Rapid Web News

As a user of desktop Linux distributions, both at work and at home, I’m often trying to promote the use of Linux-based systems such as Ubuntu.

Systems such as Linux to often seen to be only for the most geeky or technical minded of people, whilst Windows or Mac are heavily promoted as being used for everyday, family orientated purposes. This can be as complex as managing home finances and budgets with a spreadsheet application such as Microsoft Excel or the more simple managing of your family and friend’s photographs with some kind of photo album software.

Linux systems, such as Ubuntu, have plenty of tools available for spreadsheets and budgeting and the more complex home productivity. For budgeting, there are spreadsheet application such as Gnumeric Spreadsheet, KSpread and the more well known OpenOffice.org spreadsheet application, Calc. This is all very well and good, but what about the simpler, nicer and frankly muchc more things in life like grabbing, tweaking and showing off your friends and family photographs. Well, there are certainly quite a variety of Linux photo album applications available out there. In case you are thinking of moving to Linux, or are just curious about the available Linux based photo management applications, I have put a few details about the best of the bunch below.

F-Spot

First up is F-Spot. F-Spot is one of the top open-source Linux photo albums. It allows you to import your photos from anywhere – your camera, your phone, a CD, DVD, USB drive or even images you pull from the Internet. Take a look at the screenshot of F-Spot below.

As you can see from the screenshot, this is an imported picture I took from our office window. Down the left hand side, the view is set to ‘Metadata’ showing all the details which are sneakily embedded in your image files by your camera. As you can see from this information, this photograph was taken with my fantastic Nokia N97 phone’s camera, and even gives advanced photography details such as Exposure Time and ISO Speed Ratings.

But F-Spot is not just about these details, it also lets you perform special effects on all your photos, such as cropping, red-eye reduction, desaturation, sepia toning and much more. It also stores a clever history of all changes made in F-Spot so any accidental mess ups can easily by reverted with only a click or two. Of course, F-Spot is a photo album tool, and does indeed allow to you manage entire albums of photos, give them captions, rate them, tag them as favourites, organise by name, date and much more.

Overall F-Spot is a very comprehensive tool, which is both easy to use and comes with a great set of features. It also ships with the very popular Ubuntu Linux distribution.

digiKam

Next up is digiKam, which is a professional, open-source photo album management tool. It is primarily designed for the KDE Desktop Environment, but works in essentially all Linux systems. A screenshot of digiKam running on my Ubuntu system is shown below.

digiKam is quite a clever photo album management tool, and offers the vast majority of features present in F-Spot. It also allows for filtering by ratings, file types and has a comprehensive pop-out image editor which allows for additional manipulation of photos and the applying of special effects. Renaming of your images in application, searching, adding of captions, ratings and tags and sorting by the physical location photos were taken (via a geolocation service) are also some of the many cleverly supported features.

digiKam is, in my opinion, a more professional photo management suite, but its range of features is of such magnitude that it may daunt the non-professional. However, for those wishing to make perfect albums and manage their photographs with intricate details and changes, it is a perfect choice.

Picasa

Although not open-source, Picasa is an excellent family orientated image editing tool from a big brand name who you might just have heard of – Google. It is very much aimed at being simple to use, whilst still provided a nice range of features.

Along with being user friendly, many of the features have the same aim and are targeting at having fun with your photos. For example, the above screenshot shows Google Picasa 3.0 allowing you to create a collage from an album of photos in many different styles. It is hardly limited to collages however, allowing you to create gift CDs to send to friends, ordering online prints, creating slide-showing and more more in the way of fun and funky features. Picasa is defintely the way to go if you wish be the easily creative and produce stunning creative elements with very little effort.

Although fantastic functionality and feature wise, for those who are dedicated to open-source software, Picasa is proprietary and indeed, not a native Linux application but is instead a custom build of the Windows version running under Wine (a Windows compatibility layer for Linux). Although this works very well in most cases and it very fast in terms of performance, sometimes even outstripped the Windows version of Picasa, some users do report issues running Picasa for Linux. However, these issues do seem to be few, far between and usually quite simple to resolve.

I hope this quick little guide gives you some good advice on the best of the best in Linux photo album software, regardless of whether you are switching to Linux, looking for an alternative to an application you already use or just stumbled upon this article and have had your curiosity spiked.

With technology getting much smaller and quicker are these so called ‘netbooks’ just another name for a small laptop or is there something that sets them apart? Let’s take a look…

Amongst the first to hit the shelves was the Asus Eee PC 900 series which had a 900 MHz processor, 1 gig of RAM (2 gig max), 20 gig total solid state drive and a shade off a 9” screen pre loaded with Linux. Now that may not seem like a huge spec plus it doesn’t have a CD drive so what’s so special about them? Well I have to say for a general use compact laptop it was pretty good! The SSD drive coupled with Linux made start up and loading times respectable and provided you pre-installed the software you needed (Via a 30 quid external DVD drive) you were set for a good 8 hours of computing, ideal for the on-the-road workplace.

Just how popular are these tiny laptops though? Well sales figures for 2008 suggest 14.6 million units shipped and with a considerable amount of commercialisation figures for 2009 will supposedly be around the 26.3 million mark with ASUSTek hovering around the 70% market share, cha ching I hear you cry. Prices start from around £140 too so very affordable especially for the kids.

The specs are changing a lot though and becoming more like laptops. With the removal of SSD drives in favour of standard SATA hard-drives and Windows instead of Linux all seems to be bumping the price up. If you do fancy looking at a few models here is a good place to start.

Ubuntu 9.10, the user-friendly, free, Linux-based operating system, is to be released tomorrow (the 29th of October 2009). Canonical, Ubuntu’s corporate sponsor, states that Ubuntu 9.10, codenamed Karmic Koala, ‘puts the user at the heart of its new design’, and being an Ubuntu user myself for about three years and a Linux user for significantly longer, I can certainly agree.

Having been a tester of Ubuntu 9.10 during its development, I can tell you that Ubuntu 9.10 will feature the following upon its release.

• E-mail and Chat Features – Ubuntu 9.10 will feature a built-in instant messenging client, Empathy, which can connect to many of the most popular instant messaging services, including Yahoo, Gmail (Google Talk), MSN (Windows Live), Jabber, AOL, QQ and many more. In addition to instant messaging, the latest version of the e-mail and personal information management program, Evolution, is included. Evolution can manage your contacts, e-mail, schedule, tasks and memos – all for free.

• Internet – Ubuntu 9.10 ships will the very latest version of Mozilla Firefox, which is much faster and excellent for browsing modern websites and web applications which are heavy on dynamic client-side content, such as Javascript. Complex web pages such as Facebook, Google Maps and others will load and work lightning fast.

• Music and videos – Music and videos are managed with ease in Ubuntu 9.10. Simply plug in your iPod, PSP, MP3 or MP4 player and use the built-in media player, Rhytmbox, to download, store, buy and play your music collection. Ubuntu 9.10 can play many video formats with no problems and anything it can not play it will offer to download and install the required codecs automatically, and for free.

• Office and productivity – Word processing, spreadsheets or presentations can all be handled by the latest version of OpenOffice.org which is including in the latest version of Ubuntu. OpenOffice is compatible with all other office applications including, but not limited to, Microsoft Office.

• Store, share and synchronise – Ubuntu 9.10 features integrated ‘Ubuntu One’ service, which allows you to easily and seamlessly synchronise your contacts, notes, files and folders between all your Ubuntu computers. Even if you are on a computer running Mac or Windows you can still access all your files online, meaning you’ll never be at computer without your files.

• Software centre – The brand new software centre for this version of Ubuntu allows you to download and install thousands of free and open-source applications automatically with only 2 or 3 clicks.

• Gaming – Linux-based systems are generally not well known for their gaming prowess. However, Ubuntu 9.10 ships with the ability to download over 400 fun games directly from the built-in software centre. All these games are still completely free and installable with only a few clicks.

This latest version of Ubuntu provides advantages for both business workstations and home user desktops. Although not mentioned in this article so far, for enterprises and small home/offices, the server edition of Ubuntu 9.10 is also released tomorrow alongside the desktop edition.

For more information about Ubuntu, visit the official Ubuntu website.

So Google announced in July that they’re going to have a crack at making an OS (operating system). Interesting, we all mused here at Rapidweb. Will it be just a fancy GUI (graphical user interface) for Linux? Will it just be a proverbial middle finger to Microsoft? I guess most importantly will it be any good? Most of these I can’t answer but let’s look at what we know already.

I’m going to start with a list of technology companies that say they will design, build and I quote “devices that deliver an extraordinary end user experience” – exciting prospect. These companies are: Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba – some REAL big hitters! But are they just talking about pre-installing Google OS on existing netbooks and smartphones? After all it is Linux based and Linux as we all know could run on an 8o’s calculator watch. As you can see from the quote though it does suggest specific hardware to run on, this could just be Google branded products though with sponsorship advertising from the above mentioned manufacturers.

I really like how Google have re-vamped the web browser, I like how quick it is, it keeps the last bunch of webpages on a kind of active favourites homepage – in theory you could always have your favourite webpages on a single page! I also like the fact that the search bar is also the URL bar, something that Firefox also boasts but will all these innovations be enough to push an OS? One of the biggest features they’re talking about is a near instant boot up, this is interesting, and a lot of netbooks do carry a small SSD drive but it’s still not near instant, perhaps they are talking to manufacturers of chips to make their OS embedded? This in itself creates a number of potential problems, firmware flashes instead of updates? Sure it’ll be quicker initially but if it is going to be embedded wouldn’t that be a step backwards? I mean, for instance, how many people actually update their BIOS (basic input/output system) regularly on their motherboard? Ok techies do, sure but it does make it a niche market and not a widespread user friendly piece of software.

According to reports Google are currently working on a video player and a jukebox style program to roll on their new OS. Again I think it’s good that they are deciding to develop their own, after all if they use Linux based applications Google Chrome OS would just be a re-branded version of Ubuntu. This also keeps other companies on their toes, iTunes may face fierce competition if Google’s jukebox style program can sync with an iPod and I doubt Google would accept money from media goliaths like NBC to enforce DRM (digital restrictions management) so that users are prevented from recording television shows that they have the legal right to record (allegedly).

There are some supposed leaked screenshots of Google OS which you can take a look at here draw your own conclusions though, some claim them to be real some not so convinced, one thing is for sure though – it free so it’s got to be worth a look.