Web Programming - NVU

Officially at verion 1.0, NVU (pronounced N-view, for a "new view") is an exceptional web editing suite that will comfortably rival the likes of Frontpage or Dreamweaver. All to often a 'switch' to Linux from the infamous alternative seems daunting to new users, and such users have often apprehensively considered the transition to mean a loss of everything familiar. The almighty Photoshop® and Macromedia® commandeer the pole position for media applications simply as no other decent software alternatives seem to exist. The beauty of the open source community is they listen, they use, they know. If it doesn't exist, it will. And when it does you can be sure there will be dozens of variations. Thankfully to Linspire Linux we have an open source web editor that is so fully functional, it has all the features of a competent coder and all the simplicity of push-button publishing with drag and drop, menu boxes, easy table formation and alignment to name but a few of NVU's features. This is a very impressive and much awaited release that is also a 'doddle' to install. Make the transition first, and the rest will be there. After all, Open Source 'is' a community!



More screenshots here.
About NVU.

This post was created with NVU.

Amule - Serious P2P

External hard-drives, flash media and DVD writing software to name but a few. All of this storage space and for what? Files. Large quantities of files. Although frowned upon by most Western societies, is it not completely outlawed and some countries still won't touch the topic of peer-to-peer (P2P) regardless of outside pressures. So what's the best tool for the job?

Lmule was the first attempt at porting the ever popular edonkey to Linux. With it's buggy interface and constant crashes as well as dependency problems, most users favoured Gnutella or Xmule. Gnutella, the client for Gnome Desktops, although popular, did not have the feature rich interface we are familiar with on edonkey and emule which left Xmule the choice for a while. Based on a widget set to emulate the windows environment and to ease the codeweavers job or porting edonkey, Xmule would function reasonably well on most stable distros. Very similar in use to Windows emule, Xmule could get the job done.

Time passed but no-one forgot lmule, quietly in development. As distro's have hardened and become the exceptional platforms that they currently are with greater integration, more bug fixes and better features, Amule has come back to light as a truly remarkable P2P client.



More screenshots here.
About Amule.

Amule is every bit as powerful and configurable as Emule, even Emule-Plus. Upload and download monitoring statistics, easy server adding and automatic recognition of and replacement of corrupt parts. Amule certainly deserves a spot on your hard drive! Amule now works from commandline and remotely mking this a very customisable application and completely feature rich.

Full featured powerful media player

The Amarok Team proudly announces their come-back with a thunderstrike: Presenting you the first beta release of amaroK 1.2. Fresh blood, fresh ideas, make this release rather exciting. Enjoy it!

amaroK is the audio player for KDE. amaroK is a full featured audio player that is both powerful and easy to use. It is the media centre of choice!



More screenshots here.

Do you find yourself stuck searching through endless menus just to add music to your playlist? With amaroK you can simply drag and drop music into the playlist. Maybe you are just looking for that one song from the thousands in your collection. amaroK's collection browser with its search bar will help you find that one song in a matter of seconds.

So it seems amaroK has the same old features found in the average audio player, but we did not stop there. One look at the context browser and you will see why amaroK is one step ahead of the rest. The context browser features a database that is compiled on the fly to provide you with constantly updated statistics about your playlist. The context browser can also display the album cover images you have making it not only informative but also fun to look at.

Do you already have many different playlists but can never decide on which one you want to use? Then the playlist browser is just for you. Loading your saved playlists in the playlist browser is as easy as a single keystroke.

Along with aRts, amaroK also supports the GStreamer, NMM, and xine sound servers making it the most advanced audio player available for KDE. amaroK is smart, it's sexy, it's clever.

Professional desktop publishing

In a word.. Scribus! Whoever said that the move to Linux would require giving up all of your favorite applications was probably quoting something read back in the 1980s. For a serious operating system, Linux is most certainly humble enough to satisfy the desktop user.



Go here for a selection of older screenshots.

If you are an avid Adobe® InDesign user, you would be far from unimpressed with Scribus. Now at version 1.2, Scribus is a Page Layout program for GNU/Linux®, similar to Adobe® PageMaker, QuarkXPress or Adobe® InDesign, except that it is published under the GNU GPL.

With the latest release of Scribus, Linux and Unix desktop users have a user friendly, but powerful Desktop Publishing application capable of a broad set of DTP needs. Started with humble beginnings as a Python program to make menus, Scribus has been transformed into a young but rapidly maturing DTP application with numerous professional features, as well as some unique capabilities. Already, in use from everything to club newsletters to small newspaper production to animated interactive PDF presentations a la Power point. or Open Office Impress. Other uses are creating corporate stationery and brochures, small posters and other documents which need flexible layout and/or the ability to output to professional quality image-setting equipment.

While the goals of the program are for ease of use and simple easy to understand tools, Scribus offers support for professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, sophisticated "press-ready" PDF creation, EPS and PDF import/export and creation of color separations and optionally very complete ICC color management - thanks to littlecms, the first for an open source application.

Scribus supports many major graphic formats including most all of the standard ones used in DTP in addition to SVG import and export.

Printing is done via its own internal level 3 PS driver, including support for font embedding and sub-setting with True Type, Type 1 and Open Type fonts. The internal driver fully supports Level 2 Postscript constructs and very large set of Level 3.

PDF support includes transparency, encryption and a large set of the PDF 1.4 spec including interactive PDF's form fields, annotations and bookmarks. No other application is capable of producing such a wide range of PDF features on Linux, Unix like operating systems.

The file format is based on XML and fully documented. Unlike proprietary binary file formats, even damaged documents, may be partially recovered with a simple text editor - sometimes a challenging problem with other page layout programs.

When run with KDE 3.x, Drag and Drop is enabled, as well as inheriting KDE style plug-ins. Thus, for example you can drag and drop from the desktop to the pasteboard easily. There is a drag and drop scrapbook, which can contain frequently used items including text blocks, pictures and custom shapes.

Currently, the most recent version 1.2 of Scribus supports Open Type, True Type and Type1 Postscript fonts.

Get Scribus 1.2 now!

BitTorrent - P2P Filesharing

A very serious application for all you serious downloaders out there. If you are reluctant to make the move to Linux because of the loss of your file sharing applications Emule, or edonkey (to name but two), there is an alternative that is quite simply, better!

Azureus - Java BitTorrent Client provides a bittorrent protocol implementation using the java language, and will therefore run on virtually any java supported platform.

Azureus offers multiple torrent downloads, queing/priority systems (on torrents and files), start/stop seeding options and instant access to numerous pieces of information about your torrents. Azureus now features an embedded tracker easily set up and ready to use.



Click here for more screenshots.

BitTorrent is a content distribution protocol that enables efficient software distribution and peer-to-peer sharing of very large files, such as entire movies and software, by enabling users to serve as network redistribution points. Go here for a basic understanding. Rather than having to send a download to each customer requesting it, the distributor or holder of content sends it to one customer who in turn sends it to other customers who together share the pieces of the download back and forth until everyone has the complete download. This makes it possible for the original server to serve many requests for large files without requiring immense amounts of bandwidth. According to reports, a user may expect to see a full-length movie arrive within a few hours.

BitTorrent's protocol has been described as a "swarming, scatter and gather" file transfer protocol. It was written in the Python programming language by Bram Cohen and is distributed freely under an open source license.

Hot Pick - Image Viewer

If you are a windows user, you may have used ACDSee, a very capable application for viewing images and other various media. If you are switching to Linux, or do not currently use an image viewer on any platform, I recommend installing Xnview for all your picture viewing needs.

This excellent program has great functionality and a familiar interface for those who already use ACDSee. It is by no means a second choice as it is rich with features. Available for download in various sizes, complete, light, plugins etc, and for various platforms.



Feature rich, you can also edit files with a number of editing tools included with the install or even save as and work in binary mode! Typical of the open source community, all you'd expect, and then some! Check it out.

Tux Blog

Welcome to my blog.

I am currently building a Linux site where I will host various things for the new and experienced Linux user. Such things will include, but not be limited to:

• Hot Picks - New releases, Distros, applications plus more, all rated and recommended.
• News history, links and development about all flavours of Linux and it's application, from Pocket Pcs to Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and embedded applications.
• Eventually I will be adding the one thing missing from the Linux world. Screen recorded .avi or Flash animation user guides. After all, a picture says a thousand words! I hope with these to show the basics such as installing an application, filesystem and system familiarity to name but a few.
• Some fun comics, flash and movies of course! (from a linux point of view!)

I hope that this blog will generate some preliminary interest and thoughts. If you have ideas for the up-coming website, please post here. Are you new to Linux? What really frustrates you? General or specific. Post it, and see what happens. All posts are most welcome.

Hottest Pick - For the finest web browsing.

Today's Funnies:

Hilarious WindowsRG - Why you should be using Linux?

Monkey Business - Steve Balmer