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It's been a while since I had a look at Songbird, and that was when 1.0 came out. The new release was put out a little earlier this month and comes with a brand new equalizer, a new mode to auto-organise media files included in the collection and Last.fm radio integration. However, the most awaited feature is probably the 10-band equalizer and it is available using the Controls -> Equalizer menu option (or Ctrl+E). Here's how it looks:

K9Copy is a KDE application which allows to transcode and backup your DVDs. K9Copy is one of the big players when it comes to DVD transcoding, together with dvd::rip and AcidRip, allowing to encode DVD ISO images and mounted DVDs too.

Here's a review of top 10 applications for KDE4.

Herrie is a small music player for console, based upon the ncurses interface. It features a simple interface with two panels, a playlist and a file browser. Herrie can play Ogg Vorbis and MP3 and also has AudioScrobbler (Last.fm) support.

In this article I'll include three ways to screencast your Linux desktop with the help of recordMyDesktop, XVidCap and Istanbul. These three applications are included in every major distribution.

Sometimes Firefox can become a real memory hog, especially if you keep it running for hours and have many tabs opened. In order to make Firefox a little more responsive and save some RAM memory, here are three tweaks I bumped into over time. Notice that most of these tips only free up some memory at the expense of (usually) loading speed for web pages. You won't make Firefox 10 times faster, but you will surely make it use less RAM.

Free NX is a client/server application which allows you to login remotely from another PC into your Linux system. The client is available for both Linux and Windows, so you will be able to login from a Windows machine too.

APE is an open-source, free lossless audio format, just like FLAC or WAV. APE is also known as Monkey's Audio. To convert it to either Ogg Vorbis or MP3, you will first need to install several packages:

Nano is a popular and user-friendly text editor for console which is mostly used for editing quickly configuration files, sources or various other text files. It does not compete with advanced development environments like Vim or Emacs, but it's fast and easy on resources. Here are five (popular, I hope) tips for customising Nano and changing its default behaviour.

The first pre-release of Kaffeine 1.0 was released yesterday so I decided to give it a spin and see how it behaves. Since this is a pre-release, it is not intended for general use and currently lacks many features and functionality from Kaffeine 0.7. This is first KDE4 port of Kaffeine for KDE3, which was one of the most powerful players for KDE, including support for DVD menus, subtitles, video effects, and supporting a huge number of video and audio formats via the Xine engine.

In this article I will debate on several major advantages and disadvantages for using the command-line in Linux. When I think it's 'better' to use CLI, when not, and how can this can impact the work speed.

Over time K3b got its reputation as one of the most powerful burning applications not only for KDE, but for Linux in general. Development at the KDE4 release evolved rapidly in the last couple of months and the first usable alpha of the KDE4 port was put up for testing a few days ago, on April 22. Earlier today I made a brief review of this release, which you can read here (nothing is new, K3b 1.65.0 comes with the same features of 1.0.5, the only major difference is that it was ported to use the KDE4 libraries).

I was pleased to hear a while ago that K3b got two new developers assigned by the Mandriva project and that work at the KDE4 port is going well now. Although K3b was inactive for a pretty long time (the last stable release was 1.0.5 for KDE3 on May 27, 2008), it looks like development goes at a fast pace and the first alpha of the KDE4 port was put up a little earlier this month.

CMus is a very powerful audio player for the console with a ncurses-based interface, support for themes and highly configurable. Although (at least in Debian) CMus does not come with Last.fm song submission support by default, there is a script available here as a patch, which you can apply to the source, compile CMus again and enable Last.fm support.

These players are among the top audio players for console available on Linux. You can run them in a shell instance without the need of an X Server, and although several use only a command-line interface (like ogg123 of mpg123), several come with a nice, ncurses-based interface which makes music management easier and pleasant.

Ubuntu 9.04, codenamed Jaunty Jackalope, was released on April 23rd, also celebrating the 10th Ubuntu release. Since its first version back in October 2004, Ubuntu went through many improvements and quickly became one of the most popular distributions out there, with a huge and continuously thriving community and a fast development method. Free CDs through the ShipIt service can be also ordered, which is another way from which users can benefit of Ubuntu and spread it.

Based on ncurses, MOC (music on console) is a popular, text-based audio player which can play various audio formats, including Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, MP4, WMA and WAV. The release I'm going to talk about in this article is 2.5.0-alpha3, as it comes with Debian Lenny.

Although some of this stuff is old, here are some funny easter eggs I bumped into over time. In APT Fire up a terminal and type the following, one command at a time:

CMus (also called C* Music Player) is a ncurses-based audio player which can be run in a shell, with no need for an X server. CMus is very powerful and highly configurable, and it features Vi-like keyboard shortcuts, which can be bound to other keys if needed. It supports various audio formats, including Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3 (with libmad), WAV, AAC or WMA. CMus is lightweight and I must say that it was a delight testing it, and although by default it lacks support for one of the features I consider a must-have, the Last.fm song submission, this can be accomplished by applying a patch and recompiling it.

This article is an overview of 4 most popular IM clients available on Linux, and particularly in the upcoming release of Ubuntu, Jaunty Jackalope. I included only graphical applications here, but I'm sure I'll make a review of several command-line clients in the near future too. I also decided not to include Sim and KMess, since currently they only offer versions for KDE3.