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Smuxi is an irssi-inspired, flexible, user-friendly and cross-platform IRC client for sophisticated users, targeting the GNOME desktop.

Smuxi is based on the client-server model: The core application (engine) can be placed onto a server which is connected to the Internet around-the-clock; one or more frontends then connect to the core. This way, the connection to IRC can be kept up even when all frontends have been closed. The combination of screen and irssi served as example for this architecture.

Smuxi also supports the regular single application mode. This behaves like a typical IRC client; it doesn’t need separate core management and utilizes a local engine that is used by the local frontend client.

Smuxi currently supports the following features

• Detachable Frontend (frontend can be detached from a smuxi-server)
• Multiple Server Support (you can connect to more than one server)
• Unified Nickname Colors (identical color across channels and networks)
• Caret-Mode (keyboard navigation through messages)
• Regular and Bash-Style Nickname Completion
• Full Keyboard Control
• Startup Commands (when Smuxi starts)
• On Connect Commands (when connecting to a server)
• Message / Command History
• Configurable Encoding (ISO-8859-1/15, UTF-8, etc)
• Configurable Command Character
• Auto Connect (automatically connect to defined servers)
• Quick Connect Dialog (simply connect to any server)
• Open / Join Chat Dialog
• Find Group Chat Dialog
• Sorted and Reoderable Tabs
• Colors are checked and adjusted for optimium contrast
• Clickable URLs
• Word Wrapping
• Logging Support
• Fully customizable filters to ignore messages or events
• Configurable Highlight Words
• Markerlines which divide old messages from new messages
• Themeing Support
  • Configurable Font
  • Foreground / Background Color
  • Userlist Position
  • Tab Colors / Position
  • Configurable Timestamps
  • Configurable Tray-Icon Support
• Translations
  • British English
  • Czech
  • Catalan (patial)
  • Danish
  • Finnish (patial)
  • French
  • German
  • Italian
  • Portuguese
  • Spanish (patial)
  • Swedish
• Multiple Network Protocols
  • IRC Support
    • Stripping Colors and/or Formattings from Messages
    • Showing mIRC Colors
    • Splitting oversized messages
    • Channel List / Search
    • CTCP Support including a Menu
    • Invite To Menu
    • Lag Indicator
  • Twitter Support
    • Reading and Posting Tweets
    • Friends Timeline
    • Replies
    • Direct Messages

Themeing & UI

Love the way it handles tabs and userlist. First of all, userlist can show on left side or right side. Tabs can be showed at upper, bottom, right and left side. My pic above has tabs at left side. Colors and fonts are changeable too. background images and tab colours are changeable.

Download

To download Smuxi for Arch, Foresight, Debian, OpenSuse, Gentoo, FreeBSD… Go to: http://www.smuxi.org/page/Download

Today, we start to build Banshee from Git instead of tarballs. To make sure we always got a working Banshee, thats based on latest version.

Latest Banshee (1.7.3) was released with an issue that made some packagers to either remove gnome-doc-utils or using a patch to current 1.7.3 release.

So from now on, Foresight Linux will ship Banshee built from Git instead. This doesn’t mean we will update it to make it unstable, we will still make sure its stable enough to have in Foresight. As we specify from what Git commit we will build from.

Also read little from creator and developer for Banshee: http://abock.org/2010/07/22/tarballs-why

There are many applications out there for Linux that can import to your computer. But we will list 3 of them, probably the best 3 open sourced applications out there today.

F-Spot

F-Spot supports 16 common files types, including JPEG, GIF, TIFF, RAW, and others.

Import your photos from your hard drive, camera (including PTP type), or iPod.
Creating a CD of photos is just clicks away. Simply select the photos you wish to have on CD, and choose “Export to CD” from the main menu.

If you have a Flickr, 23, Picasa Web or SmugMug account, F-Spot can export photos to it, while optionally resizing your selection, and preserving tags and metadata.

You can also export to Gallery or O.r.i.g.i.n.a.l. powered websites, or a nicely themed static webpage.

Shotwell

Shotwell Features:
1. Import: Import photos from folders or from any digital camera supported by gPhoto.

2. Organize: Shotwell automatically groups photos taken at the same time. You can also use tags to organize your photo collection.

3. Edit: You can rotate, crop, reduce red-eye, and adjust the exposure, saturation, tint, and temperature of each photo.

4. Publish: Publish photos to Facebook, Flickr and Picasa Web Albums.

Rapid Photo Downloader

This one isn’t like the 2 others, as this application is a pure import application. So if you only plan to import photos/videos, then i would go for this application. No question about it.

Conclusion

If you need a great feature rich application, then F-spot is the one for you. Specially the version 0.71 that was recently released.

If you only need to grab a few photos and easy to upload them to facebook or flickr, then Shotwell is the one to use. It’s more slimmed, but remember it cant handle as much file types that f-spot do.

If you need a pure import application, then go for rapid-photo-downloader.

To install these ones in Foresight, open terminal and write:

sudo conary update f-spot

sudo conary update shotwell

sudo conary update rapid-photo-downloader

The version of the applications we got today is:
f-spot 0.7.1
rapid-photo-downloader 0.3.0
shotwell 0.6.1

XNOISE is a media player for Gtk+ with a slick GUI, great speed and lots of features.

Unlike Rhythmbox, Banshee or itunes, Xnoise uses a tracklist centric design. The tracklist is a list of video or music tracks that are played one by one without being removed (right side of window). This gives you the possibility to enqueue any track in any order, regardless if they are on the same album or not. The tracks can be reordered at any time via drag and drop.

The media browser (left side of the window) contains all available media in a hierarchical tree structure of the available metadata. It is easy to find a single track, artist or album by going through this tree or by just entering a search term. From the media browser, music or videos can be dragged into the tracklist to every position.

Single or multiple tracks, streams, albums or artists can be dragged onto the tracklist and be reordered. Within the playing track, it’s possible to jump to every position by clicking the position bar.

Xnoise can play every kind of audio/video data that gstreamer can handle.

There is a plugin interface available. Plugins are optionally build, if their dependencies are fulfilled. By now there are already some plugins, e.g. a plugin that downloads cover images from lastFm or one that shows notifications, one that monitores file changes in your local media directory, …

A local database (sqlite) is used for caching the metadata and media locations. Song tags are imported via taglib. That gives Xnoise a great speed.

If you hover the album image for a audio track, xnoise will show the image in big size in the video area

To install it in Foresight, open up a terminal and write:

sudo conary update {xnoise,xnoise-plugins-core}=@fl:2-devel

First of all, im getting very tired to see that Foresight is dead from users that really don’t know any facts at all.

Im referring to: http://vinci.wordpress.com/2010/06/17/i-declare-foresight-linux-as-dead/

Foresight is very alive and active, the only problem is that we don’t have released any official iso lately. Mostly because of PackageKit issues.

The worst part of that blog post above, is that he hasn’t even tried to get any information about Foresigt status today at all. He just looked at when a new iso was released and went from there.

Anyway, new FFmpeg and x264 is now in Foresight. Here is the Changelog from FFmpeg.

x264 site, to get more information what’s been happening lately.

Few other applications that’s also got updated recently:

Transmission 2.0

avidemux 2.5.3

ffmpeg2theora 0.26

xmms2 0.7

ffmpegthumbnailer 2.0.2

aqualung 0.9 Beta 11

empathy 2.30.1.1

whole gstreamer, gst-plugins-**** got updated to latest avaiable versions.

Wine 1.2 rc4

Homebank 4.3

Bluefish 2.0.1

Nvidia 256.35

Upcoming version bumps:

Chromium rev: 50314 or newer.

Direct Connect (DC) is a peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol. Clients connect to a central hub where they can chat or share files with one another. Users can view other users’ list of shared files or search the hub for files.

LinuxDC++

LinuxDC++ is a Direct Connect client based on DC++. Utilizing the latest DC++ core, LinuxDC++ offers similar functionality to the Windows client like segmented downloading, TTH based file integrity, etc. with a GTK+ user interface.

To install in Foresight, open terminal and write:

sudo conary update linuxdcpp=@fl:2-devel

FreeDC++

To install in Foresight, open terminal and write:

sudo conary update freedcpp=@fl:2-devel

EiskaltDC++

• Full-featured chat (parsing magnets, links, emoticons, search in the chat, filtering in users list, chat commands).
• Full-featured search engine and file-browser (lights already shared files, etc.).
• Group transfers in connection manager.
• Separate download manager.
• Download and upload lists.
• Favourite users (autoslots and etc.); Favourite hubs.
• Text (using default Qt tray messages or using standart D-Bus system manager notices) and sound notifications.
• Support of themes, icons and emoticon-packs.
• The ability to not share files by mask.
• UPnP Support.
• Substitution tag in favourite hubs.
• Compulsory indication of external IP-address in favourite hubs.
• Auto-update external IP through DynDNS in favourite hubs.
• Search spy.
• IP-filter.
• Spell-checking using Aspell.
• widget with public hubs.
• Filtering support in basic widgets (Ctrl + F hotkey).
• Away mode support.
• custom scripts examples.
• fast search panel.
• ability to run several instances of client by different system users. Different local ports have to be specified in the settings.
• ability to disable chat during automatic connecting to favorite hub.
• option in preference dialog to limit hashing speed.
• ability to pause hashing process.
• ability to limit upload to users according their own share size.
• search history, their number can be configured.
• ability to use the side dock with list of widgets instead of a one-line panel with tabs.

To install in Foresight, open terminal and write:

sudo conary update eiskaltdcpp=@fl:2-devel

To install it in Ubuntu (to make Hund happy), just install it from this PPA:

PPA available for Ubuntu. Here is the tehnick’s PPA, just follow the simple steps mentioned here- how to install software in ubuntu from PPA and enjoy the new EiskaltDC.

More and more users, specially Linux users are starting to use Chromium instead of Firefox.

So here is a list of useful plugins that I use:

If you use Google Reader and don’t want to use anything else for RSS feeds, then use these:

Google reader RSS Subscriber

Google Reader Checker or Google Reader Notifier (by Google)

Those 2 will make you easily to add new feeds and eaily to see when a new post has come to any of your google reader feeds.

If you don’t care about Google Reader, and want a live rss feed instead. Then use this one:

RSS Live Links

That one looks through your open tabs and can recommend all feeds you can add from those tabs. Also easily to modify RSS Live plugin.

Here is some great other plugins:

AdBlock

Browser Button for AdBlock

Chrome TV

Twitter and Facebook

Beautify Facebook (Item not found. This item may have been removed by its author.)

Facebook for Google Chrome

Chromed Bird

All tested with Foresight Linux and Chromium browser. Also tested with current chromium ver 5.0.379.0 (44762)

Site: Talika

This is a gnome panel applet that lets you switch between open windows using icons.

The pic above shows different ways it can show the running applications in your Linux.

It can be very useful if you dont use any lower panel in Gnome. Will be soon in Foresight for testing.

Update: We had 0.24 in FL:2-devel repo, rewrote recipe to use svn. Built from 2010.04.11 today. Hopefully it will work alot better than 0.24

So at this moment, we have revision 37 available.

sudo conary update talika=@fl:2-devel

Tips on good applications

A list i personally recommend.

Pic editor

GIMP

Show pics

Eye Of GNOME
GPicView

BitTorrent

rTorrent
Deluge
KTorrent
Transmission

Burning softwares

Brasero
Gnome Baker
K3B

E-post

Gmail Notify
Mozilla Thunderbird
Evolution

FTP

gFTP
FileZilla

Direct Connect

LinuxDC++

IRC

XChat
Irssi

Komprimering

Fileroller

Music players

Amarok
Beep Media Player
MPD
Audacious
Rhythmbox

Office

AbiWord
Open Office
Koffice

Scrobbling

Last.fm

SFV Checksum

Parano

Record desktop

RecordMyDesktop

Message clients

aMSN
Pidgin
Kopete
Emesene

RSS

Lifera
akregator
RSSOwl

Texteditors

GEdit
Nano

Videobackup

OGMrip

Video players

VLC
Totem
MPlayer

Virtual

VirtualBox

Web browsers

Firefox
Swiftfox
Swiftweasel

Eyecandy

AWN Avant Manager
Conky
Compiz Fusion
gDesklets
Screenlets

Various

Gcolor2

Source code:
The source is available on Launchpad.

GUI and script for PulseAudio users that will set up system-wide equalized audio, without needing to restart PulseAudio or any running applications.

Advantages:

• Configurable 15 band equalizer for PulseAudio;
• You can enable or disable equalized audio on-the-fly, without having to restart any running applications;
• Offers the choice of using equalized audio for the current session or permanently;
• No need to edit any configuration files by hand;
• User-customizable: you can use any LADSPA audio processing plugin (which can apply various audio effects beyond equalization);
• Packaged as a .deb file for easy installation;
• Graphical User Interface.

Usage:
Open the PulseAudio Equalizer (Applications -> Sound & Video). The interface should be fairly self-explanatory:

• 15 frequency bands you can adjust to your liking;
• Preamp will boost your equalized volume (as a multiplier value from 1x to 4x);
• Presets are included (based on VLC’s built-in equalizer), or you can choose to save own favourite configuration as a new preset;
• EQ Enabled will enable the equalizer in the current session (which applies to all running applications);
• Keep Settings will configure your PulseAudio configuration to remain permanently equalized (and therefore, you won’t need to run the PulseAudio Equalizer interface each time you login);
• Advanced menu options so that you can reset all settings (useful for troubleshooting) or delete user presets;
• Apply Settings will apply all changes.

If you already use fl:2-devel repo for your Foresight, just open terminal and write:

sudo conary update pulseaudio-equalizer

If you use fl:2-qa or fl:2 repo, then write instead:

sudo conary update {pulseaudio-equalizer,ladspa-swh-plugins}=@fl:2-devel

Any problems with pulseaudio-equalizer, plz fill an issue at: https://issues.foresightlinux.org

If its pulseaudio-equalizer itself that may be busted, look in this thread.