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djotaku's twitter feed
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- http://www.gnu.org/fry/
- Clinton Supporters: Are you really such sore losers that you're prepared to screw us all over for four years just because you lost?
- More Christian Tech Goodness: http://tinyurl.com/6c8587
- When I was a kid, I played some corny Biblical video games. Now this comes out: http://tinyurl.com/5mxczl Will it sell?
- From now on all LPGA players must pass an oral english test. Who cares if you speak english if you can swing a stick at a small white ball?
- I thought my blog looked a little weird and then I remembered that I had ad blocker turned on and my google ad was therefore missing.
- Foobar2000 the strangely named audio player with the neat features
- I'm annoyed that my Civ 4 BTS hasn't been auto-updating. Just had to download over 300 MB of patches just to play Fall from Heaven 2.
- @ASPwizer: Nothing wrong with you, Honda Elements are the cars that winners drive. q;o)
- Also, sharing: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericsbinaryworld/sets/72157606917571613/
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Aug
27
Review: openSuse 11.0 (and KDE 4)
Category: Fedora, Gnome, KDE, Linux, M$, Novell, SuSe | 
12 Comments
I’ve never used Suse or openSuse. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been a “loyal” Fedora user since Fedora Core 1 and I have Ubuntu on my laptop since it had awesome laptop support. I even got some Suse CDs as a prize for the Letter of the Month from Linux Format magazine. However, I never even tried it at that time as I was mad at Novell for the Microsoft pact. I think it lends a lot of credibility to Microsoft’s BS argument that Linux violates its patents.
But it’s been a few years and nothing horrible has happened because of the Microsoft pact and it came as a liveDVD in the latest Linux Format Magazine. I was trying to wait until KDE 4.1 came out for Fedora so that could be my first experience with KDE 4, but that’s been delayed nearly a month now (while they, rightly, fix some bugs) so I decided to go ahead with the Suse review.
Suse is the second oldest distro that’s still around. It started off as being based off of Slackware and later on was somewhat based on Red Hat, borrowing rpm and some other technologies. Since then it’s gone off on its own and is now considered one of the big boys. A few years after Red Hat shelved its personal distro and converted over to the community-sponsored Fedora, Suse decided to do the same thing with openSuse. Just like Fedora, they’ve had some uneven releases. However, openSuse 11 is supposed to be their comeback release. Historically, Suse has been one of the biggest supporters of KDE as the default desktop although that has fallen off a little seince they’ve been trying to compete with Red Hat in the business world.
It’s important to note, however, that Novell’s Suse team has put a LOT of work into their KDE desktop. This liveDVD is running KDE 4.0, yet they didn’t seem to have any problems getting icons on the desktop. Lots of people were complaining about being unable to do so in Fedora and other distros using KDE 4. Apparently, they just didn’t take the time that Suse did to engineer a really good KDE 4 release. (Frankly, I’m surprised that Siego didn’t point to openSuse 11.0 as an example of a well-implemented KDE 4.0 release!) They’ve also solved the problem of the ugly black panel that was too large. So, plus points go to Novell’s openSuse/Suse KDE team. They deserve an applause for doing this so well!
Novell has the KDE program menu that has annoyed so many people. One of the things I’ve always loved about KDE was the fact that it had a favorite (or most run) programs section on the start menu. Sure, there are some that believe that if you’re going to run programs that often you should have them as launchers on your taskbar. But that can make taskbars look a bit cluttered. Also, I think the most used program portion of Window’s Start Menu is one of the things they got very right with Windows XP. (I’m not sure if MS innovated that or copied it from somewhere) This menu is a good menu and doesn’t deserve all the hatred it’s received on the net. It just needs a couple of tweaks to make it perfect. The first problem with it is that if your mouse wanders down to the Favorites, Applications, etc portion of the menu, it switches you to that section. I think a click should be required there to keep people from accidentally switching. That was the biggest complaint most people had and it can be fixed so easily. No need to throw the baby out with the bath water. One other thing that was a bit unclear to me was how to go back on the applications hierarchy. The skinny arrow on the left is not noticeable enough - at least not the first time it catches you off guard.
Widgets…it’s one of the biggest, most talked about innovations of KDE 4. There is a lot of innovation going on in KDE 4 and if they can get past the KDE 4.0 stigma, I think they may end up surpassing Gnome with this release. With Superkaramba, KDE has always done widgets so much better than Gnome. Gnome’s desklets always seemed a bit kludgey and tacked on at the end. Superkaramba always felt like it was part of KDE; even before it was added as an official part of KDE 3.5. Now, with Plasma, the KDE team hopes to take them to the level of Apple’s OSX widgets. In fact, OSX widget compatibility is either in KDE 4.1 or coming in KDE 4.2.
Wow! If you’ve only seen the same old screenshots of a calculator, a click and a notepad, you haven’t seen the true power of the widgets. First of all, they have quite a few new ones now. You can see that I have a comic viewer, an RSS feed, and a Twitter feed. All of these came from the default “add widgets” dialog. I’m surprised, especially given the popularity of Twitter, that no one has showcased these widgets yet. I’m thouroughly impressed that we’ve moved beyond simple system monitors and weather widgets (although I’m sure those are coming soon enough!) They’re very easy and intuitive to position and configure. And, one of the problems I always had with widgets on any desktop was that if I had all my programs open, they were less helpful to me. Well, by clicking on the little button by the gecko or the top right corner, the plasma dashboard view is activated. This minimizes your programs and brings the widgets to the forefront. A simple click on the desktop brings your programs back! Couldn’t be easier. They’re also very pleasing to the eye with their drop shadows. They move smoothly and appear with a little fade-in. Very nice.
As far as programs go, they have a pretty standard set. OpenOffice.org provides the office suite. Again, like with Mandriva, this is a little bit out of place since they could use KOffice. However, I know that OpenOffice.org has much better compatibility with the suite from Redmond. Interestingly, GIMP and Krita don’t seem to be included - but then again, it’s a liveDVD. I’m sure it’s in the repositories.
In fact, let’s check out Yast, their control center. It appears to control any setting you might want to change. Plus points for them for making it all nice and organized. In fact, they seem to be on par with Mandriva here in terms of everyting you could possibly want in one place. Minus a very small point for it not looking as pretty as Mandriva or even as pretty as the rest of openSuse 11.0. From here we can install programs. Let’s see how well that appears to work.
I have to say that it is indeed ugly to look at. I couldn’t really get a good feel for it as it didn’t have repositories defined. I’ve really become much more of a fan of PackageKit’s interface. (Which I’ll talk about in my Fedora review) More and more Gnome-based distros are moving to PackageKit and I think there’s even a KDE version of Packagekit. It works very well for package management and you can’t argue against the value of a consistent interface across distros.
Some last little things I noticed. Take a look at what came up when I clicked on “My Computer”:
I really, really like this page that it loads up. It is very useful for locating places on your computer AND for getting information. To get the same info in Windows you’d have to open up “My Computer” AND right-click on “My Computer” and click on properties. Here you have some quick links to “Common Folders” and also you can see that it recognized my NTFS hard drives. You also have all the key information you need in order to get help from someone: kernel version, distro, KDE version, graphics card driver, graphics card info, CPU info, and the total and free RAM. Just one look gives you everything you need to know. And I want to finish up with just a quick look at some of the neat finishing touches that Novell has done with openSuse.
Look at that - there’s a little gecko - the Suse mascot on the title bar. This little dude appears on any title bar that has focus. It’s just little touches like this that make the distro seem more professional. I wish more distros would do things like this. And look at this:
Now, this is probably a KDE setting, as opposed to Suse, but good on Novell for leaving it in. There are many things I like about this setup. First of all, the expansion button is not next to the exit button. The number of times I’ve been frustrated by accidentally closing a window when I meant to resize it is just too numerous to count. Also, the up arrow makes more sense to me than Microsoft’s icon. It’s just that we’ve been around with the Microsoft implementation for 20 years.
So, what’s my final verdict? I think Novell has done a really, really good job with openSuse 11.0. Unlike Fedora, they did a very good job with the unfinished KDE 4.0 and turned it into something usable. Lots of visual finishing touches make the distro just feel professional and not hacked together. There are a few rough edges here and there. I also didn’t test out flash, MP3 playback, or DVD playback. I presume these can all be downloaded from some third party repository in some country where they don’t implement silly things like software patents.
Except for the still touchy subject of the Microsoft deal, I’d recommend Novell to someone who was new to Linux but ready to learn. It doesn’t have the same hand-hold style of Ubuntu, so that’s still my top choice. Right now it’s really almost a tie between recommending Mandriva and openSuse as the next best thing after Ubuntu. Fedora is often broken due to being bleeding edge and I wouldn’t recommend it to someone brand new to Linux. Of course, there still is the patent deal and they either did it to make themselves more palatable to companies than Red Hat (thus having bad motives) or they had to satisfy investors (which they legally must do in the USA). So I guess that would break the tie and give it to Mandriva. But Novell has made a top notch distro and if they can get over the negative press from the Microsoft deal (and there are websites like boycottNovell to prevent that), then I think openSuse may end up on more magazine covers and start to steal some of the thunder away from Ubuntu.
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Aug
23
Empathize!
Category: Gnome, Red Hat | 2 Comments
Well, the latest craze to hit the Linux bloggers is talking about Empathy. Everyone is talking about it. It’s apparently going to be in the next version of Gnome and Ubuntu is considering replacing Pidgin with Empathy for the next release. First of all, depending on how much work is done on Empathy between now and then, I think this may be a bad idea. Ubuntu is the distro we give our Linux n00b friends to play with. Pidgin can do (more or less) everything Trillian can do (and definitely everything AIM can do - except voice/vid). Do we want them thinking that Linux is crap because they are using the feature incomplete Empathy?
But this isn’t even the most interesting thing about this for me. The most interesting thing is that Empathy uses libpurple for the backend for some of its IM capabilities. On first glance this seems like the perfect *nix-y thing to do. You don’t want developers wasting their time writing functionality that already exists. Instead they should make the core functionality a library that all the other programs can use. This gives rise to all kinds of awesome programs - think of all Gnome programs using one program to provide spell checking so that they don’t each have to implement it and their own dictionary, etc. However, on second glance you start to wonder if it’s a good thing in this context. The spelling library being used by all the programs is fine because they don’t all compete with each other.
Now we have Empathy as a possible replacement for Pidgin and it uses Pidgin’s libraries! That seems like a bit of a slap in the face to me. It’s like, “Thanks for your libraries and now I will use them to dominate you and wipe you out.” After all, I keep hearing people calling for distros to only ship one program per function. One word processor and ONE IM program. So if they start shipping Empathy as the default, I think that for a growing category of new Linux users, that means they won’t be using Pidgin. After all, why stray from what the distro has provided for you?
So, first of all, how does this make the Pidgin developers feel? It’s like a fork, but even worse because it’s a totally different code base that can’t be morphed back into Pidgin. And what if Empathy gets more and more popular until no one is using Pidgin? Then the developers stop working on libpurple. But Empathy depends on libpurple and they’ve just shot themselves in the foot. Well, at least until they get someone who understands enough about how libpurple was working to continue working on the code (the magic of the GPL). But, more likely, they’ll just use libpurple as a stop-gap and then work on a new library - wasting the developer time they wanted to save by using libpurple in the first place.
This reminds me of a similar battle in the Linux world - Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux vs Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Oracle is using Red Hat’s source code to make their own Linux. They are competing against, and hope to dominate Red Hat. But what happens if they crush Red Hat? They’ve killed their source of source code.
So, where do things go from here? There are three possible scenarios that I can see. 1) Empathy and Pidgin get into an arms race. This benefits the users from the competition as more and more features get added. Of course, it can also hurt the users if new features are added so hastily that they introduce tons of bugs and security holes. 2) The Pidgin project folds into the Empathy project. Kind of like an unforking, in a way. Pidgin, which has always been the default IM client for Gnome, basically becomes an official Gnome project by way of becoming Empathy. 3) The Pidgin team gives up UI coding. They decide to remain their own project, but only work on libpurple. There are already other programs that use libpurple like Adium and some other duck-themed one for Macintosh. So they’re already used to people using their backend and creating other programs. (They’re just usually on Macs and don’t compete directly with Pidgin) I think I’d prefer either outcome 2 or 3 as it’d probably result in the least ill-will in the community and the most benefit for users.
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Jul
31
Gnome in Fedora 9 Part 1
Category: Fedora, Gnome | Leave a Comment
First of all, I guess we got all jealous of Ubuntu because we have a startup sound now. There goes signing in with the speakers on late at night or early in the morning. Second, I apparently no longer have any functionality in Gnome. There are no panels, I can’t right-click the background. I can rotate a cube, but that’s about it. Oh, and I can move my mouse around. Time to figure out what went wrong.
Apparently it’s some kind of metacity bullcrap because Gnome with Openbox gets me panels. Also, I’m getting two error boxes that are completely whited out. I’m pretty sure if I could read the error that I’d be able to figure out what was going wrong. Or at least have more information to ask others. I think it’s possible something that’s supposed to load into the panels is causing problems. Now things have locked up. I’m thinking it could possibly be a fight between updatesd and packagekit, but I’m not sure. I think this may be so because when I tried to do something in yum, it said another app was using yum. The IRC was, as usual, not much help. I have something like a 5% success rate there. I rebooted just in case that might clear up the problem with yum. I think I’ll first start with Gnome/Openbox and see if it freezes up again. chmodding 775 my .gnome2 directories improved things somewhat in that now I get some, but now all of my panels. There may be other files with the wrong permissions somehow. Eventually I just do a chmod 775 .* after noticing there were other files with seemingly wrong permissions. I had a promising start when GDM now finally showed my login picture. It hadn’t showed it until now and I hadn’t realized. But still no luck with Gnome.
When I looked in my .xsession-errors file I saw some sabayon errors. Specifically “No profile for user ‘username’ found. Perhaps that’s the true source of the problem? I looked online and sabayon has something to do with profiles for Gnome. So I typed in sabayon and it asked for my root password. Then I created a profile and associated it with my user account. Let’s see if it works now!!!
Nope, looks like that was a different, unrelated problem. So on the advice of someone from the mailing list I installed and ran gconf-cleaner. Then rebooted. Would this be it? No, this did not solve the problem either. I guess I’ll come back to this once I figure it out.
Trawling through .xsession-errors I see that mugshot is part of the problem. It’s a bit annoying and I can always come back to it later. So I decide to yum remove it. This also removes bigboard, online-desktop and online-desktop-gmail *-google-calendar, *-google-docs and *-google-reader. The online desktop never did work correctly for me, so good riddance.
yum install xorg-x11-fonts* on a whim from something online. Afterall, it’s either a font or a color that’s wrong. If this doesn’t work, it’s possible that my xorg.conf file might be causing the problem by referring to a font server that’s been deprecated. That’s the next thing I try…. Ok, I try getting rid of my xorg.conf to see if this fixes things - it appears this was an error with other Fedora users. So hopefully it finally works and I’ll have a solution to my problem. HOLY COW! That’s all I needed to do all along! I feel like pulling out my hair!
Well, at least it’s fixed!!! Now to get dual-screen, etc working again.
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Jul
13
This will be a few days old by the time this blog post appears on the site, but Gnome 3.0 is set to come out by 2010! This is huge news! Ever since Gnome started getting into the 2.2x series, people have constantly been asking about when Gnome 3.0 would be coming out. Since the Gnome project has decided that Gnoem 3.0 would be an appropriate time to break API and ABI compatibility, they have been saving that until it was needed. However, ever since KDE 4 was announced a few years ago, people have increased their calls for a Gnome 3.0. After all, they don’t want to seem so ridiculously behind when compared to KDE. Computer geeks like you and I know that doesn’t matter, but the lay person might think Gnome was outdated. Now that KDE 4.0 is finally out and with KDE 4.1 due at the end of this month, it seems that the momentum has finally built up for Gnome 3.0.
The source for my info is this Phoronix article. They’re usually a pretty reliable source, but we also have the blog of a prominent Gnome developer.
One of the most exciting things is that Gnome 3.0 will also see the debut of GTK+ 3.0. GTK 2.0 was a HUGE improvement over 1.0. If you’ve ever seen a program that’s still compiled with GTK 1.0, you’ll agree that it’s universally considered to be ugly. It’s like the difference between the way Windows 3.1 program windows looked and the way that Windows 95 and later looked. One is blocky and old then the other is nice and slick. Plus, this may give them the chance to fix up some of the things that people hate about GTK programming. I’m pretty psyched! After all, most of the major Linux distros us Gnome as their main desktop.
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May
3
One of the new features of Gnome 2.22 is the fact that Totem now has a plugin to access your MythTV programs. I installed the plugin and found myself wondering what to do next. I checked on Google for totem mythtv and didn’t find anything until today when Google finally got around to indexing a forum post about it on the Ubuntu Forums. I followed the directions about editing Gconf and had success!
Basically it all boiled down to one very simple thing - you had to give the plugin the address of the computer that has the MythTV backend. Unfortunately, whoever created the plugin decided not to use the “configure” button and makes you go into GConf to edit it. I think perhaps this means that the plugin wasn’t really ready for primetime, but they threw it out there for people to check out. I think I will probably submit a bug against this. I have submitted a bug, so hopefully it will be fixed in future versions of the plugin. For now, just go into gconf-editor and then go to apps->totem->plugins and under the mythtv one add the IP addres of your myth box and then go into totem and hit, once the plugin is activated, switch to it with the playlist dropdown menu. Then hit refresh. You’ll get something that looks like this:
Before this plugin I used to go into mythweb and launch the links from there into VLC. I find that the quality is comparable to watching it on VLC. Even on my wireless connection the video plays more or less flawlessly and I’m able to watch it just like watching it on the TV connected to my Mythbox. Good job Totem programmers!
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May
1
Absolute First Impression of Ubuntu 8.04
Category: General, Gnome, ubuntu | 4 Comments
Last weekend, it had been a few days since the latest Ubuntu hit the net and I hadn’t heard of any major upgrade SNAFUs so I decided to upgrade. I wanted to record my absolute first impressions without doing much, just to see how I felt. The upgrade went by without anything bad happening. My wireless connection still works and nothing major seems to have gone wrong. I went through each of the things I’d heard hyped about in Ubuntu and checked to see how they had changed.
Here’s the desktop I had before the upgrade. It was in the selection of desktops that came standard with Ubuntu.
I was curious whether it would automatically change to the new background when I updated. It did NOT change automatically, so I went ahead and changed it myself.
I really like the look of this desktop. It’s almost the perfect background. It’s not as spartan as the previous Ubuntu default of shades of brown. Yet it’s not too flashy or busy. It seems to strike the right balance and I could see some non-Linux people asking me where I got that cool background from. I really like it even more as I look at it.
Another interesting thing that changed is that the Warcraft III CD now has the same icon on the desktop as it would have in a Windows desktop. I think it’s neat - especially as that’s what the creators of the CD would want. However, in terms of the Human Interface Guide (HIG), I’m not sure it’s good because people may be looking for the CD icon and may not want to hunt for a new icon each time. After all, while I do have some clutter on the desktop, I’ve seen people with so many icons on the desktop you can’t even see the background.
Another thing that EVERYONE has been talking about on the Net is the new Gnome 2.22 calendar applet. Here’s how it looked in Ubuntu 7.10:
Nothing special, just a little calendar. Much better than Windows where you need to pretend to be changing the date to see the calendar. Here’s the new Ubuntu 8.04 (Gnome 2.22) applet:
You can see that I was up really early making the screenshot. I was woken up by a rude person who decided to share his car stereo with everyone at 0300. So the neat thing with the calendar is this little screen that shows where in the world it is sunlit. Also, you can add in time zones that you want to keep track of. So if you have a friend, family member, lover, etc in another time zone, you can see at a glance whether or not they’d appreciate a call from you.
Another thing everyone kept talking about was Firefox. Ubuntu 8.04 comes with Firefox 3 beta 5. Firefox 3 is a huge change over from 2 in that they are moving from bookmark files to a bookmark relational database - complete with tagging. They were also supposed to be changing the them to match better in Gnome.
I didn’t see any difference. I don’t know if this is because they’re waiting for the final release version to add that in or if Ubuntu had mucked with the theme.
Now, they did have a new startup page which was pretty good at providing a decent amount of information. Fedora used to have something like this before abandoning it for a very sparse startup page that doesn’t give much info. As you can see, the themes on Firefox look the same, but look at the differences in the bookmark editor - basically, you can see the tags folder. First 7.10:
Now 8.04:
Another big change in Gnome 2.22, and thus for Ubuntu 8.04, was with Totem. Specifically it gained some new plugins. Here’s 7.10:
For 8.04 there are two new plugins - YouTube and MythTv. I was able to get the Youtube plugin to work extremely easily, but I couldn’t figure out how to make the MythTv plugin show anything.
Above you can see the results of the Youtube search for Mario Kart Wii. The video played flawlessly. Unfortunately, GIMP’s screenshot wouldn’t capture the video playing in Totem so all I have is a black screen in this screenshot, but it actually works.
Finally, there was a little surprise for me in the form of tracker. It was intalled by default when I upgraded and quickly went to work indexing my files. It seemed to do this a LOT faster than Beagle. I wonder if that was removed automatically or if I was left with two competing search programs. One good potential feature of tracker is the ability to add tags to files to help it find those files in the future. Good job taking some advice from the semantic web. I don’t know how useful it will be unless you can apply tags in Nautilus, but it might be pretty awesome. All these changes make me anxious to see how well it is implemented in Feodra 9 in a couple of weeks. Here are some shots of tracker:
Overall, this upgrade left a very good impression of Ubuntu 8.04. It seems they really tried hard to make sure that everything worked, a good thing since this is a Long Term Support (LTS) release. My upgrade went off without a hitch and I can recommend it to anyone who wants a good, easy to use Linux distro.
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Apr
21
One last, good look at KDE 3 Part 1
Category: Fedora, Gnome, KDE, Red Hat | 8 Comments
As you can see, by trawling through this, I have gone back and forth between KDE and Gnome a lot. As I’ve mentioned many times before, I initially loved KDE over Gnome. It looked more like Windows, it had more neat options, and great programs. Not only is Amarok the best media player out there (although Rhythmbox is not far behind), but the KDE programs feel so much more tightly integrated than Gnome. That’s one part where they’ve always had a huge lead over Gnome, although Gnome has been catching up recently. Still, I hope that KDE continues to evolve its KParts and KIOSlaves infrastructures. (Or whatever they evolve into in KDE4) KDE programs also just seemed to fit together visually so much better, I don’t know why because Gnome has the HIG.
But I left KDE for Gnome for a few reasons. First of all, as Gnome has been getting leaner and leaner on system resources, the KDE 3 series remained bloated as a blue whale sloshing around in my RAM as though it was just a kiddie pool and not the ocean. Also, I have had KDE programs crash on me orders of magnitude more often than Gnome programs. Finally, KDE has always been treated as a second-class citizen within Red Hat. That’s why Mandrake was original started! It was originally just a KDE version of Red Hat before branching off and losing RPM compatibility.
But now I want to look at KDE again because a few things have come together to change some of the reasons why I left KDE. First of all, with KDE 4 by basing the desktop on QT4 plus other refinements it’s supposed to be light as a feather on RAM. Sure, it still won’t equate to Fluxbox, but I have a modern system, I just don’t want it to swallow up my RAM like that Kobiyashi at the Nathan’s Hot Dog eating contest. Also, ever since Fedora 7, The Fedora Project has had the KDE Special Interest Group to make sure that KDE is treated well within Fedora. It finally has integration with the updatesd program, responsible for notifying me when there are updates to download. It was really a pain to see that in Gnome and not in KDE. I also wanted to look at KDE 3 now to document what it looked like and how it worked for me so that I can compare this to my experience with KDE 4.
So, I logged into KDE from a fresh startup in Mario. It loaded up a little bit slower than Gnome, but not by too much. And, it’s not fair to look at that because KDE saves the state of your desktop when you logout so I have it automatically loading SuperKaramba, Kopete, KGPG, Kerry Beagle, KGet, and Tomboy. Recently I’ve switched to accessing my Gmail via IMAP vs POP3. This allows me to login via KDE or Gnome and have access to the same emails in my inbox. So, since I always have Evolution and Rhythmbox open in Gnome, I opened up Kmail and Amarok.
So here’s what my main desktop looked like:
Before I continue, let me say that the developers of Konqueror have some work to do. Apparently they don’t support AJAX very well because I am not able to use any of the advanced features of my blog nor does Gmail work with full functionality. So who cares if it passes the Acid2 test if it doesn’t work on the sites that I need it to.
Amarok is my favorite media player for all of the work it does with your metadata. Whereas other media players stop at using the music’s metadata to sort the music or, if it’s more advanced, to create auto-playlists, Amarok does SO much more! For example, here’s the data it shows on each song as it plays:
The info on how many times you’ve played the song and the last time you’ve played it is nothing special, but beneath lies the power of Amarok. You can add labels to each of your songs and then use that to create dynamic play lists. Amarok then consults last.fm to figure out which artists are similar to the one you’re listening to. So you can use this to acquire music by other artists that may be similar to the one you’re listening to. Then, it also lists all the music in your current music library that are by similar artists. And it also shows the rating each song has. After all, you may have songs by similar artists which you don’t like. This is a good point to mention that I really like Amarok’s rating system. Unlike others which are on a 5 star scale, Amarok is a 0-100 scale so it gives a lot more room to tell how much you like the song. Also, their auto-rating system works better than any other I’ve ever used. Anyway, under that is a list of your favorite songs by the same artist. So if you can easily jump to any of those songs by double-clicking. Then it shows each of your albums by the same artist and if you click those you can see the songs on those albums. Tell me you’ve seen another media application that makes such a good use of the metadata it has on your music! But it doesn’t stop there.
