Thursday, June 9
next
today's screenshot, e17 default theme, betsy's IM, and Gtk2MP- the frontend i mentioned in my previous post :)
Wednesday, June 8
RIP XMMS
XMMS has lived a full life. Anybody who's used Linux (should) know XMMS. You know, the audio player (video too, with plugins) that looks, feels, and acts a whole lot like Winamp. For a long time, XMMS was the standard, every Linux screenshot had XMMS in it.
Times have changed. XMMS is, as far as I care, deprecated. Deprecated beyond resurrection. Sure, it still serves it's purpose. But anybody who uses XMMS will (should) tell you, that despite how long it's been around, it's still buggy as hell, and has a ton of problems.
Example A:
XMMS demonstrating it's ability to tell you that songs are weeks, months, or even years long.
This alone is enough reason to seek an alternative to XMMS. When I went looking, I found that XMMS2 is in development. Unfortunately it's painfully difficult to acquire the source, and compile it. Needless to say, it was a no-go.. at least until it's a bit simpler.
So I used amaroK for a while. The KDE audio player. I hate KDE, but amaroK is great, it downloads your CD covers from amazon.com, reccomends songs based on what you listen to, and can even relay the information to your audioscrobbler profile. However. It's fairly resource intensive, and can be a real pain to set up. After I formatted, and reinstalled Gentoo (Stage 1), I've been completely unable to get amaroK to play anything. So that's trash, until someone feels like helping me out there.
So I've tried amaroK, Rhythmbox, Beep media player, and came to a rest with MPD. Media Player Daemon is a really awesome idea, and it's similar to how XMMS2 will/does work. A daemon runs in the background, with a database of all your songs, and plays them on request. There is no interface to MPD, however there are several frontends available in Portage. Naturally, I emerged them all. My personal preference is Gtk2MP, because it has a decent interface for managing your songs and playlists. While not nearly as polished as that of amaroK, it works just fine. And it uses next to zero CPU. The neat thing about having your music managed by a daemon, is that even though you use a frontend to access and control it, you can just close said frontend, without interrupting anything, or disrupting your playlist.
So what am I trying to say? I'll sum it up- assuming you're a Gentoo user.
Times have changed. XMMS is, as far as I care, deprecated. Deprecated beyond resurrection. Sure, it still serves it's purpose. But anybody who uses XMMS will (should) tell you, that despite how long it's been around, it's still buggy as hell, and has a ton of problems.
Example A:
XMMS demonstrating it's ability to tell you that songs are weeks, months, or even years long.
This alone is enough reason to seek an alternative to XMMS. When I went looking, I found that XMMS2 is in development. Unfortunately it's painfully difficult to acquire the source, and compile it. Needless to say, it was a no-go.. at least until it's a bit simpler.
So I used amaroK for a while. The KDE audio player. I hate KDE, but amaroK is great, it downloads your CD covers from amazon.com, reccomends songs based on what you listen to, and can even relay the information to your audioscrobbler profile. However. It's fairly resource intensive, and can be a real pain to set up. After I formatted, and reinstalled Gentoo (Stage 1), I've been completely unable to get amaroK to play anything. So that's trash, until someone feels like helping me out there.
So I've tried amaroK, Rhythmbox, Beep media player, and came to a rest with MPD. Media Player Daemon is a really awesome idea, and it's similar to how XMMS2 will/does work. A daemon runs in the background, with a database of all your songs, and plays them on request. There is no interface to MPD, however there are several frontends available in Portage. Naturally, I emerged them all. My personal preference is Gtk2MP, because it has a decent interface for managing your songs and playlists. While not nearly as polished as that of amaroK, it works just fine. And it uses next to zero CPU. The neat thing about having your music managed by a daemon, is that even though you use a frontend to access and control it, you can just close said frontend, without interrupting anything, or disrupting your playlist.
So what am I trying to say? I'll sum it up- assuming you're a Gentoo user.
- emerge -C xmms
- emerge -av mpd
- nano /etc/mpd.conf (to your liking)
- emerge -av gtk2mp
- ???
- Profit!
enlightenment_evolution
A side by side comparison of E16 to E17. Intended to illustrate the similarities and differences between old Enlightenment, and the new, using the Winter theme for both.
Tuesday, June 7
Today's E17 shot.
Uh, same shit- different wallpaper. And uh, that isn't Winamp, just XMMS using a Winamp skin. :)
Status update: euclid
My computer is really badass, I'd like to point that out first. Topping out at a whopping (ha) 1.54ghz, with a massive 256mb of ram.
Anyway, after getting over the loss of my old PC to a Windows zealot, I have decided that I no longer need to reserve the name "euclid" for that pc, and have in turn, changed my system's hostname from overlord, to euclid.
To continue, I've been using Gnome 2.10 for a few days out of boredom, and while it's certainly pretty nice, apparently the only way to edit the apps menu is with a 3rd party menu editor, that I can't even get to work. Go figure. I don't even know why I bothered using Gnome, to be honest. Seriously. I have Enlightenment DR 0.17! What the hell was I thinking?
So back to E17 it is. I've been keeping it updated during my Gnome usage, despite not using E17. So minutes ago, I finally went back to E17, and decided that the next feature I needed was a "run application" function, so I don't have to whip out a terminal every time I want to run an app that I don't have an .eapp for. Right before I went to make the suggestion in #e, I left-clicked my desktop, to bring up the menu- only to find.. what's this? They beat me to it! There's a run command function now. Yay for the E17 devs!
Next on my agenda? I need to find some ridiculous set of icons to make .eapps for! I already did it with Umicons2 (found it on DeviantART). I don't have permission to distribute them though, maybe I'll ask the author sometime.
If anybody knows of any huge packs of icons (free!!) that I can tinker with, leave a comment! :)
Anyway, after getting over the loss of my old PC to a Windows zealot, I have decided that I no longer need to reserve the name "euclid" for that pc, and have in turn, changed my system's hostname from overlord, to euclid.
To continue, I've been using Gnome 2.10 for a few days out of boredom, and while it's certainly pretty nice, apparently the only way to edit the apps menu is with a 3rd party menu editor, that I can't even get to work. Go figure. I don't even know why I bothered using Gnome, to be honest. Seriously. I have Enlightenment DR 0.17! What the hell was I thinking?
So back to E17 it is. I've been keeping it updated during my Gnome usage, despite not using E17. So minutes ago, I finally went back to E17, and decided that the next feature I needed was a "run application" function, so I don't have to whip out a terminal every time I want to run an app that I don't have an .eapp for. Right before I went to make the suggestion in #e, I left-clicked my desktop, to bring up the menu- only to find.. what's this? They beat me to it! There's a run command function now. Yay for the E17 devs!
Next on my agenda? I need to find some ridiculous set of icons to make .eapps for! I already did it with Umicons2 (found it on DeviantART). I don't have permission to distribute them though, maybe I'll ask the author sometime.
If anybody knows of any huge packs of icons (free!!) that I can tinker with, leave a comment! :)
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