This guide shows how to install the Songbird media player (0.3 Developer Pre-Release) on an Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) desktop. Songbird is a free software audio player with media database capabilities written using XUL and VLC, with an interface similar to Apple’s iTunes.

Nuxified: “In an exciting networked world we are living in, just about everything can be connected to anything. By all means that includes your mobile phone, at least if it is not more than a couple of years old…”

“Of course, the early adopters are still there, but from a purpose and density standpoint there is now a much broader range of applications being built on Asterisk.”

Pika Technologies, a vendor of media-processing hardware and software, have announced the results of an analysis of the usage habits of over 300 Asterisk developers across the globe, finding the Asterisk … via TMCnet

jabberd is a Jabber/XMPP instant messaging server.
It implements XMPP-Core (RFC3920), XMPP-IM
(RFC3921), and a range of protocol extensions:
XEP-0012, XEP-0016, XEP-0030, XEP-0049, XEP-0054,
XEP-0077, XEP-0079, XEP-0092, XEP-0114, XEP-0138,
XEP-0153, XEP-0157, XEP-0160, XEP-0191, XEP-0192,
XEP-0193, XEP-0198, XEP-0199, XEP-0202, XEP-0203.

The Gimp 2.4 was released today and it includes a number of new features, like scalable brushes, align tool, new selection tools, color Management and soft-proofing, Red Eye removal and much more. Unfortunately, there is still no 16bit per pixel support, which is useful for digital photography editing.

OSWeekly: “We often take the ability to choose our default Firefox search engine for granted. By default, it’s set to Google, and for most people, this is just fine…”

“This week’s release of Ubuntu 7.10 is a significant win for the free software community. Not only does this release incorporate an updated package set – most notably with the Linux 2.6.22 kernel and GNOME 2.20, but it also delivers on new desktop innovations from BulletProofX and displayconfig-gtk to Compiz Fusion being enabled by default on supported systems. However, for those business professionals and gamers that remain dependent on some Windows-only binary applications, the WINE project has been making some excellent headway into supporting Windows applications on the Linux desktop. With Ubuntu 7.10 and WINE 0.9.46 in hand, we had set out to compare the performance between Windows XP and Gutsy Gibbon with WINE on two popular DirectX benchmarks.”

Learn the concepts that every database programmer needs to know to develop applications that allow multi-user access to the database: Isolation levels.

OpenOffice.org Base is undoubtedly a powerful database application, but when it comes to its built-in reporting engine, words like “underpowered” and “outdated” come to mind. Fortunately, you don’t have to put up with this situation any longer: with the Sun Report Builder (SRB) extension, you can add nifty reporting features based on Pentaho reporting engine — assuming you can figure out how to use it without any help.

NetworkWorld: “However, OpenOffice.org, like many open source efforts, needs some marketing help, a big name to push them into the spotlight. And while I’m surprised IBM has volunteered, that’s exactly what is happening, with a twist…”

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OfflineIMAP is a tool to simplify email reading. It allows you to read the same mailbox from multiple computers and ensures that your changes will be automatically reflected on all computers. You can use various mail clients to read a single box or read mail while offline with full synchronization when you reconnect. You can read IMAP mail with readers that lack IMAP support (same goes for SSL). OfflineIMAP’s multithreaded synchronization algorithm performs between 10 and 60 times faster than many mail readers’ internal IMAP support, and it can be used even with mail readers that support IMAP already. There are five available user interface modules, including scripted execution, an interactive terminal interface, and GUI interfaces.

Tuxmachines: “I run all Linux all the time on all my boxes at home. But, at the high school where I teach computer science, it’s MS-Windows XP…”

LinuxSecurity.com: A number of vulnerabilities and security-related issues have been fixed in phpMyAdmin versions since the 2.9.1.1 release. This update provides version 2.11.1.2 which is the latest stable release of phpMyAdmin.

DesktopLinux: “The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, will announce its third annual desktop Linux survey on Oct. 17…”

Opera is a full-featured Internet tool, most notably a fully standard conforming Web browser. Opera includes pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing, integrated searches, and advanced functions like a password manager, mouse gestures, native Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) support, an email program,
RSS newsfeeds, and IRC chat. It is designed to be fast and highly ustomizable.