One of (e:terry) and (e:matthew)'s gripes with linux when we had it on the main home computer two years ago was that we didn't have a music player that rivaled the power of itunes.

In comes amarok It is a full featured music player with an included library search and best of all, it looks up the lyrics and cover art for each song on a lyric database.

I think this is the first ime I have seen a music player that fetches lyrics and I love that. You can also contribute lyrics to songs that arn't found in the database.


You can totally customize the way it looks. I fyou had tried this player before the latest version uses an sql database to store mp3 data makign it much faster. I love it.

So maybe you took my tip [inlink]computer,3[/inlink] and started downloading files really fast using the azureus bittorrent client and now you have all these CD .iso files that you don't know how to burn into CDs. One easy and freeware solution is to use ISO Recorder v2 Beta

With this software you can simply right click on any iso and burn them using windows XP explorer by choosing "Copy Image to CD" from the context menu. Then just insert a burnable CD and click next. I requires window XP service pack 2 I am pretty sure, although they have an odler version somewhere on the site for older versions.

--paul

(e:paul) mentioned that he is going to install SuSE 9.3 on his "supercomputer"[inlink]paul,3759[/inlink] which reminded me of some open source news:

Just this month, Novell who owns SuSE open-sourced the distro and a public beta of SuSE 10.0 as well as previous releases of SuSE are available for download

This is the first public beta for SuSE in the history of the distribution.

SuSE calls itself the "world's most usable Linux distribution" but, of course, usability is in the eye of the beholder. One of the best features of the distro is YaST which makes the distro easy to install and configure.

p.s. in case anyone is confused this journal entry was written by (e:uncutsaniflush). (e:paul) graciously has allowed me the priviledge of co-writing the computer journal with him.

Interested in finding out more about bittorrent but you don't know where to start? This tip comes passed along to me from (e:shawnr). Gettign started with bittorrent is east with the azureus client which is pretty easy to use and comes in wndows, linux, and mac os x flavors. However, it does require java which you most likely already have, if not you can get it from the azureus link.

[size=m]How do I get started?[/size]
1. Download java JRE and install it if you don't have it. You can get it at the Azureus site

2. Download the azureus client for your operating system. Same above

3. Go to the web and type whatever you want to download plus the word torrent into your search engine. Links to torrent sites will come up. WHen you find what you are looking for download the .torrent file and open it with azureus. It will start downloading to your hardrive.

4. You can also share your own video, art, whatever using bitorrent. Maybe (e:shawnr) can do a tutorial on that.

Here are some sites where you can search for torrent files.
Pirate Bay -
Bogaa -
Seedler -

[size=m]How does it work?[/size]

With BitTorrent, files are broken into smaller fragments, typically a quarter of a megabyte each. As the fragments are distributed to the peers in a random order, they can be reassembled on a requesting machine. Each peer takes advantage of the best connections to the missing pieces while providing an upload connection to the pieces it already has. This scheme has proven particularly adept in trading large files such as videos and software source code. Quoted from: BitTorrent - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Talk about swiftness. I am getting sometimes upwards of 700k per sec downloading suse 9.3, same with many other programs and files

In case anyone missed this news, OS X is being ported to PC hardware by apple. A bunch of you wrote about this a whiole back. It turns out that people have alread hacked the OS to run on non-apple PCs now. In fact there is a whole wiki with directions and information about getting this up and running . There are a bunch of mehtods for install including one for dual boot.

I know that this is gogin to make (e:uncutsaniflush) crazy unless he has already done it!!

Here is a blog with more instructions, some imagery and video of it running on vaio laptop.