After much work and much waiting Debian has released another Stable release of Debian GNU/Linux.

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Kernel 2.4.34.2 has been released today.

Kernel 2.6.20.3 has been released.

The Debian Installer team is proud to announce the second release
candidate (RC2) of the installer for Debian GNU/Linux Etch. Unless
release critical issues are discovered, this will be the version of the
installer that will be included in the release of Etch.

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I’m delighted to be able to welcome a new colleague who’s starting with Sun today. He is starting a newly-defined role as Chief Operating Platforms Officer at Sun, and is responsible for building a new strategy to evolve both Sun’s Solaris and GNU/Linux strategies. The appointment is at the same time both brilliant and controversial, but is the logical next step as far as I am concerned.

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Two useful little console applications that I don’t really think about but use a fair amount are dict and cal.

dict

dict is a client for the Dictionary Server Protocol (DICT), a TCP transaction based query/response protocol that provides access to dictionary definitions from a set of natural language dictionary databases.

What that means is you type “dict something” and it will pull results from several sites on the internet. It will also try and suggest what word you might be looking for if you have a spelling mistake.

cal

The cal utility displays a simple calendar in traditional format and ncal offers an alternative layout, more options and the date of easter. The new format is a little cramped but it makes a year fit on a 25×80 terminal. If arguments are not specified, the current month is displayed.

Most of the time I just want to see the last month, this month, and next month. This can be done with “cal -3″. If you want to see a month that is future or past dated beyond this you can “cal 12 2008″ which will show December 2008.

In most cases people just click on the time in the panel of gnome to get a mini pop-up calender, or use google to look up a word, etc. Next time your sitting in a terminal/console remember you don’t have to touch that mouse to get the info you want.

Debian Install notes:

From the command line type “apt-get install cal dict” as root.

Version 2.20 of FSlint is a program whose functionality is at odds with its design. On the one hand, a program for — as the name suggests — locating and removing unnecessary or useless material (”lint”) from a filesystem is a handy one to install. On the other hand, a rough interface with cryptic buttons and options and a lack of anything except minimal help files makes accessing its options a bit of a challenge, especially at first.

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The Debian Release team announced the plans for the next stable release of Debian (Etch). From the posting here, it looks like they are hoping for a early April release.

Being that I rarely ever use a office suite or even a word processor the whole file format thing has never been high on my personal list of issues. Any writing I do on a computer is mostly email, irc, or in a simple text editor (aee, vim, gedit).

For those of you plagued with dependency on Office Suites for your day to day work Linux Journal has a nice article on the Format Wars.

Media player is a term typically used to describe computer software for playing back multimedia files. Most software media players support an array of media formats, including both audio and video files.Some media players focus only on audio or video and are known as audio players and video players respectively. The producers of these players usually focus on providing a better user experience as they are specifically tailored toward the media type.

I want to give the list of media players available for ubuntu users with installation instructions.

Read the Article at Only Ubuntu Linux.