[ UPFRONT ]
ROCK YOUR WORLD WITH FIREFLY
No, I’m not talking browncoats and
spaceships. Unfortunately, that ship
has sailed. If you’re the musical type,
however, installing a Firefly Media
Server is fairly simple. It was renamed
from mt-daapd, so your distribution still
might call it that. After a quick install,
visit the Web configuration, usually at
http://localhost:3689 with the default
login mt-daapd and password mt-daapd.
You can configure your music location,
smart playlists and just about every
other aspect of the media server. Then
comes the cool part.
On any software or hardware on
your network that supports daap (often
known as the iTunes protocol), you
should be able to play your music
remotely. Firefly does a decent job of
scanning your music collection and
updating the clients on the network.
You can add m3u playlists, and Firefly
will serve up playlists as well.
I find the best way to listen to music on
XBMC is via daap. It makes configuring
playlists and adding media simple. It’s also
cross-platform, so those folks using actual
iTunes can listen to their tunes as well.
—SHAWN POWERS
Non-Linux FOSS
Sometimes, you just want a simple word processor. Yes, there
are many options for word processing, from the awesome
OpenOffice.org to the awesome-for-other-reasons vi. If you’re
looking for a happy medium, however, it’s hard to do better
than AbiWord. When you add the free on-line component,
AbiWord is available for Linux, Windows and even OS X. You need version 2. 8
or higher to use AbiCollab.net, but most distributions include at least version
2. 8. Check out the Web site at www.abisource.com.—SHAWN POWERS
