Don’t miss the windows live messenger

Nowadays the instant messengers are a necessity, everyone use them and many people just know the windows live messenger and Yahoo! messenger, so when they start to use linux may miss them. But chill out, there is not reason to miss them, the next alternatives will kick them out of your head.

1.- Kopete: This messenger comes by default with the KDE desktop environment and is one of my favorites. Some features are:

• Off line messages. Before send a off line message you must be online open the chat window and then you can return to the off line mode to chat with your friend.
• Chat windows styles: this will change the way you chat with your friends, there are several chat windows styles that will rock your chat windows.
• Icons packages: You can download several icons,even the windows live messenger and yahoo messenger icons.
• Now listening: trough a plug-in you can show to your friends the music that you are listening with amarok, kaffeine, etc, etc.
• Show you when your friends open or close the chat window.
• Nudges.
• Several protocols are supported; Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, IRC, ICQ, etc, etc.
• Friends search.
• Display pictures.
• Webcam.
• Messages by tags in the same chat window.
• You can chat with your friends even though they be blocked. You don’t need to unblock them (admit them).

Amarok, the windows media player alternative

I have to say that the windows media player is very nice and it have many features for the music storage. Personally I like the way windows media player manages the music, so I look for a alternative for linux with that features and I find amarok.

Amarok is developed for the KDE desktop environment even though amarok also is able to run under the GNOME desktop environment.

This is the package description:

Amarok tries to be a little different, providing a simple drag and drop
interface that really makes playlist handling easy.

Features include:
- rapid playlist creation, with drag and drop from a directory view
- context information (lyrics, artist information, similiar tracks/artists)
- nice playlist browser for your existing playlists (PLS or M3U formats)
- collection-indexing support, for smart browsing and playlist creation
- inline ID3 tag editing, capable of retrieving tags via MusicBrainz
- album cover support: automatically displays album covers from the
filesystem, or downloaded on the fly
- miscellaneous audio effects, including crossfading
- easy bindable global shortcuts, rich DCOP interface
- On-Screen Display (OSD), fully configurable
- iPod and iRiver support

Support for XMMS and libvisual visualization plugins is also compiled in (you
need to have xmms or libvisual0.4-plugins installed to be able to use it).

No doubt amarok is a excellent alternative for windows media player.