Philipp Höhn » free software

Exaile – a Gnome audio player

philipp — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 12:13:26 +0000

After suffering from this bug in moc (a console based audio player) I decided to look for an alternative for this programme. Having heard so many positive opinions about amaroK I downloaded and installed it and was quite pleased. I then got to know of Exaile which looks like a gnome version of amaroK. It has similar functions as amaroK but looks a lot more simple which I actually prefer.

“Exaile is a music player aiming to be similar to KDE’’s Amarok, but for GTK+ and written in Python. It incorporates many of the cool things from Amarok (and other media players) like automatic fetching of album art, handling of large libraries, lyrics fetching, artist/album information via Wikipedia, Last.fm submission support, and optional iPod support via a plugin.” (exaile.org)

Although I”m not satisfied with Exaile! because of certain bugs or missing functions (thanks to open source this is a problem that can be solved), I’ll try it for the next couple of days and see if it fits my needs. While waiting for Gutsy, new versions of moc and Exaile ”ll also have a look on the upcoming KDE 4 which will include amaroK 2. If you know of any other good audio players, please let me know

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Microsoft to support Chinese Open Source Project

philipp — Mon, 21 May 2007 16:34:05 +0000

Microsoft announced support for a Chinese Open Source project. The Beihang University at Beijing together with several other Chinese institutions is currently working on a translation of the Chinese Unified Office Format (UOF) into Microsoft’s debatable OOXML format, and vice versa. Open XML to UOF Translator, as the new application will be called, is going to be released at the end of January 2008. The aim behind Microsoft’s step seems to be clear: Supporting an open source project should probably be much cheaper than developing it yourself. Additionally there’’s a lot of money to be saved and a lot of publicity to be gained by using popular free software which practically advertises for itself.

It seems as if MS knows exactly which advantages free software has to offer. Quite funny, if you ask me. Didn’t Microsoft lately propagate the death of the free software movement?

Source: Heise.de

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Pidgin released

philipp — Fri, 18 May 2007 16:04:00 +0000

Pidgin, the successor of Gaim, has been released in version 2.0.0.

“In addition to the new name, this release features extraordinary enhancements to features and functionality over the previous release.”

(pidgin.im)

According to moderators from the ubuntuforums Pidgin will be part of Feisty’s repository soon meaning we hopefully won’t have to wait for the next Ubuntu release in October to receive Pidgin as an update to Gaim.
For those being impatient, I can recommend ubuntu.schmitke-hb.de where you can already download Pidgin via schmitke’s repository.

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