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Sparkle Media

Sparkle Media is the name of media player/manager which I am working/experimenting on for the past about 2-3 years.

Due to continuous improvement of KDE/Qt and my experiments (of course!) compounded by lack of time, the project is still at a very early stage. But the past few months have proved to be fruitful for the project and it can now do normal playback, show video/visualisation and offers a basic playlist with play queue and history. It is using GStreamer as its backend in place of Phonon. The project is hosted on http://sourceforge.net/projects/sparklemedia/. No binaries are available at the moment, the only option you can try it is to get it through it’s svn repository and compile yourself. You’ll need KDE4.2, Qt4.5, Gstreamer 0.10 with development packages installed to compile it. I’ll definitely provide binaries later on when I feel it has matured enough for more people to try.

Working features as of now: -

• Playback: Play/Pause, Stop, Seek, Volume
• Playlists: NowPlaying, Play Queue, History
• Play Videos
• Show visualisation for audio
• Basic support for 10-band equaliser

Major non-supported features as of now: -

• Play videos in full screen
• Play AudioCD/VideoCD/VideoDVD
• Manage/save custom playlists
• Media collection for audio/video

For updates about the project, please visit the project web site http://sparklemedia.sourceforge.net

KMines

KMines is another game offered by KDE. Beneath the square boxes are hidden mines. The object of the game is to locate all the mines as quickly as possible without uncovering any of them. If you uncover a mine, you lose the game. Simply put, it is a step above Minesweeper (for Windows, if you have played that already).

KGoldRunner

KGoldRunner is the best game for me offered by KDE. It offers very good gameplay (tests your reflexes, your brain and sometimes even your patience), coupled with very good default theme complemented by a few more good themes.

Installing KDE on Windows

Installing KDE on Windows is a simple process, just download and run the KDE for Windows Installer and follow the instructions.

Here is a to-the-point visual guide…

KDE on Windows

KDE is an international technology team that creates Free Software for desktop and portable computing. Among KDE’s products are a modern desktop system for Linux and UNIX platforms, comprehensive office productivity and groupware suites and hundreds of software titles in many categories including Internet and web applications, multimedia, entertainment, educational, graphics and software development. KDE software is translated into more than 60 languages and is built with ease of use and modern accessibility principles in mind. KDE4′s full-featured applications run natively on Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X. More…

KDE on Windows Project is aimed at native porting of the KDE applications to MS Windows. I’m very much interested in it as I have to use Windows in the office, and this will let me use my favourite KDE application at office as well.

Though many applications are available even now, the project still is in early stages and you are likely to face some issues. But I have found KDE games very stable on Windows. The Project hosts not 1, 2, 5, or 10 but a lot of 30 games from different genres. The great part of the KDE games is that they  are themed using Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) implying that you can resize the game window and the game’s graphics will resize accordingly and still look spot on.

In the following posts I will guide you to install KDE games on Windows and introduce you to some of my favourite games in the pack.

Sources: http://www.kde.org/, http://windows.kde.org/

openSUSE 11.1 countdown begins…

openSUSE is one of the leading Linux based distribution which I have been using for the last 5-6 years. Its latest avatar i.e. openSUSE 11.1 is scheduled to release on December 18… and just for you here is the way you can have beautiful counter like this to spread the news about openSUSE 11.1 release.

Update: openSUSE 11.1 was released on December 18th, I’ve downloaded the following:

• openSUSE 11.1 (i586) [1-DVD]
• openSUSE 11.1 KDE4 LiveCD (i686) [1-CD]

For details click here.