(few clients for Linux
do), but all the other
great peer-to-peer
conference features
to which users are
accustomed are
readily available.
For graphics editing, there isn’t such a clear winner. The field is dominated by two very robust contenders: Krita and The GIMP. I published an in-depth article in the July 2007 issue of LJ reviewing Krita and its advantages over The GIMP.
The philosophies of the two programs are very different, as are the interfaces.
The GIMP has a broader user base at the moment and more available plugins, and Krita offers more professional color
management and a broader array of basic editing tools. Currently, they’re very different programs, and from the point of view of the lay user, a lot is going to boil down to personal taste in interface.
Either will serve very well.
ENTERTAINMENT
Between Google video, podcasting, video podcasting, integrated DVD players and USB-powered...well, let’s call them
“personal exhilaration devices”, the com-puter now is an entertainment center.
Projects like MythTV let you literally build an entertainment appliance out of your PC, but even your desktop has to have a good multimedia backbone in it, or you might get frustrated and bored. We can’t have that, now, can we?
So, let’s start with home videos. You shoot them, and then what? Are you really going to spend months of your twilight years rewatching ancient DV tapes in real time? Of course not. But, you can edit them and export them to DVD or YouTube to share with your family if you install Kino on your system.
Small, fast, feature-loaded and stable, it’s the Linux answer to Windows Movie Maker and iMovie.
Of course, playing those movies you make and the DVDs already on your shelf, is another matter. You need a good, all-purpose media player. In Windows-land, you need QuickTime, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, Flash Player and
WinDVD to cover everything. In Linux, you need only one program, though you have a choice of three that are quite excellent: MPlayer, Xine and VLC. They all use FFmpeg as a back end, which is both highly robust and versatile. All three also can call upon Windows-native codecs to decode proprietary file formats. The choice between them primarily is one of taste. MPlayer can be run from the command line as well as with a GUI, it has a very stable Firefox plugin, and it contains an excellent set of command-line encoding and stream-ripping tools. Xine (and its front ends, like Kaffeine) tends to have the friendliest interface. VLC is equipped Figure 6. Browsing through Albums with digiKam
Figure 8. Kino’s Main Editing Window
Figure 7. Krita’s interface with photo loaded—notice the color management system is open by default in the upper right.
FEATURE Desktop Must-Haves
w w w. l i n u x j o u r n a l . c o m m a rch 2 008 | 57 to broadcast Net streams as well as
rip them and transcode them natively in the GUI. I personally keep all three around, but any one of them will do you well, depending on what you’re looking for. In practice, you’ll wind up using one for your viewing pleasure.
You’ll also need a podcatcher and media library organizer and player similar to iTunes. In this field, Amarok stands alone. It also allows you to select the back-end engine you prefer (GStreamer, Xine and so on) and will play pretty much any audio format under the sun. It includes integrated id3 tag editing, a very intuitive database index, a MusicBrains store interface and lots of fun little extras for dealing with iPods and other portable media devices.
Finally, you’re going to need something to burn all the CD compilations, DVDs from videos you’ve edited, and backups of your data. The best and most fully featured solution you can get for this is K3b. It sup-ports data CDs and DVDs to a variety of formats and standards, rewritable media, video CDs and DVDs, burning from a variety of ISO types, and even self-booting media CDs and DVDs with micro-operating systems (eMovix discs).
WRAP-UP
The good news about Desktop Linux isn’t merely limited to the fact that you can do everything—or nearly everything—
on Linux that you need to do on a desktop system. The really good news is that most of these programs—
Pidgin, OpenOffice.org, Evolution, MPlayer, THE GIMP, Firefox, GnuCash and VLC—work on Windows, so you
can ease yourself into the Linux/Open Source world in stages.
Is this the Year of the Desktop for Linux? That’s something history will decide, if it even cares. But, one thing is without doubt: Desktop Linux has arrived.I
Figure 9. Kaffeine plays a video.
Figure 10. Kaffeine’s playlist building interface, with a file browser on the left, a preview window under it, and the playlist on the right. Kaffeine is a Xine front-end.
Figure 11. Amarok is the ultimate podcatcher/portable media player/sync manager/music library manager/player.
Dan Sawyer is the founder of ArtisticWhispers Productions (www.artisticwhispers.com), a small audio/video studio in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has been an enthusiastic advocate for free and open-source software since the late 1990s, when he founded the Blenderwars filmmaking community (www.blenderwars.com). He currently is the host of “The Polyschizmatic Reprobates Hour”, a cultural commentary podcast, and “Sculpting God”, a science-fiction anthology pod-cast. Author contact information is available at www.jdsawyer.net.
In June 1996, PC Week ran a piece titled “Andreessen Eyes Internet OS”.
Marc Andreessen was famously the prime author of the Mosaic and Netscape browsers, and a cofounder of Netscape as well. The money quote from that piece was, “The only differ-ence technically between Netscape’s Navigator browser and a traditional operating system is that Navigator will not include device drivers.”
Needless to say, this and other remarks along the same lines did not please Microsoft. A great deal of history followed, including the “browser wars”, the sale of Netscape to AOL, the federal lawsuit against Microsoft, the dot-com crash, Y2K and much more. Forgotten in the shuffle was Marc’s original
ambition, which was to establish the browser as a platform, and in the process, to commoditize operating systems to the “bags of device drivers” they had long been called.
Now it’s 2008, and Google is busy treating the browser as a platform and is generally agnostic toward operating systems. (Its own services are mostly deployed on Linux-based systems, but its applications are either browser-based or made to run on multiple platforms.
Google Earth is the ideal example.
Picasa is not.)
But, the browser is mostly where Google likes to run user-side apps as Web services. In fact, Google now provides most or all of your basic desk-top application suite—mail, office
(documents, spreadsheets, presentations), calendar and instant messaging—inside your browser. It’s up to the user which bag of device drivers runs between browser and iron. May the best bag win.
Thus, it was perhaps inevitable that somebody would come along and make a bones—or bare-browser—box that’s optimized to run Google’s browser-based apps on the best-commoditized platform, fulfilling the Andreessen Prophesy.
That somebody is Dave Liu, the 21-year-old CEO of Good OS LLC. The company’s main product is gOS, an Ubuntu-based distro tweaked to run Web apps as if they were desktop ones.
gOS might have been Yet Another Linux Distro had it not made news last