Smuxi is an irssi-inspired, flexible, user-friendly and cross-platform IRC client for sophisticated users, targeting the GNOME desktop.

Smuxi is based on the client-server model: The core application (engine) can be placed onto a server which is connected to the Internet around-the-clock; one or more frontends then connect to the core. This way, the connection to IRC can be kept up even when all frontends have been closed. The combination of screen and irssi served as example for this architecture.

Smuxi also supports the regular single application mode. This behaves like a typical IRC client; it doesn’t need separate core management and utilizes a local engine that is used by the local frontend client.

Smuxi currently supports the following features

• Detachable Frontend (frontend can be detached from a smuxi-server)
• Multiple Server Support (you can connect to more than one server)
• Unified Nickname Colors (identical color across channels and networks)
• Caret-Mode (keyboard navigation through messages)
• Regular and Bash-Style Nickname Completion
• Full Keyboard Control
• Startup Commands (when Smuxi starts)
• On Connect Commands (when connecting to a server)
• Message / Command History
• Configurable Encoding (ISO-8859-1/15, UTF-8, etc)
• Configurable Command Character
• Auto Connect (automatically connect to defined servers)
• Quick Connect Dialog (simply connect to any server)
• Open / Join Chat Dialog
• Find Group Chat Dialog
• Sorted and Reoderable Tabs
• Colors are checked and adjusted for optimium contrast
• Clickable URLs
• Word Wrapping
• Logging Support
• Fully customizable filters to ignore messages or events
• Configurable Highlight Words
• Markerlines which divide old messages from new messages
• Themeing Support
  • Configurable Font
  • Foreground / Background Color
  • Userlist Position
  • Tab Colors / Position
  • Configurable Timestamps
  • Configurable Tray-Icon Support
• Translations
  • British English
  • Czech
  • Catalan (patial)
  • Danish
  • Finnish (patial)
  • French
  • German
  • Italian
  • Portuguese
  • Spanish (patial)
  • Swedish
• Multiple Network Protocols
  • IRC Support
    • Stripping Colors and/or Formattings from Messages
    • Showing mIRC Colors
    • Splitting oversized messages
    • Channel List / Search
    • CTCP Support including a Menu
    • Invite To Menu
    • Lag Indicator
  • Twitter Support
    • Reading and Posting Tweets
    • Friends Timeline
    • Replies
    • Direct Messages

Themeing & UI

Love the way it handles tabs and userlist. First of all, userlist can show on left side or right side. Tabs can be showed at upper, bottom, right and left side. My pic above has tabs at left side. Colors and fonts are changeable too. background images and tab colours are changeable.

Download

To download Smuxi for Arch, Foresight, Debian, OpenSuse, Gentoo, FreeBSD… Go to: http://www.smuxi.org/page/Download

F-Spot

F-Spot supports 16 common files types, including JPEG, GIF, TIFF, RAW, and others.

Import your photos from your hard drive, camera (including PTP type), or iPod.
Creating a CD of photos is just clicks away. Simply select the photos you wish to have on CD, and choose “Export to CD” from the main menu.

If you have a Flickr, 23, Picasa Web or SmugMug account, F-Spot can export photos to it, while optionally resizing your selection, and preserving tags and metadata.

You can also export to Gallery or O.r.i.g.i.n.a.l. powered websites, or a nicely themed static webpage.

Shotwell

Shotwell Features:
1. Import: Import photos from folders or from any digital camera supported by gPhoto.

2. Organize: Shotwell automatically groups photos taken at the same time. You can also use tags to organize your photo collection.

3. Edit: You can rotate, crop, reduce red-eye, and adjust the exposure, saturation, tint, and temperature of each photo.

4. Publish: Publish photos to Facebook, Flickr and Picasa Web Albums.

Rapid Photo Downloader

This one isn’t like the 2 others, as this application is a pure import application. So if you only plan to import photos/videos, then i would go for this application. No question about it.

Conclusion

If you need a great feature rich application, then F-spot is the one for you. Specially the version 0.71 that was recently released.

If you only need to grab a few photos and easy to upload them to facebook or flickr, then Shotwell is the one to use. It’s more slimmed, but remember it cant handle as much file types that f-spot do.

If you need a pure import application, then go for rapid-photo-downloader.

To install these ones in Foresight, open terminal and write:

sudo conary update f-spot

sudo conary update shotwell

sudo conary update rapid-photo-downloader

The version of the applications we got today is:
f-spot 0.7.1
rapid-photo-downloader 0.3.0
shotwell 0.6.1

Unlike Rhythmbox, Banshee or itunes, Xnoise uses a tracklist centric design. The tracklist is a list of video or music tracks that are played one by one without being removed (right side of window). This gives you the possibility to enqueue any track in any order, regardless if they are on the same album or not. The tracks can be reordered at any time via drag and drop.

The media browser (left side of the window) contains all available media in a hierarchical tree structure of the available metadata. It is easy to find a single track, artist or album by going through this tree or by just entering a search term. From the media browser, music or videos can be dragged into the tracklist to every position.

Single or multiple tracks, streams, albums or artists can be dragged onto the tracklist and be reordered. Within the playing track, it’s possible to jump to every position by clicking the position bar.

Xnoise can play every kind of audio/video data that gstreamer can handle.

There is a plugin interface available. Plugins are optionally build, if their dependencies are fulfilled. By now there are already some plugins, e.g. a plugin that downloads cover images from lastFm or one that shows notifications, one that monitores file changes in your local media directory, …

A local database (sqlite) is used for caching the metadata and media locations. Song tags are imported via taglib. That gives Xnoise a great speed.

If you hover the album image for a audio track, xnoise will show the image in big size in the video area

To install it in Foresight, open up a terminal and write:

sudo conary update {xnoise,xnoise-plugins-core}=@fl:2-devel

Im referring to: http://vinci.wordpress.com/2010/06/17/i-declare-foresight-linux-as-dead/

Foresight is very alive and active, the only problem is that we don’t have released any official iso lately. Mostly because of PackageKit issues.

The worst part of that blog post above, is that he hasn’t even tried to get any information about Foresigt status today at all. He just looked at when a new iso was released and went from there.

Anyway, new FFmpeg and x264 is now in Foresight. Here is the Changelog from FFmpeg.

x264 site, to get more information what’s been happening lately.

Few other applications that’s also got updated recently:

Transmission 2.0

avidemux 2.5.3

ffmpeg2theora 0.26

xmms2 0.7

ffmpegthumbnailer 2.0.2

aqualung 0.9 Beta 11

empathy 2.30.1.1

whole gstreamer, gst-plugins-**** got updated to latest avaiable versions.

Wine 1.2 rc4

Homebank 4.3

Bluefish 2.0.1

Nvidia 256.35

Upcoming version bumps:

Chromium rev: 50314 or newer.

This is a gnome panel applet that lets you switch between open windows using icons.

The pic above shows different ways it can show the running applications in your Linux.

It can be very useful if you dont use any lower panel in Gnome. Will be soon in Foresight for testing.

Update: We had 0.24 in FL:2-devel repo, rewrote recipe to use svn. Built from 2010.04.11 today. Hopefully it will work alot better than 0.24

So at this moment, we have revision 37 available.

sudo conary update talika=@fl:2-devel

A list i personally recommend.

Pic editor

GIMP

Show pics

Eye Of GNOME
GPicView

BitTorrent

rTorrent
Deluge
KTorrent
Transmission

Burning softwares

Brasero
Gnome Baker
K3B

E-post

Gmail Notify
Mozilla Thunderbird
Evolution

FTP

gFTP
FileZilla

Direct Connect

LinuxDC++

IRC

XChat
Irssi

Komprimering

Fileroller

Music players

Amarok
Beep Media Player
MPD
Audacious
Rhythmbox

Office

AbiWord
Open Office
Koffice

Scrobbling

Last.fm

SFV Checksum

Parano

Record desktop

RecordMyDesktop

Message clients

aMSN
Pidgin
Kopete
Emesene

RSS

Lifera
akregator
RSSOwl

Texteditors

GEdit
Nano

Videobackup

OGMrip

Video players

VLC
Totem
MPlayer

Virtual

VirtualBox

Web browsers

Firefox
Swiftfox
Swiftweasel

Eyecandy

AWN Avant Manager
Conky
Compiz Fusion
gDesklets
Screenlets

Various

Gcolor2

GUI and script for PulseAudio users that will set up system-wide equalized audio, without needing to restart PulseAudio or any running applications.

Advantages:

• Configurable 15 band equalizer for PulseAudio;
• You can enable or disable equalized audio on-the-fly, without having to restart any running applications;
• Offers the choice of using equalized audio for the current session or permanently;
• No need to edit any configuration files by hand;
• User-customizable: you can use any LADSPA audio processing plugin (which can apply various audio effects beyond equalization);
• Packaged as a .deb file for easy installation;
• Graphical User Interface.

Usage:
Open the PulseAudio Equalizer (Applications -> Sound & Video). The interface should be fairly self-explanatory:

• 15 frequency bands you can adjust to your liking;
• Preamp will boost your equalized volume (as a multiplier value from 1x to 4x);
• Presets are included (based on VLC’s built-in equalizer), or you can choose to save own favourite configuration as a new preset;
• EQ Enabled will enable the equalizer in the current session (which applies to all running applications);
• Keep Settings will configure your PulseAudio configuration to remain permanently equalized (and therefore, you won’t need to run the PulseAudio Equalizer interface each time you login);
• Advanced menu options so that you can reset all settings (useful for troubleshooting) or delete user presets;
• Apply Settings will apply all changes.

If you already use fl:2-devel repo for your Foresight, just open terminal and write:

sudo conary update pulseaudio-equalizer

If you use fl:2-qa or fl:2 repo, then write instead:

sudo conary update {pulseaudio-equalizer,ladspa-swh-plugins}=@fl:2-devel

Any problems with pulseaudio-equalizer, plz fill an issue at: https://issues.foresightlinux.org

If its pulseaudio-equalizer itself that may be busted, look in this thread.

Right now, the only hacked gnome-shell is in my personal repo. The installation is here. So it will only work if you use my version of Gnome-Shell. Or you will end up with conflicts.

To install the forest theme, open a Terminal and write:

sudo conary update gnome-shell-theme-forest=zinden.rpath.org@fl:2-devel

Then restart desktop or if you already using gnome now, push alt+F2 and write r or restart.

Thats it, be happy with your new gnome-Shell theme.

This will overwrite the old theme thats black, so if you want to get default again. Then you need to uninstall the theme and sync gnome-shell again.

sudo conary erase gnome-shell-theme-forest

sudo conary sync gnome-shell

Changes (since version 2.28.0) in Gnome Shell include:

• Redo the application browser to use a grid of icons
• Initial version of the extension system
• Initial support for RTL layout in ST and the shell
• Add undo capability to overview, e.g., when removing favorites
• New workspace switcher popup
• Work on visual appearance to match mockups
• Port most of existing code to CSS
• Show a scaled-up excerpt from the application item in the panel
• Minimize windows to ‘Activities’ button
• Use a fixed ordering for well-known icons in the system tray
• Nicer animation of hidden windows when transitioning to/from the overview
• Draw a ripple when the hot corner is hit
• Completion to the Alt-F2 run dialog
• And many more

A complete list of changes can be found HERE.

The latest version of Gnome Shell also adds the ability to set your presence to the user status menu, yet another feature which will remind you of Ubuntu. I still don’t understand what’s going on here, why are so many Ubuntu features replicated in Gnome Shell?

Important note: due to problems encountered in testing GNOME Shell against Clutter 1.1, gnome-shell-2.29.0 still requires Clutter 1.0

If you missed what Gnome-Shell is, here is some info:

Site: Gnome-Shell
pdf file: here

Brief info
The GNOME Shell redefines user interactions with the GNOME desktop. In particular, it offers new paradigms for launching applications, accessing documents, and organizing open windows in GNOME. Later, it will introduce a new applets eco-system and offer new solutions for other desktop features, such as notifications and contacts management. The GNOME Shell is intended to replace functions handled by the GNOME Panel and by the window manager in previous versions of GNOME. The GNOME Shell has rich visual effects enabled by new graphical technologies.

Pictures:

Video:
From Vimeo

And there is alot of youtube videos…..

How to install it:
Foresight Linux
Foresight Linux – Bleeding edge Gnome-Shell

Source code for Gnome-Shell 2.29.0 : Here

There is also Themes available for Gnome-Shell, will write about it in my next post.

• Rolling updates
• Rollback feature
• Conary as package manager
• Standalone, not based on any other Linux dist.
• Easy to create own packages [2], maintain packagers and create a own repository address to use/share.
• 32bit and 64bit always available. i686 system.

i686 is a much more modern architecture. It includes practically every processor that’s Pentium II or better. x86_64 is a 64 bit extension to the x86 architecture. x86_64 processors can still run 32 bit operating systems (e.g. i386) if you so choose, but they’re also capable of running 64 bit operating systems.

Watch the presentation that Michael Johnson gave at FOSDEM 2008 (follow along with his slides)

Watch how fast a user in Foresight can update a package to newer version.

That’s little info in generally. Let’s dig little deeper now.

At anytime an update fails Conary will rollback to the previous job leaving your system dep complete and fully functional.

How Conary Organizes Packages

If you use debian or rpm repositories…you know that inside a repository directory “stable” (as an example) are all the stable packages for your distribution. The packages are versioned according to their upstream version (if the repository maintainers are sane) and maybe arch and revision number. This is done by hand. It is managed by hand. If developers/packagers cross names between repositories you are brought into dependency problems. To illustrate this concept, if you and I both packaged firefox3 and named it accordingly…and someone used both your and my repository…our versions would conflict because the packaging system wouldn’t know which one to install.

Conary takes the manual operation from this…if you use a Conary based system, yourrepositories ARE VERSIONED. In other words, the repositories aren’t static directories that contain a bunch of packages…they are versioned branches that contain components of software.

These components (packages) are also versioned according to upstream version…but revision is handled automatically by Conary…no manual process. This eliminates the possibility of having two packages named the same exact thing in different repositories. In other words, if Joe Schmoe is packaging Liferea for his apt.joeschmoe.com repository and names his package the same thing as say Joe Smith’s package for Liferea in his apt.joesmith.com repository we run into problems. With conary this NEVER WILL HAPPEN…EVER. This kills about 90% of dependency problems all together.

But what about arch? Arch is architecture…32bit or 64bit…PPC and more. Once again, you’re bit by the possibility of conflicting names across repositories. You’re also limited in the name because a developer has to put the architecture INSIDE THE NAME. Take a look at liferea as an example: liferea-1.2.2-2.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm. Is this easy for an end user to understand? Is it the same as liferea-1.2.2-2.el5.rf.x86-64.rpm?

Conary takes a different approach. Each package has a ‘flavor’ that it is ‘cooked’ (committed) in. There may be a 64bit flavor, 32bit flavor, Xen flavor, and so on. This flavor is visible to the user only if the user requests to see it…and it is NOT inside the name of the package. The package is still called, simply enough, liferea. Revision number, arch, upstream version, etc…are all handled automatically by Conary.

You can see how creating and maintaining software would rely less on a manual process and more on automatic source controlled one with Conary. You can also see how organized Conary is with its packages. (this chapter comes from devnet)

Conary treats packages as change-sets and not as a bundle of files. This means that when updating a package, Conary communicates with the repositories to determine what needs to change on the system to install the new package and only downloads the bits needed for that change. There are many advantages to this approach, but most visible to the user is the efficiency in bandwidth and speed.

When updating a large package for the first time, you will essentially download the full package, however, when updating in the future the downloads could be significantly smaller. Here is an example: installing Abiword 2.2.6 on a system for the first time would be approximately a 15MB download, however updating to Abiword 2.2.7 is only 2.4MB.

How can I be sure things still work if I remove a component from my system?

First, Conary warns you if you are about to remove a component that is used to resolve a dependency elsewhere on the system. Conary keeps track of these dependencies for you. Second, you can use the –deps option to display dependency-related information. Furthermore, you can also use –file-deps to list component dependencies at the file level. Results display what the trove “requires” to resolve its own dependencies and “provides” to resolve other packages’ dependencies. You don’t have to track this information unless you really want to do so; trusting Conary’s warnings is usually enough to prevent mistakes when installing and removing software.

What’s that colon for? Is “chromium:runtime” different than the “chromium” package?

It is different, but part of the same package. When the package name is followed by a colon and another name,

such as “chromium:runtime” and “chromium: doc,” this references a component.

When the package is first built, Conary separates out the files into components.

Each component represents some logical grouping of files within the package,

such as everything needed to run the software or the documentation for how to use the software.

This gives the flexibility for other packages to resolve dependencies by bringing in components rather than entire packages.

It also gives users the freedom to uninstall components that are just taking up space without removing an entire package.

But, enough about how awesome Conary can be.

So unlike other packaging systems, where you might have 2 packages, firefox and firefox-devel, Conary would have one package with the devel headers split into firefox: devel. This is a great thing, you no longer end up installing -devel packages from random repos in your sources.list just because it looks like a newer version. The devel headers are just part of the same package, you just don’t have to have them installed. These components combined with rich dependancy information really shines.

Info about some packages

There is few applications that makes a user happy with a Linux dist, so here is a few that works perfectly with Foresight:

Chromium: Updates almost every week. Flash, embedded trailers works out of the box.

Nvidia/ATI: Easy to install, but legazy drivers is little harder. But works to get them in too.

Gnome-Shell: Stable gnome-shell available and latest git gnome-shell can be easily installed. (very easy to go back to stable when testing unstable)

Wine: When installed, everything works as it should with wine. 32bit and 64bit works fine from start.

Create own packages

Maybe sounds hard, but think again. It’s very easy.

1: Setup environment

2: Full packaging example

And as you saw in the video earlier in this post, an update of a package can go really fast

What do you really get from creating own packages?

First of all, very easy to maintain and update. Usually updating before every linux dist out there. Very easy to uninstall a package. Very easy to switch from stable repo of a package to unstable and back again. Easy to change parameters for a package and repack it for your needs.

And as soon you see a new application, like radiotray, you can easily make a package and test it. As soon you are done testing, unistall it as it never was installed. Or even better, let Foresight users also use it and suggest it to be added in Foresight repo. (can offcourse be installed from your personal repo too)

Download

Test iso files:

If you want to use test iso, then after installation and first time you boot up Foresight, you need to change installation label in it. To make it use “test” repo instead of stable repo.

Open terminal and write:

sudo sed -i -e 's/fl:2/fl:2-qa/g' /etc/conary/config.d/foresight

To get started with Foresight Linux:

Look at foresight userguide at system > Foresight userguide

To get common codecs, open terminal and write: sudo conary update group-codecs

To install Nvidia drivers: sudo conary update nvidia nvidia-kernel

sudo nvidia-xconfig

To install ATI drivers: sudo conary update ati-fglrx ati-fglrx-kernel

sudo aticonfig --initial --input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf

Search after applications or browse after applications: rBuilder online

Some known problems:

Packagekit, the gui for conary isnt working as it should.

This is also holding up the new release of a new iso for stable repo.

First time when trying to update system can fail, a restart of system will fix it.