Back in 2000, xmms was the hot MP3 player for Linux that everybody loved. Most likely due to it’s near perfect match in design and functionality to Winamp. Well time makes you bolder and MP3 players get older. And with no major updates (not even a port to GTK2), xmms just sits around. Recently some distributions have stopped including it in favor of more modern players. So I tried Rythmbox (the Music management and playback software for GNOME.

If you pay attention to Linux news, I’m sure you’ve heard that Eric S. Raymond (commonly called “ESR”) has dumped Fedora in favor of Ubuntu. In case you’re wondering who he is, he is the author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar which is one of the best essays about open source development (highly recommended reading by the way). The first thing that might come to mind is “so what?” So what if this open source advocate switched?

Although there is no update on the official Linux Flash Blog from Adobe, it does appear that a final NON-beta version of the Flash 9 Plugin has been made available for Linux. The release version is 9,0,31,0 (the last beta was 9.0.21.78 on Nov 20, 2006). So update!!! Fedora Users: The official Fedora Flash repository has not been updated. However if you pick: Option 2: .rpm Download the Flash Player .

I have a decent computer with a large hard drive. My initial intent was to boot multiple different operating systems (as can be seen by the 6+ EXT3 partitions). However the latest technology hype is the need for virtualization or emulation. In effect, this would allow loading one operating system inside another without any reboot. I use the term “hype” because the consumer demand (i.e. non admins, non developers, people with real lives) is very low.

Sun has made a significant step for providing users and developers better access and freedom with Java. Sun announced this week they will be open sourcing key parts of Java under the GPL. In effect most users should not see a direct impact on their Java usage, however in the long term Java will have a more widespread usage, subject to fewer problem and more readily available on different systems.