As MP3 players and mobile devices become very common, more and more people are beginning to convert their audio CD collection to music files so they will listen to them while on the move. In Windows and Mac, the conversion can be done automatically with Windows Media Player or iTunes. What about Linux? Let’s take a look. /> id="more-20023">

Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox is the default player in Ubuntu. Like many other media player, it comes with the capability to import audio CD into your library.

Open your Rhythmbox. Before you start to import your audio CD, it is best to configure the location of the imported files and the song format.

Go to Edit -> Preferences. Click on the Music tab.

In the “Music Files are placed in” field, select the location of the folder where the imported music will be stored.

Next, you may want to configure how the folder hierarchy of the album.

Filed under: Games, Linux

Installing applications in Ubuntu is as easy as the app store in iPhone. Hit the Ubuntu Software Center, find the application you want and click Install. Due to this convenience, most of the time, you won’t need to backup the applications itself.

However, there are times when you want to restore the newly formatted machine to the original state and you find it a chores to manually install all the applications again. This is when the backup is useful.

When we say “backup” in this case, we don’t really mean backing up the actual application. What we are going to do is to export the list of all your installed app onto a text file. Next time, we can just get the system to reinstall the apps listed in the text file. /> id="more-20622">

Backing up your Apps

(Optional) To list all your installed applications, open a terminal and type:

sudo dpkg --list

To backup your list of applications to a text file:

sudo dpkg --get-selections > app-backup-list.txt
 

This will create a text file of the name “app-backup-list.txt” in your Home folder.

The concept of activities is a new feature introduced with KDE 4. In the old desktop model of KDE 3, the desktop was a program called “kdesktop”, which gave users the ability to have a number of virtual desktops. Although other tools like Superkaramba could be used to add more features, the essential KDE desktop ended there.

When activities were introduced into KDE 4, they did not make much sense in isolation. In addition to having virtual desktops, there were activities, which the user could create and configure to have different wallpapers and different widgets. Much of the virtual desktop functionality of KDE 3 was absent and not directly connected to Plasma activities.

With the release of KDE 4.5, Plasma has reached a much higher level of maturity, and activities can now be integrated with virtual desktops, dual monitor screens, and with the Dashboard feature. /> id="more-20579">

We’ve talked about Linux software for kids a few times here at MakeTechEasier, but so far we’ve never actually sat down to take a closer look at whole distributions intended for children. Many people are familiar with Edubuntu, the Ubuntu spinoff intended for school and other educational institutions, but you may not know much about Qimo. Unlike Edubuntu, which is designed for a client-server network model, Qimo is intended for a sole desktop user – in this case children 3 years old and up. It uses a customized version of the XFCE desktop, with large icons and simple menus, to make it easy to navigate. Included are many of the top titles in kids software for Linux, such as GCompris and TuxPaint. Today we’ll take a look at what Qimo has to offer, and submit it to the ultimate test: a real live toddler. /> id="more-20290">

Download and Installation

ISO files for Qimo (pronounced “kim-oh”, as in “eskimo”) can be found on their Downloads page.

Windows/Linux (with Chrome): By default, Google Chrome exits the entire program when you've closed the last tab. Chrome extension Last Tab Standing prevents this from happening by opening an empty new tab page when you close your last tab. More »

Backing up your information is very important to you, or at least it should be. One of my college professors once told me, “It is not a question of if your hard drive will crash; it is when your hard drive will crash.”

Rsync is a tool that allows you to keep two distinct directories in sync, either locally (two locations on the same machine, including attached devices) or remotely (local computer to server or even server to backup server). It is free and open source software and runs on Linux and most other Unix-like operating systems, including FreeBSD and Mac OS X.

Furthermore, those who prefer not to get their fingers dirty on the command line can use Grsync, a graphical frontend for rsync, available in most Linux distribution repositories. /> id="more-20248">