Daily Archives: Friday, May 17, 2013

  • Amarok 2.7.1 “Harbinger” released

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    Amarok logoAmarok is a great media player for the Linux platform and one I’ve used for years; and now it’s also available for Unix and Windows too.

    The Amarok team announced the release of version 2.7.1, codenamed “Harbinger” on Wednesday this week. According to the following from the release announcement, it’s a release to fix one bug in particular:

    The Amarok Team has discovered a very unpleasant bug in QtWebkit ↔ GStreamer interaction that made continuous playing almost impossible, due to frequent crashing. We decided to work around it in our code and take it as an opportunity to release a bugfix version. It contains a couple of other fixes we deemed important.

    This version only contains some very essential fixes and changes compared to 2.7.0:

    • A modification in handling MusicBrainz ID tags was needed to avoid problems with falsely duplicate tracks.
    • We fixed a weird behaviour when the “Use Music Location?” question is answered “Yes” on the first run.
    • We now have worked around the QtWebkit ↔ GStreamer bug that caused frequent crashes on track start; this happened if the Wikipedia applet tried to load a page containing an audio tag.
    • The database is now also created if the home directory contains non-ASCII characters.
    • The Nepomuk Collection now also shows track numbers.

    These changes have also been incorporated into the next release – 2.8.0 – which is still in development and promises yet more fixes and enhancements.

  • Open source “strengthens democracy”

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

    image of Ivo Josipović
    Croatian President Ivo Josipović
    Open source strengthens democracy, according to Croatian President Ivo Josipović, as reported on Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website.

    Josipović appreciates the open source community’s creative and innovative spirit and is reported as saying: “What you are doing is something good, creative and innovative”, while opening the Croatian Linux Users’ Convention 2013 in Zagreb on Wednesday 15th May. As regards democracy, the President remarked: “Most importantly, open source helps to strengthen democracy.”

    President Josipović also expressed his “complete support” for the government plans to implement open source and open standards (what about open data? A stool needs three legs, not two! Ed.) in the Croatian public sector’s IT, according to the organisers of the Croatian Linux Users’ Convention.

    This is not the first time that Mr Josipović has shown his support for open source and open standards (posts passim)