So, you’ve decided you want to setup a symlink, well look no further! It is a fun tool that is most commonly used to set up a shortcut or a filesystem redirect.  Well the full explaination of one and how it works can be found at this page .  But really, it is quite simple:

ln -s target linkname

target=where you want to the shortcut to go

linkname=where you want to name the shortcut

Here are a couple examples:

Say you’re tired of typing in a full path to something like a web root, you can setup something like this:

ln -s /var/www/vhosts/google.com/httpdocs/ /root/google.com

Then when you log in as root, you can just do cd google.com and be dumped into web root

Alternatively, say you moved mission critical files for a program like libs to a different dir for tidiness reasons and adjusting the code would take too long, you can just symlink it to save time!

ln -s newdir olddir

so ln -s /usr/local/php5 /usr/local/php4 would direct all calls to the php4 dir to the php5 dir, where all of your new libs are.

So, with my ongoing usage of the Ubuntu Hardy Heron os on my spare work laptop, I needed to get a good, flexible music player.  After a little bit of searching, I came across the Amarok player.

This nice little KDE player has all the gizmos you could want, including a MySQL driven database of your music.  Upon setting up the player, it takes all of your music, from a specified location, and reorganizes it Alphabetically by artist.   From there, it also imports all of your cover art, as we all know your “collected” music does not always come with the art work.

Some of the other nice features are : MP3 device management, hookup with streams like last.fm , scripting (what open source system would be good without this), as well as the simplest cd burning I have ever seen.

One snag with the burning though is that the proper libs are not installed.  HowToGeek has  pretty good guide for this, but you can also use your Synaptic Package Manager to install these libs as well.  The appropriate libs to grab are k3b, libk3b2, and the libk3b2-extracodecs.  You can also install k3b-il8n for internationalized k3b.

All in all I recommend this player, but if I find something better, I will be sure and let you know.