FOSSwire

Apologies for the FOSSwire radio silence recently. I've been really really busy with university stuff. My Christmas break starts next week, so with any luck FOSSwire should get some more content over the festive period. Thanks for bearing with us!

The Amarok team have officially unveiled the 2.0 release of the popular open source music and media player application.

The world of digital music management has changed a great deal since the birth of Amarok four and a half years ago. Amarok 1 established a reputation for innovation, but maintaining development with the old framework became more difficult as Amarok grew, often in directions we never imagined.

Some of the things this new release brings to the table include:

• New user interface
• Integration with many online music services (Last.fm, Magnatune and others)
• New scripting API

Crucially, Amarok 2.0 is built against KDE 4, rather than KDE 3, making it an ideal music player for KDE 4-based desktops as it now runs natively.

There are also Beta versions of this 2.0 release available for other platforms as well - with Windows and Mac OS X versions available. The use of the Qt library underneath KDE means that the versions for these other systems integrate well (for example, Amarok 2.0 uses global menu bar when run under Mac OS X - so it 'feels like' any other Mac app).

I haven't yet had a chance to play with the new release, but you can read further release notes and download the 2.0 version from the Amarok site.

There are a couple of others (Konqueror, Epiphany), but the primary open source browser that you're likely to be using on Linux is Firefox.

Now don't get me wrong, Firefox is great for a lot of things. It is endlessly customisable and has ubiquitous support from website developers. It does have disadvantages too, however, including not exactly being the quickest beast out there.

WebKit is an open source browser engine (the code that does the heavy lifting inside your browser) that Apple made for its Safari browser. It is derived from the KHTML engine that was developed for Konqueror, but was reworked quite a bit by Apple and now various other third parties.

A lot of people prefer WebKit to Gecko (the engine behind Firefox). It's clean, fast and has a lot of different companies and organisations behind it. It's not just limited to Safari - it's in lots of mobile phone browsers, powers Google's Chrome browser and lots more.

Midori is a lightweight web browser for Linux built on top of WebKit. It doesn't have a load of features right now, but if you're looking for something that's quick, but has good compatibility with websites that don't play well in other alternative browsers like Konqueror, it's worth a look.

Despite some of its limitations, Midori does have built in support for User Scripts (which you might know as Greasemonkey), a bookmark manager, a customisable search box and a few other features.

It won't be suitable for everyone, however, or perhaps for all your browsing needs. I didn't find a way to run Flash inside, which might put some people off. Despite that, if you want a browser that's very quick and very light, even if you don't use it full-time, seriously take a look at Midori.

If you're running the latest Ubuntu version, Intrepid Ibex, you'll be able to install Midori by searching in Add/Remove Programs. Alternatively, still trying searching in your package manager, or you can get the source code.

[found via]

It's about time for another quick tip, and this one relates to the premier open source office suite, OpenOffice.org.

Using the built-in heading styles in your Writer document means that OOo can handle the styling automatically for you and also you can generate tables of contents and more with the built-in tools. Note that this tip assumes that all your headings are set up in this way.

In some documents, you might want or need to number your headings. Again, rather than typing numbers in each heading manually, you can set up your heading styles to number this for you.

This even works with hierarchy - your Heading 1 can be numbered '1' and a Heading 2 underneath it will then be '1.1', for example.

To set this up, first go to Tools > Outline Numbering.

In this dialogue box, simply pick the heading level on the left and then choose the numbering style you want from the Number box.

Repeat this process for any of the other heading levels (e.g. Heading 2, Heading 3). In this way you can quickly build up the hierarchical numbering system using whatever numbering style (1, I, i, a) you prefer. While you're here, you might want to go to the Position tab and change the minimum spacing between the numbering and the text of the heading so it isn't squashed up.

Once you've set your headings up the way you like, OK that dialogue. Any existing headings in the document will gain the numbers and future headings will be numbered as you've indicated. You won't have to bother manually renumbering things if you later decide to cut and paste something into a different place.

And if you're going to need this a lot, you could also save a template with this style already set up.

[via]