Exaile is pretty much a drop in replacement for Amarok . I've always liked Amarok, particularly for the cover art, smart playlists and general music management, but I can't deny there's something unpleasant about running a native KDE app on Gnome. Exaile is written in Python, GTK-based, and has all the features and smoothness of Amarok - but for Gnome. Love it, love it, love it. Having tabbed playlists so you can have multiple open at the same time also seems like a big improvement on Amarok as well.

Instructions for install on Ubuntu here .

Edit [2007-02-21]: After some issues with Exaile not showing the album covers correctly and not being able to seek to a particular point in a Podcast, I'm currently trying out Listen instead. Will update in a few weeks based on how I get on...

I've published one solution on this site (the JobMonitor application), but that is only one facet of SysAdmin automation. Another project I've worked on is what I affectionately call "the Automator". It was written for a specific employer, so I don't know if I'll ever be able to give it the light of day, but it's basically a web-based console that allows for automating ssh commands across multiple servers. Sounds scary? Well, it's logging in as a non-privileged user with a private key that is password-protected. It can optionally su to root and run commands like that. It then puts the output into a database and optionally can integrate with the JobMonitor application to error check that output. There's also a scheduling system built into it so you can schedule up commands to be run across various servers using a syntax similar to cron.

It's been used to run over 700,000 commands in 8 months on over 300 servers. Would love to be able to open source it someday...

The main things for me were performance (Beryl was showing a lag the last time I tried it on my laptop, whereas Compiz was slick and smooth), and coping adequately with Suspend to RAM. Both of these boxes are checked in the new version, and it's nice to have a barrel of new features as well, including a better Control Center, the burn animation (love it for closing windows), minimized window thumbnails and transparent cube!

For consistency, with previous postings, I'm now getting this from glxgears -info

With Beryl 0.20RC2: 

6356 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1271.111 FPS
7285 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1456.884 FPS
7227 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1444.934 FPS
7181 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1436.071 FPS
6785 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1356.899 FPS

With Metacity: 

8291 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1658.111 FPS
9031 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1806.146 FPS
6931 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1386.142 FPS
9061 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1812.010 FPS
9049 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1809.699 FPS

So really not too bad... 

In the end, the setup wasn't too bad, but it did take quite a bit of getting used to. Not the most intuitive process.

Basically, get yourself set up with Ekiga, which on Ubuntu Edgy is available in the Ubuntu repos, and then once you've signed up for an Ekiga account (which you can use for PC-to-PC calls) you can also sign up for a PC-to-Phone account. I chose to use the one that's built into Ekiga (with Diamondcard ), as I figured it would work better, but also that there might be some kick back to the Ekiga project from Diamondcard, so that supporting it would be a good thing. Not sure if I'll stick with them once I'm all set up - will depend mostly on call quality and rates.

In any case, the big gotcha for me was that I was getting "Security check failed" even after I'd verified that I had everything set up correctly (which I could do by going through the configuration wizard, and then calling the "echo test" (which just repeats back to you whatever you say to it to show it's hearing and to verify you can hear that) at "sip:500@ekiga.net". I put in a support request to Diamondcard, and got a return reasonably promptly telling me that I didn't need to include the first "00" for my call. So, for instance, to call a number in the UK such as 0207 123 4567 you would call "sip:442071234567" not "sip:00442071234567", as I'd seen in some of the online docs.

Anyway, all set up and looking forward to using it, being able to track call history, and seeing what other benefits IP telephony can bring!