Projects on the Move

Home , Amarok (software), Skolelinux, Winamp, Xine

An up-to-date overview of free software and its makers Projects on the Move Free software covers such a diverse range of utilities, applications, and other assorted projects that it can be hard to find the perfect tool.We pick the best of the bunch.This month we cover the Amarok player, Flightgear, Debian’s third revision of Woody, and oadRel,visipix.com Ronald Raefle, Skolelinux.

BY MARTIN LOSCHWITZ

he subject of software patents has Leonardo da Vinci and even before. But 12 Gbytes of data. This said, individual been keeping advocates and oppo- most people never get to see the inside of sectors of the world map can be down- Tnents equally busy. The pro-patent a cockpit for lack of money or lack of a loaded separately. proposal to the EU parliament by the EU pilot’s license. Microsoft introduced a After completing the install, users can Commission had very little chance of flight simulator a long time back, but the simply type fgfs to launch Flightgear. success, but it was approved by the EU MS product will not run on Linux. As we Launching the program without any Council with only minor changes. One all know, the open source community is parameters puts you in a Cessna at the reason for this was that Germany’s Min- self-sufficient: Flightgear brings that previously mentioned San Francisco ister of Justice, Brigitte Zypries, changed cockpit feeling to your desktop, and it is location. A joystick is perfect for plane her stance on the subject. She had previ- licensed under the GPL. control, but you can also use a mouse. In ously promised to abstain, which would The Flightgear developers say that dis- standard mode, the mouse is used to effectively have torpedoed the proposal. satisfaction with commercial flight operate the cockpit instrumentation and In October, all parliamentary parties in simulators was their major motivation; access program menus. Right clicking the German parliament came down the fact that the MS source code was with the mouse switches the mouse to against software patents, but they were closed meant that they had no way of joystick mode. Right clicking again unable to agree on a motion. It is hard to adding extensions and enhancements. changes the perspective. You can view say if a motion would influence the Ger- Flightgear quickly became a project the plane from the outside – from either man government’s stance on the subject. with global ambitions. Innumerable pro- a side view, a front view, or a bird’s eye Although the Ministry of Justice would grammers from all over the world now view – but gamers will typically prefer not be obligated by a motion, it would work on the flight simulator. the view from the pilot’s seat. exert considerable pressure. If you are unhappy with the Cessna, Giant Download simply select another airplane. A variety Taking off with Flightgear The basic Flightgear package, with vari- of jets, such as the Boeing 747 or the Flying machines have been a fond dream ous airplane models and a small map of Antonow (Figure 2) are available, as are of humans ever since the days of the San Francisco area (Figure 1), weighs two fighters (the F16 and the prototype in at more than 90 Mbytes. And you of a Northrop/McDonnell Douglas). For Martin Loschwitz is from a small Ger- need more digital Flightgear maps for the the historically minded, there is even a man town called Niederkrüchten and rest of the world. If the download is too model of the first plane by the Wright a developer for Debian GNU/Linux. much for your Internet connection, you brothers. Some Flightgear fan pages on Martin’s leisure time is mainly pre- can order the complete package on the the Internet have more planes. occupied with activities in the Debian Flightgear homepage [1]. The package In contrast to commercial flight simu- or GNU community. THE AUTHOR gives you three DVDs or eleven CDs with lators, Flightgear is quite frugal with

www.linux-magazine.com February 2005 87 COMMUNITY Free Software Projects

Figure 1: Flightgear maps are available for airports and cities all over the Figure 2: An Antonow on the Flightgear runway. Flightgear has a large selec- world. tion of airplane types. respect to hardware requirements; you Noatun work with simple playlists, stor- information on the current track, the will need a fairly recent graphics adapter ing the paths to the audio files artist, and other playlists (Figure 3). If with OpenGL 3D accelerator support. It consecutively in a text file. The players required, the player can display a sepa- is quite difficult to master the world of then read the list and play the tracks one rate Xmms-style player window to virtual piloting. The manual on the after another. A database with artists, visualize the musical output. There are a Flightgear homepage gives you an titles, and genres based on the ID3 tags number of plug-ins to extend the stan- overview of the most important instru- embedded in the files is lacking. dard feature range that Xmms also ments and keys. Some time ago, Amarok hit the stage provides. as a new audio player set to resolve these Like other players, Amarok has a Amarok as a KDE Audio Player issues. Amarok is mainly targeted at KDE playlist window that shows users the With Linux continuing to make inroads users, and this is evidenced by the fact next track up, however, the program into the desktop landscape, the number that the program does not have a plug-in allows users to compile a playlist flexibly of GUI-based players for MP3 and Ogg for direct access to the Alsa kernel mod- from various collections. To do so, users audio files has skyrocketed. Although ule. Instead, Amarok uses the KDE Arts first define one or more sound file source purists may prefer the mpg123 [2] com- sound system, although there are exten- directories for Amarok to search. The mand line tool, GUI users are quite sions for GStreamer and the Xine engine. program then displays a dropdown list of happy with the Winamp clone, Xmms, or The Amarok GUI displays a compre- artists, allowing users to select individ- the KDE standard tool, Noatun. hensive playlist with a variety of ual tracks or artists and add tracks to the Both of these programs playlist. have their drawbacks. For The context view gives one thing, both programs users details on the track have a fairly staid user inter- playing currently. Besides face. Xmms can use Winamp the name and artist, this skins, but only if they are for includes statistics on how version 2 of the Windows often a track has been program. The Winamp played, and when it was developers designed a new played first and last. Below skin system for their latest this information, the pro- offering, as they found the gram displays other tracks older layouts too boring. from the same album and Noatun changes to reflect the highest-ranking tracks the KDE design, without any by the same artist, based on extras. Amarok rankings. The second disadvantage Amarok grades each track that both players have is that of your personal collection they do not help the user to identify your favorites, manage large collections of Figure 3:The Amarok collection window displaying information on the album, upping a track’s ranking music. Both Xmms and title, and artist. when played, and dropping

88 February 2005 www.linux-magazine.com Free Software Projects COMMUNITY

the track down the list if it fails to play administration is correctly. This approach allows Amarok important, both to gradually boil the list down to include for updating exist- all of your personal favorites. ing clients and for The cover manager gives you a graphic installing new for many albums by downloading the clients. cover images from the Amazon server This said, the and displaying them to accompany the level of experience current track in the context view. In con- that users have is trast to Noatun, Amarok also plays typically quite dif- Internet streams. There is even a playlist ferent. Some with a few Internet radio streams. school kids use Amarok does not have a lot to offer in computers and the the line of color. It does not have a skin Internet on a daily system; instead the program modifies its basis. For others, appearance to match the QT theme. the classroom is Amarok also has a default black and their first contact Figure 4: Skolelinux comes from Norway, but it speaks lots of languages. blue outfit, although users can change with a computer. the foreground and background colors to Teachers, who typically assume the Opera as Skolelinux’ standard Web reflect their own taste. When it launches administrator role in schools, often do browser (Figure 4). Webmin helps the into a new track, Amarok’s on-screen not have the necessary training. The administrator manage users and groups display pops up a blue box with the title, Skolelinux [3] project was founded with and handle other daily chores. artist, and length. You can configure the the goal of providing a Linux distribution The Skolelinux server provides Cups- OSD with respect to color, position, size, for classroom environments. based printing for the other machines on and font. A few years ago, the Skolelinux Team the network. It will even allow Windows All of this makes Amarok a serious took over the orphaned Debian Edu pro- computers to print via Samba or IPP. alternative to Xmms for lovers of music. ject. Ever since, they have been working Skolelinux configures the Samba packet The program’s controls may not be as hard but out of the limelight. One of the to support seamless integration of Win- intuitive as some users would wish, but project’s focuses has been developing a dows clients and shares. Additionally, an the music database functionality is a vast more comfortable installation routine. LDAP server handles central account improvement on simple playlists. The boot floppies used by Debian Woody management, with NFS, Apache, and a are generally regarded as unacceptable mail server ready to run if required. New Revision of Debian for future releases. Skolelinux was the Skolelinux has gained a sizable follow- GNU/Linux Woody first project to develop a new installer to ing at many schools in Norway, the Martin Schulze, the Debian GNU/Linux facilitate the initial system setup. And project’s home country. Of course, stable release manager, has announced this installer forms the basis for the Skolelinux is suitable for schools of any the release of a new revision of the cur- installation program that Debian Sarge nationality, although the following may rent stable version of Debian GNU/Linux uses. not yet be as strong as in Norway. Inci- 3.0 (Woody). Debian 3.0r3 follows the dentally, the jury at this year’s Linux project’s release policy of only adding School-Like New Media Award recognized the pro- security updates and major bug fixes to A Skolelinux network assumes a specific fessionalism shown by the Skolelinux an existing distribution. Thus, the scenario: a server that provides the ser- developers in the Best Newcomer Distri- update will not do anything to worry vices used by an arbitrary number of bution category. administrators. Most of the fixes are clients. There are installation profiles for security updates. In fact, if you regularly both, and that makes it easy to set up That’s all folks… install package updates from the website identical network desktops. …for this month at least, but we do have [security.debian.org], you will already Skolelinux does not require much in one request before we go: if you can rec- have the modifications. the line of client hardware; an important ommend a program that you would like criterion in schools that are often forced to see featured in Projects on the Move, Linux at School to resort to a jumble of computing why not mail me your suggestion [4]? The requirements for school networks dinosaurs. The client doesn’t even need and the clients attached to school net- a hard disk, if it is network attached. INFO works are similar to the requirements in Assuming that the Ethernet card sup- [1] Flightgear:http://www.flightgear.org enterprise, government, and university ports PXE, the computer can boot off the [2] Mpg123:http://www.mpg123.de environments. The clients are typically network as a thin client. The pupils get [3] Skolelinux:http://www.skolelinux.org semi-public so that restrictions with everything that end users would typi- respect to the selection of programs cally expect from a PC: KDE on the [4] Tips and suggestions: apply. At the same time, centralized desktop, the Open Office suite, and [email protected]