In my last post about everyone’s preferred music player, I mentioned that I was dying to try out the Linux player Amarok because I’d heard great things about. There’s just one problem: I’m a Windows user.

Luckily, the guys at Amarok have decided to give the Windows users a taste of what this music player is all about. The process of porting Amarok to Windows is well under way and seems to be going quite well.

All their hard work is paying off. They recently released a version of the program for Windows users to take out for a test run. There is one small thing though. You can’t just download the program. You also have to have the KDE installer and all its binaries.

continue reading "Amarok is now Available for Windows"

Open Office 3.0 beta has been released by the Open Office development team and is ready to be tested by the large community. The biggest change in my opinion is the support for Microsoft Office 2007 files, you know those docx, xlsx and pptx type of files that could not be opened not long ago and caused a lot of frustration by users who received such files from colleagues or friends. Other additions are Mac OS X and OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 standard support.

The beta can be downloaded and installed on computers that run Windows, Linux, Solaris or Mac OS X Intel Aqua. Localized versions are available as well and can be downloaded from the external mirrors that host all localized builds.

A Beta page lists all of the features that have already been implemented in the current Beta of Open Office 3. It divides the changes in New Core Features, like the import filter for Microsoft Office 2007 formats, Core Features that have been introduced in minor releases since the release of Open Office 2.0 and Features that have been released as extensions or complimentary tools.

continue reading "Open Office 3.0 beta released"

Who would have thought that Ubuntu would become one of the most popular, or the most popular, Linux distribution in a matter of years ? Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy Heron is out and can be downloaded from the official Ubuntu website. Am I the only one thinking that this naming convention is utterly stupid and causes confusion by new users ? I have two questions that can hopefully be answered by veteran Ubuntu users.

The first question, why is it Ubuntu 8.04 and not Ubuntu 8 ? There better be a good reason for the .04 at the end of every release. Second, what’s with the “funny” codenames ? I personally would like to see a release named Ubuntu 8 which would perfectly be enough. It’s short and everyone knows what it means.

The releases are available as torrents which should be used to take away some load from the main website and servers. Here is the torrent link for i386 and AMD-64. Those torrents can be downloaded with full speed, at least that’s the case currently.

continue reading "Ubuntu 8 is out"

I totally forgot to post the software updates article yesterday and apologize for that. This week was rather eventful with updates to several popular applications including three Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Open Suse and Damn Small Linux).

A short explanation for those that never followed one of my software updates articles before. I collect information about software updates and compile a list of all applications that have been updated in the last seven days every Wednesday. Only software that has been mentioned before here at Ghacks will be included in the list to make sure that it consists exclusively of high quality free applications.

The application of the week is Opera 9.5 beta 2 simply because I think it’s time to push Opera to become the third browser with a bigger market share. The browser deserves that spot and should have a marketing share of at least 25% and not the 5% or so that it has now.

continue reading "Software Updates Week 17"

Animated gif files are a great way to get your profile pic or avatar to really stand out from the rest of the crowd. I’ve seen software that will make gifs for you but Noah has figured out a method to create animated gifs from a video clip using two of the most popular open source programs, Mplayer and Gimp. Noah’s method is primarily written for the Linux user but it works fine on Windows as well.

Before I give Noah’s method, I’d like to mention that there is a way to create animated gifs directly with MPlayer. However, the resultant gif file can sometimes be very strange-looking so it’s not very reliable. Anyway, once you figure out what video clip to use, let’s begin. Fire up MPlayer and switch to command-line operation. Then type in the following command:

mplayer -ao null -loop 0 -ss 0:11:22 -endpos 5 file.avi

continue reading "Create Animated Gifs from Movie Clips"