XMMS is a player which the new generation of Linux users have seem to forgotten. For the Linux users who are just adjusting with the new KDE/Gnome interface and still are not ready to leave their favourite player WINAMP, this is for you. XMMS is a very light song player which will open up in your first click and thus unlike the heavy players like Songbird

Several major distributions like Debian or Slackware dumped support for XMMS and no longer include it in their repositories due to the fact that it's old, hasn't been updated for some time and uses the GTK 1.x libraries. XMMS was replaced by the newer Audacious, which uses the newer GTK 2.x libraries. To install Audacious, just type as root apt-get install audacious.

Audacious is a powerful audio player for Linux which resembles the older XMMS, only using GTK2 toolkit for its interface. It supports XMMS and implicitly Winamp 2.x skins, coming with support for various audio formats, including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) or WMA (Windows Media Audio).

Development distributions play a crucial role in the free software ecosystem. They are the proving ground where much new software is first exposed to a wider user community; they are also the place where this software demonstrates how well it plays with other packages.

January 27, 2009. The KDE Community announced the immediate availability of "The Answer", (a.k.a KDE 4.2.0), readying the Free Desktop for end users. KDE 4.2 builds on the technology introduced with KDE 4.0 in January 2008. After the release of KDE 4.1, which was aimed at casual users, the KDE Community is now confident we have a compelling offering for the majority of end users.

Qmmp (Qt Multimedia Player) is a Qt-based audio player for Linux which resembles the appearance of XMMS (and Audacious for that matter), so users of these two players which want to have a player which integrates well in KDE will probably want to give it a try.

When it comes to music players, Linux evolved heavily during the last three or four years, and new players are announced on a regular basis. I remember that in 2006, when I was starting up with Linux, there were only a few applications to choose from, like Amarok, Rhythmbox, Listen or XMMS, and a few more less popular and not so full-featured.

Audacious is a GTK music player similar with the older XMMS (X Multimedia System) player. Ubuntu 9.04 ships with Audacious 1.5.1, which is a little old. However, you can easily install and set up the latest Audacious (currently 2.1) following the steps below:

These test profiles seem irrelevant for free system distributions in that they use some non-free software in order to make their benchmarks "powerful". Phoronix Test Suite is free software: i think it'd be useful to do these benchmarks with software freedom involved...