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Cover thumbnailer is a small Python script which displays music album covers in nautilus, preview of pictures which are in a folder and more. The script fits in nautilus like any other thumbnailer of the GNOME thumbnail factory; so you don't have to run it manually to generate thumbnails.

Even though Ubuntu Netbook Remix is already somewhat optimized, I don't like how some things work and also there is room for a lot more optimizations. I would like to share with you these optimizations, all with screen real estate and low power consumption in mind. A part of this article is for EeePC only, but most work on any netbook!

What if we could use a bash script to use "apt-get" with Axel (a command line application which accelerates HTTP/FTP downloads by using multiple sources for one file) so the "apt-get" download speed would increase dramatically? Well, you can, thanks to Matt Parnell who has created a bash script which does just that.

PulseAudio 0.9.21 was released yesterday and comes with even more bug fixes than version 0.9.20 which was released just two weeks ago. You can see a list of changes, HERE. Besides bug fixes, PulseAudio 0.9.21 also integrates the device-manager module.

We've managed to use Adium themes in Pidgin on Ubuntu Jaunty and in Empathy (Ubuntu Karmic). But how about Pidgin and Ubuntu Karmic? That's pretty easy actually; here is what you need to do:

GMPC, or Gnome Music Player Client is a lightweight client for MPD, extendable through plug-ins: alarm, album view, AWN applet, dynamic playlist, fullscreen info, jamendo, last.fm, libnotify, lirc, lyrdb, lyricsplugin, lyricwiki, magnatune, wikipedia info, taglib (for editing tags) and so on (in the latest version). Even though through plugins, GMPC becomes a fully featured music player and manager, it's still one of the fastest applications of this kind: currently it handles a play queue with more than a 1.000.000 songs without a problem. I have a collection of almost 40.000 songs and GMPC uses about 30 mb of RAM with all the plugins installed (the author says that for it's database of 32.000 songs, it used 11 MB of RAM but I guess that was either an older version, or he didn't test it using all the plugins). This article will cover installing the latest version of MPD and GMPC in Ubuntu (as well as setting everything up).

We’re here today to talk about Google Chrome OS. We aren’t launching it today and not beta today. But we’ve made progress. As of today the code will be completely open. We’re excited to announce this.

Goggles Music Manager is a music collection manager and player that automatically categorizes your music files based on genre, artist, album, and song. Basically, it's a simple music player that does it's job and works really fast. Other than it's speed, I was also impressed with how little system resources it uses: 8.7 MB of RAM (on my system) and never more than 2% CPU (my music collections is something near 40.000 songs).

About a week ago, we wrote about gaining some space on your Linux Desktop (but the tutorial was focused on Ubuntu) by removing the titlebar of maximized applications - which can be achieved either with Maximus or Compiz. But at the time, we only provided some keyboard shortcuts to handle these windows. Read on to find out another way to do this and also how to use DockBarX for some even more optimization.

FreeOrion is a turn-based, futuristic science fiction computer strategy game for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. The purpose of the game is to lead one of a number of races to dominate the galaxy through a combination of diplomacy and conquest while developing technology, exploring and colonizing star systems. The game uses a point-and-click interface as well as keyboard shortcuts to control the management of colonies, technology, ship construction, diplomacy and combat and comes with both single and multi player game modes.

Pidgin Embedded Video is a GTK plugin for the popular instant messaging client Pidgin. It transforms a simple conversation into a much more attractive and interesting experience. The purpose of this plugin is to provide a faster way to watch videos while chatting with your friends. No more additional browser windows!

Cuberok is a music player and collection manager which resembles A LOT to the very popular Amarok 1.4. It is based on Qt4 and has a lightweight interface, music collection support and many features, e.g. music autorating and Last.FM scrobbler.
Cuberok works on Linux, Windows and Mac OSX but for now I have only tested it in Linux (Ubuntu).

Firstly, in case you don't know, Dropbox is a cross-platform service for file sharing, synchronizing and backup.
And now, about using Multiple Dropbox instances (and obviously, multiple accounts) in the same time. Yes, there is a way to run multiple Dropbox instances on the same computer. Here is how:

You probably know that to use a Launchpad PPA repository, you must also import the GPG key. Lately, keyserver.ubuntu.com which we need to import the GPG key goes down quite often, so how can we solve this?

If you ever used Google Chrome - and you must have -, then you might have noticed how much vertical space you can gain by removing the window title bar. Yes Google Chrome has a titlebar, but as an extent of the tabs, so that's not conventional titlebar. This can be very useful for a laptop, netbook and so on as you will gain a lot more usable space, but believe me, you will also notice the extra space on a normal desktop monitor.

We've seen how to check Gmail using the terminal (shell) in Linux and Mac but how about sending emails from a shell? This is actually pretty easy, here's what you have to do:

Widelands is an open source (works on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX) real-time strategy game, built upon the SDL and other open source libraries. If you knew Settlers I & II (Bluebyte), then you already have a rough idea what Widelands is all about because Widelands is heavily inspired by those two games. It has single-player, network, internet multiplayer modes and single player campaign missions. Players may select one of three different tribes. Widelands provides two tutorial missions. Advanced players can create their own maps with the included map editor and it is also possible to import and play original Settlers II maps.

For about a month, mouse clicks stopped working for me in Flash and Ubuntu, no matter the browser I use. Digging a bit, multiple solutions came up, so I will share them with you.

GRUB 2 is a new boot loader which comes with Ubuntu Karmic Koala. GRUB 2 is in charge of showing the menu that allows you to choose the operating system or Kernel version when your computer starts. This post will explain how to change the background image and colors in GRUB2.

Everybody posts about applications to install after upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. That's interesting, and some applications in those posts are quite useful. But those are just lists of applications like any other "Top 10 Ubuntu applications" list. I'm not saying they are not interesting, I'll even post some links to such posts from other blogs (look at the bottom of the post) I really liked, but to get there, you must firstly fix everything that's not working for you, tweak some things and so on. From the tweaks in the post: Fix the Internet connection, ctrl + alt + backspace behavior, update manager behavior, disable the login sound, enable icons in menus and buttons, fix the popping sound, browser specific tweaks, etc.