WAHIL.net

Amarok 2.1 is out & Installing Amarok 2.1 on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty

I was catching up on some feeds yesterday, and this piece of news caught my eye - Amarok 2.1 released. Being a long time Amarok fan ( heck Amarok itself was catalyst to make me use my SUSE 10.0 use full time) - I read the article with great interest. Amarok 2 users would know that Amarok 2 series is a shadow of its old Amarok 1.4(”Amarok Classic” self) - and quite a few people still prefer Amarok classic to Amarok 2 - primararily because of Amarok’s missing support for visualizations, equalizer amongst others. I don’t use equalizers - and as for visualization - well don’t use that either.

Coming back to the point - Amarok 2.0 release was somewhat like a KDE 4.0 release - more of a framework release, basic building blocks in place, but just about. I terribly missed queuing support, and promptly stopped using Amarok (and on a different note, switched to Gnome - Rhythmbox is sweet!). Amarok 2.1 brings in a lot of improvements - and the most obvious one is the improvements to the playlist and main play window area. With Amarok 2.0 - the playlist area was a bit of a hit and a miss the lyrics, Wikipedia info was there but wasn’t obvious, you had to “Add the plasma” and once you added multiple plasma(”applets”) you had no idea how many were there without “zooming out” and overlooking it. And with the zoom effect not at its slickest best it was a big chore. Amarok 2.1 fixes this by adding buttons which bring up the respective applets making it easy to remove the exisitng applets, add new ones or simply re-arrange them.

Another nice feature introduced is “bookmarking” - any track with a length greater than 10minutes and Amarok will save the last listened position, so when you return to playing the track, it resumes from the last bookmarked place. You can also manually bookmark any track btw.

There are other improvements too - only I couldn’t figure it because the damned player wouldn’t play anything
I’ve put my query in Ubuntu forums over here - my problem is that Amarok just refuses to play any local files. If any of my readers can help me figure this out, it’ll be great, just drop a comment.

As for installing Amarok, its pretty straightforward, Goto System -> Administration -> Software Sources. Click on third party sources, click on Add, enter the below line.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backports/ubuntu jaunty main

Save, update. Launch Synaptic, search for amarok and mark for install.

That’s it, Amarok 2.1 is ready to rock. Were you able to get Amarok successful run on your system ? Do drop a comment.

Originally posted at author’s blog

Posted on June 2009 in News

Filmaster: free and open social network for movie buffs with reviews and recommendations

Bias warning: Author of this article is one of the founders of Filmaster. At the same time he’s the founder of PolishLinux.org.

Filmaster — Main page

Why create yet another movie site?

That’s a valid question. And the answer to it can be summed up in the following points:

• Film rankings are useless!
  Have you ever checked out the movie ratings at IMDB or RottenTomatoes and wondered “how on Earth could this crappy movie have such a high score?”. Wonder no more as Filmaster suggests you the movies that you will enjoy. It personalizes rankings using a custom recommendation algorithm, so that the Top 100 is prepared for each user individually based on their weird tastes.
• Movie websites are not social enough!
  On Filmaster you can blog about movies (and you’re getting a cool URL for your blog like michuk.filmaster.com), discuss movies on forums, make friends and follow their activity, check your and their ratings and compare your movie tastes using the taste comparison indicator, share your movie libraries or wishlists and much more…
• All movie sites are proprietary
  You don’t own your data at IMDB or Flixter. The companies behind those websites do. And they can disconnect you from your data at any given time. It’s all in the convoluted terms of use. Filmaster is free as in freedom. You own your data. You control your data. And you can do whatever you want with it. What is more, you can also use the code that runs the service as it’s fully free as well, being a mixture of BSD licensed stuff (mainly borrowed from the Pinax project guys) and Affero GPLv3 (all the original Filmaster code including the recommendations engine). What can you do with it? Well… sky is the limit.

Planet Filmaster aggregates all user activities

Filmaster as an open service

Implemented in Django (a Python framework) and using a PostgreSQL database engine, Filmaster was made possible by using strictly free software. The decision to open source the code of the service itself came a few months after the development started. It became clear to the project founders, Borys Musielak and Adam Zielinski, that making Filmaster fully free software will enable the project to grow much faster and gain a wider range of features compared to proprietary websites offering similar recommendations functionality like Jinni.com, Criticker.com or ClerkDogs, not to mention a popular movie social network Flixter.com.

But the code is only one part of a fully open service. According to the Open Service Software Definition, an open software service is one:

• Whose data is open as defined by the open knowledge definition with the exception that where the data is personal in nature the data need only be made available to the user
• Whose source code is:
  • Free/Open Source Software (that is available under a license in the OSI or FSF approved list).
  • Made available to the users of the service.

This is why all the content created by the users at Filmaster.com is automatically licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0, and that is why the team is working hard to provide an API that will make it possible to trivially access all the essential data, like user ratings, reviews, personal recommendations, wishlists, collections and all the rest using simple JSON calls.

How can you help?

Easily. Check out Filmaster.org, the developer’s community wiki, get an account at the issue tracker, set up the environment (which shouldn’t take more that 15 minutes if you follow the set up instructions precisely) and get going!

There is a lot of cool stuff going on at the moment, mainly thanks to our great contributors:

• Jakub is working an an enhanced version of the recommendations engine. Feel free to comment on his conception described on the wiki as New recommendation engine.
• Witold is planning to migrate the code base from Subversion to Git in order to make it easier to manage and provide a better tool for a distributed coding project like this.
• Turin is working on enhancing the search features, tagging and a single page to follow all the answers to your posts and reviews.
• And you may take one of other cool planned features like the integration with TV programme and local cinema schedules, adding a ClerkDogs-like “film DNA” feature, e-mail/SMS notifications about upcoming shows that are on user’s wishlists and many more, perhaps just the ones that you think that are missing from the roadmap.

But… I can’t code! Am I useless?

Quite the opposite! There are fortunately many things that you can do if you can’t help us programming:

• Translate Filmaster to your native tongue! We have two language versions at the moment: English (launched at May 24th) and Polish (running in beta since January 2009). You can create the one for your language and either work with us or set up your own instance of the service and work independantly. The power of open source, that is!
• Become a moderator of the English version of the website. There are thousands of things that need to be done manually, like tagging the movies, editing the official movie descriptions, correcting the current data and many more. You don’t need to do all :>, just a little help will do. With a strong community we can do amazing things, I assure you.
• File bugs if you find them, suggest new features and — what is most important — advertise the website to your friends, so that they can join and help us well!

OK, but… where is the catch?

Sorry to disappoint you, but there is none. We are simply film buffs ourselves and we think that the current websites are not good enough so we decided to change that by creating our own that will be more social, more personalized and completely free at the same time. With an open service like Filmaster this can happen and we very much hope you will like the idea and join us!

Even if you don’t feel like doing much work, just sign up sign up and use the website. Rate some 20+ movies and wait for the recommendations to arrive. They may surprise you as they are actually pretty good even at this early stage. And if you would like to share your opinion about the movies you love and hate either by leaving a short note or a longer review, we would be even more delighted to see that happening!

Contact us

The information provided here is not good enough? Just contact us and ask for more!

The best way to contact us is via Jabber. Just send a message to me (michuk@jakilinux.org) or Adam (adz@jakilinux.org) and we can talk about what we can do together. You can also leave us an e-mail — the addresses are the same. Everyone is invited to join and I hope we can quickly gather quite a numerous community of movie and software geeks and their friends to work together on this exciting project.

By the way, kudos to the founders of Identi.ca, Wikidot.com and Libre.fm for inspiration and great kudos to the Pinax project that made Filmaster possible to arrive as fast! Free software and free content is a great thing and keep doing your great work, please!

Posted on May 2009 in News

Filmaster: free and open social network for movie buffs with recommendations

Bias warning: Author of this article is one of the founders of Filmaster. At the same time he’s the founder of PolishLinux.org.

Filmaster — Main page

Why create yet another movie site?

That’s a valid question. And the answer to it can be summed up in the following points:

• Film rankings are useless!
  Have you ever checked out the movie ratings at IMDB or RottenTomatoes and wondered “how on Earth could this crappy movie have such a high score?”. Wonder no more as Filmaster suggests you the movies that you will enjoy. It personalizes rankings using a custom recommendation algorithm, so that the Top 100 is prepared for each user individually based on their weird tastes.
• Movie websites are not social enough!
  On Filmaster you can blog about movies (and you’re getting a cool URL for your blog like michuk.filmaster.com), discuss movies on forums, make friends and follow their activity, check your and their ratings and compare your movie tastes using the taste comparison indicator, share your movie libraries or wishlists and much more…
• All movie sites are proprietary
  You don’t own your data at IMDB or Flixter. The companies behind those websites do. And they can disconnect you from your data at any given time. It’s all in the convoluted terms of use. Filmaster is free as in freedom. You own your data. You control your data. And you can do whatever you want with it. What is more, you can also use the code that runs the service as it’s fully free as well, being a mixture of BSD licensed stuff (mainly borrowed from the Pinax project guys) and Affero GPLv3 (all the original Filmaster code including the recommendations engine). What can you do with it? Well… sky is the limit.

Planet Filmaster aggregates all user activities

Filmaster as an open service

Implemented in Django (a Python framework) and using a PostgreSQL database engine, Filmaster was made possible by using strictly free software. The decision to open source the code of the service itself came a few months after the development started. It became clear to the project founders, Borys Musielak and Adam Zielinski, that making Filmaster fully free software will enable the project to grow much faster and gain a wider range of features compared to proprietary websites offering similar recommendations functionality like Jinni.com, Criticker.com or ClerkDogs, not to mention a popular movie social network Flixter.com.

But the code is only one part of a fully open service. According to the Open Service Software Definition, an open software service is one:

• Whose data is open as defined by the open knowledge definition with the exception that where the data is personal in nature the data need only be made available to the user
• Whose source code is:
  • Free/Open Source Software (that is available under a license in the OSI or FSF approved list).
  • Made available to the users of the service.

This is why all the content created by the users at Filmaster.com is automatically licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0, and that is why the team is working hard to provide an API that will make it possible to trivially access all the essential data, like user ratings, reviews, personal recommendations, wishlists, collections and all the rest using simple JSON calls.

How can you help?

Easily. Check out Filmaster.org, the developer’s community wiki, get an account at the issue tracker, set up the environment (which shouldn’t take more that 15 minutes if you follow the set up instructions precisely) and get going!

There is a lot of cool stuff going on at the moment, mainly thanks to our great contributors:

• Jakub is working an an enhanced version of the recommendations engine. Feel free to comment on his conception described on the wiki as New recommendation engine.
• Witold is planning to migrate the code base from Subversion to Git in order to make it easier to manage and provide a better tool for a distributed coding project like this.
• Turin is working on enhancing the search features, tagging and a single page to follow all the answers to your posts and reviews.
• And you may take one of other cool planned features like the integration with TV programme and local cinema schedules, adding a ClerkDogs-like “film DNA” feature, e-mail/SMS notifications about upcoming shows that are on user’s wishlists and many more, perhaps just the ones that you think that are missing from the roadmap.

But… I can’t code! Am I useless?

Quite the opposite! There are fortunately many things that you can do if you can’t help us programming:

• Translate Filmaster to your native tongue! We have two language versions at the moment: English (launched at May 24th) and Polish (running in beta since January 2009). You can create the one for your language and either work with us or set up your own instance of the service and work independantly. The power of open source, that is!
• Become a moderator of the English version of the website. There are thousands of things that need to be done manually, like tagging the movies, editing the official movie descriptions, correcting the current data and many more. You don’t need to do all :>, just a little help will do. With a strong community we can do amazing things, I assure you.
• File bugs if you find them, suggest new features and — what is most important — advertise the website to your friends, so that they can join and help us well!

OK, but… where is the catch?

Sorry to disappoint you, but there is none. We are simply film buffs ourselves and we think that the current websites are not good enough so we decided to change that by creating our own that will be more social, more personalized and completely free at the same time. With an open service like Filmaster this can happen and we very much hope you will like the idea and join us!

Even if you don’t feel like doing much work, just sign up sign up and use the website. Rate some 20+ movies and wait for the recommendations to arrive. They may surprise you as they are actually pretty good even at this early stage. And if you would like to share your opinion about the movies you love and hate either by leaving a short note or a longer review, we would be even more delighted to see that happening!

Contact us

The information provided here is not good enough? Just contact us and ask for more!

The best way to contact us is via Jabber. Just send a message to me (michuk@jakilinux.org) or Adam (adz@jakilinux.org) and we can talk about what we can do together. You can also leave us an e-mail — the addresses are the same. Everyone is invited to join and I hope we can quickly gather quite a numerous community of movie and software geeks and their friends to work together on this exciting project.

By the way, kudos to the founders of Identi.ca, Wikidot.com and Libre.fm for inspiration and great kudos to the Pinax project that made Filmaster possible to arrive as fast! Free software and free content is a great thing and keep doing your great work, please!

Posted on May 2009 in News

Selective list of Plasma changes for KDE 4.3

Notifications

The system tray of KDE4.3 finally supports notifications fully. Also the configurability has changed there. Now we can select the group of icons that are to be shown at all times - e.g. the Hardware group, containing i.e. KMix - if not enabled, the KMix icon won’t be shown in tray. The notification icon is shown at all times, unlike the earlier KDE4 versions. The notifications can now be grouped together and also they can e.g. display the Kopete contact avatar. Also the possibility to choose whether the notifications are to be hidden after some time, or to be always visible, has been added - when the mouse pointer floats over the notifications icon, a Notifications and jobs tool-tip is shown.

Plasma::Dialogs

The dialogue windows of Plasma are now animated. These animations work if the KWin effects are on. So far, the animation is not too smooth yet.

libplasmaclock

Can now speak out the current time (using text to speech) and show the holiday days for a chosen country in the calendar.

Plasma desktop shell

Cashew is now smaller and its appearance can be changed. If not docked, it can show the given activity’s name in one of the corners of the screen. Also the keyboard shortcuts of Plasma options are now in Cashew menu. Also as I mentioned earlier in the article on KDE4.3, Plasma has now a separate table to dock Plasmoids on. They appear when this table is turned on, not on the desktop as until now. Now the empty space on a panel can be added directly from its configuration tool. The empty space can be resized at will. The new “show windows underneath” option causes the windows to be visible in the background of the panel.

New Plasmoids

• Bubble Monitor - system monitor
• Media player - audio/video player
• RememberTheMilk - integration with this site
• Unit converter
• Weather

New wallpaper plug-ins

• Virus - burn-out the screen pixels
• Weather - the wallpaper adjusts to current weather
• Mandelbrot
• Marble - the Earth on your desktop

These are the most visible changes from the user perspective. Obviously there were many changes under the bonnet too.

The full list of Plasma changes can be found here

This article was posted originally as Wybrana lista zmian w Plaźmie dla KDE4.3 / Selective list of Plasma changes for KDE4.3 on the Authors’ blog.
Translated-by : el es

Posted on May 2009 in News

A quick look at Mandriva 2009.1 Spring

They say first love never dies, and I guess there is a degree of truth in that. Mandrake the predecessor of Mandriva was my first Linux, and despite the fact that over the years our ways parted, I have a sentiment for this distribution and I come back to it every now and again to check what’s new. This time round I decided to have a look the newest addition to Mandriva family; Madriva One 2009.1 Spring, boldly promising to bring the best of the latest cutting edge technology to your desktop. As promises go this is a big one, and after reading the release note on the Madriva website I wondered if this once probably the most popular distro is ready regain the leaser position.

First Impressions and Installation

After popping the live CD into the drive, rebooting my laptop and waiting for a couple of minuets for the system to load I was welcomed to new, shiny KDE 4.2.2 desktop. The default theme is aya with a light blue background and Mandriva logo on it, even though I’m not an aya lover I have to admit, things were looking very good indeed.

Mandriva developers spend a lot of time and pay a lot of attention to visual aspects of the system, and this immediately shows-what you get is well thought out and balanced desktop. Leaving visual aspect aside I went to the central control panel to check the hardware detection; Mandriva lived up to its reputation and all but the webcam was correctly detected. The Ricoh webcams installed in some of HP and Sony laptops including mine are a constant nuisance to Linux users, and none of the distros I’ve tried so far managed to recognised it. I’m not going to pick on Mandriva in that respect. My wireless card was correctly detected and so I proceed with establishing the connection to my home network, a task that took me about 30 second and was painless and straightforward; another point scored for Mandriva here.

As responsiveness of the live CD was becoming an issue and my first impressions were excellent, I decided not to wait any longer and install the system on my hard drive. After clicking the appropriate icon on the desktop, the installation wizard has started offering partitioning options including resizing of the Windows partition if you have one, the option I decided to test. Wizard proceeded to do the necessary work while I was still able to use the Internet to check my email and the latest news on BBC website. The whole instillation process took just under 18 minutes and I have to say I was very impressed by it.

This is a bold claim but to me the newest Mandriva installation wizard is probably the best I’ve ever used. It is simple, intuitive and very fast and I can’t see a single reason why anyone with no previous Linux experience and limited computer skills would run into a problem using it, well done Mandriva team. After rebooting all the settings and changes from live CD session, including my network password were remembered, something that is still lacking in some other live CD distros and adds another points to so far nearly excellent record. Overall in terms of installation and hardware detection Mandriva scores the highest mark with a small minus for the webcam recognition.

Software and Multimedia handling

Mandriva One comes with a decent selection of software; all the usual utilities found in other leading distros are available here as well. For any additional software just fire up rmpdrake, using Install & Remove Software tab in kick off menu and vast Mandriva repositories will provide you with almost any software you might need. Installing and removing software is very straightforward, if you know what you are after, just find and select the require packages, approve the selection and wait for the system to do the rest for you. If you new to Linux and don’t know much about what’s on offer or if you just browsing to see what’s available, tabs grouping available software in thematic categories can come very handy, just click on a chosen category tab and in right-hand pane you’ll see the selection of available packages. Software management tool is very intuitive and works smooth and fast, over the curse of last few weeks of testing and a large number of different packages I installed or removed I didn’t experience a single problem with it, my overall experience was very pleasant, and I have to say this is probably one of the best software management tools I’ve used recently.Whether you’re an advanced user or a just discovering the Linux grounds you should quickly find you’re way round it and just enjoy using it.

When it comes to multimedia Mandriva One does very well, it will play common formats out of the box which is a nice feature , especially for less seasoned users. If you attempt to play a multimedia that require a proprietary codecs not available by default, system will launch codeina web shop offering you an option of purchasing an appropriate solution. Obviously you can opt out and stick to free packages available for the Linux platform which in most common case scenarios will do good enough, if however you are prepared to dig out few pennies it might make sense to upgrade to powerpack edition which will include all the proprietary codecs out of the box along with other commercial software you might find useful (list here) and on-line support should you require it. It this place I’d like to highlight that Mandriva is a powerful system available free of charge and you don’t have to spend a penny to get the full functionality. However unlike some other major distribution Mandriva is a commercial venture and as such will offer you several additional paid for options, like support and commercial software and this is not a bad thing at all, some users might require it. At the end of the day it all comes to personal requirements, for those on a tight budget or those just not willing to dish out money on software most of the functionality offered in Power Pack can be archived with free solution and a little creativity just like in any other major distribution. If on the other hand you are looking for ready made solutions and technical support, Power Pack might be a right option for you. My advice is get the free version first and see if you like it then carefully evaluate your needs before clicking the purchase button, it is simple and best method to avoid latter disappointment. To sum up - Mandriva does an excellent job in terms of software management and multimedia handling, new users will appreciate intuitive interfaces and ease of use, and more advance users will appreciate the wealth of configuration options and fast and solid performance.

Conclusion

The newest Mandriva is no doubt an excellent system, easy to configure and use, appealing visually and offering a very powerful system under the hood. I really like the look and feel of it, but somehow I doubt it will dominate the Linux word or challenge the dominant position of Microsoft Windows. In comparison to Ubuntu the most popular Linux distro at the moment, Mandriva has nothing to be ashamed of, if anything many things are going to be easier for new users and I bet if you take 10 Linux novices and let them play for half an hour with both OS, the majority will point to Mandriva as more friendly. This however doesn’t matter much as if asked I will still recommend Ubuntu to any new user, and there are few reasons for that. The first one is the community, whatever problem you might have with Ubuntu, there are countless forums and websites dedicated to Ubuntu and the chances are you’ll find a solution to your problem sooner rather than latter. In case of Madriva community support in comparison to other major distribution is very poor; the result of ill thought Mandriva approach to community in last few years. Mandriva club available only to paying subscribers proved to be a big failure and recently Mandriva opened it up to everyone, still though it is a bit of a ghost town. If you walk into your local bookshop you’ll find at least few books on Ubuntu, one or two on Red Hat / Fedora and openSuse and absolutely nothing about Mandriva. Searching Amazon for any kind of introduction to the OS returns nothing. Uncertainty about which direction is going to be adapted by the company in the future remains an issue, probably the last thing you want is to get involved into a community project that is going to be fully commercialised sometime along the way or the other way round - to pay for software that will fail to gain a significant market share and disappear into oblivion. Judging from the recent announcements, people in Mandriva headquarters finally realised that without strong and vibrant community achieving success in the Linux word is nearly impossible. I genuinely hope that the recent attempts at rebuilding community spirit will work out as the OS is definitely worth it, but no doubt this will take time and lot of effort. To give justice to the company though they managed to develop one of the best Linux distributions around, it is available for free, and if any of the above doesn’t pose a problem for you, it is a distro worth a try.

Posted on May 2009 in News