Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on June 05, 2007 by CyberNet.

Have you been itching to get your hands on a Media Center computer that lets you record all of your shows? Both Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate include these capabilities, but you can download Mythbuntu if you’re looking for an open source alternative to put an extra PC to work.

As the name implies, Mythbuntu is based on the ever-popular Ubuntu Linux operating system. It makes it extremely easy to setup MythTV so that you can quickly begin recording your favorite shows. Here are some of the features you’ll get with Mythbuntu/MythTV:

• Basic ’live-tv’ functionality. Pause/Fast Forward/Rewind "live" TV.
• Support for multiple tuner cards and multiple simultaneous recordings.
• Distributed architecture allowing multiple recording machines and multiple playback machines on the same network, completely transparent to the user.
• Completely automatic commercial detection/skipping
• Grabs program information using xmltv.
• Displays basic program information on channel change using a themeable semi-transparent on-screen display.
• Electronic Program Guide that lets you change channels and select programs to record.
• Scheduled recordings of TV programs, and playback and deletion of those programs, all through a themeable UI.
• A nice web interface to let you select programs to record remotely.
• Rip, categorize, play, and visualize MP3/Ogg/FLAC/CD Audio files. (FLAC, Vorbis, and MP3 encoding). Create complex playlists (and playlists containing playlists) through a simple UI.
• An emulator frontend. (MAME, NES, SNES, generic PC games)
• An image viewer/slideshow application.
• A weather module.
• A generic video player module, with automatic metadata lookups
• A DVD player / ripper module. Make perfect backups, or transcode down to smaller file sizes.
• An RSS news feed reader module.

MythTV is also well known for the selection of plugins that are available, as well as some themes. With nearly 300,000 downloads it’s looking like the MythTV project is doing pretty well for itself.

Even though MythTV is stable for you to use, Mythbuntu is still in the Alpha stage so you have to be willing to cope with some bugs and known issues. I’m sure it will continue to get better as future versions are released, and I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful thing!

Although lazy people will probably buy a pre-configured MythTV computer.

If you want some screenshots of Mythbuntu you can visit this page, or screenshots of MythTV can be found here.

Source: Download Squad

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on June 07, 2007 by CyberNet.

Click to Enlarge

Alright, many of us have been waiting for Mozilla to get Places into the Firefox Alpha releases and it has finally happened. Alpha 5 comes to us one-week late, but marks the beginning of Places which could end up being a beautiful thing. The only thing is that the user interface changes are still very minor so don’t expect to see any of the cool things, but as I previously mentioned Places is indeed working in the background to manage your bookmarks.

The password changes are also quite important for extension developers who leverage off of the current password system in Firefox. Justin Dolske said that "the new Login Manager has one downside… The interfaces for using it have changed, so extensions that might have been using the old interfaces will need to be updated to use the new ones instead." So this is probably the point where you will start to see more extensions fade into the sunset until developers get around to updating them.

Okay, so let’s take a look at the new stuff in this release:

• Bookmarks portion of Places has been enabled.
• New crash reporting system, Breakpad. It’s enabled by default on Mac OS X, on about 50% of Windows installations, and not yet available on Linux. You can also view crash reports at this site.
• New Javascript-based Password Manager. More details available here.
• Support for Growl notification under Mac OS X
• Support for native controls on Mac OS X
• Miscellaneous Gecko 1.9 bug fixes

If that sounds appetizing for you, then the English downloads are currently at your beckon call:

• Windows: Gran Paradiso Setup Alpha 5.exe
• Mac OS X: Gran Paradiso Alpha 5.dmg
• Linux: granparadiso-alpha5.tar.bz2

Looking ahead at Alpha 6 (scheduled for June 29) we should see a much more developed Places implemented. This will include a synchronization client, starring and tagging capabilities, and a unified organizer. Also in Alpha 6 should be a better download manager which I believe is very much needed.

Then comes the move into the Beta’s. The first Beta is scheduled for July 31, and by that time all of the features (including the user interface) should be in place. They’ll start working on fixing everything they have gotten implemented so that they can ship Firefox 3 the third quarter of 2007.

Also, development for Opera 9.5 is underway, which is also supposed to bring some nice things to the table. I haven’t seen any official mentioning of new features, but I’m sure the Opera team will thrown in some pretty cool surprises.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on December 11, 2007 by CyberNet.

I’m not sure how long this is going to be available, but it looks as though Windows XP users can download the first Release Candidate of Service Pack 3 (SP3) straight from Microsoft. One member over at the WinMatrix forum posted the download link, which directly points to XP SP3 executable installer located on the Windows Update server.

The download is 336MB so make sure you have some time set aside for it to finish, but I have downloaded and verified that it is the real deal. Here are a few things you should know before downloading XP SP3:

• SP3 is cumulative, so users can install SP3 on top of Windows XP SP1 or SP2.
• SP3 is able to update any version of XP, including XP Media Center.
• SP3 will not upgrade Internet Explorer to version 7. The Service Pack does include updates for both versions of Internet Explorer, but the main version of IE that you’re running will remain untouched.

The installation process took me about 15 minutes to complete, which I would say is good because I was expecting it to take much worse. Here is a screenshot gallery from my journey:

(Click to Enlarge)

Download Windows XP SP3 (RC1) from Microsoft

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on January 20, 2007 by CyberNet.

Opera has decided to take the route that other software companies are taking to improve the user experience. They are now asking people to download an experimental build of Opera (version 9.12) that will test a new reporting function that they have implemented. Like most other usage reports, this one is not designed to steal any personally identifiable information from you.

After you download and install the new experimental build of Opera you’ll get a popup window similar to the one above when you start the browser. It is just giving you a heads up that they will be collecting some information from you along with a quick way to disable this “feature.” The report is stored as an XML file in your profile so that you can review exactly what is being sent to them, but I noticed that the report is only created/modified when you close the browser.

In case you’re wondering what information they’ll see I have went ahead and attached my report here (I used a clean profile so there aren’t many stats in it). As you can see they only store numbers (excluding Visa and MasterCard numbers as they pointed out ), but it is actually quite a bit of information. Here is a quick run down on what they are collecting:

• Wand: whether it is enabled and how many logins/pages.
• Mail: number of searches, filters, total messages, unread messages, and number of accounts.
• Feeds: number of feeds.
• History: number of pages visited last week.
• Workspace: minimum/maximum number of tabs you have had open, minimum/maximum number of windows you have had open, average number of tabs, and browsing time.
• BitTorrent: number of downloads.
• Bookmarks: number of bookmarks and folders, along with the last time you created a bookmark.
• Contacts: number of contacts and folders, along with the last time you created a contact.
• Widgets: number of widgets and folders, along with the last time you created a widget.
• Notes: number of notes and folders, along with the last time you created a note.
• News: number of accounts.
• Chat: number of accounts.
• General: date/time when Opera was first installed.

That is pretty much all of the information that they take from you, but I guess I did fail to mention that they retrieve every preference as well. While this is a lot of information I don’t think it is the end of the world, and if anything it will really help the Opera team by seeing which of their features are used the most so that they can focus on making those better. I was reading through their comments and it looks like people are excited to see Opera collecting this information to make the browser even better.

If, however, you decide that you don’t want this feature enabled just go to the address bar, type in opera:config#UserPrefs|EnableUsageReport and uncheck the box to disable the usage report from being sent.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on April 13, 2007 by CyberNet.

There has been a lot of things going on in the Linux world these past few weeks, and so I thought I would throw it into a single article that sums it all up.

Ubuntu 7.10

Ubuntu 7.10 (code-named Gusty Gibbon) is going to take priority soon since Ubuntu 7.04 should be released next week. Mark Shuttleworth announced that Ubuntu 7.10 will actually be coming in two forms, the normal one that we’re all used to and an “ultra-light” version that doesn’t have any drivers, images, sound or applications included.

Mark also had this to say about the Compiz/Beryl progress:

On a personal note, the monkey on my back has been composite-by-default, which I had hoped would happen in Edgy, then Feisty. I’m nervous to predict it now for Gutsy, for fear of a third strike, but I’m told that great work is being done in the Compiz/Beryl community and upstream in X. There’s a reasonable chance that Gutsy will deliver where those others have not. I remain convinced that malleable, transparent and extra-dimensional GUI’s are a real opportunity for the free software community to take a lead in the field of desktop innovation, and am keen to see the underlying technologies land in Ubuntu, but we have to balance that enthusiasm with the Technical Board’s judgement of the stability and maturity of those fundamental layers.

Ubuntu 7.10 is slated for an October 18th release date which keeps them right on track for their 6–month milestone release schedule.

Now it makes you wonder what their next code-name is going to be? They are going in alphabetical order so both words would start with an “H”…maybe Happy Hippo?

Freespire 2.0

The next milestone for Freespire, version 2, is making its rounds through their alpha stages right now. This distribution of Linux has always caught by attention because of the free Click-N-Run (CNR). With CNR you are able to install both freeware and shareware of the applications you are looking for without having to do any of the work yourself. Just click a button and CNR will do the rest.

Another one of the big features is that Freespire automatically installs Nvidia and ATI graphics card drivers. However, the latest alpha release will not automatically install these drivers for you, so you may want to hold off until a more stable release is available that corrects the problem.

One of the higher priorities is for Freespire to include XGL that will provide a 3D desktop experience. This feature should make the final release as long as they get all of the bugs worked out in time.

Both the Beta and Release Candidate (RC) builds are expected later this month, and then the final release is slated for the second quarter of 2007 (which is between now and July).

Thanks for the tip Jack of all Trades!

OpenSUSE 10.3

OpenSUSE just releases version 10.3 Alpha 3 for anyone who feels the need to test the latest software. Probably the most talked about feature in this release is that people running the 64–bit version will benefit from having the 64–bit package of Firefox as well. More on what’s new in each of the pre-releases can be found here.

OpenSUSE 10.3 is expected to hit final form around September, which puts it about 10 months after their last milestone.

There are some big months ahead for the Linux community, and it will be really interesting to see how the 3D desktop evolves.

If you know of other release dates for Linux distributions feel free to send us a tip or drop it in the comments below!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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