The Linux platform has matured into an excellent way of listening to streaming music services. There are clients available for most of the popular music streaming services. But what if you want a single app that covers the very popular ones without straying away from the Linux terminal. Step forward Tizonia.

Tizonia offers access to some excellent streaming music services — all from the command line. The software supports popular services such as YouTube, Spotify, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, Chromecast, and more.

Tizonia is innovative software. It doesn’t use FFmpeg, libav, gstreamer or libvlc for playback. Instead, the software’s multimedia framework is based on OpenMAX IL 1.2. OpenMAX (Open Media Acceleration) is a non-proprietary and royalty-free cross-platform set of C-language programming interfaces. It provides abstractions for routines that are especially useful for processing of audio, video, and still images.

Tizonia is C/C++ software which integrates online services with Python connectors/proxies. This means it should be fairly easy to integrate new services, assuming a Python-based API is accessible.

• Kate LSP Client Continued

  The new LSP client by Mark Nauwelaerts made nice progress since the LSP client restart post last week.

  [...]

  Both are aimed to improve the support of the Rust LSP server. As you can see, they got already reviewed and merged.

• Pitivi Video Editor Gets Better Thanks to Google Summer of Code

  The Pitivi video editor is getting some (arguably overdue) love and attention as part of this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC).

  New features, interface adjustments, and improved clip editing are among the changes the open-source non-linear video editing app is in line to pick up.

  Two recent updates from GSoC 2019 students reveal a bit more about the enhancements that are underway.

  Millan Castro reports on his ‘first month working in Pitivi‘. His goal: ‘implement an interval time system”.

• Microsoft Office 365: Banned in German schools over privacy fears

• FreeOffice July Update Adds MS Office 2019 Support, Classic Interface Option

  A major update to FreeOffice by SoftMaker, a gratis set of productivity apps modelled after Microsoft Office, is now available to download.

  Dubbed the “anniversary update”, the latest version of this office suite intros compatibility with the latest Microsoft Office file formats.

  All three apps in the family, TextMaker, PlanMaker and Presentations, are said to be fully compatible with the latest Microsoft Office file formats, allowing users to open, edit and save in native Office formats like .docx.

  The suite now lets users choose an interface layout, with the standard “Ribbon” interface mode and a more traditional menu-based UI available.

• Microsoft Office Clone ‘SoftMaker Office 2018’ Sees Summer Update

  Do keep in mind that SoftMaker Office 2018 is not free software so you will need to buy a subscription or make a one-off purchase to use it longterm.

We are happy to announce the release of bzip2 1.0.8.

This is a fixup release because the CVE-2019-12900 fix in bzip2 1.0.7 was too strict and might have prevented decompression of some files that earlier bzip2 versions could decompress. And it contains a few more patches from various distros and forks.

bzip2 1.0.8 contains the following fixes:

Accept as many selectors as the file format allows. This relaxes the fix for CVE-2019-12900 from 1.0.7 so that bzip2 allows decompression of bz2 files that use (too) many selectors again.
Fix handling of large (> 4GB) files on Windows.
Cleanup of bzdiff and bzgrep scripts so they don’t use any bash extensions and handle multiple archives correctly.
There is now a bz2-files testsuite at https://sourceware.org/git/bzip2-tests.git
Patches by Joshua Watt, Mark Wielaard, Phil Ross, Vincent Lefevre, Led and Kristýna Streitová.

• Top GUI Tools for Linux System Administrators

  Let’s have a look into the list of top GUI tools for Linux system administrators. If you are tired of running command and need some change then this post is for you.

• Millan Castro Vilariño: GSoC: First month working in Pitivi

  Pitivi is a video editor, free and open source. Targeted at newcomers and professional users, it is minimalist and powerful. This summer I am fortunate to collaborate in Pitivi development through Google Summer of Code.

  My goal is to implement an interval time system, with the support of Mathieu Duponchell, my menthor, and other members of the Pitivi community.

  An interval time system is a common tool in many video editors. It will introduce new features in Pitivi. The user will be able to set up a range of time in the timeline editor, playback specific parts of the timeline, export the selected parts of the timeline, cut or copy clips inside the interval and zoom in/out the interval.

  Mi proposal also includes the design of a marker system to store information at a certain time position.

• Foliate – A Simple & Modern New GTK eBook Viewer

  Foliate is an open-source GTK eBook viewer built with GJS and Epub.js.