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If it weren't for the fact that Sebastian Dröge's name is no longer mentioned after the second cleanup, I would send in a patch to fix the lack of umlaut* over the 'o'.

* = The most interesting usage of umlaut-like diacritics has *got* to be the diaresis, if for nothing other than the fact than a mispronunciation of the name can induce laughter.

Oh, the other day I read something about the history of Gilbert and Sullivan which leads me to think that applying the term "piracy" to copyright infringement originally was a reference to the international nature of the theft. Has anyone researched this? I know the ship has sailed (excuse the pun) for preserving the identity of piracy as that of violent plundering in international waters, but maybe we can still present a good argument for why making a mix tape of Metallica songs should not be called "piracy" by any stretch. (Another interesting thing---the Wikipedia entry on looting refers to large-scale looting by Germany, then refers to the Allied mass acquisition of German intellectual property also as looting; if that wording was being used at the time, and the two distinct forms of "looting" were seen in a comparative light, that might have further deteriorated linguistic barriers between physical and intellectual property. Any thoughts?)

Buckets of Cocks are well known to be predictable in size and weight, the two normal ways of obtaining randomness from them. the change is to a bucket of cookies, which provides considerably more secure randomness. I mean, you've got oatmeal, oatmeal rasin, oreo, etc. Considerably more random than cocks.

Quod Libet is a fantastic GTK+-based music player designed for gigantic libraries. There are so many ways to search in it (for instance, you could search for &(genre=pop, genre=rock, #(lastplayed > 30 days)) to find every pop rock song you haven't been listening to for the last month, if you've got the tags right), so finding the tracks you're looking for shouldn't ever be a problem either.

You can't possibly offend my G4, its slow PowerPC CPU renders it useless in any production environment. I only used it for web surfing and music listening, for which it was barely "okay". However, I had no such performance problems with Quod Libet, which can do mostly everything iTunes does, and if not built in, then through plugins. Except for the DRM infested music store, that is, but the up-and-coming new music player Songbird has focus on web content, and thus also alternative online stores. If I was paying money for digital files, I'd never buy some lossy file which I couldn't use freely, thanks to DRM. FLAC audio, on the other hand...

For Linux/BSD, there are quite a few choices. AmaroK or JuK are the obvious one for KDE, and usually included in most distros. If you prefer Gtk applications, the best one out there is probably Quod Libet (I would not recommend Rhythmbox as it used to be rather slow and unstable). In the console, there's cmus for an iTunes-like ncurses interface, and plait if you prefer the good old command-line. Or you could go for client/server approach with mpd and its plethora of clients.

Quod Libet is the answer.
Written in PyGTK, GPL'ed, it is the ideal solution. Advanced searching, browsing, mass-tagging and best of all: it has a play queue. What else do you need? And if you do find something missing, you can easily write a plugin.

See http://www.sacredchao.net/quodlibet for more info.

I only counted 6.

Torsmo
http://torsmo.sourceforge.net/

ImageMagick
http://imagemagick.org/

Aterm
http://aterm.sourceforget.net/

Root-tail
http://www.goof.com/pcg/marc/root-tail.html

Quod Libet
http://sacredchao.net/quodlibet

Transmission
http://transmission.m0k.org/

Of course, there's also Quod Libet if you need a good, stable GTK2-based music player with iTunes-like library management capabilities.

While there isn't a Linux port of foobar 2000 yet, I've found Quod Libet to be a close-enough replacement for those of us who have gotten tired of whiz-bang graphics. Though mostly, I switched from xmms for the UTF-8 support (hey, that's the reason I switched from winamp too ;)

You can have multiple values for a single tag, but sadly most programs and databases don't support this.

(Quod Libet does.)

Worse, it only uses the Qt toolkit, so users of Gnome and XFCE have to either turn elsewhere or deal with it looking crappy. Since I don't use KDE, I use Quod Libet, instead. It's a bit like Rhythmbox, except good.

Recommendation: don't touch that with C. At all. Use perl or ruby or python (in that order :P).

I tried to hack something like that together once, where it would store its information as a set of associations (song 1 -> song 2, good; song 2 -> song 3, bad, etc.). The problem I hit with that (apart from the fact that I vaguely suspect my program had some sort of bug in it :|), was that it would take ages to build up an initial data matrix good enough to actually make a better-than-random guess at the next program.

Nowadays, I just use QuodLibet[1], and tag all my oggs with insane passion. Then, I just pick the all "romantic", "sad" and "angry" songs, or whatever other combination I feel like using. They also allow regular expression searches, which would be helpful if my library wasn't small enough to scroll through (I am too honest for my own good).

[1] I solemnly swear that I am not associated with QuodLibet. QuodLibet is available at your nearest Debian package archive or at selected Gentoo outlets. Do not eat QuodLibet.

I found the choice of applications included with the distro to be more than enough to keep a basic user content, but personally I would require more diversity. For instance, I prefer to use Amarok over any of the gtk-based apps available today. I find it to have the best features and ease of use out of any application on the market. Period. In my opinion, Amarok is a fine example that Open Source software can indeed be better than commercial alternatives.

GUI-based:

• gnome-apt
• synaptic
• kpackage
• stormpkg

Console-based:

• wajig
• aptitude

WWW-based:

• dpkg-www

(Click a distribution (stable, testing, unstable) for a package description.)

These are just the ones that have the string 'apt' somewhere in their Dependencies: line. I'm sure there are others, like Feta, a Front-End To Apt, which is still in development (there's an intent to package currently filed for it).

OK, I think your first question was answered in the other comments, just use sudo and the like.

The second one is something i had trouble with for a while. My first solution was to include a crapload of redundancy in the UI to load terminals - I have two hotkeys, an icon on the panel, an icon on a menu in the panel, a place to launch it from GKrellM, a minicommander (1 line command line that sits in the GNOME panel), and a cvoicecontrol command to load a terminal :) Since then, I've never been at a real loss.

I'm not sure what "DOS Prompt Here" is, but I know what start is, and I wanted it to. So here it is, rewritten in Perl. The major downside is that you need to manually write a config file, but there's some rather complete examples included.