OpenOffice.org Grows Up

Nine years after Sun Microsystems bought StarOffice, the resulting OpenOffice.org project is ready to roll out its 3.0 release. Enhanced format compatibility and features put it on par with Microsoft Office.

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45+ Sources and Sets of Photoshop Custom Shapes

For web designers, working with custom shapes in Photoshop can be a big time-saver. While free brushes get a lot of attention, custom shapes probably get less. Here is a rundown of some of the best resources to download free custom shapes for your own work in Photoshop.

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Clean up your filesystems with fslint

Maintaining filesystems can be a real administration burden. Over time you might start getting multiple copies of the same file, soft links that point to files that no longer exist, temporary files that have been hanging around longer than they should, and binaries that have been installed and not had their debugging information stripped out

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NPX-9000 UMPC is inexpensive but underpowered

The wave of cheap netbooks, mini laptops, or ultra-mobile PCs has crested with the cheapest yet, the NPX-9000 from Carapelli. Though it was announced in July with great fanfare at a price of £65 (or $110), it has yet to appear on the vendor's Web site. But we got our hands on one of the first units to escape from the factory and put it through its paces. We found that you get what you pay for -- if that.

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Will Chrome Find a Home With SaaS?

It didn't take long for NetSuite to cozy up to Google. Shortly after the Web conglomerate rolled out its open source browser Chrome last month, the SaaS suite provider announced its support. NetSuite was also the first vendor to announce support for the iPhone and for Firefox 3.0, Mini Peres, NetSuite's vice president of product marketing, told LinuxInsider. Support for Chrome, though, may prove to be an especially intriguing alternative for its customer base -- primarily because it is so Ajax-friendly.

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Setting Up Your New Computer - Beginner User

Linux Loop: "Today, I have a tutorial for anyone new to Ubuntu who has just gotten a machine with Ubuntu, either from Dell or from any other manufacturer. These are the things I would consider doing as a new user getting his or her first PC with Ubuntu"

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Distribution Release: ALT Linux 4.1 "Desktop"

Alexey Rusakov has announced the release of ALT Linux 4.1 "Desktop" edition, a general-purpose GNU/Linux distribution intended for use on desktops, laptops and netbooks: "We're happy to announce our new release, ALT Linux 4.1 'Desktop'. Changes since version 4.0: based on the new stable 4.1 repository branch; 2.6.25....

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Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE beta-fest

As we approach a new round of distro releases, Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSUSE have popped out development snapshots. Ubuntu 8.10 Beta "delivers the features you need for an increasingly mobile digital life" (aka kickin' wireless support), while Fedora 10 Beta and OpenSUSE 11.1 Beta 2 also have plenty of bleeding-edge goodies to play around with.

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Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE beta-fest

As we approach a new round of distro releases, Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSUSE have popped out development snapshots. Ubuntu 8.10 Beta "delivers the features you need for an increasingly mobile digital life" (aka kickin' wireless support), while Fedora 10 Beta and OpenSUSE 11.1 Beta 2 also have plenty of bleeding-edge goodies to play around with.

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Italian carrier ships Linux MID

BenQ and Italian mobile carrier TIM announced the availability of a MID with both WiFi and HSDPA mobile networking. Running Red Flag's Midinux Linux distro, the BenQ S6 Mobile Internet Device (MID) is equipped with an 800MHz Intel Atom processor and 4.8-inch WVGA touchscreen.

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IT Business Edge: What Will Economy Do to Open Source?

Lora Bentley considers the effect of the economy on open-source software.

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Open-source resource for government launches online

The Free and Open Source Software Foundation for Africa has launched the online Government Open Source Software Resource Center.

Linux World News

Mono Moonlight – Shedding Light Without Generating Heat

The need for Mono's Moonlight project, which allows Microsoft's Silverlight to run on Linux, might be questioned by many Linux purists, but the fact remains that there will be websites developed using Silverlight. Paul Ferrill tries to cut through the controversy and examines the issues surrounding Moonlight.

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Linux Turns 17 Today

Meshach writes "Over at the Linux Journal, Doc Searles is noting that today marks 17 years since Linus posted to Usenet, starting Linux (post). As a Linux user at work and at home I say, thanks Linus!" The anniversary is also featured on the top page of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Luc Verhaegen: Updated hackergotchi.

Just spent 12 days in malta, on a holiday that included a lot of eating, drinking (cocktails and Cisk lager), talking tons of nonsense (as per usual) with equally interesting people, a lot of swimming, some culture (mostly churches :(), and even some hiking.

Being in a mediterranean climate in early autumn has some effect on a persons appearance...

Ordinarily, since i ride a bicycle or fly gliders on the weekend, my skin colour is two-toned, as i don't tend to expose much of my geeky white body to sunlight directly. But now, after a lot of swimming and wearing shorts and some sunbathing, i am somewhat more evenly coloured.

I also lost my long hair. For about half my life, i wore my hair very long. I had stopped wearing it in a ponytail about 5 years ago and have been thinking about cutting it off for a few months now. But now the salt water and the direct sunlight made my hair very unruly and uncontrollable. So the decision was made, and it got the axe there and then. As usual, i either do all or nothing, so i went from shoulder-length (for those bits that still wanted to go that far) to about 7mm all over.

So far, I've received an "Oh Gott", a few "who are you and what have you done to libv"s, a few nervous giggles and a lot of surprised looks, but overall, after the shock has worn off, impressions seem to be very positive. Especially today is a bit interesting, now that i'm in the office again :)

In any case, i needed to spend half an hour with the southpark generator, as my previous hackergotchi was kind of out of touch with reality:



And no, that is not a peace sign i am making, it's a secret hand-symbol that only a select few will understand :)

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Performance Comparison between NIO Frameworks

Most NIO frameworks can saturate 1 gigabit ethernet at some point. However, some frameworks can saturate the bandwidth with the smaller number of connections while others can not. The performance numbers of the 5 well-known open source NIO frameworks are presented here to help you figure out the excellence of Netty in performance.

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First look: Latest Fedora and Ubuntu Betas Really Shine

The developers behind the increasingly popular Ubuntu and Fedora Linux distributions announced the availability of new beta releases last week.

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Areca and plan/b offer Java-based backup for Linux

Everyone needs to back up their computers, but when you have machines running on different platforms and different operating systems, it can be annoying to have to learn several interfaces. Areca and plan/b are two Java-based backup solutions that can run on any platform, including Linux, Windows, and Unix. Although maintenance has been discontinued for plan/b, both apps are worth a look.

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Cloud Computing: Perilous Pitfall or Panacea?

There's never a dull moment for those of us lucky enough to be part of the technology industry, and we here at LinuxInsider are just as prone as the next tech enthusiasts to get caught up in the excitement of new innovations and ideas. Take cloud computing. It's a concept that has been grabbing an increasing portion of the digital ink on our pages and elsewhere, thanks not only to its promise but also to the growing numbers of related announcements coming from tech companies far and wide.

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BIOS Settings Demystified

Hardware 2.0: "I find that when it comes to people building their own PCs (or tweaking their existing rig) then the mysteries that lay within the BIOS settings are scarier to most people than anything hardware related. Let's do something about that!"

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Mono 2 Released

The Mono project has released Mono 2.0. As most of you will know, Mono is an open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework for Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, and other operating systems. The 2.0 release comes packed with new features, the main ones being the compiler upgrade to C# 3.0 with support for LINQ, as well as the inclusion of ADO.NET 2.0, ASP.NET 2.0 and System.Windows.Forms 2.0. The release notes detail all the changes and new features.

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The Current State of the Economy and Linux

Recently, the Linux Foundation has apparently been pointing out that the struggling US economy may cause businesses that are looking to cut cost to switch to Linux. I completely agree, but there is potentially even more to it than just the struggling economy.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 273

This week in DistroWatch Weekly: Overviews: Linux Mint and CentOS News: Barry Kauler retires from Puppy Linux, more OpenSolaris features Released last week: Ultima Linux 8.4, NetSecL 2.3 Upcoming releases: Mandriva Linux 2009, NetBSD 4.0.1 Site news: DistroWatch on Voice of America Donations: Miro receives US$300 New additions:....

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Netbook Return Rates Much Higher For Linux Than Windows

ivoras writes "An interview with MSI's director of US Sales, Andy Tung, contains this interesting snippet: "We have done a lot of studies on the return rates and haven't really talked about it much until now. Our internal research has shown that the return of netbooks is higher than regular notebooks, but the main cause of that is Linux. People would love to pay $299 or $399 but they don't know what they get until they open the box. They start playing around with Linux and start realizing that it's not what they are used to. They don't want to spend time to learn it so they bring it back to the store. The return rate is at least four times higher for Linux netbooks than Windows XP netbooks.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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KDE 4.1.2 Released

The KDE Community has announced the immediate availability of "Codename",
(a.k.a KDE 4.1.2), another bugfix and maintenance update for KDE4.
"Codename is a monthly update to KDE 4.1. It ships with a basic
desktop and many other packages; like administration programs, network
tools, educational applications, utilities, multimedia software, games,
artwork, web development tools and more. KDE's award-winning tools and
applications are available in more than 50 languages."

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A Disturbing Trend

"Lawyers in the Windows Vista Capable lawsuit against Microsoft want a federal judge to force the company to use Windows Update to notify potential class members of the suit, according to court documents." This is the opening paragraph in an article in ComputerWorld. A number of people, including myself think this is a bad idea.

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Tux Geek: Fix Your Music Library: Song Names, Album Art, Automatically

This article was written by Stefan Neagu from the Tux Geek Blog, a How-To Geek Blog focused on network security, linux and other issues regarding the tech world.

With every new version of media players, we get new beautiful album art views, recommendations and all kinds of sorting by genre, year, composer. These are all based on correct information stored in the songs 'tags'.

If you're like me and you download music from all over the place, rip CD's, swap songs with buddies, your library probably won't look this one, organized and sexy.

Information about your music is stored with your songs in ID3 tags. Manually editing these for an album works, but try editing a 12000 song library. This is where MusicBrainz and FixTunes come to the rescue.

You're in luck, because I'm going to show you how to fix those pesky details.

For all fairness and justice, I choose both a free open source solution and a closed source, commercial one. I personally use both of them and find them complementary to each other.

MusicBrainz (Windows, Linux, Mac)

MusicBrainz is an project that aims to create an open content music database similar to CDDB, but more comprehensive. The database is user-maintained, meaning you can help out if something isn’t correct, and it’s licensed under Public Domain/Creative Commons.

MusicBrainz captures information about artists, their recorded works, and the relationships between them. Recorded works entries capture at a minimum the album title, track titles, and the length of each track. These entries are maintained according to a common style guide. Recorded works can additionally store information about the release date and country, the CD disc ID, an acoustic fingerprint for each track and have an optional free-form text field or annotation attached to them. As of Dec 31, 2007, MusicBrainz contained information about 350,718 artists, 534,986 releases, and 6.3 million tracks.

In order to use it you need to download a small application that interfaces between your library and the MusicBrainz database. It’s available from musicbrainz.org. Screenshots are for the Windows version, but the other versions are equally easy to use.

It’s a simple process:

• Select the song or album from the right panel and click Lookup. Possible albums and the correct metadata will appear on the right.
  
• Sometimes using the lookup button might not turn up any results. The Scan button, creates a fingerprint of the song, without using the previous metadata, and manages to find the information.
  
• Just right click and click Save to write the correct information to your song/album.
  
• The Cluster button will organize your songs in albums for easy access.

The only caveat of MusicBrainz is that it doesn’t pull down album art; FixTunes does that automatically. Free solutions are:

• Automatic: Album Art Downloader (Windows) EasyTag (Linux/MAC)
  
• Manual: albumart.org; art4itunes.com or searching Amazon.com for the album name, but unfortunately it’s manual.

[Edit: "MusicBrainz *DOES* pull in album art automatically, you just need to enable the plugin in the newer versions of Picard. The only problem is that not all the albums have art, although most do."]

FixTunes (Windows, Mac)

FixTunes is a shareware and after the free trial(50 corrected songs) costs 24,95$. However, it has a complete approach, covering everything including album art. In my case, the results we’re pretty good, but users are complaining about crashes, poor support staff and some tags stored in Chinese.

The main design fault in FixTunes is the lack of a fingerprinting technology, songs named ‘Track 1’ cannot be automatically detected and fixed.

There are two versions of this app – one created especially for iTunes, with a minimalistic approach, and one that works with any library.

Using the app is trivial, the wizard walks through finding the music library and settings, like integration with iTunes. Fixing songs is a three step process: submit your song names to the server, look to see if the corrections are appropriate, and, based on similarity percentage click on Fix.

You can get FixTunes from here.

A quick note to Windows users – Windows Media Player has similar functionality integrated. However, it doesn’t apply the new information to the songs, it just modifies the entries in the music database to reflect the new information - until you click "Apply Media Information Changes" in the library drop down menu.

Conclusion

If you want a quick ‘click and fix’ experience with pretty good results with no effort on your part – FixTunes is your choice. If you’re willing to put a little time you can save those 25$ and buy yourself some nice indie rock.

MusicBrainz is a great initiative, and I strongly recommend you create an account and help out submit some of those obscure artists you’re listening to.

What about you? What do you use to edit metadata on your songs? Tell us in the comments.

Stefan Neagu is the author of the Tux Geek Blog where he discusses network security, linux and other issues regarding the tech world. He's a student, an amateur C# programmer and photoshopper.

Copyright © HowToGeek.com. All Rights Reserved.

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Tux Geek: Fix Your Music Library: Song Names, Album Art, Automatically - The How-To Geek

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Updates On Older Posts

Made some updates on older posts. So if you were following those posts you might find these updates helpful.

6 Places to Buy Pre-installed Linux Computers - Updated with 13 more entries and 4 different countries. Now you really don’t have any excuse of not having the option to buy pre-installed Linux computers. Spread it out to as many as people as you can.

30 Cool Acer Aspire One Hacks - Small update with four more links; if you are into netbooks, you might find these links useful.

If you have any more updates, tips or topics you want us to write about; feel free to tell us.

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• One Year For LinuxHaxor!!


• This is How I Felt When I Didn’t Blog Anything for More than Five Days


• Using OCR (Optical Charactor Recognition) to Read Very Simple Captcha Text


• Nmap Guide


• 5 Anti-Linux Sites You Must Follow!

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