Turn your computer into a media center PC with GeeXBoX 1.1

 

By Mayank Sharma on July 31, 2007 (4:00:00 PM)

 

GeeXBoX, a small media center Linux live CD distribution, can run from any small device, such as a USB disk or a wallet CD-R, and can play both disk-based media like DVDs and online media like Icecast streams. The project has been in development for several years and has just released version 1.1. I fed it every kind of media file I could lay my hands on -- Ogg, MP3, MP4, AVI, DVDs, VCDs, and their ripped versions -- and it played them all without a hiccup. But what makes GeeXBoX a fantastic distribution is its ease of use and malleability.

GeeXBoX 1.1 is a mere 8.9MB ISO download. Its hardware requirements are minimal -- a Pentium II 400MHz processor and 64MB of RAM are enough to power GeeXBoX -- and of course you'll need a CD/DVD drive to play your media. GeeXBoX ejects its CD boot media after copying itself into memory and booting the computer. If you don't want to bother with the GeeXBoX CD every time you want to power up your media center, you can install GeeXBoX onto a hard drive as well. To install GeeXBoX you need only an 8MB partition, and it can install in a Windows FAT partition as well as Linux ext2/3 partitions. If you don't have a hard disk on the computer you want to run GeeXBoX on, you can install the distribution onto a USB disk.

GeeXBoX boots quickly into a simple graphical environment. The first screen displays controls to open and play media files, change preferences (for audio/video playback, displaying subtitles, and so on), and configure some options (such as a sleep timer and autoplay mode). The developers have done a good job of making the distribution as easy to use as a regular DVD player. Unless you're really picky about the font size of your subtitles, you'll be happy with the default settings.

Good hardware support

GeeXBoX, in essence, is wrapped around the MPlayer media player. Using MPlayer allows GeeXBoX to play files on local hard drives and USB disks or from over the network through Samba and NFS shares, and it can also stream content from over the Internet.

GeeXBoX also has excellent hardware detection capabilities. The distribution is based on Linux kernel 2.6.21.3 and claims to bundle drivers for nearly all video, sound, network, and Wi-Fi cards. GeeXBoX had no trouble detecting any of the sound, video, and network devices on any of my desktops and laptops. It worked with PC Card wireless adapters as well as older 802.11b PCI desktop cards via NDISwrapper.

GeeXBoX also supports lots of TV tuner cards. If your card is supported, you can use GeeXBoX to watch TV. Additionally, the distribution uses the LIRC (Linux Infrared Remote Control) package and supports its more than 2,000 infrared receivers and remote controls. The only drawback here is that GeeXBoX developers provide key bindings for only a handful of popular remote controls. If you don't have one of these remotes, you'll have to figure out the keybindings on your own. One thing I miss is support for Bluetooth controllers.

Customizing GeeXBoX

If you download and use the official GeeXBoX 1.1 ISO, you'll be unable to play Internet radio and video or detect a wireless adapter that has proprietary firmware. This is to keep the distribution GPL-compliant. But the project offers a simple graphical utility to generate customized GeeXBoX spins.

The GeeXBoX ISO generator is available in a 10.9MB package that has executables for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Using the generator, you can make cosmetic changes to GeeXBoX's interface, select themes and menu language, and set audio and video parameters such as resolution and number of audio channels (stereo, 5.1 surround). GeeXBoX 1.1 defaults to an ATI remote, but with the generator you can choose your own remote controller and receiver devices.

One aspect of the generator I like is that it allows you to define your network settings. You can either let GeeXBoX autodetect and autoconfigure your network hardware and settings, or you can enter them through the generator. This is useful if you want to give the media center machine a fixed IP address and set its wireless SSID and encryption key beforehand to avoid entering them every time GeeXBoX boots. If your wireless card isn't supported, you can include its Windows drivers using the generator, which will make your custom GeeXBoX use them with NDISwrapper. The generator also lets you add codecs and firmware that weren't included in the official distribution due to conflicting licenses.

The generator lets you enable streaming audio and video. It supports SHOUTcast and Icecast radio and TV streams. To allow you to filter the channel list, the generator has fields where you can blacklist and whitelist certain channels. With a single click you can also make your custom GeeXBoX run services like FTP, Telnet, and a Web server. In addition to installing these services, I would love the ability to add software like Web browsers that, when activated through the generator, would let users browse the Internet using GeeXBoX.

Along with drivers and codecs, you can also add folders containing media files that will be included in your custom distribution. So irrespective of what computer you run your custom GeeXBoX distribution on, your music and video will always be there with you.

The distribution's developers are actively working on version 2.0, which will not only add more features but be a complete overhaul, but they're not announcing any projected release date yet.

GeeXBoX is a very functional media center distribution. It has a simple, newbie-friendly user interface, extensive hardware support, and flexible configurability. In fact, I like it so much that I recommend you don't download the official GeeXBoX 1.1 ISO -- rather, you should just download the generator and make your own customized GeeXBoX ISO spin.

Quoted from http://www.linux.com/feature/118210:

Linux.com :: Turn your computer into a media center PC with GeeXBoX 1.1

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Intelligence center hones spy tech

IARPA develops groundbreaking gadgets for 16 agencies, but critics question need.

Katherine Shrader
The Associated Press

Washington — Using a new laptop and a satellite link, FBI agents can find out within two minutes whether the fingerprint from a newly captured suspect overseas matches a terrorist database in Virginia.

Intelligence officials are running documents in languages such as Arabic through a new computer program called "English Now." It converts the foreign characters into the Roman alphabet and makes words such as Baghdad, President Bush or Osama bin Laden jump out to spies who can't read Arabic.

The language software and the fingerprint-recognition system are examples of new spy gear that the national intelligence director's office bought last year. They may seem like tools that should have been available years ago, but the government isn't noted for its ability to quickly develop new technology.

A fledgling center called IARPA is hoping to change that. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity will try to develop groundbreaking technology for the 16 spy agencies.

One potential tool sounds like it comes from an episode of "Star Trek": "cloaking" technology that can bend radar around an object to make it appear it's not there. Others include power sources shrunk using nanotechnology and quantum computers that can speed code-breaking, says IARPA acting director Steve Nixon.

Not everyone is convinced this is the right way to make spy tools. The House Intelligence Committee questions whether the government needs it.

There is even resistance within the CIA itself, according to officials who spoke about the concerns privately. The agency gets money that is supposed to go for spy tools that can be shared across the government. CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano denied any friction, saying the agency welcomes ideas that promote collaboration on new technology.

In the last half-century, U.S. spy agencies have made technical breakthroughs large and small. In the 1970s, the CIA shared its lithium-iodine batteries with the medical field, which now uses them in pacemakers. Its scientists developed microdot cameras that can produce images so small they can be hidden in the period of this sentence. They also built a life-size robotic dragonfly that could have been used for surveillance, if only it could have handled crosswinds.

The new intelligence organization will be based at the University of Maryland and staffed with 56 intelligence professionals from the CIA and from McConnell's organization.

Nixon says IARPA will sponsor research at universities, national labs and other organizations.

IARPA is thinking broadly, he said. It won't limit itself to hard sciences, but will also tackle social-science problems such as finding tools for language research or to help analysts measure cultural habits of another society. He also said the organization will work on privacy protection. NSA and other agencies want to be able to make better use of foreign intelligence information from overseas, which often contains information on U.S. citizens.

 

This was found at News-Leader.com

Google Apps to take on PowerPoint

Presentation app joins Google's Docs & Spreadsheets, but CEO Eric Schmidt maintains Google is not trying to compete with Microsoft Office

By Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service

April 17, 2007

Google is adding a presentations application to Docs & Spreadsheets, narrowing the competitive space between this productivity and collaboration hosted suite and Microsoft's Office suite.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt made the announcement at the Web 2.0 Expo event in San Francisco Tuesday during a keynote appearance. The move had been widely expected, as Google has embarked on developing hosted communication and collaboration products for organizations.

Prior to breaking the news, Schmidt demonstrated the application to the attendees, showing several slides with mock Google announcements for the day. "None of these [slides] are really the announcement, but in fact the thing that is doing this presentation is the announcement," Schmidt said.

Now, Docs & Spreadsheets will feature a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentations application, but Schmidt said the suite isn't a direct competitor to Office because Docs & Spreadsheets doesn't have all of Office's functionality. Also, it's more focused on Web collaboration than Office, which is a desktop-centric product.

In fact, Docs & Spreadsheets is an example what Schmidt called a new Web-based, hosted architecture for applications designed to let users collaborate and share information. Collaboration, he said, "is the killer application."

The presentations application will be delivered in the U.S. summer timeframe, said Jonathan Rochelle, product manager of Google Docs & Spreadsheets, in an interview after the keynote ended. He expects that as soon as it becomes available, the presentation application will also become part of Google Apps, the company's communication and collaboration suite for organizations. Google Apps includes Gmail and other hosted services, including Docs & Spreadsheets.

Like the other two components of Google Docs & Spreadsheets, the presentations application is being designed with collaboration and sharing in mind so that multiple users can participate in the creation and delivery of presentations, Rochelle said.

Google decided to add a presentations component to Docs & Spreadsheets as a result of user demand, Rochelle said, adding that Google isn't providing details of the application's features and functionality yet.

The presentations component will have import and export capabilities for Microsoft's PowerPoint, the presentations application in Office, in the same way that the word processor and spreadsheet applications have those capabilities for Office's Word and Excel, respectively, said Rajen Sheth, product manager in Google's enterprise unit. In this manner, Google's productivity applications give Office users the ability to share files and collaborate on them, Sheth said. In that way "we're adding functionality to existing Office tools," he said.

Also on Tuesday, Google announced it has acquired Tonic Systems, a company based in San Francisco and Melbourne, Australia, that has technology to create presentations and converting documents. "It will be a great addition as we add presentation sharing and collaboration capabilities to Google Docs & Spreadsheets," Google said in an official blog posting.

Docs & Spreadsheets is free, unlike Office. Google Apps has a free version and fee-based version.