iTunes Alternative for Linux

For most of my music playing needs in Linux, I've relied on Audacious. It's a perfectly solid player that has the advantage of using relatively little memory. In a world where almost every Linux application is described as "lightweight," it's actually lightweight. But it lacks a few advanced features, most notably iPod support. Here's where Banshee comes in. Banshee is an advanced music player if you're looking to replace iTunes that has a similar and attractive feature set.

As you can see from the screenshot above, it has pre-installed plugins for downloading album art and iPod support and has an interface instantly familiar to anyone who's used iTunes. It also has a context pane you can pop up which shows links to similar artists. In syncing an iPod, I found you have to mount it manually in a file manager, if your desktop doesn't automount, before it'll appear in Banshee. But otherwise syncing works as expected. I also tried syncing an iPad running iOS 5 from the instructions on this page and some troubleshooting advice here, but it didn't work. Though I could mount the iPad in a file manager, it's appearance in Banshee was purely decorative;)

Banshee is built on the Mono framework, so it's not native GTK, but I didn't notice any speed deficiencies. It'll use about 60 MB of RAM, so it's not lightweight like Audacious, but the extra features are impressive. The only issue I had was enabling the equalizer gave me stability problems, but an equalizer isn't a big deal to me.

Rhythmbox and Exaile are similar players, but I found them lacking in a few ways. Rhythmbox is a little too simplistic and hard to configure. Album art fetching doesn't work out of the box and Google tells me it would take some effort to get it running. Also, it too has a context pane, but you have to be a paid subscriber to Last.fm to use it. Exaile comes with an iPod plugin which I couldn't get to do anything. I also had stability issues when changing the volume mid-song, and Exaile doesn't use its screen real estate well. And if you only want iPod syncing, there's gtkpod, but I found it extremely slow and the layout was confusing.

One last note on iPod support, the iPod Touch supposedly won't work because it doesn't mount like a typical usb storage device (thanks, Apple). Instead you have to go through hoops like with the above link to get it to mount, and even then getting it to sync is far from certain. In that respect, Touches are like iPhones and iPads, a pain in the rear for open sourcers. Best to quit fiddling with Apple and get a real usb device that mounts like one.

OS X Dictionary Alternative for Linux

One of the killer features of OS X (since Tiger, I believe) is when you right-click any word in a cocoa app, you get a menu with a "Look Up in Dictionary" option to bring up a popup showing a quick dictionary definition of the word and its synonyms. Well, somebody got the bright idea to develop something similar for Linux and it's called Artha. It's in the Debian and Ubuntu repositories, and when you install it, it works in a similar way. You highlight a word and press the hotkey combination (default is ctl + alt + w) and it brings up a window with a definition of the word and also options for synonyms, antonyms, derivatives, and more. In addition to those extra choices, it also outdoes OS X by working within Firefox/Iceweasel, something OS X's dictionary can't.

Launching Artha initially has it running as a background process where you need to invoke it with the hotkey combo for it to do anything. The exception is on first run when it shows you a brief info message and takes you to the main window. Notice the red quit button in the toolbar. If you quit with that, Artha will no longer run in the background and invoking it with the hotkey won't work, so to close the window you'll want to use the close window button only. Also, to have it running automatically after startup, you need to add the "artha" command to whatever autostart scheme you're using.

Artha performs well except for one major bug. When looking up some verbs ending in ing, it crashes with a segmentation fault. Specifically verbs ending in ie and replaced with ing like tying, vying, and lying. Also verbs with a second consonant added like swimming, sitting, and falling. And, inexplicably, matter, but not tatter or slammer. These faults are somewhat predictable and can be avoided, but I'm going to file a bug report against the Debian Wheezy package, anyway. If you can reproduce this bug on Ubuntu, feel free to file a bug report there, too.

I found a couple of other minor bugs. First, there's supposed to be a notification feature where if you hit the hotkey combo it brings up a notification popup with a simple definition instead of bringing up the main window. However, the dependency libnotify1 has been pulled from Debian Testing (temporarily?), so that feature can't work. Also, I tried changing the hotkey combo, but either I did it wrong or it's another bug, 'cause I couldn't change it.

I'll update this space with any news on the ing bug, but I wanted to post about it now because this package shows a lot of promise and is still somewhat early in its development.

Icons On Your Linux Desktop

Furthering my quest to get a more Mac-like interface on my desktop while still remaining (fairly) lightweight, I'm now going to tackle icons on the desktop. There are several ways to get this on an Openbox desktop. There's using Nautilus to draw the desktop, but Nautilus is slower than my preferred file manager, Thunar. There's also PCManFM for desktop icons, but PCManFM can crash occasionally and when it does it takes your entire desktop with it. So I poked around to see if there was a Thunar/XFCE way of doing it, and yes there is.

Full details are on this Crunchbang wiki, but the gist of it is to install xfdesktop4, though you launch it as xfdesktop without the 4. Then check your ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs file and make sure it points the desktop directory to your ~/Desktop folder like this:

XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"

Then after you launch, you get this. What do you think?

A few notes. First, the new desktop will take over the right and middle-click menus in Openbox, but xfdesktop's right-click menu includes an applications menu, and middle-click brings down a similar workspace menu. You can still access both Openbox menus by clicking on tint2 if you have that installed (check the above link for the configuration). Also, xfdesktop will display your wallpaper, so using Nitrogen or feh for that is redundant. To set the wallpaper, right click on the desktop, go to "Desktop Settings..." and click the "+" button to add your own wallpaper. And don't forget to comment out any wallpaper entries when adding xfdesktop & to your autostart file.

I don't know if this is a bug or a feature, but dragging a file from Thunar to the actual desktop will copy it, not move it. You have to drag it to the Desktop folder shortcut on the side pane to simply move it.

One last thing. Future versions of XFCE will supposedly have all this set up from within Thunar, so installing xfdesktop won't be necessary. Either way, I've found XFCE's desktop icons to be snappy and sleek. Now if I can only get a global menubar.

An OS X-ish Dock for Linux

So say you want your Linux install to be a bit more familiar. Coming from OS X, you expect to see a dock. Taskbars are nice, but they're just so Windows-like, you know? Probably the simplest way to get a dock is to use lxpanel. You can configure it to look like a dock, and it's quick and easy. But I want to show you something a little more advanced. It's called Cairo-Dock, and it's loaded with features, including sub-docks, desklets, applets, and anything else you can think of.

On first run, it'll ask you if you want it to launch in OpenGL. I'm not sure PowerPC users can use it in OpenGL given the state of graphics drivers, so I chose "no." This doesn't mean you can't have 3d effects. In fact, you don't need 3d acceleration running, either. You just need a composite manager like xcompmgr (see how to set up xcompmgr here). Otherwise, you may get a black box around it.

As you can see, there are applets in addition to simple launchers such as a clock, cpu meter, bandwidth monitor, desktop switcher, applications menu, and session management for logging out, sleeping, or shutting down. Memory usage is fairly light, and there are several settings available to lighten the cpu load. In fact, in the settings pane if you click the advanced button, you'll find so many options you'll get lost and never be found again.

I tried one other dock, called Docky, and it was okay, but it wasn't as feature-rich as Cairo-Dock and it was a little hard on my cpu. So Cairo-Dock comes out the winner.

EDIT: I forgot to add, to put it in your autostart file, use the command cairo-dock -c for the cairo backend and cairo-dock -o for the OpenGL backend. And make sure to end the line with an & if it's an Openbox autostart file.

EDIT II: As long as we're on the subject of things I forgot, I installed with sudo aptitude install cairo-dock-core and then sudo aptitude install cairo-dock-plug-ins --without-recommends. I did the --without-recommends part to keep it from installing a bunch of extra stuff I didn't want including the dreaded apt-xapian-index (a package indexer that isn't vital and will bring low end systems to a screeching, and I mean screeching, halt).

EDIT III: One more thing and I promise I'll go. Cairo-dock's plug-in package will install pulseaudio as a dependency. If pulseaudio gives you any problems, I wrote a little about it here.

Skitch Alternative for Linux

Welcome to another episode of How Do I Do That?, where you're using a piece of software in OS X, and you want to do the same thing in Linux and you ask, "How do I do that?" Today's title is a nifty screenshot tool called Shutter, an alternative to Skitch that enables you to not only take screenshots of desktops, windows, and menus, etc., but also annotate and edit them. Kind of like Skitch! Here's a screenshot of the main window:

I gave it a picture within a picture effect just for kicks. And here's the editor window:

Okay, now I'm getting confused. You can see the basic editing tools on the side pane. You can also use several plug-ins for special effects like 3D effects, sepia tones, or making it look like a polaroid. And it comes with special upload tools for uploading via ftp or to Ubuntu One or to a number of other image hosters.

The only minuses I found were Imageshack uploading was broken in my Wheezy version, and jpeg compression was poor, leaving artifacts on annotations. So it's best to save in png format and use another viewer/editor to convert to jpeg if you must. CORRECTION: JPEG compression is the same in other programs. I must've been seeing things.

And I'm also informed that the Evernoting of Skitch is nearly complete as Evernote is eliminating all old Skitch sharing accounts and making users migrate to Evernote to take advantage of syncing! and searching! but apparently no direct links. Users have until October 10th to download their old images. Thanks, whoever sold Skitch to Evernote.

ToyViewer and Seashore Alternative for Linux

Everybody's heard of Photoshop and GIMP, but what if you want to do a quick photo edit, like a quick sharpen or gamma correction, without having to open a massive application that takes forever to load? In OS X, you could always choose ToyViewer and Seashore, two lightweight and deceptively powerful photo editors, for such occasions. But what about Linux? Besides the GIMP, what is there? There are photo browsers like gThumb and Mirage that have very rudimentary editing capabilities, but ToyViewer and Seashore offered much more. This is where Fotoxx comes in. Fotoxx is a lightweight, fast, and feature-rich photo editor that offers all the basics and more without making you stare at a splash screen all day or trying to navigate your way around a myriad of window panes.

The features are too long to list here, but you can see some of them in the menu above. For a full list you can visit their website. There's a bit of a, I wouldn't call it a learning curve, but more an adjustment period. The menu options aren't listed in a traditional way and it takes a minute to find what you're looking for at first, but once you get over that, it's a great tool to have. The only caution I have is that it wants to index all your photos on first launch. This can take awhile if you have a ton, but it's supposed to bring you fast search results of meta tags. If you have no need for this, you can always point the indexer to a subfolder with few or no pictures in it (i.e., not ~/Pictures) when you first run it. There's a brand new version that makes indexing optional, but the Debian Wheezy version is a tad older.

Have fun cropping and embossing!

Quicksilver Alternatives for Linux

I should make this a regular feature, where I take an application in OS X and point out its nearest Linux equivalent. Kind of like, "I used to do that s___ in OS X. Now I got Linux. How do I do that?"

First up is Quicksilver. If you don't know, Quicksilver is an OS X application launcher and much more. It basically allows you to open any application, document, or task using only the keyboard. It has a learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, it greatly speeds up your workflow.

There are two Linux alternatives I'll write about today, Kupfer and Synapse. Ubuntu's Unity and the new Gnome Shell have a similar feature built-in, but there's no reason those of us running Openbox or some other lightweight environment have to do without the snazzy features of a modern desktop. And Kupfer gets things off to a good start.

It's immediately familiar to Quicksilver users, and with its array of plug-ins pre-installed, comes with a lot of functionality out of the box. You invoke it with ctrl + spacebar or clicking on it in your system tray and then start typing and tabbing and arrow-keying. It's pretty intuitive. It has a fairly light memory footprint and a helpful preferences section where you can choose auto-load on login without having to edit config files. Imagine that.

Synapse is slightly different. It has a similar interface and comes with different skins, but it comes with less plug-ins built in and less functionality out of the box. Instead, it uses the Zeitgeist backend. Zeitgeist basically logs all your recent activity and how often you do certain tasks, and with Synapse utilizing it, can anticipate what you want almost before you type. Once you train it, Synapse just might be the more powerful in the long run. It's also fairly lightweight and has a similar preference panel where you can choose auto-launch on login instead of editing config files. Imagine that.

If they're both invoked with ctrl + spacebar, make sure they're not both set to auto-launch, though.

The only glitch I found (on both) was with drop shadows causing artifacts after the popup windows closed. I fixed it by adding f and -D1 options to my xcompmgr settings like this:

xcompmgr -cCf -D1

This adds fading and sets the interval to the lowest setting to make it imperceptible. That fixed it.

"This blog isn't dead yet!" he said screaming into the wind.