KDE Project Ships First Release Candidate for Leading Free Software Desktop, Codename “Calamity”

With the first release candidate, the KDE project would like to collect feedback to ensure the quality of KDE 4.0.

The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the first release candidate for KDE 4.0. This release candidate marks that the majority of the components of KDE 4.0 are now approaching release quality.

While the final bits of Plasma, the brand new desktop shell and panel in KDE 4, are falling into place, the KDE community decided to publish a first release candidate for the KDE 4.0 Desktop. Release Candidate 1 is the first preview of KDE 4.0 which is suitable for general use and discovering the improvements that have taken place all over the KDE codebase.

At the same time, the KDE team releases the final version of the KDE Development Platform, which provides the needed libraries and applications the KDE Desktop is based on. The KDE Development Platform, comprising the basis for developing KDE applications, is frozen and is now of release quality. The sourcecode for the KDE Development Platform can be found in the “stable/” subdir on KDE’s FTP server and mirrors.

Building on this, the majority of applications included in KDE 4.0 are now usable for day to day use. The KDE Release Team has recently underlined this by calling on the community to participate in reporting bugs during the time remaining before the release of KDE 4.0 in December.
Meanwhile, preparations for the KDE 4.0 release events are taking place, with the main event taking place in Mountain View, California in the USA in January 2008. Make sure you don’t miss it!

The new Beta 4 incorporates many improvements from previous Beta and alpha releases: Beta 4, Beta 3, Beta 2, Beta 1, Alpha 2 and Alpha 1.

More Info Here

Related: KDE 4: Plasma drag&drop, Digikam multiple storages

EOS by Vlad Gerasimov (his studio website)

It is nice to know that a graphics designer from Russia came upi to be a winner, as I am ….. u know. Other wallpapers that participated in this hot contest can be found here. I decided to use it on my Vista (only for gaming … remember) and it really looks nice. Besides, did I ever mention that Blue is my colour.

Few days ago Mozilla launched Mac and Linux versions of Prism. What’s Prism (WebRunner) again? It’s a stripped down version of Firefox that essentially lets you load a single web page at a time. No tabs, no useful URL or navigation buttons. But Prism can come in handy if you like to keep a single web site like Gmail open all day, since it uses fewer resources than Firefox.

As it is only 0.8 version, expect to encounter bugs such as F11 failing to go into full-screen mode and Prism not being able to notice that Flash is installed. All in all, not a bad release but there’s still lots work to be done.

Just keeps getting better – the Audacity team has released another update to their popular cross-platform, open source digital audio editing application. The Audacity 1.3.x beta line features a ton of options that aren’t available in the 1.2.x stable versions. For example, it’s much easier to move sound files from one track to another or to split and manipulate audio tracks.

Audacity 1.3.4 beta features a ton of small, but important updates, including:

• A new welcome screen
• Enhanced Windows Shell integration, meaning you should be able to access Audacity from Windows dialogs like “open with.”
• New keyboard commands and shortcuts
• The solo track button actually does what you’d expect and mutes all other tracks
• Metadata editor added for OGG, FLAC, and WAV/AIFF exports

As usual, Audacity 1.3.4 beta is available for Linux and Windows platforms, though for OS X is still 1.3.3 beta. More info here can be found here.

This week in DistroWatch Weekly:

• Reviews: Impressions of Fedora 8
• News: Fedora’s GNOME Online Desktop, Ubuntu JeOS, Oracle vs Red Hat, future of Kurumin Linux, CAELinux 2007
• Statistics: Windows versus Linux
• Released last week: Linux Mint 4.0, PC-BSD 1.4.1
• Upcoming releases: Pardus Linux 2007.3
• New additions: gOS
• New distributions: KarachiOS, OS Desktop
• Reader comments

Read more in this week’s issue of DistroWatch Weekly….

Last month, following the availability of Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” was the release of Mythbuntu 7.10. Mythbuntu is an Ubuntu derivative and has been around for less than a year, but they have been making great progress with this MythTV-optimized distribution.

After using Mythbuntu 7.10 extensively, this is the best MythTV distribution we have used. This just isn’t Ubuntu (or rather Xubuntu) with the MythTV packages installed by default and the changed artwork, but the Mythbuntu team has driven real innovation into this distribution. The Mythbuntu Control Center is the most advanced and feature-rich MythTV control area we have ever seen and is certainly a handy utility for any Mythbuntu user. The live front-end was also great and worked very well during our testing. At first we were unsure of all this automation that Mythbuntu provides, after being used to manually configuring MythTV for years and only mild success from other MythTV distributions, but Mythbuntu really hits the head on the nail with Mythbuntu 7.10. If you’re looking to assemble a MythTV setup, Mythbuntu is definitely worth considering.

Review @phoronix

MPlayer is one of the most popular Linux/Unix media player … we all know that, don’t we. Now, thanks to XDA-Developers forum member amitv_17, the porting to Windows Mobile has started.

It’s available HERE, in the official XDA-Devs thread and is, of course, a free download. It seems to be compatible with most WM5 and WM6 Pocket PC’s and Smartphones. For now at least it seems it’s incompatible with pre-WM5 operating systems .

The goods:

1. a HUGE arsenal of codecs and communications protocols already available; in this respect, it’s even better than CorePlayer (which, as of now, doesn’t support RTSP, albeit it will really soon be added)!
2. supports even RealAudio / RealVideo, unlike CorePlayer / TCPMP / ANY other Windows Mobile player (Note that the CoreCodec folks have announced (before the port of MPlayer) that they would never add RealOne support to CorePlayer because it’s a proprietary format).
3. alternative HTTP tunneling with RTSP; working just GREAT with RealAudio streams! In this respect, it’s even better than RealPlayer on Symbian S60v3 FP1 (for example, the one that comes with the Nokia N95), because not even the latter supports HTTP RealOne audio/video streaming, “only” for MPEG4 video streaming (unlike HTC’s own and, in this respect, really incapable Streaming Media on Windows Mobile)
4. supports real (UDP-based) RTSP, which means better bandwidth utilization than with HTTP tunneling. Of course, it also means you must have direct access or a capable Wi-Fi network. This will only later be added to CorePlayer.
5. supports both (most) Pocket PC and MS Smartphone models (unfortunately, WM5+ only)

Given that it’s the first version, pretty much promising.

The bads (for now):

1. HUGE CPU usage when playing back streamed audio! This means it’ll chew through your battery very fast .
2. bad MP3 playback, very sensitive to CPU usage peaks
3. no WMA support (better to have one since this is Windows Mobile platform after all)
4. very-very rudimentary interface
5. problems with streaming MPEG4 videos
6. local (as opposed to streamed) MPEG4 videos do work. They are, however, very choppily played back; CPU usage is pretty bad, too.

So for the mean time the verdict is that it’s certainly nice to welcome Mplayer on Windows Mobile. It’s a far cry away from established media players, particularly video playback-wise, typically considering the raw CPU performance I can get from my TI OMAP 200Mhz (even when o/c to 260-273%) [HTC Artemis] when decoding. For now though I am sticking with TCPMP/Core Player.

Download armv4 version of Mplayer this should run on all devices

Download armv5te version of Mplayer this should run on all omap850+ devices

All-in-all, this is GREAT news and is definitely something to keep an eye on!

BTW, out of curiousity, how many of you use Windows Mobile – PDA’s and/or phones. If not, then which mobile are you using?

E17 enlightenment running the the OpenMoko Neo1973. If you don’t know, Enlightenment is a popular UI for desktop distributions of Linux, and it appears someone was able throw it onto the Neo with impressive results. Practical or not, it is still really cool. BTW, OpenMoko and Android are competitors when it comes to Mobile 2.0.

I know … it is illegal to run hackintosh macintosh OS X on any other x86/PPC platform other than “Apples” … but then again I did it just for fun and to show coolness (mine and OS X) to friends. But still, ain’t that COOL … I mean running nearly 100% working version of OS X 10.4.10 (even updated it using Apple’s Update Utility) on an AMD Athlon64 based system.

One PC able to run several OS – Linux, Solaris, Windows and now OS X …. that wasn’t possible just few years ago, on a desktop computer and so smoothly, if you know what I mean.

One thing for sure, even though I consider Linux to be my choice of OS, I gotta say that OS X is the best breed that desktop OS has to offer. Now only if I can manage to run Leo on this hardware to have even more fun.

Don’t worry, still sticking with Linux :-p

Open source software (OSS) is not so much the underdog in the IT world, according survey findings announced by Barracuda Networks, a provider of e-mail and Web security appliances. Barracuda polled 288 IT security professionals and found their preferences to be roughly split on the likelihood of deploying OSS versus proprietary software, particularly for applications with similar functionality. The OSS option actually had a small lead in the survey results, with 53 percent expressing a preference for open source versus 47 percent opting for commercial solutions.

The reasons IT professionals favored open source over proprietary software:

• 80% for price
• 57% for availability of code
• 41% for community code reviews

The reasons IT professional favored proprietary software over open source:

• 65% quality of support
• 47% ease of adoption
• 47% automated software updates

Interesting poll, I can certainly see the arguments for both sides, at least consumers now have a viable choice.