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10 most important Linux and free software logos, which represent Linux best.

This article is a continuation of the 10 Best KDE Applications Not Included in KDE which I wrote a while ago. In the first article I reviewed Amarok, KTorrent, K3b, Gwenview, KVirc, Kaffeine, KDevelop, Kid3, DigiKam and Yakuake. In this second part I'll add 10 more applications which I consider to `be full-featured and to have a high quality. I included the screenshots at the end of the article. So, here goes the list...

Article reviews 10 audio/video players for KDE.

4 applications for ripping DVDs or DVD ISO images on Linux: K9Copy, dvd::rip, acidrip and Thoggen.

The article contains 5 frequent tips to make working with the shell easier.

K9Copy is a DVD ripper for KDE. The last version for KDE3 is 1.2.3 and you can install it from the debian-multimedia.org repositories. A version for KDE4 is also available for download on the official website.

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a protocol for text-based internet chat created by Jarkko Oikarinen in 1988. Ever since it was developed, IRC gained more and more popularity and currently it's one of the standard ways for projects and distributions to provide online help, for developers to meet and discuss aspects regarding their work.

You may find this useful to rename MP3 or image files in a directory, so they will all look the same. The following script will work on directories with less than 100 files of the same type, and will rename all of them to file01, file02, file03, ... and so on.

13 of the popular CLI tools/audio players for audio playing and encoding/decoding on Linux: mp3blaster, mpd, music123, cmus, mpg123, ogg123, ripit, oggenc, flac, ogginfo, vorbiscomment, cuebreakpoints, shnsplit.

Review of several best tools to get work done on Linux: GIMP, Scribus, Blender, OpenOffice.org, Audacity, Cinelerra, Emacs, Inkscape, K3b.

Review of several KDE applications for listening and manipulating audio files, including Kid3, Amarok, soundKonverter.

This is just a rant (hopefully it will be regarded as pertinent and non-'laming') on why Windows users try Linux and return frustrated to Windows after several hours or days. I won't praise Linux and the way it works, I won't even compare and say 'here Linux is easier because ...', instead I have a few questions for all of you who blame Linux for not being and behaving like Windows.

Apricot is the newest project from the Blender Institute with the goal to build an open-source game instead of a Blender video this time. The characters used in the game are from the Big Buck Bunny movie, the last free movie developed using Blender under the name Project Peach.

Up to now I reviewed SMPlayer and 11 video players for Linux, and in this article I'll take a look at Kaffeine 0.8.6, the last version for KDE 3.x, and also a well-known video player for KDE. When it comes to video players, Kaffeine is my favourite, several reasons for it being that it plays anything I feed it with, it has good subtitle support and the interface it provides is clean and simple to use. Well, the interface is more a matter of taste, since most of the video players have it the same, no matter if they are for KDE or GNOME. But I prefer the players which only use a single window over the the ones who come with a main window for controls and menus and another one for playing the movie itself. As I said, only a matter of taste.

IRC is one of the most used protocols for text chatting and most major projects and distributions have several IRC channels to offer help or discuss development or any other issues. XChat is a very powerful IRC client written in GTK who has been around for years and is now feature complete, low on resources, with a powerful scripting interface and support for C plugins.

SMPlayer is a complete video player built in Qt 4.4.0 and based on the powerful, open-source MPlayer. The version I decided to test in this review is 0.6.1 from SVN. SMPlayer basically plays anything video or audio, including DVDs, VCDs or DVD ISO images, audio CDs, MPEG, AVI or ASF. You can also play mounted images of DVDs by pointing to the directory which contains the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS directories. It can also play videos from a given URL location. One of the great features SMPlayer has is the ability to resume a movie after you closed it and restarted the application.

Last.fm is an open-source application licensed under the GPL, allowing you to listen to Last.fm radio stations and submit the songs in the same time. For those of you unfamiliar with Last.fm, it's a great social music community, allowing you to submit songs you currently listen to, statistics, forums for bands or music styles (or even more: Amarok has a group, most major distributions also, and you can start your own group about anything, match people and discuss), together with information for each artist, open for anyone to edit, just like the Wikipedia style.

A few days ago I reviewed BasKet, the wonderful KDE application for taking notes, so today I decided upon Tomboy, which is an application for GNOME. Tomboy does not provide as many features as BasKet, but it might be the right choice for those using GNOME. It provides global hotkeys, spell-checking while typing, and several options for formatting the text, like highlighting. It can be embedded in the system tray and it uses a low amount of resources.

1. SMPlayer SMPlayer is a fully featured video player built using the Qt 4 libraries. It basically plays anything, including DVDs and ISO images, but it skipped the menus when reading DVD ISOs. It's complete and it offers plenty configuration options, including for subtitles and the interface itself, allowing to choose the icon set and the style used. You can also configure the language SMPlayer uses for its interface, including English, Romanian, Polish, German and many other. I was impressed to see translations are pretty much complete.

There are many ways to learn Linux, and I can't think of one as being the 'best'. Of course, something may work for some users while failing miserably for others. There are users who prefer to ask a friend or get their answers fast on a forum, either because they are too lazy or they just don't have enough time to learn something new: they want it to work in their own way. Well, that's not quite an option, since there is no universal program which will fit any user's way of doing things.