In a continuation of my last post, I’m going to check out a few more music players. Again, these are development versions, and they might be different from the current stable versions.

JuK (KDE)

JuK seems to be another popular player for KDE. The easiest way to describe it would be having the interface of Amarok with the feature set of Rhythmbox. It basically plays music and lets you organize your library, and that’s it. There isn’t any plugin support, so if you don’t like the features it has you cannot do much with it. That said, JuK has an easy, intuitive interface and is a great way to just listen to your music without all of the thrills of other players.

Quod Libet (GNOME)

At first glance, Quod Libet seems to be just another simple music player. However, that is all changed when you open the Plugins dialog. Quod Libet comes with over 30 plugins to activate, ranging from a tray icon to a music alarm clock. It has multiple views, such sa Paned Browser and Internet Radio, so there is always a new way to look at your music. It comes bundled with Ex Falso, a tag editor accessible as its own application and from within Quod Libet.

2 more players after the jump.

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Development on KDE 4, the next major version of the popular desktop environment, continues and if you’re curious as to what progress is like, you might want to take a look at what is going on right now.

Thankfully, there is a Live Linux distribution containing a recent version of the (unstable) KDE 4 which you can download and try out if you want to have a play. The distribution is based on OpenSUSE and contains recent builds of KDE 4, KOffice and Amarok 2 from the Subversion repositories.

I did download this disc myself and boot it to give it a spin, but unfortunately I ran into a few problems and didn’t have much success. Of course, that is the risk that you take with running pre-release software and it is probably an issue with my specfic hardware configuration, so your mileage may well vary and you will hopefully be able to get a little further than I did!

You can download an .iso image of the “KDE Four Live” CD from home.kde.org/~binner/kde-four-live/, which you can then burn to disc.

To be fair to them, Google are now producing quite a few desktop applications for Linux now. However, we don’t yet have a Gmail Notifier application which runs in the background and shows you when you have new email in your Gmail inbox.

Even so, us Linux users aren’t left out in the dark for Gmail checking programs as there are actually a couple of open source projects already that allow you to do just that. One of the most popular is CheckGmail, and it is the application I’m going to take a look at today.

CheckGmail is a nice graphical application that sits in your system tray just as the official Google Notifiers for Windows and Mac OS X do. Once you’ve got it downloaded and installed, you open it for the first time and simply enter your login information into the Preferences dialogue.

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