Thanks for posting this story, even if it jumped the gun a little bit. It prompted me to revisit the iRiver support site and I found that 1.60 firmware had been released, dated Sept. 1st. Look here
Don't get too excited, though. The only new feature that was a regular in user wishlists and which I am going to use regularly is file deletion from the player. "Gapless" is certainly not what I expected (live albums, eg, still hava an awkward pause between songs).
Nothing's been done about improving navigation (with 5100 files in my H140, this is a big issue), which is still the major flaw in my opinion. I'd love to see an open version of the firmware, but for now on this will have to do. When I was researching digital players, I went for the iRiver H140 and despite some shortcomings, I'm not sorry. With 40Gb, standard usb mass storage device interface, recording capabilities, radio tuner, and especially ogg support (a must for me), I think it's the best hardware out there (although I haven't kept up with new players since I bought this).
Someone else in the forum mentioned an open source program to create databases, but that branch seems to be pretty much abandoned. But, oh, the joys of free software! Someone else picked up the project and has released a new version that fixes some of the bugs. Find it at
As for Enlightenment & other window managers, I don't use them because I don't know how to configure various software packages just to watch various multimedia files. I can't underscore this enough.
mmmmm?
Frankly, there are not that many video playing engines in Linux. Basically, I use either gmplayer or xine; if they cannot play the file, I forget about it. Granted, there are a bunch of frontends for these (qt, gtk, whatever), but that does not alter the capacity to play a certain format or not.
To keep more to the whole thread, I use englightenment; that with gkrellm and one or two terminal windows plus the occasional use of the root menu is all I need for navigation. I just don't get the "everything and the kitchen sink" emphasis of KDE or gnome, it seems like they are there to out-windows windows.
Whatever you do, avoid buying a zoom. It's not that I'm completely averse to zooms, there are some very good ones out there, but the nice, fast ones tend to be pretty expensive. Most manufacturers promote body+zoom "kits". I made this mistake when I bought my Canon EOS 300, and now the 28-90 that came with the camera is perpetually sitting in my bag.
Especially, as a learning tool, a zoom can be a bad asset, since it encourages you to compose by zooming in and out rather than thinking about the perspective of different focal distances. Only when you have a good idea of perspective can you use a zoom effectively. It is a pain having to change lenses every moment, but this annoyance will keep you thinking about the right tool for the right effect, if you are learning it's better to go the slow way. And in that respect, put some money on your budget for a good tripod too, an indespensable tool that will also help in making your more reflective about your shots.
So go get a second hand body, or a new body with no lens, add a 50mm (most entry level 50mm lenses are fast, cheap, and sharp), practice with that for a while, and then go get a wide-angle prime (24mm is my favorite lens right now, maybe a 28 is better for most people) and keep practising. When you feel the need, you can complete your system with a telephoto (since you've already got a fair idea of how perspective works by now, it would be OK to get a zoom now).
As some previous poster said, shoot slides, bracket your exposures, take notes of everything and study your pictures.
You are making assumptions about what the person who asked wants to use the software for. It may not necessarily be a finished, polished, perfectly smooth document.
I've been looking at something like this myself. I am writing a PhD dissertation and I need a place to keep my notes, link them to related notes, organize them and be able to do a text search easily. While I know that when it comes to the actual writing, I will have to sort them out and give them full coherence, it would not make sense to follow the same process for research notes: a note can fall under more than one category and be related to multiple issues/other notes, so a full hierarchical and linear distribution would not help. Sometimes it pays off to break away from this mode of thinking, not all bits of knowledge are related like a well-planned report or book, even when you have to get them into that shape later.
Now, for something that may actually be useful to the person who made the question, I found two possibilities: OpenReference, but I never could make that one work on my computer; currently, I am looking at Pile, which looks interesting, I got it working in my machine, but I have not had enough time for a close look.
I switched to Debian a while ago, so it's been some time since I used RedHat or SuSE, but from the point of view of a native speaker of Spanish, I'm quite happy with what they provide. Of course I have a pretty good command of English, so it's tough for me to judge how it would be for a monolingual speaker...
Personally, I'd burn CD images with all the Deian packages. You'd probably want to go with Woody, since it is almost frozen and Potato is quite outdated. Find pointers and instructions at http://cdimage.debian.org/. This way, you can make the install in English yourself and then install the appropriate packages. There is a very convenient "spanish" task package containing doc-linux-es, manpages-es, ispanish, wspanish and user-es. Then, run the "castellanizar" script found in user-es to have all the possible defaults in Spanish.
Another suggestion is for you to start to practice your Spanish now and make the same question on http://barrapunto.com, a Spanish-speaking slashdot copycat site. Best luck, anyway, I hope you make good converts...
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for posting this story, even if it jumped the gun a little bit. It prompted me to revisit the iRiver support site and I found that 1.60 firmware had been released, dated Sept. 1st. Look here
http://www.iriver.com/support/download_view.asp?iDon't get too excited, though. The only new feature that was a regular in user wishlists and which I am going to use regularly is file deletion from the player. "Gapless" is certainly not what I expected (live albums, eg, still hava an awkward pause between songs).
Nothing's been done about improving navigation (with 5100 files in my H140, this is a big issue), which is still the major flaw in my opinion. I'd love to see an open version of the firmware, but for now on this will have to do. When I was researching digital players, I went for the iRiver H140 and despite some shortcomings, I'm not sorry. With 40Gb, standard usb mass storage device interface, recording capabilities, radio tuner, and especially ogg support (a must for me), I think it's the best hardware out there (although I haven't kept up with new players since I bought this).
Someone else in the forum mentioned an open source program to create databases, but that branch seems to be pretty much abandoned. But, oh, the joys of free software! Someone else picked up the project and has released a new version that fixes some of the bugs. Find it at
http://www.fataltourist.com/iripdb/This new version is already in debian testing, by the way.
As for Enlightenment & other window managers, I don't use them because I don't know how to configure various software packages just to watch various multimedia files. I can't underscore this enough.
mmmmm?
Frankly, there are not that many video playing engines in Linux. Basically, I use either gmplayer or xine; if they cannot play the file, I forget about it. Granted, there are a bunch of frontends for these (qt, gtk, whatever), but that does not alter the capacity to play a certain format or not.
To keep more to the whole thread, I use englightenment; that with gkrellm and one or two terminal windows plus the occasional use of the root menu is all I need for navigation. I just don't get the "everything and the kitchen sink" emphasis of KDE or gnome, it seems like they are there to out-windows windows.
Whatever you do, avoid buying a zoom. It's not that I'm completely averse to zooms, there are some very good ones out there, but the nice, fast ones tend to be pretty expensive. Most manufacturers promote body+zoom "kits". I made this mistake when I bought my Canon EOS 300, and now the 28-90 that came with the camera is perpetually sitting in my bag.
Especially, as a learning tool, a zoom can be a bad asset, since it encourages you to compose by zooming in and out rather than thinking about the perspective of different focal distances. Only when you have a good idea of perspective can you use a zoom effectively. It is a pain having to change lenses every moment, but this annoyance will keep you thinking about the right tool for the right effect, if you are learning it's better to go the slow way. And in that respect, put some money on your budget for a good tripod too, an indespensable tool that will also help in making your more reflective about your shots.
So go get a second hand body, or a new body with no lens, add a 50mm (most entry level 50mm lenses are fast, cheap, and sharp), practice with that for a while, and then go get a wide-angle prime (24mm is my favorite lens right now, maybe a 28 is better for most people) and keep practising. When you feel the need, you can complete your system with a telephoto (since you've already got a fair idea of how perspective works by now, it would be OK to get a zoom now).
As some previous poster said, shoot slides, bracket your exposures, take notes of everything and study your pictures.
You are making assumptions about what the person who asked wants to use the software for. It may not necessarily be a finished, polished, perfectly smooth document.
I've been looking at something like this myself. I am writing a PhD dissertation and I need a place to keep my notes, link them to related notes, organize them and be able to do a text search easily. While I know that when it comes to the actual writing, I will have to sort them out and give them full coherence, it would not make sense to follow the same process for research notes: a note can fall under more than one category and be related to multiple issues/other notes, so a full hierarchical and linear distribution would not help. Sometimes it pays off to break away from this mode of thinking, not all bits of knowledge are related like a well-planned report or book, even when you have to get them into that shape later.
Now, for something that may actually be useful to the person who made the question, I found two possibilities: OpenReference, but I never could make that one work on my computer; currently, I am looking at Pile, which looks interesting, I got it working in my machine, but I have not had enough time for a close look.
I switched to Debian a while ago, so it's been some time since I used RedHat or SuSE, but from the point of view of a native speaker of Spanish, I'm quite happy with what they provide. Of course I have a pretty good command of English, so it's tough for me to judge how it would be for a monolingual speaker...
Personally, I'd burn CD images with all the Deian packages. You'd probably want to go with Woody, since it is almost frozen and Potato is quite outdated. Find pointers and instructions at http://cdimage.debian.org/. This way, you can make the install in English yourself and then install the appropriate packages. There is a very convenient "spanish" task package containing doc-linux-es, manpages-es, ispanish, wspanish and user-es. Then, run the "castellanizar" script found in user-es to have all the possible defaults in Spanish.
Another suggestion is for you to start to practice your Spanish now and make the same question on http://barrapunto.com, a Spanish-speaking slashdot copycat site. Best luck, anyway, I hope you make good converts...
There is a really good attempt to build a collaborative, volunteer, peer-reviewed, open, free (both senses) encyclopedia at www.nupedia.org