Looking for a good MP3 music manager is reoccurring task for me, because so far none has really convinced me, yet. After switching to a new distro recently, it was time to reevaluate the choices. Below is a list of library managers/players available through the Arch package manager.

I installed them all, tried to import my music library¹⁾ and tested a few common tasks. The list below is not an in depth feature comparison. It's just the features/non-features that caught my attention.

All tested players have an iTunes-like artist/album/song browser. I was most interested in their last.fm integration but also had a look at other features. My album cover images are stored as a file named folder.jpg, so I checked if the tools would find and display that correctly.

This article is part of a monthly series.

Every month I present a DokuWiki powered site which is special for its design, content or clever use of the software. To give you a first impression on what the site is about I'll send a short, interview style questionnaire to its creator.

This month's wiki is remarkable for being funny and serious at the same time. Surely not your ordinary programming language wiki .

Questions were answered by LOLCODE's inventor and site maintainer Adam T. Lindsay.

A bit more than a month after announcing the first release candidate a new DokuWiki release is born.

During the last month we fixed several smaller bugs that where discovered in the two release candidates. I did a new release yesterday, but something told me not to announce it, yet. It turned out I was right . Another bug was just found today. Because it affected an important feature, I decided to build a new release today, which I hereby finally announce.

For completeness, here's the freshmeat release description:

This release adds several frontend improvements like an AJAXified index, a completely rewritten ACL manager, better RSS support, support for diffs between arbitrary revisions, and much more. An XML-RPC interface was added, and several improvements for plugin and template writers were made. Security measurements against CSRF attacks were introduced, and several minor bugs have been fixed.

More can be read at wiki:changes

Download DokuWiki 2008-05-05 now.

You also might want to

• read installation instructions
• read upgrade instructions
• get support
• report bugs
• buy schwag

After a long, gray and depressing Winter, it is finally Spring and Berlin awakens from its coma. If you think about visiting Berlin, I really recommend to do it now. Here are a few photos to whet your appetite .

I spent yesterday evening and most of today with installing a new operating system on my desktop PC. After years of using Debian on all my systems, I recently became a fan of Arch Linux and made it my new distribution of choice.

After reading much good about it in Michael Klier's blog, I first tried it on my EeePC a month ago. I was immediatly sold. Arch's approach of not hiding system internals behind fancy installers and configuration scripts isn't the best for newbies for sure, but experienced Linux users like me feel right at home.

Like Debian, Arch has a powerful package management system. But unlike Debian there are no “releases” in the common sense, instead they use a “rolling release system” where new packages are phased in regularly. This is what makes Arch IMHO very attractive as a desktop system.

If you are considering switching from Debian to Arch, here are a few pointers that might help you get started:

• The apt-get equivalent in Arch is called pacman
• Packages are built from simple package descriptions much like with dpkg-buildpackage
• Community provided packages can be easily installed with yaourt
• There's no /etc/init.d – it's all in /etc/rc.d
• daemons, network settings and similar stuff is configured in /etc/rc.conf (a bit like /etc/default/*)
• There's lots of useful info in the wiki

If you're using Arch already, what's your experience? What would you point out to a convert like me? If not, what distribution are you using? Why?