Review: Dolphin 1.2.1 File Manager

Introduction
Dolphin was intended to replace Konqueror as the default file manager in KDE 4. The scope of Dolphin was to only provide a compact and easy-to-use file manager, without all the features and uses Konqueror has. And (I think) it succeeded. In the beginning most of the users were reticent regarding this idea, since Konqueror provided anything one could possibly ask from a file manager. Besides, most KDE fans thought Dolphin looks too much like with Nautilus and may be limited regarding usability and configuration. However, I see in Dolphin an appropriate manager for day-to-day use.


Interface
Dolphin is split in three main components (except for the menubar and toolbar). The first one would be the Places widget, located by default to the left, and containing shortcuts to the most important places like home directory, root, trash, and mounted devices. The center is occupied with the file browser, while to the right there is the file information widget. The good thing is that the Places and Information widgets can be moved and grouped wherever one likes. Another plus is the way the icons in the Places tab resize depending on the tab's width.

Features
Dolphin comes with tab support (the usual CTRL+T and CTRL+N shortcuts by default, also the KDE-specific CTRL+, and CTRL+. for switching to the previous and, respectively, next tab). Although not visible by default, the location bar can be shown using the standard CTRL+L shortcut.


Regarding configuration, Dolphin offers all the necessary and specific options for a regular file manager: from sorting files by name, size, date, type etc to file previews, a huge number of zoom levels for icons (with a zoom slider which can be shown or hidden via Settings -> Configure Dolphin -> General tab), the ability to browse through archives (by embedding Ark) and several more. It allows three view modes for files: icons, details and columns, and it also includes the option to split tabs vertically (left/right). Basically, all the important features in Konqueror's file manager can be found in Dolphin too.

Split left/right

As in every standard KDE application, you can configure the shortcuts in the Settings -> Configure shortcuts menu option.

If you miss buttons like Up (Alt+Up) or Zoom In/Out from the toolbar, you can add these by right-clicking on the toolbar and going to the Configure Toolbars... option.

Conclusion
Since my main system is Debian Lenny (KDE3) I must say I did not have much time to test KDE4 (although lately I spent some time with Kubuntu Jaunty Beta), but I was impressed in a pleasant way by Dolphin. What I've read before was mostly how crappy of a file manager it is, how limited it is and so on. Although I prefer Konqueror, I must say this isn't true: Dolphin is actually pretty feature-complete and easy to use.


It's true that once you get used in Konqueror, for example, to open pictures, text files etc. in a new tab, it will be hard to get unused to this when in Dolphin. But Dolphin's purpose is not to be Konqueror and that's it. And it is not so 'basic' and tiny as some make it look. In time, it will probably become the file manager of choice for the majority of KDE4 users (if not already).

About

Do you use Dolphin on a daily basis? Do you prefer it over Konqueror or use another file manager in KDE4? Please share it in the comments below.

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10 Essential Applications Included in Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

While I agree that there are applications for KDE 4.2 which still lack several important features (like for example the equalizer and ability to go to the previous/next song using the tag editor in Amarok), I must say that it also improved very much since the last time I had a look at it. It is definitely faster, the desktop looks nicer, it does not seem a beta environment any more. Overall, the improvements in KDE 4 are really visible and I'm glad for that from a user's point of view. The only drawback is that (at least on my system - an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHz, 1 GB DDRAM2 and GeForce FX 7600GS) I had to disable desktop effects (OpenGL support) when playing Unreal Tournament 2004. The nVIDIA driver I used was the last one from the official website (180.29). I also tried the ones included in the repositories (all 4 versions of the packaged nvidia-glx) but this one seemed to work best for me. I'll give it another go when Jaunty will be stable and eventually make a full review.

Back to the main topic of this article. I will briefly review no less than ten applications which are included by default on the Kubuntu 9.04 CD. The Kubuntu team released the first Jaunty Jackalope beta on March 26, so after installing it on a separate 10 GB partition (my other system is Debian Lenny) I performed a sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade to make sure the last updates were included. Kubuntu 9.04 comes with KDE 4.2.1, Amarok 2.0.2 and OpenOffice 3.0.1 as an office suite (still no inclusion of KOffice).

Music player: Amarok 2.0.2
This is the KDE 4 port of the famous Amarok audio player. It has some issues with scanning the music collection, but it's usable overall. It comes with a lot of features, including a powerful collection manager, cover manager, support for services like Last.fm and Jamendo. One of the great features introduced in Amarok 2.x was the widget support, which allows you to embed lyrics, song info and many more in the central area of the player.
Official website


Movie player: Dragon Player 2.0
Although not as powerful as players like SMPlayer or Kaffeine, Dragon Player (formerly known as Codeine) will play all the popular video formats (including Matroska MKV) and DVDs. It is a small, basic player with support for subtitles but not any other options.
Official website


Web browser: Konqueror 4.2.1
This is the port of the famous and default file manager, viewer and web browser in KDE3. Currently it still has some issues, especially crashes when pressing some web buttons or filling in forms. For example, I couldn't write a Blogspot post using Konqueror. Still, it is the default web browser which ships with KDE 4 and implicitly Kubuntu Jaunty and I hope it will be fixed in the versions to come.
Official website


File manager: Dolphin 1.2.1
Praised by some and highly criticised by others, Dolphin is now the default file manager in KDE 4. Although there are many (including me) which prefer to use Konqueror as the file manager, Dolphin has a nice clean interface and it's pretty simple and intuitive to use.
Official website



CD/DVD burner: K3b 1.0.5
Probably the most loved and the most complete burning application available for Linux, K3b still is at version 1.0.5 for KDE3, which will make it look a little ugly compared to the way KDE 4 applications look now. Although Kubuntu 9.04 will come with this K3b version, the official maintainer of this wonderful application started working at a KDE 4 port for it.
Official website


BitTorrent client: KTorrent 3.2.0
Together with clients like Azureus or Deluge, KTorrent was always one of the top BitTorrent clients available for Linux, and definitely the number one choice for KDE users. It's just feature-complete, it has support for plugins and the default ones are more than enough, you can download many torrents at one time without any problems, it can download only specific files from inside a torrent, you can search for torrents directly from within KTorrent and many, many more.
Official website


IM client: Kopete 0.70.0
Kopete hasn't changed much compared to its KDE 3 counterpart. It currently has no more features, it's just the same old client ported to KDE 4 with a changed interface here and there. It supports many networks like Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, Jabber and WLM.
Official website


Image viewer: Gwenview 2.2.0
Gwenview was always my default image viewer of choice. It is powerful enough, well-designed, with a clean interface and all the options one needs from an image viewing application. It also comes with a bunch of plugins which will turn out quite useful for basic image manipulation.
Official website


IRC client: Quassel 0.4.1
Quassel is an IRC client which is new to me, and I've never used it before. Since the Konversation port to KDE 4 is yet to be complete as far as I know, Kubuntu includes this one. It's a basic client with no scripting support, but it includes enough configuration options to make it useful for getting on IRC. Those who never bothered making various plugins or customising their IRC client using event-based scripting will be fine with Quassel. There are, however, some problems with Quassel. I couldn't change the chat window font and it doesn't seem to remember the size of the nicklist.
Official website


Terminal application: Konsole 2.2.1
I couldn't exclude a terminal application from an 'essential applications' list in Linux. Konsole is the default shell in KDE and it supports configurable profiles (together with font sizes and colours).
Official website


Together with those there are also included OpenOffice 3.0.1 as the office suite, Okular, which is the universal document viewer in KDE 4, and KOrganizer.

Review: Battle for Wesnoth 1.6

After more than a year of constant development, The Battle for Wesnoth 1.6 was put out on March 22. This release comes with new graphics and unit portraits, a new campaign, called 'Legend of Wesmere', the possibility to log into the multiplayer with the forum account, and many, many other improvements.

Battle for Wesnoth 1.6 - main menu

For those who don't know, Battle for Wesnoth is a wonderful, completely free (licensed under the GPL) turn-based strategy game, with a huge community, developed continuously and at a fast rate.

Before proceeding with the review of 1.6, I'd like to point out that the 1.4.x series (the now old stable release) was also a very good and polished release, so what more can Wesnoth provide with this release?

First of all, one of the features which was always subject of debate on the forums was now implemented: the ability to own a nickname in the multiplayer game. You can now join the multiplayer lobby using your own username and password from the Wesnoth forums, so you won't have problems with someone else 'stealing' your nickname or identifying friends. This feature was awaited for a long time and now it's available.

Regarding the game interface, it didn't change much. The main menu has a background which resembles the one in 1.4, which looks very good anyway.

Major changes were done at the graphics, unit portraits, terrain, and the way in-game messages are displayed. Although there are still default faction units which don't have a portrait, most of them have refined portraits which now look awesome compared to the older ones used in 1.4.x. There are also new graphics for terrain like forest and villages, but all in all the way the terrain looks did not change much.

Playing vs. AI on Isar's Cross - notice the changes in the map

Most of the maps were re-done, for example the popular Isar's Cross is now larger and Fallenstar Lake (former Meteor Lake in versions pre-1.4) will need a different approach to play it in the middle of the map.

Comparing Fallenstar Lake in 1.4 vs 1.6

Regarding campaigns, 1.6 includes no less than 14 official ones, and most of them were available before only as add-ons. Also, the new campaign 'Legend of Wesmere' tells the story of Kalenz, an Elvish hero probably best known from the campaign Heir to the Throne. In one scenario, this campaign allows the AI to control one of your allied sides too.

The new Legend of Wesmere campaign

The WML (Wesnoth Markup Language) also received many improvements and the map editor can be started now from within the game's main menu. The background music hasn't changed much but that's OK since 1.4 had pretty appealing music. However, there are five new original background tracks.

Like all the default features are not enough, there are plenty of add-ons available, which definitely turn Wesnoth into an even more appealing TBS game.

This is how the new in-game dialogues look like now

All in all, this release is one step ahead for Wesnoth regarding both graphics and gameplay, and although in my opinion the difference from 1.4 to 1.6 does not seem to be as big as the changes from 1.2 to 1.4, it is definitely a good and long-awaited improvement.

Update: Here is a video of Wesnoth 1.6 on the Colosseum map:

First-Person Shooter Games for Linux III: Urban Terror

This article is part of the first-person shooter games reviews I'm putting up. Until now I talked about Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, ioQuake3, UT2004, Nexuiz and OpenArena. For those who want to read my previous articles, here are the links:

3 Classic First-Person Shooter Games for Linux
First-Person Shooter Games for Linux II: Nexuiz and OpenArena

I will dedicate this edition entirely to Urban Terror, a great first-person shooter game which was initially developed as a Quake 3 mod and evolved into a powerful and fast standalone game. Most of the people who played both Counter-Strike on Windows (or through Wine) and Urban Terror usually have the same opinion when describing it: it's like Counter-Strike, only better. That was my impression too. I think Urban Terror is the best alternative for those who like CS and eventually made the switch from Windows. It is natively supported on Linux, it is maintained constantly and it has a solid community. In fact, when I first played it about a year ago, I was stunned to see that I was playing it very good just because I was used with Counter-Strike.

Developed by Frozen Sand, the team behind it, Urban Terror was initially developed as a Quake 3 mod, but the game offers now a complete package and can be run without the need of Quake 3 binaries. The last version, UrT 4.1, comes with a ZIP package for Linux, of about 700 MB, and you only need to uncompress it, make the ioUrbanTerror.i386 binary executable and run it.

A multiplayer game on Abbey

The game features modes like TDM (team deathmatch), FFA (free for all) or CTF (capture the flag) and provides a large number of weapons to choose from, like the popular Kalashnikov, the M4A1 or the Remington SR-8. Usually each weapon should be used in a different way (for example you can use to Remington to snipe your opponents and the powerful Kalashnikov for medium-range combats). Notice that the rebound is pretty high, so firing constantly will do anything else but hitting your opponent. It's best to use burst firing when you have an automatic weapon.

Prague, one of the most popular maps

One of the features I find great in Urban Terror is the ability to run for a short distance, then keep the crouch key pressed: this way you will be able to move very fast, and it's useful especially to make quick and unexpected attacks and to go quickly from one part of the map to another. Of course, there is an energy bar which will start to decrease when running or jumping, so you will have to walk from time to time too in order to save strength for when you will need it.

Another feature is the ability to 'bandage' yourself and other wounded teammates. After a successful attack against you, your character will not be able to run or walk at full speed unless you bandage yourself (or another teammate bandages you). Also, depending on how much health you have left, you will not be able to run at maximum speed or make long jumps.

The game comes bundled with around 30 wonderful maps, which vary from cities to jungle areas or desert. Maps like Kingdom, Abbey, Prague or Uptown are very popular on the Internet servers.

The game was designed for multiplayer only, and bots are not supported officially, but still there is the possibility to play against bots (read how in this forum thread). Instead, the game offers a great and dynamic online playing experience. The servers are usually crowded, and the multitude of mods will certainly fit any fan of fast-paced shooter games.

Uptown, probably the most played map

The graphics are not very impressing, but at least this allows the game to run on older computers too. I tested on my Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHz and GeForce 7600 GS and it runs at a steady 76 fps using the resolution 1280x1024. I usually encounter frame drops only on several maps with water and many players, otherwise there are no problems running it.

Another aspect worth mentioning are the trickjumps and the ability to jump off walls, which, in combination with the run/crouch ability will let you go in places inaccessible otherwise.

Many competitions are often organised, and details regarding those are available on the official website and the forums.

In conclusion, Urban Terror is awesome in every aspect (maybe except the graphics which are not exactly the newest) and it offers a great pleasure playing it. It's fast-paced, it has plenty of mods and maps, and it allows you to configure everything just the way you want it.

Songbird 1.0 Review - An Awesome Release!

Not long ago I reviewed Songbird 0.7.0, and in the meantime version 1.0.0 was released. What are the new features Songbird comes with and what improvements over the previous releases features 1.0? Well, to begin with, I was extremely impressed in a pleasant way with this Songbird release, so let me tell you why.

Songbird is an audio player and music collection manager built using XUL, the same language used by Firefox. Songbird is available on all the three major platforms: Linux, Mac and Windows.

To start with, I must say I was very impressed to see how many improvements and how much work was put into this player in the last couple of months only, since my last review of version 0.7.0.

When Songbird starts, it will prompt you with the license agreement, and then it will let you choose your media directory so it can scan your music collection. Scanning is pretty fast, and it took around 1:30 minutes on a collection of aproximately 5000 Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files, using my Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHz.

Scanning the music collection for the first time

Next, you will be able to choose what plugins you want to enable by default. Songbird comes with an iTunes plugin, Last.fm support and song submission, Shoutcast support, and a plugin which I strongly recommend, mashTape. mashTape is a configurable add-on which will fetch detailed information about the currently playing song from various websites. For example, it will show the artist's biography using the Last.fm wiki, album reviews from Amazon.com, artist news from Google News, photos, and the most wonderful thing, it will even embed YouTube videos related to the artist. It's just great, isn't it? And all these features are possible due to the fact that Songbird is practically not only an audio player, but a web browser too. It embeds most of the Firefox browser into it, so you will be able to search for lyrics or read artist info (other than that provided by mashTape) directly from it just by opening a new tab inside Songbird.

The Preferences window is similar to the one of the Mozilla browser

The interface is clean and intuitive, and the playlist allows you to sort it by any information possible: from title, artist, album or year, up to bands' tour dates, genre or file location. And these are just a few. You will be able to search the playlist using the Ctrl+F shortcut.

I also love the tabbed approach, which lets you open more than one playlist in each tab, and eventually browsing the artist info in another one. Also, this release includes several new keyboard shortcuts to improve Songbird's functionality, and you can see them from the Help -> Keyboard Shortcuts menu. You can install new add-ons directly from Songbird, or from the official add-ons website, in which case you will have to install them manually in ~/.songbird2/RANDOM.default/extensions (they are ZIP archives). There are plenty add-ons to choose from, which allow you to change the appearance, customise the web browser, get further information about your music and even more.

Another thing to mention: Songbird will automatically detect album covers inside the song's directory, and will display in the lower-left corner (I tried it for cover.png and cover.jpg). You will be able to right-click on a cover and save it under a different name if you like.

Songbird in action - notice how useful the mashTape add-on is

The official page provides a package which contains the binaries, so you won't have to compile anything yourself. Just copy the directory Songbird in a location of your choice (I use ~/apps for example), then make a launcher to the songbird binary. The configuration files are kept inside the ~/.songbird2 directory.

One of the few minuses is that Songbird does not start very fast and the interface is a little bit too slow, but this should not be such a big deal. Once in action, Songbird is beautiful!

Regarding stability, for the couple of hours I tested it Songbird never crashed and I could not catch any bug at first sight. It seems pretty solid.

Conclusion
Well, Songbird definitely became a major player with this release. With plenty of features and a wonderful approach, I can say I warmly recommend Songbird as the primary audio player to anyone, and at least a try if you haven't used it yet. It's powerful and it practically acts like a music centre for an audiophile.

More screenshots

Tick and untick the add-ons you want Songbird to use - I strongly recommend Last.fm and mashTape

Importing media when Songbird is started for the first time

Artist information from Last.fm

About

Official website

Top 10 Applications to Install After Installing Ubuntu

Amarok - in my opinion, this is the greatest music player and collection management for the Linux platform. I think it's also a killer application for Linux with all the features it has.

SMPlayer - one of the most powerful video players for Linux using the mplayer engine, and including support for DVDs, DVD ISO images, Matroska video files and much, much more. A must-have.

KTorrent - for me this is the BitTorrent client of choice. It has all the features I need, including the possibility to only download certain files in torrents, a feature which some other clients lack.

XChat - I think there is no other (graphical) client for IRC as powerful as XChat. Maybe KVirc, but regarding the scripting/plugins part, XChat wins over Konversation or KSirc easily. It supports scripting in Perl and Python by default, C plugins, and a Tcl scripting plugin is also available, but not by default. It can also be easily customisable via the /set variables.

BasKet - BasKet is a notes-taking application which I also reviewed in the past; it has a wonderful approach of letting you make full projects, not only simple notes, and it organises your data in baskets and sub-baskets. Except for the fact that the current version does not support printing (well, you can always export notes to an HTML file and print that one) it is definitely full-featured. I strongly recommend this application over other notes-taking applications.

Wesnoth - this is a turn-based strategy game, well-maintained, with a strong community and a beautiful gameplay, both in single-player mode and online. I must say, I love this game and I really appreciate all the work it has been put for creating and maintaining it.

K3b - definitely the most full-featured CD/DVD burning application, and it allows to create ISO images too. No KDE 4 port yet though, and it looks like development is currently stalled.

Emacs - I find Emacs to be an essential tool and one of the most powerful and popular IDEs out there.

Yakuake - a terminal application which acts just like consoles in FPS games (e.g. Quake, ET, UT). Yakuake can be hidden or shown using the F12 keyboard shortcut.

TVTime - this application is useful to those who own a TV card. In the past I also tried kdetv, but nothing compares with TVTime in my opinion.

Opera 10 Alpha - Preview

Introduction
Opera 10 is the next generation of the popular, closed-source web browser built in Qt, and available on UNIX (including both Linux and FreeBSD), Mac and Windows platforms.

In this review I used the Qt 4 version of Opera 10 alpha, build 4102 (the .tar.gz package), but Opera 10 will be available using both Qt 3 and Qt 4 toolkits, so you can choose which one you prefer. I ran Opera in Debian Lenny (KDE 3.5.10) with all the updates to date.


Presto 2.2 engine
Opera 10 alpha is powered by the Presto 2.2 rendering engine, which, according to the website, should provide 'significant improvements in speed, performance and security'. Presto 2.2 also comes with improved CSS performance, web font support, and a score of 100/100 at the Acid3 test, where Firefox 3.0.5 gets 71/100 and Konqueror fails. Acid3 is a test page for web browsers which shows how much a browser follows web standards like DOM or JavaScript.


Impressions
At this stage, the interface is Nice Graphics by Flott Altså, the same one used in Opera 9.6, with apparently no changes. Currently, the alpha version does not come with Flash Player included by default. A bug I could catch was that sometimes when you click a widget (like the web pages scrolling bar or clicking on tabs) does not always work the first time you use it, so you will have to click it again. This happens completely random for me.


Regarding stability, I was impressed to see that Opera 10 is pretty stable, even though it's still in alpha stage. No crashes occured while I used it for this review.

Currently Opera 10 does not include new features (except for the Presto engine), but these will be added pretty soon when it gets into beta phase.

Conclusion
There isn't much to say about Opera 10 alpha at this time, expect for the major change with the new version of the rendering engine. I truly hope for a stable release on Linux rather than lots of new features, since I already consider Opera full-featured, coming with an IRC client, BitTorrent client, widgets, great-looking, customisable themes, these being just a few.

Round-up: Most Popular Posts in 2008

10 Essential Applications Included in Ubuntu 8.10
Review with screenshots of 10 essential applications included in Ubuntu 8.10 'Intrepid Ibex', the latest Ubuntu release.

Kubuntu 8.10 'Intrepid Ibex' Beta Screenshots Tour
This article briefly reviews Kubuntu 8.10 about a week before the release, including screenshots with KDE4.

3 Classic First-Person Shooter Games for Linux
Here's a review of 3 popular and classic first-person shooter games available for the Linux platform, which made history over time: Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Unreal Tournament 2004 and ioQuake 3.

Ubuntu 8.10 'Intrepid Ibex' Beta Screenshots Tour
Although the screenshots were took before the release to happen, it pretty much sums up the look of default Ubuntu, not the new DarkRoom theme.

Compiling C/C++ Code in Ubuntu and Available IDEs
This article is addressed to new users who want to study C/C++ and need basic guidance. I also included several brief reviews for most popular IDEs out there, like Kate, KDevelop, Code::Blocks or Emacs. It does not contain much technical information, so it's suited for beginners.

5 Simple APT Tricks for Debian and Ubuntu
As the title suggests, this article shows five tricks for one of the most powerful package management system among the Linux distributions: APT.

7 Reasons to Pick Ubuntu and When Not to Choose It
Somewhat of an essay on why and when to pick Ubuntu, and when it's probably a better idea to go with another distribution.

13 Terminal Emulators for Linux
Not really a review, this article lists and briefly describes 13 terminal emulators for Linux.

Tip of the Day: Install Adobe Flash Player 10 in Debian
Although the scope of these articles (tip of the day) is to reduce the quantity of information to a minimum and only present small tips, this is rather a tutorial for installing Flash Player 10 in Debian. Note: Only for 32-bit hardware.

Mount CD/DVD Images (ISO/BIN/NRG) Using AcetoneISO2 in Debian and Ubuntu
A short tutorial on how to install and use AcetoneISO2, a popular application for mounting CD/DVD images.

3 Best Video Players for Linux: SMPlayer, VLC and Kaffeine
A review of three of the most popular video players out there: the popular, cross-platform video player built in Qt4, the older version of VLC built in wxWidgets and the KDE3 version of Kaffeine.