Inspired by two popular Mac applications; Spotlight and Quicksilver, David Siegel has developed GNOME Do as a part of his university course which afterward became a popular application for Linux.

With GNOME Do, you can quickly launch an application just by typing the application’s name. It’s not just restricted to applications. You also can search and open webpage, Firefox bookmarks, files, album in Rhythmbox and etc. Everything is just on your finger tips. Type the things you one in GNOME Do and launch it. You can extend the functionality of GNOME Do by installing extra plugins such as Banshee, Pidgin, Google Calculator and Tomboy.
Install GNOME Do in Ubuntu 8.04:
Read the rest of this entry »
About two weeks after the release of the first beta version, here comes Banshee 1.0 Beta 2. Same as before,three new features has been added in this released and over 28 bugs have been fixed since beta 1.
New Features:
Podcast Support
With Banshee 1.0 Beta 2, you can subscribe to your favorite audio and video podcasts, and search and browse your podcasts the same way you do your Music Library.Banshee will stream the audio or video so you don’t have to wait for it to download first.
Read the rest of this entry »
Ubuntu system doesn’t come with something like Mac OSX widgets or Windows Vista gadgets by default. However, you can get this feature by installing software called Screenlets.Screenlets are small applications written in python which can be put anywhere on your desktop. With the released of Screenlets 0.1.1, support for web widgets (widgets which are written in HTML, JavaScript and CSS, similar to Mac OSX widgetst) and Google Gadgets were added. With the widget plugin for Compiz Fusion, you can show and hide the Screenlets the same way you can with Mac OSX widgets. Screenlets include a bunch of preferences like keep above, keep below, lock a screenlet, make it sticky and set it as widget.
Read the rest of this entry »
On May 6, 2007 first beta version of Banshee 1.0 has been released to the public. In this released, three new features has been added and over 30 bugs has been fixed.
New Features:
- MTP and iPod device support: Now you can drag and drop the music and video files from your library to your device and it will be synced immediately. Album art will also be synced. Banshee also will convert the files to format which your player supports automatically. Alternatively, you can set what format and quality of the files you want.
- Smart by Default: The default smart playlist and other predefined smart playlist can be edited and created from the New Smart Playlist dialog.
- Minimode: Minimode is a view extension which enable Banshee to be displayed in a smaller windows. Minimode can be enable using the extension manager .
- Fullscreen video is now supported.
Installation
Ubuntu: For Ubuntu user, please read my previous post.
Fedora: Install via yum: yum install banshee
Foresight 2.0: Install banshee-1 from PackageKit, or in a terminal type, sudo conary update banshee-1
OpenSUSE 10.3:

Banshee is a music management and playback for Gnome. Banshee is just like Windows Media Player where you can import, organize and play your music files. With Banshee, you also can rip CDs, play and sync your iPod, create playlists, and burn audio and MP3 CDs. The first alpha version of Banshee 1.0 hits the street on March 13,2008 with new redesign user interface and new features. The second alpha released saw a support for video management and playback has been added.
New Features
Here is a list of the features added for Banshee 1.0
- Artist/Album Browser - the ability to filter a source by Artist and Album selections. The album view features glorious cover art previews.
- The Play Queue
- Last.fm Integration - Last.fm has been integrated to Banshee
Read the rest of this entry »
Sopcast is a software which you can use to watch the video and listen to radio on the Internet. You also can broadcast your on tv channel if you want for free. On Vista, I used Sopcast to watch Formula1 race. When I am using Ubuntu, I have no idea how to watch the show. I look around and finally I found one post on Ubuntu forum discussing about how to install Sopcast.
On Windows, Sopcast comes with really good user interface but not on Linux. So you need to install special modified code to get the GUI
Read the rest of this entry »