Get over to the other side and get updated in the mean time.

Nokia X6 To Land In The UK This Friday

If you have been eyeing Nokia’s latest touchscreen music phone – the X6, it is coming to the UK Friday. As is usual with many phones there, it has found a carrier who will be offering it for free against a long-time contract. This time it is Orange for £35/month.

For the SIM-free version you will have to pony up £449, which is roughly around $670 at today’s exchange rate. You can pre-order it from shop.nokia.co.uk from today. [read]

Skype Nokia N900 Demo Video

Nokia N900 comes with Skype built-in. So now you have more reason to buy the N900 for $649, that is if you can wait for the next shipments to arrive. The last I heard of it was that it was pre-ordered to capacity and new orders were behind huge queues. At least now you can get one for $480 on Amazon ($530-$50 mail in rebate). [read]

Skype has demoed Skype for Maemo on an official video. Since Skype is already available on Linux, this port could not have been all that hard to execute. [read]

UK Retailers Pull Satio, Big Bugs Need Squashing

Bad news folks, Sony Ericsson’s Satio is now as good as off the shelves right now. This decision had to be taken after numerous customers came in with complaints about freezes, mysterious powering down of the phone and other problems. The two major retailers of the Phone in the UK – Carphone Warehouse and Phones 4U – have decided to offer replacements to customers who are returning the Satio.

Official word from Sony Ericsson is that the issues will be fixed before Christmas. The bugs are apparently to deep for normal updates to tackle. Well, I guess that’s what we get for lusting after a too-good-to-be-true 12MP camera phone.

Kurara Reviewed, Is OKAY

Like he promised, the man behind mobile review has posted a more detailed look at the Kurara. From Murtazin’s post, it is clear that the phone sounds good on paper but it is pretty ordinary in person. It definitely fits the bill for an understudy of the Idou and should be priced somewhere around half of the high-end offerings. That said, if this phone is priced right, it could become a hot-selling phone for those who are looking for an entry-level touchscreen experience that is slightly better than the Samsung options.

The ARM Cortex Ab with 256MB RAM still is powerful enough to breeze through the Symbian UI. So that part is covered I suppose. Read the extensive review of it right here.

O2’s ‘Free’ HTC HD2

The Brits are at it again. They are really good at giving away phones for free as long as you promise to pay them a hefty sum. If you are in the market for the HTC HD2 and if you are in the UK, you can get it for free from O2 against a long-term contract. You will have to pay a nice £45 per month on it though. So far, I do not think the HD2 retailing SIM-free there. So O2 looks like the only option right now. [read]

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The program uses three independent windows to control the recordings. Windows 1 is the start window with all options and configuration settings. The user can define the download path in here, load radio stations, change the skin, configure the build in Live365 support, change the default stream title format or generate a command line command for this preset which can then be used in batch files, loaded during startup or used in the Windows Task Scheduler.

Windows 2 lists all radio stations that have been added by the developer and user. It is possible to remove, add or edit the radio stations in the list.

The third and final window is the music player and recorder. It uses basic controls to play, record, pause and stop the music. The MP3 VCR tries to identify the name of the song so that it can save each tune with a descriptive file name. This is however only possible if the radio stations are including the title in the stream.

One interesting option is the ability to record radio stations for a certain time. This, in combination with the option to launch the program from the command line make it possible to record specific radio stations regularly.

The MP3 VCR can be downloaded from the developer’s website. It is compatible with most versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system including Windows 7.

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You might think, because of the nature of the task surrounding this tool, that MP3 Diags would be challenging to use. It’s not. In fact it’s quite simple to scan and repair your music collection. In this tutorial you will learn how to install and use MP3 Diags to diagnose and repair your broken MP3s.

NOTE: Martin covered using MP3 Diags for the Windows operating system in his article “Diagnose your MP3 collection with MP3 Diags“. Since there are issues to over come when using this application in the Linux operating system, I decided it was beneficial to cover it once again.

What can it fix?

Some of the problems that MP3 Diags can repair are:

• Adding/fixing track info.
• Correcting song duration times.
• Correcting seek problems.
• Renaming files based on fields.
• Low quality audio.
• Missing VBR header.
• Missing normalization data.
• and much more.

Now before I continue on, I will tell you that MP3 Diags can be resource intensive. If your collection is large you can expect this to take some time. During an initial scan MP3 Diags was running at approximately 2,000 files every 15 minutes. You can do the math from there.

Installing

MP3 Diags should be found in your distributions repositories. If you are using Ubuntu you can either open up Synaptic or the Ubuntu Software Center, do a search for “mp3 diags” (no quotes) mark the application for installation, and apply the changes.

When the application is installed you will find it in your Sound & Video menu entry.

Usage

When you first start up MP3 Diags a window will appear asking you to create a file which the application can save its configuration data. You can place this file anywhere you have write permission. In that same window you can set up a scan by including the directories you want to scan. In most modern Linux distributions you will find a ~/Music directory. If you’re like me (and you like to keep everything well organized), you can just select that folder and begin the scan.

During the scan expect your machine to become a big sluggish. You might want to start the scan and walk away (to keep yourself from getting a wee frustrated). When the scan is over, the real fun begins.

Scan results

Figure 1

Take a look at Figure 1.  What you are seeing is the results of a first-run scan containing over 2,000 audio files. Near the top (under the tool bar) is a listing of all the possible issues that each file contains. Let’s just look at one file. To show only one file highlight that file and click the “Show One Song At a Time” button (Sixth button from the left on the toolbar). I will select a file, downloaded and converted from Youtube, of Rush’s La Villa Strangiato. Obviously, since this was a download from Youtube, the audio quality is going to be poor. So let’s repair that as much as it is possible.

Figure 2

Once you have your one file selected (see Figure 2) click the first work icon on the left (that’s the first hammer on the left) which is a drop-down. When you first click this you will get a warning that says “although this works on the developers’ machine, it might not work on yours”. Take this as a caution and back up your files before you start working on them.

From the drop-down you will see numerous fixes for your file. However, instead of searching from the drop-down, you can hover your mouse over hammer icons labeled 1-4. Each of these contains a pre-configured set of fixes that allow you a single click to fix numerous, related issues on a file. For my poor audio quality file you can see it suffers from four issues:

• fa – No ID3V2.3.0 tag found
• ea – ID3V2 tag doesn’t have APIC frame.
• ab – Low quality MPEG audio stream.
• an – No normalization undo data found.

When you go to fix these problems you will instantly come across an issue when using MP3 Diags in Linux. MP3 Diags uses the application mp3gain to normalize mp3 files, which is not installed by default. And, to make matters worse, MP3 Diags does not install this dependency for you. So you will have to fire up Synaptic, search for “mp3gain” (no quotes), select the results for installation, and apply the changes.

Once mp3gain is installed you can now normalize with MP3 Diags.

Another issue, specific to Linux, is that if you want to configure MP3 Diags to not erase original files, but instead to move them to another directory, you will need to make sure you change the destination directories in the preferences window. By default all of the temporary directories are set to /tmp which you will have write access to, but if you want to archive that file you do not want it saved in the /tmp directory, because it will be deleted automatically. Different distributions handle this task differently – some clean up /tmp regularly, some upon reboot, some will empty a file in /tmp after it has gone untouched for a pre-determined span of time (usually 30 days). If you want to keep those original files around, you will want to reconfigure MP3 Diags to use a different directory than /tmp.

Final thoughts

After running MP3 Diags on my music collection, I have found that all MP3 files do, in fact, sound better and have far fewer issues. You should definitely give this application a go if you have a collection of MP3s lying around in need of repair.

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PicPick is available as a portable version and an installer. The capture software places its icon in the Windows task bar after startup. The user can then make use of the functionality by clicking on that icon or by using one of the freely configurable hotkeys to do so. The screen capturing options include full screen captures (with multi-monitor support), active windows captures, window controlled, fixed region and free hand captures.

The screen capture is then displayed in the program’s interface which offers basic image editing features that include crop, resize and rotate options, basic image editing tools like adding text, basic geometric shapes, a color picker and magnifier.

The memory consumption is lower than 10 Megabytes of computer memory which is acceptable for such a program. The screen capture capabilities combined with the imaged editor make PicPick a potent screen capturing program. The program can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

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SPlayer uses binary codecs. The player was able to play all formats that we threw at it including video formats such as avi, mpg, mkv but also audio formats like mp3. Even better is the fact that it can also play movies from DVD, Blu-Ray or remote locations.

The player uses a basic interface much like the new Windows Media Player lite does in Windows 7. The controls only become visible if the user moves the mouse cursor into the interface. It is then possible to load movies or music, configure and control playback settings and various other options.

We had to use Google Translate to translate the Chinese information on the developer’s homepage into English. The homepage does contain a table comparing SPlayer to various other media players including KPlayer and Real Player (but unfortunately not Windows Media Player, Quicktime, VLC or a MPlayer variant).

Some of the features that speak for SPlayer are that it is Open Source, uses GPU acceleration, has a low installation size, rather low memory and cpu footprint and uses binary codecs to playback videos. The only problem could be the non-English homepage which could make it difficulty to get support or questions answered.

SPlayer is available from the developer’s website. It worked fine in Windows 7 Professional and is likely to work in other Windows operating systems as well.

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It is usually not that easy to evaluate all the different editions to find a suitable one. Even users who buy a pre-build PC system should make sure that the included operating systems meets all their demands. Windows 7 Home Premium’s main advantage is its price and the fact that it offers all features that Microsoft would consider essential. Here is a small overview of those features:

Windows 7 Home Premium features that Windows 7 Home Basic and Windows 7 Starter do not have:

• Full Windows Aero support: The graphical user interface and theme for most Windows 7 editions.
• Home Group (Create & Join): Easy network creation (the basic editions can only join but not create)
• Multi-Touch (touch capabilities for the PC)
• Premium Games (Internet Backgammon, Internet Checkers, and Internet Spades.)
• Windows Media Center

There are on the other hand features that are not included in Windows 7 Home Premium. Those are only available in the higher priced editions:

• Backup and Restore Center (backup to networks)
• Windows Server Domain support.
• Remote Desktop Server support.
• Location aware printing: Automatically changes the default printer based on the location of the user.
• Encrypting the file system
• Presentation mode: Presentation Mode is found in the Mobility Centre (Windows Key + X) and lets you control your machine’s behavior while you are giving presentations
• AppLocker (Ultimate only): Helps eliminate unwanted and unknown applications within an organization’s network
• BitLocker Drive Encryption (Ultimate only): Hard drive and removable media encryption
• BranchCache Distributed Cache (Ultimate only): BranchCache offers the potential of being able to access large files stored on servers much faster.
• DirectAccess (Ultimate only): Utilises IPv6-over-IPsec to encrypt comms over the internet between remote workers and the DirectAccess server
• Multilingual User Interface Pack (Ultimate only): Ability to switch to other interface languages.
• Virtual Hard Disk Booting (Ultimate only): Create a virtual hard disk image, install an operating system and boot it.

Finally there are also hardware limits in place. Windows 7 Home Premium supports a maximum of 16 Gigabytes of computer memory. This limit is raised to 192 Megabytes in Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate. Windows 7 Home Premium seems to be the natural choice for most home users unless one or multiple of the features only included in Windows 7 Pro or Ultimate are needed to operate the computer system.

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And like most popular Linux distributions, OpenSuSE offers a Live CD. Most everyone can stick in a CD, boot it, play around with it, and double click the “Install” icon. But what about the full-blown, standard installation DVD? Is that more difficult than the Live CD? I’m glad you asked, because in this tutorial I am going to walk you through the installation (complete with pictures) of OpenSuSE 11.2.

It should go without saying that the first step is to download the ISO image, burn it to disk, put it in the DVD drive, and boot your machine. Once you have taken care of that you are on your way to installation Nirvana. I say that, not necessarily because the installation is the simplest installation you will encounter, but more because it is the cleanest and well thought out installation you might see.

Figure 1

Step 1

The first step (see Figure 1) is to choose the language and the keyboard layout. On this page you will also have the opportunity to read the license agreement. Once you have made these selections, click the Next button to move on.

Figure 2

Step 2

This next step (see Figure 2) will not require any interaction from you. What this step does is analyze your system to gather information that will be pertinent to the installation. There is nothing required of the user here, so just wait until the analysis is complete and then click Next.

Step 3

Figure 3

The next windows (see Figure 3) wants to know the type of installation you are attempting. If you are new to OpenSuSE, most likely this will be a new installation. If you have downloaded either the Non-OSS CD or the Extra Languages CD make sure you click Include Add-on Products before you click Next.

Steps 4 and 5

Because these steps are so simple, there is no need for a screenshot. What you will take care of in Step 4 is to select your time zone. In Step 5 you will select which desktop you want to install. Your choices for desktop are: KDE, GNOME, or Other. If you select Other you will have to install a desktop later on.

Step 6 and 7

Figure 4

The next window (see Figure 4) requires you to select your partitioning. Unless you have a need to use LVM (Logical Volume Management), select Partition Based and click Next. Depending upon the type of partition mode you select, the next window will vary. Most likely you will use Partition Based, so you will only have to select the hard drive you want to use and then click Next.

Step 8

Figure 5

The next step will list what OpenSuSE will be installed upon (see Figure 5) and give you a couple of options. The first option is to have the /home directory placed on a separate partition. This is a good setup if you know there is a chance that you might relocate or share out your /home directory. The second option is if you want to reconsider using LVM and to encrypt your home directory.

Make your choices and click Next.

Step 9

Figure 6

Now it’s time to create a user for your OpenSuSE system (see Figure 6). The only option that might seem different is the ability to use your user password as the system administrator password. If you are of the paranoid mind you most likely will skip this option. Click Next to continue on.

Step 10, 11, 12, 13

Figure 7

The final steps of the installation are all either summary windows or progress windows (see Figure 7 as an example). These do not require user intervention.

The results

Figure 8

Finally the system will be installed and you will have a brand new OpenSuSE Linux desktop system (see Figure 8). You will find that OpenSuSE has tweaked the GNOME desktop to look and feel a bit differently than the standard GNOME desktop. This is more in-line with the Enterprise desktops you will see with SLED and RHEL.

Congratulations, you are the proud owner of an OpenSuSE Linux desktop. I have a feeling you will enjoy a long, happy life together.

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Switcher will display a configuration menu after installation which can be used to configure the program. This starts by choosing one of three view modes, animation and appearance settings or the window style over filters, keyboard shortcuts and detailed advanced settings.

The user should take a close look at the view modes available and at the keyboard shortcuts and adjust them for better personalization. A total of three view modes are available: Tile, Dock and Grid with Tile being the default view mode.

Tile will simply place all windows on the screen whereas dock places them on top and grid ordered and next to each other.

The settings window can be hidden afterwards and the application itself controlled by the keyboard shortcuts. All windows will be displayed in the selected view mode after the corresponding keyboard shortcut is put into action. The same key is then used to switch through the windows. The enter key will bring the selected window to the front.

All windows are numbered and it is also possible to press a number to bring the window to the front immediately without having to flip through individual windows first.

Another interesting feature is the multi-monitor support that is enabled by default. Switcher can be downloaded from the developer’s website where it is available as an installer and portable version.

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This new option made it possible for Microsoft to offer a multiple of the themes that they offered for previous operating systems. The Windows 7 Personalization Gallery over at the Microsoft website contains download links to dozen of themes from country specific themes to sponsored themes. Every Windows 7 user can create basic themes with custom wallpapers, sounds, mouse pointers or desktop icons.

Windows 7 News has published a comprehensive guide on theme usage in Windows 7 (read: Windows 7 Guides: Managing Windows 7 Themes (Part 1) and Windows 7 Guides: Managing Windows 7 Themes (Part 2)).

Part 1 of the guide describes the build in theme management options while part 2 deals with custom third party themes that require system file patching before they can be installed. The Windows 7 theme patcher for Windows 7 can be downloaded from the same website. Please note that the patcher will replace several system files in Windows 7 with different versions. Make sure to backup all important data before making any changes to the computer system.

A good resource for finding third party Windows 7 themes is the Windows 7 themes repository at the Windows 7 News website. There are however other places to look for new themes for the operating system including Deviant Art.

On a personal note: I’m pretty happy with the default themes that are provided with the operating system and have not yet felt the need to search for third party themes. What about you? Have you customized your theme in Windows 7?

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Of course one might think such a technology would be difficult at best to use. Not so. The developers of Ksplice have created an incredibly easy to use system that allows the administrator to handle critical updates, normally requiring a reboot, as easily as those updates that do not require a reboot.

Getting such a system working does requiring the installation of third party software. This tutorial will walk you through installing Ksplice as well as how to go about updating a currently running kernel with the new system.

Installing Ksplice

Figure 1

To install Ksplice navigate your browser to the Ksplice Uptrack page and click on the link for your particular distribution. If you are using Ubuntu the Gdebi installer will be an option to select from (see Figure 1) . Select Open with and then make sure GDebi is selected. Click OK and the installation will commence.

During the installation a new window will open specific to Ksplice. In this window you will have to agree to a License and then click Forward. Once you have done this the installation will complete.

Using Ksplice

Figure 2

After install is finished Ksplice will automatically open up the update window (see Figure 2) and reveal to you if there are any updates for your currently running kernel. This might very well remind you of the average Linux package management front-end.

In order to install the update(s) click the Install All Updates button to take care of any updates pending.

You will also notice a new icon added to your Notification Area (see Figure 3). This Icon will not only allow you to launch the

Figure 3

Ksplice tool, it will also keep you informed if there are any updates available. Figure 3 shows the Ksplice icon with a pending update.  When your system is up to date the “!” will disappear and leave you with a clean “K” icon.

Command line

What Linux tool is complete without a command line component? Ksplice includes four command line tools for your terminal pleasure:

• uptrack-upgrade: This command will download and install the latest kernel updates available for your system.
• uptrack-install PACKAGE: Will install a specific update (Where PACKAGE is the package name to update.)
• uptrack-remove PACKAGE : Will remove a specific update (Where PACKAGE is the package name to remove).
• uptrack-show PACKAGE: Will show more detail about a specific update (Where PACKAGE is the package name).

Final thoughts

I have been using Linux (and computers) for quite some time. I never thought I would see the day when such a major update to the underlying sub-systems could be pulled off without a reboot. And not only that, it is done as simply as using a GUI interface.  But now we are looking at something special. Ksplice is only now beginning to make serious inroads into reaching that goal of 100% uptime. And now, without having to reboot after a major upgrade, that 100% number is looking closer and closer every day.

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A user wanting to lockup these icons would need to make them visible which can be easily done from the available customize link.

All visible system tray icons will be listed on the custom web page. Each in its own row with information that include the name, system path, description, company and its icon.

A click on an item will open a detailed overview of that application (if available) that contains actions at the top, descriptions and technical information at the bottom of the page. The actions listed at the top can be used to perform various task including terminating the process responsible for the system tray icon and uninstalling the application.

System Tray Cleaner is an easy to use system manager that can assist the user in identifying system tray icons. The majority of Windows users on the other hand might prefer the manual way of researching system tray applications due to a number of reasons including privacy concerns. Users who want to test the application can download it from the developer’s website. It is compatible with most versions of Microsoft Windows including Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

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The only way to overcome this restriction temporarily is to press F8 during system boot.But this would have to be done on every boot which can become quite a nuisance.

Driver Signature Enforcement Overrider is another option. The software program makes use of a developer test option in both operating systems to load drivers which would otherwise be rejected by the operating system.

These drivers still have to be signed but not digitally which means that the operating system will accept the signatures that are provided by the software.

This option does come at a price though as it is required to disable UAC, the User Account Control, to run the program in Windows Vista and Windows 7.

How to use the program:

So how do I use it?
First and foremost; you are using this software at your own risk, we do not take responsibility for any damages to your system, but we do not believe it can harm anyone anyway. Secondly, User Account Control (UAC) must be disabled in-order to use this tool as well.

1. Go ahead download and launch the application from the link below. Inside its main menu, press on the “Enable Test Mode” button and follow the instructions on the screen. This will enable TESTSIGNING mode, which allows unverified system files to be loaded.

2. Now all you have to do is to add the unverified signature to the required system files. To do so press on the “Sign a System File” button from the main menu, and enter specific filename including full path. For example: if ATITool64.sys from C:\Windows\System32\drivers refuses to load due to driver signature enforcement, you should type: “C:\Windows\System32\drivers\ATITool64.sys”, and if you would like to sign more than a single file, just repeat this procedure until you’re done, and finally reboot.

After you enabled Test Mode and added signatures to the required system files, they should bypass Windows’s driver signature enforcement and load without any issues.

Is it worth disabling UAC for it? This has to be answered by everyone individually. Windows Vista and Windows 7 users who want to give the software program a try can download Driver Signature Enforcement Overrider from the developer’s website.

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Avira made an announcement a few days ago where they addressed that problem somewhat. They mention that they have realized that “users of the free Avira AntiVir Personal had issues fetching the Updates in time recently”. This is not exactly the same issue but it could very well be related.

Avira therefor decided to implement the following two changes: Change the virus definition file format and use a content distribution network.

First, we switch from our current virus definition files (called iVDF) to a new format called nVDF. iVDF consists of 4 VDF files, while nVDF uses at least 32 files – we need to transfer less data for updating our virus definitions effectively in the future.

This means that we need to deliver about 25 MByte to every Avira installation starting today for switching to the new update system. This might lead to some delays for some users, especially for the users of our free version Avira AntiVir Personal. Just to get an idea about what we’re talking here: More than 100.000.000 Users are trying to get the update more or less on the same day. That is more than 2.5 Petabytes (or 2,500 Terabytes) of traffic.

The previous format used four files that contained all the virus definitions of the program. The new format splits those virus definitions in at least eight times that number so that it will take less data transfers to update the virus definition files (it theoretically could slow down as well if a majority of the files need to be updated as this would mean that more files need to be transferred than in the old update system, but that’s just speculation as there are no technical information available about the process at this point).

To ease the bandwidth bottleneck, we decided to additionally use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). We were first testing a CDN built up by our current Internet service provider. Shortly after activating the CDN, the redirectors – which redirect the update requests to servers close to the users location – were overloaded and couldn’t answer the requests anymore. The situation was solved a little later on, but the CDN isn’t big enough yet to spread this huge update in time. So we decided to switch to a global player in the CDN market to deliver the update.

The second change is the use of a content delivery network. Avira is building up their own CDN but had to contract a global CDN company to spread the massive update to all Avira users. It is likely that they intend to switch to their own CDN at a later time.

It does sound like a good plan though although the massive data transfer to bring the update to all Avira users could prove to be quite a challenge. Did anyone already receive the update?

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Amazon.com not only has an outstanding collection of digital downloads in their music section (as covered by Martin in his insightful article “Amazon DRM Free MP3 Store“), they offer a completely cross-platform tool to make this process simple. The Amazon MP3 Downloader is a very simple (as well as required) tool that enables you to purchase music from Amazon.com and use it at your leisure. And since the files are DRM-free, you aren’t limited to putting them on one device and only one device. Instead you can download your music, burn it on to CD, copy it to your device, copy it to your friends device…what have you.

But in order to take advantage of this service, you MUST have the MP3 downloader installed. That’s where this tutorial comes into play. Here you will see how to install and use the Amazon MP3 Downloader on your Linux box.

Getting and installing

Point your browser to the download page and download the proper file for your distribution. As of this writing you have the choice of files for the following distributions:

• Ubuntu 8.10/9.04
• Debian 5
• Fedora 10
• OpenSuSE 11

Yes, Amazon is a bit behind the times, but you can get around this (at least on Ubuntu 9.10). Below you will find the steps to install the Amazon MP3 Downloader on Ubuntu 9.10.

Download the .deb file for Ubuntu.

Open up a terminal window and issue the command (from within the directory the file was saved) sudo dpkg -i amazonmp3.deb.

You will see a bunch of errors that will end with the warning: Errors were encountered while processing: amazonmp3.

• Issue the command sudo synaptic.
• You will get a warning that you have 1 broken package.
• Go to the Edit menu and select Fix Broken Packages.
• Click Apply in the new window.
• Close Synaptic when the packages have been fixed.

Using Amazon MP3 Downloader

There are two ways you can use the downloader. The first is to start up the application by clicking on Internet submenu of the Applications menu. From within this menu click on the Amazon MP3 Downloader entry.

When you first launch it your default web browser will start up with a “congratulations” page informing you that the Downloader will launch the next time you download a song from Amazon.com. You also will get the chance to download a free song. When you click on the button (on Amazon.com) to download a free song you will taken to the Amazon.com login page. Log in and then you will have the chance to download your free song.  Go ahead and download your free song.

What you will download is an .amz file that links to your download. Your browser, by default, will ask you what to do with the file. Go ahead and let the Amazon MP3 Downloader open that file and the download will being.

But where did that file go? The Downloader will, by default, download all files to ~/Music/Amazon MP3/. If you open up that directory (after you download your file) you will see the sub-directory containing your new download.

Figure 1

Another way to use the Downloader is to open up the tool and click the

Configuring the Downloader

There aren’t many options in the Downloader’s preference window.  From within that window you can click the button “Shop Amazon MP3 Store”. This will automatically open your default browser to the store.

In order to configure the tool click on the File menu and then select Preferences. From within this window you can configure the following:

• Download directory.
• Automatically check for updates.
• Proxy settings.

And that’s it. But what more would you need to configure for such a simple tool? The only option I always change, by default, is the Download Directory. I tend to change this to the directory used by my multimedia player so I don’t always have to add the new media to the player when I download something. Of course, in order to have this work you have to have your media player set up to automatically scan for new files.

Final thoughts

If you are a Linux user, and a purchaser of digital music, you should do yourself a favor and give the Amazon MP3 Downloader a try. If for another other reason, all Linux users should give it a go in order to show support for Amazon’s support for Linux.

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The analysis will display the total number of files and the number of fragmented files on the PC system. Auslogics Disk Defrag can then defragment the selected hard drives. A new feature is the option to optimize the fragmentation by consolidating free space by placing all files on the disk contiguously.

The top menu contains several additional options, namely the option to defragment a file or folder and to change the process priority of the defragmentation.

The defragmentation can be paused and resumed anytime. One interesting option is the defragmented file view which makes it possible to take a look at all defragmented files of the selected hard drive. Most changes have been made to the core including performance improvements to the defragmentation process, better tie-ins with the Windows Task Scheduler or better processing of files that are locked by the computer system.

Auslogics Disk Defrag is available as an installer or portable version. It can be downloaded from the developer’s website where it is available for all Microsoft operating systems that have been released since Windows XP including Windows 7 and Windows Vista. Interested users can take a closer look at the release notes to read about all of the changes that have been added to the disk defragmentation software. (via Download Squad)

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Martin has posted his concerns about Chrome OS in his insightful “Google Chrome OS: My concerns“. I am in full accord with Martins’ take on cloud computing. But instead of discussing my feelings on the cloud or why we need another OS, I thought it would be beneficial to take a look at a running instance of the Google Chrome OS. I will preface this by saying the OS is in the very early stages of development. But even with the early stages it is quite obvious where this fledgling operating system is heading.

Getting and “installing”

In case you are interested in trying Chrome OS out you can with the help of either VirtualBox or VMware. Since we’ve covered VirtualBox here on Ghacks (read my article “Install VirtualBox with USB Support” to learn how to install VirtualBox) I will show you how to get Chrome running with that application.

After you have VirtualBox up and running you will need to download an image file to use. I have tried both the Chrome OS VirtualBox image and the VMware image on VirtualBox. The results of the VirtualBox image was a black screen that wouldn’t boot. The VMware image, however, was able to successfully boot. So it is my recommendation that you hop over to the Google Chrome page on Gdgt and download the VMware image. You will have to register on the site in order to get to the downloads page.

The download is just over 300 MB and will come in zip form. After you unzip the file you will have a vmdk file ready to use. What you will need to do is move that file to your VirtualBox hard disk directory with the command:

mv *vmdk ~/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/

When that file is properly located you can then create a new virtual machine using that image as your hard disk.

What you get

Figure 1

When Chrome OS boots (and it does so fairly quickly) you will be at a login prompt. It shouldn’t surprise you to find out the login/password is your GMail username/password credentials. As you can see, in Figure 1, your Google Chrome OS experience will very closely resemble the experience you have in Google Chrome – the browser.

But what else can you do? So far not much. I have read about application panels, but it seems as if you have to have a google.com login to experience them. I am, sadly enough, only the holder of a gmail.com login so I can not witness, first hand, some of the other features of the OS. Without having that login there is so little to the OS, in its current state, that it seems nothing more than a web browser running without an apparent operating system (which I believe is the point).

One of the few features of the OS I have managed to find is the ability to pin a page to a tab. What this effectively does is allow you to create a tab dedicated to a page (or Google application). For example: If you use Calendar, Mail, and Documents frequently you could pin each of these tools to their own tabs so that, in order to use a tool, you only have to click that that tools’ tab.

It should be pretty obvious what the intention of the Google Chrome OS is – a foolproof, web-based, single minded operating system who’s experience will only be as good as the applications available to it. This type of operating system seems as if it wants to take the metaphor of the mobile OS and put it square in the middle of your desktop. But with the way the web experience is growing vs. the computing habits of the average user – it makes perfect sense. You have a stripped down OS that can do everything you need to do without having anything on the periphery to confuse or confound the user.

“Features”

Figure 2

After playing around with the OS I have found a few features in place that are usable. You can add a compact navigation bar (see Figure 2). By default this bar (text area to the left in Figure 2) is not there. You have to click on the Options menu and select “Compact Nav Bar” for this to appear. But where is the Options menu? Take a look in Figure 2. The downward-pointing arrow in the far right corner is clicked in order to reveal the Options. You will be surprised to see that this menu is very similar to the Google Chrome Options menu.

As I mentioned earlier, you can pin a page to a tab. Say you use Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Documents frequently. Instead of creating bookmarks for these pages, all you need to do is open that page up, right click the tab, and select Pin Tab. This will create a tab for that page (or App if you will). Now, as Google Chrome OS is very much in the early stages, these pinned tabs will disappear upon reboot.

Final thoughts

It’s only a start, but the Google Chrome OS has all of the underpinnings of something that could have remarkable impact on a very specific application. I wouldn’t necessarily suggest using this early release, but when it hits beta, it will certainly be worth a try.

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Another difference that becomes obvious right away is the support for both Windows and Linux operating systems whereas Ninite only supports Windows. AllMyApps on the other hand makes it more difficulty to finish the process, especially at first run. The user needs to download the application and install it on the computer system. An account at the website needs to be registered afterwards. Once that is done it comes down to selecting the applications that should be installed on the user system.

That selection takes more time compared to Ninite as the developers have listed them in categories with no apparent option to view all at once. It usually takes a few clicks to add an application to the list of applications. AllMyApps offers more applications than Ninite does. Both seem to provide access to popular applications such as CCleaner, Google Talk, Paint.net or ImgBurn to name a few.

The applications need to be transferred to the installed application. The web browser will display a launch application dialog (Firefox does at least, not tested in other web browsers) with the AllMyApps application preselected. Security software of the operating system, like UAC in Windows, might also display a prompt that needs to be accepted before the data can be transferred. The program will then display the applications in its interface giving the user the option to cancel or start the installation.

A click on start will initiate the download of the setups and afterwards the installation of the selected software programs without further user interaction. Users who want to install multiple applications at once now have two programs to chose one. Ninite works only in Windows and does not offer as many applications but is less complicated to use. AllMyApps is compatible with Windows and Ubuntu Linux, offers more applications to install but makes it harder to install the applications due to the registration and software selection process.

Users who want to try out AllMyApps can visit the project’s homepage to do so.

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Here it is possible to change the output directory and video bitrate before the queued videos are processed. Advanced users can edit batch files with advanced settings that are located in the program’s installation directory. These batch files contain the default configuration for the video to mkv conversion. The standard settings produce great results but advanced users might want to tweak the settings further to improve the quality of the output further.

Video To MKV will automatically detect several subtitle formats (srt, idx, sub) which are then automatically embedded in the mkv file that is created. The software program supports multiple audio channels as well.

Video To MKV is an easy to use program. All it takes to convert videos to the mkv format is to drag and drop them into the interface to process them one after the other. Advanced users can tweak the settings in the supplied batch files. Not the most comfortable way of editing the video conversion settings but better than no options to tweak them at all.

The software is available for download at the developer’s website. It is compatible with most versions of Microsoft Windows and does not need any additional software installed to function properly.

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Torrent Fetcher uses a basic interface that contains both the torrents search engine and the results listings. It is possible to enter a search phrase and start the search for torrents right away or configure some of the advanced options like the number of results that should be retrieved, the torrent download directory or a specific category that should be searched to avoid that unrelated torrents are displayed in the search result listing. Up to 1000 results can be displayed by the software. Categories include the usual assortment of games, tv shows, movies, software and music that one finds in almost every torrent search engine on the Internet.

Torrents in the search results are displayed with their name, size, seeders, peers and date it was added to the database. Torrents are color coded so that the user can see on first glance if a torrent is well seeded or not.

A double-click on any file will download the torrent to the local computer system. Some Bittorrent clients can be configured to monitor directories for torrents. The programs could therefor be configured to start the downloads of the files right after the download of the torrent file has finished if the client supports it. There is also an option to automatically launch downloaded torrents which is another way of adding them directly after download the Bittorrent application.

The developer of Torrent Fetcher could improve the software program by adding the following features to it:

• The ability to retrieve additional information about a torrent. It is currently not possible to see where a torrent originated from.
• The option to download multiple torrents at once.
• Search filters like excluding words from the search results or searching for an exact phrase.

Torrent Fetcher is a comfortable alternative to searching for torrents on websites. It does not offer the same amount of information that those websites usually offer on the other hand. This is something that the developer should consider improving on.

The software program is available for download at the developer’s website. It is compatible with most versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

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Chrome OS will be minimalistic which has the advantages that it will boot fast. Several security concepts like sandboxing processes or verifying core systems during startup make it harder to attack and less likely to spread.

There is one premise though that users have to understand. Chrome OS is not aiming for the same market that Microsoft is targeting with Windows or Apple is targeting with Mac OS. At least not in the years to come. Why? Because it is to limited. Here are a few examples:

• Cloud based data storage means that an Internet connection is required to access the data. Google probably plans to make it possible to store data on the local computer system (Google Gears?) so that it can be accessed without Internet connection. This does however mean that a fast connection is required to be able to upload, download and sync the data. It could on the other hand be the perfect system for users who want to use it for very specific operations, i.e. banking, chatting or social networking to name a few.
• Entertainment: If you want to play that 10 Gigabyte ultra-HD video sitting on your desktop you can do so by clicking on it. How will this work if the video is in the cloud? What about an audio collection? This could become really problematic if data cannot be stored offline, especially for users with slow Internet connections. But then again, who says that this is one of the applications of the OS?
• Games are another area where Chrome OS will not cut it. You can play browser games sure but that’s it for now.

There are however some advantages. This (likely) includes lower hardware requirements to run the operating system (not only cpu or memory but also hard drive space, optical drives), data backups that are taken care of or a possible lower battery usage for the system.

Chrome OS will be a very specialized operating system in my opinion and not the Microsoft Windows killer that many users hope it to become.

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