The recent release of wine - version 0.9.48 - is able to run MSYS - the unix-like build environment for Win32 platforms. Initial test show that it is possible to successfully build win32 binaries although there are some rough edges. My goal is to be able to build Stellarium without having to take up half my memory with a VM running Windows.

The trick to being able to start msys is to run the msys.bat file inside a cmd.exe instance running in wine. Assuming the default install paths for all components, it's possible to start an msys terminal in a single command, like this:

wine cmd /c 'C:\msys\1.0\msys.bat'

Since the release of version 0.9.0 of Stellarium easier this year, there have been over half a million direct downloads from the Stellarium website. The actual number of copies in use is rather harder to estimate, as there are no figures available for re-distribution of the software.

Re-distribution channels include sites such as softpedia and various Free software download archives, cover disks from magazines (computer and astronomy magazines), person-to-person copying and Linux distro packaging and distribution via software repositories.

The recent release of Stellarium version 0.9.0 has been quite a success. In the first two weeks after the release, Stellarium 0.9.0 has been downloaded over 92,000 times. The new version of the user guide nearly 9,000 times and the extra star catalogue packages over 7,000 times.

The total volume of data served totals a humungous 5 TiBytes! I'd like to thank Sourceforge for doing this for us. Bravo!

By far the most important new feature of the 0.9.0 release is the new star database. For users with a lot of memory and disk space, the new extra star catalogues mean Stellarium can display over 200 million stars (600 thousand in the default packages, the rest available as extra downloads). That's quite an increase from the previous 200 thousand in the previous release!

After nearly a year of work since the release of version 0.8.2, we released the latest and greatest version of Stellarium 2007-06-07.

At the recent developer meeting in Munich, Germany at the end of April, we agreed that we should release more often, and as such we should make an effort to release something as soon as possible. The result of this decision is version 0.9.0.

The last month has been a flurry of activity for all the developers. We managed to get a lot of really great stuff in the release.

The biggest change is the ability to use a HUGE star catalogues. Johannes Gajdosik took data from the Tycho, NOMAD and Hipparcos catalogues to build Stellarium's new star database. The default installer ships with over 600,000 stars, and extra catalogues (downloadable from sourceforge) weigh in at a massive 210 MILLION stars! You'll need a lot of RAM to hold all that data though.

Here's how to configure firefox to work with the very nice KDE RSS feed aggregator, Akregator. These instructions were written for Kubuntu Edgy, but they'll probably work with other distros. The versions of the software used are:

• Firefox 2.0
• Akregator 1.2.5
• Kontact 1.2.3
• KDE 3.5.5

Amarok is a wonderful media player and audio library management tool for Linux. It allows for extensions by third parties via a nice script system.

Amarok has some in-built support for subscribing to podcasts, however, at time of writing, there is no convenient way to manage deletion of downloaded podcast episodes en-masse. Presently, the only way to delete downloaded podcast files from amarok is to traverse the podcast list, right clicking on each downloaded podcast episode, and selecting delete from the contect menu. This is quite cumbersome, particularly considering the fact that ever deletion provokes a confirmation dialog.

I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I wanted a better way to manage my downloaded podcast files, so I wrote a small script to delete downloaded podcast files.

I've seen several rather convoluted methods to record a Skype conversation on Linux, some requiring more than one computer, or using special software packages not typically available in standard distribution repositories. This method is very simple, works on budget sound cards with only one channel (e.g. using the snd_intel8x0 driver), and requires no special software.

I've long been interested in computer generated graphics, especially when the computer does all the work. Back in the 16-bit days I remember something of a craze among magazine cover disk makers for including fractal landscape generators. These were a lot of fun. One of the modern day descendants of these programs is Terragen, which is capable of generating amazingly realistic and beautiful landscape images.

Sadly, although Terragen is free for personal use, it's not open source and there is no Linux version. Enter WINE - the Windows compatibility layer which allow some Windows program to run under Linux.

Lastminute.com and Coolgorilla.com have teamed up to produce some rather nice little language tools for iPods. The language packs allow users to select phrases using their iPod's menu system, and have the translated phrase spoken to them.

Sadly, the creators of these tools don't provide instructions for us Linux users. Here's how to install them when you don't have access to iTunes on a Mac or Windows.