Layman Linux

Totem Media Player is one of the most widely used media player amongst Linux user. Given its ability to handle many formats using the versatile G-Streamer framework, it has become a one stop all player for users who favor simplicity over the advanced VLC Player. Though the player offers a simple interface, there are some interesting features on offer which lie covered under the applications menu. Let’s dig in & unearth them!

Screenshot Taker:

If you need to take screenshot from your favourite movie, then simply press “CTRL+S” or go to Edit>Take Screenshot. Fill in the location to save the screenshot & you’ve your custom wallpapers from your favourite flick. The resolution of the screenshot will depend on the resolution of the video file you’re watching.

Screenshot Gallery:

Screenshot Gallery is useful if scenarios where you want screenshots taken at predefined intervals in your video/movie & then stitched together in single image file which can be displayed on forums or your website for illustration purposes. Its a bit rough & needs refinement but gets the job done satisfyingly enough. Screenshot Gallery can be accessed by navigating to Edit > Create Screenshot Gallery…

Aspect ratio:

Have problems viewing widescreen videos on your old square CRT monitor(or vice-versa)? The videos leave blackbars on your CRT monitor reducing the area of view. No problem, just navigate to View > Aspect Ratio and select the desired aspect ration for your monitor to get a fullscreen view. CRT monitors have aspect ration of 4:3 whereas Widescreen LCD monitors have ratio of 16:9.

Plugins:

Totem media Player has plugin support but its not enabled by default. Navigating to Edit > Plugins will present you with a list of installed plugins. A description alongside will help you to determine the utility of a particular plugin. Enable any plugin as per your preference.

Additional Preferences:

For additional preferences, navigate to Edit > Preferences. Here you can change the font of the subtitle, visualization, sound output & other miscellaneous options. Set it according to your tastes.

Once you do the above refinements, you’ll definitely have a improved Totem experience. I’ve done it & I’m enjoying it. Simplicity at its best, that’s what Totem Media Player shines for!

Autoten is a nifty application which makes installing proprietary codecs & other proprietary stuff a piece of cake on your Fedora system. It does the same things which Easy Life does in a way which is similar to Easy Life. Autoten should ideally be run after your first install so that your system is ready for multimedia playback including mp3, mp4, mkv etc. Autoten is available for 32bit & 64 bit Fedora and Omega Linux.

To install autoten, simply enter the following in an terminal;

su
rpm -Uvh http://dnmouse.org/autoten-4.7-4.fc13.noarch.rpm

Upon installing and executing Autoten, you get a similar screen as shown below. Here you will find four columns. The first column contains applications/utilities/codecs to install, second column is for info, third column for uninstall & the last one gives you status whether the corresponding application is installed or not on your system.

To install any application/codec/utility simply click on its corresponding box from the first column & Autoten will do the rest in the background terminal. You can click on the info button to see an overview of what will Autoten do when you click to install the particular application/codec/utility. It actually contains the commands which are executed in the background. This is helpful if you wish to know exactly what will Autoten do to your system. If later you wish to uninstall anything you installed via Autoten simply click on the remove box under uninstall row corresponding to your application/codec/utility & it will be uninstalled. I found this pretty useful as the extra backgrounds I choose to install were not up to my liking.

The author of autoten has done a superb job in keeping the application fuss-free & that should be appreciated as nobody wants to wander through menus to get simple things installed. Considering this application will be used by amateurs, there is no way they will get lost or feel intimidated by the huge(complex but informative) homescreen. Autoten gets a highly recommend tag from our side.

For windows migrators, using Linux applications can mean a steep learning curve. Though some Linux applications are designed so that windows user feel at home but still most of windows migrators would like to run windows applications in their Linux OS. “Is this possible?” asks a windows migrator. The short & relieving answer is ‘Yes’.

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Copying your favourite tracks to your hard-disk & then playing it back in your media player is generally the preferred way in which most of the users enjoy their music. It saves one from hassle of replacing Audio CD’s into your computer drive at regular intervals. Not to forget, it also offers advantage of randomizing your playlist & organising your music collection. If you have copied an Audio CD anytime to your hard-disk you might be knowing that you can’t directly copy the files located onto the Audio CD as they won’t work. They first need to be ripped into a suitable format to be stored onto your hard-disk. This ripping work can be done by various softwares. Let’s see how to rip Audio CD’s in Linux using Sound Juicer. I’ll be using Fedora Linux which has Sound Juicer installed by default.

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Last.fm provides a good platform to share with the world your music liking & also to befriend people who share similar music taste like yours. Most Last.fm users scrobb(post) their tracks on their profile via the media player. The media player updates the tracks played by the user onto their profile in real-time. This is done by a plugin which pings the Last.fm server. On Linux if you’re using XMMS media player, you can update your track list by using the XMMS-Scrobbler plugin. I’ll tell you how to install XMMS media player, the XMMS scrobbler plugin & then configure the plugin so it can update your profile on Last.fm.

I assume that you don’t have XMMS media player installed on your system. Before you install it, you’ll need to enable the RPMFusion repositories. Simply follow the instructions on this page to enable them as per your operating system.

To install XMMS media player on a Fedora or its derivative system, issue the following command with root privileges into the terminal.

yum install xmms xmms-scrobbler

The above command will install XMMS media player and the XMMS Scrobbler Plugin.

Once you’re done with the above, launch XMMS & then right click & go to Option > Preferences. Here click on the ‘General Plugins’ tab. You should see ‘XMMS-Scrobbler’ plugin. Highlight the plugin by clicking on it and then click on configure. It will prompt you for your Last.fm username & password. Enter them & click ok. Now in the General Plugin tab with XMMS-Scrobble plugin highlighted check the Enable plugin chechbox.

That’s it. The XMMS-Scrobbler plugin is enabled. Now play a track in XMMS media player & check whether it gets scrobbed on your Last.fm profile. If it does then all is good. If it doesn’t then you will have to recheck whether you entered the correct credentials in the plugin configuration page.

Happy Scrobbing!

Everytime one installs a new operating system there are some tasks needed to be performed before one can start using the system. There are many task which one should do after a fresh install like disabling unwanted services, customizing settings etc but here we would talk about the most important task – Installing essentials. Essentials are those software which are required to make a crude system usable. These includes flash player, add-on plugins, media players, codecs & small utility software’s.

Generally, most of the users would hit various sites to download & install the essentials. Some users tend to do the same but via graphical package managers. Though there is nothing wrong in the above methods but these methods tend to consume a lot of time. Even I used to follow the same until I got to know about Easy Life.

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