Loosely speaking, in software terms, a wrapper is something that provides an alternate interface to another object. SMPlayer is an advanced multimedia player wrapped around MPlayer that provides a friendlier and more powerful front end to the underlying application. SMPlayer can play practically anything -- you can watch DVDs and VCDs, stream videos from a URL, or play audio CDs or MP3s.

Boxee is a new entrant into the increasingly crowded open source media center space. The company's eponymous application is billed as a "social media center" -- melding a smorgasbord of social networking services into an XBMC-based media center designed for the couch-centric user.

KDE 4 is barely eight months old, and already it has three options for a main menu. Until now, users have either used the default Kickoff, which makes for awkward navigation of the menu tree, or reverted to the familiar but unwieldy classic menu.

PCLinuxOS Magazine, September 2008 (Issue 25) is available to download.

I used to think that Gnome 1.4 was the Last Good Gnome. Because when Gnome 2.0 came along, everything I liked was gone. It was dumbed-down to the point of unusability, and the roadmap called for yet more dumbing-down. So I switched to KDE for my main workstation, and IceWM, XFCE, and Blackbox for lower-powered PCs. For all these years I haven't seen much to like in Gnome.

My wife often rolls her eyes at me, because once I find a new hobby I latch onto it as though life depended on it. The more arbitrary the nature of the hobby, the less she's impressed with it. So imagine her immense delight when, a year ago, the only thing I would talk about with her was Linux.

Late yesterday Anirudh Acharya, aka infra_red_dude, started a new support thread for the Mac4Lin Transformation Pack on the Ubuntu Forums. The old thread was moved to the archive section of the forums some time back and a couple weeks ago it had been locked so there was no good way to get assistance for it.