as a HTML editor.
[141001510190] |Maybe just for quick web pages that just need to be done quickly, regardless of their design.
[141001510200] |The main window of BasKet shows the hierarchy of baskets and the contents of the currently selected basket.
[141001510210] |You can drag'n'drop notes to the basket which contains texts, images, links, files, color codes, application launchers, while to some notes, you can assign special tabs such as TODO, important, idea, highlight.
[141001510220] |The items in the baskets can be manually arranged by preferences, or you can automatically arrange them into categories.
[141001510230] |Above the basket contents, there's a toolbar for searching within the basket.
[141001510240] |Because your BasKet can end-up holding sensitive data such as personal files or passwords, it offers a security-related feature: the ability to encrypt the baskets with a password.
[141001510250] |Keep in mind that its baskets are unencrypted and have no password set by default so if you plan to use BasKet for sensitive data, make sure you first set a password. 
[141001510260] |Another feature you can use is its integration with Kontact.
[141001510270] |If you would like to have a single big program for taking notes, reading your email, fetching RSS feeds and so on, you may give it a short while it's running inside Kontact.
[141001510280] |New baskets can easily be created through a dialog which offers pre-defined templates.
[141001510290] |The proprieties dialog for each basket allows you to change the basket's background image, color, layout and keyboard image.
[141001510300] |The proprieties dialog can be reached from the Basket dialog or by selecting the basket and pressing the F2 button.
[141001510310] |Also in this dialog, you can select an icon for a basket.
[141001510320] |BasKet can be configured through the Configure dialog, which is divided into several sections.
[141001510330] |General allows you to change options regarding the basket tree and filter position or whether to dock in system tray, Baskets section allows you to change options regarding their appearance and behavior, while New notes section holds options about how new notes should look, while the Notes Appearance allows you to change the looks for all notes.
[141001510340] |The last section, Applications, allows selecting the path for default applications.
[141001510350] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001510360] |BasKet is an application which can easily take all sort of notes, collect research results and share them, centralize your project, organize your thoughts, keep track of your information in a smart way and more.
[141001510370] |Definitely useful for people lacking their organization senses and bad memory.
[141001510380] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001510390] |As an application, BasKet is stable, impressive and easy to use; however, it's a bit too much for people that only need a notes taking application.
[141001510400] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001510410] |Basket is a very good application for people in need of saving their notes and such.
[141001510420] |However, it might be a little too much if you only need a notes-taking application.
[141001510430] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001520010] |<title>Zero Install Injector Review</title>
[141001520020] |<img/>ROX Desktop is one of the many graphic Desktop environments available for Linux which recently started to use its application directories in combination with Zero Install, a caching network filesystem, to make software installation completely automatic.
[141001520030] |Zero Install is a promising alternative to the currently used Linux package systems, such as RPM or dpkg but unfortunately, just like other alternative package systems, it faces problems of winning acceptance from the major distributions so currently, this alternative package system can only be used as a supplement to native package systems, not as a complete replacement.
[141001520040] |And it's all good, Zero Install doesn't even try to be that. 
[141001520050] |So what's different about this package system?
[141001520060] |Native package systems have a few issues which Zero Install overcomes thanks to its design.
[141001520070] |On one hand, it's the security issue.
[141001520080] |Every time you update your computer (a regular Linux installation has about 1000 packages), the authors of those packages are allowed to run a custom shell script as root on your machine.
[141001520090] |Even if you trust each and every one of those authors, there's always the risk that one of them has their machine compromised.
[141001520100] |On the other hand, there's the lack of flexibility, which forces you to have only one version of a program at any time.
[141001520110] |You can't compile a program against two different versions of GTK and have both executables available and usable.
[141001520120] |And you won't either be able to run a very old program because the libraries it needs have changed their versions and you will only get a libXX.so not found error. 
[141001520130] |Rather than replying on a list of repositories, Zero Install is developed to allow programs in a number of formats (from .deb to .rpm and .tar.gz) to be entered on-the-fly from various websites, as long as those packages are digitally signed.
[141001520140] |Unlike native package systems, Zero Install only installs and updates programs as normal users.
[141001520150] |This feature prevents users from damaging their systems, but it also allows software to be easily sandboxed by maintaining several user accounts only for the purposes of experimenting with different versions of a package.
[141001520160] |Unfortunately, the main drawback to this system is that software must be installed separately for each user. 
[141001520170] |The Zero Install system has been replaced with a set of user-level tools written in Python, called the Injector.
[141001520180] |To install the Injector on your system, you will need a few programs installed: Python version 2.3 or later, including any -dev package, GnuPG for checking digital signatures, PyGTK 2.0 or later needed for running the GUI and the author's GPG key.
[141001520190] |Packages for several distributions have been made available to make installation a bit easier.
[141001520200] |The program's homepage provides installation packages links for Fedora, Mandriva, SuSE, Debian, Ubuntu (all versions), Knoppix, Slackware and others, by installing the software manually from sources.
[141001520210] |Once installed, you will have three new commands: 0launch, which downloads and runs programs by URL.
[141001520220] |If the program is not already installed on your computer, 0launch downloads information about which versions are available and lets you choose one to download.
[141001520230] |It will also automatically do the same for the required libraries.
[141001520240] |0launch will also check for updates if it has been a long time since the last check, thus allowing users to download and upgrade software without requiring root access.
[141001520250] |The second command is 0alias, which creates quick scripts to run 0launch programs, removing the need to keep typing the full URI each time you want to run a program with 0lanch.
[141001520260] |0alias will create a new little script in your PATH to do it for you.
[141001520270] |The third is 0store, which manages the implementation cache.
[141001520280] |Normally, the cache is updated automatically using 0launch.
[141001520290] |How to use the injector.
[141001520300] |First, you'll have to run 0launch as a normal user, giving it the URL for the program you want to use.
[141001520310] |Currently, only a few programs are compatible with Zero Install, the full list can be found <a>HERE</a>.
[141001520320] |The injector will switch to graphical mode (use -console to disable) and will check for updates to the GUI itself.
[141001520330] |If any is available, you will be prompted to confirm if you accept software signed with the author's key.
[141001520340] |Next, if any library is required by the program, it will be fetched as well and you will be prompted again to accept if the key matches.
[141001520350] |The main part of the window contains a list of all the components needed to run the selected program and when you're happy with it, you can click the Run button to start the program.
[141001520360] |The injector will next download and uncompress the packages into a temporary directory and their contents will be checked against the digests in the interface files.
[141001520370] |If correct, the packages will be placed in a cache to remove the need of having to download them again next time you run that program.
[141001520380] |When the download is complete, the program will run.
[141001520390] |To create a new alias which removes the need of typing the full URL every time you need to run that program, use the 0alias command: 0alias program-alias program-URL.
[141001520400] |To uninstall programs, run 0launch -gui, click on Show Cache, select the versions you don't need any more from inside the URL and press delete.
[141001520410] |Moreover, anyone can make software available through Zero Install.
[141001520420] |You will first need to create an alias to 0publish-gui and run it.
[141001520430] |You will get a new window prompting to enter some details about the program, such as name of the program, its description, its feed URL, the programs' homepage URL and an icon.
[141001520440] |You will then need to add one or more versions of the program in the feed, which can be done from the Versions tab, using the Add Archive button.
[141001520450] |Also from the Version tab, you can select any required files.
[141001520460] |Finally, you need to sign the feed so people can check that it's really from you.
[141001520470] |Go back to the previous tab and choose your GPG key from the menu.
[141001520480] |If you don't already have one, click on the add button.
[141001520490] |In the end, you will have three files: the signed XML feed listing the version, the GPG public key which lets people check the signature and an XSLT stylesheet, in case anyone wants to feed in their browser.
[141001520500] |The files will need to be uploaded on a web-server in order for anyone to run your program through the injector.
[141001520510] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001520520] |Zero Install project is a supplement to the current package managers.
[141001520530] |However, unlike them, the Zero Install's injector provides more security and control over the programs you need to run.
[141001520540] |Moreover, the programs are fetched and run from the web but none is actually installed.
[141001520550] |The program only keeps a cache to prevent re-downloading the program's files each time you want to run it.
[141001520560] |Moreover, programs run by Zero Install don't require root access.
[141001520570] |You can also create new Zero Install packages.
[141001520580] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001520590] |Zero Install doesn't support installing an application for multiple users only to increase the security level.
[141001520600] |However, this is a bad thing only if you're trying to install it on a multi-user machine with several users registered on it.
[141001520610] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001520620] |Zero Install is a very promising application that will become an asset when it gets integrated into distributions.
[141001520630] |You will be amazed of how quickly it runs a program from a source package, even if the program isn't even installed.
[141001520640] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001540010] |<title>KGpg Review</title>
[141001540020] |<img/>One of the most important features the modern Linux distributions have inherited from Unix is the powerful command line.
[141001540030] |However, using the command line can be a little difficult for all Linux users, not just for the beginners.
[141001540040] |Fortunately, many developers have created user-friendly front-ends applications to common command line applications.
[141001540050] |One of the many such applications is KGpg, a front-end to GPG, the GNU Privacy Guard.
[141001540060] |GPG has been created for the main reason of replacing PGP, a popular encryption program.
[141001540070] |Nowadays, GPG is a very popular component in a Linux system and it's used for verification by most utilities. 
[141001540080] |GPG has been developed to provide security for - among other things - email and it's best known as an implementation of public key cryptography.
[141001540090] |Basically, for each user, GPG provides two keys, a public and a private key.
[141001540100] |If one would like to send an encrypted email to another, he will encrypt the email using his private key and the other's public key, while the other person will be able to decrypt it using his private key and the sender's public key. 
[141001540110] |Another use of GPG, besides encrypting emails, is that of a way of digitally signing software packages, so the recipient can verify each program coming from the person who claims to be the author of it. 
[141001540120] |Most likely, KGpg is already installed on your computer.
[141001540130] |If not, it can easily be installed through the distribution's package manager.
[141001540140] |For example, if you use Fedora, open a terminal and type sudo yum install kgpg.
[141001540150] |For Ubuntu, replace yum with apt-get and so on.
[141001540160] |Once installed, you can start KGpg by clicking its shortcut found in KDE or Gnome main menu, under 'Utilities' or open a terminal and type kgpg.
[141001540170] |Once started, a system tray icon will appear.
[141001540180] |A left click will open the Key Manager window, while a right-click will open a menu allowing quick access to some important features. 
[141001540190] |<b>Using KGpg</b>.
[141001540200] |The first thing you need before using KGpg is a key.
[141001540210] |If you don't already have a key, it's likely that KGpg will automatically pop-up the key generation dialog at the first start-up.
[141001540220] |If the dialog doesn't open, you can access it in the Key Manager from Keys / Generate Key Pair.
[141001540230] |All you need to do is enter your name and email address in the appropriate fields and click OK.
[141001540240] |Keep in mind that clicking the 'Expert Mode' will open a terminal window running GPG.
[141001540250] |After clicking OK, you will be presented with a window containing signature's Key ID and Fingerprint.
[141001540260] |It's also possible to create a Revocation Certificate but this step is optional, as you can do it later by right-clicking a key and select Revoke Key.
[141001540270] |This is a safety measure, if your system is compromised, you can send this certificate to let people know your public key is void. 
[141001540280] |<b>Encrypting Files</b>.
[141001540290] |There are two ways to encrypt your data.
[141001540300] |First, using Symmetrical encryption, will only encrypt with a password.
[141001540310] |Anybody using a computer with gpg can decrypt your data if you give him the password.
[141001540320] |Second, using Key encryption requires a key pair (secret and public key) to be created first.
[141001540330] |Exchange your public key with your friends and colleagues.
[141001540340] |Then, if you want to send encrypted data to a colleague, you need to encrypt the message with your colleague's public key, while he will need his own secret key and passphrase to decrypt the data.
[141001540350] |Encrypting data can be easily done through Konqueror, by right-clicking on the file you want to encrypt and choosing Actions / Encrypt file.
[141001540360] |You will be prompted with the Public key selection dialog, where you need to select the recipient's public key and click Encrypt.
[141001540370] |The encrypted file will be saved as .asc or .gpg extension, depending on the encryption type.
[141001540380] |A file can also be encrypted using Kgpg's window by dragging and dropping the file into KGpg's system tray icon. 
[141001540390] |Decrypting the data can be done through Konqueror as well, by right-clicking the file and choosing Open with KGpg.
[141001540400] |Alternatively, you can use KGpg's editor by selecting File / Decrypt File and choosing the encrypted file. 
[141001540410] |<b>Encrypting Emails</b>.
[141001540420] |With Kmail, decrypting emails is a built-in feature.
[141001540430] |First, edit your identity in Kmail and add the sign and encrypt keys.
[141001540440] |Before sending an email to a recipient, you first need to search the recipient's public key on one of the key servers and import it.
[141001540450] |While composing the message, don't forget to click on the Lock icon or go to Options menu and select Encrypt.
[141001540460] |The recipient will be asked for his passphrase to decrypt and show the email.
[141001540470] |More popular than encryption is signing emails.
[141001540480] |This process is done almost the same as encrypting but it doesn't encrypt the text, it just signs the email to prove that it's coming from the right person. 
[141001540490] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001540500] |With KGpg installed, you can increase security for your files and protect your privacy for emails a little easier as it's only a front-end to GPG, the GNU Privacy Guard, a command-line application.
[141001540510] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001540520] |Even if it's a graphical application, where everything is documented and explained, KGpg is still a very hard to use application.
[141001540530] |If you're not a security addict or you don't really, really need this high level of security, it's not worth it to complicate your life using it. 
[141001540540] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001540550] |KGpg is a front-end to GPG, which makes it easier to use.
[141001540560] |However, if this high level of security isn't an absolute must for you, you shouldn't complicate your life using it. 
[141001540570] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001580010] |<title>Album Cover Art Downloader Review</title>
[141001580020] |Nowadays, computers are used for a lot of things but while doing those things, most people will also listen to music.
[141001580030] |That music can either be an FM or on-line radio, an audio CD or a few audio files saved in mp3 format on the hard drive.
[141001580040] |Moreover, some people like to collect mp3 files and end up with very large collections that fill all their drive space.
[141001580050] |Now, if you're one of those people, you most likely know that there are a lot of programs available which will organize and sort your music collection in various ways and also that most of those programs will also download and display the cover of each album you've bought and turned into mp3 files.
[141001580060] |However, if you prefer to do the organizing yourself, then you might be happy to know that a free program has been developed which will only search and download an image which best suits as an album cover for all items in your collection.
[141001580070] |This program is called Album Cover Art Downloader.
[141001580080] |Album Cover Art Downloader will go through your collection of music albums and for each one, it will download a set of matching cover images for you to choose from.
[141001580090] |The search is performed on several on-line stores such as Amazon, Wal-Mart or Buy.com but will be also performed on image search engines such as Yahoo! Images.
[141001580100] |Setting a cover for each album in your collection will allow several applications to make use of the downloaded images to display them while browsing the album directory or while playing them.
[141001580110] |For instance, KDE, Gnome and others that follow the FreeDesktop.org .desktop-entry spec.
[141001580120] |They will display the cover as the folder icon while browsing through your collection.
[141001580130] |Other programs include the Windows Media Player, CDcover and CoverViewer (Xmms plugins), as well as various Winamp plugins such as Cover TAG.
[141001580140] |Installing Album Covert Art Downloader is a quite easy process, and it gets even easier if you're running a distribution for which an installation package has been made available.
[141001580150] |For instance, I'm running Ubuntu and have downloaded the albumart .DEB package, which I've installed within seconds with the command dpkg -i albumart.deb.
[141001580160] |There are packages available for other distributions as well, such as any RPM based distro, Gentoo or even other operating systems, like Microsoft Windows.
[141001580170] |For all other distributions, there's also a source package available which requires local compiling and installing to make it working.
[141001580180] |Keep in mind that in order to run the source packages, you'll need: Python 2.3 or better with python-xmlbase, Qt 2.3 or better and PyQT, the Python bindings.
[141001580190] |You will also need Python Imaging Library and GNU Make.
[141001580200] |Once installed, you can start it by running the <b>albumart-qt</b> command from a terminal window or by looking for a shortcut in KDE/Gnome main menu, under Multimedia.
[141001580210] |The first time it's ran, Album Art will only display empty sections and won't ask you for any locations (the music location for example), but you'll have to do this yourself.
[141001580220] |So right after it's ran, you'll need to click the File Open and navigate to the directory containing the albums you want to download images for.
[141001580230] |The program will then load all the directories under that path and try to guess an artist and album for each entry.
[141001580240] |Next, to set covers for the albums, you have two possibilities: either press the Download Covers button, which will automatically download covers for all directories but it might skip some of them, as it only accepts exact matches when searching covers or, if no images are found, try to broader search, like just for the artist name.
[141001580250] |Alternatively, you can set the covers manually.
[141001580260] |Simply select a directory from the list and check if the artist and album fields are correctly filled.
[141001580270] |Next, click on Download Covers: after a few seconds, you should see a list of cover images on the right.
[141001580280] |If no images are found, try to simplify the search by clearing the album field completely.
[141001580290] |After the search has been successfully completed, you can select a cover from the results and click Set as cover.
[141001580300] |You can also drag and drop an image from your file manager on the collection item to use that image as a cover.
[141001580310] |Once the "Set as cover" button has been pressed, the following actions have taken place: a folder.jpg image has been created in the album directory to be used by Windows Xp.
[141001580320] |Next, there is a .folder.png and an Icon entry in .directory for Konqueror etc, to be used as commercial.
[141001580330] |Other actions include embedding the ID3v2 APIC file into mp3 files.
[141001580340] |Additional custom image targets are also supported.
[141001580350] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001580360] |Album Cover Art Downloader is a simple, easy to use program which is used only for setting covers to your media collections.
[141001580370] |Setting the covers can be done either automatically, when the image name best matches the albums name and artist, or can be set manually by manually selecting an image from the search results.
[141001580380] |The program can search on Amazon, Buy.com and Wal-Mart websites, as well as by using the Yahoo! Image search service.
[141001580390] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001580400] |The program's interface is very easy to use, but maybe too easy.
[141001580410] |It would have been nice if there were buttons for saving the images in a custom location and such.
[141001580420] |Also sometimes, the results section will display results for older albums and you'll end-up with a very long list of results, making it a little more difficult to find the best suited cover.
[141001580430] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001580440] |If you're one of the people which like to manually organize their media collection, this application will come in very handy when you're at the step of setting up the covers.
[141001580450] |It's also very easy to use and very fast so it won't cause any troubles while using it.
[141001580460] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001590010] |<title>gnormalize Review</title>
[141001590020] |People usually use a different program for every task related to their music collection.
[141001590030] |They use a program for ripping audio CDs, another program for converting the audio files to various formats, another program for normalizing the volume level and another program for editing the tags.
[141001590040] |If you're one of those people, you will most likely be glad to find out that all four tasks, including others, can easily be done with one single program, called gnormalize.
[141001590050] |gnormalize decodes the MP3/MP4/MPC/OGG/APE/FLAC file to WAV, then normalizes the WAV to a targeted volume level and re-encodes it.
[141001590060] |Moreover, gnormalize can extract Audio CD track and output as various popular audio formats (MP3, MP4, MPC, OGG, APE, FLAC, WAV) with fast speed and high quality.
[141001590070] |gnormalize can also convert audio format between MP3, MP4, MPC, OGG, APE and FLAC with high fidelity, which meets your need to play and collect audio files.
[141001590080] |It can change the encoding and Metadata (tag) properties of final normalized files.
[141001590090] |gnormalize can be used to adjust the volume of audio files to a standard volume level, where different recording levels on different albums can cause the volume to vary greatly from song to song.
[141001590100] |Unfortunately, gnormalize can't be installed through apt-get, yum or other package managers because it isn’t (yet) available in the distribution repositories.
[141001590110] |However, installing it from the sources package is a process very much simplified by the install script provided with it.
[141001590120] |Once you've downloaded and uncompressed the sources, you will need to run the install script and answer a few questions related to the additional Perl modules you would like to be installed.
[141001590130] |The modules provided with gnormalize are CDDB_get, MP3-Info and Audio-CD.
[141001590140] |The latest, however, will require libcdaudio and its development package to be installed on your system.
[141001590150] |Even if gnormalize only required two packages to run (perl and perl-Gtk2), it won't be able to play or convert to formats such as mp3, ape or flac by default.
[141001590160] |So, if you need to play or convert an audio file to one of these formats, you'll need to install a few more dependecies: mac to encode and decode APE format, flac to encode and decode FLAC format, faac to encode WAV to MP4 format and faad to decode MP4 to WAV.
[141001590170] |Once the program is installed, together with the additional dependencies needed for encode/decode the filetypes you need, you can start gnormalize by typing its name in a terminal or in the Alt+F2 dialog.
[141001590180] |You'll notice that its interface is very intuitive and most of the items are explained through tool tips.
[141001590190] |Moreover, the interface is divided into five tabs, each tab having its own special utility.
[141001590200] |The first tab allows you to convert various audio files to mp3, mp4, mpc, ogg, ape, flac or wav formats and it also enables you to adjust the volume of audio files to a standard volume level.
[141001590210] |The second tab enables you to config various encoding/decoding options and also to select whether the read CDDB function is enabled.
[141001590220] |In this tab, you can also press the "Show the command line", which acts as a console and displays any warning message it can occur.
[141001590230] |This is a very helpful feature as it acts like a console and shows what went wrong and which executable is missing, allowing you to easily repair things.
[141001590240] |The third is the info tab, which displays the MP3 Info and also allows you to make modifications to the tag.
[141001590250] |Next tab, rip, allows you to rip audio CDs but also acts as an audio player.
[141001590260] |Here, you can select which tracks you want to convert to digital format and you can also preview them with the integrated audio player.
[141001590270] |If you right click the player, it detaches from the main window and hides it.
[141001590280] |The player offers basic functions such as eject, play, pause, next etc.
[141001590290] |The player's appearance, as well as the programs used for playing various formats can be configured through a dialog, which pops-up once you click the scrolling information.
[141001590300] |The last tab displays a short description of gnormalize and a random Tux animation.
[141001590310] |Funny.
[141001590320] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001590330] |gnormalize is able to decode various audio formats to WAV, normalize the WAV to a targeted volume level and re-encode to the original format or, optionally, to another.
[141001590340] |The whole normalize feature is optional as you can only convert an audio file from a format to another. gnormalize can also rip audio CDs to a custom digital format and can also display and edit the file's Metadata (tag).
[141001590350] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001590360] |Most of the interface's items are explained through tool tips but there is no documentation available.
[141001590370] |The progress bar button also acts as the command line button so if you want to view both, you'll need to push the button twice.
[141001590380] |I guess it's better this way, but this is something every one needs to figure out as it's not explained anywhere.
[141001590390] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001590400] |gnormalize frees you from the need of having three or four programs to manage your audio files.
[141001590410] |It's a front-end to several programs and it brings their features into a single program.
[141001590420] |Its interface is very intuitive and easy to use, even if there is no documentation available.
[141001590430] |Definitely worth trying.
[141001590440] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001600010] |<title>Rhythmbox Review</title>
[141001600020] |Rhythmbox Music Player is an audio player that plays and helps organize digital music.
[141001600030] |It has been inspired by iTunes, but it is a free software, designed to work well under the Gnome desktop.
[141001600040] |It uses the GStreamer media framework which enables comprehensive audio support for a large number of digital formats.
[141001600050] |Rhythmbox also offers a number of features designed to make the playback experience a pleasant one.
[141001600060] |Rhythmbox is found on most distributions; unfortunately, only as an older version.
[141001600070] |This is a result of being an actively developed process.
[141001600080] |For example, the Ubuntu software channel spreads at this time version 0.9.6 of Rhythmbox, while the latest version is 0.9.8.
[141001600090] |If you're an Ubuntu user and want to install the latest version of Rhythmbox, visit the getdeb site, click the download link and select GDebi as the package manager.
[141001600100] |Ignore any warnings, if any, and you'll have the program installed and ready to run within seconds.
[141001600110] |The first time Rhythmbox is started, it will present a welcome screen, followed by a configure screen which asks you to choose the media folder.
[141001600120] |After completing the wizard, you will be able to browse and play your favorite music, using the program's main components.
[141001600130] |In the upper part of the main window, you'll notice the menubar, which contains menus that enable you to perform various tasks in the program.
[141001600140] |Underneath the menubar, there's the toolbar which provides access to player functions such as play, play previous/next, enable continuous or random play and volume level.
[141001600150] |When a track is being played, the track name is displayed, as well as the artist and album names.
[141001600160] |Underneath them, you'll notice a time slider which allows you to change the playing position of the song.
[141001600170] |Now, for the most important parts of the main window: The source list allows you to access your music library, Internet radio, your playlists and audio CDs.
[141001600180] |The source lists can contain the list of queued tracks, the player library, Internet Radio sources, Podcast feeds, audio CDs music, songs from portable players such as iPod or DAAP Music shares discovered on the LAN.
[141001600190] |Another important part of the main window is the statusbar, which displays additional information regarding the number of songs, duration and total size and the duration of the selected song.
[141001600200] |The statusbar can be toggled on or off by selecting View / Statusbar.
[141001600210] |Also, the player's main window can be switched to a minimized mode by selecting View / Small Display.
[141001600220] |This view mode will only enable access to the menubar and the player functions.
[141001600230] |There's also a party mode available, which will switch the main window to full screen.
[141001600240] |The Library is the main source available in Rhythmbox, it's the database that contains all the music files you imported from your hard drive or removable media.
[141001600250] |What's interesting, however, it that the library can also contain music files available over remote network services such as public/authenticated FTP, NFS or Windows shares.
[141001600260] |To find your favorite tracks more easily, Rhythmbox offers a search function, which enables you to find and filter tracks by a search term.
[141001600270] |Another convenient way to search through your media is by using the Browser, which is basically a two or three pane view which enables easy navigation among music genres artists and albums.
[141001600280] |The Radio source will list several Internet Radio stations, each broadcasting a different genre of music.
[141001600290] |I'm not sure where these radio stations come from.
[141001600300] |Either the author has included them into Rhythmbox's install package, or, the program has fetched the top 20 stations from the Shoutcast website.
[141001600310] |Moreover, you can add your own Internet stations and even add them into existing genres.
[141001600320] |To broadcast the radio stations by their music genre, simply go to View / Browse or press Ctrl + B.
[141001600330] |The Podcast source enables you to subscribe to podcast feeds and automatically download and play an episode once it has been made available.
[141001600340] |Podcasting is a new way to broadcast audio content over the Internet, split into several episodes and distributed through an XML feed.
[141001600350] |Other sources include DAAP Share, a network protocol which enables sharing your media files with your network neighbors.
[141001600360] |You can share media also with users who useDAAP compatible software such as iTunes.
[141001600370] |The DAAP shares are automatically scanned for at Rhythmbox start-up and displayed in the Source list.
[141001600380] |If sharing and the DAAP plugin are enabled, your library and playlists will also be published at start-up.
[141001600390] |This way, you can easily listen to music stored on other people's computers and they can easily listen to yours.
[141001600400] |Other plugins include Last.FM, which submits song info to your last.fm account and plays last.fm streams, Magnatune Store plugin, which enables Rhythmbox to play and purchase from the Magnatune online music store, while Jamendo is a plugin similar to Magnatune, only that it plays and downloads albums from the Jamendo music store.
[141001600410] |If you were to listen to every song on both Magnatude and Jamendo for 24 hours a day, never repeating a song, it would take over 80 days to hear them all.
[141001600420] |There's also a Lyrics plugin which tries to fetch the lyrics for the current song and a visualization plugin which will display a nice animation while playing a song.
[141001600430] |The LIRC plugin enables Rhythmbox control over an infrared remote control, while the last plugin, Cover Art, will try to fetch album pictures from the currently loaded albums.
[141001600440] |Since the 0.9 version, Rhythmbox also supports creating audio CDs from your playlists.
[141001600450] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001600460] |Rhythmbox is an audio player for the Gnome desktop which supports playing and organizing digital music.
[141001600470] |Its interface is somewhat similar to Apple's iTunes but it has been released as a free application.
[141001600480] |It uses the GStreamer media framework which supports a large number of formats.
[141001600490] |It also offers a useful set of features which makes Rhythmbox a powerful and easy to use audio player.
[141001600500] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001600510] |I just wish the preferences dialog had a bit more options to customize.
[141001600520] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001600530] |Rhythmbox is a very good audio player with useful features; unfortunately, there are a few players that offer the same functionality as Rhythmbox, an then some, so it's hard to choose Rhythmbox as your default player, unless you like a more simple player or you're on a slow PC.
[141001600540] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001620010] |<title>ISO Master Review</title>
[141001620020] |Have you ever wanted or needed to add or remove files from a CD image without breaking the boot record or the whole image?
[141001620030] |If you look hard enough on Google, you're likely to find a way, by running a number of long, scary commands in a terminal and even then, you won't be certain that your CD image is safe.
[141001620040] |Fortunately, an open source application for Linux has been developed, which enables you to create and modify ISO9660 files, without the risk of breaking anything - ISO Master.
[141001620050] |ISO Master enables you to extract or add files to an ISO, create ISOs from scratch and even make the new ISOs bootable, all in a simple, easy to use graphical interface.
[141001620060] |The application can open both ISO and NRG files but unfortunately, it can only save as ISO.
[141001620070] |ISO Master is based on bkisofs, a library for reading, modifying and writing ISO images.
[141001620080] |The library shares the same package as ISO Master so you won't have to install anything separately, except for the usual requirements that may appear while compiling the source package.
[141001620090] |Installing ISO Master is a rather easy process, thanks to the variety of pre-installed packages available.
[141001620100] |There are two .deb packages for Ubuntu Dapper and newer, as well as for Debian testing/unstable, for i386 and amd64 architectures.
[141001620110] |You can also find RPM packages for Fedora Core 5 and 6 and a TGZ package designed for Slackware.
[141001620120] |For Gentoo users, an ebuild file has been made available, while Archlinux and FreeBSD users can find a package on the websites dedicated to their operating system.
[141001620130] |Moreover, surprisingly or not, there are also packages available for smaller distributions, such as SLAX, NimbleX or Puppy Linux.
[141001620140] |Alternatively, you can download and compile the source packages, which requires your system to have installed a C compiler, make and some packages required for compiling GTK2 application, such as gtk2 developer libraries and pkg config.
[141001620150] |On an Ubuntu system, you can install these by running apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev pkg-config.
[141001620160] |The C compiler and its tools can be obtained on an Ubuntu system from the built-essential package, found in the Universe repository.
[141001620170] |Once installed, you can start ISO Master either from the newly created shortcut on the Desktop (not available on all distributions/desktop environments), from the shortcut created under 'Utilities' in the KDE Menu or from a terminal, by typing 'isomaster'.
[141001620180] |Its interface is very simple and easy to use.
[141001620190] |Each button has its function explained through tooltips and also, there's a small help document available under the Help menu, Overview (or by pressing F1 on the keyboard).
[141001620200] |Other menus are Image, which provides functions for creating a new image, opening an existing image or saving the currently modifying image as a custom name.
[141001620210] |From the Image menu, you can also view the image proprieties, which provide the creation time, volume name, published and allows you to choose whether the filenames should have RockRidge and Joliet selected, and the Quit function.
[141001620220] |The View menu allows you to Refresh the current directory, view the hidden files and sort directories first.
[141001620230] |The BootRecord menu allows you to view the current bootrecords proprieties, save the bootrecord to drive, delete it or add a new one from the selected file, from a custom location on the drive or from a floppy disk.
[141001620240] |The Settings menu allows you to choose whether to scan for duplicate files or follow symlinks. 
[141001620250] |The interface is basically divided into two main parts, the drive browser at the top and the ISO browser at the bottom.
[141001620260] |Each browser has its own toolbar with various buttons.
[141001620270] |The upper browser (drive), provides two buttons: go back and create new directory, while the lower browser (ISO), provides five buttons: go back, create new directory, add the selected file in the drive browser to the ISO, extract the selected file in the ISO browser to the drive browser location and delete the selected file in the lower browser.
[141001620280] |Also on the lower browser, it's displayed an estimated size of the ISO file. 
[141001620290] |Using ISO Master is quite simple.
[141001620300] |To open an ISO file, simply click on Image menu and Open.
[141001620310] |To create a new ISO file, click on Image and New.
[141001620320] |To add some files to the ISO, select them from the drive browser and click the 'Add to ISO' button on the lower browser's toolbar.
[141001620330] |To extract files from the ISO, select them in the ISO browser and click 'Extract from ISO' button on the same toolbar.
[141001620340] |You can also create new directories or delete files on both the ISO and your local filesystem.
[141001620350] |Once you have created or made modifications to a CD image, you can save it as a custom name, but only followed by the .iso extension.
[141001620360] |You can't also overwrite the original ISO.
[141001620370] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001620380] |ISO Master is an open source graphical (GUI) application for Linux which enables users to create and modify ISO9660 files; ISO images and NRG (Nero) images.
[141001620390] |It allows you to create an ISO from scratch, add or remove files and directories from or to a CD image and also create bootable CDs using various record types: no-emulation (isolinux, Microsoft Windows), 1.2, 1.44 and 2.88 floppy disk emulation.
[141001620400] |It also supports RockRidge and Joliet file names.
[141001620410] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001620420] |Nothing much, except for the documentation which skips the BootRecord section.
[141001620430] |A beginner user wouldn't know what those floppy disks are or where to get a bootrecord from.
[141001620440] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001620450] |ISO Master allows you to modify the content of an ISO file without damaging the bootrecord and ruining the image's bootable capabilities.
[141001620460] |If you ever need to add or remove content from a CD Image, then ISO Master is the application you should use!
[141001620470] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001630010] |<title>AutoScan Review</title>
[141001630020] |Quite often, network administrators use various tools to scan, test and monitor their network just to make sure everything is in place and to prevent eventual problems.
[141001630030] |Network tools come in many shapes and sizes, each with its own advantages and disadvantages so picking a tool is totally up to you, your needs and preferences.
[141001630040] |One of them is AutoScan, a network tool for exploration, monitoring and network management.
[141001630050] |This is a free software, released under the GPLv2 license and it's available for Linux graphical environments, as it's a GTK2.0-type application.
[141001630060] |AutoScan is based on two programs:
[141001630070] |- AutoScan_Network which is somehow the visible part;
[141001630080] |- AutoScan_Agent, which is the system main part, it carries out the exploration and monitoring of the network.
[141001630090] |To install AutoScan, you can either use the auto-installer package or the source package which needs to be compiled locally.
[141001630100] |There is also a Live CD available which provides AutoScan among other network related tools.
[141001630110] |If you choose to install AutoScan using the source package, your system needs to have a few dependencies: glib-devel, net-snmp-devel, libao-devel, libvte-devel and a few others.
[141001630120] |Fortunately, while running configure, the script will notify you which package you'll need to install.
[141001630130] |After installation, you can run AutoScan either from the shortcut under Internet in main KDE menu, or by running 'AutoScan_Network' in a terminal.
[141001630140] |On each start-up, AutoScan will run a wizard which enables you to set your network's parameters, such as the name of your network, its private subnet and the interface to be used for scanning.
[141001630150] |After those parameters are set, AutoScan starts scanning the network for each known equipment which is classified according to its type (workstation, server, router etc).
[141001630160] |When it finds an unknown equipment, it allows you to manually integrate it into the database of OS fingerprints.
[141001630170] |Moreover, according to their identification, to each equipment an icon is assigned to facilitate the visualization.
[141001630180] |These icons are customizable and can be replaced with others, as long as you copy them to /usr/share/pixmaps/AutoScan/Equipment and keep their names.
[141001630190] |Progressively with the discovery, each equipment is added in the left section of the main window, while clicking on one of them will post additional information in the right section.
[141001630200] |In particular, you can view the equipment's IP address, MAC address, open ports and several information fields which you can fill by hand (email address, name of the holder, system info etc).
[141001630210] |When selecting an equipment, the right section of the window also provides a list of open ports.
[141001630220] |For each port, you can associate one or more programs to be used accordingly.
[141001630230] |For instance, you can set Konqueror to start browsing that IP if a Samba share was discovered.
[141001630240] |However, for the most used ports, there is already an action set in the Open TCP Ports menu.
[141001630250] |For SSH, FTP, Telnet and other ports discovered, AutoScan allows you to use that service right from the program.
[141001630260] |AutoScan also provides an integrated Nessus client which allows connecting to a Nessus server and carrying out vulnerability tests upon the equipment.
[141001630270] |Other functions include integrated SNMP client which is able to gather additional information from the equipment which has the SNMP port activated, the ability to send messages to the equipment through the service transport (netsend), execution of pre-configured scripts (such as nmap and ping), but also others which can be manually added. 
[141001630280] |The bottom bar provides real-time information regarding the volume of data in emission and reception.
[141001630290] |It also displays the total number of found equipments, the number of equipments in course of scan/on standby of scan and the percentage of scan process.
[141001630300] |AutoScan can be configured through the Settings dialog, which is divided into five tabs.
[141001630310] |The general tab allows you to set various configuration options, such as if the program will minimize to tray, start minimize, the program's SMTP address, which audio device to use and whether the computer running it is directly connected to the Internet or through a proxy server.
[141001630320] |The Ports tab allows adding/editing/deleting ports.
[141001630330] |For each port, you can set a program to run with custom parameters.
[141001630340] |The Fingerprinting tab enables you to change/add/delete OS fingerprinting, a process of determining the operating system running on the remote host.
[141001630350] |The Scripts tab allows adding, removing or modifying commands and scripts to be run on the selected machine, while the Restore tab allows restoring a previous saved network state each time AutoStart is started.
[141001630360] |AutoScan also provides functions used to monitor the network: notification and intrusion alert.
[141001630370] |The first will notify you when an equipment is not responding or a server is not available anymore, while the second will save the current network configuration and will notify you when new equipments are discovered on the network (useful for detecting pirate devices).
[141001630380] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001630390] |AutoScan is an easy to use tool for exploring, monitoring and managing a network.
[141001630400] |You can use it to detect equipments on the network and fetch various information about them.
[141001630410] |It's also possible to manage them through ssh and telnet, clients which are integrated into the program.
[141001630420] |One can also monitor the equipments, run custom scripts and more, right from the program's interface.
[141001630430] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001630440] |Unfortunately, there's no documentation except for one written in French.
[141001630450] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001630460] |If you need a simple tool for fetching various information about your network or you need to perform basic management actions on it, you may give AutoScan a try and might even be impressed with it.
[141001630470] |However, for advanced management options, you should use a more advanced tool.
[141001630480] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001640010] |<title>Hybrid Share Review</title>
[141001640020] |I don't know about you but as a Linux user, I've always had problems with transferring files between me and my friends who use different operating systems.
[141001640030] |Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that Linux can't share files; it just doesn't offer an easy way to do it.
[141001640040] |For example, what do you do when you want to share some files with your friends?
[141001640050] |You can use one of the IM clients which support file transfer but chances are the transfer won't even start.
[141001640060] |Second option will be attaching the files to an email but you will only be allowed to send relatively small files due to email size limit.
[141001640070] |What's left then?
[141001640080] |FTP requires installing and configuring an FTP server, which is too much work, samba only works for sharing files inside a local network and other methods are just too complicated to even mention.
[141001640090] |Fortunately, there is a solution: <b>Hybrid Share</b>!
[141001640100] |Hybrid Share is a rather new application which acts as an IM client but is mostly focused on file sharing.
[141001640110] |It's written in Mono C#/Gtk#, thus can run on Linux, Windows and Mac.
[141001640120] |Its interface is user-friendly and it's very easy to use; basically, you will only need to add new buddies, just as in an IM client, and drag files into their folders.
[141001640130] |Unfortunately, the installation process will give you a bit of a headache, unless you are, of course, using Ubuntu.
[141001640140] |<b>INSTALLATION</b>
[141001640150] |The downloads section on the official homepage provides several links for you to choose from, depending on your operating system.
[141001640160] |For Ubuntu users it's easy, they have a .deb package available which can be downloaded and installed with a few clicks.
[141001640170] |For other Linux distributions, there's a binary and a source code package available.
[141001640180] |However, from what I've noticed using a Fedora Core 6 system, the binary version is a bit unstable as I've got it to segfault a few times.
[141001640190] |Running out of options, I've downloaded the source code package and tried to install it.
[141001640200] |Here is what happened.
[141001640210] |Before starting the installation, I made sure my system had all the required packages installed: Mono (mono-core, mono-data, mono-devel and mono-data-sqlite), Gtk (gtk-sharp2 and gtk-sharp2-devel), Glade (libglade2 and libglade2-devel) and of course, a compiler, GNU make, AutoConf and AutoMake.
[141001640220] |Next, I've started to compile and install all the packages provided by the source archive in this order: niry-sharp, hybrid-share-core, hybrid-share-plugins, hybrid-share.
[141001640230] |The first package installed flawlessly with:
[141001640240] |<b>$ cd niry-sharp$ sh autogen.sh$ make$ sudo make install</b>
[141001640250] |As for the second, when I typed the same commands, I got an error saying it couldn't find NIRY_SHARP.
[141001640260] |I got passed that by running this command and re-running the commands above:
[141001640270] |<b>$ sudo cp /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/niry-sharp.pc /usr/share/pkgconfig/</b>
[141001640280] |I've then moved on to hybrid-share-plugins where I faced a similar problem.
[141001640290] |Fixed with:
[141001640300] |<b>$ cp /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/hybrid-share-plugin.pc /usr/share/pkgconfig/</b>
[141001640310] |After these errors, everything went smoothly.
[141001640320] |I started Hybrid Share by typing hybrid-share in a terminal.
[141001640330] |<b>INTERFACE</b>
[141001640340] |The first thing you'll notice when starting Hybrid Share for the first time is its resemblance to ordinary IM clients.
[141001640350] |It provides the log-in screen with username and password fields, two check boxes, Rememer password and Use secure authentication and two buttons: OK and Quit.
[141001640360] |If you check the Use secure authentication, you will need to register at a central server which will exchange the IP addresses automatically between clients.
[141001640370] |If you decide no to use secure auth when adding a new buddy, you'll have to manually enter his IP address as well.
[141001640380] |You will also need to enter a username (no registration required).
[141001640390] |After logging-in, you'll see the main window.
[141001640400] |If you haven't used secure authentication, the monitor in the left will have a cracked lock next to it.
[141001640410] |This is just for informational purposes so don't panic.
[141001640420] |Now, you'll need to set yourself Online, using the Network menu.
[141001640430] |To add a new buddy, again, use the Network menu.
[141001640440] |Once you play around with it for a short while, you'll see it's quite straight-forward and easy to use.
[141001640450] |Using the buttons on the toolbar, you can view your shared folder(s), the transfer's status and even perform a search.
[141001640460] |Also, there's the Settings button which will popup a dialog, allowing you to change various preferences such as which port to listen to, shared directories and so on.
[141001640470] |Hybrid Share is also extensible via Plugins.
[141001640480] |One of the plugins offered by default is the Talk plugin which allows you to chat with people about or while you're sending or receiving a file.
[141001640490] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001640500] |Hybrid Share is a cross-platform application designed to break the file sharing barriers between different operating systems.
[141001640510] |It can be installed on both Linux and Windows, as well as on Mac.
[141001640520] |It provides a clean, beautiful interface which is also easy to use and several other functions that will make file sharing a lot easier.
[141001640530] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001640540] |This is a work-in-progress application and it might crash until the developer fixes all the bugs.
[141001640550] |Also, the sourceforge server used to generate new accounts has produced a few errors.
[141001640560] |Finally, it would have been nice if it supported other protocols as well (jabber, YM).
[141001640570] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001640580] |If you are one of the people that had problems while trying to share some files among different operating systems, then Hybrid Share is the perfect application for you and your friends.
[141001640590] |You can also use it to transfer files from work, home and vice-versa if any other methods have failed.
[141001640600] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001660010] |<title>ManDVD Review</title>
[141001660020] |In the last couple of years, multimedia support in Linux has evolved quite nicely.
[141001660030] |Nowadays, modern distributions provide software for playing, editing or remastering video and audio files, several cool games with complex and modern graphics have already got released and I'm sure many more will follow.
[141001660040] |At this evolving rate, it shouldn't take very long until Linux will provide at least the same level of multimedia support as Windows or, why not, even excel it.
[141001660050] |The newest addition to my multimedia software collection is a tool for generating video DVDs from video files on the hard drive.
[141001660060] |It also supports various useful features such as DVD menu creator, subtitle management, several video effects and more.
[141001660070] |Let's see.
[141001660080] |Before anything, you'll need to install ManDVD.
[141001660090] |This isn't a hard thing to accomplish as the author has provided a binary package that should run on any distribution.
[141001660100] |Unfortunately, using ManDVD will require a pretty long list of requirements, which are listed at the top of this review.
[141001660110] |To enjoy all the features of this program, you'll need to open your distribution's package manager and start looking for each package, install it and only then run ManDVD. 
[141001660120] |When running ManDVD for the first time, it will greet you with a dialog which asks you to choose a language.
[141001660130] |After selecting the language you know best from that list, you'll notice a second dialog.
[141001660140] |Unlike the first one, this will pop-up every time you run ManDVD and will ask you to choose a destination folder for the DVD project, where the AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS folders will reside, a video standard you want to use (PAL or NTSC) and size.
[141001660150] |The video size drop-down menu only provides four resolutions, 720x576, 704x480, 352x576 and 352x288.
[141001660160] |From the same dialog, you can load an existing project.
[141001660170] |After confirming the second dialog, ManDVD will show its interface in all its grace.
[141001660180] |In fact, its interface is really a large and complex wizard and this is the first step: adding media.
[141001660190] |The upper part of the window consists of the program's name and version in the left and a logo in the right.
[141001660200] |The rest of the window is divided in two sections: in the upper left, there's a slick preview box which looks like a small monitor bolted into the application.
[141001660210] |Underneath the preview will be listed the media files added for processing.
[141001660220] |Each file in this list will have an icon right next to it.
[141001660230] |What the icons mean is listed in the lower left part of the first step.
[141001660240] |If the file's icon is black and white, it means 'Video not reencoded', while the sepia icon points out a reencoded file.
[141001660250] |Now for the right part: it provides a menu divided in categories.
[141001660260] |The first category, 'Add or Modify Media Stream' contains buttons for adding a video, modify the title, remove the selected video and create the slideshow.
[141001660270] |Other categories include 'Editing and Adjustments' for cutting film parts, defining chapters, managing subtitles and video effects and 'Other' for adding an interactive video to the DVD.
[141001660280] |The lowest part of the step is reserved for various information, such as total file size, video format and in path.
[141001660290] |There are also two buttons, 'Save project' and 'NEXT' which guides us to the next step, 'Menu parameters'
[141001660300] |In the next step, you'll customize the appearance of your DVD menu.
[141001660310] |You can create and modify the DVD menu background, buttons, fonts style and color.
[141001660320] |Moreover, you can choose a sountrack for you main menu.
[141001660330] |The image set as background can be mirrored horizontally or vertically, or applied a negative or sepia color effect. 
[141001660340] |Third step leads to menu creation.
[141001660350] |For each video and/or chapter created in the first step, you can add a button in the DVD menu.
[141001660360] |Each button can be resized and repositioned, or cleaned-up if you want to start over.
[141001660370] |Moreover, you can define the order in which the items are selected on your menu by clicking the 'Tab order' button in the lower right.
[141001660380] |Underneath it, there's another button named 'Mask edit' which leads to another screen.
[141001660390] |Here, you will be able to manage the selected or clicked mask by adding or removing lines or text.
[141001660400] |I'm not sure what this feature is for, but I think everything you add will appear on top of the button, in the DVD menu.
[141001660410] |In the final step, your DVD will be generated.
[141001660420] |First, click the Options button at the bottom and choose a video bitrate and the subtitle font, size, location and charset.
[141001660430] |You can also choose whether to deinterlace the video and where to start reading the DVD from.
[141001660440] |Pressing the Options button again will return to the previous screen.
[141001660450] |Now from the right menu, select a format (4:3 or 16:9), the execution priority and you are ready to click the Generate DVD structure button.
[141001660460] |During encoding, you may press the show /hide console bottom to see a detailed output of what is going on under the hood.
[141001660470] |When the process is complete, several buttons will be revealed: Watch the result (using xine), Burn DVD, Burn DVD with K3b and Create an ISO image. 
[141001660480] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001660490] |ManDVD is a multimedia application for creating video DVDs.
[141001660500] |Its interface is very clean and easy to use and allows creating a full-featured DVD in a very short time.
[141001660510] |Besides creating DVDs, ManDVD can also generate slideshows from images and provides basic features for editing the video file before encoding into the DVD structure.
[141001660520] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001660530] |Unfortunately, ManDVD has a few downsides: it has no help system, the interface isn't totally translated in English and the red/green colors in Mask Edit can't be changed (or I didn't find out how)
[141001660540] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001660550] |Well designed application.
[141001660560] |It's stable, very easy to use and has a clean, nice interface.
[141001660570] |Definitely worth trying!
[141001660580] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001670010] |<title>GCstar Review</title>
[141001670020] |Have you ever tuned your whole house up-side-down in search of a DVD you desperately need, and after a while, you faintly recalled that you have lent it to a friend, but can't quite remember to which friend?
[141001670030] |I know I did.
[141001670040] |More than once.
[141001670050] |Fortunately, I've found a software that allowed me to categorize my audio CDs and movie DVDs.
[141001670060] |After a while, I found out I also needed a software to organize books, games and that's how I ended up using about one application per category.
[141001670070] |I wasn't quite satisfied with the way things were so I've started looking for a program able to manage all types of personal collections.
[141001670080] |That's how I've found GCstar.
[141001670090] |GCstar is a free application for managing personal collections such as movies, video games, books, music or even user-defined collections.
[141001670100] |When possible, detailed information on various items such as audio albums or movies are automatically fetched from the Internet.
[141001670110] |Additional info can also be optionally added by the user, such as location or whom he/she has lent the item to.
[141001670120] |One can also search and filter the collection by various criteria.
[141001670130] |GCstar installation seems quite easy as the homepage provides instructions on how to install the application on various distributions.
[141001670140] |Additionally, there's a generic Linux tar.gz package which provides a graphical or text installer.
[141001670150] |Basically, you can install GCstar on any system for which Gtk2-Perl is available, including MS Windows.
[141001670160] |However, there are some optional requirements which won't block the installation process, but will render certain features unavailable.
[141001670170] |To find out which optional requirements are missing from your system, either run the graphical installer from the generic package or install GCstar using your distribution's package manager (which will install only the mandatory requirements, not the optional as well), run the application and follow the menu Help / Dependencies.
[141001670180] |Both will list the optional dependencies and the name of the modules that require them.
[141001670190] |Once installed, you will find the GCstar icon under the Sound and Video section in Gnome main menu, or under Office, in KDE main menu.
[141001670200] |When running the application for the first time, it will ask you to create a collection type.
[141001670210] |You will have to choose from a 'New collection type', which you can customize, or use an existing type: books, movies, music, numismatic or video games.
[141001670220] |Once you've selected the collection you want to use, start adding items to it.
[141001670230] |To do this, simply press the Add button, enter a name and press the Fetch Information button.
[141001670240] |Depending on the collection type, you will be presented with a list of sites from where the application is able to fetch data about your item.
[141001670250] |For instance, if you have chosen a movie collection, while searching, you will be presented with a list of websites such as iMDB or Amazon, while for video games, the websites will be Gamespot and so on.
[141001670260] |When you're done adding items in the collection type, simply save it to a custom location.
[141001670270] |Unfortunately, you will have to create a new database file for each new collection you add.
[141001670280] |Therefore, you better add a bookmark for each collection type, for quick access to it.
[141001670290] |The program's interface is very clean and intuitive.
[141001670300] |The toolbar provides buttons that link to most used functions: add an item to the collection, save the collection, open the preferences dialog, search and so on.
[141001670310] |Under the toolbar, the program's interface is divided into two sections.
[141001670320] |The left section will list items from each collection, while the right section will display various information about the item selected in the left section.
[141001670330] |Here, you'll see different information fields, depending on the collection type chosen.
[141001670340] |Therefore, if you've chosen movies, you'll see here information fields such as original title, date, director, length, country, genre, cast and so on, while books type collections will display fields like publication date, publisher, pages etc.
[141001670350] |Of course, the displayed information can be customized from the Settings menu.
[141001670360] |Also from the Settings menu, one can manage the borrowers.
[141001670370] |Basically, the whole interface is changing based on the collection type you've selected.
[141001670380] |Moreover, if the program is currently displaying items for a movie type collection and you change some options in the preferences dialog, those changes will only apply to movie type collections.
[141001670390] |Other types will use the default preferences, until they are changed as well.
[141001670400] |Creating a new collection type has proved a rather difficult thing to achieve, even if the author has done all he could to make it easier.
[141001670410] |You'll need to add a new field for each piece of information you will like to see in the right section of the interface.
[141001670420] |Moreover, you'll need to set a type for each field, as well as a group and their parameters and values, when these are available.
[141001670430] |There's also the possibility of exporting the collection in CVS, HTML, SQL, tar.gz, Tellico or XML format, as well as importing from other software, such as Ant Movie Catalog, CSV, DVD Profiler, CGfilms, Names list, .tar.gz or Tellico.
[141001670440] |The application can be customized through the Preferences dialog, found under the Settings menu.
[141001670450] |The preferences are divided into five tabs: Main, Display, Paths, Internet and Features.
[141001670460] |Almost every tab will display a few additional advanced functions when the 'Expert Mode' check box at the bottom is checked.
[141001670470] |The Main section allows you to choose the language and the skin, while the Display tab contains options regarding how the items list, layout and toolbar are displayed.
[141001670480] |The Paths section allows you to change the paths of the programs used by GCstar, while the Internet section allows you to select which sites will be used for searching items information, or whether a list of websites is displayed to the user on each search.
[141001670490] |Finally, the Features section provides basic GCstar options such as whether to show splash screen, ask for confirmation before deleting item, automatically save collection and load previous collection on start-up, as well as the history size.
[141001670500] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001670510] |GCstar is a free application for managing personal collections.
[141001670520] |By default, it can manage movies, video games, books, music or numismatic collections but also allows the user to create a custom collection type.
[141001670530] |Detailed information on each item can be fetched from Internet websites but also additional information can be manually added by the user.
[141001670540] |It's quite easy to use and provides a clean interface.
[141001670550] |It's written in Gtk2-Perl so it's able to run on basically any GNU/Linux system, as well as on MS Windows. 
[141001670560] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001670570] |Unfortunately, each collection type is saved under a different file, creating a new collection type is very difficult and the items list can't display both the image and text at the same time.
[141001670580] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001670590] |GCstar can organize different types of items, for instance movies collections, games, books, music, numismatic or even user defined collections.
[141001670600] |Unfortunately, creating a new collection is quite difficult.
[141001670610] |However, it's a pretty good application and you should first give it a try and then decide if you want or don't want to make it a part of your software collection.
[141001670620] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001680010] |<title>Bluefish Review</title>
[141001680020] |As a web designer in Linux, you won't have as many programs to choose from as in Windows.
[141001680030] |Moreover, if you've chosen Linux, it's likely you won't even want to hear about proprietary software so that will leave you with even fewer applications to choose from.
[141001680040] |Of course, don't think that 'a few' means one or two applications; there are a whole bunch of them but I'll mention only the tree most important.
[141001680050] |First of all, it's Quanta Plus, which is shipped with the KDE environment and then there's Screem and Bluefish, both developed using the GTK2 toolkit (this means they run really well on Gnome).
[141001680060] |For now, let's stick to the third.
[141001680070] |Bluefish is a powerful editor for experienced web designers and programmers.
[141001680080] |It's well suited for developing websites but it also works well as a general purpose editor and IDE (Integrated Software Development Environment).
[141001680090] |It provides support for a number of programming languages such as HTML, JSP, Java, JavaScript, SQL, XML, Perl, PHP and Python.
[141001680100] |However, on one hand, Bluefish isn't a WYSIWYG text editor.
[141001680110] |The code generated by this type of editors isn't often clean so a simple editor will provide full control to the programmer.
[141001680120] |On the other hand, the editing process is facilitated by a number of features provided by the application.
[141001680130] |For instance, toolbars, dialogs and user-customized menus provide easy insertion of markup and code, while syntax highlighting, advanced search and replace functionality, scalability and language function references truly define Bluefish as a powerful tool for development.
[141001680140] |Under Fedora, Ubuntu, Gentoo (and other popular distros), Bluefish installation is a snap.
[141001680150] |Simply use your distribution's package manager to search and install the 'bluefish' package.
[141001680160] |However, for those exotic, strange or new distributions, where there are no repositories or package managers, there's only one way to install Bluefish (and other applications as well): by installing from source.
[141001680170] |Keep in mind, however, that if you choose this installation method, you better have all the required libraries installed on your system or you'll end-up with a crashing and burning compilation process.
[141001680180] |Speaking for me, I'm using Fedora and thus, doing a yum install bluefish made the installation a real pleasure.
[141001680190] |Once it was installed, I found its shortcut nicely put under Development / Web Development in KDE main menu.
[141001680200] |Running it for the first time will shortly display a nice splash screen, followed by a dialog entitled "Bluefish Tip", similar to 'Tip of the day' dialogs.
[141001680210] |I'm not such a tips fan as I like to discover new features on my own, so I immediately checked the "Don't show it again" check box and closed the dialog.
[141001680220] |This uncovered the Bluefish interface which is pretty amazing at first sight.
[141001680230] |After looking around the toolbars and menus, I've noticed that all the main options and features were visible and obvious.
[141001680240] |Another interface-related thing I found really impressive was the existence of only two toolbars: the main toolbar with functions found in any application and the HTML toobar, which had tabs: a tabbed toolbar!
[141001680250] |Remember those applications (MS Word) that had 6-7 toolbars that almost reached the bottom, leaving only about an inch for you to work on?
[141001680260] |Those times are so over if all applications will follow this tabbed toolbar trend.
[141001680270] |The HTML toolbar basically changes its buttons based on the chosen tab.
[141001680280] |There are tabs for fonts, tables, frames, forms, list and CSS but there's also a tab that opens the standard bar with basic HTML functions and a quick bar which could provide the most important buttons chosen by the user from other tabs.
[141001680290] |Underneath the toolbars, there's a custom menu which provides basic functions for various programming languages.
[141001680300] |For instance, the HTML menu provides the META refresh tag which pops-up a dialog asking a refresh time in seconds and the destination URL.
[141001680310] |To the left, you'll notice a side panel that consists of a file browser, a function reference browser and a bookmark browser, accessible by clicking the corresponding sidebar notebook tab.
[141001680320] |The location of the sidebar can be customized from the Preferences dialog if, for instance, you want the sidebar to be on the right side.
[141001680330] |The file browser provides quick access to files and directories on the local file system, while the second browser references CSS2, HTML, PHP and Python functions with their syntax.
[141001680340] |Moreover, some of them will provide dialogs to help you insert them.
[141001680350] |The last browser provides access to previously bookmarked position in a file.
[141001680360] |The status bar at the bottom shows messages, the current line and column number, the current mode (insert or overwrite) and the type and character encoding.
[141001680370] |The most important part of the interface is the editor area.
[141001680380] |You can open several editor areas via tabs, located by default on the bottom.
[141001680390] |The editor area will color your code depending on the document type (accessible from the Document menu) and will display line numbers along the document.
[141001680400] |Besides the clean and pretty nice interface, Bluefish provides powerful and easy to use features.
[141001680410] |For instance, it offers wizards for start-up, tables, frames and others.
[141001680420] |Dialogs are also provided for image insertion and various HTML tags, as well as their attributes.
[141001680430] |Thumbnails are automatically created and linked to the original image, while multi-thumbnail generation allows easy creation of photo albums or screen shot web pages.
[141001680440] |Bluefish also allows the user to specify his own tags or sets of code and define his own dialogs in a custom menu.
[141001680450] |Moreover, it provides a powerful support for search and replace from the custom menu, which also allows POSIX and Perl-compatible regular expressions and sub-pattern replacing.
[141001680460] |Spell checking is also available, as well as translations in as many as twenty languages.
[141001680470] |Many, many other small functions and features are available through the numerous menus, suitable for both advanced and beginner users.
[141001680480] |Bluefish Preferences dialog is available from the Edit menu and allows customizing various options such as start-up behavior, editor font, undo history, encoding and more.
[141001680490] |In my opinion, the most important preference is found under the External programs tab which enables defining and customizing external programs.
[141001680500] |Here you can customize the browsers you will want to use for previewing the web code, as well as the utility and filter tools.
[141001680510] |While other applications have certain browsers defined by the author, Bluefish allows you to add a large (probably infinite) number of browsers, along with their binary path.
[141001680520] |This is very useful for web designers as it allows them to define whichever browsers they want, including Internet Explorer to test their compatibility with their products.
[141001680530] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001680540] |Bluefish is a powerful and mature editor for various programming languages but focuses on editing HTML code for dynamic and interactive websites.
[141001680550] |Its simple editor provides the programmer with full control over his code, compared to WYSIWYG editors which don't usually generate clean code.
[141001680560] |However, the editing process is facilitated by a large number of features such as customizable syntax highlighting or advanced searching and replacing functionality, as well as various features for inserting markup and code such as wizards and dialogs for numerous functions.
[141001680570] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001680580] |This application has everything (or most of) you need for editing and creating websites.
[141001680590] |However, it should be nice if there were an 'Upload to FTP site' button that would update the website files.
[141001680600] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001680610] |Bluefish is defined as a complex and powerful editor for experienced web designers and programmers.
[141001680620] |But this doesn't mean that inexperienced users shouldn't at least try it; they could really be impressed with it.
[141001680630] |I know I was and my experience as a web designer is close to nonexistent.
[141001680640] |Check out some screenshots below:
[141001690010] |<title>Revelation Review</title>
[141001690020] |If you're one of those people that use a computer several hours a day, you surely have gathered some sensitive and personal information.
[141001690030] |For instance, everyone has an email address which requires that an username and a password are used when reading and sending new electronic letters.
[141001690040] |Clearly, the more you use and rely on computers, the more sensitive data is gathered and the harder it becomes to remember and not to mix it.
[141001690050] |At this point, there are two options commonly used: people with good memory will rather store the sensitive data in their brain, while others prefer to use a password manager program to store their personal data on a computer, CD, USB stick, watch, phone and so on.
[141001690060] |For Linux, as well as for other operating systems, there are a variety of such applications to choose from, each with its own specific features and drawbacks.
[141001690070] |Revelation is one of the most popular password managers that's also seamlessly integrated into the Gnome desktop, free, secure and easy to use.
[141001690080] |It's likely to find Revelation already included into most distributions, or at least available in the distribution's repository.
[141001690090] |Alternatively, you can install it by downloading the packages and following the instructions available on the official homepage.
[141001690100] |Prior to the installation, you system has to meet several requirements which are also listed on the homepage.
[141001690110] |After completing the installation, you will be able to run Revelation by clicking its icon in the Gnome main menu.
[141001690120] |On its first run, you should create the file that will store your sensitive data and save it in a hidden folder somewhere in your home directory.
[141001690130] |Revelation will immediately ask for a password that will be used to gain access to your other personal details.
[141001690140] |So, basically, you can use Revelation to store an infinite number of accounts, passwords, IP addresses and credit cards information which will be accessible with only one password which you'll have to remember.
[141001690150] |When adding a new entry to the password manager, a dialog will pop-up, requesting the entry details.
[141001690160] |In this dialog, you'll have to type a name and a description and pick a type.
[141001690170] |You'll have to choose from a drop-down menu which contains credit card, crypto key, database, door lock, email, FTP, generic, phone, shell and website.
[141001690180] |Depending on which type you've chosen, the account data fields underneath will change.
[141001690190] |For instance, when adding a new credit card entry, you will be asked for card type, number, expiry date, CVV and PIN, while when adding an email type entry, you will be prompted for the email address, hostname of the mail server and the username and password for the mail account.
[141001690200] |For each entry added to Revelation, you can define a 'GoTo' command that can be defined from the proprieties window.
[141001690210] |For instance, if you have a secured FTP server (with username and password), you can set Nautilus as the GoTo command so it will open a connection to the FTP server using the saved login credentials with only one click.
[141001690220] |Revelation also provides a password generate function capable of creating as much as 256 characters.
[141001690230] |This function can be used either separately, or while adding a new entry.
[141001690240] |You can easily search for certain entries using the built-in search function available in a separate toolbar.
[141001690250] |For Gnome users, there's the possibility of adding a new toolbar applet which allows you to easily browse or search your accounts without having to start Revelation.
[141001690260] |Moreover, gnome-vfs is used for loading and saving files, so you can access your accounts via ssh, webdav, smb, http, ftp and more.
[141001690270] |When you're done using Revelation, the data file can be locked either manually from the File menu or automatically, after a custom amount of time.
[141001690280] |Also from the File menu, you can change the password that guards the data file.
[141001690290] |Revelation also supports exporting and importing data to other applications such as Password Safe, GPass, MyPasswordSafe and more.
[141001690300] |<b>The Good</b>
[141001690310] |Revelation is a password manager that integrates quite well in the Gnome desktop.
[141001690320] |Its interface is clean and intuitive, the sensitive data is kept safe in an AES-encrypted data file, everything is organized in several account types, including credit card, shell, ftp and more.
[141001690330] |It also provides a search tool and the ability to import and export the sensitive data to similar applications.
[141001690340] |<b>The Bad</b>
[141001690350] |While the application is running and has opened the data file, both the file contents and the file password are stored in memory as plain text, which allows the root user or other programs to access this information.
[141001690360] |While this is an unfortunate drawback, it's shared with most password managers as it's very hard to avoid. 
[141001690370] |<b>The Truth</b>
[141001690380] |Revelation is a Gnome-compatible application that stores all your accounts and passwords in a single, secure place, and gives you access to it through a user-friendly graphical interface.
[141001690390] |While Revelation offers several useful and interesting features, it also has a major drawback, present in most password managers.
[141001690400] |If you decide to give it a try, use it only on computers you trust, or better yet, only on your own.
[141001690410] |Check out some screenshots below: