Since the Xbox Media Center was released it was relatively impossible to find the easy way to install it.

XBMC (formerly named “XBox Media Center”) is a free and open source (GPL) media-player and entertainment hub. XBMC can play a very complete spectrum of of multimedia formats, and featuring playlist, audio visualizations, slideshow, and weather forecast functions, together with a multitude of third-party plugins.

Now it is possible to install the XMBC on Ubuntu using deb packges that some people have prepared. Also we can add some repositories to synaptic and install it directly.

You just need to add these repositories to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-hardy/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-hardy/ubuntu hardy main

Then install it (and the skins, scripts…):
sudo apt-get install xbmc xbmc-skin-* xbmc-eventclients-*

It’s a nice Media Center, eventhough we have other media centers on GNU/Linux like Elisa or Sofa that are pretty as well.

• Link | Ubuntulife
• Download | Deb packages (if you don’t want to add the repositories)

aMule is the linux version of eMule. When we run aMule we notice that the environement is not as cool as eMule, and it’s been since it was published.

A new version of aMule is in development and the main changes will be taken on the GUI: we will be able to change the icon theme and choose among a kind of cool flavours: KDE4, XFCE, GNOME, Tango…

But there will be more general improvements on the graphical side. Some details that have always been a problem will be fixed. Of course, the engine will improve (actually, it’s been already improved) and other small things are supposed to change as well.

At this moment it is possible to install the development version on Debian using these repositories:
deb http://www.vollstreckernet.de/debian/ testing amule wx

Then, just install needed packages:
apt-get install amule amule-skin-gnome amule-skin-tango

For other distributions you can visit this page.

• Link | jEsuSdA

Those people who translate free software to other languages (for example, I translate from English to Catalan), has realised that Ubuntu is not as good as we could think.

First of all, Ubuntu uses Rosetta in order to organize the translations. It seems is a good and easy system to do it, but there is an important problem: Rosetta is not free software.

Second, translations done by this way can’t be used in other distributions, so it’s necessary to translate again something if other distribution wants to use that software.

I know my explanation isn’t very good. For that reason it’s better to read the article in wingolog.

Someone has proposed it at the BrainStorm area. It is a good idea to vote it.

The Internet is full of presumptions: some of them are more optimists than the others. On one hand, the Gartner consulting group assures that GNU/Linux could end the year being used by 7.5% of the computers around the World.

Other companies as Hewlett-Packard aren’t as optimists as Gartner Group, however they think that it is really possible that GNU/Linux will surpasses Mac computer percentage.

Meanwhile, May has begun and the statistics show that there has not been any important movements on. Therefore, during the last month the Linux usage went down from 2% to 1.89% as W3Counter says.

So this is the current situation: Windows Vista is the only one that went up during April. The Ubuntu 8.04 releasement had no effects (it’s important to remember that Ubuntu 7.10 really impacted the stats).

If we talk about net browsers, Firefox is still improving its position and each month goes up. Of course Internet Explorer 7 goes up as well, but that’s because people come from the old Explorer version.

What will happen when the year ends?. We would like to believe that linux could rise to 7.5%, but it doesn’t seem to be possible. Anyway, a global view shows that GNU/Linux and Firefox are there, competing seriously.

It’s been a little over a month since GNOME 2.22 was published and we didn’t know what the Roadmap for GNOME 2.24 was going to be. Finally, GNOME team has publised the scheduled, and it contains important news.

First of all, it is important to note that they’ve started to talk about GNOME 3. As of this moment when we tried to learn something about it, we could only see a note explaining that GNOME 3 development wasn’t necessary because of the stability and good results that GNOME 2 was producing.

As time passed by, GNOME 2 couldn’t offer all that programmers wanted to add to the new releases (above all graphical improvements). So it seems that now they’ve realized that it’s time to prepare the road to GNOME Topaz.

But GNOME 3 is sill far in the future, so we must currently focus on the GNOME 2.24 changes. There will be an important change in this version: Epiphany will migrate the engine from Gecko (firefox) to Webkit (as Safari and Konqueror). The first tests show that the new engine will pass test ACID3 with 100%.

Other improvements will be the unified account management and Exchange 2007 supoort for Evolution (pending on licensing resolution), new artwork (with 256×256 icons, new “black” and “plain” themes, and new wallpapers).

Next months will be amazing for the GNU/Linux community because on June/July will be published KDE 4.1 as well (three days ago the first alpha was published).

• Source | VivaLinux
• Link | GNOME RoadMap