I was hoping for a more detailed survey but this survey’s results should give a general idea about video and Linux usage for users. If you see other surveys like this one, please don’t hesitate to share it with us here on New Linux User. If it would help the software development process, then I guess it’s a good thing and we could participate in our own little way.

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The search for the perfect music player will always follow me. In any case I am currently running Audacious and for most of those who have been used to the old school WinAmp, the general look and feel of Audacious is similar to it.

In any case Audacious has some plugins which you might find useful, depending on the stuff you play. It also has an equalizer and no pre-set options. So you’d have to listen well and make sure that you get the settings of your choice if you’re not used to setting the equalizer manually. The XMMS website has the WinAmp Equalizer settings shared on its site and you can use that too. I’ve learned about that from Simon who shared the tip about using WinAmp presets on Audacious, XMMS and BMP. As for themes, you could download XMMS themes on Gnome-look :D

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Andrei Neculau has made a collection of various protocols’ emoticons and provided them here. You just need to download the tarball, go to the Preferences menu in Pidgin then look for that tarball and select it. After that you should be able to see all those cute emoticons that would make Pidgin look more familiar. At least when it comes to communicating with animated emoticons. ;)

Enjoy!

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In any case, the article is interesting for me because it pointed out that netbook sales might be a good buy for immediate family members because netbooks seem to be the ‘in-thing’ these days.

The article gives tips for netbook buyers so that they’d get their money’s worth. He even gave a link to the custom search he made for checking out Black Friday netbook deals.

There’s going to be Linux netbooks out there. A lot of them. You might consider buying a netbook for your family members and he mentioned that the cheapest netbooks come with Linux and that it “may even be preferable to Windows.” However, you still have to consider your recipient’s needs. It’s a gift, after all, and you’d want the person to enjoy it. If it turns out that the Linux netbook you gave is not enough, add a special helping of your Linux tips and that might do the trick.

Happy shopping!

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Gournal is an application designed for use in a Tablet-PC. If you’re looking for an application that would allow you to treat your Tablet-PC like a regular notebook or if you’re looking for something similar to Microsoft One Note but for Linux, this could be something to look at.

Dependencies are: libgtk2-perl, libgtk2-gladexml-perl, libgnome2-canvas-perl, libcompress-zlib-perl, libgnome2-print-perl and libxml-mini-perl.

The application developer wrote that this application doesn’t recognize handwriting but the pages of your notes are saved as gzipped SVG files.

Features:

• Multiple sections
• Fine/Normal/Medium/Think Pens
• Eraser
• Highliter
• Typed Text
• Time-stamp
• Zoom
• Infinite undo/redo
• Delete entire strokes
• Networkable pages
• Insert Images
• Load a file as the background

Not quite as versatile as OneNote but it makes it more like a notebook for people who use Tablet-PCs. This makes me a little envious right now. And if ever they do put a handwriting recognition feature, I’d probably end up saving up for a Tablet-PC then install this. ;) Though I prefer a wiki-like version of this app very much, to be honest.

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Clker.com
openclipart.com
wpclipart.com
documentation.openoffice.org/Samples_Templates/User/gallery/

If you want other clipart images, well, you would have to agree with the terms of service of the source of the images you might like to consider. There are actually a great number of sites which share their clipart for free but normally they would indicate that you have to link back to them or you cannot use the images for commercial use. That might be something you wouldn’t like to deal with.

In any case, enjoy these sources for now. :) Hopefully I’d also find out some more sources which are royalty-free as well.

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Exaile has come to my rescue!

Tabbed playlists in Exaile, screenshot by Clair Ching (2008)

Exaile has smart playlists, tabbed music browsing, a bunch of plugins and an equalizer! Yes. An equalizer. I was told that Banshee also has these features but because I miss using Exaile, I decided to install it for the sake of reminiscing, as well reacquainting myself with this nifty application and the equalizer. Sometimes you catch yourself wanting to hear more of the bass or less of it, in the case of some songs. This is just awesome for me.

Exaile has an equalizer, screenshot by Clair Ching (2008)

The smart playlists are great when you just feel like listening to a particular set of songs based on genre and artists or whatever you feel like.

Another great thing about Exaile is that you could have a list of your files on the panel at the side of your playlist. In case you wanted to look for certain music files, you don’t need to open up your file manager. It’s just a few clicks away :D

Exaile lets you view lists of files on the panel, screenshot by Clair Ching (2008)

I currently miss the lyrics plugin I had on Rhythmbox but I think that the newer version of Exaile has one too. So it might not be too far away from me, in this case. :)

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Some tips I think new users would benefit a lot from:

12. Use Workspaces more effectively
Use ‘Ctrl alt’ and either cursor left or right to switch between adjacent workspaces, and if you hold down the shift key, the active window will move to the new desktop too. For better control, right click on any windows top border to open a context menu, and from here you can choose to move the window to another workspace.

14. Remember the running session
Another neat feature of the setting manager is that you can configure your desktop to remember the applications that were running when you shutdown your machine. This is a great way of quickly launching into your working environment. Just switch to the Session Options page and enable the ‘Automatically Remember’ option.

17. Use pervasive searches
Ubuntu comes with an excellent utilities for searching through the contents of files and emails, but it’s not enabled by default. Open the Search and Indexing window from the Preferences menu, and enable both indexing and watching. After the index has been created, you can search through your files using the ‘Tracker Search Tool’ in the ‘Applications>Accessories’ menu.

23. Launch OpenOffice.org faster
The default OpenOffice.org configuration errs on the side of caution. There are 100 levels of undo, for example, and reducing this number will reduce the amount of memory it uses. This setting can be found from the Options window by switching to the Memory page. Try reducing the undo steps to 30.

28. Quickly restart the desktop
Occasionally, you may find that your desktop hangs and you can no longer use the keyboard or mouse. Fortunately, the desktop process is entirely independent of the rest of the operating system, and you can reset the desktop by holding down the Ctrl Alt and backspace keys. But you will still lose any unsaved data, so be careful.

29. Jump to a console
Another option if your desktop has crashed is jumping to a command-line console. Pressing Ctrl and alt, followed by F1-F6 will switch the display to one of six different consoles. From here, you can login and try to kill the process causing trouble, before switching back to your desktop by pressing Ctrl Alt and F7.

These are actually some of the things I learned when I was just starting on using Ubuntu. Actually a lot of these tips are also useful for those using other distros. :) The article segregates the topic for us.

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For one, I love the shutdown option which is now part of the user menu on the panel. And how the the desktop looks clean, overall! This is thanks to the Ubuntu team and the Gnome team :) I love what they did!

I have yet to test the use of a mobile 3G provider with my laptop. I am mainly just using wifi from the office or at home. Though I’ve been having problem when I hibernate the laptop. When I wake up the laptop from hibernate, it can’t seem to detect any wireless networks even though there is one available. This happened twice this past week. I’d better observe this again next week.

Another quirk I encountered was that F-spot was the application opening the directories on my laptop when I try to access it from the main menu. Hrm. Must be an F-spot setting?

I also appreciate the tabbed view on Nautilus when moving files from various directories. My desktop won’t look too cluttered this way. One of my co-workers seems to want to update now after seeing that it was possible already. He is still on Hardy and he installed a different file manager because of that.

How’s it been using Intrepid Ibex for you?

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Rest assured, I would slowly but surely email you about this. I hope you understand my troubles in the first contest I am holding on this blog. :)

Thanks and hope you would keep on reading this blog!

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