Multimedia applications

Electric Eyes (ee)

Electric Eyes is a very sophisticated and feature-rich viewer for graphical images. Electric Eyes can be invoked from the panel or by typing

$ ee filename &

Electric Eyes has its own manual with several screenshots, available in the GNOME help system, so I will not attempt to describe its myriad features here. I will only mention that to "get going" you probably do not want to invoke ee with no options, but rather you want to invoke it directly on an image file or on several files, or even a directory with several images.

Once Electric Eyes is running you can bring up all the menu options by clicking the right mouse button, as shown in Figure 2-13. The most interesting options are probably those available Edit submenu.

GNOME mixer (gmix)

GNOME also has some sound programs; one of them is a mixer application. A mixer allows you to control how your computer's sound card handles sound from various inputs: using sliders you can block out some sound inputs while raising the gain on others, just like the mixer console in a live music PA system.

You can invoke the GNOME mixer from the panl or by typing

$ gmix &

In Figure 2-14 you can see a screenshot of gmix running on my laptop which runs GNU/Linux with GNOME and has a Sound Blaster card. You will notice that some channels are stereo while others are mono. For each stereo channel there is a Lock button which ensures that the right and left channel will have the same gain. You will also notice that there are mute buttons to completely ignore a certain channel.

NOTE: If you have trouble running gmix you might want to make sure that sound is properly configured for you. With older versions of Linux you might have to re-configure and build the kernel with support for your sound card. With recent distributions (such as Red Hat 5.x) you can run sndconfig to select and enable your sound card at runtime.

GNOME CD player (gtcd)

Another GNOME sound application is a nice CD player which allows you to play compact discs if your computer has a CDROM drive. You can invoke gtcd from the panel or by typing

$ gtcd &

Here are some screen shots which show you how you can use gtcd and what it can do. The first one (Figure 2-15) shows me blasting the Pixies [1] song Here Comes Your Man in my headphones as I write these words.

[1] The Pixies are an excellent punk group. I seldom listen to punk rock, but I enjoy them.

The GNOME CD player also allows you to dowload information from the impressive network Compact Disk DataBase (CDDB); in Figure 2-16 you can see how to tell gtcd to connect to the database server at www.cddb.com.

Once you have downloaded the information from CDDB you can then select songs or movements from the CD by name, using the Goto button, as shown in Figure 2-17.