And finally, my favorite multimedia player has reached version 1.0

I’ve been a VLC user for a long time, it works great on all platforms. I use it to listen to music and watch videos.

Let’s celebrate together! If you can, consider giving the project a small donation, now is the perfect time!

DOWNLOAD 1.0 NOW

Features:

• Free, Open Source and cross-platform

• Independant of systems codecs to support most video types

• Live recording

• Instant pausing and Frame-by-Frame support

• Finer speed controls

• New HD codecs (AES3, Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, Blu-Ray Linear PCM, Real Video 3.0 and 4.0, …)

• New formats (Raw Dirac, M2TS, …) and major improvements in many formats…

• New Dirac encoder and MP3 fixed-point encoder

• Video scaling in fullscreen

• RTSP Trickplay support

• Zipped file playback

• Customizable toolbars

• Easier encoding GUI in Qt interface

• Better integration in Gtk environments

• MTP devices on linux

• AirTunes streaming

• New skin for the skins2 interface

The ReactOS Team gathered more than 10 years ago to address this problem. I often wonder why they fail to make the headlines with their releases (probably because the project has yet to reach beta stage), as their goal is very useful to the wider open source community: to completely reverse-engineer Redmond’s flagship product, thus providing a working clone of Windows under an open source license. 10 years is a long time and although they failed to deliver version 1.0 in this time, by working closely with the WINE project, they managed to put together a working development version, which is still impressive considering the work reverse-engineering a multi-million-dollar project demands.

I know I’ve written about the project before, but I never did an extensive review. I decided to do it this week, the guys are doing a great job and they certainly deserve a mention.

So let’s see what version 0.3.9 has in store for us, shall we?

The new release is very fast, the minimum requirements are under 32 megabytes of RAM, you will need as many megabytes of hard disk space to download the live image. I took 0.3.9 for a spin using Virtualbox. The LiveCD should work fine too.

Apart from the usual apps and a skin that will make any veteran Windows 95 and 98 user shed a nostalgic tear, the Tango icon theme certainly improves the overall impression. Notice the icons do not have a transparent background. I believe this is a Virtualbox problem, it worked fine using the LiveCD. And what do we have here? Virtual desktops! Yes, ReactOS provides this essential tool out-of-the-box (unlike Windows 7).

ReactOS also features ReactX, which should replace DirectX. It is still in its early stages, but you can see it resembles DirectX very closely, even with the version numbers.

Now let us download some applications! First, we will try out ReactOS’ “Download”, an interface similar to Linux package managers. You simply select the software you wish to install, and the front-end does the rest of the work for you.

Not really a lot of apps available yet, but there is some fun stuff, like Diablo. I downloaded DosBox, Abiword and Firefox (both 2 and 3 are available). Don’t forget, these are all Windows binaries!

The installers worked fine. Now to try the software out!

Firefox 3 was a minor disappointment. Looks like it could not render the CSS. On the other hand, it did actually load the sites. And because there are lots of nice plugins like FireFTP which can replace some desktop apps, making Firefox work well would be a step in the right direction.

I then attempted to run Abiword, a FOSS word processor. In the virtual machine, there were some graphics glitches, but I could write without any problems. The toolbar buttons were a bit funky, too.

So the tested applications managed to run and perform some basic tasks. Even though ReactOS is still in alpha, let us try some untested software and see how it works. I fired up Firefox, downloaded the VLC player installer…

… when suddenly …

You have to admit this is a good Windows clone. Joke aside, I am sure this will see a great deal of improvement throughout the alpha and beta stages.

Since the restart takes about 20 seconds and I was still curious, I rebooted the VM and downloaded the lightweight OffByOne browser (interesting that they included it in Downloads) in order to obtain my VLC executable. This is how the ReactOS File Manager looks like. Like Explorer’s evil twin.

I installed VLC, but sadly it did not run. Of course, I was maybe wrong to choose a multimedia application, though I somehow had confidence in VLC’s excellent programming. However, this is still an alpha-quality operating system and multimedia is probably not their first priority.

I recommend you give ReactOS a try. You will be surprised at how far a community project can come. Programming an entire operating system is not an easy task. The ReactOS Team certainly has the vision, they want to bring you a completely free version of Windows, so you have control over what you run, but do not need to switch to an OS that works different. ReactOS gives you a choice and choice is one the most important aspects of software freedom.

You can view the project roadmap here and if you really like what they are doing, consider donating a few bucks. To download and test ReactOS click here.

I received another guest blog article, so I’m posting this before I start. This very interesting article is by Ryan. Ryan’s other postings are at http://source.kohlerville.com where he mainly posts about problems he runs into at his work.

At my work, I noticed that I work on some documents that I felt needed to be encrypted. Working in a hybrid environment with Gentoo Linux, CentOS Linux, Solaris 10 sparc/i86pc, and Windows, I wanted to pick a program that was open source and can use cross platform if possible. I wanted to encrypt files instead of creating encrypted volumes that I have to mount and then put files into. It gives me an option to e-mail the encrypted files as well.

By default, our Solaris boxes come with /usr/bin/crypt which I can use to encrypt and decrypt files. Looking over the wikipedia entry, it is too cryptographically weak that it could be brute forced. After reading about this, I wanted something that uses the Rijndael cipher, which is much stronger and would take quite awhile to brute force.

Upon my search, I found two different open source programs that hashes the key to 256 bits (2^256 different possibilities):

• ccrypt
• aescrypt

Here’s a quick run down of some pros and cons of each:

ccrypt

Pros:
• Can be compiled/installed on multiple operating systems. Encrypting a file on Linux doesn’t mean it has to be decrypted in Linux. You can use encrypt in Linux and decrypt on Solaris just fine.
• The encryption writes over original file so you don’t leave any plain text copies around.
• The ccat command lets you cat the encrypted file to your screen without leaving plain text copies.
• Can decrypt old UNIX crypt files.
• A ton more options you can do. For example, recurse through directories.

Cons:
• The Windows port needs to have cygwin installed.
• Compiling on UNIX required to do the old ./configure, make , make install. Only a con because of how simple aescrypt was.

aescrypt

Pros:
• Can be compiled/installed on multiple operating systems. Encrypting a file on Linux doesn’t mean it has to be decrypted in Linux. You can use encrypt in Windows and decrypt on Solaris just fine.
• Windows port integrates with the context menu. You can right click a file and choose “AES decrypt” or “AES encrypt”.
• Really simply to compile, just a simple make.
• Has a java library to use for your java programs.

Cons:
• Encrypting a file creates a new file with the extension aes and leaves the plain text file alone.
• Only decrypt and encrypt, no nifty ccat command like in ccrypt.

The real deal breaker to some people though is how aescrypt can integrate in the context menu in Windows while ccrypt has to use cygwin to get it to work. I did not fall into this category as my deal breakers were the convenience of having ccat to quickly look over a file and the fact that I don’t have to do an extra step of deleting my plain text file after encrypting to be well worth it. Yes, it would be nice if I could use ccrypt in Windows without cygwin, but having it work on Linux and Solaris was good enough for me.

Choose what you need for your environment though, not everyone’s needs are the same. For creating some encrypted volumes, try out True Crypt.

Also, I added my blog to the Linux Outlaws Planet, a feed mashup featuring numerous excellent blogs from people in the Linux Outlaws Community. Be sure to check it out if you like Linux- and related blogs.

-gregor

Everyone keeps talking about “cloud” computing these days, and there seems to be a lot of concern regarding security and privacy of data. For those that are new to the subject, cloud computing typically involves using web-based application instead of native clients and using an external server for storage of documents. A good example is Google Docs: an online service that lets one edit documents using a web-application and the edited documents are stored somewhere on Google’s server, where who-knows-who is doing who-knows-what with the documents. The same can be said for most online services that host sensitive data.

With the “cloud” it is now possible to use a web browser to edit documents, check email, read blogs and forums, send instant messages, and do a bunch of other crap, albeit on someone else’s server, and all the end user needs in order to access all of these services is a small portable wifi enabled device; like a netbook. But what if one doesn’t want their data on someone else’s server? The answer of course is for one to run their own server at home.

When most people think of a web application server, they think of a giant energy consuming work horse that cost thousands of dollars to purchase and costs hundreds of dollars to run. However, since web apps, with fancy interfaces and boat loads of javascript manipulating the DOM, rely upon the power of the web browser’s machine, one can use an energy sipping low power machine as their own personal cloud. With a properly configured router, one can access their home network cloud from anywhere in the world (as long as they have internet access).

As long as one controls their own data, there is no reason to fear the cloud.

He is a Danish public administrator, linguist, Slackware user and free culture enthusiast.
Find out more at technographer.net

A hot topic lately in the US technology media has been the discussion of the right to access the source code forming the basis of the software included in breathalyzers. Citizens accused of drinking while intoxicated have demanded access to the source code for the device in question, the breathalyzers that present the primary evidence against them in the accusation.

The request raises some issues. On one hand, the device – the Intoxilyzer 5000EN – is employed by the police and should as such be subject to scrutiny by the public. On the other hand, the company behind it is a private entity which reserves the right to deny access to the software source on the basis of trade secrets apparent if the code is made public.

Unfortunately, the debate has been somewhat obscured by a sidetrack into an open source versus proprietary software issue. While this is understandable – and more on that later – it is not actually a question of signing over the rights to the code, but simply to allow perusal of the code to ensure that no-one receives an unjust verdict. A commenter on Ars Technica posting under the name xoa suggests that it is unacceptable that this type of device is a “Black box”, an undocumentable analysis engine, and that all such devices should be developed openly and source should be placed in the public domain for inspection.

It is hard to come to an end-all conclusion on this discussion, since it squares a company’s private property against a public demand for – and right to – insight in a technological process which has the potential to influence many lives. But the discussion is important.

Interestingly, as an aside into the open source discussion, Eric Raymond argues in his classic work on the open source development model The Cathedral and the Bazaar that it is in the interest of the company – he mentions as an example producers of graphics cards – to release the driver source code, since this partially outsources the development of the driver and makes little influence on the development cycle, since by the time the competition has been able to reverse engineer the product, the producer will have moved on the next generation of the product. While I am no expert on breathalyzers, I suspect that the breath analysis market is somewhat different from the graphics cards scenario.

But the discussion is relevant, as has also been made clear by the debate around electronic voting machines. The potential for a democratic deficit is a very real and relevant concern, and it should not be dismissed. Contrary to the breathalyzers, the customer base here is clear – and in this case, it is the right (but perhaps not immediately apparent to be in the interest?) of the consumer, the state, to be able to submit the source code for review along with the election results. This is not much different from a right to a recount of votes on paper. In this otherwise technologically advanced country, a pencil mark on a piece of paper remains the method of choice for the citizen’s submission of a vote for referendums and public elections – to avoid the black box, the mystery method, between the voters and the result.

Something similar can be said to apply to medical equipment, but this is the (mine) field of patents, secret methods and methodology, proprietary software and hardware specifications locked down to an extreme extent. Still, one might argue that the source code of the software and the hardware plans of a medical device performing diagnostics or even treatment should be subject to peer review to ascertain that safety protocols have been followed and potential hazards taken into account – if nothing else, then post mortem in order to examine the cause of the fatality and to avoid further injury. Obviously, only a select few scientists would have the knowledge and abilities to assess this question, a highly specialized combination of medicine and informatics.

I shall finish off with a quote by a representative of the natural sciences, a mathematician to be more exact, who has taken the consequence of scientific accountability and, as the project leader of the free software application TeXmacs, has presented the following conclusions:

As a mathematician, I am deeply convinced that only free programs are acceptable from a scientific point of view. I see two main reasons for this:

• A result computed by a “mathematical” system, whose source code is not public, can not be accepted as part of a mathematical proof.

• Just as a mathematician should be able to build theorems on top of other theorems, it should be possible to freely modify and release algorithms of mathematical software.

However, it is strange, and a shame, that the main mathematical programs which are currently being used are proprietary. The main reason for this is that mathematicians often do not consider programming as a full scientific activity. Consequently, the development of useful software is delegated to “engineers” and the resulting programs are used as black boxes.

Many people will give you many reasons why GNU\Linux is better than Windows, Mac, or any other Operating System out there. I will not, I am just going to give the reasons I feel GNU/Linux is a better OS.

First, a little about me. I work in the Information Technology sector. Currently I am employed at a gastrointestinal clinic in Jackson, Ms, USA. I got into technology only about six years ago, when I built my first PC. It had an AMD 64 single core processor and 1gb of memory and an nVidia 7800GT. It was a nice computer and I had fun troubleshooting (and bleeding on) it. Back then, I only had Windows XP as my OS, but I did play with Knoppix here and there. Fast forward about a year and I am now dropped out of high school and in college working on my Associates in Applied Science in Networking support Technology. We were required to take a GNU/Linux course for the degree, so that gave me some insight into the server side of things.

By the time I finished my AAS, I had started working at G.I. Associates as a jack of all trades IT tech. I had enough money now to build a brand new computer, and I went with Windows Vista for my gaming habit. Had some trouble with it, so I dropped back down to Windows XP and worked with that for about 6 months. About this time I had been able to upgrade our one GNU/Linux server at work to Debian Etch from Fedora Core 2 so I could make a working LAMP (Linux, Apache, mySQL, PHP) server. That really got me started on the ball with GNU/Linux and ended up adding a Debian hard drive to my home computer as well as a Linux web server, hosting www.senshikaze.net. By April of 2009 I had decided to switch to Archlinux on my workstation and Acer Aspire One netbook. Now I only ever boot into windows at home when there is a new game I really want to play.

The reason GNU/Linux makes sense to me is that I am a big fan of the “Free software” ideal. I like the fact that I can take my software and change it to work for me and that is completely legal. I like that I can freely distribute the code to anyone I want. I also like knowing that there are people who see things the same way are there to protect my rights (FSF). I use GNU/Linux out of a desire to live free and without the threat of someone installing a rootkit or a spy program to make sure I am using it the way the company who made it want me to.

While many people give different reason for why they use GNU/Linux, I have one simple one: freedom. The freedom to use, share, copy, change, and redistribute is an important thing to me.

So I stumbled upon this neat Wordpress Mobile plugin which modifies your page for handheld devices. It is pretty neat, the only thing that bothers me is the restrictions made by the author, Andy Moore: that you cannot remove his sponshorship, even though the plugin is GPL-licensed (I will be looking into this).

I am one of those people who try to give credit where credit is due and I think Moore should switch to donations. However, this is probably the fault of our mentality and not Andy’s fault.

Anyway, the mobile version works fine and you can check it out with your handheld device, be it a Nokia, iPhone, Android Phone, or any other device using a mobile browser. The format is much better and loading times are crazy low.

So enjoy.

Internetling.com on the Nokia e71

What I found quite impressive was the long battery life of the MSI Wind (almost 7 hours!). On the other hand Dell’s mini laptops proved to be a great disappointment, with the Mini 9 somewhere in the middle and the 12 inch model completely on the bottom of the list (though let us not forget that the big screen is also a factor).

This test was conducted using a benchmark program the author of the article developed. Also, looks like the biggest factor in battery life is the number of cells, I quote:

“This obviously isn’t an exhaustive test but it does show that six-cell battery netbooks should last well over three hours while those with three-cell batteries will struggle, on average, to deliver better than two hours.”

You can find lots of detailed information about this comparison, along with the list in the original article.

I’d also like to hear from netbook owners: how long does your netbook battery last?

Looks like MSI has the longest battery life.

The laconi.ca micro-blogging platform, created by Evan Prodromou, is free as in freedom. There is the “original” laconi.ca installation on identi.ca, but you can also download laconi.ca, install it on your own server and your users can talk with every site where a laconi.ca install is present.

Due to Twitters immense popularity, there are far more desktop clients available for it than for identi.ca, especially for Linux. However, this time Linux has it all covered, from simple methods to “ident” your message (still looking for an equivalent to “tweet”) to full-fledged desktop clients, which bring all the functionality of the website to the desktop.

To be more correct, these article features software you can run in GNU/Linux that supports identi.ca. Gwibber and Twhirl also support Twitter and a multitude of other sites/protocols/whatever.

Gwibber

Probably one you would first want to go for. Built in GTK using Python, Gwibber certainly has the “shiny” factor. It is very popular amongst Linux users because it’s easy to use, open source and built using open source and aside from the main website available for download directly from most distributions’ repositories. Gwibber sports two curious features: you can apply a separate banner color for each service and support for RSS feeds (which I find very useful).

Arch Linux users may encounter problems installing the pywebkitgtk-svn dependency from the Arch Users’ Repository.

UPDATE: a working howto for Arch is available here. Many thanks to the author.

Twhirl

Twihrl is the client I use at the moment. So yeah, this is an Adobe AIR application and I personally find it quite good. Still, the lack of interest from Adobe’s side is  sadly very apparent. Installing AIR is not difficult, your distribution should enable you to easily obtain it from a repository. After you have got Air installed you download the Twhirl binary from the project’s website and run it using “adobe-air /path/to/file.air”

Problems:

• at the moment there is no comfortable way of updating Adobe AIR, which is quite a pain, especially when I see those OS X users with their smug smiles when they use the AIR auto-update.
• I can’t figure out how to make a command out of it, but I saw it somewhere. I’m too lazy anyway, just made a quick-launch icon with the command in the gnome toolbar
• Twhirl will want access to the default keyring for your stored identi.ca password, which is a weird bug GNOME has to fix. And no, don’t erase the keyring file, it will screw GNOME up.
• I hate them for not showing the Linux logo on their site alongside Mac OS X’ apple and the Windows “flag”
• You will need a compositing manager or else the app will have ugly black borders. You can use xcompmgr if you don’t want to hog your system.

identibash (marshall’s mod)

Using the terminal is sometimes much faster. So why not use it to communicate with your identi.ca friends? Linc from TLLTS, a good Linux podcast, made a little script which can act as a sort of a client for identi.ca.

You have all the basic functions, posting and reading new stuff. The client has also been covered by the LV podcast, where we discussed marshall’s mod, which improves upon Linc’s code.

Here is Marshall’s post on the Linux Outlaws forums which will double as a good guide to setting up and using identibash. Don’t be afraid, it’s really simple and takes less than 5 minutes.

Posting only:

Gnome Deskbar

Since Gnome 2.24, the Search field in the Deskbar applet enables you to post your ramblings to identi.ca.

Gnome Do identi.ca plugin

Install the Gnome Do plugins pack and enable the identi.ca plugin in the Settings. Then invoke Do, type what you want to send and Do will suggest you post it to identi.ca!

Well, that will do for today!

Do you know any other identi.ca clients for Linux?