Linux Software

How many times did you type a command and forgot to type sudo first ? What do you want to say when that happens ? No, not that…you might want to say : sudo !!

Sudo will understand you desperation and guess that you forgot him when you typed the last command. No, I’m not kidding. If you type "sudo !!", sudo will be invoked with the last executed command. This is exactly for those situations and it’s brilliant. I couldn’t find a better way to represent the feeling and at the same time solve the problem. It’s easy to forget sudo, but it’s hard to forget "sudo !!", when you forget the first one :)

Just a small tip for today, have sudo fun (that’s when you’re allowed to do what you always wanted) :)

After reviewing Amarok, a great music player, I’m going to talk today about Rhythmbox. Rhythmbox is the default music player for Ubuntu, so it deserves a little review. I recently installed Ubuntu on a new Laptop and this time, instead of installing Amarok, I gave a little try to Rhythmbox (version 0.11.5). Although I’m no fanatic about Gnome, I do prefer Gnome over KDE (both are good, it’s just a matter of choice). Normally I use a mix of Gnome and KDE applications, but this time I decided to use just Gnome applications and see how it goes.

First Impressions

Rhythmbox is not very different from Amarok. It can play your music collection (and organize it by playlists), tune in internet radio stations, integrate with last.fm, receive podcasts and even browse the online stores Magnatune and Jamendo.
The differences are mostly on the interface. All of the features are easily reachable from the sidebar menu, which essentially works like Amarok tabs. By selecting one of the menu options, both the toolbar and the "body" changes context. In the toolbar you have the basic actions, like play, pause, etc and some specific ones depending on context (like "love song", "ban song" when using last.fm).

Browsing your music collection

Rhythmbox uses a classic system of select boxes, like many other players. In the first box, you select the artist and in the second you select the album. The third box (shown on the bottom of the other two) displays the songs of that selection. This is a simple and efficient way to browse a collection (you can configure this and select "genre" for one the box for example). Above those select boxes you have a search box that works surprisingly well, by letting you search for artists, albums and titles (or all). Results are displayed as you type, which makes this is, by far, the fastest way to find a song, if you know its name.
The list of songs has all the usual information: title name, genre, duration, rating, etc.

Playlists and Play Queue

If you want to play one of the tracks in the track list of you music collection, just double-click on it. If you want to choose which songs to play, you have a few choices: you can make a playlist or you can add songs individually to the play queue. The concept of a play queue is simple, but using it, maybe a little confusing. First, let me explain how you use the play queue. Right-click on a song and select "add to play queue". Simple.
However, what happens when you don’t do that and double-click on a track of your music collection ? The song is played and when it finishes, the next one in that list starts, despite not being in the play queue. And when you do have songs in the play queue and you double-click on a song of the collection, that song is played, but afterwards the play queue is resumed instead of playing the next song in the collection list. This is a little confusing at first.

Playlists are extremely simple to create in Rhythmbox. Just select a song, right-click and select "add to playlist". From there, you are shown a list of available playlists and the option to create a new one. Creating is simple, using them has the same problem as with individual songs. I would expect that a double-click on the playlist would start playing the songs in that playlist. It doesn’t, so I tried double-clicking a song in that playlist which worked. However, to my surprise when that song finished, it didn’t play the next one in the playlist. Instead, it continued to next song in the Play Queue, that I had filled earlier. Then I found that right-clicking on the playlist name gives you the option "queue all tracks". That worked, but I first had to clean the "Play Queue" because there were still some remaining songs that I hadn’t listen. It’s not difficult, it’s just a matter of getting used to it.

Internet radio

Rhythmbox doesn’t come with many radio stations configured and you don’t have access to shoutcast AFAIK. But you can add any radio station you like and categorize it. I like the fact you can also rate the stations like you do with songs in your music collection.
Last.fm works as expected and like the other radio stations you can also rate your custom last.fm radios.
Podcasts also work as expected and the interface is similar to the rest of the application. You are also given a search box, which is very useful to find the feed or episode you want. And finally, you can also rate your feeds and episodes as well, which is cool.

Cover art and lyrics

There are other small details I didn’t mentioned, like the ability to fetch covers from Amazon and lyrics. The lyrics are displayed in the properties window, which is cumbersome and too small. It should be given a different space. A space where one could follow the lyrics when the song changes, for example. Instead I have to open again the properties window, this time for the next song.
I also couldn’t find a box to enter details about a particular album. Rhythmbox comes with a plugin that fetches cover art from the internet, but doesn’t give any more options than that. I couldn’t find a way to change that cover, for example.

Conclusion

Overall, Rhythmbox is a nice player that does its job. I’m using it at work, because it’s simple and works well. Because I’m working, 99% of the time it’s minimized, so I don’t watch lyrics or cover arts or artist’s information (for this, Amarok is much better). One thing I like better than Amarok is the support for internet radio stations. Amarok also supports it, but I find Rhythmbox’s interface easier and richer.

I’m usually quite happy with Linux software, so I don’t use Wine all that much. Normally, I only use Wine to test some web pages in IE. But now and then I have the need to edit some word file that Open Office can’t handle. For that reason I recently installed Microsoft Office on my Ubuntu at work with the help of PlayOnLinux. PlayOnLinux is a program to simplify the installation of several windows applications under wine. The result is very good and I now have microsoft office running flawlessly on Linux.
PlayOnLinux is a very interesting project. It’s essentially a framework for creating scripts that install windows applications. There’s already a good amount of scripts available, most of them for games (that was the original motivation for the project). However, don’t think you have to manually run those scripts. There’s a simple interface that lets you choose which application to install and follow a brief wizard.
If you plan on using any windows application under wine, consider PlayOnLinux that really simplifies all installation issues. Good work.

Firefox is a well known success case. I’ve been using it for years and version 3 (which is almost ready) has great improvements. I’m using beta versions of Firefox 3 for some time and I’m quite happy with its new features. However, they’re beta versions and probably because of that I experienced more browser crashes in a month than in all my life. I’m sure Firefox 3 final will solve these stability problems.
As for me, I didn’t want to go back to version 2, so decided to try something different. Opera has been around for years and it’s a stable browser, known for innovations in the browsing experience. That’s right, most of the new features in recent Firefox versions have all already been implemented in Opera.
So, after seeing the cool new features of Firefox, I was curious at what Opera was offering these days.

Tabbed browsing

This is not new, but it’s worth mentioning that has been around in Opera from the beginning (as far as I know). You can also drag around any tab freely. At the left side of the tabs, there’s a button to create a new tab and at the right side, there’s a button to restore recently closed tabs (or blocked popups). Although there’s other ways to do these operations (like CTRL+T for new tabs) I see myself using them more and more.

Browsing experience

Much has been said that Opera doesn’t render some pages well. My only issues were with some blocked images in some sites. Other than that, everything works nice. Compared to Firefox I’d say it works nicer, performance wise. That was the first thing I noticed: for me it renders pages much faster than Firefox, specially pages with lots of pictures and animations. If I scroll down a page full of pictures and animations on Firefox I see some sluggishness. In Opera I don’t. Maybe it’s because Opera doesn’t use as many resources, and my hardware is not very recent.

Address bar and bookmarks

One of the cool things in Firefox 3 is the innovation in the address bar. Now, it serves not only for typing full URLs, but also to search for bookmarked (or recently visited) pages, based on keywords. Although Opera also has some auto-completion it’s not that good and you can’t add tags as you do on Firefox (and I love the little star on Firefox address bar to add bookmarks).

Search bar

This has been around in both for a long time, and it’s a huge time saver. There are differences between Firefox and opera, though. With Firefox you can add new search engines very easily by selecting the appropriate option when navigating in a supported site. With Opera you need to right-click on the site’s search box and select the option "create search". As for removing search engines, in Opera you have to go the preferences, while in Firefox you just right click on its name and select delete. Also, in Firefox a favicon is showed for every search engine. In Opera, some favicons appear, others don’t. The good thing about Opera is that you can create a search from virtually any site and not only a list of supported ones. I think here, Firefox clearly wins on usability and Opera in flexibility.

Gestures

Firefox doesn’t have gestures out-of-the-box, but you can easily add an extension for ti. Opera does have gestures out-of-the-box. Overall they work the same.

Find in page

I just love this feature in Firefox. Instead of having a popup window, the find box integrated in the status bar it’s a great idea that has been around since version 2. So, it was with surprise that I saw a popup window in Opera when I pressed CTRL+F (I wasn’t used to it anymore). Afterwards I found there’s another toolbar I can make visible that has the same functionality as Firefox. I think it would be better to just get rid of the popup box once and for all.

Speed dial

This is something that just exists in Opera. It’s a simple idea, but very handy. When you create a new blank tab, you get a grid with nine cells. If you drag a tab to one of the cells, you create a bookmark for that page. The cool thing is that it’s stored a screenshot of the page and so it becomes very easy to spot. It’s a nice way to launch pages we regularly visit.

Sessions

Opera implements sessions long before Firefox started thinking of it. Not only you can recover the pages you were seeing in case of a sudden crash, but you can also save special sessions and open them whenever you like.

Popups and form handling

Firefox has made a smart move, it stopped showing popup windows in several situations (when a window is blocked, when it asks to save the password, etc). Opera still shows some annoying popups.  However, Opera has a nice feature that can save you time: it can save not only the login/password but also some personal information so that it’s automatically filled on forms.

Downloads

I never liked the download box in Firefox. Not even in this version 3. Opera handles download information as another tab with much more information and support for resuming downloads.

Widgets and extensions

You can’t talk about Firefox without talking about extensions. There’s so much of them that someday you may call Firefox a complete operating system  :)  I like the simple way you can install extensions in Firefox. Firefox 3 also improved this feature by integrating a small browser to find the extension you want. Opera has something called widgets. At first I would say it’s the same thing, but looking at available widgets I can see some differences. Opera’s widgets normally work as floating windows. For example, you can add a widget that shows local weather. This widget is a small window that you can drag around inside and outside of the main Opera window. This architecture is more flexible and allows for every kind of widgets. However, the down side is that there aren’t as many widgets as there are extensions. And most of them are not as useful.

Conclusion

Opera is a stable and faster browser and has pretty much most of the features Firefox has, although in some cases with worse usability. You may have to struggle a little more with Opera, at least in the beginning, but it compensates with some added flexibility. If you’re a developer, maybe you can find widgets architecture more interesting than firefox’s extensions. As for me, I’m still using Opera, despite feeling that I lost some usability. After the final version of Firefox comes out I’ll decide if I go back to Firefox or if I stay in Opera.
 

After this brief hiatus, originated by a small trip, I’m back to review a software I use on a daily basis: Zim. It’s a personal organizer based on a wiki. However, It’s not a regular wiki web based.  Zim is a desktop application with no dependencies to servers or databases and in its core there’s a wiki engine.

Wikis introduced a new way of organizing information, essentially focused on creating pages fast, connected by links (wiki names). The most well-known example of a wiki is wikipedia. These wikis, however, are web applications. Normally, you write your text in a box, full of weird syntax codes to format your text. Then, you press submit to see the results. That’s the normal process for a web-based wiki.
Zim, being a desktop application makes this experience a lot richer. You don’t have to remember special syntaxes to make titles, italics, lists, etc. To make a text italic, just press CTRL + I, as you would with any text processor. You still have some wiki syntax, like the wiki names for links and my favorite one: lists. To make a list, write * (asterisk) and a space at the beggining of a line. It will turn immeadiately into a bullet item. And after you press Enter another bullet item is added in the new line. This is very very handy. This also shows other advantage of being a desktop application: there’s no submission phase. All formatting happens immediately and not after pressing a submit button.
Another interesting feature of Zim is the introduction of the "context" concept. This basically allows you to define categories in a tree structure for organizing your pages (and shows that tree in the sidebar). This normally doesn’t happen in a wiki. Wikis usually rely only on links, leaving the burden of organizing information to the creators of the pages. The problem with this is that most of the times we are dealing with organized information. We try to put information with a natural logical structure into a framework that doesn’t support structure. This forces you to a tight discipline when creating pages, or else you will end up with a chaotic mess. Ideally, searching should bring order from the chaos, as google does with web pages. But here you’re not dealing with random stuff. Google’s indexing algorithms work better when you’re exploring, trying to find something based on a few keywords. In my case, the information is already organized in a natural way and it becomes easier to find something just by looking at a tree structure. Also, wiki’s search algorithms are hardly as good as Google :)
Overall I think Zim is a great personal organizer (I usually use it to store personal projects documentation, etc). The only thing I miss is tables support. That would be a great addition to its formatting capabilities.