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Using the MPlayer engine, SMPlayer is a powerful video player built in Qt4, with support for playing DVDs, DVD ISO images, a configurable interface, icon themes, the very useful feature of remembering settings and time left from a video after closing it (so when you restart SMPlayer the movie will be loaded from where you left it), support for subtitles and much more. SMPlayer lately gained a lot of popularity and I'm sure it will become one of the most used video players on Linux, if it's not already.

Xine is an engine which allows to play audio CDs, DVDs, VCDs, various audio and video formats like AVI, WMV, MOV to list a few. The last version of xine-lib is 1.1.15, released on August 14, 2008. To compile from source and install xine-lib 1.1.15 in Debian Lenny you'll have to follow the steps below.

IRC plays a major role in the Linux development and the community itself, and most distributions and software projects usually have one or more IRC channels (usually on Freenode or, in Debian's case, on OFTC) for discussing issues related to the project or just helping users.

This article intends to select and briefly review 8 of the most useful applications which come by default with Kubuntu 8.04 'Hardy Heron' (the LTS release which comes with KDE 3.5.9), as included on the Live CD. Screenshots included.

KDocker comes handy when you want to embed some graphical application in the system tray, given that the respective application does not come with its own feature to put it in the tray. Although not updated since 2005, the last version released on April 5, 2005, is good enough and, according to the official website, it works with all the window managers that respect the NET WM standard. To mention a few: KDE, GNOME, Xfce, Blackbox or Fluxbox. I only used it in KDE 3.5.9, but I'm sure it works well in the other desktop environments too, given that you don't want to use a native docking application, like ALLTray for GNOME.

Medibuntu is a project somewhat similar with debian-multimedia.org for Debian, providing packages which are not included in the official Ubuntu repositories due to legal issues. In order to make use of the packages included in Medibuntu (including the non-free video codecs w32codecs and libdvdcss2 for watching ecrypted DVDs), you will only need to follow several easy steps explained below.

SMPlayer gained a lot of popularity lately due to its rich features and the ability to remember settings and time it was stopped for each movie/video file individualy. So you can close it while watching a movie, and next time you open that movie with SMPlayer it will continue from the time you closed it. SMPlayer is built using the Qt4 libraries.

BasKet: This notes-taking application just might be a killer application for Linux. Some say a single application won't make a person switch from one OS to another, but I disagree. Take all those threads/comments like 'I only dual-boot because of Photoshop or GTA or you name it'. On forums I also read many threads in which the authors say they switched or tried KDE just because they like Amarok or K3b (being the only KDE application they used). Or vice-versa.

Instead of an introduction, I'll answer the question 'Why did you left out wonderful applications like Scribus, Inkscape, Cinelerra, Wine, QCAD etc?'. Well, because the article is about applications which I consider essential for daily use. Of course, some work with those every day, but not the majority. Secondly, if you ask why Amarok and not Banshee, or why KTorrent and not Deluge, well that's a personal preference. Unfortunately the article is about 10 and only 10 applications, so I can't include all of them here. Instead, I mentioned several (I know, not all) alternatives for each of the applications included here. Happy reading!

The new Banshee 1.2 includes several new features over the last stable release, like the equaliser or the music recommendations panel. The full list of new or improved features is here. For those who didn't hear about Banshee yet, it's a pretty powerful audio player for GNOME which received more and more attention lately, featuring things like a media library, support for Last.fm, podcasts, cover fetching, plugins and many more.

FrostWire is a P2P (Peer to Peer) client written in Java. To install and run FrostWire, you will first need to download the DEB package from here (just select the Ubuntu/Debian package).

This article reviews all the most common command line tools for manipulating and listening to audio formats on Linux. Players, editors, encoders/decoders, tag editors, music servers, they are all here. Currently it includes no less than 18 CLI (Command Line Interface) tools.

A tutorial intended for beginners explaining how Linux CLI works and the basic concepts and commands of Bash.

Since I'm an IRC addict and I always liked to spend time learning new stuff on IRC, here is a review of several IRC clients for Linux. Some of them are well-known and popular, like XChat, Konversation or Irssi, and others are not so widely used or known, but nevertheless, they deserve mentioning.

Listen is a not so widely known audio player written in Python and using the GTK toolkit, with an interface similar to the one of Rhythmbox, and including features like a music library, podcasts support, lyrics fetching, Wikipedia integration, and Last.fm song submission.

Review of 12 web browsers for Linux, graphical and for command line. The article includes Firefox, Konqueror, Opera, Kazehakase, Dillo, Epiphany, Galeon, lynx, elinks, links, links2 and w3m.

Exaile is an audio player built in GTK, and although it's not as popular as Banshee, Rhythmbox or Audacious, it's feature-complete and offers a unique concept by using multiple tabs for showing several playlists, each one in its own tab, and other dozens of good features which an audiophile will definitely find useful.

File managers for Linux: Konqueror, Nautilus, Thunar, Krusader, Dolphin, Xfe, ROX-Filer, PCManFM, Midnight Commander.

Two days ago I reviewed Xfe, a pretty good file manager built using the FOX toolkit, so today I'll continue in the same fashion by reviewing with PCMan FM, a GTK file manager with a simplistic interface and basic features.

The first impression Xfe gave me was of a solid, full-featured, powerful and good-looking file manager. I have to admit, I was really impressed by this application, and I've never used it before. Since I'm a KDE guy, my file manager of choice was always Konqueror and I was never able to get used to Nautilus, Krusader, Thunar or ROX-Filer. But Xfe is a completely new and pleasant experience. Let me tell you what I've found so nice about it...