Guide to setup Multimedia Applications in Ubuntu Feisty Fawn…

After Ubuntu Feisty Fawn is setup, it comes to your notice that you cannot play your MP3’s or any of the compressed Videos, DVD etc. Your search for a CD/DVD burning application turns up nothing. Heres a brief guide to setup these applications.

The first thing you should do is to get Automatix2 for Feisty from

http://www.getautomatix.com/wiki/index.php?title=Installation. To install it just double click, give the root password and Debi package Installer will popup and and install it for you.

Then go to Applications > System Tools> Automatix2 in menubar. From the List of the applications select those you’d like to install.

1.VLC Media Player
2.Brasero CD/DVD Burning Application.
3.AUD Codecs. (Include all the codecs to play MP3, Xvid, Quicktime, DVD, MP4, DIVX and others)
4.Totem-Xine
5.Exaile Media Player
6.Real Media Player

and click Apply. This will download and install the selected applications.

There are other set of codecs called the “Gstreamer set” that you can download from the Add Remove menu from the Applications Menubar.

When the windows pops up it asks you to reload or refrest the database. Make sure you’re connected to internet and click reload. After that search for Gstreamer with view options set to All Applications.

Select the following:
1.Gstreamer Bad set
2.Gstreamer Ugly set.
And click Apply. This will download and install the Applications.

Now you can play all your multimedia contents. For Music you have Exaile!, for videos and DVD’s you have VLC Media Player, Totem, Mplayer, Real Player.

Enjoy…..

Few GNOME Applications….

Unlike KDE, GNOME comes with very few applications and that too with the very basic feature set. e.g. Nautilus CD Burner, RythmBox. On the KDE front there is K3B Burning Application (it is as good as Nero), Amarok (a full featured Music Jukebox comparable to iTunes). GNOME lacks such applications. There are many applications that are good, feature rich and have a good interface that can be included into GNOME.

Music Jukebox:

Exaile! (http://www.exaile.org)
This is a python based Music jukebox and is comparable to Amarok. It’s got all the features like Music Library with Search, Album Art Cover Display, Nice OSD, Podcasting and Radio Support, Last.fm, and many other plugins…

When any of the track is playing it download all the available information for the track and the Album which includes Lyrics, Album Art Cover, Band History, other Albums by the Artists and much more….

Banshee(http://banshee-project.org/screenshots)

This is a Mono based Music Jukebox has features similar to Exaile!. It is supported by Novell. In its latest version 0.12.x they have included Music recommendation which automatically displays the Artist that you might want to
listen to depending on the Genre, Artist, of track you frequently play…

CD Burning Application:
Brasero(http://www.gnomefiles.org/app.php/Brasero)

Brasero is a very easy to use CD Burning Application. Though it is not as good as K3B but is good enough for burning CD/DVD. It has Multisession Support, can burn images, Audio Disks etc. Its interface is very well laid out and takes no time to get used to it.

What happened to WOW!!

Well its been a month since the release of Windows Vista, and more than the WOW!, the security issues and vulnerability in Vista are in the News, So much that Microsoft will be releasing a Service Pack 1 soon. The WOW! Factor which Microsoft was counting on has faded way too early. Now what did Microsoft said while the Launch “The Most Secure Windows Ever”. Didn’t they said the same during Windows XP’s Launch?

Many of the security related features in Vista are taken straight from MAC and Linux. The WOW effects in Vista are limited and DO NOT help increase productivity. Take a look at Beryl, Compiz Fusion or Metisse where along with the eyecandy, there are plugins which actually help increase productivity.

Compiz Fusion Demo….(Its still in Alpha!!!!)

Metisse Copy paste Demo(ONLY IN 2 CLICKS!!!!!!)

Consider the amount of resources required for Vista. It need atleast 2GHZ CPU,1GB of RAM and 64MB onboard RAM 3D Graphics card with Direct X9.0c(min) support to run all the eyecandy, 15GB of HDD for the Installation alone. Let alone the other softwares that are required to be installed viz. Office productivity tools, PDF Reader, Photo Editor, Good Games…..

Compare that with a Linux distro, Say openSuSE 10.2, it needs 1GHz of CPU, 512 MB of RAM, 10GB HDD space for installation (Includes all the required softwares like GIMP(Photoshop alternative), OpenOffice.org(MS Office alternative), F-Spot(MS Photoviewer alternative), and may more Games).
And a decent onboard Graphics with 64 MB share memory to run Beryl smoothly. And this is one of the most resource hogger distro… think of Ubuntu Feisty or Arch Linux.

The Last but certainly not the least is the price, you can get Vista w/o support and Manual for $199 while openSuSE 10.2 is FREE….